Both the Arab and Frankish chroniclers during the Crusades report massive numbers of hostages, both female and male, being taken and sometimes ransomed back. The viewpoints of either side towards these hostages and towards each other is quite telling. I’ll begin with the female hostages.
Imad ad-Din al-Isfahani, Saladin’s chronicler, goes into lengthy and bizarre descriptions of the Frankish women taken captive from Jerusalem. I half-expected him to begin with “Dear Penthouse, I never thought it would happen to me…”
Women and children together totalled 8,000, and were quickly divided up amongst us, bringing smiles to Muslim faces at their lamentations. How many well-guarded women were profaned, how many queens were ruled, and nubile girls married, and noble women given away, and miserly women forced to give themselves, and women who’d been kept hidden stripped of their modesty, and proud women made ridiculous… precious women used for hard work, and pretty things put to the test, and virgins dishonored and proud women deflowered… untamed ones tamed, and happy ones made to weep!
Women were sometimes ransomed back, but not always fully accepted into society. William of Tyre reports on the wife of Renier Brus, who was taken from Banyas in 1132 and ransomed from Damascus two years later.
She was returned to her distinguished husband after an absence of two years, and he graciously restored her to her wifely position. But later, however, he discovered that her conduct while with the enemy had not been altogether discreet. She had not satisfactorily preserved the sancitity of the marriage bed as a noblewoman ought. Accordingly, he cast her off.
She ended her days in a convent in Jerusalem. It’s unfortunate that so few details about this case are given – was she raped? Was she willing? How did her husband find out? Did she tell him? Did he suspect? But the blame in this is definitely laid at her feet.
Depressingly, William of Tyre also alludes that the reason Yvette, daughter of King Baldwin III of Jerusalem, didn’t make a grand marriage like her sisters is that her virginity was thought to be in doubt after she’d been given as a hostage to the Ortoqids at the age of four. Instead, she went into the religious life and became Abbess of Bethany. I sincerely hope that this was just based on paranoia, and not on any actual evidence.
Highborn women were not always ransomed, either because they were not considered valuable enough by their male relatives, or because their captors refused to part with them. Raymond V, the Count of Toulouse, died (allegedly poisoned) in 1148, and his illegitimate son Bertrand and an unnamed daughter, also probably illegitimate, were taken captive by Nur ad-Din. She evidently stayed in Nur ad-Din’s company, as Robert of Torigny claims she bore him a son.
According to Albert of Aachen, the Frankish women were quick to exploit their good looks (if any) as early as the First Crusade, if threatened with capture. He describes the women captured at the Battle of Dorylaeum thus:
Stunned and terrified by the cruelty of this most hideous killing, girls who were delicate and nobly born were hastening to get themselves dressed up, offering themselves to the Turks so that, at least, roused and appeased by their beautiful appearance, the Turks might have pity on their prisoners.
But what of Muslim women taken captive by Franks? Tabari in his *Kitaab al Jihad *advises women to submit to persecution rather than be put to death. On the other hand, Usama ibn Munqidh relates several tales of women drowning themselves rather than be hostages, or parents threatening to kill their daughters rather than allow them to be taken. Fulcher of Chartres mentions Franks marrying Saracen women who’d been baptized, probably another result of the endess back and forth hostage taking. The early laws of Jerusalem demanded no less than castration for a Frankish man who raped a Saracen girl (Medicine in the Crusades: Warfare, Wounds and the Medieval Surgeon, Piers Mitchell). The poet Ibn Al-Khayyat, writing during the First Crusade, describes the terror of Muslim women facing capture:
How many young girls beat their throats and necks out of fear of [the Franks]?
How many nubile girls have not known the heat of day, nor the cold of night, until now?
They are almost wasting away of fear and dying of grief.
