Keeping watch and serving as lookouts;

Conducting reconnaissance and reporting enemy activity and movements to the Christian leaders;

Providing first aid to the wounded;

Providing long-term medical care to the sick and wounded;

Providing meals to the fighting men;

Providing water to the fighting men;

Bringing ammunition (rocks and arrows) to the fighting men;

Putting out fires;

Cleaning and repairing the clothes of combatants;

Helping in the construction and deployment of siege engines;

Digging ditches and constructing barriers to prevent enemy access; and

Building up earthworks to facilitate attacks or protect against attacks.

The most famous offensive sieges in which women are depicted taking an active part were the initial siege of Jerusalem in 1099 and the siege of Acre in 1190–1191. Albert of Aachen recorded that during the initial siege of Jerusalem, women (along with children and older people) were tasked with sewing together hides from camels, cattle and horses to create protective coverings for the siege engines. The leather coverings reduced the risk of the siege engines being set alight by burning arrows. While sewing hides together could be done outside the range of enemy sharpshooters, Aachen notes that women also helped push the finished siege engines into position, a task that brought them within range of enemy missiles. Likewise, when the Saracens later managed to set one of the Frankish siege engines on fire, women were explicitly mentioned as being among the crowd that rushed forward with water in a futile attempt to put the fire out.

In 1190–1191, Guy de Lusignan undertook a siege of Acre, which soon turned into a war of attrition that consumed, as the chronicles tell us, 6 archbishops, 12 bishops, 40 counts and 500 barons along with ‘countless’ thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of ordinary men – and women. Most of the women lost during the siege fell to disease, the natural consequence of the highly unsanitary conditions in the siege camp. Thus, Queen Sibylla and both her daughters died in the siege camp at Acre. Other noblewomen were also present, notably Sibylla’s younger sister and successor, Queen Isabella of Jerusalem, Richard of England’s Queen Berengaria and his sister, the dowager queen of Sicily.

Yet it was the women of lesser rank who contributed to the siege. One such incident made it into the Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi, a chronicle widely viewed as a biased eulogy of King Richard the Lionheart. It is hard to know if the anonymous chronicler included the below account because it was representative or exceptional, yet the tone is unquestionably one of admiration. The text reads:

Among those carrying earth to fill the ditch around the city so that it could be captured more easily was a certain woman. With great care and persistence, she laboured on to get the job done. She worked without stopping, untiringly coming and going, encouraging the others as she went … While this woman was busy depositing the load of earth she had brought, a Turkish sniper shot her with a dart, and she fell writhing to the ground … [H]er husband and many others came running to her side, and in a weak voice she tearfully begged her husband for a favour. ‘Dearest lord, … I treat and implore you, my darling, not to let my corpse be removed from here when I am dead. No, because I may no longer live to labour towards the completion of this work, let my body have a place in the work so that I can feel I have achieved something.’… O admirable faith of the weaker sex! O zeal of woman worthy of imitation68

In another passage, the same source records the fate of ‘Turks’ who broke into the crusader camp. Not only were many killed by women, but the women were also specifically described as dispatching them with particular (desperate?) brutality. Reportedly, they grabbed the Turks by their hair and cut their throats with kitchen knives.

While some women took part in offensive sieges fulfilling largely subordinate and auxiliary roles, the part played by women in defensive sieges was, on the whole, both greater and more important. The most important defensive sieges at which women were present were Banyas in 1132, Edessa in 1144, Saladin’s sieges of Kerak in 1183 and 1184, Saladin’s sieges of Beirut, Jaffa and Jerusalem in 1187, Saladin’s siege of Jaffa in 1192, al-Adil’s siege of Jaffa in 1197, the siege of Ascalon in 1247, the Mamluk sieges of Caesarea, Haifa and Arsuf in 1265, the Mamluk sieges of Jaffa and Antioch in 1268, the siege of Tripoli 1289 and, of course, the siege of Acre in 1291.

