The very concept of an armed pilgrimage to liberate the Holy Land, the activity that we have come to call crusading, was radical and innovative when it was first broached by Pope Urban II in 1095. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the exact role of women in these pioneering, religiously motivated military expeditions had not been envisaged or properly considered.
Indeed, Pope Urban appears to have been taken entirely by surprise by the degree to which his appeal for fighting men to liberate the Holy Land by force of arms would resonate with women, just as he had not expected clerics, the sick, disabled or elderly to answer his call either. Yet in the wake of Urban’s speech at Clermont, women by the thousands rushed to ‘take the cross’. Furthermore, these women included venerable widows, devout nuns and powerful noblewomen, all of impeccable reputations. They could not be dismissed as camp followers, and they exhibited palpable piety in their desire to free the Holy Land.
Disconcerted and confused, Pope Urban started back-pedalling immediately. He attempted to restrict those who took crusader vows to individuals physically and financially capable of making a military contribution to what promised to be a difficult armed expedition. He forbade monks from taking crusader vows, although he accepted the need for secular clergy to accompany the fighting men to provide them with spiritual support (hear confessions, bury the dead, etc.). Yet while Urban sought to discourage all types of non-combatants, clerical concern about the participation of women was twofold.
In addition to being unable to make a military contribution to the crusade, commanders and clerics worried that women would become a distraction and temptation for the male participants who were supposed to be undertaking the expedition in the service of God. As envisaged by the papacy, participants were expected to focus on spiritual duties and rewards rather than carnal matters such as material gain and pleasure. Crusaders were admonished to avoid all forms of sin, which meant avoiding adultery and fornication no less than jealousy, greed, pride, etc. The mere presence of women was presumed to be a temptation that would lead to sin and, with it, divine displeasure. In an age when divine intervention in events was considered normal, many commanders were wary of conditions that might attract the wrath of God.
Urban tried to solve the problem created by unsuitable persons taking crusader vows by urging these individuals to obtain absolution for their vows from a cleric of appropriate rank. In at least one recorded case, the bishop of Toulouse ‘converted’ the crusader vow of a prominent noblewoman into a vow to build a hospice for the poor instead. That is, he promised the same level of spiritual benefit as Urban had promised to participants in the crusade for her act of charity at home.
This and other acts like it set a precedent so frequently followed that, by the mid-thirteenth century, transmuting crusader vows to financial payments had become a cynical source of clerical income. In 1213, Innocent III had already institutionalised ‘proportional indulgences’ for services in support of crusading yet short of actual participation and officially offered ‘redemptions’ of crusader vows – at a price. His successor Gregory IX took things further in 1243 when he eliminated all restrictions on those allowed to take a crusader vow, thereby dropping all considerations of suitability or probability. Instead, Gregory actively encouraged everyone – the old and infirm, the sick and disabled, the destitute and women – to take crusader vows and pay cash into the papal coffers to redeem those vows. As historian Christopher Tyreman put it, these thirteenth-century innovations ‘transformed crusade finance’.35
Meanwhile, clerics and military leaders alike had to deal with another relevant phenomenon: whether women took crusader vows or not, they had a profound influence on recruitment. For one thing, in the early years of crusading history, the prevailing clerical view was that married men required the permission of their wives to undertake a crusade. This derived from mediaeval marital theology, which argued that married partners owed ‘conjugal services’ to one another (often referred to as ‘the conjugal debt’). The inability to fulfil one’s conjugal duties due to long periods of absence made both partners more vulnerable to the temptations of adultery. Thus, the Church argued that both partners must consciously agree to the separation that crusading inherently entailed. Many clerical advocates of the crusade feared that wives might deny their consent to husbands keen to participate.
These fears were not entirely fabricated. Enough men blamed their wives for their failure to take crusading vows that the papacy concluded a remedy was needed. In 1201, Innocent III officially ended the need for a crusader to obtain his wife’s consent. However, this only aided those men keen to undertake a crusade. As the Church knew all too well, many more men were reluctant to join a crusade because of strong emotional attachments and a sense of responsibility for wives and children. Men who loved their families were disinclined to be separated for years.
