* Ibelin commanded 85 knights from his wife’s fief of Nablus, 40 from his brother’s fief of Ramla and Mirabel, and 10 from Ibelin for a total of 135 knights. Only the Count of Tripoli commanded more. At least one squire accompanied every knight, and, as a rule of thumb, a banneret had at least as many light horsemen under his command as heavy cavalry. Barons also often had “household” knights, i.e. knights on a retainer rather than land-holding vassals. On top of these came the foot soldiers. Ibelin may have contributed as many as 1,500 men to the feudal host.

Chapter 11

Defeat and Captivity for the Women of Outremer

Defeats, as well as victories, punctuate the history of the crusader states. This meant that the possibility of death or capture could never have been far from the minds of the inhabitants of Outremer. After all, less than one in five of those who set out on what we call the First Crusade survived to reach Jerusalem, underscoring that even the costs of victory were great. Furthermore, warfare continued sporadically throughout the crusader period. Even when peace descended upon the region, the borders remained porous and the seas insecure. As a result, travel remained treacherous throughout the crusading era. Overland travel was dangerous due to the risk of enemy and criminal raids, while Muslim and Christian pirates plagued the seas of the Eastern Mediterranean throughout the Middle Ages. This prevailing insecurity had particular and unique consequences for women.

In the era of the crusades, the rules of warfare in the Near East were unambiguous concerning the fate of a conquered people: a defeated enemy was entirely and without restrictions at the mercy of the victors. Although rare exceptions were made for enemy leaders who might be more valuable as hostages or men who were wealthy enough to pay alluring ransoms, the fundamental rule was that all adult males would be killed. The fate of their women and children was equally unequivocal: they would be enslaved. Islamic authors are most explicit about recommending this course of action, and countless examples demonstrate the policy was ruthlessly implemented.

In warfare, women usually fell into the hands of the enemy after their men had been slaughtered. As noted above, Balian d’Ibelin was initially urged to sally forth to a martyr’s death, but was persuaded to seek terms with Saladin to spare the women. Ibelin turned the threat on its head and promised Saladin that:

If we see that death is inevitable, then by God we shall kill our children and our wives, burn our possessions, so as not to leave you with a dinar or a drachma or a single man or woman to enslave. When this is done, we shall pull down the Sanctuary of the Rock and the Masjid al-Aqsa and the other places, slaughtering the Muslim prisoners we hold – 5,000 of them – and killing every horse and animal we possess. Then we shall come out to fight you like men fighting for their lives, when each man, before he falls dead, kills his equals; we shall die with honour, or win noble victory!79 [emphasis added]

Yet not all leaders were as courageous or as compassionate as Ibelin. Following the Battle of Paphlagenia in 1101, Albert of Aachen reports that the men simply fled to safety, leaving their tents, equipment, wagons – and wives – behind. According to William of Tyre, in 1126, the men in an unspecified besieged town likewise fled rather than risk sharing ‘the wretched bonds of captivity along with their wives and children’.80

Furthermore, women in this era fell into captivity not only because of warfare but also due to low-scale raiding and criminal activity. Attacks on travellers by Bedouins, highwaymen and marauding troops from the neighbouring territories were commonplace. Some raids were explicitly undertaken to seize slaves. Yvonne Friedman, who has undertaken extensive research on the topic, claims that ‘raids into hostile territory to take hostages and slaves were standard procedure, both in Muslim and Christian warfare; here, the women were valuable trophies and loomed large in the number of captives’.81

It was also common to attack merchant caravans for costly goods. In such attacks, any women seized were viewed as additional loot. At sea, the target was usually the ship and cargo, but again any women on board were treated as extra booty. Two women of royal rank were victims of piracy. Arda, the first wife of Baldwin I of Jerusalem, was taken by pirates when traveling from Edessa to Jerusalem to join him. Eschiva d’Ibelin, the wife of Aimery de Lusignan, was the victim of an even more audacious pirate attack. A Greek/Armenian pirate sailed into the cove beside the estate where she was recovering from an illness, stormed ashore and carried her and her children off to captivity in what was clearly a targeted attack on a prominent woman.