In most of these sieges, women were trapped in cities alongside their menfolk and the regular garrison. In some cases, the besieged cities had been intentionally reinforced in advance of the siege and contained large numbers of additional, trained, fighting men. This was the case, for example, with most Mamluk sieges, particularly the siege of Acre in 1291. In these circumstances, i.e., when men were present in substantial numbers, the role of women remained subordinate to and supportive of the trained male fighters.

Yet in the sieges that Saladin undertook following his victory at the Battle of Hattin, the situation was radically different. King Guy had summoned the entire feudal host to fight off Saladin’s invasion in late June 1187. He mustered one of the largest Christian army ever recorded in this era, including roughly 1,200 knights, an equal number of turcopoles and some 18,000 sergeants/infantry. In order to field such a large army, the garrisons of castles and towns had been stripped of fighting men. King Guy’s defeat at Hattin resulted in the annihilation of the Christian field army as a fighting force. Along with King Guy, all but three barons were taken captive. Of the estimated 20,000 other troops, knights, turcopoles and infantry, only 3,000 are believed to have escaped. These survivors did not disperse to their home cities and villages but retreated as a body towards the nearly invincible stronghold of Tyre. This meant the other cities, towns and villages of the entire kingdom were without fighting men.

The news of the catastrophe at Hattin naturally spread panic among the civilian population, particularly those living in the kingdom’s unwalled and indefensible rural communities. Non-combatants, mostly clerics and women with their children and ageing parents, fled from these villages to seek refuge behind city or castle walls. Consequently, the walled cities and castles of Outremer were overrun with refugees following the defeat at Hattin. As with refugees everywhere in any era, they arrived with little more than the clothes on their backs and without stores of food or water. They immediately became a burden to the residents of the towns they fled to and a liability in case of siege since they represented additional mouths to feed.

Furthermore, while walls provide a sense of security, walls alone offer insufficient protection against an attacking army. Antioch famously had 400 towers. The sheer size of such a perimeter consumed manpower merely to maintain a watch along it. The greater the perimeter, the larger the number of troops necessary to defend it. Even the mightiest of the crusader castles, such as the legendary Crak des Chevaliers, eventually fell not because the walls were weak or the design was ineffective, but because such elaborate structures required large garrisons to take advantage of their overlapping fields of fire and other defensive features. In short, the inhabitants were unsafe even after taking refuge in walled cities.

The laws of war in this period dictated that the inhabitants of a city that surrendered should be spared, while those that defended themselves but lost could be put to the sword or enslaved. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that in the aftermath of the catastrophe at Hattin, most cities in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, including Acre, opted for surrender. Beirut, Jaffa and Jerusalem were the exceptions.

While Jaffa and Beirut rapidly fell and their surviving inhabitants paid the price in death or slavery, Jerusalem put up such a spirited defence that it forced Saladin to come to terms. It is worth looking more closely at this defence because it tells us a great deal about the women of Outremer in a military crisis.

According to the primary sources, the defence of Jerusalem against Saladin was led by Balian d’Ibelin, a highly experienced native baron, who commanded one of the largest contingents of troops in the feudal army.* It was probably because of this that he was entrusted with the command of the rear guard at the Battle of Hattin. He had fought his way off the field separately from Tripoli and initially made his way to Tyre. From there, however, he approached Saladin and obtained a safe-conduct to go to Jerusalem to remove his wife and four small children from the city before hostilities against the city commenced. Saladin, however, stipulated that Ibelin must go to Jerusalem unarmed, accompanied by only one squire, and remain only one night. This was to ensure his arrival did not serve to reinforce the meagre garrison in the Holy City.

