Don’t know how many, but many Templar Knights refused to be ransomed when captured by Saladin, a Kurd, during Richard the Lionhearted’s Crusade. Saladin executed them, probably using damascene steel scimitars, which were far superior to the swords that the Europeans used at the time. (European swords at that time weren’t sharp enough to cut through a man’s head like you saw on 300 Frank Miller version, so they were using nothing but brute strength, fanaticism, and the speed of the horse to get it dug in)

Regardless of the soldier vs combatant vs ransom vs non-ransom system, what was true back then was that if you violated the Rules of War, they no longer applied to you. This occured during the Peloponessian War between Athens and Sparta, when Athens refused to fight lawfully hoplite to hoplite against Sparta’s ranks sitting outside their city walls. And it also occured whenever a city in medieval times, refused to surrender after their walls were breached. This led to Cromwell almost annihilating the city’s population.

Book said combatants, not soldiers. You know, like the Greek translator for the Persians, that the Athenians executed around the time of the Xerxes invasion.

Do people that think others are short on history, ever realize that there could be problems with their reading comprehension being shot?

You are either short on history or joking. Exchange of prisoners – with or without ransom – was the rule in warfare from Greek times at least. On the rare occasions when it was broken, as with Syracuse’s savage treatment of the captured Athenians, it was because the enemy was felt to have waged a war beyond the limits of legality and decency (in the case of Syracuse, the Athenians had attacked the city without provocation). When the prisoners could not be exchanged or ransomed, they were sold as slaves. The mass murder of enemy prisoners never features even in the darkest periods of Western history: one just has to remember the astonishment every historian feels at the single mention of Charlemagne executing 4000 Saxons – but the text is dubious, and even if he did, he had plenty of provocation – and the universal disgust which greeted, centuries later, Henry V’s murder of prisoners at Azincourt.

I am unhappy with anyone, Republican or Democrat, that voted funds and authority behind the war in Iraq, but name calling seems unproductive compared to turning this tide.

C. Tennis
rural Washington

We’re not at the point where retributive death is the only option we have. The Nazis used that cause they were lazy and/or incompetent at catching the partisans. We have thousands of partisans and agents that we know have killed people. Their executions will not be because of their “buddies” actions. Anymore than Saddam’s execution was because we were pissed at the Baathists killing Americans, or the Iraqis and Kurds being pissed at their families being killed.

If you don’t kill people who need killing, Book, then justice will not be served. And without justice, people will no longer obey the laws that are now too unjust.