The Women Who Actually Went on Crusade — and Why Their Stories Keep Getting Buried
The Crusades as most people know them are a male story — kings, popes, military orders, and siege engines. Women appear at the margins, if at all. The real record is more complicated. Women traveled to the Holy Land. Some of them fought. Many others ran the estates their husbands left behind, keeping Western Europe functioning while the men died in Anatolia or Egypt. A few became the most powerful figures in the conflict on either side. Here's what actually happened.
By BookOfWorldHistory·June 7, 2026·History·10 min read · 1,925 words
Originally published at: https://www.bookofworldhistory.com/blog/women-crusades-history-warriors-queens-regents-holy-land
The Crusades as most people know them are a male story — kings, popes, military orders, and siege engines. Women appear at the margins, if at all. The real record is more complicated. Women traveled to the Holy Land. Some of them fought. Many others ran the estates their husbands left behind, keeping Western Europe functioning while the men died in Anatolia or Egypt. A few became the most powerful figures in the conflict on either side. Here's what actually happened.
The history of the Crusades that gets written down is heavily male. Chronicles focus on battles, sieges, the decisions of kings and popes and military commanders. Women appear at the edges — as the reasons behind disputes, as inheritance vectors, as the occasional dramatic exception to a rule that's rarely stated outright.
The actual history is different. Women went on crusade. Some of them fought. Many more ran the estates their crusading husbands left behind, keeping the political and economic structures of Western Europe intact while the men were away fighting — or dying — in Anatolia and Egypt. A few became rulers outright, making military decisions and negotiating treaties under conditions that the male-centered historical record struggled to fit into its existing categories.
None of this was straightforward. The church's attitude toward women in the crusading enterprise ranged from grudging tolerance to active hostility. The only female role officially approved during the First Crusade was washerwoman — and even then, she was supposed to be unattractive, to reduce the risk of distraction. That stipulation was not consistently followed. Women of all classes and purposes joined the expeditions, and the attempts to remove them — armies were purged of female company several times throughout the crusading period, with church reformers blaming military defeats on the sinfulness their presence encouraged — never quite worked.
Women's participation in the Crusades ranged from sutlers and washerwomen to fighting nobility and ruling queens. Muslim accounts sometimes preserved these stories more completely than Western chronicles, partly because female Christian aggression was the kind of detail that seemed worth recording.
The Women Who Actually Fought
The surprise in the historical record, once you look carefully, is how many women fought and how little space most accounts give them.
Florine of Burgundy was a warrior-princess who accompanied her husband Sweyn of Denmark in the First Crusade. Together they commanded a force of about 1,500 cavalry crossing the plains of Cappadocia when a Turkish force ambushed them. Both were killed along with most of their soldiers. Florine appears in most histories of the First Crusade as a footnote, which says more about how those histories were written than about her significance.
Ida of Austria, widow of Leopold II, Margrave of Austria, led an army during the Crusade of 1101 marching toward Jerusalem. Her forces were ambushed at Heraclea Cybistra by Kilij Arslan I. Depending on the source, she was killed or taken into his harem — the uncertainty itself says something about how the records tracked what happened to women, even women leading armies.
Eleanor of Aquitaine is the most famous case. She accompanied her husband Louis VII on the Second Crusade as the leader of troops from Aquitaine, bringing some of her ladies-in-waiting along as soldiers. The crusade's strategic failure became entangled with arguments between Louis and Eleanor over campaign direction — she supported her uncle Raymond of Antioch's plan for attacking Aleppo and Shaizar; Louis insisted on going directly to Jerusalem — and contributed to the eventual collapse of their marriage. Eleanor's role in actual combat is disputed by the sources, but her presence at the head of an Aquitanian military contingent is not.
Margaret of Provence is the woman whose story comes closest to commanding a crusade outright. After Louis IX was captured at the Battle of Mansurah in 1250, it was Margaret who led the negotiations for his release, organized the defense of Damietta, and kept the expedition from immediate disaster. She was pregnant and had recently given birth during the crisis. Her contemporary Jean de Joinville recorded her actions in enough detail that the scale of what she accomplished is hard to miss. She reportedly made a knight swear to kill her rather than let her be captured by the Muslims. The accounts that survive give her more credit than most synthetic histories do.
Shajar al-Durr — The Sultan the Western Chronicles Mostly Ignored
The most powerful woman in the Crusade record is probably the one who gets the least space in Western histories of the period.
Shajar al-Durr was the widow of the Ayyubid sultan As-Salih Ayyub. When her husband became gravely ill during the Seventh Crusade in 1249, she helped organize Egypt's military response. After Ayyub died in November 1249, his death was concealed for months while the campaign continued — with Shajar effectively running the military and political situation from behind the throne. The Egyptian forces that defeated Louis IX at the Battle of Mansurah in February 1250, trapped the crusader army, took Louis prisoner in April, and negotiated the ransom that secured his release all acted under her authority.
After the Bahri Mamluks assassinated her stepson Turanshah, Shajar was formally recognized as sultan in her own right. The Abbasid Caliph in Baghdad objected, reportedly sending a message to the effect that if Egypt had no man capable of governing it, he would send one. Eventually a male sultan had to be installed. She married the Mamluk commander Aybak, who became sultan with her support, and they ruled jointly for seven years.
The political situation eventually moved against her. When she suspected Aybak of planning to take another wife, she had him killed. His former supporters had her beaten to death and her body thrown from a tower. She lay in the moat for three days before burial.
The Crusader chronicles, which devote considerable space to the military operations that failed against her, give almost nothing to Shajar herself. The Muslim sources are far more detailed, partly because her rise was unprecedented enough to demand explanation and partly because the question of female rule was a live theological controversy that her reign forced into the open.
