It took the Third Crusade to re-establish a viable crusader state on the coast of the Levant after Saladin’s victory at the Battle of Hattin, but in the period following that crusade, most Frankish territorial gains were made by treaty rather than warfare. Nevertheless, Saracen raids into Frankish territory continued sporadically, such as the sack of Caesarea and Limassol in 1220 and 1221, respectively. Then, starting in 1261, the Mamluks kept up near-continuous military pressure on the crusader states, taking one city after another until they captured the last Frankish stronghold, the city of Acre, in 1291, thereby ending the Frankish presence in the Levant.
Contemporary accounts of crusades and warfare in the crusader states frequently refer to women. This was not because women warriors were commonplace but rather because circumstances in the Holy Land repeatedly resulted in situations requiring the response of every Christian, male and female. In short, women took part in the defence of the Holy Land largely in response to emergencies.
Furthermore, women are conspicuously absent from Christian accounts of mounted raids and invasions, i.e., mobile operations. Mobile operations were conducted in the crusader states by mounted troops of two kinds: knights (heavy cavalry) and turcopoles (light cavalry). Knights were expected to fight on horseback with lance and sword, while turcopoles were mounted archers who had to use a bow and arrow while controlling their horses with their legs only. No man or woman could obtain proficiency in these skills without years of intensive training. Such training was both time-consuming and expensive and could not be carried out without the approval and complicity of various actors. In contrast to mobile warfare, however, women were prominent in all forms and nearly all aspects of static warfare – that is, siege warfare – both in offensive and defensive situations.
This chapter explores the role of women in the Holy Land during armed conflict with the Saracens. It looks at the various activities women undertook during military engagements, including combat, support and command functions. Because a woman’s social status was decisive in determining how they participated in warfare, the chapter looks first at the bulk of women fighters (the commoners) and then at the role of aristocratic women. First, however, it is useful to consider contemporary attitudes and how they influenced the sources.
Contemporary Perceptions of Women Warriors
The leading female historian of the crusades, Helen Nicholson, notes that contemporary European and Muslim cultures viewed warfare as a male preserve and rejected female warriors in principle as unnatural. It is precisely because female fighters were anathema to the Muslims that Muslim chroniclers delighted in depicting Christian women who violated ‘natural laws’. Several Muslim accounts, for example, describe finding the corpses of women dressed fully in armour among the Christian dead. Yet, such voyeuristic accounts, Nicholson stresses, were intended to demonstrate the dishonourable and barbaric character of Christians. She writes: ‘Muslims … gladly depict Christians as allowing their women to fight, as this would show that they were a barbarous, degenerate people’.65 She further claims that Baha al-Din, a notoriously unreliable and melodramatic Muslim source, ‘mentioned women fighting and the presence of women in the Christian forces to underline the perverted fanaticism of the Christians’.66
Christian sources, on the other hand, while sharing the view that the natural place of women was in non-combat roles, accepted and admired those extraordinary women who, in exceptional circumstances, took up arms and fought ‘manfully’. Indeed, Christian chroniclers on the whole saw the martial qualities of Frankish women as remarkable – and admirable – because physically, women were viewed as the weaker sex. Nicholson points out that in contemporary literature (texts not intended to depict historical reality but purely fictional and even fantastical), women don armour and take up arms almost invariably to ‘show the failings of the male characters’.67 In the context of Outremer, however, the salient point was that women who fought were seen as defending Christendom and the Holy Land and their ‘unwomanly’ actions were considered minor miracles in which the holiness of their cause endowed the weak with unusual strength. While fighting for Christ made their ‘manly’ actions admirable, it did not make them ‘natural’ or ‘normal’. Women taking an active part in warfare remained the exception rather than the norm.
In her study of women on crusade, Sabine Geldsetzer makes another important point. Muslim accounts of finding women dressed in armour and helmets like men, even if taken at face value, do not prove that the women were engaged in combat. Women are known to have donned armour merely to protect themselves while traveling in insecure territory or when bringing water, ammunition or food to men defending the walls of a city under siege or while on watch. While wearing armour was mostly for protection, it also served to deceive the enemy. Women standing watch on a wall would have signalled a vulnerability to the enemy. By wearing men’s clothing, especially armour, women made the defending forces seem stronger than they were and therefore helped discourage attacks.
Women at War: Commoners
Based on the Christian accounts, it is fair to say women played an active role in warfare only in emergencies and that the military role of women in the crusading era was primarily supportive and auxiliary. Indeed, most references to women are incidental to the overall narrative depicting military events. Nevertheless, the historical record provides explicit references to women engaging in the following support activities that contributed to the fighting capacity of the Christian armies:
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.
