Gone Medieval - Forgotten Women of the Crusades

Episode Date: April 12, 2022

Little has been known up until now about the involvement and power of women during the Crusader period. When Saladin's armies besieged Jerusalem in 1187, behind the city walls a last-ditch defense was being led by an unlikely trio - including Sibylla, Queen of Jerusalem. She was the last of a line of formidable female rulers in the Crusader States of Outremer - a world where women conducted diplomatic negotiations, made military decisions, forged alliances, rebelled, and undertook architectural projects. In today's episode, Gone Medieval goes to India! Cat is on location at the Jaipur Literature Festival where she is joined by Katherine Pangonis, a historian and author specialising in the medieval world of the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Together they explore some of the women who dared to rule.Katherine Pangonis is the author of Queens of Jerusalem: The Women Who Dared to Rule, published by Orion Publishing Co.For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Gone Medieval newsletter here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download, go to Android or Apple store. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. Most of our listeners will probably have heard about the Crusades. You've probably read a book or something.

In fact, there's an endless number of books and films written about the Crusade. But one of the things that's quite often missing from these stories is the women and the stories of the women. But actually, they shouldn't be missing from those stories. And now there's a new book that deals with all of this. And in 1187, Saladin's armies besieged the Holy City of Jerusalem. He had previously annihilated Jerusalem's army at the Battle of Hatin, and behind the city's high walls, a last-ditch defence was being led by an unlikely trio, including Zibylla, Queen of Jerusalem.

She was the last of a line of formidable female rulers in the Crusader's estates of Utrema. All of this is the topic of a book called Queens of Jerusalem, the Women Who Dared to Rule by Catherine Pangonis. And Catherine Paganis is a historian specialising in the medieval world of the Mediterranean and the Middle East,

and in particularly trying to write the voices of women back into those narratives. Catherine normally lives in Beirut, but she is with me now in quite a different location because we are in India, we're at the Jaipur Literature Festival, where Catherine has had her first book featured and spoken at the festival.

So welcome to the podcast from India, Catherine. Thanks so much for having me, Kat. It's a delight to be here. So we are at the festival now. We just sneaked away into a little corner so you can hear lots of festival noises in the background. But as Catherine's here, I thought I'd take the opportunity to talk to her. But Catherine, I just wanted to ask, first of all, why did you decide to focus on this for your book? Well, it's exactly, as you've just said, actually.

I mean, the Crusades are a hyperactive field of study, both in the academic world and in the world of trade publications for the general readers. More books are written about the crusades every year. There's an endless flow of material published about this fascinating period in world history. But something I did always notice from A-levels right through my university career is that the women are glossed over if they're mentioned at all. And even at A-level, I remember our syllabus touched on Melasond of Jerusalem, who I'm sure we'll talk a lot about in a minute or two.

And Sibyla of Jerusalem, the final reigning queen of Jerusalem, the final reigning queen in Jerusalem, as well as some of the other important women that I talk about in my book, Alice of Antio, Codiano of Tripoli, et cetera. And by the time I finished my university career, I realised there still wasn't anything accessible for the general reader written on these women.

And although there had been massive strides in the academic world, I mean, historians like Natasha Hodgson, Helen Nicholson, had been producing really excellent material on these women. Nothing had quite been brought that someone like me, a curious reader,

might have been able to pick up. So I wanted to fill that gap and make sure these women and their, quite frankly, amazing careers were getting the airtime they deserved in the popular sphere. So that was my motivation. Excellent. Well, it's clearly a book that was needed. But let's just start with the setting of this. So can you just explain where are we in the world? Which sort of bit of the world have you focused on? And what's going on just as a brief sort of primer? Yeah, brilliant. So I focus on this quite tight sliver of coastline that runs from southern Turkey, the cities that are now known as Antakia and Ulfa,

but in the medieval period would have been known as Antioch and Odessa, right down the coast of Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, to northern Egypt and the Gaza Strip. And this area is traditionally known as the Holy Land or the Levant. But in the Middle Ages, it was known even more widely as Ultramar, the land overseas. And so it's a region defined by Western writers by its otherness to the west.