In exceptional circumstances, women of very high birth might be held for ransom rather than enslaved. Albert of Aachen records one case in which a lady was taken captive on the road after her husband, Folbert of Buillon, and his knights were all killed in a fierce clash. The lady was then taken to the fortress of Azaz, where the lord ‘ordered her to be treated honourably while he found out if she might be worth some great sum of money in ransom’.82 Although we know nothing about the intentions of the pirate Canaqui who seized Aimery de Lusignan’s wife and children, Eschiva d’Ibelin was released to her husband quite promptly after the intercession of Leo of Armenia.

On the other hand, sex alone did not inherently protect a captive from slaughter. Contemporary accounts tell us that Kilij Arslan’s men spared ‘only young girls and nuns, whose faces and figures seemed pleasing to their eyes and beardless and attractive young men’.83 In a similar fashion, Kerbogha offered to spare only ‘beardless youths’ and virgins.84 Yet, if being held for ransom or slaughtered immediately represent the two extremes of treatment for female captives, the overwhelming mass of women in the mediaeval Near East faced a single fate: slavery.

Female Slaves

As the references to sparing only attractive and young women from slaughter suggest, the immediate fate of the overwhelming majority of female captives was rape and sexual abuse. Indeed, it was expected, taken for granted, and assumed to take place by all parties. Precisely because sexual abuse was the presumed fate of female slaves, many women, both Christian and Muslim, preferred death to slavery. After the capture of her husband, King Louis IX, Queen Marguerite of France kept an elderly knight in her bedchamber whose express purpose was to kill her rather than let her fall into Muslim hands. She was not going to risk rape, even if her rank would probably have spared her. On the other hand, some women chose the opposite course. In at least one recorded case when a crusader camp was overrun by Saracens, ‘stunned and terrified by the cruelty of this most hideous killing, girls … were offering themselves to the Turks so that at least, roused and appeased by love of their beautiful appearance, the Turks might learn to pity their prisoners’.85

The bottom line was that the Muslims of this period viewed the sexual abuse of female captives as the conqueror’s right, ‘regardless of the captive’s former standing’.86 This is illustrated best by the following passage describing the situation in Jerusalem in 1187 after the forty-days of grace ended. It was written by Saladin’s secretary Imad ad-Din, an eye-witness:

There were more than 100,000 persons in the city, men, women and children. The gates were closed upon them all, and representatives appointed to make a census and demand the sum due. … About 15,000 were unable to pay the tax, and slavery was their lot; there were about 7,000 men who had to accustom themselves to an unaccustomed humiliation, and whom slavery split up and dispersed as their buyers scattered through the hills and valleys. Women and children together came to 8,000 and were quickly divided up among us, bringing a smile to Muslim faces at their lamentations. How many well-guarded women were profaned, how many queens were ruled, and nubile girls married, and noble women given away, and miserly women forced to yield themselves, and women who had been kept hidden stripped of their modesty, and serious women made ridiculous, and women kept in private now set in public, and free women occupied, and precious ones used for hard work and pretty things put to the test, and virgins dishonoured and proud women deflowered, and lovely women’s red lips kissed and dark women prostrated, and untamed ones tamed, and happy ones made to weep! How many noblemen took them as concubines, how many ardent men blazed for one of them, and celibates were satisfied by them, and thirsty men sated by them, and turbulent men able to give vent to their passion. How many lovely women were the exclusive property of one man, how many great ladies were sold at low prices, and close ones set at a distance, and lofty ones abased, and savage ones captured, and those accustomed to thrones dragged down!87

It may surprise readers that there is no Christian equivalent to Imad ad-Din’s glorification of rape. While it would be naïve to imagine that rape did not occur, it was not the official policy of the Christian leadership, and it was not institutionalised. Furthermore, it was condemned by the Church because it degraded the sanctity of the cause (fighting for the Holy Land) and constituted a mortal sin. Christian theology, it will be recalled, regarded sex outside of marriage as a sin for men as well as women. The difference in attitude towards the rape of captives is well illustrated by the first-hand account of Fulcher of Chartres, who proudly reports: ‘In regard to the women found in the tents of the foe, the Franks did them no evil but drove lances into their bellies’.88 For those who question if this was merely whitewashing or disingenuous propaganda, the Frankish custom of not raping female captives is corroborated by contemporary Jewish sources that reported, with evident surprise, that the Franks did not violate or rape women ‘as others do’.89

