#pre-modern

In the twelfth century, initially with the Song court’s (960-1279) encouragement of maritime commerce (Shiba 1968, 1970, 1983), Chinese merchants began to travel to southern Asia. Chinese traders not only frequented Indian ports, but also used the Coromandel and Malabar coasts of southern India as major transit points for their trips to the Persian Gulf. The Indian ports thus consolidated their status as vital transshipment centers for goods originating from or destined for the Chinese markets. The Indian subcontinent also assumed a key position in the Yuan (1279-1368) and early Ming (1368-1644) courts’ foreign policies. This can be discerned from the Yuan and Ming sources that document an unprecedented number of diplomatic missions to the Indian kingdoms through the maritime channels.

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A shipwrecked vessel excavated from the Quanzhou Bay in southern China, which seems to have sunk sometime after 1271, provides the archeological evidence of China’s entry into the shipping channels to southern Asia (Fujian sheng Quanzhou haiwai jiaotong shi bowuguan 1987; Wake 1997). The thirteen compartments of the sunken ship contained a cargo mainly of import items, including spices such as black pepper, frankincense, and ambergris, sandalwood, tortoiseshells, glassware, and cotton textiles. While most of these products were exports from Southeast Asian ports, ambergris, frankincense, and glassware may have originated in the Middle East or the eastern coast of Africa. The black pepper and cotton textiles likely came from southern Asia.

Indication that sailors and ships of Chinese origin were navigating to southern Asia during that time comes from the record of a diplomatic mission from the Yuan court to the Malabar coast in 1281. The Yuanshi (210: 4669) reports that a Yuan mission led by Yang Tingbi , which sailed on a ship from Quanzhou, encountered unfavorable wind patterns around the Gulf of Mannar and it was recommended by the “sailor” (zhouren ) Zheng Zhen and others that it make an emergency landing at a port in the Ma’bar kingdom. The fact that Zheng Zhen, clearly a person of Chinese origin, was mentioned as a “sailor” and not a “merchant” (shangren ) suggests that he was not merely a passenger, but held a position of employment on the vessel, whether as a seamen or a commander. This source also indicates that ships from Quanzhou were making direct voyages to the South Asian coast.

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Because of Yang Tingbi’s missions, it seems, the rulers of Ma’bar and Kollam began sending regular tributary missions to the Yuan court. The Syrian Christian and Muslim trading communities in coastal India also may have dispatched their own representatives to China. Perhaps the primary purpose of these tributary missions was to reestablish commercial links with the coastal regions of China after the clashes between the Mongols and the Southern Song forces. In fact, a bilingual inscription found in Quanzhou indicates that traders from southern India began reappearing at coastal China shortly after Yang Tingbi’s first mission. Written in Tamil and Chinese, the inscription bears the date April 1281 and notes the installation of an idol of Shiva in a Brahmanical temple at the Chinese port for the “welfare” of the Yuan ruler (Subramaniam 1978; Sen 2003: 227-231).

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Wang Dayuan’s work contains descriptions of about ninety-nine ports and kingdoms located on the Indian Ocean (Ptak 1996). Wang usually gives a short ethnographical description of these sites, followed by an account of the local produce and a list of trading items. Some twenty sites referenced in Wang’s book were located along the coastal regions of India. These included Bengal and Orissa in the east, Ma’bar and Calicut in the south, and Mumbai and Gujarat in the west. As Roderich Ptak (1996) has pointed out, the “sequential arrangement” of the ninety-nine locations in the Daoyi zhilüe seems to be symbolic, making it impossible to reconstruct Wang Dayuan’s itinerary. Nonetheless, it is evident that the traders with whom Wang was traveling sailed from coastal China to the Indian subcontinent, from where they made further voyages to the Persian Gulf and to the eastern coast of Africa. This pattern of mercantile travel from the Chinese coast to the Indian ports would change, as suggested in the next section, during the early Ming period, when traders of Chinese origin made their voyages to southern Asia mostly from their bases in Southeast Asia.

