Hardly a day goes by without the public being made aware of the constant presence of violence in war through the media. Russia’s attack on Ukraine in violation of international law and, more recently, Azerbaijan’s invasion of Armenia testify to the high topicality of violence in warfare for the public and scholars. Violence in war has been discussed in the humanities with numerous approaches. Since its first written records in premodern age, it has been in a constant state of flux between negotiation and contestation. Following on from this, the way war has been waged and perceived is also subject to this constant change. As a cross-societal phenomenon, it is particularly the differences in how and when violence is bound and unbound in war that make the boundaries of accepted and transgressive violence appear extremely fluid. To revisit research foci as well as perspectives and to explore the question of bounded and unbounded violence in war, Lennart Gilhaus (Bonn) set out to discuss the explosive topic with participants interdisciplinary, cross-epochal, and global for the eras of pre-modernity.
In the first lecture, DANIEL SCHLEY (Bonn) examined the significance of religious violence in written sources of pre-modern Japan in the 12th and 13th centuries. With the assimilation of Buddhism in the 8th and 9th centuries and the subsequent fanning out of Buddhist religion into multiple forms in connection with Japanese Shintoism, a dialectic in the discourse on violence took hold that condemned religious violence on the one hand and could accept it on the other. The key to understanding this contradictory attitude lies, according to Schley, in the specific role played by the clergy and court in medieval Japan. Intrareligious violence was considered a common problem, but it was less religious than political.
HANS VAN WEES (London) discussed the role of slavery in archaic and classical Greek warfare. Based on the begun revision of the former research consensus, according to which war-dependent enslavement was of minor importance in early Greece until ca. 550 BC, he demonstrated through literary sources that, in contrast, the enslavement of captives was of large dimension in Greek warfare as early as 750 BC.
The importance of royal power in the Ottonian Empire of the 10th and 11th centuries, which is still under discussion today, was examined by DAVID BACHRACH (New Hampshire). Bachrach countered the predominant opinion in German scholarship of a consensual rule divided between king and nobility in the early medieval Ottonian Empire. He draw the picture of a strong monarch who legitimized and organized both military offense and defense, whether large- or small-scale. Using the example of Carolingian legal practice, which continued to be carried out in the Ottonian succession, Bachrach showed that although internal violence existed in the empire, the authority and capacity to bundle, legitimize and control it lay clearly with the king and could serve as an example of bounded violence within the realm.
On a genuinely anthropological level, ELIZABETH ARKUSH (Pittsburgh) illuminated the diverse patterns of forms of violence in pre-Columbian Peru (400–1450). The different forms of relationships with enemies that could vary from danger avoidance, predatory raiding, and extermination are particularly explainable with the correlation of war frequency and resource scarcity. One key factor she highlighted was the marginal value of labor. While production was high and labor flourished on the Peruvian north coast, wars were fought over the control of people. Where this production was low, as in the highlands of the Andes, the struggle for resources determined the violent conflicts.
On the language of transgression NATHALIE BARRANDON (Reims) examined massacres and extreme violence in Roman society from the end of the Republic until the 2nd century BC. Barrandon showed that in ancient narratives several Latin words can express the act of transgressing, based on the three registers of law, religion and morality. These registers are accumulated when a Roman historian refers to a transgression by extreme violence. The perception of these violent acts in the narratives shows that while transgressing norms using extreme violence was a form of ancient warfare, it was possible to stigmatize the transgressors.
WERNER RIESS (Hamburg) analyzed the two distinct depictions of violence in Caesar’s writings “De bello Gallico” and “De bello civili”. While Caesar openly describes massacres and his bloody warfare in the Gallic War, he portrays a kind of clean, disciplined warfare in the Civil War. However, the cruelty of the Roman civil wars is well known trough other sources, and Rieß convincingly showed that Caesar uses an elaborate language with a gentle tone in his own writing to disguise it. Rieß argued that this approach is not only due to the different intentions of the writings regarding self-presentation and propaganda, but even corresponds to distinct strategies of violence used against the differing enemies.
