Victorious premodern rulers paraded captured war trophies across vast distances as visual propaganda

Evidence

An interesting case of visual propaganda occurred after the battle of Varna in 1444, when a Crusader army sent to fight the Ottomans was defeated and the Ottoman sultan Murad II captured a group of Frankish knights, gorgeously attired and caparisoned. He sent them all the way across the Middle East, to Afghanistan and back. The propaganda purpose is obvious: the Ottoman sultan, still in an early stage of Ottoman greatness, was saying to all his neighbors, colleagues and of course rivals: “Look at what I did!” “Look at what I got!” These Frankish knights in full war-kit must have been quite impressive, though they were probably rather tattered by the time they got to Afghanistan. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 485

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: A concrete mechanism example of how prestige was demonstrated to rival audiences, parallel to the signaling dynamics in reputation regimes and pre-state trade communities; the physical display of captives as a pre-literate form of power communication resonates with gift/exchange readings of legitimacy.
• CANDY: The image of tattered Frankish knights dragged from the Black Sea to Afghanistan as an early Ottoman ‘look what I did’ flex is a delightfully vivid, self-contained anecdote.
• XREF: connects to: Captured knights paraded across Eurasia advertised Ottoman military power