It's that sort of mythical, exotic land across the sea. The Christian territories in the East are formed by the Knights of the First Crusade, who, as I think many of your readers will know, conquered their way across this land by the sword, you know, massacring and displacing thousands, at least, of people as they went. And they carved out these four distinct crusader states, as they're popularly known. And those include the County of Odessa,

the first crusader state that was formed around the city, as we've discussed, Urfa in southern Turkey, and the Principality of Antioch, the second, around current Antakia and northern Syria. Then the county of Tripoli, in a region that now encompasses some of Syria, but mostly around Lebanon and of course the city of Tripoli. And then of course the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem,

which focuses on the modern states, Israel and Palestine, around the holy city of Jerusalem, which is the magnet at the heart of all this religious conflict. And to this day, it's a place of unparalleled important for the three great Abrahamic religions, Islam, Judaism and Christianity. And from medieval times, the modern day, it has been this object of bitter conflict in the medieval period of religious warfare,

which takes on a new energy with the advent of the crucible. when Christian pilgrimage becomes armed and becomes violent. And these states are amazing multicultural hubs. I mean, we have evidence of people from as far afield as Iceland and India converging on this city of Jerusalem and people of many different ethnic and religious groups coexisting to an extent within the crusade estates. It's not as simple as simply Christians versus Muslims. Of course, that is the overarching narrative and that is the basis of the conflict.

But on top of that, you do have Muslim people living and trading in Christian territory in exchange for higher taxes, etc. and so on. And some of the best accounts we have of life in the Crusader States come from Islamic travel writers who give beautiful and vivid accounts of life and culture in the Crusader States. And then on top of that, you know, we of course have the many multifaceted Christian communities of Armenians, Syriacs, Maronites, and of course the European Christians who have settled. So it's a multicultural centre. It's incredibly diverse. And they're very unstable because the Crusaders are an occupying force in hostile territory. So it's a very unstable and fascinating

region. Okay, so let's get straight to these women that you write about. So you're writing essentially about one particular dynasty, aren't you? How does that all begin? How do these women come to prominence? Where does it all start? Well, it's a great question, and it really starts in the city of Odessa, as we've mentioned, Urfer in southern Turkey, where an Armenian princess named Morphia of Melateen has an arranged marriage with a crusader from a Baldwin of Bork, who will then become Baldwin's second of Jerusalem. And their marriage is really interesting. Not only is it, because essentially there's an interracial marriage between an Armenian

woman and a European crusader, but also she only gives birth to daughters. She has four daughters, or that's what we have on record, certainly no sons that survive infancy. And despite precedence set by other kings of Jerusalem, Baldwin does not find reasons to divorce or repudiate his wife, and instead he sticks with her and makes his daughters, his heirs. Crucially, Melasond, his eldest daughter, she's recognised in documents from a young age as she will be her father's successor. And this takes on a new significance when Baldwin succeeds to the throne of Jerusalem on the death of his cousin, another Baldwin, Baldwin I won't talk too much about him now.

But this is where it begins. It begins with Morphea and her four daughters, Melizond, Alice, Hodgiana and Yvette, and all of them go on to have really quite remarkable careers. Melizond will become the first queen regnant of Jerusalem, which I'll tell you a bit more about in the second. and Alice will become a very rebellious princess in Antioch. She will try three times to seize control and autonomy in that region. Her sister, Hodyana, will become the Countess of Tripoli through a marriage, but then on the death of her husband, killed by the assassins, no less. She will rule in her own right as the regent for her son,

but wield a lot of power for several years. And then the youngest daughter, Yvette, perhaps the most interesting of all, she is in fact held as a hostage by the Muslims for a year in her infancy, and this prevents her from making a marriage, but she will become a powerful woman in the ecclesiastical sphere because she becomes the abbess of the convent of Bethany, which her sister Melisond will found basically on her behalf. But no, Melisond manages to take power in Jerusalem

