In 1210, Alice was escorted to Cyprus by her uncles John and Philip d’Ibelin, where she formally married Hugh de Lusignan and was crowned queen of Cyprus. She would have been roughly 17 years old at the time, while her husband Hugh was just 14. Shortly afterwards, Hugh assumed his majority – with a vengeance. He immediately accused his brother-in-law of embezzlement and exiled him outright or forced him to flee. In either case, Walter de Montbéliard quit the kingdom and went to the court of his cousin John de Brienne in Acre.
In 1217, at age 22, Hugh joined what we know as the Fifth Crusade. He led a contingent of Cypriot crusaders to the mainland, where they made incursions into Saracen territory preliminary at the start of the main crusade against Egypt. During the winter lull in the fighting, Hugh travelled north to attend the wedding of his half-sister Melisende, his father’s daughter by Isabella of Jerusalem, to Bohemond IV of Antioch. During the festivities, Hugh became ill and died on 10 January 1218.
He left behind two small daughters and an eight-month-old son, Henry. Alice de Champagne was a 25-year-old widow. By all accounts, she was immediately recognised by her vassals as the regent for her infant son. Yet, either at the advice of the High Court or in accordance with the dying king’s wishes – or possibly of her own accord – Alice publicly appointed her uncle Philip d’Ibelin as her baillie. Significantly, after all the liegemen did homage to Queen Alice as regent, she had the barons swear to obey Philip d’Ibelin ‘until her son Henry came of age’.32
According to the chronicles, the kingdom’s revenues largely went to Alice, who thereby controlled patronage, while the day-to-day business of administration and the critical task of leading the armies of Cyprus devolved to her appointed baillie, Philip d’Ibelin. However, by no means was Alice’s role passive or nominal. In 1220, Alice was actively involved in negotiating the settlement of a dispute between the Latin and Orthodox Churches in Cyprus. Meanwhile, Alice’s baillie Philip d’Ibelin rebuffed efforts by the Duke of Austria to disinherit the Lusignan kings altogether. The Austrian duke spuriously alleged that Cyprus was a part of the ransom Richard the Lionheart owed his family. In addition, Ibelin repelled an Ayyubid raid on Cyprus’ principal southern port of Limassol. Ships were burnt in the harbour, and allegedly 13,000 Cypriots were killed or captured. This was the first Arab attack on Cyprus in roughly 200 years and must have terrified the population and shaken the government under Ibelin, who very likely recalled vassals involved in the crusade in Egypt to defend Cyprus. Two years later, Cyprus was devastated by a severe earthquake, damaging three major cities, Nicosia, Limassol and Paphos. The latter was particularly ravaged, with the castle and much of the city levelled.
Perhaps the costs of rebuilding and repair caused by these calamities put Ibelin on a collision course with Queen Alice. Thirteenth-century historian Philip de Novare, an intimate and supporter of the House of Ibelin, claims that Alice spent money ‘freely’, implying irresponsibly.33 Another chronicle is even more specific, saying: ‘Queen Alice was very generous and spent the revenues of the kingdom liberally, and disposed of them entirely as seemed good to her’.34 Ibelin evidently disagreed about how the revenues should be spent and tried to curb the queen. Alice resented his interference, leading to a rupture between them.
The High Court sided decisively with Ibelin. In 1223, Queen Alice abandoned her three children and went into voluntary exile in Tripoli, but not with any intention of giving up the fight. On the contrary, there she married the eldest son of the Prince of Antioch, Bohemond V, with the probable aim of returning to Cyprus with Bohemond as her consort in order to dismiss Ibelin. Queen Alice’s plans foundered on a papal dissolution of her marriage to Bohemond based on consanguinity.
Alice next tried to outflank Ibelin by appointing a different baillie, a Cypriot lord by the name of Aimery Barlais. The High Court of Cyprus rejected Barlais’ claims by citing their oath to obey Ibelin until King Henry came of age. Meanwhile – and ominously – Alice faced opposition from a different and more powerful quarter. Namely, the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II Hohenstaufen, rejected Alice’s right to be regent; he proclaimed his exclusive right to this position. As with his claim to be king of Jerusalem after his wife’s death and his attempt to force the Prince of Antioch to do homage to him, his presumption of the regency of Cyprus violated the constitution of the kingdom and the will of the High Court.