STEFANIE RÜTHER (Frankfurt am Main) examined the boundaries of tolerated and non-tolerated violence in late medieval warfare. She provided a typology that focuses especially on the justificatory narratives of violence. Enemies of God (1), divine intervention (2), honor (3), circumstances (4), and memoria (5) represent clues of an order of what to expect in the written sources in terms of justification. Rüther illustrated through the five categories that chivalry was often seen as a substitute for a lack of martial law in the Middle Ages and emphasized that especially when noble combatants did not meet the implicit norms of chivalry and honor, there was a high urge for justification of violence.
HENDRIK HESS (Bonn) analyzed how the image of masculinity was conceived and constructed in the historiographical sources of the late Middle Ages, taking Rudolf of Habsburg as an example. Hess argued that it was not so much the masculinity of the ruler as an individual character image, but rather the royal duty of peacekeeping that was decisive for the image of the king. Violence does not play the integral part of masculinity in historiographical literature. Rather, it fits into the general fama and gloria of the ruler and was not crucial to the portrayal of Rudolf as a person. Hess thus overturned the common image of a public opinion about the violent and masculine Middle Ages that is oriented towards masculinity.
On the basis of texts from Attic oratory, SARAH BRUCIA BREITENFELD (Davidson) illustrated the violence in the daily experience of enslaved women in the 4th century BC. Comparing the two scenes in Dem. 19.196–198 and [Dem.] 59.33–35, they pointed out a significant overlap regarding the violent treatment of enslaved women. By analyzing the texts, they described how male citizens become perpetrators towards enslaved women during drinking parties. According to Brucia Breitenfeld, these scenes provide insight into specific circumstances of daily life that proved to be dangerous for women in slavery.
JOHN SERRATI (Ottawa) examined the role of women in the male-dominated warfare of the middle Roman Republic. He pointed out that revenge was an essential part of the Roman concept of war, with physical revenge in combat clearly considered masculine. However, since revenge itself was seen as a feminine attribute, this male-female interweaving, according to Serrati, indicates that women take an important part in influencing men to fulfill their duty in war. This opportunity is given to them through the publicly performed acts of ritual mourning at Roman funerals, which are meant to inspire young males to assent anything for the community.
HITOMI TONOMURA (Michigan) focused on the connection between narratives, gender and violence in pre-modern Japan. She fundamentally questioned the approach of modern scholars who define violence through war and war through violence and opened up a much more diverse intake on the matter. Using 12th century vernacular literature that presented female participants in wars as particularly salient, Tonomura illustrated how gendered rules developed in association with the level of violence in order to mitigate more violence.
ISABELLE PIMOUGUET-PEDARROS (Nantes) discussed extreme violence, transgression and their connection to one another in the Hellenistic period. By illuminating the notion of extreme violence, she identified three manifestations of extreme violence in Hellenism, namely acts of mass violence, acts of cruelty, and collective suicide. However, extreme violence was not necessarily considered a transgression. Pimouguet-Pedarros showed that this transgression merely exists in connection with a value system and is subjected to the prevalent fundamental norms and their implementations. Therefore, no violence was transgressive in itself, but must be seen in the context it occurred.
ALI ANOOSHAHR (Davis) examined the limits of accepted and unaccepted violence in the 16th century Indian Mughal Empire. Using the example of Emperor Humayun (d. 1556), Anooshahr emphasized that especially the question of persons, i.e. who was punished, was decisive for whether the exercised violence was perceived as justice of the ruler or whether it was considered unjust or even transgressive, since it affected sacrosanct groups of persons in that time. In many cases, the form of punishment as a legal act was more problematic than the violence itself, and in a period of intense change it necessarily required the general consensus of the nobility to justify the ruler's punishment, especially when the punishment affected sacrosanct groups of people.