The immediate solution was to allow men and women to travel together on crusades. Since sex within marriage was not a sin, married couples could fulfil their mutual conjugal debt without sinning and would not incur the wrath of God. By travelling together, they were also presumed to avoid the temptation of adultery. The tradition of married couples crusading together was thus born during the First Crusade and became increasingly popular in the various expeditions that followed.
At the same time, contemporary sources also noted that if some women held their menfolk back, others actively encouraged crusading. The Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi, for example, underlines the popularity of the Third Crusade by claiming that ‘brides urged their husbands and mothers incited their sons to go’.36 While such statements are easily dismissed as propaganda and are unquantifiable, they are unlikely to have been entirely without basis. Jonathan Riley-Smith, furthermore, documented the degree to which women served as catalysts for crusading by tracing family connections between prominent crusaders. His work demonstrates that noblemen who participated in the crusades tended to come from interrelated families. While sons followed in the footsteps of their fathers and grandfathers, the sisters and daughters of crusaders spread crusading enthusiasm to their husbands and in-laws, systematically expanding the circle of crusading nobility.
The more established the concept of crusading became, the more women shared enthusiasm for it. Women of this era, like their fathers, brothers and husbands, viewed the Holy Land as Christ’s homeland and believed it should be under Christian control. Furthermore, pious women no less than devout men longed for the spiritual benefits associated with a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Consequently, women supported and participated in crusading in one form or another from the first to the last crusade.
Before looking more closely at the women who participated in the crusades, it is worthwhile taking a brief look at the supporting roles played by the many women who remained in the West. The most obvious way these women supported crusading was by assuming the burdens and responsibilities of their crusading male family members. In some cases, wives or mothers took over the family business, oversaw workshops and staff, maintained commercial ties, conducted business correspondence and managed estates. At the pinnacle of society, for example, Queen Eleanor of England was instrumental in rebuffing her younger son John’s attempts to usurp her elder son Richard’s throne while the latter was in the East. She was certainly tireless in gathering her son’s ransom after Richard was taken captive by the Duke of Austria on his return from the Third Crusade. Queen Blanche of France, another queen mother, was more powerful still. She assumed the full regency of France during Louis IX’s crusade. In the opinion of some scholars, she ruthlessly enforced ecclesiastical tithes and otherwise marshalled resources to support her son’s disastrous crusade and his subsequent activities in the Holy Land. Likewise, the dowager Countess of Champagne, Marie, governed Champagne for her son Henri while forwarding him the bulk of the revenues from his estates to finance his crusading activities and pay the debts he incurred in Acre. More commonly, knights’ and nobles’ wives assumed the role of lord during their husband’s absence, a precedent set in the First Crusade by, for example, the daughter of William of Conqueror, who ruled Blois and Chartres whilst her husband Stephen took part in it. Such activity, however, was not exclusive to crusading. Under feudalism, women routinely assumed the role of lord for absent male relatives, regardless of the reason for that absenteeism.
More specific to crusading was the large number of women who provided financial assistance directly to crusaders. In some cases, this entailed agreeing to sell lands held jointly or even dower properties to finance the costs of a husband’s or son’s expedition. In other instances, it entailed direct donations to cover the costs of outfitting and provisioning foot soldiers or knights who wished to participate in a crusade but could not afford it. During the Third Crusade, Richard I’s sister Joanna, the dowager queen of Sicily, agreed to sell her entire dower to help finance her brother’s crusade in exchange for a promise to reimburse her from holdings inside his continental empire at a later date. At a smaller scale, yet completely without a guarantee of material compensation, the widow of Balian d’Ibelin of Beirut, Eschiva de Montbeliard, outfitted an entire ship at her own expense to transport crusaders of the Seventh Crusade to Egypt. There is also evidence that the women of Genoa raised more charitable donations in support of the crusades than their men. Lastly, after the establishment of the militant orders dedicated to maintaining Christian control of the Holy Land (the Templars, Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights), women contributed to crusading objectives by donating and endowing these institutions. While the total sum of these contributions has never been calculated, anecdotal evidence of grants to individual houses suggests that women played a significant role in bolstering the financial position of the militant – and indeed all – religious orders.