Indeed, despite Alice’s friction with Ibelin and the High Court of Cyprus, the barons of Cyprus (including Ibelin) remained loyal to her. When Frederick II tried to make them do homage to him, they refused on the grounds that they had already done homage to Alice, and she was the legal regent. As always, the legality of his position was of no interest to the autocratic emperor. Frederick II ignored Alice and the High Court and imperiously appointed his own baillies for Cyprus, five men whose rapaciousness soon led to bloodshed and the only instance of violence against Orthodox clergy in the history of Frankish Cyprus.
Just as Frederick II’s arrogance and disregard for the law had turned the Ibelins, the Prince of Antioch and the common citizens of Acre against him, his treatment of Alice pushed her into open rebellion as well. As soon as Frederick had sailed away (still drenched in the offal and innards the people of Acre had thrown at him as he walked down to his galley), Alice went before the High Court of Jerusalem and laid claim to the crown of Jerusalem. It was early May 1229.
Her reasoning was compelling and highly sophisticated. Queen Yolanda of Jerusalem had died on May 5, 1228. Her infant son, Conrad, was her heir apparent, and it was only as his regent that the barons of Jerusalem had submitted to Frederick II. However, Alice now pointed out, in accordance with the laws of the kingdom, the heir to a fief not resident in the domain was required to claim his inheritance within one year. A year had passed since Conrad had inherited his title, and he had not yet claimed it. In consequence, Alice argued, his claim had lapsed, and the next in line to the throne should be recognised as the rightful heir. After Conrad, Alice was the closest blood relative to the last queen, her niece Yolanda.
Alice’s legal reasoning was based on the laws of inheritance for fiefs and, up to this point, had not been applied to the crown itself, but her arguments could not be dismissed out of hand. The High Court sent word to Frederick II, informing him of the kingdom’s customs and demanding that he send Conrad east to enforce his claim. Frederick, of course, ignored the High Court as he always did. Yet while the emperor’s attitude inflamed anti-imperial sentiment in Outremer, it did nothing to help Alice. Instead, a full-scale civil war exploded in which Alice’s abandoned son, King Henry of Cyprus, played a prominent role on the side of the rebellious barons. He and his supporters (headed by the Ibelins) had no desire to complicate things by doing homage to a woman who had earlier tried to push an Ibelin from power – and possibly sought to depose her son as well. Alice had made the wrong enemies in 1223–24.
After her initiative had come to nothing, Alice turned her attention to an ultimately futile attempt to lay claim to her father’s County of Champagne in France. Then in 1239, a young nobleman in the king of Navarre’s entourage approached Alice and proposed (or accepted a proposal of) marriage. Alice was 47 years old, and her bridegroom, Ralph Count of Soissons, is thought to have been roughly half her age. Presumably, he was most attracted to her because she was the queen-mother of Cyprus and heir presumptive to Jerusalem since Conrad Hohenstaufen had no heirs of his body..
It is hard to imagine that what happened next was entirely coincidental. By 1243, the conflict between Frederick II and the leading rebels of Outremer had been frozen for roughly a decade. The emperor had lost all influence in Cyprus with the victory of King Henry over the Imperial Forces at the 1232 Battle of Agridi. On the mainland, Frederick’s baillie Richard de Filangieri held sway only in Tyre, while the rest of the kingdom recognised the baillies appointed by the High Court. In early 1243, the rebel barons were told there was disaffection in Tyre and that elements within the city would welcome them if they could liberate it from imperial control.
Suddenly, the legal advisors to the leading barons of the anti-imperial faction remembered that a minor king had just one year to claim his inheritance after coming of age. If he failed to do so, his right to exercise power lapsed. Since Conrad had come of age in 1242 (or some say 1243), Frederick II could no longer call himself regent and no longer had the right to appoint baillies. On the other hand, Conrad had no right to appoint baillies either, or at least not until he had come to the kingdom and been properly crowned and anointed. Instead of the absentee monarch, power in the kingdom, so the argument went, should be exercised by the king’s closest relative resident in Outremer, who would become monarch if the heir failed to appear within one year of coming of age. Conrad Hohenstaufen’s closest relative resident in Outremer was none other than Alice de Champagne.
