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.

Part III

The Women of Outremer

Chapter 6

Mortar for a Multicultural Society

Putting Down Roots: Local Brides for Foreign Settlers

The moment the first crusade mutated from a military campaign intent on conquest into an attempt to maintain permanent and stable political control over the Holy Land, the role of women was transformed from incidental and supportive to essential and central. Permanent control depended not on soldiers but on settlers. Settlers, by definition, come to make their living in a new place, put down roots and find families. In short, settlers needed wives.

To be sure, many crusaders had been married men. Most of them had left their wives and families behind when they took the cross and set out on this exceptional expedition to the East. However, the majority of married crusaders returned home to their wives and families rather than remaining in the Holy Land. There were also a few crusaders who travelled in the company of their wives. If both survived the long hazardous journey – and only one in five did – they might have opted to remain together in the Holy Land. But the number of such couples would have been dismissively small. There can be little doubt that most of the crusaders who elected to remain in Outremer at the end of the First Crusade were bachelors or widowers, men without wives at home or in Outremer.

As these men turned to peaceful pursuits and thought of founding families, they turned – as men always have and always will – to the women closest at hand. Unlike the settlers of the sparsely populated ‘New World’ centuries later, the Latin settlers to the Near East in the early twelfth century found themselves in a well-populated region. Equally important in the twelfth-century context, the women around them were, for the most part, fellow Christians.

The importance of this fact cannot be overstated. Pope Urban II had called the First Crusade, in part, to rescue the native Christians from Muslim oppression. The papal legate on the crusade, Adhemar Bishop of Le Puy, had maintained close ties with the Greek Orthodox Patriarch throughout the campaign, and the Latin and Orthodox authorities had issued what we would nowadays call ‘joint communiques’ about the progress. The Greek Patriarch had sent the starving crusaders supplies from Cyprus during the siege of Antioch. The Crusaders reinstated the Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch after their victory. Orthodox priests assumed the role of confessor to some of the crusade’s leaders. In the first crusader state established in Edessa, the Latin count was first adopted and installed in accordance with Armenian customs and with the blessings of the Armenian church. Although the Latin and Orthodox hierarchies later engaged in squabbling over titles and tithes, the salient point with respect to inter-church relations was made by the Jacobite patriarch, Michael the Great. Writing in the second half of the twelfth century (that is, after a half-century of Frankish rule) Michael stated unequivocally: ‘[the Franks] never sought a single formula for all the Christian people and languages, but they considered as Christian anyone who worshipped the cross without investigation or examination’.38

This policy was decisive to the success and survival of the crusader states. It demonstrates additionally that the crusader states were never apartheid-like societies in which the new elites attempted to segregate themselves from the local population or viewed intermarriage with other ethnic, linguistic and cultural groups as undesirable. The reverse was true. From their inception, intermarriage with the native population was accepted and practised without approbation in all four crusader states. Indeed, far from being aloof and apart from the native residents, the Latin settlers were integrated and absorbed into the broader family networks of the local (Christian) inhabitants from the very start.

Writing in the first quarter-century after the establishment of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, Fulcher of Chartres, chaplain to Baldwin I, approvingly reported that the settlers ‘have taken wives not only of our own people but Syrians or Armenians or even Saracens who have obtained the grace of baptism’.39 He goes on to say: ‘Some [settlers] already possess homes or households by inheritance. … One has his father-in-law as well as his daughter-in-law living with him, or his own child if not his stepson or stepfather’.40

This Western cleric stresses – unconsciously because to him it was self-evident – the advantages these marriages with local women brought. Marriage in the mediaeval context was not only about ‘taking a wife’; it was about acquiring a father-in-law who already had land or businesses. As Chartres notes, it was about brothers-in-law who could help tend the vineyard and till the fields. It meant obtaining mothers-in-law to help look after the children, stepsons who could herd the goats, and stepdaughters to help spin and weave. As Chartres enthusiastically points out in his description of settler society, settlers were already starting to inherit lands and benefit from the broader networks afforded by family ties. In mediaeval society, a man alone was always poorer than a man with a family.

In the context of Outremer, however, the value of these family ties was materially greater than in the West. The Western European settlers to Outremer found themselves in an alien environment with a seemingly hostile climate characterised by infrequent rains and completely different growing seasons than they had known at home. The Westerners confronted unusual crops, exotic insects and unfamiliar vermin, strange diseases and unexpected dangers. Alone, the settlers would have found it very difficult to survive; supported by a native family familiar with the crops, livestock, weather and hazards, they had far less to fear.

