Quote Originally Posted by theangelJean View Post
Been reading Volume 2 to my daughter and speculating about the "hostages" on Castle Wulfenbach.
There's been a slight semantic shift to the meaning of hostage, since about the 1970s. Nowadays when we use the word hostage, we think of criminals: terrorists, bank robbers, etc. who capture whichever random people were at the wrong place at the wrong time as a bargaining chip. Historically, though, it was still a bargaining chip but it was part of how early feudal systems worked. Let's not forget it has the same root as "host", "hospitality" or even "hotel". The vassals sent their children to their liege, who took care of their education. This allowed the liege to control the kind of values the heirs of the vassals would be taught, kept the vassals themselves in line, but also allowed the vassals to hopefully curry favor with their liege and help their heirs find suitable alliance prospects among the other hostages. In fact, the practice was once commonplace enough that some children were actually named Hostage as their name, because that was what their purpose was going to be. This is the case notably for the Germanic-origin names with the gisl root in it, like Ghislain or Giselle. Hostages were also taken after a peace treaty between two countries, sometimes even mutually, as a way keep the peace treaty alive and foster greater understanding for their neighbor in the next generation of rulers.

This practice died off in the 18th century, though; so it could be seen as a bit anachronistic in Girl Genius; but it fits the setting and it's not like there aren't more important deviations between the real world and Sparky Europa.