![]() ![]() The first example of international agreements on the fate of prisoners was the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, concluded at the end of the Thirty Years’ War. By the rules…Īll in all, there was no common practice of treating the prisoners of war until the 17th century. The legend says, when King Samuel II of Bulgaria saw his soldiers blinded, he died of a heart attack. The Bulgarians were divided into columns of 100 people, with 99 soldiers fully blinded and only one of the hundred left with one eye to see the road. For instance, in 1014, Byzantine Emperor Basil II commanded to blind 15,000 Bulgarian soldiers captured in the Battle of Belasitsa and sent back them to Bulgaria that way. In the Middle Ages, the attitude toward prisoners of war was no better. Captured noblemen were forced to grind the bones of their ancestors as a sign of complete submission to Assyria, rejection of their past and refusal to fight. ![]() Bloody pyramids were made from the heads of killed enemies, the captives were flayed alive, and their skin hung on the walls of the Assyrian capital. The Assyrian Empire (14th-7th centuries BC) was especially cruel to prisoners of war and civilians. Such prisoners had much more value because they could be ransomed for a generous price, or used to negotiate more favourable terms in postwar agreements.īut even the noble captives were sometimes killed demonstratively, just to show power and intimidate the enemy. The only exception was the captured elite, aristocracy and rulers. However, there was no clear distinction between prisoners of war and ordinary prisoners: both captured civilians of the enemy state and captured soldiers were treated as the property of the victor and were equally powerless. Now they were not an unnecessary burden, but a valuable labor resource: they could be used as slaves. And on the onset of the Neolithic Revolution, the attitude toward prisoners of war has changed. This trend continued until the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture. That is why the armed conflicts of that time were so brutal: if one could not count on the mercy of the winner, one had to fight to the last drop of blood. The cases of ritual cannibalism against prisoners of war were also known. Most often, the entire tribe of the defeated was destroyed, except for women capable of childbearing. Therefore, the men who survived the clash between the tribes were usually killed by the victors. Primitive people did not see any point in pardoning their enemies, let alone providing them with any conditions for survival. The fate of the prisoners of the first intertribal conflicts was unenviable. ![]()
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