When Saladin released the Lusignan brothers, Eschiva was reunited with Aimery. There is no evidence Eschiva joined him at the siege of Acre, and relations between the Lusignan brothers appeared to have soured. Certainly, when Guy first went to Cyprus after being deposed as king of Jerusalem, Aimery conspicuously did not accompany him. Even more striking, when Guy died within the next year, he left Cyprus not to Aimery – who had endured so much with him at and after Hattin – but to their elder brother, Hugh. Aimery acquired Cyprus from the barons who had settled (and fought) with him in Cyprus rather than his ever-incompetent younger brother Guy.

Then a remarkable thing happened. Cyprus, which had been in open revolt, was pacified in a mere five years. An island that had defied the most powerful militant order in the world (the Templars) became a model of harmonious co-existence between Latin and Orthodox, Frank and Greek. It became an island kingdom famous for its luxury, prosperity and self-indulgent aristocracy. The laws and policies that set it on that course were promulgated by Aimery de Lusignan. No historian has adequately explained this, and the fairy tale repeated in most books that Guy de Lusignan asked and received advice from Saladin is exactly that: a fairy tale. The real key lies with Eschiva and her Ibelin connections.

Eschiva’s pivotal role in reconciling her family the Ibelins with the Cypriot Lusignans cannot be overstated, and the importance of the Ibelins in Cyprus, something historians have puzzled over for centuries, can best be explained by her. It is generally assumed that because the Ibelins opposed Guy de Lusignan, they were also inveterate opponents of Aimery. Yet the Ibelins were perfectly capable of distinguishing between the two Lusignan brothers and, therefore, able to judge Aimery for his strengths rather than condemning him for his brother’s weaknesses.

Eschiva’s role as a mediator between her uncle and her husband explains another mystery that has long baffled historians: how the Ibelins became so powerful in Cyprus so fast. Historians such as Peter Edbury express perplexity at the fact that an Ibelin (Balian’s second son Philip) was named regent of Cyprus by the Cypriot High Court only seven years after the first written reference to the presence of Ibelins on Cyprus. However, in the decade following the Third Crusade, the Kingdom of Jerusalem struggled to re-establish its institutions while the Kingdom of Cyprus was completely inchoate. In short, the first recorded presence of an Ibelin need not be the first actual presence of the Ibelins. It is more likely that Balian d’Ibelin and his wife, Maria Comnena, played an active role in the pacification of Cyprus. This would explain how the Ibelins came to possess vast estates in the island kingdom and the influence they held on the Cypriot High Court.

Indeed, the very fact that Balian d’Ibelin disappeared from the records of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1193, usually assumed to mean he died at this time, more probably reflects the fact that he was active in Cyprus rather than on the mainland. The same thing happened a quarter-century later when the Lord of Beirut disappeared from the witness lists after being regent of Jerusalem during King John’s reign. Despite disappearing from the witness lists, Beirut was very much alive and well. Indeed, he would return to lead the baronial revolt against Frederick II. In short, the fact that Balian d’Ibelin disappears from the witness lists at the court of his stepdaughter Isabella I does not mean he was necessarily dead. It does no more than suggest he was absent from Isabella’s kingdom. The most logical place for him to have been in this period was in Cyprus at the invitation of his niece, Eschiva. The reason Eschiva would seek her uncle’s support for her husband at this juncture brings us to the second woman whose critical role in the history of the Latin East has been neglected: Maria Comnena.

Maria Comnena: The Key to Cyprus?

As noted above, Maria Comnena had already played a key role in forging an alliance between her first husband, King Amalric and the Comnena dynasty in Constantinople. She had arrived in Jerusalem with a large entourage of Byzantine artists and artisans, fostering the spread of Byzantine culture in her new homeland.