sort of unexpectedly because her father, as you would, arranges a marriage for her with a wealthy knight from Europe, Fulke von Jou, who brings with him troops and money and military experience, all the things needed to govern the Kingdom of Jerusalem. And Fulke is expecting to become the king of Jerusalem on his own, in his own right, and that's what persuades him to leave his very wealthy dukedom in France and travels this very hazardous and unstable region in Ultramar. He wants to be king of Jerusalem,

and he doesn't expect to be sharing power with his much younger wife. But Baldwin II plays a blinder on his deathbed when he summons a council around him, the dying king, lying in state, you know, about to pass out of this world. And he says, instead of leaving power to folk alone, he's going to leave a triumvirate of power to folk Melasond and their infant son altogether. So Melazond inherits an equal share of power, which is completely unexpected,

and it gives her this unprecedented role of a queen regnant of Jerusalem. When Volk is crowned king, she is crowned queen as well, and they're both anointed, and they should have equal power. In the early years of her reign, Folk does manage to suppress Melazon. We don't see her name in the charters so much. But then this very dramatic incident will occur when a supporter of Melazons, Hugh of Jaffa, who some argue was in fact her lover, but was also her cousin. so very typical of medieval gossip in that way.

He rebels against the king. He's accused of treaties and an open court. And in order to avoid trial by combat, he actually flees and forms an alliance with the Egyptians of Ascalon, who are, Ascalon is at this time in the hands of a Muslim dynasty. And it leads almost to a civil war. And it's fighting sort of for Melodon's rights because there's a lot of resistance within the local baronage of Utremer

against folk, perceived him as an interloper. And when he comes to Jerusalem to take on this role, he brings all his cronies with him and he wants to give them lands and positions and titles and this obviously rankles with the already established aristocracy. So this is really the heart of this matter. It's not really an affair between Melasond and Hugh at all, whether or not that happened.

It really is this wide a political issue. And this conflict really propels Melaton to find her own voice and eventually Hugh dies. There's an assassination attempt made on him. He's banished and then he dies in exile. And this prompts Melazon to really find her voice and step into her own. And the chronicles are there explicit on.

on this, Fulke is terrified of his wife from this point on. Her wrath is so terrifying that Fulke and his supporters will not go into her presence unarmed alone. They're terrified for their lives. And remarkably, you might think, Fulke and Mellazone do reconcile. We know this because another son is born. We also have an amazing solter that Fult commissions a gift for his wife as a peace offering. But the result of this is that Mellazons really does become the senior partner in their relationship from that day forward. He doesn't make a single decision without her consent.

Her name is on all the charters and the laws that are passed. So this is when she really converts the authority that she's inherited into tangible power that she wields in the kingdom. And from that point forward, we see her taking a leading role in politics, making military decisions, undertaking huge architectural projects of patronage. She's a great patron of the church. She changes the whole aspects of the church of the Holy Sepulchre, the old city of Jerusalem. We can still see Melizond's architectural projects today in the winding streets of the suits of Jerusalem. So she's a remarkable woman, and her career will go on and on from one height to the next.

She's a brilliant woman. And that's where it starts. And then Sibyla, who we've touched on in the beginning, is Merson's granddaughter. So this trend of powerful woman does continue. And part of what allows them to come into this space is the fact that the life expectancy for a fighting around a Neutramer is low. Men die all the time. The life expectancy for a native-born king in Ultramar is early 20s.

