Be a Man and Feel for a Woman: The Rhetoric of Violence against Women in the Crusades

Modern-day perceptions of the Crusades depict them as a series of Christian versus Muslim conflicts fought for purely religious motives. This perspective, however, is too limiting and perhaps reflects contemporary Western views on the Middle East more than past ones. In addition to Muslims in the Levant, the enemies of Christians in these wars were sometimes other Christians, and the motives for fighting them went beyond the religious. Through close reading of medieval texts from different groups involved in these conflicts, this paper will focus on one of those other motives: the abuse of women. These texts—Usamah ibn-Muniqdh’s memoir, excepts from early Arabic poetry, Pope Urban II’s 1095 sermon at Clermont, and Salimbene of Parma’s c.1285 discussion of the Italian Crusade—share a common rhetoric about the atrocities committed against women as a form of propaganda for entering into a Crusade. An examination of these works not only can tell us about the status of women and how their treatment was viewed in a similar way by Christians and Muslims, but also gives insight into the history of emotions in the period. The emotions to be provoked show that religious fervor was not a sufficient incentive to get Christian Crusaders and Muslim defenders to fight, so the apparent danger to these non-combatants was added as an extra emotional appeal for them to do so. Looking at the use of this sort of propaganda in the past can also illuminate both Western and Middle Eastern views on women’s roles in contemporary conflicts.