In 1190, Maria Comnena played a critical role in re-establishing a viable monarchy in the Kingdom of Jerusalem by convincing her daughter Isabella to put the welfare of her battered and bleeding kingdom ahead of her personal feelings. Maria’s intervention at this time shows the wisdom of the daughter of the Byzantine imperial family. She understood political and military realities and correctly conveyed to her daughter the imperative of meeting the demands of her barons for a militarily competent king. In doing so, Maria Comnena saved the crown of Jerusalem for her dynasty. Had Isabella instead clung to Humphrey de Toron as her husband, the barons would almost certainly have abandoned Isabella altogether and elected Montferrat (or another candidate) as their king. The kingdom would have been fragmented even further by the competing claims to the crown put forward by Lusignan, Isabella/Toron and the barons’ candidate. Maria ought to be praised and admired for her statesmanship rather than vilified for browbeating her 18-year-old daughter into making a rational rather than an emotional decision.

Once the succession was settled by the departure of Guy de Lusignan for Cyprus and Isabella’s marriage to Henri de Champagne, Maria Comnena – like her second husband – seems almost to disappear from the history books. Yet, nothing would have been more logical than for her to go to Cyprus to assist in the pacification of this formerly Byzantine and still Greek Orthodox island. Maria Comnena was related to the island’s last Greek ‘emperor’, Isaac Comnenus. She spoke Greek, understood the mentality of the population, and probably had good ties (or could forge them) to the secular and ecclesiastical Greek Orthodox elites on the island. She had the means to help Aimery pacify his unruly realm, while her husband Balian was a proven diplomat par excellence, who would also have been a great asset to Aimery.

We know that Maria was later credited with brokering a reconciliation between Aimery de Lusignan and her son-in-law, Henri de Champagne. Maria’s tool in this case was a marriage alliance between Lusignan’s eldest son (and heir) and Champagne’s eldest daughter. Yet while Maria’s influence with her son-in-law is logical, it is hard to see what influence she would have had with Aimery de Lusiginan unless she had earlier helped him establish himself in Cyprus by serving as a mediator to his Greek subjects during his early years in Cyprus.

Marguerite d’Ibelin: Bridge Between Rebels

Finally, there is Marguerite d’Ibelin, the eldest daughter of Balian d’Ibelin and Maria Comnena. Marguerite married the Lord of Sidon at an early age and her eldest son by that marriage became one of the most powerful barons in Jerusalem in the thirteenth century. He was appointed regent of the kingdom by Frederick II on two separate occasions and made serious attempts to mediate between his uncle and cousin of Beirut and the Holy Roman Emperor. Meanwhile, his mother had been widowed at a young age and married a second time.

Since she was a widow, Marguerite’s second marriage could not have been imposed on her, and we can assume that she chose her second husband freely. Her choice fell on a certain Guy de Montfort, a crusader from the West. Guy and his elder brother Simon took the cross in or about 1203 but refused to attack fellow Christians at Zara or Constantinople. Instead, they had distanced themselves from the campaign financed by Venice that ended with the capture of Constantinople and travelled independently to the Holy Land. Simon soon returned to France and took command of a different crusade, the crusade against the Albigensians in Southern France. Guy remained in the Holy Land, married Marguerite, and had three children with her, two daughters and a son, Philip.

Marguerite died while these children were all still small, so Guy returned to France, taking his children with him. He turned the upbringing of his children over to his sister-in-law, Alice de Montmorency, wife of his brother Simon. Alice was the mother of Simon de Montfort, later Earl of Leicester. Philip and Simon appear to have been quite close, and nearly half a century later, they took the cross and set out to the Holy Land together. They participated in what became known as ‘the Baron’s Crusade’ of 1239–1241. Like his father, Philip remained in the Holy Land and married there. Unlike his father, he married an heiress and became baron of Toron by right of his wife. He was also one of the staunchest and most steadfast supporters of his cousin Balian d’Ibelin, Lord of Beirut, in the latter’s fight against the Holy Roman Emperor.