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Additionally, Chinese merchants were purchasing large quantities of luxury items from the Coromandel coast, which forced the Yuan court, in Yuanzhen 2 (1296), to issue a prohibition on the trade in luxury goods with the kingdom of Ma’bar (Yuanshi 94: 2402-2403; Schurmann 1956: 233; Abraham 1988: 154-155). This order was part of the general attempt of the Yuan court to limit the outflow of Chinese metallic currency in payment for imports and was directed toward seafaring traders who purchased luxury goods like pearls and kingfishers’ feathers (cuimao ) from the Indian kingdom (Rockhill 1914: 423; on the ban on the import of kingfishers’ feathers, see Hirth and Rockhill 1966: 235-236). Despite the court’s injunction, Wang Dayuan’s record indicates that kingfishers’ feathers and other luxury items continued to be imported into China from Ma’bar and other Indian kingdoms during the Yuan period.

Generally, hostages were male, but there are several examples of females being used as political hostages in the medieval period. In the early ninth century, Kosto mentions that the mother of Andrew, Duke of Naples, was used as a hostage.9 In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, there are more examples of women and girls being used as hostages. During the first Crusade, King Coloman of Hungary allowed the Crusaders to cross his territory only if he had as hostage Baldwin of Boulogne, along with his wife and family.10 Count Joscelin II of Edessa handed over his daughter Isabella to the Emperor John II Comnenus in 1142; Balduk was killed by Baldwin of Edessa in 1190 when he delayed in handing over his wife and children as hostages; and King Baldwin of Jerusalem handed over his four-year-old daughter Iveta as a hostage in exchange for his own ransom from captivity.11 Closer to Ireland, John Gillingham notes that Henry II castrated and/or mutilated both the sons and daughters of Welsh princes as political hostages in 1165.12 And there is the famous case of Nest, the Welsh princess who was abducted from her husband Gerald Fitzwalter by Owain ap Cadwgan and held by him in the early twelfth century.13

In Ireland itself, only one female political hostage is mentioned explicitly in the annals: in 1165, the daughter of Eochaid Mac Dunnshléibhe was given as a hostage, along with a son of every chieftain in Ulster, to Muircertach Mac Lochlainn, an aspirant to and sometime high-king with opposition of Ireland.14 But Anthony Candon has recently argued that in the eleventh century, Mór, wife of Conchobar Ua Mael Sechlainn, king of Mide (Meath), was also used as a political hostage in Conchobar’s ongoing contention with Diarmait mac Máel na mBó, the king of Laigin. Candon argues that Mór was being held as a hostage for Diarmait mac Máel na mBó by Gilla Pátraic Mac Donnchada, king of Osraige, and that when Conchobar Ua Mael Sechlainn retook his wife in 1053, this was in violation of Mide’s fealty to Laigin.15

In early Ireland, hostages were mainly used by Irish kings as markers of their status and to reinforce the hierarchical nature of the various kingships in Ireland: for example, the high king of Ireland would take the hostages of the king of Mide to ensure Mide’s continuing submission to him. If the king of Mide rebelled against or otherwise broke any contract with the high king, the high king could enforce a penalty. Fergus Kelly claims that this penalty included killing, blinding, or ransoming the hostages in question. The annals do show evidence of this, but the entries referencing these punishments are fairly late, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.16 Still, regardless of the severity of the penalties, the taking of hostages was “a means of asserting political power” from the ninth to the eleventh centuries (and perhaps later).17 In essence, a hostage was a physical symbol of political subordination, held by the subordinator. One law text, as Robin Chapman Stacey remarks, “equates the taking of hostages with the ability to claim royal rank: Ni rig laisna biad geill i nglaisib. [. . .] He is no king who does not have hostages in fetters.”18 The Irish law text on hostages, De Gnímaib Gíall, is fragmentary, but the parts still extant do not specify that hostages must be male, and therefore do not rule out women being used as hostages.