At once a written agreement was drawn up in which the leaders of the baronial faction, Balian d’Ibelin of Beirut (the son of John d’Ibelin, the former regent of the kingdom), and Philip de Montfort, Lord of Toron, agreed to swear homage to Alice as regent of Jerusalem. She promised to invest the named lords with all the fortresses in the kingdom, that is, to delegate the defence of the realm to them. On 5 June, an assembly was held, attended not only by the members of the High Court but also representatives of the Catholic Church, the military orders and the Italian communes. Alice was formally invested as regent, and those present swore homage to her, starting with Balian of Beirut, the foremost baron in the Kingdom of Jerusalem at this time, followed by his cousin, Philip of Toron (a cousin of the English Earl of Leicester).
A week later, Beirut led a military assault on Tyre, slipping through a postern with a few men and opening the chain to the harbour to admit a fleet loyal to the barons. The Imperial Forces were driven back to the citadel and soon agreed to surrender. They were granted free passage out of the city and returned to Sicily to face the wrath of the Hohenstaufen. Ralph de Soissons immediately demanded the victors turn Tyre over to him in his capacity as regent-consort.
Beirut and Toron did not share his interpretation of his role as husband to the regent Alice. They could legitimately argue that they had been entrusted with the defence of the realm, which naturally included such a vital and nearly impregnable city as Tyre. Furthermore, as an immature newcomer from France who had not been held hostage and tortured by Frederick II as Balian of Beirut had been, nor fought in the vicious, violent phase of civil war from 1228–1232, Soissons was not taken seriously. The depth of Soisson’s feelings for Alice was made apparent when he immediately sailed for France, complaining loudly about his lack of power and the double-dealing and treachery of the barons of Outremer. This narrative reinforced the steady whining of Western chroniclers against the Franks resident in the Holy Land. Alice, however, did not join her husband. Nor does she appear to have shared his indignation. She remained where she was enjoying the revenues and, when Conrad as expected failed to put in an appearance, the title as well of reigning queen of Jerusalem. She was the last of the powerful royal women of Outremer.
Part II
Crusading Women
Chapter 5
Crusading Women
Policies and Attitudes
The very concept of an armed pilgrimage to liberate the Holy Land, the activity that we have come to call crusading, was radical and innovative when it was first broached by Pope Urban II in 1095. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the exact role of women in these pioneering, religiously motivated military expeditions had not been envisaged or properly considered.
Indeed, Pope Urban appears to have been taken entirely by surprise by the degree to which his appeal for fighting men to liberate the Holy Land by force of arms would resonate with women, just as he had not expected clerics, the sick, disabled or elderly to answer his call either. Yet in the wake of Urban’s speech at Clermont, women by the thousands rushed to ‘take the cross’. Furthermore, these women included venerable widows, devout nuns and powerful noblewomen, all of impeccable reputations. They could not be dismissed as camp followers, and they exhibited palpable piety in their desire to free the Holy Land.
Disconcerted and confused, Pope Urban started back-pedalling immediately. He attempted to restrict those who took crusader vows to individuals physically and financially capable of making a military contribution to what promised to be a difficult armed expedition. He forbade monks from taking crusader vows, although he accepted the need for secular clergy to accompany the fighting men to provide them with spiritual support (hear confessions, bury the dead, etc.). Yet while Urban sought to discourage all types of non-combatants, clerical concern about the participation of women was twofold.
In addition to being unable to make a military contribution to the crusade, commanders and clerics worried that women would become a distraction and temptation for the male participants who were supposed to be undertaking the expedition in the service of God. As envisaged by the papacy, participants were expected to focus on spiritual duties and rewards rather than carnal matters such as material gain and pleasure. Crusaders were admonished to avoid all forms of sin, which meant avoiding adultery and fornication no less than jealousy, greed, pride, etc. The mere presence of women was presumed to be a temptation that would lead to sin and, with it, divine displeasure. In an age when divine intervention in events was considered normal, many commanders were wary of conditions that might attract the wrath of God.
