In enemy hands: the Byzantine experience of captivity between the seventh and tenth centuries

Abstract

The present paper deals with forced migration experienced by subjects of the Byzantine Empire captured by foreign enemies in the context of warfare between the seventh and the tenth centuries. The focus of the first part is on the scenarios faced by individuals and groups when an enemy had taken control of a settlement or a larger territory. The second part discusses aspects of the role social status and gender played in the process of being taken over and then (possibly but not necessarily) held in captivity. Although one can trace similarities in the way captors treated their captives on different occasions, an overgeneralizing approach can prove misleading, distracting us from the dynamics of the consequences that war and abduction had on both the agency of the victor and the fate of the loser in the early Middle Ages.* The research for this paper was conducted during my affiliation with the project 'Moving Byzantium: Mobility, Microstructures and Personal Agency' funded by the FWF Austrian Science Fund (Project Z 288 Wittgenstein-Award). I wish to thank Prof. Claudia Rapp for inviting me to contribute an article to this special issue. I am grateful to her, to Dr Christodoulos Papavarnavas, and especially to EME 's anonymous reviewer for their valuable remarks and comments. This article is dedicated to the memory of my great-grandfather Gergo Vulov Vasilkjovski (1882Vasilkjovski ( -1965, a prisoner in the First World War.