Notably, the inhabitants of Jerusalem had already rejected very generous terms from Saladin. According to the Lyon continuation of the History of William of Tyre, Saladin promised to give the citizens both 30,000 bezants to build up their fortifications and the land within a five-mile radius around the city to cultivate without interference. He even offered to send provisions and guaranteed a truce until Pentecost of the coming year. If Jerusalem had not received outside aid by that time, however, Jerusalem’s citizens were to surrender the city peaceably to Saladin, and he would allow them to withdraw with all their moveable goods. The representatives of Jerusalem rejected Saladin’s terms because, according to contemporary accounts, ‘they would never surrender that city where God had shed His blood for them’.69

Significantly, the delegation that went to Saladin was composed exclusively of burghers, that is, non-nobles. Neither Queen Sibylla nor the Dowager Queen Maria, both of whom were in Jerusalem, were parties to the negotiations, although we do not know why. Given that the population of Jerusalem notoriously had a disproportionate number of clerics, churchmen may have dominated the delegation to Saladin. Possibly, it was this clerical component that preferred martyrdom to life. It is hard to imagine that a woman who faced a future of unremitting sexual abuse in slavery would be quite so sanctimonious about not surrendering the city. Whoever the Christian spokesmen were, Saladin’s response was predictable and understandable. He vowed never to negotiate for the city again but to take it by force, with all that implied for the inhabitants.

Both the rejection of Saladin’s offer and Saladin’s vow to put Jerusalem to the sword occurred before Ibelin’s arrival. The chronicles tell us the citizens of the Holy City pleaded with the baron to remain and assist them in repelling Saladin’s army. When Ibelin demurred because of his oath to Saladin, they sought out the patriarch of Jerusalem and asked him to dissuade Ibelin from departing. The patriarch duly argued that an oath given to an infidel was secondary to a Christian nobleman’s duty to protect the Christian inhabitants of Jerusalem. Ibelin relented and sent word to Saladin of his decision to stay. The sultan generously sent his own men to escort Ibelin’s family (and, incidentally, Queen Sibylla) to safety outside Jerusalem.

For Ibelin himself, the decision to remain and take command of the defence must have seemed suicidal. Not only was Jerusalem flooded with as many as 60,000 refugees, bringing the total population to 80,000 or more, but in all that humanity, there were allegedly only fourteen ‘fighting men’. Another account says there were just two knights. Ibelin is recorded knighting sixty to eighty youth of ‘good birth’, presumably the younger brothers and sons of men lost at Hattin or youth of the wealthy middle class. Yet when all was said and done, the ratio of women and children to men was noted as 50:170

Even if the ratio of 50:1 was, in part, rhetorical hyperbole, there can be no question that women outnumbered men by an overwhelming number. Unlike the defence of Antioch in the First Crusade or Acre a hundred years later, Ibelin’s defence of Jerusalem in 1187 was conducted primarily by women. While clerics in the crusader kingdoms were explicitly exempt from the usual prohibition against shedding blood and would also have fought in this fierce and religiously impassioned battle, women undoubtedly formed the greatest number of defenders.

Furthermore, Ibelin not only defended Jerusalem successfully for nine days, but he also mounted sorties out of the city. One of these resulted in the death of a prominent emir; another drove Saladin’s troops back to their camp, and, in a third instance, some of Saladin’s siege engines were set on fire. However, after the Saracens had undermined it and brought down a forty-metre-long segment of the wall, the city became indefensible.

At this point, when some of the men were calling for a fight to the death, the patriarch interceded on behalf of the women and children, arguing: ‘If we [the men] are dead, the Saracens will take the women and children. They will not kill them but will make them renounce the faith of Jesus Christ, and they will be lost to God’.71 For the sake of the women and children, therefore, the highest Church dignitary in the Holy Land abjured martyrdom and advocated instead for a negotiated settlement. Ibelin agreed to seek terms and after much bargaining, eventually succeeded in obtaining a deal with Saladin that saved the lives and freedom of something like 50,000 Christians.

Yet the chronicles are curiously coy about describing the activities of the female defenders of Jerusalem during the nine days in which they held off Saladin’s vastly superior army. Only the biography of Margaret of Beverley, a Cistercian nun, includes a reference to her wearing men’s armour while standing watch on the walls of Jerusalem in 1187. Whether she bore arms or not is unclear. In the absence of historical records, we can only speculate and imagine the courage of these women.

