Crusading Warfare, Chivalry, and the Enslavement of Women and Children

The subject of the treatment of prisoners taken in crusading warfare, long neglected, has attracted considerable interest in the last 15 years, but more can still be said, particularly on the ways in which crusaders dealt with their enemies’ women and children, the archetypal non-combatants. ¹ In this paper I focus principally on the campaigns which established the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem during and after the First Crusade, and then address very briefly the ways in which the women and children of the defeated were treated during the conquests of Estonia and Occitania in the Baltic and Albigensian crusades. Comparing this aspect of three crusades has the effect of highlighting a fundamental development in the customs of war within Europe, one relevant to the origins of chivalry in the sense of a code of values which helped to set limits to the brutality of war; it is also a development which puts a question mark against the view that in terms of constraints on the excesses of war “the crusaders’ homelands were less advanced than the eastern Mediterranean lands”. ²