Shajar al-Durr ran Egypt's military response when her husband fell ill during Louis IX's crusade, organized the forces that defeated and captured the French king, and was formally recognized as sultan — a rise so unprecedented that even Muslim sources struggled to categorize it.
The Wives Who Traveled and What They Risked
Several dozen named women have been identified as wives who traveled with their husbands on the crusading expeditions — with the real number certainly much higher, since the chronicles recorded names selectively and women without high social rank rarely made it into the written record at all.
Godehilde accompanied her husband Baldwin of Boulogne on the First Crusade. She died of illness at Kahramanmaras while Baldwin was marching toward Cilicia. Her death deprived him of the revenues from her lands and complicated his position considerably. He eventually entered into a politically convenient marriage with an Armenian noblewoman.
Elvira of Leon-Castile, illegitimate daughter of King Alfonso VI, traveled while pregnant with her husband Raymond IV of Toulouse, leader of the largest contingent in the First Crusade. After Raymond's death at the siege of Tripoli in 1106, she gave birth to their son — later Count of Toulouse — and returned to Castile.
Corba of Thorigne traveled with her husband Geoffrey Burel during the Crusade of 1101 and was captured by the Turks. What happened to her afterward is unknown — she simply disappears from the record.
The Crusader expedition of the Second Crusade included women explicitly enough that regulations for the crusader fleet mention wives. Eleanor of Aquitaine's household was part of Louis VII's contingent. The presence of women was documented, regulated, and periodically resented, but it was never eliminated.
The Women Who Stayed Home and Kept Things Running
For every woman who traveled to the Holy Land, several more stayed behind managing the estates their crusading husbands left. This was not passive work. It involved administering landholdings, presiding over courts, managing debts — crusading was expensive, and knights who mortgaged their lands to finance the journey often left their wives with complicated financial situations to navigate — and holding off political pressure from rivals.
Adela of Normandy, daughter of William the Conqueror and wife of Count Stephen of Blois, is one of the better-documented cases. Stephen left on the First Crusade, came home early after the brutal siege of Antioch, and was reportedly shamed by Adela into returning. He died on a minor expedition in 1102. Adela ran his estates throughout this period, served as regent for their children, and managed the political transition after Stephen's death. Among her children was the future King Stephen of England.
Adelaide del Vasto, who became Baldwin I of Jerusalem's third wife and brought substantial wealth including ships and money to the marriage, was unceremoniously set aside when Baldwin needed to make a politically convenient remarriage. She returned to Sicily furious, and her son Roger II of Sicily later refused to assist the Crusader states during the Second Crusade — partly because of how his mother had been treated. The diplomatic ripple effects of Baldwin's treatment of one woman lasted decades.
The legal position of widows in the Crusader states of the Levant was somewhat different from their position in Europe. The courts of Outremer gave widows half to a third of their husband's estate, more than was typical under Western feudal practice. Women who outlived crusading husbands accumulated property and became valuable. Widowed countesses and princesses attracted European men who came specifically to marry into Levantine estates, and the pattern gave some of these women considerably more practical leverage than their European counterparts typically had.
The women who stayed behind to manage crusading husbands' estates were not passive figures — they administered courts, managed debts, held off political rivals, and often ran complex organizations for years while their husbands were absent or dead.
What the Muslim Accounts Preserved
There's a useful asymmetry in the source material. Western chronicles, focused on the religious and military achievements of male crusaders, mentioned women mainly when they were inconvenient or exceptional. Muslim accounts were interested in something else.
They recorded the fighting women partly as evidence of crusader depravity — look at these Christians, letting their women join in the violence — which meant they were actually paying closer attention to details that Western chroniclers skipped. The aggressiveness of Christian women was exactly the kind of thing that deserved documentation, from a Muslim perspective, because it demonstrated something about the nature of the enemy. This form of preservation is odd but real: some of the most specific accounts of women's military participation in the Crusades survive in sources that recorded them out of something closer to outrage than admiration.
Ismat ad-Din Khatun, the Turkic Muslim regent of Damascus, also appears more substantially in the record than her Western counterparts. She was the daughter of the regent of Damascus, wife first of Nur al-Din Zengi and then of Saladin, and exercised considerable political power under both. In 1174, when Nur al-Din died without an heir and King Amalric of Jerusalem immediately invaded to take advantage of the instability, Ismat ad-Din governed Damascus and negotiated a successful peace. The chronicler William of Tyre, writing from the Crusader perspective, described her as exercising courage beyond that of most women — a backhanded compliment that nonetheless acknowledged something the Latin chronicles about their own women rarely managed to articulate.
What Their Stories Actually Tell Us
The women of the Crusades don't fit neatly into either the domestic-sphere narrative that medieval and much subsequent history assigned them or the gender-equality narrative that some contemporary writing wants to project back onto them. The reality was more varied and more constrained than either.
Some women fought and are remembered only because they died fighting. Some women ruled, temporarily or for sustained periods, and did so effectively — but were generally replaced by men when a man was available or could be arranged. Some women traveled to the Holy Land as servants, sutlers, or prostitutes and appear in the historical record only when armies were purged of them, at which point they took collective blame for military failures that had considerably more complicated causes.
What the record actually shows, once you look for it, is that women's participation in the Crusades was both more common and more varied than standard accounts suggest. The chronicles weren't designed to record it. The military orders officially excluded women from full membership, though the Hospitallers did allow women as affiliated members with limited roles. The papacy's position on female crusaders shifted between tolerance and discouragement depending on who was pope and what the immediate political situation demanded.
None of that stopped them. What it did was make their history harder to find — and mean that the people who preserved it were often, as with Shajar al-Durr, writing from the other side.