Soon, as Chartres records, the settlers started to ‘go native’ as well. Thus, they ‘use the eloquence and idioms of diverse languages in conversing back and forth. Words of different languages have become common property known to each nationality’.41 Significantly, Chartres claims:

He who was a Roman or a Frank has in this land been made into a Galilean or Palestinian. He who was of Rheims or Chartres has now become a citizen of Tyre or Antioch … Indeed it is written, ‘the lion and the ox shall eat straw together’. He who was born a stranger is now as one born here; he who was born an alien has become a native.42

This description highlights that while the Franks did not attempt to set themselves apart, the native population did not reject them, either. The picture Chartres paints is one of mutual acceptance. The key is Chartres’ phrase in his description noting that ‘mutual faith unites’. As Michael the Syrian stressed from the other perspective, the common bond of Christianity – regardless of the exact form that religion took, whether Maronite, Melkite, Jacobite, Armenian or Latin – transcended and trumped all differences of ethnicity, race, language, culture and tradition.

The common bond of Christianity enabled intermarriage. Intermarriage, in turn, gave the new settlers the tools to adapt to their new environment and command of the local languages and fostered identification with their new home. Intermarriage, more than anything else, turned immigrants from France, Germany, Italy and England into Galileans and Palestinians. By the second generation, the children of these marriages also had a new identity. Regardless of where their fathers had come from, the second generation of Latin residents in the Holy Land was not only called Franks but also viewed themselves as such. In all this, it was the women – the native women – who played the crucial role in binding the settlers to their new homes.

Eastern Brides for Frankish Lords

While Chartres eloquently depicts the situation of the common settler, strikingly those at the highest level of society – the kings, counts and barons of the Holy Land – likewise initially sought their wives among the local nobility rather than sending to the West for consorts. This may, in part, have been because, as relative parvenus, they could not expect to obtain the hand of daughters of the higher European nobility. Yet it also reflected the need and desire to secure the aid of in-laws embedded in existing power structures and familiar with local conditions.

As Count of Edessa, Baldwin I immediately realised an Armenian wife was indispensable. When he became King of Jerusalem, he found the Armenian connection less useful and attempted to put his Armenian wife aside. He sought, instead, to forge an alliance with Sicily by marrying the Dowager Queen Adelaide. Although Adelaide’s principal attraction was her wealth, troops and the Sicilian fleet, she had already proven herself an able and prudent ruler of a multicultural state with Greek and Muslim minorities when she served as regent of Sicily from 1101 to 1112. In short, she brought more to the marriage than money and troops; she brought invaluable experience.

Baldwin II also married into the Armenian aristocracy as Count of Edessa, but he made no attempt to rid himself of his Armenian wife Morphia when he became King of Jerusalem. Thus, Morphia was crowned queen and ruled as Baldwin II’s consort until his death. Baldwin II’s successor was his daughter Melisende, but the next time Jerusalem needed a queen consort for a ruling king, the kingdom was sufficiently established and powerful to seek – and receive – a marriage alliance with the most powerful Christian state in the Near East: the Byzantine Empire. Both of Melisende’s sons married brides from the ruling Byzantine dynasty, the Comnenus.

Again, the principal political advantage of these marriage alliances with Constantinople was military. Kings Baldwin III and Amalric I sought and received Byzantine armies and fleets to assist them in confronting their Muslim foes and, in Amalric’s case, pursuing geopolitical ambitions in Egypt as well. Yet the influence of the Greek brides extended beyond the military sphere. The Byzantine princesses went to Jerusalem accompanied by scribes, artists and craftsmen. They brought trousseaus whose transport required entire caravans. Their wardrobes and generous gifts were intended to inspire admiration for Byzantine culture and craftsmanship. Under Maria Comnena especially, Greek money poured into the kingdom to construct churches and monasteries, and an influx of Greek artisans followed the money. It was also while Maria Comnena was queen that Amalric visited Constantinople and did homage to the Byzantine Emperor. This significant political act was largely obscured by the Christian defeat at Hattin only sixteen years later. The disaster at Hattin rendered any implied subservience to Constantinople irrelevant, while Constantinople’s subsequent alliance with Saladin justified the Latin conquest of the Byzantine capital a few decades later.