Urban tried to solve the problem created by unsuitable persons taking crusader vows by urging these individuals to obtain absolution for their vows from a cleric of appropriate rank. In at least one recorded case, the bishop of Toulouse ‘converted’ the crusader vow of a prominent noblewoman into a vow to build a hospice for the poor instead. That is, he promised the same level of spiritual benefit as Urban had promised to participants in the crusade for her act of charity at home.
This and other acts like it set a precedent so frequently followed that, by the mid-thirteenth century, transmuting crusader vows to financial payments had become a cynical source of clerical income. In 1213, Innocent III had already institutionalised ‘proportional indulgences’ for services in support of crusading yet short of actual participation and officially offered ‘redemptions’ of crusader vows – at a price. His successor Gregory IX took things further in 1243 when he eliminated all restrictions on those allowed to take a crusader vow, thereby dropping all considerations of suitability or probability. Instead, Gregory actively encouraged everyone – the old and infirm, the sick and disabled, the destitute and women – to take crusader vows and pay cash into the papal coffers to redeem those vows. As historian Christopher Tyreman put it, these thirteenth-century innovations ‘transformed crusade finance’.35
Meanwhile, clerics and military leaders alike had to deal with another relevant phenomenon: whether women took crusader vows or not, they had a profound influence on recruitment. For one thing, in the early years of crusading history, the prevailing clerical view was that married men required the permission of their wives to undertake a crusade. This derived from mediaeval marital theology, which argued that married partners owed ‘conjugal services’ to one another (often referred to as ‘the conjugal debt’). The inability to fulfil one’s conjugal duties due to long periods of absence made both partners more vulnerable to the temptations of adultery. Thus, the Church argued that both partners must consciously agree to the separation that crusading inherently entailed. Many clerical advocates of the crusade feared that wives might deny their consent to husbands keen to participate.
These fears were not entirely fabricated. Enough men blamed their wives for their failure to take crusading vows that the papacy concluded a remedy was needed. In 1201, Innocent III officially ended the need for a crusader to obtain his wife’s consent. However, this only aided those men keen to undertake a crusade. As the Church knew all too well, many more men were reluctant to join a crusade because of strong emotional attachments and a sense of responsibility for wives and children. Men who loved their families were disinclined to be separated for years.
The immediate solution was to allow men and women to travel together on crusades. Since sex within marriage was not a sin, married couples could fulfil their mutual conjugal debt without sinning and would not incur the wrath of God. By travelling together, they were also presumed to avoid the temptation of adultery. The tradition of married couples crusading together was thus born during the First Crusade and became increasingly popular in the various expeditions that followed.
At the same time, contemporary sources also noted that if some women held their menfolk back, others actively encouraged crusading. The Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi, for example, underlines the popularity of the Third Crusade by claiming that ‘brides urged their husbands and mothers incited their sons to go’.36 While such statements are easily dismissed as propaganda and are unquantifiable, they are unlikely to have been entirely without basis. Jonathan Riley-Smith, furthermore, documented the degree to which women served as catalysts for crusading by tracing family connections between prominent crusaders. His work demonstrates that noblemen who participated in the crusades tended to come from interrelated families. While sons followed in the footsteps of their fathers and grandfathers, the sisters and daughters of crusaders spread crusading enthusiasm to their husbands and in-laws, systematically expanding the circle of crusading nobility.
The more established the concept of crusading became, the more women shared enthusiasm for it. Women of this era, like their fathers, brothers and husbands, viewed the Holy Land as Christ’s homeland and believed it should be under Christian control. Furthermore, pious women no less than devout men longed for the spiritual benefits associated with a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Consequently, women supported and participated in crusading in one form or another from the first to the last crusade.
