The Role of Women in the Western Mediaeval Economy

Unique Economic Characteristics of the Latin East

Women as Patrons of the Arts and Church

Chapter 10 In Defence of the Holy Land: The Women of Outremer in Times of War

Contemporary Perceptions of Women Warriors

Women at War: Commoners

Women at War: Noblewomen

Chapter 11 Defeat and Captivity for the Women of Outremer

Female Slaves

Escaping Slavery

Women Post-Captivity

Summary and Conclusions

Biographies

Agnes de Courtenay, Queen Mother of Jerusalem

Alice of Antioch, Princess of Jerusalem and Antioch

Alice de Champagne, Princess of Jerusalem, Queen Consort of Cyprus and Regent of Cyprus and Jerusalem

Constance of Antioch, Ruling Princess of Antioch

Eschiva d–Ibelin, Lady of Cyprus

Eschiva de Montbéliard, Lady of Beirut

Isabella I, Ruling Queen of Jerusalem

Isabella II (Yolanda), Ruling Queen of Jerusalem

Iveta, Princess of Jerusalem, Abbess of St Lazarus at Bethany

Maria Comnena, Princess of Constantinople, Queen Consort of Jerusalem and Lady of Ibelin

Maria de Montferrat, Ruling Queen of Jerusalem

Melisende, Ruling Queen of Jerusalem

Sibylla, Ruling Queen of Jerusalem

Notes

Bibliography

Introduction

The Powerful Women of Outremer challenges two of the most persistent – and egregious – myths about the Middle Ages. First, that the crusader states were fragile, apartheid-like colonial societies established by barbarous warriors intent on genocide and destroying the cultures around them. Second, that women in the Middle Ages were mere chattels without power or self-determination and subject to pervasive misogyny. As a rigorous examination of the historical record demonstrates persuasively, neither myth is true.

The crusader states, known collectively as ‘Outremer’ (i.e., ‘Beyond the Sea’), were political entities established in the Levant in the wake of the First and Third crusades. They were multicultural societies in which different ethnic and religious groups lived harmoniously together for nearly 200 years, despite periodic violent clashes with the neighbouring Islamic world that we have come to call ‘the crusades’.

The native population in these states, composed predominantly of Orthodox Christians, experienced an economic boom and religious renaissance for almost 200 years following the re-establishment of Christian control over the region in 1099. The affluence and power of the native inhabitants found expression in the restoration and establishment of multiple Orthodox monasteries, the construction of hundreds of Orthodox churches and the widespread building of commercial and domestic structures for the native population. Native Christians were landowners, officeholders and patrons of the arts and formed the backbone of the bureaucracy as well as the bulk of the fighting forces in the crusader states. Meanwhile, Jews fleeing rising anti-Semitism in Western Europe, immigrated to the Latin states in the Holy Land, where they experienced no persecution. As a result, Acre developed into a thriving centre of Talmudic study. At the same time, the minority Muslim population remained free to practise their religion in public, build mosques and make pilgrimages to Mecca (Hajj).

The entire population (Latin, Orthodox, Jewish, Samaritan, Shia and Sunni) profited from the intensive investment in infrastructure undertaken by the ruling Latin elites. Crusader-era aqueducts, urban sewage systems, rural irrigation, terracing and road networks have all been identified by archaeological surveys. Irrigation reversed the encroaching desertification of the previous centuries, and under the ‘Franks’ (as the Latin Christians were collectively called, regardless of their country of origin), trade skyrocketed. Goods from China, Ethiopia, Arabia and India passed through the ports of the crusader states on their way to London, Paris, Cologne, Lisbon, Barcelona and the trading centres of the Italian peninsula such as Genoa, Pisa and Venice. Meanwhile, under Frankish rule, domestic industries such as industrial-scale sugar manufacturing and the mass production of manuscripts and icons developed in the Christian states of the Levant.

Sitting at the interface of the Byzantine, Turkish, Arab and Western European spheres of influence, Outremer became a hotbed of cross-cultural and technological exchange. A hybrid culture drawn from these diverse traditions and reflected in the art, architecture, institutions and military tactics evolved. The inhabitants of these unique multicultural, highly urbanised political entities were diverse and mostly polyglot and tolerant. At the apex of this society, a feudal elite notorious for its wealth and love of luxury ruled. It was composed of politically savvy, diplomatically adept, well-educated and multilingual men – and women.

Western European women from the tenth to thirteenth centuries, throughout the era of the crusades, enjoyed a period of exceptional power and self-determination. It proved to be short-lived. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, women’s status and opportunities had already begun to deteriorate. In subsequent eras – the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Industrial Revolution – women became disenfranchised, increasingly demeaned, restricted and discounted. Women would not again attain a level of empowerment comparable to that of the eleventh and twelfth centuries until the early twentieth century.

This is not to say that women in the era of the crusades enjoyed full equality with men; they did not. Nor does it mean that no one in mediaeval society expressed misogynous sentiments; many did. The same, however, is true for the early twenty-first century. Unfortunately, there is a tendency among feminist historians to focus on the limitations and restrictions faced by women rather than the possibilities open to them. In contrast, The Powerful Women of Outremer emphasises what women in this time and place are known to have done. Against this record of action and influence, the misogynous commentary of individual mediaeval clerics is as irrelevant as the Facebook whining and tweets of early twenty-first century ‘incels’.

That said, when writing about people who lived some 700 to 900 years ago, we depend on the contemporary chronicles, histories, charters, deeds, letters, literary works and other objects from the historical record combined with the evidence of art and archaeology to reconstruct events. We know little about the people who did not find their way into the historical record. Inevitably, this work has an unavoidable bias in favour of the fate of women from the literate, ruling class.