After the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187, there followed almost a century in which the crown of Jerusalem passed to daughters or was held by absentee kings with no interest in the kingdom’s welfare. It is notable, however, that for most of the thirteenth century, the Kings of Cyprus sought their brides from among the local nobility of Outremer rather than the West. King Aimery married an Ibelin first and the queen of Jerusalem second. His successor Hugh I, also married a Princess of Jerusalem. Not until the third generation was a foreign bride sought; Henry I of Cyprus first married a Montferrat (a family tied to the crown of Jerusalem by marriage twice in the previous century) and took an Armenian princess as his second wife. His successor died before reaching the age for marriage, and the next king of Cyprus to take a queen, Hugh III, married yet another Ibelin.

Almost prophetically, the last ruling king of Jerusalem, Henry II of Cyprus, was the first ruler of a crusader kingdom to take a Western European bride. Henry married Constance of Aragon, but there was no issue from this union, and his successor reverted to the usual pattern of local brides, marrying two different daughters of the House of Ibelin in succession. It was not until the fourteenth century that the princes of Cyprus consistently sought western brides. Guy (who died before his father) married Maria de Bourbon. Peter I married a local heiress Eschiva de Montfort first but then took Eleanor of Aragon as his second wife. John first married Constance of Aragon but took an Ibelin for his second wife. Finally, James I married a German bride, Helvis of Braunschweig. All these alliances with Western royalty occurred in the second half of the fourteenth century when all serious hope of re-establishing Christian control of the Holy Land proper had evaporated. The earlier alliances with Armenian, Greek, and even Sicilian woman, had served to anchor the crusader states in the Eastern Mediterranean and had contributed significantly to giving the kingdoms in Outremer a hybrid or multicultural character.

Western Consorts for Frankish Heiresses

The situation with respect to female heiresses was the exact reverse – and arguably led to the kingdom’s destruction. Although the right of heiresses to inherit the crown was established early in the kingdom’s history, it was also recognised that a ruling queen needed a male consort capable of leading – physically and in person – the feudal army of the kingdom. The importance of this military role undoubtedly led the High Court of Jerusalem to assert its right to select husbands for heiresses to the crown. Perhaps out of a desire not to elevate any of its own members to a higher status, the High Court consistently looked to Western Europe for fitting consorts.

This precedent was set very early when Baldwin II designated his eldest daughter Melisende as his heir. Almost at once, the High Court requested the King of France select a suitable nobleman to come to Jerusalem and marry their future queen. At roughly the same time, the High Court in Antioch rejected attempts by the dowager Princess Alice to marry her daughter to the Byzantine Emperor, preferring to invite Raymond of Poitiers to Antioch instead. Obviously and understandably, the barons of Antioch feared increased Byzantine interference in their affairs and possibly a complete loss of independence had the powerful Byzantine Emperor married the heiress of the principality. Yet, it is noteworthy that they preferred a French candidate over a nobleman from Armenia, Tripoli or Jerusalem.

The next female heiress in the Kingdom of Jerusalem was Sibylla, the sister of Baldwin IV. Again, the High Court sought to find an appropriate Western nobleman, although they rejected attempts by the Count of Flanders to impose unworthy candidates upon them. Nevertheless, the Archbishop of Tyre was dispatched to the West to identify a husband for Sibylla and returned with Stephen of Sancerre of the House of Blois. Stephen was clearly of sufficient rank; his sister was married to Louis VII of France, and his brothers were married to Eleanor of Aquitaine’s daughters by Louis VII. But Stephen unexpectedly refused to marry Sibylla and returned to France.

Evidently disenchanted with the French king, the High Court turned next to the Holy Roman Empire and invited William Marquis de Montferrat to become their next king. William was first cousin to both Louis VII of France and the Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich I. Furthermore, his family had a long tradition of crusading. He arrived in the Holy Land in October 1176 and married the then 16-year-old Sibylla within six weeks. He was invested with the title of Count of Jaffa and Ascalon, the traditional title for the heir apparent to the throne. Unfortunately, he died just eight months later, in June 1177. Sibylla gave birth in August to a posthumous son named Baldwin, after her brother.

Meanwhile, the High Court again appealed to the King of France to select a consort for their future queen. Louis VII’s choice fell this time on the Duke of Burgundy, who agreed and announced his intention to arrive in Jerusalem in the spring of 1180. However, before Burgundy set out on the journey to Jerusalem, King Louis died, leaving the 14-year-old Philip II as his heir. With the predatory Plantagenets licking their chops, Burgundy evidently believed it was his duty to remain in France. Sibylla had been jilted a second time, which may explain why, at this juncture, she took things into her own hands and married a man of her own choice. Despite his obvious unsuitability as the younger son of the Lord de la March, Sibylla married Guy de Lusignan with the disastrous consequences discussed earlier in this book.