In contrast to a native-born king in England or France, where their life expectancy is sort of 58 to 62. So there's this huge gulf. So the men are dying of in battle, of disease, of mishap, fault dies in a hunting accident, and the women are outliving their male counterparts that might previously have controlled them. And because the states are so unstable, there isn't this superfluity of eligible princes and dukes waiting around the corner. So in order to keep dynastic continuity, they have to allow women to succeed, and they have to allow women to rule as regions. So it creates this sort of power vacuum, which women can drive themselves into,

if they have the motivation and take the initiative to do so. And they seem them to be quite well accepted in the community and by the people as well, do they? And what other reasons for that, do you think? Yeah, that's a great question, because part of why Melason has the support of the local aristocracy over her foreign husband, folk from Europe, is because she's a great symbol of the multicultural nature of the kingdom of Jerusalem. Her mother is this Armenian princess of Greek Orthodox faith. So Melizond is the daughter of a crusader and a native Christian, a native of the Middle East. And Melizond herself is born and raised in the citadel of Urfa, which still says.

stand today. It's amazing place. Everyone should go. And this gives them this greater degree of affinity and acceptance within the local populations. And we do see this continuing throughout Millazon's career because we know that she makes donations to refugees from Urfa. We know that she sponsors projects for the Armenian Cathedral of St. James, in addition to being a beneficiary of the whole city of Jerusalem. We know that she makes donations to the Templars. She's very active in shoring up the loyalties and allegiances within her political sphere. So yeah, she's a popular queen. And even the chroniclers, William of Tyres, the main chronicler for this period. And even he, he's very disparaging of her, certainly her sister Alice and many other women,

calls them witches and such. Even he writes of Melasone that she was a woman of unusual wisdom and was pretty much of equal to any of the princes of the age. So she's a remarkable woman. In April, 1982, armed forces from the United Kingdom and Argentina went to war over the Falkland Islands. This month, 40 years later, we are dedicating... a special series of episodes to finding out what this conflict was all about and what it was like to fight on either side.

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That's a really interesting point about the sources, because that's quite often where we lose out on learning about women in history in so many different periods, is because they're not written about. Was that something that you found here as well, or is there actually a lot written about these women? No, it's 100% true. If my book was written about a male crusading king, it would be one book on one man. But, you know, my book talks about seven women. It's great to bring them together and draw the comparisons, but also, we don't have enough source material to write a single book about our of Antioch or even maybe something shorter but Sibyla or Melazone, they are greatly emitted from

the sources and so my exercise in writing this was to go through as many sources of crusades as I could and as many different languages with a fine-tooth comb to pull out the references and to compare this with the material culture and with the archaeological record to work out where they were, what events they were involved in and things like this. And we also have the charter evidence of course, so the documents produced by the scriptorium of the Holy Sepulchre and to the scriptorian of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. This can tell us a bit about their activity in political affairs. But no, unfortunately, there's not as much as I would like to have written about these women.

I mean, medieval chroniclers give us so much detail about male appearance. They use this technique called iconismus, where they go into the minutiae of someone's appearance. We know that Raymond of Tripoli had this hooked nose or sallow skin. We know that Baldwin had knees callous from prayer. But Melazon, the only glimpses we have of her appearance, are in a description of her son, where they say something like he was rather spare. respect he resembled his mother. So we know that she's quite thin. And that's really all we have to go on. William, despite praising Melizond at length, never thinks, oh, subsequent generations might want to know about

this woman in more detail. No. So there's a lot missing, but, you know, there's a lot to go on. And there's elements of reading between the lines. But yeah, you have to bring a lot of things together to try and construct a real portrait of any of these women. But I hope I've done them justice. Yeah, absolutely. You've sort of pulled together so much here. But one of the characters that you also write about that's probably more familiar to a lot of our listeners is Eleanor Aquitaine. What's her role in this story? Well, she's obviously very

different to Melisond in that she's a European queen. She's born in southern France. She's not half Armenian. She's not involved in the world of Utremer until her early 20s when she goes on Crusade. And during the course of her involvement in the Second Crusade, she will meet Melisond in Jerusalem. And I believe that this

encounter with this very powerful woman ruling in her own right and having her voice heard on war councils. We know that Melizond was at the Council of the Second Crusade that they had in Palmaria near Acre and decided where the Second Crusade would attack. And Eleanor was excluded from that. So I think there is reason to believe that this example set by Melisone would have influenced Eleanor. But no, Eleanor has a very