The length to which Imad ad-Din goes to describe the sexual humiliations of the Christian women and the stress he puts on their misery, along with Muslim joy, eloquently illuminates Muslim attitudes to enslaved Christian women. Yet sexual abuse was only one aspect of the treatment to which women slaves were subjected. Albert of Aachen notes that the female captives were ‘chained by the Turks, who sent them as slaves into countries where they could not speak the language, to be treated like dumb animals’.90 Thomas of Froidmont’s biography of his sister Margaret of Beverley stresses the physical work and the privations to which his sister was subjected while glossing over any sexual abuse she endured. Although it is possible she was so unattractive at the time of her capture that she escaped sexual abuse, it is far more likely that her brother, writing in Western Europe about a sister he wished to honour for her piety, chose intentionally to omit reference to something that might have discredited her in the eyes of readers.

As Froidman’s account makes clear, enslaved women could be required to carry out tasks more commonly done by men, such as chopping wood or carrying stones for construction. Nevertheless, contemporary accounts show that most female slaves performed household tasks. They cleaned floors, baths and toilets. They spun, wove and did other needlework. They laundered clothes and worked as bath attendants. They harvested crops, preserved foods and cooked. They tended fowl and herds of livestock. They served as personal attendants, combing, coifing and bathing the wives and concubines of their masters. Slave girls were particularly useful for shopping, as they could venture out into the male-dominated exterior world, whereas Muslim women of any status could not. Lastly, slave women often looked after the children of their owners.

While such tasks did not, perhaps, differ substantially from what many of the captive women would have done at home, their condition as slaves was fundamentally different. First, they had no rights, not even the right to life itself. Second, they did not share in the profits of whatever business or estate their work supported. Third, they were subject to sexual and other forms of physical abuse. Fourth, most women did not speak the language of their captors and were, therefore, isolated. All this came on top of the circumstances which had delivered them into slavery in the first place, i.e., a traumatic event such as capture by pirates or robbers or a siege and assault that had destroyed their home and family.

The psychological condition of enslaved women in this era is eloquently illustrated by the following account left to us by Ibn al-Athir.

When I was in Aleppo I had a slave girl, one of the people of Jaffa. She had a child about a year old, and wept greatly when she dropped him, though he was not really hurt. I calmed her and told her there was no need to weep for so small an accident. She replied, ‘it is not for my boy that I am weeping, but for what happened to us at Jaffa. I had six brothers all of whom perished. I had a husband and two sisters; what has happened to them? I have no idea’.91

Al-Athir explicitly states she is only one of many slave women in such a state. Indeed, he also tells another anecdote about two slave women meeting in Aleppo.

‘Then he [the owner of the house] brought out another Frankish woman. When the first one caught sight of this other, they both cried out and embraced one another, screaming and weeping. They fell to the ground and sat talking. It transpired that they were two sisters. They had a number of family members but knew nothing about any one of them.92

Arguably, trauma experienced during a siege or sack and subsequent abuse, along with psychic stress associated with uncertainty about the fate of loved ones and the future, was far greater torture than sexual abuse or hard work.

Escaping Slavery

Opportunities to escape from slavery were extremely limited. Most captives were first taken in large slave caravans to distant slave markets in the major urban centres of the Near East. These slave caravans consisted of slaves chained together and forced to walk behind the beasts of burden of their captors. Along the way, they were often prodded, whipped, raped and taunted by those escorting them. On arrival in a major urban centre, which might be hundreds of miles from the point of capture, the slaves were led through the city triumphantly and subjected to further verbal and physical abuse. At the slave market, the ‘goods’ were sold without regard for keeping families together. Because slave markets drew customers from a wide radius, slaves were often transported substantial distances after purchase. Thus, slaves generally ended up isolated from everyone they had known before their capture. Typically, they found themselves living in towns and villages far from familiar geography among people speaking a language they did not understand. It would not have been uncommon for slaves to have no idea where they were until after some time in captivity when they gradually learned the language and more about their new environs.

