Examines the changing situations in which hostages were used in the Europe and the Mediterranean world from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries, touching on a wide range of topics in military, diplomatic, political, social, gender, economic, and legal history.

• 1: Hostages in the Middle Ages: Problems and Perspectives


• 2: Varieties and Logics of Medieval Hostageship


• 3: Hostages in the Early Middle Ages: Communication, Conversion, and Structures of Alliance


• 4: Hostages in the Later Middle Ages: Representation, Finance, and the Laws of War


• 5: Conditional Hostages


• 6: The King's Ransom


• 7: Hostageship Interpreted, from the Middle Ages to the Age of Terrorism

Adam Kosto is an historian of medieval European institutions. He studied at Yale (BA 1989), Cambridge (MPhil 1990), and Harvard (AM 1991, PhD 1996) before joining the faculty of Columbia University in 1997, where he now serves as Professor of History.