Women, Families and Noncombatants on Crusade: Work, Travel and Household Effects

Crusading from the late eleventh century into the thirteenth was an armed religious journey as well as a series of military campaigns. Its armies moved from western Europe through the Mediterranean and, in different expeditions, across Anatolia and into the Levant or Egypt. They included more than combatants: women, clergy, servants and other people accompanied or supported the forces, sometimes as vowed participants and sometimes through family or work ties. Those who stayed behind also sustained the expeditions by managing estates, raising money and caring for dependants.

Social rank and household responsibilities shaped participation. A noblewoman might travel with attendants or administer estates during a husband’s absence; poorer women supplied labour in the camp and depended more directly on wages, provisions or household support.

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Who traveled, and why

For many participants, taking the cross joined a military expedition to pilgrimage and penance. Religious commitment and the hope of spiritual reward could motivate women as well as men. Some traveled with husbands or other relatives; some followed employers. For women with few resources, accompanying a household could also offer a means of support when a husband or employer departed. Noblewomen often traveled with servants and attendants, while the records reveal much less about the many people of modest means.

Travel could involve whole families and complicated decisions about dependants. Pregnancy and childbirth did not always stop a journey, though they could alter its course. Elvira of León-Castile traveled east while pregnant with Raymond IV of Toulouse. Their son Alfonso Jordan was born before Raymond died in 1105. Elvira eventually returned to Castile.

Religious participation did not require every woman to travel with an army. Nuns and other religious women appear in accounts of expeditions, while women also supported crusading through prayer and financial gifts. Pope Innocent III encouraged women to pray for campaigns or help finance a knight. Such support connected households and religious institutions to campaigns even when their members remained at home.

Work, religious practice and danger in the moving army

An army on the move needed water, food, clean clothing, care for animals and a supply of usable equipment. Accounts describe women carrying water and food, washing clothes, removing lice, tending livestock and helping prepare ammunition or load crossbows. During the First Crusade, women were reported carrying water at Dorylaeum in 1097 and moving rubble during the siege of Arqa in 1099. Carrying water kept fighters supplied; washing clothes and removing lice were forms of camp work rather than battlefield command.

Religious leaders and commanders sometimes tried to exclude women from camps, in part because they believed sexual relationships would compromise the penitential discipline expected of crusaders. Fulcher of Chartres describes an episode in which women were expelled from an army. Commanders linked sexual restraint to their understanding of the expedition as penance. Women continued to appear in campaigns, and chroniclers could blame their presence for sin or failure while overlooking their practical contributions.

Travel and proximity to fighting exposed noncombatants to disease, capture, enslavement and death. Godehilde, who accompanied Baldwin of Boulogne on the First Crusade, died during the journey in Anatolia. Corba of Thorigné was captured during the expedition of 1101, and her eventual fate is unknown. Servants and poorer travellers also accompanied expeditions, although aristocratic women are more often named in surviving accounts.

Women who lived along campaign routes could be caught up in violence without choosing to travel. In 1096, crusading bands attacked Jewish communities in the Rhineland. Hebrew accounts describe Jewish women resisting attacks and attempts at forced conversion; accounts of the massacres also show how the arrival of armed groups endangered entire communities. The experiences of civilians were shaped not only by the destination of a crusade but by the routes armies crossed.

Political authority and exceptional combat

Elite women could use their rank, wealth and family connections to influence campaigns. Eleanor of Aquitaine traveled with Louis VII on the Second Crusade, accompanied by members of her household. Cecilia of Le Bourcq is credited with helping organise Antioch’s defences after her husband, Roger of Salerno, was killed at the Field of Blood in 1119. Such work involved political authority and the organization of defense, not simply presence in a military camp.

Some women took on public responsibilities during a crisis. On the Seventh Crusade in Egypt, Margaret of Provence remained at Damietta while her husband, Louis IX, was captured. Jean de Joinville describes her persuading the Genoese and Pisan sailors to remain by arranging provisions. Keeping Damietta in Christian hands preserved the city that could be surrendered in the agreement for Louis’s release. After the death of the Ayyubid sultan al-Salih Ayyub in 1249, Shajar al-Durr helped maintain government in Egypt while the succession was unsettled. She later ruled for a short time. Her brief reign emerged from the Ayyubid succession crisis and the growing power of Egypt’s Mamluk commanders.

Stories of women fighting are rarer and need to be read in context. Margaret of Beverley, an Englishwoman whose experience was recounted by her brother Thomas of Froidmont, was said to have helped defend Jerusalem during Saladin’s siege in 1187. The account depicts her carrying water to the defenders and using a cooking pot for head protection. Thomas wrote a religious narrative about his sister, so the details come through his account rather than through a military roster. Her story describes a civilian assisting a city’s defenders during a siege.

Households, property and kin left behind

When a landholder took the cross, the household still had to function. Some crusaders arranged for relatives to manage their property, made grants or drew up documents setting out their wishes. A regent, meaning someone entrusted with governing an estate or territory during an absence, might oversee land and dependants until the crusader returned. Adela of Normandy, wife of Stephen of Blois, managed his estates during his absence on the First Crusade and after his death in 1102. Women’s administrative work could include overseeing property and children, and in some cases handling disputes or commercial affairs.

Absence could bring uncertainty as well as authority. News traveled slowly, and a family might not know whether a crusader was alive, captured or dead. Ida of Leuven went east in an effort to find her husband Baldwin II, who had disappeared during the First Crusade, but did not find him. Such uncertainty could affect inheritance and remarriage as well as the everyday care of a household. Women left behind were not always widows in a clear legal sense, even when a return seemed unlikely.

In the Latin-ruled states of the eastern Mediterranean, deaths in warfare and repeated remarriages could concentrate land and political influence in the hands of widows and heiresses. Legal customs reserved a widow’s dower, land or income for her support, while other property passed to children or heirs. A widow’s land and status could make a later marriage politically important, while her own authority depended on her family position and the circumstances of inheritance. This differed from much of western Europe, where inheritance patterns often concentrated landed property in a principal heir. Neither region offered women one uniform experience.

Women also contributed to crusading finance without leaving home. Donations to religious institutions and transactions involving family property helped provide resources for campaigns. Documents sometimes required a woman’s consent when land was sold or pledged. These arrangements show that a crusader’s departure could draw on the labor, property and legal standing of relatives who did not join the expedition.

Young people and the movements of 1212

The movements commonly called the Children’s Crusade took place in France and the Rhineland in 1212, but they were not formally authorized crusades, and later stories combine uncertain details from different events. The Latin word pueri, often translated as children, could refer to young people but also carried social meanings associated with dependence or low status. The participants included actual children and adolescents, but accounts also mention adults, women and poor people. Historians therefore do not treat the movement as a single army made up only of small children.

An early Cologne chronicle says that some participants left ploughs, carts or flocks they had been working or tending. That detail suggests the departure could disrupt household labor and livelihoods, because participants were leaving work normally needed by their households. The movements had religious aims, but lacked the organization and papal authorization of an officially proclaimed campaign. Pope Innocent III urged participants who reached Rome to return home.

The familiar tale of children marching to Marseille, expecting the sea to part, and then being sold into slavery developed through later accounts that combined and embellished the events. The mass enslavement story comes from later narrative traditions; contemporary reports describe separate movements and incomplete journeys rather than this single sequence of events.