Women at War: Noblewomen

Yet, important as women must have been (anonymously) in defending Jerusalem in 1187, arguably, women’s most significant contribution to the defence of the crusader states was the part played by aristocratic women in their capacity as feudal lords. As Nicolson summarises: ‘A noblewoman was responsible for the defence of her own estates if they were threatened … [She] was also deemed responsible for defending her husband’s lands if he were unable to do so, and as a mother of an underage son, she was responsible for the defence of his inheritance’.72 Unsurprisingly, given the vulnerability of fiefs in the crusader kingdoms and the right of female inheritance, we have numerous examples of noblewomen doing precisely this.

In 1119, a Frankish army from Antioch led by the regent Roger of Salerno was obliterated at the ‘Field of Blood’. His widow, Cecilia le Bourcq, sister of Baldwin II, immediately took measures to shore up the defence of Antioch. She is specifically described as knighting squires to increase the number of fighting men available, an exceptional and possibly unprecedented act.

In 1144, after the fall of Edessa, the widow of Count Joscelyn II was praised explicitly by William of Tyre because: ‘she busied herself in strengthening the fortresses of the land, supplying them with arms, men and food’.73

In 1184, Saladin laid siege for a second time to the mighty castle of Kerak, and once again, the feudal army of Jerusalem went to its relief. Although Saladin again avoided a direct confrontation with the army of Jerusalem, during the withdrawal he sent his troops out to do as much damage as possible to the undefended countryside along the route back to Damascus. Sebaste was sacked by marauding soldiers, and several nunneries and monasteries were laid waste. The unwalled city of Nablus was likewise attacked and sacked. However, contemporary reports claim that not a single Christian soul was lost because the inhabitants found refuge in the citadel. Commanding that citadel was its feudal lord, Queen Maria Comnena, the widow of King Amalric. Although Nablus owed 85 knights to the feudal army, most of those knights would have joined the feudal army under the banner of her second husband, Balian d’Ibelin. In short, Maria defended Nablus with a garrison composed primarily of native troops.

During Saladin’s invasion of 1187, his first move was to lay siege to Tiberias, the main city in the Principality of Galilee, a fief held by Eschiva de Bures, in her right as heiress. When Saladin invested Tiberias, Eschiva’s husband, Count Raymond of Tripoli, as well as her four sons and the knights of the barony, had mustered with the army of Jerusalem. Like Maria Comnena at Nablus three years earlier, Eschiva was left with a garrison composed primarily of native archers and infantry. These forces were insufficient to defend the entire town. So, just like at Nablus, the citizens of Tiberias withdrew into the citadel. Although the citadel withstood the first attacks, Eschiva believed her position was sufficiently precarious to justify requesting aid from the feudal army of Jerusalem. Although her husband argued against such action for the reasons noted above, King Guy decided to attempt her relief. This decision cost him his army and his kingdom, both of which he lost on the barren plains near Hattin en route to Tiberias. After the obliteration of the Christian army at the Battle of Hattin, Eschiva had no choice but to surrender the citadel of Tiberias. Saladin generously allowed her and the citizens to withdraw unmolested to the nearest Christian-held territory, Tripoli.

In the aftermath of Hattin, only the most powerful castles stood any chance of holding out until relief could come from Western Europe in the form of a new crusade. Most of the fortresses that succeeded in defying Saladin were held by the militant orders, that is, they were castles garrisoned by trained fighting men and unburdened by civilian refugees in significant numbers. Notably, the Hospitallers’ modern and self-sufficient castles, such as Crak des Chevaliers, Belvoir, Castel Blanc and Margat (Marqab), were considered so impregnable that Saladin did not attempt to assault them, counting on time and isolation to force them to surrender eventually.

