A prisoner of war (POW) 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 (releasing and repatriating them in an orderly manner after hostilities), 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.Wickham, Jason (2014) The Enslavement of War Captives by the Romans up to 146 BC, University of Liverpool PhD Dissertation. Wickham 2014 notes that for Roman warfare the outcome of capture could lead to release, ransom, execution or enslavement. Early Roman gladiators could be prisoners of war, categorised according to their ethnic roots as Samnites, Thracians, and Gauls (Galli)."The Roman Gladiator" , The University of Chicago – "Originally, captured soldiers had been made to fight with their own weapons and in their particular style of combat. It was from these conscripted prisoners of war that the gladiators acquired their exotic appearance, a distinction being made between the weapons imagined to be used by defeated enemies and those of their Roman conquerors. The Samnites (a tribe from Campania which the Romans had fought in the fourth and third centuries BC) were the prototype for Rome's professional gladiators, and it was their equipment that first was used and later adopted for the arena. [...] Two other gladiatorial categories also took their name from defeated tribes, the Galli (Gauls) and Thraeces (Thracians)." 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 (later canonised as the city's patron saint) 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.Attwater, Donald and Catherine Rachel John. The Penguin Dictionary of Saints. 3rd ed., New York: Penguin Books, 1993. .
King Henry V's English army killed many French prisoners of war at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415."But when the outcries of the lackies and boies, which ran awaie for feare of the Frenchmen thus spoiling the campe came to the kings eares, he doubting least his enimies should gather togither againe, and begin a new field; and mistrusting further that the prisoners would be an aid to his enimies, or the verie enimies to their takers in deed if they were suffered to live, contrarie to his accustomed gentleness, commended by sound of trumpet, that everie man (upon pain and death) should uncontinentlie slaie his prisoner. When this dolorous decree, and pitifull proclamation was pronounced, pitie it was to see how some Frenchmen were suddenlie sticked with daggers, some were brained with pollaxes, some slaine with malls, others had their throats cut, and some their bellies panched, so that in effect, having respect to the great number, few prisoners were saved." Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, quoted by Andrew Gurr in his introduction to 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 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 (1209) 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."Samurai, Warfare and the State in Early Medieval Japan" , The Journal of Japanese Studies.
In the 13th century the expanding Mongol Empire famously distinguished between cities or towns that surrendered (where the population was spared but required to support the conquering Mongol army) and those that resisted (in which case the city was ransacked and destroyed, and all the population killed). 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.Meyer, Michael C. and William L. Sherman. The Course of Mexican History. Oxford University Press, 5th ed. 1995. For the re-consecration of Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan in 1487, "between 10,000 and 80,400 persons" were sacrificed.Hassig, Ross (2003). "El sacrificio y las guerras floridas." Arqueología Mexicana, pp. 46–51.
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.Roger DuPasquier. Unveiling Islam. Islamic Texts Society, 1992, p. 104. Christians captured during the Crusades were usually either killed or sold into slavery if they could not pay a ransom. During his lifetime ( – 632), 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.Maududi (1967), Introduction of Ad-Dahr, "Period of revelation", p. 159. 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 (spoils of war).
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."Prisoner of war", Encyclopædia Britannica.
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 (1826). 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