With slim prospects of returning home, many slaves sought to adapt to their new circumstances. The easiest route out of slavery was conversion. Contemporary Christian and Muslim religious thought condemned the enslavement of co-religionists. Consequently, in the case of Christian women in Muslim captivity, conversion to Islam offered an escape from the status of slave. As noted above, Muslim women in the Near East had extremely limited rights and status in this era, but at least they weren’t technically chattels, as were slaves. Furthermore, conversion opened the door to the status of wife rather than concubine. While precarious (the man only had to say, ‘I divorce you’ three times to get rid of an unwanted wife), this was better than complete subjugation and destitution. There are numerous references throughout contemporary accounts of Christian captives married to Muslim men.

Another route to freedom was through payment of compensation to the Muslim enslaver to release the slave. Effectively, this happened when a ransom was paid. Yet even for common prisoners subjected to the complete indignity of slavery, the prospect of being freed from slavery through a cash payment was a real possibility.

This came in three forms, private, religious and public. First, family members or entire communities sometimes raised money to purchase individuals taken into captivity. Indeed, Jewish law demanded the ransom of prisoners and gave precedence to women prisoners because they were presumed to suffer most (i.e., sexual abuse) in captivity. As we have seen, Frankish feudal law likewise stipulated that a man must ransom a mother or daughter or risk the loss of his fief. Farther down the social scale, some mediaeval marriage contracts explicitly included the obligation to ransom one’s wife. For example, marriage contracts have survived that include the following clause: ‘And if you are taken captive, I will ransom you with my possessions … and I will take you back. And I will not wrong you concerning this’.93

Payment for a specific individual, however, assumed the person could be tracked down and identified. After a small-scale raid or pirate attack on a single ship, this might be reasonable; in the aftermath of a major military disaster, on the other hand, few family members remained in a position to make a payment. Furthermore, discovering the location and contacting the owner of any individual caught up in a major catastrophe was almost impossible.

Perhaps in recognition of this fact, or at least in acknowledgement of the limited resources available to the families of captives, the religious orders increasingly took responsibility for securing their release. The military orders took the lead in transforming the purchase of enslaved Christians into a pious duty. It was, after all, only a small step from protecting pilgrims (the raison d’etre of the Templars at their foundation) to rescuing pilgrims from captivity through their repurchase. Likewise, the Hospitallers were, from their inception, dedicated to serving the ‘holy poor’, and slaves were the incarnation of complete destitution because they owned not even their own bodies. Charitable activities to release Christians from Saracen slavery were a natural extension of the Hospitaller ethos.

The end of the twelfth century also saw the founding of an order specifically dedicated to the ransoming of Christian captives in the Muslim East. This was the Trinitarian order, founded in France in 1198 with strong papal backing. Significantly, a woman, Margaret I, Countess of Burgundy, was the leading patron, providing the initial land grant for the establishment of the order. Fully one-third of the order’s income was set aside for the ransom of captives or, interestingly, the purchase of Muslim slaves who could be used in slave exchanges. Significantly, the order also set itself the task of establishing hospitals to assist the redeemed slaves both physically and mentally after their return to Christian society. Within twenty years, the Trinitarians had forty houses, including seventeen hospitals. Furthermore, the Trinitarians inspired imitators.

Within a short space of time, a fundamental change in public attitudes towards captives had taken place. By the thirteenth century, the release of prisoners from Muslim captivity was no longer viewed as the responsibility of their families but rather the responsibility of Christian society as a whole. Furthermore, the suffering of those Christian captives who did not convert to Islam was equated with the sufferings of Christ. No distinction was made between men and women in the activities of these charitable institutions.

