![]() During the First Crusade in 1096-99, one of the few which actually achieved its military goal, the overall casualty rate was astonishing. Even for non-combatants, the dangers of such expeditions were very real. Far more often they served in support roles: supplying food for crusaders, doing their laundry, tending the sick, and providing sexual services, sometimes as prostitutes but more commonly as wives and mistresses. But female warriors were rare, not only because of conventional gender roles but because women lacked the specialised training and equipment of knights. Women frequently travelled on campaign with their menfolk. So do abortive popular movements such as the so-called Children’s Crusade of 1212 and the Shepherds’ Crusades of 12. By this definition, campaigns in Iberia, the Baltic, southern France, Ethiopia, Malta and Rhodes all qualify, whether the ‘enemy’ was Muslim, pagan or Cathar. Like other recent historians, Nicholson redefines crusading to denote ‘any military expedition originated, authorised and organised by the papacy any expedition which its participants depicted as a crusade … or any instance of penitential warfare, holy war which justified fighting in defence of the Christian faith with the expectation of spiritual reward’. Helen Nicholson’s project in Women and the Crusades is to consider all dimensions of women’s participation, both on campaign and on the home front. As they failed in their primary goals – to recapture territory and convert Muslims – the crusaders’ ideal evolved towards the purification of society through penance and imitation of Christ in his Passion, especially in the very lands where he suffered. But recent scholarship has revisited crusading from new perspectives, seeing in the movement not merely a long series of failed foreign wars, but a penitential practice that deeply shaped European Christendom and involved the whole of society, men and women alike. In the Fourth Crusade of 1202-4, the Venetians diverted the army from Egypt to sack Constantinople, while the Albigensian Crusade of 1209-29 devastated a flourishing Occitanian culture. Departing crusaders routinely attacked Jews, giving them the options of slaughter or forced baptism (many preferred collective suicide). ![]() Aside from the bitter legacy of hate they left in the Middle East, they also wrought havoc in Europe. F ew medieval enterprises have been as romanticised or as vilified as the Crusades. ![]()
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