In the annals, hostages are referenced using two main terms: aitiri (singular aitire) or gíall (singular géill). For many years, scholars did not make a distinction between these two terms. The texts discussing hostages are fragmentary and remain obscure; further, the distinction between the two terms seems to have collapsed by the eleventh century or so, meaning that many of the annalists referencing hostages after the eleventh century (and possibly before) may not have been particular about which term they used. Robin Chapman Stacey, however, has argued that these two terms had distinctive semantic values before the eleventh century and that the aitire and the géill would have been used to enforce different kinds of contracts between kings and their over-kings. The aitire, she argues, was a high-status member of the community who would have been associated with a kind of contract called a cairde, a compact that existed between two kings or two túatha which involved no loss of status to either party. “[T]he aitire developed out of a need for a hostage-surety who could stand ‘between’ tribes or kindreds of relatively equal status—who could, in other words, guarantee the terms of relationships in which political subordination was not to be implied.”19 On the other hand, the géill implied a loss of political status; gíall were more often associated with contracts known as cána, which could be statutes on the local or inter-túath level, or they could be a type of tribute owed by one túath and its king to another. As Stacey argues, “the obligations for which the gíall stood surety were those associated with subordinating political relationships that were conceptualized, both on the domestic (aicillne) and intertribal level, as forms of base clientship, and that therefore entailed a certain loss of independent status for the client or client-tribe involved.”20 That loss of independent status could be made manifest by shackles: gíall could be held in chains, but this was not acceptable for aitiri.21

Stacey goes on to argue that since so many Irish kings lost their independence during the ninth to the twelfth centuries and were encompassed within larger kingdoms, it is hardly surprising that the distinction between gíall and aitiri disappeared.22 The disappearance of a people’s free status should mean an increase in the exchange of gíall rather than aitiri, although the annalists sometimes seem to use the terms interchangeably. But if gíall are indeed representative of a loss of independent status, then using women as gíall can be seen as an overdetermined literalization of a political metaphor. In the same way that females were legally dependent upon males, “defined as ‘legally incompetent, senseless’ (báeth, éconn),”23 and therefore domestically dependent, so were the gíall representative of political dependence.

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The second Gormlaith has a better-developed literary character than the first Gormlaith; historically, she was the daughter of high king Flann Sinna mac Máelsechnaill, who reigned from 879–916. She was certainly married twice—to Cerball mac Muirecáin of Laigin and Niall Glúndub, high king of Ireland—but those marriages may have been preceded by another, to Cormac mac Cuilennáin, the king-bishop of Cashel, who supposedly sent her back to her father because he chose the Church over her.29 With the assistance of Cerball, Flann Sinna then attacked Cormac in 908 and defeated and killed him at the Battle of Belach Mugna.30 According to the Book of Leinster, Cerball took great delight in reliving the defeat of Cormac to Gormlaith, his current and Cormac’s former wife, upon which she uttered a mild reproof. Cerball’s response was to kick her to the ground. She left Cerball and went to her father’s house, but Flann Sinna returned her. At this, another king, Niall Glúndub, son of Áed Findliath, gathered an entourage to remove her, an action negated because she initiated divorce proceedings. Sometime after her divorce, she married Niall Glúndub, who went on to become high king.31

As opposed to the first Gormlaith, who is referenced only in annals and the Banshenchas, a text that takes as its focus the famous noblewomen of Ireland and their illustrious progeny, the second Gormlaith was the subject and potential source of contemporary and later literature. The second Gormlaith appears as a character in the Book of Leinster (twice), as mentioned above, and several poems collected in Osborn Bergin’s Early Bardic Poetry are attributed to her.32 Most of the literary texts that refer to her are dated to the twelfth century or later. Máire Ní Mhaonaigh has catalogued the many references to and by Gormlaith in the various texts, in order to shed light on how these references helped create a complex literary figure out of a historical woman.33 The literary character created is active, critical, and ethically-minded. She is also represented as a political thinker, one who understands the cascade of reactions that can follow one small action. While none of the literature mentions hostages, one poem attributed to Gormlaith depicts her as cognizant of the responsibilities due a family member held captive...

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