Finally, public action by the state could lead to the wholesale release of captives. This could come in the form of military or diplomatic action. Whenever the Franks took Muslim-held territory, Christian slaves in these lands were automatically freed. More commonly, however, ‘prisoner’ exchanges were negotiated when military hostilities temporarily ceased and a truce was signed. Again and again, these truces included clauses that provided for the release of captives. Sometimes, the exchanges were one-for-one, a knight for a mounted Muslim fighting man, an infantryman for an infantryman, or a woman for a woman. In such circumstances, the fact that the Muslims placed a much higher value on men than women reduced the opportunities for the return of Christian women.

Nevertheless, there were circumstances in which the Christian negotiators could and did demand a wholesale return of slaves. In 1159, for example, a truce with Nur ad-Din secured the release of thousands of captives, including men held since the Second Crusade ten years earlier. Another truce imposed on Damascus in roughly the same period explicitly included women captives. Ibn al-Athir states:

The Franks sent to review those male and female slaves of their people who had been taken from all the Christian lands, and bade them choose whether they would stay with their lords or return to their homelands. Anyone who preferred to stay was left, and anyone who wanted to go home went there.94 [emphasis added]

Women Post-Captivity

Christian theology might equate the suffering of Christian slaves in Muslim captivity with ‘a living martyrdom’ for Christ, but Christian husbands rarely viewed their wives’ ‘failure to respect the sanctity of the marriage bed’ in the same light. The Trinitarian Order established their hospitals in recognition of the fact that captives – male and female – faced significant difficulties after their release. Similarly, the Hospitallers stipulated that freed male and female captives should be given a sum of money to help them start a new life. This custom highlights that many captives could not pick up their lives where they had left off. In many cases, the cities where they had lived had been destroyed or taken over by the enemy. In other cases, their entire family had been killed, captured or dispersed, leaving them without a family network in which to reintegrate. In other cases, individuals may simply have opted to attempt a new start in life in a new place where their past was unknown. Significantly, because Christian women, unlike their Muslim sisters, did not need a male guardian, women no less than men could take advantage of this option. Returned women slaves were free to purchase property, set themselves up in an independent business or accept employment.

Nevertheless, for women, the inherent difficulty of reintegration into society was aggravated by the universal assumption that a woman returning from Muslim slavery had been subjected to repeated sexual abuse. In some prominent cases, the wives of Frankish elites were sequestered in convents following their return from captivity. While this sounds like incarceration to our ears, it may have been exactly what these women wanted to avoid the looks, innuendos and voyeuristic questions of others. A key consideration here is that a wife’s sequestration in a convent did not free the husband to remarry. Christian theology did not recognise captivity and any attendant sexual abuse as grounds for divorce. Thus, while Muslim women who won release from captivity were promptly set aside, Christian women retained their status of wife and lady – whether their husbands liked it or not. This also meant that a husband gained little by putting a wife away in a convent against her will.

Yet status alone does not create acceptance, much less respect or sympathy. Despite being the victims of abuse against their will, the Church still viewed sex outside marriage as a sin. As a result, former women captives had to confess, repent and seek absolution for the abuse they had suffered. Many would have found this an indignity; it certainly would have required mentally reliving the trauma. Not all priests would have shown understanding. The penance imposed might be burdensome or humiliating. Nor was it just husbands who might be reluctant to welcome returned captives. Parents might also be embarrassed by an unmarried but no longer virgin daughter. Not all siblings would have been as sympathetic to the sufferings of a sister as Margaret of Beverley’s brother.

Depending on the individual’s circumstances and expectations of treatment from family and society, women sometimes opted to remain in captivity. This explains why the terms of the truce cited above state explicitly that only those slaves who wished to return would be released to the Franks. Yet, there are also examples of women who gave up comparative luxury and status to return to a humble home. Usamah ibn-Munqidt tells the story of a beautiful Christian captive who was sent as a gift to the ruler of Ja’bar, Shihab al-Din Mulik ibn Salim. She joined his harem and, in due time, her son by Shihab al-Din became the ruler of Ja’bar. Yet, despite her exalted position as the ruler’s mother, the ‘ungrateful’ Christian woman took advantage of her new status to escape back to her Christian husband. Usamah was outraged that this woman ‘preferred life with a Frankish shoemaker, while her son was the lord of the castle of Ja’bar’.95 Two things are striking about this account. First, the woman’s Christian husband evidently welcomed her back. Second, the luxury of a golden cage was not inherently more attractive than freedom.