Supporting Roles
Before looking more closely at the women who participated in the crusades, it is worthwhile taking a brief look at the supporting roles played by the many women who remained in the West. The most obvious way these women supported crusading was by assuming the burdens and responsibilities of their crusading male family members. In some cases, wives or mothers took over the family business, oversaw workshops and staff, maintained commercial ties, conducted business correspondence and managed estates. At the pinnacle of society, for example, Queen Eleanor of England was instrumental in rebuffing her younger son John’s attempts to usurp her elder son Richard’s throne while the latter was in the East. She was certainly tireless in gathering her son’s ransom after Richard was taken captive by the Duke of Austria on his return from the Third Crusade. Queen Blanche of France, another queen mother, was more powerful still. She assumed the full regency of France during Louis IX’s crusade. In the opinion of some scholars, she ruthlessly enforced ecclesiastical tithes and otherwise marshalled resources to support her son’s disastrous crusade and his subsequent activities in the Holy Land. Likewise, the dowager Countess of Champagne, Marie, governed Champagne for her son Henri while forwarding him the bulk of the revenues from his estates to finance his crusading activities and pay the debts he incurred in Acre. More commonly, knights’ and nobles’ wives assumed the role of lord during their husband’s absence, a precedent set in the First Crusade by, for example, the daughter of William of Conqueror, who ruled Blois and Chartres whilst her husband Stephen took part in it. Such activity, however, was not exclusive to crusading. Under feudalism, women routinely assumed the role of lord for absent male relatives, regardless of the reason for that absenteeism.
More specific to crusading was the large number of women who provided financial assistance directly to crusaders. In some cases, this entailed agreeing to sell lands held jointly or even dower properties to finance the costs of a husband’s or son’s expedition. In other instances, it entailed direct donations to cover the costs of outfitting and provisioning foot soldiers or knights who wished to participate in a crusade but could not afford it. During the Third Crusade, Richard I’s sister Joanna, the dowager queen of Sicily, agreed to sell her entire dower to help finance her brother’s crusade in exchange for a promise to reimburse her from holdings inside his continental empire at a later date. At a smaller scale, yet completely without a guarantee of material compensation, the widow of Balian d’Ibelin of Beirut, Eschiva de Montbeliard, outfitted an entire ship at her own expense to transport crusaders of the Seventh Crusade to Egypt. There is also evidence that the women of Genoa raised more charitable donations in support of the crusades than their men. Lastly, after the establishment of the militant orders dedicated to maintaining Christian control of the Holy Land (the Templars, Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights), women contributed to crusading objectives by donating and endowing these institutions. While the total sum of these contributions has never been calculated, anecdotal evidence of grants to individual houses suggests that women played a significant role in bolstering the financial position of the militant – and indeed all – religious orders.
Participation
Regardless of what Pope Urban II had intended, wanted, said or done to prevent it, women took part in all the armed expeditions to the Holy Land that we call crusades. Chronicles, family histories and Muslim sources attest to the presence of women in the various crusading hosts, and it is a moot point whether these women were true crusaders or merely pilgrims. Undoubtedly, some women who travelled with each crusading host were traditional camp followers (whores, washerwomen, servants in attendance on more affluent female pilgrims, etc.). However, many more appear to have been religiously motivated pilgrims who had either officially taken the cross, were widows fulfilling vows made by their deceased husbands, or were the wives of crusaders who accompanied their husbands on their expeditions.
As noted above, the religious motivations driving the crusades – the desire for personal salvation, the feudal obligation to ‘ransom’ Christ’s homeland from the Muslims, or the commitment to end the oppression of fellow Christians – appealed to women no less than to men. Precisely because women were more vulnerable to violence and less likely to be able to defend themselves, many female pilgrims preferred to join armed expeditions with large numbers of fighting men rather than travel independently, whether they took a crusading vow or not.
The most common pattern of female participation was in the form of wives accompanying their husbands, and there are many recorded instances of men and women taking vows simultaneously. Nevertheless, we also know of cases where sisters went with their brothers (e.g., Joanna Plantagenet and Richard I cited above) and daughters accompanied their parents. There is also evidence of unaccompanied women going on crusades, although the majority of these were presumably widows because wives needed the permission of their husbands to travel, and nuns were doubly discouraged both as cloistered clergy and as females. Whatever their status, women unaccompanied by a male relative usually travelled with other women for greater safety. Whether with male companions or alone, the women who set out on crusade came from all segments of society, from the richest to the poorest. Inherently, we possess more information about queens and noblewomen than their impoverished or less well-off sisters. Nevertheless, there is enough anecdotal reference to poorer women to suggest that upper-class women were not disproportionally present on crusades.