interesting experience in the Middle East and on Crusade because, as I say, she comes from France. Her trip on Crusade is her first excursion outside the borders of the French kingdom. She goes first to Constantinople with her husband and they're on a sort of penitential mission because her husband's involved in something that's become known as the Holocaust de Vitri, where a lot of innocent civilians were burned inside a church. So Louis Eleanor's husband, the King of France is in a penitential mood,

and this partly is the crusade. And it's a response to the loss of Odessa. So Adessa is conquered by the Turkish Actabegh, Zengi, and this is while Melasand is a ruling in Jerusalem. And this is a great personal loss to her. This is her homeland, and it shakes the crusader estate. It shakes their security, and it sends reverberations across Christendom. And this brings Eleanor and Louis to the east.

So they have this very long journey. go through Constantinople, and then they attempt to march across Asia Minor, very difficult terrain. They're very unprepared for it. They have a terrible time. Eleanor is caught in an ambush on Mount Cadmus as they try to approach the port to sail to Antioch. But then perhaps the most famous part of Eleanor's experience in Antioch is this, again, an alleged affair with her uncle, Raymond of Antioch. And Eleanor, while she's in Antioch, this is where she really starts to become a problematic wife for Louis, because she starts to hint to him that she'd like to have a divorce and she also says to him she'd like to stay in Antioch while he goes on to Jerusalem.

And again, she's smeared in the Chronicles. There's a lot to suggest that maybe she did have this affair with Raymond, but there's no hard evidence for this. It's just chroniclers repeating gossip and they're repeating each other and regurgitating the same story in sort of cloaked terms. But the reality of the matter is, is Eleanor's uncle, Raymond of Antioch, asks Louis to not send his troops to Jerusalem and Damascus and Adessa, but to stay and defend Antioch against Aleppo. And Louis refuses. And this, again, really could have been a political issue rather than a romantic one and the chroniclers tend to like to put these women's political agency down to romantic issues but i strongly believe it was actually it wasn't to do with an affair it was

to do with the legitimate political decision that she wanted to support her uncle in antioch and it's certainly from her perspective and from raymond it's a shame that she wasn't successful in this because raymond would subsequently be killed in the battle of enab which would drastically reduce the power of antioch and then eleanor she goes to jerusalem by this point she's in disgrace because she's got this rumour of this affair hanging over her. And in Jerusalem, she meets Melasons. And I believe this has a great impact on her later career. So do you think there is much knowledge back in north-western Europe

about what's going on with these creams at the time? Are there many reports in Western sources as well? Contemporary sources. Yes. To a degree, I mean, we know that Melazon is a known figure, and we know this because Bernard, the Abbott of Clairvaux, arguably one of the most powerful figures in 12th century Europe, is her correspondent.

You know, he's writing to her. it actually encouraging her to rule on her own. One of the most remarkable letters we have from Melizond's reign is on the death of her husband. Bernard writes to her and encourages her to rule alone, to put her hand to strong things and be a man in a woman and not to shrink from the challenges of rule in this male society. Well, it is, of course, a condescending letter to modern eyes.

In the medieval period, this is not condescending at all. And it's fantastic. He's not encouraging her to marry again and to give power to a man, but to govern on her own. So she's certainly known to Bernard Abbott of Clevo. She's certainly known to the European dynasties because Fulke, her husband, is actually the father-in-law of Matilda of England

who has a similar struggle for succession at this time. So that these families are all very closely interconnected. Anna Racton is the niece of Raymond of Antioch. They are known. And of course, they're also in very close touch with the Pope because it's the Pope they write to when they need a papal bull issued for a new crusade for reinforcement. So the royal houses of Europe and Ultramar are very closely interlinked

between France and the Italian Normans and so on. So thinking a bit more about this and how these women are written about them, how actually are they represented as women in what were both in the contemporary sources, but also more currently and in what's written about them now and in films and so on. How are they portrayed?