Regardless of what Pope Urban II had intended, wanted, said or done to prevent it, women took part in all the armed expeditions to the Holy Land that we call crusades. Chronicles, family histories and Muslim sources attest to the presence of women in the various crusading hosts, and it is a moot point whether these women were true crusaders or merely pilgrims. Undoubtedly, some women who travelled with each crusading host were traditional camp followers (whores, washerwomen, servants in attendance on more affluent female pilgrims, etc.). However, many more appear to have been religiously motivated pilgrims who had either officially taken the cross, were widows fulfilling vows made by their deceased husbands, or were the wives of crusaders who accompanied their husbands on their expeditions.
As noted above, the religious motivations driving the crusades – the desire for personal salvation, the feudal obligation to ‘ransom’ Christ’s homeland from the Muslims, or the commitment to end the oppression of fellow Christians – appealed to women no less than to men. Precisely because women were more vulnerable to violence and less likely to be able to defend themselves, many female pilgrims preferred to join armed expeditions with large numbers of fighting men rather than travel independently, whether they took a crusading vow or not.
The most common pattern of female participation was in the form of wives accompanying their husbands, and there are many recorded instances of men and women taking vows simultaneously. Nevertheless, we also know of cases where sisters went with their brothers (e.g., Joanna Plantagenet and Richard I cited above) and daughters accompanied their parents. There is also evidence of unaccompanied women going on crusades, although the majority of these were presumably widows because wives needed the permission of their husbands to travel, and nuns were doubly discouraged both as cloistered clergy and as females. Whatever their status, women unaccompanied by a male relative usually travelled with other women for greater safety. Whether with male companions or alone, the women who set out on crusade came from all segments of society, from the richest to the poorest. Inherently, we possess more information about queens and noblewomen than their impoverished or less well-off sisters. Nevertheless, there is enough anecdotal reference to poorer women to suggest that upper-class women were not disproportionally present on crusades.
Two leaders of the First Crusade, Baldwin of Boulogne and Raymond of Toulouse, set out with their wives. A total of fifteen women of high birth are known by name to have taken part in the several armed pilgrimages carried out between 1096 and 1101. These include Ida of Austria, who led her own military contingent in the expedition of 1101. In the Second Crusade, Eleanor of Aquitaine famously took the cross publicly in front of the assembled nobility of France and, furthermore, did so in her own right as Duchess of Aquitaine rather than queen of France to encourage participation by her vassals. Eleanor was notoriously accompanied on the Second Crusade by an unspecified number of noble ladies, who were derogatively referred to as ‘amazons’. Joanna Plantagenet and Berengaria of Navara, the sister and betrothed/wife of Richard of England, respectively, both joined him on the Third Crusade. The widow of King Bela III of Hungary, the sister of Philip II of France and former Queen of England and consort of Henry the Young King, likewise took crusader vows in 1196 and succeeded in making it to Jerusalem, where she died.
In the next century, Eleanor of Castile, Princess of Wales, took the cross in her own right in 1267, and in 1287 Alice Countess of Blois took crusading vows and led a large contingent of knights to the Holy Land. Incidentally, by this time, the papacy had not only institutionalised the practice of allowing women to take crusader vows to redeem them with a cash payment, but it also explicitly condoned or encouraged female crusading, provided the women were accompanying their husbands or were wealthy enough to ‘lead (ducere) warriors to the East at their own expense’.37
It is fair to ask, however, what these women actually did while on these crusades. Starting with the high-profile cases, later sources blamed Eleanor of Aquitaine for the disaster we know as the Second Crusade or at least one severe setback during it. The popular legend that Eleanor and the women who accompanied her dressed and behaved scandalously, calling down the vengeance of God, is pure fiction. It is a hybrid construction based on allegations of an inappropriate relationship between Eleanor and her uncle Raymond of Poitiers, the Prince of Antioch, and a Byzantine account of German female crusaders who wore armour. (The Second Crusade was composed of two main contingents; the German component led by Conrad III of Germany passed through Constantinople before the French contingent.)