The connection between the rebels of Outremer and the rebel Simon de Montfort is a chapter of mediaeval history that has not yet been adequately explored and illuminated. It is, however, hard to believe that Simon de Montfort’s stance against arbitrary and authoritarian monarchy was not, in part, inspired and encouraged by the successful stand of his Ibelin cousins against Frederick II. It is even more notable that the barons of Outremer under the Ibelins had experimented with harnessing the support of the commoners (e.g., the Commune of Acre, non-feudal observers to the High Court) before Montfort did. The fact that the Montforts and Ibelins were cousins made exchanging ideas and sentiments easier than between strangers. Family ties were forged by women like Marguerite d’Ibelin, who brought the ideas and customs of the East and West together in the same household. She was only one of scores of such women, most of whom escape the notice of chroniclers and historians.

Chapter 7

The Legal Status of Women in the Crusader States

Feudal Lords

As noted earlier, the crusader states embodied developed feudalism before it began to degenerate into absolutism. Under feudalism, the monarch sat at the pinnacle of a pyramid of contractual relationships based on oaths of fealty; a person’s status in society depended first and foremost upon one’s place within that pyramid. The barons or ‘tenants-in-chief ’ held their lands and titles directly from the king, forming the second tier of society. The barons’ vassals formed the third tier, their vassals’ vassals the fourth, and so on, to the bottom of the pyramid inhabited by those without land, e.g., farm labourers, itinerant workers, etc. Wealthy merchants and tradesmen represented a rising non-feudal economic sector that, on the one hand, integrated into feudal society via marriage and land purchases and, on the other hand, undermined and brought down the system over time.

In the crusader states, however, feudalism was at its apogee. The key indicator of legal status was the ability to give and receive homage, i.e., to take the feudal oath that elevated the oath taker into the feudal elite of the realm. Within decades of their establishment, the crusader states had recognised the right of women to hold the crown and so receive oaths of homage. It logically followed that women could also give oaths of homage, i.e., as barons and lords right down to the sergeant’s fiefs at the bottom of the pyramid. There are numerous examples in the historical record illustrating this.

The right of women to give and receive homage derived from the laws of inheritance that recognised the right of female inheritance. In the crusader states, inheritance law explicitly gave the direct female descendants of the deceased lord precedence over male relatives from a collateral line. (For example, the lord’s daughter took precedence over the lord’s brothers or nephews.) Furthermore, if a man held more fiefs than male heirs, daughters inherited after their brothers. For example, if a man held three fiefs but had only two sons and one or more daughters, the eldest son would receive the largest and most prestigious fief, his second son the next fief and the eldest daughter the third.43

However, women could not fight in the feudal army. As the entire point of feudalism was to create a structure to defend the kingdom, one of the critical obligations incumbent upon a vassal was to fight in the entourage of his lord. Since women could not fulfil this fundamental feudal duty, the right of female inheritance was limited. First, male heirs were given precedence over female heirs, except in cases where the male was, for some reason, incapable of fulfilling his military obligations.44 This could be because of physical or mental handicaps or due to religious vows. Second, female heirs over age 12 yet under 60 were required to be married to men capable of fulfilling the military obligations that went with the fief, e.g., serving as a sergeant (if it were a sergeant’s fief), as a knight (in a knight’s fief), or personally leading multiple knights as a banneret, if the fief owed more than one knight to the feudal host. (For example, the barony of Ibelin owed 10 knights, the barony of Transjordan owed 40, and the barony of Galilee owed 100.)

In the absence of a suitable male heir, the rights of the eldest daughter were initially accepted as equal to the rights of the eldest son. That is, for the first seventy years, the eldest female heiress received the entire fief just as the most senior male heir would have. However, in 1171, in the reign of King Amalric, the High Court ruled that, except for the kingdom itself and the tenants-in-chief, fiefs should be divided equally among the female heiresses. At the same time, the High Court stipulated that the younger sisters should do homage to their eldest sister for their shares of the fief, making them rear vassals of their elder sister. The point was to increase the number of men who could be called upon to render military service in the feudal host. An unintended consequence was to fragment the holding and possibly impoverish it.