KARL FRIDAY (Saitama) explored, in the context of the Late Classical Japanese Heian period (794–1185), how violence was perceived in the interplay of private and public influence at the different levels from the court, the center of power, and the peripheral rural areas. He broke the common assumption of a detached warrior community that in reality was much more closely tied to the court. The exercise of power was always in the authority of the center and the court while at the same time the boundaries of social mobility were quite fluid. In a period of socioeconomic and political stability, violence and military power were meaningless without the backing of the legal authority.
BETH SCAFFIDI (Merced) illuminated the common practice of taking and using trophy heads in the Pre-Hispanic Andes. Scaffidi explained that the moveable trophy heads were worn and displayed during a very long usage period in which they are passed on over generations. However, it is still the subject of intense debate among Andeanists as to who these heads belonged to and whether they were taken by a violent death. Reflecting on a wide range of scientific data Scaffidi convincingly argued that the trophy heads were fresh and violently taken from enemies slain in combat, and subsequently kept. Thereafter, the trophy heads were left intact so they remained clearly identifiable, and very carefully maintained.
DOMINIK MASCHEK (Trier/Mainz) examined organized violence and its socio-cultural impact in Italy of the Late Roman Republic. He stated that extreme violence, which was previously reserved for externals abroad, was also committed to fellow Romans and Italians. By taking a close look to the sieges of Fregellae, Asculum and Praeneste, Maschek not only illustrated this extreme violence, but also showed the consequences and profound transformation it brought about. The dramatic impact of the increased violence incapsulated i.a. destroyed and abandoned cities, emerged settlements and cult places in often substantially transformed landscapes, destabilized and completely remodeled hierarchies as well as new social-political systems.
MARTIN CLAUSS (Chemnitz) spoke about the relationship between narrative and the act of violence in the Middle Ages. As a product of social and literary construction, the “heroes” in his analysis serve as a means of viewing excessive violence in war, revealing different attitudes at different times in different societies. Clauss presented an analytical model, which should help to recognize processes of heroizing in narrative sources and to classify them in the context of applications of violence. The kind of violence described always depended on the narrative context, as long as the hero as protagonist of the narrative reflected its own form of agency, and so the most important feature of heroizing. Thus, it is not the violence per se, but who perpetrates it at a given moment in a specific context that determines heroizing.
Under the concept of a community of violence, LENNART GILHAUS (Bonn) analyzed the practices and dynamics of the 10.000 Greek mercenaries who, led by their strategist Xenophon, marched through Asia Minor to the Black Sea in the aftermath of the lost battle of Cunaxa in 401 BC.
JÜRGEN PAUL (Hamburg) focused on the extent of violence during the Mongol and Timurid conquest from the 12th to the 15th century. He used the example of the Anatolian city of Mardin to show the widely divergent extents of violence in the course of its multiple conquests. In a time frame of 200 years (1199–1410), Paul examined the mainly contemporary sources under which conditions violence degenerated and when it was controlled, especially by the army leadership. By showing the different forms of prolonged sieges with little violence and short sieges with excessive violence, and vice versa, Paul illustrated that a clear pattern of the extent of violence cannot be discerned.
BEATRICE MANZ (Boston) showed how strongly actors and agencies could actively influence the image of a violent time by means of the Mongol conquest of Iran in the first half of the 13th century. According to Manz, a charged political field of numerous actors created a “festival of violence” that was not limited to the Mongols, but was a dynamic part of both the conquest and the civil war. Thus, the examples of the cities of Nishappur and Marv during the short period of conquest (1219–1224) show, which effects the constantly changing loyalties and internal power struggles of the Iranian population could have on the degree of the subsequent violent conquest. According to Manz, the level of agency in particular should not simply be dismissed, but can provide insights especially into the perception and political handling of the conquest by the local population and power elite.
In the final lecture, R. ALAN COVEY (Texas) impressively illustrated the emergence and development of military violence in the Inca Empire. He noted that the expansion of the Inca territory began through diplomacy and rare campaigns, but proceeded without diplomacy trough more frequent and brutal campaigns. The brutality eventually culminated in the unbounded violence and destructiveness of the civil war. Covey thus traced an Inca vision that militarism and establishing kinship relations initially built the empire, but misguided brutality left it vulnerable to the upcoming Spanish invasion.
