In this talk I argue for establishing a connection between the ransoming of captives and the hosting of refugees as a politically legitimizing practice. I consider twelfth-century military and demographic changes that led to an increase in capture and ransom, the legal framework and social response to the ransoming industry, and leaders’ involvement in the release of captives as a high concern of state. An example of large-scale conquest, enslavement, and ransom in the thirteenth century illustrates how ransom and refuge were causally related and predicated upon the reciprocal social expectations of frontier societies.
 

Dr. Camilo Gómez-Rivas is assistant professor of Middle Eastern History at the American University in Cairo where his teaching focuses on Islamic Spain and the Maghrib. His book Law and the Islamization of Morocco under the Almoravids is forthcoming with Brill. This talk is based on an article that is forthcoming with OUP and is part of a larger project on the reception of Iberian refugees in the Maghrib. Dr. Gómez-Rivas is on the executive committee of the Spain-North Africa Project and co-edited its inaugural volume, Spanning the Strait: Studies in Unity in the Western Mediterranean, which appeared in 2013 with a forty-page introduction by the editors on the last half-century of scholarship on Iberian-North African studies.