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.
* 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.