On the other hand, accusations by some sources that Eleanor was responsible for a disaster during the advance cannot be entirely dismissed. When passing through Anatolia in January 1248, Eleanor allegedly urged the vanguard under the command of one of her vassals to disregard orders from her husband, the king. Allegedly she convinced her vassal not to halt in a mountain pass but instead to continue down into the valley where it would be more pleasant to camp. As a result, a wide gap developed between the advance guard and the main body of troops. Exploiting this fact, the Turks attacked the main force while it was in the pass and inflicted heavy losses. King Louis’ horse was killed under him, and he was nearly taken captive. Nightfall spared the crusaders from complete destruction, but as many as 7,000 men and hundreds of horses had died and the baggage train was looted. As in any military debacle, multiple mistakes were made, and it seems somewhat illogical to blame the French queen alone. Nevertheless, she may, indeed, bear some share of the guilt.
Yet, other sources note that the Byzantine empress corresponded with Eleanor during the French advance. Some have suggested that the women managed to mitigate growing tensions between the Greek emperor and the French king. If this is the case, both women served as mediators, thereby facilitating the progress of the crusade.
It is challenging to identify any specific role played by Queen Berengaria or Queen Joanna during the Third Crusade beyond the financial support given by Joanna to her brother noted earlier. On the other hand, Marguerite de Provence, the queen of Louis IX of France, played an extraordinary role in the Seventh Crusade. First, she commanded the forces that remained behind in Damietta while the main body of crusaders advanced up the Nile. After the debacle at Mansourah, Louis’ army was cut off from supplies and devastated by various diseases, including scurvy and dysentery. Eventually, Louis was forced to surrender from his sickbed. Needless to say, news of this catastrophic development soon reached Damietta, carried by an Egyptian army bearing the captured arms of the French knights and nobles.
While the Muslims singularly failed to terrify Marguerite into surrender, they invested the city by land, and panic duly set in among the crusader garrison. The troops left behind consisted primarily of sailors and archers from Pisa and Genoa. Believing the crusade was over and the French army killed and captured, they wanted to sail away. Despite being unable to stand after giving birth to a son, Jean Tristan, Marguerite summoned the leaders to her chamber. Here she implored the men not to abandon her and those in captivity. Presciently she noted that the city of Damietta was the most important bargaining chip the crusaders had for negotiating a ransom for the captive men. The Italians countered by claiming they were starving. The queen promptly offered to buy all the provisions of the city with her own resources and undertook to keep every man at the crown’s expense. The ploy worked, and the Italian sailors and archers remained in Damietta.
Yet, Marguerite’s role was not over. Louis and the other surviving noblemen were in an extremely precarious position. Early in the ransom negotiations, the sultan threatened to torture Louis unless he surrendered certain castles in Outremer. The castles in question, however, had been built and maintained by the Templars, Hospitallers and barons of Outremer. Louis replied that he could not surrender castles that he did not control. When he was shown the instruments of torture his captors intended to employ, Louis answered that they could do what they liked, but he still could not surrender castles held by men not subject to the French crown. Eventually, the sultan offered to release him and the other prisoners in exchange for the surrender of Damietta and an enormous cash ransom payment of 400,000 livres. Louis agreed to ‘advise’ his queen to accept these terms but refused to swear an oath because, he told the sultan, he did not know if Marguerite would consent. To the sultan’s astonishment, he explained that he could not compel her because she was his consort and the Queen of France. Marguerite agreed and complied without haggling, although the sum requested was astronomical.
Turning to the activities of nameless, non-noble women who joined crusading hosts, the chronicles tell us that they, too, played important roles. Women are described and praised, for example, for bringing water and refreshment to the men defending the shield wall at the Battle of Dorylaeum. At the siege of Jerusalem in 1099, women wove panels to protect the siege engines from missiles. At the siege of Acre, they helped fill in the ditches that protected the city and took their turn on guard duty protecting the siege camp. The women with crusading hosts reportedly provided first aid to the wounded, cleaned clothes, removed lice, ground corn, cooked and baked. At times, they donned improvised armour (such as putting pots on their heads) and used whatever came to hand (such as kitchen and butcher knives) to take an active part in the fighting – usually defensive fighting amidst a crisis.
None of these actions represented decisive undertakings that men could not have fulfilled. Indeed, most of the activities, with the possible exception of laundering, were routinely carried out by both men and women. Yet, while women with the crusading host may not have been indispensable, they were not merely dead weight either.