Well, it feels inevitably portrayed both then and now through two competing lenses of strong Orientalism and sexualisation. And we see this down the ages from medieval chronicles to today. So, I mean, thinking about Eleanor of Aquitaine, Perhaps the most famous representation of her in the modern sphere is Catherine Hepburn's portrayal of her in The Lion and Winter. Brilliant film, but in which Catherine Hatburn declares,

I rode bare-breasted halfway to Damascus. It obviously didn't happen. She didn't ride bare-breasted anywhere. There are reports that maybe she wore a breastplate, but nothing more salacious than that. And even in her own lifetime, there are these rumours that Eleanor of Aquitaine tried to elope with Saladin. I mean, there's one source which suggests she has one foot on a ship

about to sail away with Saladin, who was a child at this time, before her husband managed to carry her back. So they're always viewed through these very specific and distorting lenses. And we see the same with Sibyla of Jerusalem. You know, again, famous Crusades film of sort of the last decade is Kingdom of Heaven. And in that film, we see Herb Trails this very glamorous, exotic and very sexual figure. And that the story of her life is completely distorted by this desire to present image in this way.

But it's important to say, I mean, maybe for the sake of the directors of these films, they're not actually stepping too far away from the narrative of medieval chronicles because the medieval genre of romance literature is emerging at this time. I mean, Eleanor is a patron of the romance genre famously, and she falls victim to the downside of it, which is casting women in this role of Luanda Moore, love from afar. So Hodgiana of Tripoli, this powerful ruler in the medieval Middle East,

her main legacy is as the distant sexual fantasy of a troubadour. Geoffrey Rudel was a major player in the literary world of Middle Ages, and he was obsessed with this fantasy of Hodgiana, Countess of Tripoli. And this is massively affected her legacy as well. And also in the way that they're assessed by the medieval historians and modern ones, there's this very gendered lens, which is they're disparaged on the grounds of their femininity. So Alice of Antio, we haven't been able to go into her story, but when she's ridiculed for her rebellions, they attack her skills as a mother.

They definitely depict her as a bad mother, and they depict her as sexually ravenous. And it's the same for Sibilla. We have no evidence at all that she's. she killed her son. But chroniclers, they pluck it out of the air in the 17th century. There becomes this legend of a black sibble who murdered her son in order to further her in gains. There's no evidence for this at all. And so there is this tendency throughout not just medieval chronicles, but literature in general of casting women in one of two camps, either a sinner or a saint. And this is definitely true in the crusader period as well. And they talk about

them in the same ways. Alice is described as wicked. When her rebellions are described, William of Tyre doesn't even credit her own intelligence in bringing about the rebellions. He says, oh she must have been conceived by evil spirits to do this. And this does filter down into the work of modern historians. So men who I really respect, I won't name. But, you know, when they deal with the episodes that concern these women, they do tend to follow the party lines set by the medieval chroniclers. And that's ridiculous.

And so what I've seen my main task here is to try and peel back those layers of misogyny that have been applied thick and fast over the generations and just try and get back to the facts of where these women were, what they were doing, and how they functioned in the socio-political framework of their day. And that's exactly what you're doing in your book. So I would absolutely recommend you pick up a copy of Catherine Pongone's book, Queens of Jerusalem, The Women Who Dare to Rule. Catherine, thank you so much for sharing that with me today.

Thank you so much. It's been a great discussion. And thank you all for listening. So this has been an episode of Gone Medieval by History. I brought you today from Jopor Literature Festival. So I hope you enjoyed the atmosphere of chatter and things going on in the background. It's a bit hectic here. But we will be back again with a new episode. My co-host, Matt Lewis, will be back on Saturday with the next episode.

And don't forget that you can subscribe to our newsletter, Medieval Mondays. Just look in the episode notes. And we'll hope to have you join us again soon. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. Thank you so much for listening.