Summary and Conclusions

Fundamental to understanding the significant contribution of women to the history of the crusader states is recognising that human development is not linear. Because women in later ages suffered significant curtailments to their independence, enfranchisement and status, it is all too often assumed that women in the Middle Ages were even more restricted. The contrary is true. As French feminist historian Regine Pernoud noted, ‘From the tenth to the thirteenth century … women incontestably exercised an influence that the lovely rebels of the seventeenth century or the severe anarchists of the nineteenth century were not able to achieve’.96

The deterioration in the status of women in more recent centuries can be traced to what we know as the Renaissance – the European rediscovery of all things Roman. Whatever benefits the Renaissance may have brought, the reintroduction of aspects of Roman Law resulted in women being denied the status of a legal entity, thereby making them subject to a male guardian. Women were effectively disenfranchised, losing the power, status and freedoms they had enjoyed in the feudal period.

The Latin kingdoms in the Levant were feudal states par excellence. Established at a time when feudalism was already an established and well-developed form of government, the crusader states of Outremer recognised the right of female inheritance from their inception. Women derived their status as overlords and vassals from that fundamental right. The right of women to own and run feudal fiefs, businesses and enterprises, from trading empires to workshops and market stands, followed logically. Women learned and exercised trades and professions, participating actively in a wide range of economic activities, many of which are nowadays more commonly associated with men.

Furthermore, women could vote. They voted in secular bodies such as professional guilds and the High Court. They also voted in the chapters of religious houses, where they could be elected to executive and leadership positions.

As a result, contemporary accounts describing the fate of Outremer is full of colourful examples of women, both prominent and humble, who contributed materially to the successes and failures of the crusader states. From Queen Melisende effectively thwarting her husband’s attempt to sideline her to Queen Sibylla’s crowning of her unpopular husband Guy, Jerusalem’s reigning queens shaped the fortunes of the Holy Land. Yet, the nameless native women who married crusaders and integrated them into local families and communities, enabling them to survive and prosper in an alien environment, were just as crucial to forging the crusader states. The latter unnamed women made it possible for the transient crusaders to become settlers, enabled the settlements to become prosperous, and in so doing, secured the viability of the Frankish states for two centuries. It was the native wives of crusaders and pilgrims that created a multilingual second generation of Franks adept at navigating the shifting rivalries and alliances among the Muslim princes. Ultimately, the mixing of Frankish settlers with locals created the hybrid society that gave the Frankish states their unique character.

Daily life in the crusader states was fashioned as much by women as men. Women made up at least half the population and could be found in every walk of life. Unlike their sisters in the Muslim states around them, the women of Outremer did not live locked behind the walls of their guardians’ homes but instead enlivened the streets by their presence as shopkeepers and customers, tradespeople and homemakers, pilgrims, nuns and patrons of the arts. Their public presence both scandalised and intrigued Muslim visitors such as the poet Ibn al-Qaysarani, who was enraptured by Frankish women and wrote effusive poems praising their beauty, or Ibn Jabayr, who, after feasting his eyes on the sight of unveiled women, felt the need to ‘take refuge with God from the temptation of the sight!’97

The extent to which their presence was more pronounced than in contemporary Western societies is not the subject of this book and a conclusion in that regard must be deferred to scholars with a greater comparative perspective. It has been suggested that ‘women were integrated into all aspects of the crusades, from preserving the home to participation in business and agriculture, from care of the sick and wounded to logistical support in wars, and from their role in religious life to active political leadership.’98 If so, this may imply that the era of the crusades generally – or specifically – was conducive to female empowerment, irrespective of geography. This thesis rests on the notion that the extraordinary logistical, financial and military mobilisation necessary to carry out these massive campaigns over thousands of miles of territory was similar to a modern world war. As such, the societies involved in the pervasive struggle elevated the status of women out of the need to harness all available human resources. Yet, such a theory fails to explain why women’s status as heiresses, reigning queens and guild masters, etc., was not confined to periods of conflict.