The interdisciplinary, cross-epochal, and global scope of the lectures illuminated the question of bounded and unbounded violence in pre-modern warfare from many angles, and yet revealed remarkable coherence. The diverse approaches showed that understanding bounded and unbounded violence is at first a matter of source and a topic of group identification. In a final discussion it was highlighted that the view of violence has proven to be flexible and dialectical, as the particular context is absolutely crucial, i.e. why who inflicts violence against whom and by what methods. It was pointed out that different scales are applied in different social environments, as shown in the dichotomy between insiders and outsiders. Thus, the use of bounded and unbounded violence was interwoven with patterns of social and historical context. These insightful results were enclosed with followed-up questions that emphasized the significance of the subject as well as the interest in continuing the research discussion, and indicated that particular needs exists around the topics of ages and gender of involved people, the role of women in the experience of extreme violence and different conceptions of the body. Accordingly, following on from these desiderata, there is more enlightening research on bounded and unbounded violence to come.
Conference overview:
Lennart Gilhaus (University of Bonn): Introduction
Violence and the State
Daniel Schley (University of Bonn): Killing the Buddha – Praising the Buddha. Some Preliminary Remarks on the Discourse of Religious Violence in Medieval Japan
Hans van Wees (University College London): War and Slavery in Early Greece
David Bachrach (University of New Hampshire): Feud, Governmental Authority, and the Balance of Power in the Conduct of War in Ottonian Germany
Elizabeth Arkush (University of Pittsburgh): Relationships with Enemies: Cross-Cultural Patterns in War, Violence, and the Politics of Production
Narrating Violence
Nathalie Barrandon (University of Reims): The Language of Transgression in Latin Sources
Werner Rieß (University of Hamburg): Caesar’s Distinct Strategies of Violence in his Gallic and Civil War
Stefanie Rüther (Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, Frankfurt am Main): Justified? Norms of War and Narratives of Excessive Violence in the Middle Age
Gender and Violence
Hendrik Hess (University of Bonn): Violence, Power, Masculinity – The Representation of the Ruler at the End of the 13th Century
Sarah Brucia Breitenfeld (Davidson College): They Forced Her to Drink – Violence, Gender, and Enslavement in Attic Oratory
John Serrati (University of Ottawa): War as Controlled Violence – Masculinity and Female Agency in the Roman Republic
Hitomi Tonomura (University of Michigan): Gendered Narrative of Violence: The Case of Premodern Japan
Performing Violence
Isabelle Pimouguet-Pedarros (University of Nantes): War, Extreme Violence and Transgression – Definitions and Case Studies for the Hellenistic Period
Ali Anooshahr (University of California, Davis): Lest Your Justice Prove Violence: Contested Defintions in 16th-Century Mughal India
Karl Friday (Saitama University): Thugs & Thegns: Appraisals and Appropriations of Violence in Classical Japan
Beth Scaffidi (University of California, Merced): Trophy Heads as Agents of Intergroup Warfare in the Pre-Hispanic Andes
Violent Actors
Dominik Maschek (University of Trier / Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum Mainz): From Fregellae to Actium – The Scale and Socio-Cultural Impact of Organised Violence in Late Republican Italy
Martin Clauss (University of Chemnitz): Violence and Heroism in the European Middle Ages
Lennart Gilhaus (University of Bonn): The Ten Thousand Greek Mercenaries as a Community of Violence
Conquest and the Impact of Violence
Jürgen Paul (University of Hamburg): The City and its Hinterland. Sieges and Conquests of Mardin, Twelth-Fifteenth Centuries
Beatrice Manz (Tufts University, Boston): Why was the Mongol Conquest of Eastern Iran so Violent?
R. Alan Covey (University of Texas): Emerging Expressions of Military Violence in the Inca Empire
Lennart Gilhaus (University of Bonn): Concluding discussion