Fortunately, precisely because women played a prominent role in Outremer, their deeds commanded a place in the contemporary Latin, Old French, Greek, Syriac and Armenian sources. Only one source of information is eloquently silent about them: the Arab chronicles, which depict the crusades from the Muslim perspective. While Arab documents usually enrich our understanding of the people and events in the Near East of this era, they conspicuously slight the women rulers and powerbrokers of Outremer, drawing a literary veil across their faces. As one of the leading crusades historians put it: ‘The Moslem world was clearly shocked by the degree of social freedom which Western women enjoyed and reacted to women with political power much as misogynist dons did to the first generation of women undergraduates, by affecting not to notice them’.1

Yet, while contemporary Christian sources were not reluctant to record and discuss noteworthy actions taken by women in the crusader states, modern historians have tended to neglect them. This is largely due to the modern obsession with the military expeditions to the Holy Land, i.e., the crusades, at the expense of the political, social and economic history of the crusader states. While it is true that women in this era rarely took an active part on the battlefield, that does not mean they did not contribute to the defence, survival and prosperity of the states in which they lived.

On the contrary, militarised states and states in dangerous geopolitical situations generally delegate a larger share of the non-military burden to women precisely because the men are called to arms and absent much of the time. This was as true in ancient Sparta as it was in WWII Britain. The crusader states were no exception. The laws that evolved reflected a need to ensure the maximum number of fighting men were available to defend the realm; a by-product of that concern was a willingness to allow women to fulfil other functions.

The Powerful Women of Outremer has not been written for experts, who will find little new here, but rather for hobby historians and students still in the early stages of exploring the exceptional world of the Middle Ages. The book does not pretend to uncover new evidence or contribute to scholarly debates but instead pulls together information scattered throughout other works. It seeks to highlight the position and deeds of women that have been detailed in primary sources yet obscured by the prevailing contemporary emphasis on the era’s military history. Rather than put forth new, revolutionary theses on the status of women, it attempts simply to collect in a single volume a summary of the many known contributions of women to the establishment, prosperity and defence of the Christian states in the Eastern Mediterranean in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

In doing so, it nevertheless breaks new ground since no comparable book has been published on the topic to date. Existing literature is overwhelmingly skewed towards discussions of women’s relationships to and participation in the military expeditions of the crusades rather than their position in the crusader states.

The Powerful Women of Outremer is divided into three sections. First, a narrative history of the crusader states organised around the women at the apogee of society, the queens. It highlights the role of women in the establishment, development, decline and end of the crusader states while inevitably spotlighting the ruling elite who found their way into contemporary accounts. A chronology at the start of the book will, hopefully, help readers unfamiliar with the history of the Latin East to put the events described into a broader context.

Second, the role of women is examined thematically. This section opens with a comparatively lengthy review of women’s support for and participation in the various crusades before turning to a description of the women of Outremer proper. The topical description of women in the crusader states starts with an overview of who these women were and where they came from, followed by an examination of their legal status, their political and economic functions, their contributions to the defence of the Latin East, and finally, a look at their fate in defeat and captivity. Throughout this section, an attempt was made to include information about women from the middle and lower classes to the extent we can infer anything relevant about their lives from existing archaeological and historical sources.

Finally, the book concludes with a series of short biographies highlighting the lives of some of the most influential women in the history of the crusader states – not all of whom were queens. A degree of overlap between these biographies and examples used to support the earlier text is unavoidable; I apologise and hope the duplication is not excessive.

Throughout this volume, some anachronistic terms are consciously employed. For example, contemporaries never used the terms ‘crusades’ or ‘crusaders’. Instead, people ‘took the cross’, embarked on ‘armed pilgrimages’, ‘fought for Christ’ and the ‘Holy Land’, etc. Certainly, no one in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries numbered some – but not all – of the larger military expeditions. Indeed, no one considered military campaigns condemned by the pope (such as the attack on Constantinople in 1203–1204 or Emperor Frederick II’s self-serving expedition to Jerusalem in 1228) comparable to the arduous mobile warfare of 1097–1099, which resulted in the restoration of Christian control over Jerusalem. Yet, for the sake of clarity, my text does refer anachronistically to the First, Second, Third, etc., Crusades.

Likewise, although the emperor in Constantinople believed he was a ‘Roman’ emperor and his subjects called themselves ‘Romans’, using such terminology today risks confusing modern readers. Therefore, throughout the text, the Empire ruled from Constantinople is referred to as the Byzantine Empire and its inhabitants as Byzantines. On the other hand, the terms ‘Saracens’ and ‘Franks’ are convenient contemporary terms that have been adopted, albeit slightly adapted. In the crusader era, the term ‘Saracen’ referred to all ‘Easterners’, regardless of race, language or religion. In this book, the term’s meaning has been narrowed for clarity to mean only the Muslim elements in the population of the Near East, regardless of whether they were Turkish, Arab, Bedouin, Berber, etc. Similarly, the term ‘Franks’, widely used by the Saracens and Byzantines of the crusader era to refer to all ‘Latin Christians’, is used in this volume to refer only to the Latin Christians living in Outremer. The crusaders and other transients in the region are described by their linguistic (e.g., French, English, German, Italian, etc.) or institutional (e.g., Templar, Hospitaller, Franciscan, etc.) identity.

List of Illustrations

1. Map of the Crusader States 1100–1180. (Image: author’s own)

2. Map of the Crusader States 1190–1240. (Image: author’s own)