Though historians have fixed the crusading knight firmly in the public mind, it is less easy to picture the women who went along on these ventures. Women followed the pilgrimage routes of medieval Europe as avidly as men. Women suffered while on ordinary pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and they could hardly expect lighter treatment on the Crusades. And yet they went.

Well-known ladies accompanied their husbands on these dangerous journeys—for example, the wives of Baldwin of Boulogne and Raymond of Toulouse, leaders in the First Crusade, and the wife of Richard the Lion-Heart, who married him in the course of the Third Crusade.

Most of the women who accompanied the crusaders, though, were the wives of ordinary pilgrim-warriors. Sometimes the proportion of women must have been relatively high, considering the dangerous nature of the expeditions. On the First Crusade, the armies were held up at Antioch when a pestilence struck: it was reported, incredibly, that “nearly fifty thousand” women died ...

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