The next time the High Court exerted its influence over the choice of king consort, it turned yet again to Western Europe, selecting Conrad de Montferrat (from the Holy Roman Empire) as Isabella I’s second consort. Isabella’s third and fourth husbands, in contrast, were her own choices and in both cases, she chose French men already in the Holy Land. Her fourth husband was a man who had been in the Latin East for decades and had risen to be King of Cyprus largely on his merits. The marriage of Isabella I to Aimery de Lusignan was undoubtedly a means to shore up both kingdoms. Yet it may also reflect the fact that Jerusalem was so fragile and vulnerable at this time that the prospects of finding a high-ranking Western nobleman willing to abandon his secure titles to assume the august but uncertain post of King of Jerusalem were undoubtedly slim.

This political reality is underscored by the High Court’s difficulty finding a consort for Isabella’s heir, Maria de Montferrat. Eventually, John de Brienne came to Jerusalem, but he was unquestionably a nobleman of tertiary rank without great fortune or following. Yet if he proved a disappointment to the barons of Jerusalem, the ‘coup’ of marrying Maria’s successor Yolanda (Isabella II) to the greatest of all Western monarchs, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen, proved utterly disastrous.

The marriage of Yolanda to Frederick II demonstrated the drawbacks of the High Court’s predilection for seeking Western consorts in the hope of obtaining greater military protection for the kingdom. Although Fulk d’Anjou, Raymond de Poitiers, Henri de Champagne and the Montferrat brothers William and Conrad were all Western magnates, they had been willing to renounce their lands in the West and resettle in the Holy Land to defend Jerusalem in person. That changed with Yolanda’s marriage to Frederick II. He neither renounced his other titles (king of Sicily, king of the Germans, Holy Roman Emperor) nor took up residence in the Latin East. Altogether, he spent less than one year of his 25-year reign in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. More disruptive yet, he took the ruling hereditary queen away from her kingdom (she travelled to his Kingdom of Sicily to marry him) and denied her her hereditary rights as ruling queen from that day forward. Instead, he confined her to his harem and usurped her authority until she died aged 15. He then usurped the authority of her infant son.

The kingdom never recovered from the consequences of this disastrous marriage, and historians can only speculate on what course history might have taken had the spouses of queens consistently been men resident in and committed to Outremer. Isabella’s choice of Aimery de Lusignan was brilliant, and it is tempting to picture the fate of the kingdom had Yolanda married, say, the heir of Beirut, an extremely competent fighting man, or his nephew, the brilliant jurist John of Jaffa.

Women at the Crossroads of History: Three Case Studies

The role of women in holding together the different cultures that collided in Outremer can perhaps best be illustrated by case studies. Below are three examples of women who forged critical alliances yet whose role has been largely overlooked in more general histories.

Eschiva d’Ibelin: Founder of a Dynasty

Eschiva d’Ibelin, the daughter of Baldwin d’Ibelin, Lord of Ramla, was married at an unknown but undoubtedly early age to a noble but penniless adventurer from France, Aimery de Lusignan. At the time of her marriage, she was not an heiress, and the union was indicative of her husband’s desire to settle in the East and forge ties with the local feudal elite. Why the Lord of Ramla found the third son of the Lord de la March a suitable match for his daughter is unclear, but Aimery must have been a man of considerable charm; King Amalric of Jerusalem had been willing to pay his ransom when he was taken captive by the Saracens, a generosity that was far from common. Indeed, some sources allege Aimery de Lusignan was so charming he became the paramour of the Queen Mother, Agnes de Courtenay.

As time went on, however, Eschiva’s husband and father came into irreconcilable conflict. Eschiva’s brother-in-law Guy had married the heiress of the kingdom, Sibylla, the woman her father had hoped to marry himself. Furthermore, Guy, as Count of Jaffa, became the Lord of Ramla’s overlord, causing him further resentment. When Sibylla usurped the throne and crowned the widely unpopular Guy her consort, Eschiva’s father could take no more. He abdicated his lordships and departed the kingdom. Such a dramatic breach between her father and husband must have been extremely painful for Eschiva, but on the surface, she sided with her husband and remained at his side.

Less than a year later, Aimery and Guy were both prisoners of Saladin, and Eschiva had lost everything. She had several small children, no means to raise her husband’s ransom and was a refugee. With the Lusignans in a Saracen prison, Eschiva almost certainly found support and refuge with her father’s younger brother, her uncle Balian d’Ibelin. Balian was one of only three barons not in Saracen captivity, but arguably more importantly, he was married to a Byzantine princess. She had access to resources outside Saladin’s grasp.