Initially, the powerful border fortresses in Transjordan, Montreal and Kerak also refused to surrender. Saladin was extremely keen to seize these castles threatening the lines of communication between Egypt and Syria. His eagerness to lay claim to them was no doubt further heightened by the fact that his nemesis, Reynaud de Châtillon, had successfully defended these castles against him, most notably Kerak in 1183 and again in 1184. Although Saladin took Châtillon captive at the Battle of Hattin and ordered him beheaded immediately, the castles did not automatically fall into his hands. Instead, they were held by Châtillon’s wife, the hereditary heiress of Transjordan, Stephanie de Milly. Saladin, however, believed he had the means to force Stephanie to surrender these two fortresses because he had taken her son from her first marriage, Humphrey de Toron IV, captive at the Battle of Hattin.

Saladin offered to free Humphrey in exchange for Stephanie’s castles. According to one popular legend, Stephanie agreed to the exchange, but the men of her garrison refused, so she dutifully sent her son back to Saladin and captivity. Ibn al-Athir reports more credibly that Stephanie went to Saladin and begged him to release her son, but Saladin made the surrender of Kerak the condition. Stephanie returned to Kerak (without her son), and it continued to hold out for almost two more years, with or without her consent.

The most credible account claims that only when supplies began to run out did Saladin bring the captive Humphrey out of his dungeon to plead in person with the garrison for surrender. Allegedly, ‘Humphrey said:

“Sirs, if you can maintain yourselves and the castle in the interests of Christendom, then stay as you are, but if you don’t think you can hold out, I call on you to surrender it and free me”. The men in the castle who by now were in great discomfort agreed among themselves that if Saladin would give them a safe-conduct to go securely with their wives, children and possessions to the Christian-held lands and would free their lord, they would surrender the castle’.74

Curiously, the passage ends with the statement that Saladin ‘had Humphrey taken to his mother and escorted the people of the castle as far as the land of Antioch’.75 It is unclear if this means Stephanie was inside the castle or not.

On the other hand, Philip de Novare’s account of the civil war between the Holy Roman Emperor and the barons of Outremer in the mid-twelfth century contains an intriguing if oblique reference to another noblewoman seizing the initiative to secure a castle, thereby preventing its fall to the enemy. This is worth quoting in detail:

Most of the ladies and damsels and children of Cyprus were taken so unawares that they were not able to go to [the castle of] Dieudamor and so they took refuge in the churches and houses of religion, and many there were who took refuge and hid in the mountains and in caves. Lady Eschiva de Montbéliard, who was at that time the wife of Sir Balian d’Ibelin son of my lord of Beirut … mounted a rock [castle] called Buffavento. Therein was she received by an old knight named Guinart de Conches who was there on behalf of the king, and she supplied herself so that she provisioned it [Buffavento] with food, of which it had none.76

What is particularly interesting about this incident is that Eschiva was not the feudal lord of Buffavento. The castle of Buffavento was a royal one. Also, she did not take command of the defence; that was in the hands of Sir Guinart. However, her wealth was such that it enabled her to provision the entire garrison. In this instance, the provisioning alone was decisive to victory because, as Novare states, the garrison had no food and implicitly would have been forced to surrender if Eschiva had not arrived and brought with her adequate supplies. Buffavento held out until the emperor’s forces were defeated at the battle of Agridi and withdrew from Cyprus altogether.

This episode highlights how noblewomen repeatedly contributed to the defence of the Holy Land through donations or patronage. Two more examples will serve to emphasise this point. In his first-hand account of the Seventh Crusade, Jean de Joinville notes that the widow of Balian of Beirut, Eschiva de Montbéliard (yes, the same Eschiva who had taken supplies to Buffavento), financed a small ship for the Seventh Crusade and put this ship at his disposal. He used it to carry eight horses during the attack on Damietta.77 Another example of female military patronage comes from Alice, Countess of Blois. In 1288, she travelled to Acre with a large military entourage, and funded the construction of a tower to help defend Acre from a Muslim attack.78

These few examples that have found their way into the chronicles are most likely only the tip of the iceberg. Unfortunately, we have too little data to quantify the magnitude, much less the overall impact, of such female financial support to the defence of the Holy Land. Furthermore, it must be remembered that women were also prominent patrons of the militant orders, providing land grants and other resources that contributed materially to the wealth and strength of these institutions dedicated to defending the Holy Land.