Naturally, the husbands of heiresses not only fulfilled the feudal obligations that went with their wives’ fiefs, but they also enjoyed the wealth and prestige that went with their wives’ titles and properties. One need only think of Reynald de Châtillion becoming ‘Prince of Antioch’, Balian d’Ibelin styling himself ‘Lord of Nablus’, or Raymond of Tripoli’s controversial role as Lord of Tiberias – all titles that derived from marriage rather than through inheritance or bestowal from the crown. Yet these husbands of heiresses, who held the titles and enjoyed the revenues, castles and prestige of fiefs ‘by right of their wife’, lost all when their wife died. At an heiress’ death, her title and control of her fief passed to her heirs (male or female) rather than her husband. There are many prominent examples of this, the most famous of which was Reynald de Chatillon’s ‘loss’ of Antioch after his wife’s death and, of course, Guy de Lusignan’s loss of the Kingdom of Jerusalem after Queen Sibylla died.

The status of a feudal lord, however, was not confined to heiresses alone. The consorts of kings, barons, lords and knights likewise served as the deputies of their husbands. This meant that if their husbands were either absent or incapacitated, their wives took on the role of lord and acted in their husbands’ stead. They managed the household and finances, presided over the feudal court and commanded the garrison and any other fighting men left in the domain. Most important and astonishing, perhaps, in Outremer, women could and did attend the High Court of the Kingdom to represent their fief. They did this as heiresses if they were temporarily without a husband, as guardians for minor heirs or heiresses, or if their husband was incapacitated either by illness or being held in captivity and thus prevented from attending a session of the High Court.

This astonishing right of Frankish women has largely been overlooked in the literature probably because, as a rule, the number of women attending any one session of the High Court was too few to evoke comment. However, in 1261, in the Frankish Principality of Achaea, a situation arose that sheds light on this privilege. In 1259, the Byzantine Despot of Epirus, Michael Comnenus Doukas, allied with the Kingdom of Sicily and the Frankish Prince of Achaea to attack his Byzantine rival, Michael VIII Palaiologos. Doukas took the offensive and was forced to retreat with substantial losses, but when reinforced by his allies, he prepared to take a stand. In July 1259, it came to a battle known alternatively as the Battle of Pelagonia or Kastoria. Due to the discrepancies between the five existing accounts of the battle (three Byzantine and two Frankish), it is challenging to form a clear picture of what happened. The only thing beyond doubt is that mistrust between the Greeks and the Franks resulted in Doukas’ army abandoning the field on the eve of battle. Palaiologos’ forces then greatly outnumbered the Franks and achieved a resounding victory in which the Prince of Achaea, William of Villehardrouin, and thirty of his barons were taken captive. Many other Frankish knights were also killed or imprisoned, leaving the Latin Empire of Constantinople virtually defenceless. Within two years, Constantinople fell to the Greeks under Michael VIII Palaiologos, who re-established the Byzantine Empire and founded his dynasty.

Once he was secure in Constantinople, Michael VIII opened ransom negotiations with William de Villehardoin and the other Frankish nobles still in captivity since the Battle of Pelagonia. The deal struck was that the prisoners would be set free in exchange for oaths never to fight against Emperor Michael again and the surrender of three key fortresses in the Peloponnese (Maina, Monemvasia and Mystras). However, as with Louis IX of France when negotiating with the Mamluks, the Prince of Achaea and his nobles could only recommend the ransom terms. They did not have the power to enforce them. Instead, the terms were referred to the High Court of the Principality, which had the duty to reject or ratify the terms negotiated by men in captivity.

Guy Duke of Athens, the highest ranking of the Frankish lords still at liberty, convened the High Court of the principality ‘as was his duty’.45 Yet only two men attended. Women represented the remaining fiefs. These were either the widows of the dead lords and knights acting in their capacity as regents for minor heirs or the consorts of the men held captive in Constantinople. The latter, just like Queen Marguerite of France after King Louis IX’s capture in Egypt, controlled the fiefs of their husbands for as long as they were prisoners.

The decision of the High Court was no rubber stamp. Guy of Athens himself firmly opposed acceptance of the negotiated settlement. He feared the surrender of the three fortresses would so weaken the Frankish hold on the Peloponnese that it would crumble altogether. Indeed, he offered to take Villehardouin’s place in the dungeon rather than accept the loss of the castles.