Reading through a lot of the chronicles as well as fictional stories such as the Arabian Nights and chansons, I get the definite impression that both sides were sort of sexually obsessed with each other. Raymond d’Aguiliers claims that the Saracens wanted to breed a “warrior race” with the Franks. Many a hero in Christian epics had a beautiful Saracen princess as a love interest. Usama tells several stories of Muslims falling in love with their Frankish captives.
Badran ibn Malik, lord of Qalat Ja’bar was the son of an Arab Bedouin father and a Frankish woman. His mother escaped captivity and returned to her people, something Usama relates with amazement, evidently believing that she should have remained a concubine (he probably considered the lord of Qalat Ja’bar to be quite the catch). Similarly, legends that arose shortly after the deaths of both Saladin and Zenghi claim they had Frankish mothers. I’m not sure what the motivation behind this was – possibly garbled reports of Frankish women kept as hostages, plus some sort of wish to “claim” Saladin and Zengi as their own? The only Muslim lord I’m aware of who definitely had a Frankish mother was the aforementioned Badran ib Malik. Of course, the various Turkish sultans were all born to Greek and Russian mothers, with the occasional Italian thrown in for variety.
Over several centuries of contact during the Crusades, the Franks and the Saracens had ample opportunity to observe one another’s cultures and poke swords into one another. This, at least on the Franks’ part, manifested as a tendency to accuse their enemies of being cum-guzzling cock-mongers.
A 10th century Latin play by Hrosthwitha of Gandersheim depicted the martyr Pelagius being captured and seduced by the Caliph Abderahemen (Abd al-Rahman III), who was “corrupted by sodomic vices” [This sounds suspiciously like an early slash fic]. The theme of tender young Christian boys at the mercy of lascivious Arabs seems to have been a common fear for centuries afterward.
Pictured: Every straight white Christian medieval male’s worst nightmare.
A forged letter allegedly sent by the Emperor Alexios I to Robert of Flanders details Muslim atrocities against their Christian victims, building to a crescendo in which “Men of every age and rank – that is, boys, youths, old men, young men, nobles, servants, and – what is worse and more wicked – clerics and monks and even, alas! and for shame, something from the beginning of time has never been spoken or heard of, bishops – have been degraded by the sin of sodomy. They have already killed one bishop with this abominable sin.”
Guibert of Nogent repeats the dead bishop story, and says: "And while [the Muslims] do not spare the feminine sex – which nevertheless might be excused by virtue of its agreement with nature – they go onto the masculine…"
Back in England, the Hereford Map in Hereford Cathedral depicts images of ‘Monstrous Races’, among them a nude hermaphroditic figure depicted in a Muslim-style turban.
Fidentius of Padua, in his Liber de recuperatione terrae sanctae, written between 1266 and 1291, claimed that the Saracens were lecherous “from the soles of their feet to the tops of their heads”, and that their love of sodomy alone is reason enough for Christians to fight them, even putting aside the whole Crusades and Holy Land business. His contemporary, a Florentine Dominican named Riccoldo da Montecroce, who despite having lived and preached among Arabs in Akko, Jerusalem, the Mongol ilkhanate, and Baghdad, erroneously claimed that the Qu’ran permitted same-sex love.
Pictured: An Abassid caliph with his harem of jizz-hungry boy-sluts.
The French Dominican, William of Adam, writing about 1318, helpfully tells us that “in the Saracen religion any sexual act at all is not only not forbidden, but permitted and praised.” He goes onto to describe effete young Saracens shaving their beards and cross-dressing in order to cohabitate with their male lovers [and how do you know about this, William?].
Marino Sanudo, a Venetian nobleman, and his contemporary Jacopo da Verona both describe the practice of the Egyptian sultan purchasing handsome slave boys for his “excrabile et publice” crimes.
SOURCES:
Babayan, Katherine and Najmabadi, Afsenah. Islamicate Sexualities: Translations across Temporal Geographies of Desire, 2008.
Strickland, Debra. Saracens, demons, & Jews: making monsters in medieval art, 2003.
Tolan, John. Saracens: Islam in the medieval European imagination, 2002.
