A Cautionary Tale from the Crusades? War and Prisoners in Conditions of Normative Incommensurability
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The conventional wisdom is that treatment of prisoners during the Crusades, in an age long before the development of the modern laws of war, can only have been horrendous. Historical evidence seems to partly vindicate this account, but is also testimony to how well prisoners were treated on some occasions. This chapter explores the impact that norms about the nature of war and how it should be waged had on the issue. It suggests that despite the religious intensity of the Crusades and the fact that they unfolded along civilizational divides, there were several strands within the Christian and probably even more the Moslem tradition which guaranteed a degree of moderation in warfare, particularly protection for prisoners. The conclusion is that an overarching law of war is not necessarily a pre-condition to restraint in warfare, as long as a number of other circumstances exist such as a strong deontological imperative of self-restraint.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".