The majority of the High Court chose instead to accept the negotiated terms in order to set free all of those who still lived (several Franks had already died in captivity). Furthermore, as guarantees of their good intent, two ladies were sent as hostages to the Greeks. The history of this so-called ‘Ladies Parliament’ demonstrates that women of the feudal elite in the crusader states were expected to fulfil the feudal duty of advising the king (i.e., attending parliament) if their husbands could not do so. It further demonstrates that their advice and vote were equal in weight to that of any male fief holder.

The legal privileges of Frankish women did not, however, extend to the entire population. On the contrary, Muslim women were still subject to Sharia Law, Jewish women to Talmudic Law, while the women from the various Italian mercantile states lived under the laws of their respective metropolitan cities, be it Venice, Pisa or Genoa. Nuns, naturally, were subject to canon law. Yet it is still noteworthy that women enjoyed extraordinary and prominent rights at the highest echelons of society, something which was bound to influence the attitudes and behaviour at lower levels as well.

The Marriage of Heiresses

As noted above, due to the need for the holder of a fief to fulfil military obligations, any woman who held a fief in her own right was required to have a husband capable of performing those military duties. In most cases, heiresses were betrothed at a young age (the legal minimum was seven for both boys and girls) by their parents or guardian and, as a rule, were already married when they succeeded to their inheritance. Among royal heiresses, we see this was the case with Queen Melisende, who wed Fulk de Anjou before her father’s death, with Sibylla, who wed before the death of her brother, and with Isabella I. It was also true of baronial heiresses such as Eschiva of Tiberias and Stephanie de Milly, the heiress to Transjordan.

The marriages of royal heiresses were supposed to require the consent of the High Court, and those of baronial heiresses were supposed to be approved by the feudal overlord. However, in practice, most baronial marriages contracted before an heiress came into her inheritance were made without the consent of the feudal overlord, i.e., the families alone selected spouses for their children. Philip de Novare claims that under King Amalric in the 1160s, an attempt was made to give the feudal overlord a say in selecting husbands for heiresses. He admits, however, that this met with resistance from the barons, who wished to retain complete control over the marriage of their daughters, suggesting this practice may not have been universally implemented. Most likely, some barons avoided surrendering control over the marriages of their offspring or obtained the nominal consent of their overlords for their own choices. Nevertheless, Amalric asserted his right in at least one case, namely that of Stephanie, the widow of Humphrey of Toron the younger, who Tyre claims King Amalric gave to Miles de Plancy.46 Likewise, his son Baldwin IV successfully asserted this right to select the husband of his half-sister, Isabella, taking her away from her mother and stepfather against their wishes and forcing her into a betrothal at the age of 8 that ended in an illegal marriage at 11 years. In both cases, however, the heiresses involved were half-orphans with no father capable of withstanding the king’s will.

Curiously, in cases of orphans who came into their estate without already being betrothed or married, the laws of Jerusalem provided clear guidance on what was to happen next. Namely, as soon as the heiress reached the marriageable age of 12, her feudal lord would propose three suitable candidates, from which she was to select her husband. The legal scholars of the thirteenth century explained further that if she refused to marry any of the three, she would lose her fief (the revenues and privileges) for a year and a day, after which she would be re-summoned and again offered three candidates. Likewise, if a woman held a fief in her own right and was a widow without an adult male heir, she was required to remarry, albeit not until one year of mourning had passed. In both cases, ‘suitable’ candidates meant men of equal rank and status who were young, fit and strong enough to fight. Widows over the age of 60 were exempt from the mandate to remarry.

