EPTSo you may have noticed that my blogs have started becoming a little more diverse in topic. I think it's a good thing. I'm writing this blog because I love history and have a history report to write by the end of the day and I figure this is a good way to get my rough thoughts down. It's actually super-interesting: Frankish women were sluts!
Frankish Women of Peace and War
So the document that I have to review is by Imad ad-Din, an Arab historian who was a very good friend of Saladin. He's actually a character in the movie Kingdom of Heaven, which is terrible history but still good for picturing what everything looked like at the time:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/kxP8U.jpg)
Imad ad-Din at the Battle of Kerak
Imad ad-Din is a good primary source for the Arab side of the conflict in the Crusades, since he both lived through the Second and Third crusades and was also directly involved as a political figure and scribe. Of course he's biased, but at this time who wasn't? You will find no such thing as a secular source written in the middle ages, unless a Buddhist Monk were to witness everything.
So the Third Crusade was sparked when Jerusalem and Acre fell. It's main two leaders were Richard the Lionheart and Saladin, but the deposed King of Jerusalem Guy de Lusignan also took part, along with Frederick I Barbarossa of Germany (his run was cut short, in the least awesome way imaginable), and Philip Augustus of France.
Well, in Imad ad-Din's document he talks about a group of 300 Frankish (French) women who came to the Holy Land with some mighty queen. They came with a very special mission; to relieve the crusaders of their pent up sexual desires during the long siege of Acre. Apparently, they were somehow ordained by the Church to give up their bodies to the crusaders as the noblest of selfless sacrifices in order to appease them, and God would forgive them of their sinfulness. I don't know if this was a papal declaration or not, but Imad ad-Din does not think too highly of it. He was certainly not shy of using every medieval sexual innuendo imaginable to describe what was going on though. Check it out:
They were the places where tent-pegs are driven in, theyinvited swords to enter their sheaths, they razed their terrain for planting, they made javelins rise toward shields, excited the plough to plough, gave the birds a place to peck with their beaks, allowed heads to enter their ante-chambers and raced under whoever bestrode them at the spur’s blow. They took the parched man’s sinews to the well, fitted arrows to the bow’s handle, cut off sword-belts, engraved coins, welcomed birds into the nest of their thighs, caught in their nets the horns of butting rams, removed the interdict from what is protected, withdrew the veil from what is hidden. They interwove leg with leg, slaked their lovers’ thirsts, caught lizard after lizard in their holes, disregarded the wickedness of their intimacies, guided pens to inkwells, torrents to the valley bottom, streams to pools, swords to scabbards, gold ingots to crucibles, infidel girdles to women’s zones, firewood to the stove, guilty men to low dungeons, money-changers to dinar, necks to bellies, motes to eyes.
So basically they had a lot of sex with pretty much everyone who needed it, and it earned them a one-way ticket to heaven. I'd compare it to tailgating outside a football game, but replace the barbecues with women on cots and you get the idea.
Apparently there were other women there too, even though the popes at the time of the crusades didn't want women going on them in the first place. They were noblewomen with money who dressed up as knights and fought. You would have had not clue that they were women until they were captured, at which point they'd be promptly sold off as slaves, and despite Muslim laws pertaining to slaves I'm willing to be the quality of their treatment was dubious at best. These were, after all, dark times with different attitudes about a great many things. ad-Din basically laments the fact that they were out of the kitchen, and God have mercy on whomever let them do it.
Imad ad-Din also mentions that there were old women there for the purpose of motivation, but at other times they were a weakness. He doesn't speak too highly of them, although though in reality they were probably nuns.
Imad ad-Din concludes with the statement that the latter women, "in their religious zeal tired of feminine delicacy... and became hardened, and stupid, and foolish." He more or less relates their religious wrongness to the fact that they are taking some refuge in audacity to cover for the fact that they have lost their femininity because they went out crusading in the first place. What turns this into circular logic is the fact that their religious zeal is what led them to crusade in the first place...
Either way, this was a much different time.
EDIT: More history.
