Prisoner of war
A prisoner of war is a person held captive by a belligerent power during or immediately after an armed conflict. The earliest recorded usage of the phrase "prisoner of war" dates back to 1610.
Belligerents hold prisoners of war for a range of reasons. These may include isolating them from enemy combatants still in the field, demonstrating military victory, punishment, prosecution of war crimes, labour exploitation, recruiting or even conscripting them as combatants, extracting or collecting military and political intelligence, and political or religious indoctrination.
Ancient times
For much of history, prisoners of war would often be slaughtered or enslaved. Early Roman gladiators could be prisoners of war, categorised according to their ethnic roots as Samnites, Thracians, and Gauls. Homer's Iliad describes Trojan and Greek soldiers offering rewards of wealth to opposing forces who have defeated them on the battlefield in exchange for mercy, but such offers were not always accepted.Typically, victors made little distinction between enemy combatants and enemy civilians, although they were more likely to spare women and children. Sometimes the purpose of a battle, if not of a war, was to capture women, a practice known as raptio; the Rape of the Sabines involved, according to tradition, a large mass-abduction by the founders of Rome. Typically women had no rights, and were held legally as chattels.
In the fourth century AD, St Acacius of Amida, touched by the plight of Persian prisoners captured in a recent war with the Roman Empire, who were held in his town under appalling conditions and destined for a life of slavery, took the initiative in ransoming them by selling his church's precious gold and silver vessels and letting them return to their country. For this he was later canonised.
Middle Ages and Renaissance
According to legend, during Childeric's siege and blockade of Paris in 464 the nun Geneviève pleaded with the Frankish king for the welfare of prisoners of war and met with a favourable response. Later, Clovis I liberated captives after Genevieve urged him to do so.King Henry V's English army killed many French prisoners of war at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. This was done after a French raiding party returned to the main army after looting the English camp, Henry misinterpreted this as the French receiving reinforcements, and was afraid that the prisoners who would rejoin the fight against the English.
In the later Middle Ages a number of religious wars aimed to not only defeat but also to eliminate enemies. Authorities in Christian Europe often considered the extermination of heretics and heathens desirable. Examples of such wars include the 13th-century Albigensian Crusade in Languedoc and the Northern Crusades in the Baltic region. When asked by a crusader how to distinguish between the Catholics and Cathars following the projected capture of the city of Béziers, the papal legate Arnaud Amalric allegedly replied, "Kill them all, God will know His own."
Likewise, the inhabitants of conquered cities were frequently massacred during crusades in the 11th and 12th centuries. Noblemen could hope to be ransomed; their families would have to send to their captors large sums of wealth commensurate with the social status of the captive.
Feudal Japan had no custom of ransoming prisoners of war, who could expect for the most part summary execution.
In the 13th century the expanding Mongol Empire famously distinguished between cities or towns that surrendered and those that resisted. In Termez, on the Oxus: "all the people, both men and women, were driven out onto the plain, and divided in accordance with their usual custom, then they were all slain."
The Aztecs warred constantly with neighbouring tribes and groups, aiming to collect live prisoners for sacrifice. For the re-consecration of Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan in 1487, "between 10,000 and 80,400 persons" were sacrificed.
During the early Muslim conquests of 622–750, Muslims routinely captured large numbers of prisoners. Aside from those who converted, most were ransomed or enslaved. Christians captured during the Crusades were usually either killed or sold into slavery if they could not pay a ransom. During his lifetime, Muhammad made it the responsibility of the Islamic government to provide food and clothing, on a reasonable basis, to captives, regardless of their religion; however, if the prisoners were in the custody of a person, then the responsibility was on the individual. On certain occasions where Muhammad felt the enemy had broken a treaty with the Muslims he endorsed the mass execution of male prisoners who participated in battles, as in the case of the Banu Qurayza in 627. The Muslims divided up the females and children of those executed as ghanima.
Naval forces from both Christian and Muslim countries often turned prisoners of war into galley slaves. Thus, at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, 12,000 Christian galley slaves were freed from the Ottoman Turks.
Modern times
In Europe the treatment of prisoners of war became increasingly centralised, in the time period between the 16th and late 18th century. Whereas prisoners of war had previously been regarded as the private property of the captor, captured enemy soldiers were increasingly regarded as state property. The European states strove to exert increasing control over all stages of captivity, from the question of who would be attributed the status of prisoner of war to their eventual release. The act of surrender was regulated so that it, ideally, should be legitimised by officers, who negotiated the surrender of their whole unit. Soldiers whose style of fighting did not conform to the battle line tactics of regular European armies, such as Cossacks and Croats, were often denied the status of prisoners of war.In line with this development the treatment of prisoners of war was increasingly regulated by international treaties, particularly the so-called cartel system, which regulated how warring states would exchange prisoners. The 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years' War, established the rule that prisoners of war should be released and allowed to return to their homelands without ransom after hostilities ended.
There also evolved the right of parole, French for "discourse", in which a captured officer surrendered his sword and gave his word as a gentleman in exchange for privileges. If he swore not to escape, he could gain better accommodations and the freedom of the prison. If he swore to cease hostilities against the nation that held him captive, he could be repatriated or exchanged but could not serve against his former captors in a military capacity.
European settlers captured in North America
Early historical narratives of captured European settlers and the perspectives of literate women captured by the indigenous peoples of North America, exist. The writings of Mary Rowlandson, captured in 1676 in the chaotic fighting of King Philip's War, provide an early example. Such narratives enjoyed some popularity, spawning a genre of the captivity narrative, and had lasting influence on the body of early American literature, most notably through the legacy of James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans. Some Native Americans continued to capture Europeans and use them both as labourers and as bargaining chips into the 19th century; see for example the case of John R. Jewitt, a sailor who wrote a memoir about his years as a captive of the Nootka people on the Pacific Northwest coast from 1802 to 1805.Great Northern War
During the Great Northern War of 1700 to 1721, Russian authorities sent many Swedish prisoners-of-war, especially those who surrendered after the Battle of Poltava in 1709, to Siberia.French Revolutionary wars and Napoleonic wars
The earliest known purpose-built prisoner-of-war camp was established at Norman Cross in Huntingdonshire, England in 1797 to house the increasing number of prisoners from the French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars. The average prison population was about 5,500 men. The lowest number recorded was 3,300 in October 1804 and 6,272 on 10 April 1810 was the highest number of prisoners recorded in any official document. Norman Cross Prison was intended to be a model depot providing the most humane treatment of prisoners of war. The British government went to great lengths to provide food of a quality at least equal to that available to locals. The senior officer from each quadrangle was permitted to inspect the food as it was delivered to the prison to ensure it was of sufficient quality. Despite the generous supply and quality of food, some prisoners died of starvation after gambling away their rations. Most of the men held in the prison were low-ranking soldiers and sailors, including midshipmen and junior officers, with a small number of privateers. About 100 senior officers and some civilians "of good social standing", mainly passengers on captured ships and the wives of some officers, were given parole outside the prison, mainly in Peterborough although some further afield. They were afforded the courtesy of their rank within English society.During the Battle of Leipzig, both sides used the city's cemetery as a lazaret and prisoner camp for around 6,000 POWs who lived in burial vaults and used coffins for firewood. Food was scarce and prisoners resorted to eating horses, cats, dogs or even human flesh. The bad conditions inside the graveyard contributed to a city-wide epidemic after the battle.