Edbury points out that such a practice was an invitation to corruption. Anyone keen to obtain the fief (or the bride) would be inclined to bribe the feudal overlord to become a ‘candidate’. The heiress might also bribe her lord to ensure he included her preferred candidate among the three he would present. Or, the heiress’ guardian, who enjoyed control of her estates until her marriage, might bribe the overlord to forget to summon the heiress altogether.47

Nevertheless, the practice was considerably more favourable to heiresses than prevailing law elsewhere, as a quick comparison to the contemporary customs in England and France demonstrates. In England and France, heiresses could not marry anyone without the permission of their feudal overlord. This meant women were, in effect, forced to bribe their overlord before they could contract a marriage with the candidate of their choice. In France, it was not until the middle of the thirteenth century that King Louis IX introduced into French law the custom of giving an heiress a choice between three candidates presented by the feudal overlord. Notably, this custom was introduced after King Louis’ four-year sojourn in the crusader states. Before that, as in England, the feudal overlord selected an heiress’ husband without giving her any choice whatsoever.

Practice, however, can vary substantially from theory. There can be little doubt that mediaeval noble children, whether male or female, rarely enjoyed anything more than nominal consent to their marriages. Betrothed as children and married in puberty, most lacked the power or courage to withhold consent from a marriage arranged by their parents or guardians. Furthermore, while the High Court of Jerusalem rejected the Count of Flanders’ demeaning candidate for Sibylla’s second husband on the grounds that her year of mourning was not yet over, Isabella I was married to her third husband only a week after the assassination of her second. Admittedly, this was during the Third Crusade, and it could be argued that the High Court had not been formally reconstituted since the disaster at Hattin. Five years later, after the institutions of the Kingdom of Jerusalem had been re-established, however, Isabella married her fourth husband within just four months of losing her third. In both cases, she did so freely as an adult ruling queen and widow to whom her barons had already done homage.

Isabella was not the first widowed heiress to take her marriage into her own hands, regardless of law and custom. Another kinswoman, Constance of Antioch, had already provided a more spectacular example. Constance was the daughter of Queen Melisende’s sister Alice and Alice’s husband, Bohemond II of Antioch. Bohemond was killed in 1130, making Constance the ruling princess at age 2, long before she could either exercise her office or marry. The principality was governed by regents and the High Court, which in 1136 selected Raymond de Poitiers, the younger brother of the Duke of Aquitaine, as Constance’s husband. Poitiers came to Antioch armed with a papal dispensation to marry the 8-year-old Constance. The issue of consent was brushed aside for dynastic reasons. The marriage lasted until 1149, when Raymond de Poitiers died fighting against Nur ad-Din in the Battle of Inab. Constance was left a widow at 21 with four children, including a 5-year-old son, Bohemond, now Prince Bohemond III.

After her year of mourning, the king of Jerusalem – Constance’s cousin Baldwin III – urged her ‘repeatedly’ (according to William of Tyre) to take a new husband. Tyre notes that ‘there were in the land at that time a number of noble and distinguished men … [anyone of whom] seemed with justice quite capable of protecting the region’. Tyre goes on to list the three candidates with their qualities and bloodlines to show they were worthy consorts for the Princess of Antioch. However, as Tyre says: ‘The princess … dreaded the yoke of marriage and preferred a free and independent life. She paid little heed to the needs of her people and was far more interested in enjoying the pleasures of life’.48

While Tyre’s opinion of Constance’s motives may be biased, the fact remains that the king singularly failed to convince or force Constance to take one of his ‘suitable’ candidates. Indeed, he summoned what Tyre calls a ‘General Council’ at Tripoli and sent for Constance’s aunts, Queen Melisende and Countess Hodierna of Tripoli, as well. Yet, as Tyre laments, ‘neither the king nor the count, her kinsmen, neither the queen nor the countess of Tripoli, her two aunts, was able to induce her to yield and thus provide for herself and her land’.49 Yet, three years later, Constance remarried a man of her choosing – the soon-to-be notorious adventurer, Reynald de Châtillon. Less than twenty years later, the widowed Sibylla of Jerusalem followed Constance’s example by marrying the man of her choice without the consent of the High Court, albeit with her brother’s approval: Guy de Lusignan.

Finally, the case of Isabella d’Ibelin of Beirut is an interesting case study regarding heiress and marriage obligations. Isabella inherited this important lordship from her father, John d’Ibelin of Beirut II, in 1264, when she was just 12. Shortly afterwards, she was betrothed to Hugh II of Cyprus, a youth her age, who unfortunately died two years later in 1267. Isabella returned to Beirut, yet her feudal overlord undertook no measures to make her remarry, despite her being an heiress of marriageable age. Apparently of her own will, she married and was widowed a second time. Then, suddenly, ten years after she had left Cyprus, the Cypriot king, Hugh III, sought to enforce his feudal rights as overlord to compel a marriage on Isabella. He had misjudged her. Isabella took her case to the High Court and won with an ingenious defence that will feature later in this book.

What this tells us is that no matter how much the High Court of Jerusalem wanted to ensure that heiresses were always wed to spouses capable of fulfilling the military obligations of their fief, the Church requirement for consent to marriage gave women the means to refuse the political pressure to marry – if they had the backbone. It is doubtful if a maiden of 12 or 13 would have had the courage to resist pressure like Constance did at 21 or Isabella at 25. Yet there can be no doubt that mature women, notably widows, could – and did – ignore the legal niceties recorded by the scholars of the thirteenth century in order to marry who and when they wanted.

Wives and Widows: Rights of Property, Dower and Guardianship

Turning to the status of non-heiresses as wives and widows, the laws of the crusader kingdoms were again surprisingly progressive. First, property was held jointly by a married couple, and neither partner could dispose of it without the other’s consent. Indeed, it was common for all documents involving property transfers to be witnessed not only by husband and wife but also by all potential heirs (i.e., children over 7).

When a man died, his widow received a dower amounting to fifty per cent of his property at the time of his death. In other words, only half of the estate went to the adult heir or heiress, while the widow retained the other half for her maintenance until her death. The only exceptions to this were for the kingdom and the four principal baronies (Jaffa and Ascalon, Galilee, Tripoli and Transjordan). Due to the size of these estates, it was deemed appropriate that a smaller dower would suffice. As we have seen, the widowed Queen Theodora Comnena received Acre, and Maria Comnena was given Nablus, both extremely wealthy lordships. Widows of all lesser fiefs, were entitled to half of their husband’s estate at the time of his death.

For comparison, in English law, a widow’s dower initially consisted of only those lands and properties that had been explicitly designated at the time of the marriage. These might be generous or paltry, depending on the ability of the bride’s family to negotiate a dower portion for her. By the twelfth century, English law recognised that in the absence of a formal agreement a widow was entitled to one-third of her late husband’s property. In France, however, the right of a widow to a dower (properties for her maintenance after the death of her husband) did not evolve until the middle of the thirteenth century. In France as in England, it was set at one-third rather than one-half (as in Outremer) of the husband’s property at the time of his death.

In the crusader states, widows had complete and sole control of their dower lands, including the right to alienate property. There are many examples of widows granting lands and revenues, entirely on their own, particularly to the Church. Equally important, however, was the right to buy fiefs if they were for sale. (Although that sounds like a contradiction since the crown granted fiefs, there were circumstances in the crusader states under which a fief-holder was allowed to alienate his fief through a sale.) However, a widow could only acquire such a fief if she were married and her husband could fulfil the military obligations associated with the fief.

This brings us to the marriage of widows. As noted above, widowed heiresses were, at least theoretically, required to marry after one year of mourning. In contrast, widows who were not heiresses were not required to remarry. In England, however, widows throughout the crusader era could be compelled to remarry. This fact offended contemporary sensibilities sufficiently for a prohibition of the practice to be included in Magna Carta. This seminal document explicitly states: ‘a widow should not be compelled to marry so long as she prefers to remain without a husband’.50 Yet the custom persisted; the grievance was raised again in the baronial revolt of the mid-thirteenth century.

While they could not be compelled to remarry, widows in possession of fiefs either as dowagers or as regents for minor heirs required the permission of their feudal overlord to remarry. Thus, we find Reynald de Châtillon outside the siege camp at Ascalon in 1153, seeking the consent of King Baldwin III to marry Constance of Antioch. Likewise, William of Tyre reports in his history that ‘Balian d’Ibelin … with the king’s consent espoused Queen Maria, widow of King Amaury’.51