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2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., xxiv.
5. Ximenes is also spelled Jimena or Ximena.
6. El Cid was of good birth, but inferior to Ximenes. His father was Diego Larnez, a faithful servant of Leon, who married above his rank to an unnamed woman, a descendant of Rodrigo Alvarez who assisted at the coronation of Ferdinand I of Leon in 1038. See R.M.Pidal, The Cid and His Spain trans. H. Sutherland, London, 1934, p.71. R. Fletcher, The Quest For El Cid Hutchinson, London, 1989, has cast some doubts on the details of this interpretation, but the general outline of Pidal's views remains intact.
7. Ibid., p.133.
8. The Cid and His Spain, p.125.
9. Ibid., p.70.
10. Ibid., p. 173.
11. Ibid., p.408.
12. J.J. Norwich,Byzantium: The Early Years Viking, London, 1988, p.68.
13. R. Pernoud, In the Steps of the Crusaders Constable, London, 1963, p.8.
Chapter 2:
Women's Faces
"Women's faces look out from every page of the story of the Crusades and the overseas kingdoms, but they have not attracted the attention of modern historians." 1
The Crusade was at first a message preached to the male nobles of France, that elite segment of society which was supposed to take sole responsibility for freeing the Holy Sites of Palestine from the armies of Islam:
"Beloved Brethren...
...Let those who have hitherto been accustomed to fight wrongfully in private strife against the faithful, now combat the infidel ... let those who once were mercenaries for sordid hire now win eternal rewards; let those who toiled to the detriment of both body and soul now strive for a double recompense....let the warriors put their affairs in order and collect what is needful...when the winter is over and spring come, let them set out with cheerful hearts...."2
They responded immediately. The first to step forward to claim the right to the pilgrimage was the pope's eminence grise in France, Adhemar, Bishop of le Puy, followed immediately by a proxy of the local magnate, Raymond of St Giles, Count of Toulouse. In a frenzy of enthusiasm, hundreds of other nobles present in the fields outside Clermont, where the pope delivered his order, swore to go.
"What a sweet and wonderful sight it was for us", says Fulcher, "to see all those shining crosses, whether of silk or gold or other stuff, that at the Pope's orders the pilgrims, as soon as they had sworn to go, sewed on their shoulder of their cloaks, their cassocks of their tunics."3
This suggests the unremarked presence of women in or near the field of knights: the seamstresses of Europe - unless of course the knights of Europe had recently learned the skills of needle and thread! But women are rarely mentioned in these accounts describing the slow waking of the barbarian power of Dark Age Europe.
The documents are written from a male point of view, with the warriors and priests as their focus. Women appear as asides or as conventionalised figures used to establish the sorrow of parting.
Robert of Rheims' account of Urban's speech includes only one specific reference to the role of women in the journey:
"...nor should women go at all without their husbands or brothers or official permission: such people are more of a hindrance than a help, more of a burden than a benefit."4
In this most misogynistic of ages, clerical writers often regarded women as unnecessary appurtenances to the serious business of saving God's Holy Sites.
Ralph Niger in his De re militari (c.1189), for instance, begins with the bald statement that women are the birdlime of the devil: the source of temptation by which the devil could catch his prey, men's souls. For this reason, Ralph did not agree with female participation in a major campaign to be carried out by men. Nevertheless, he acknowledged that it was extremely difficult to populate newly conquered territories without the benefit of women's special attributes, therefore including women could be considered useful in order to resettle the conquered lands with a new population. On the other hand, and more importantly, the outcome of a military campaign was itself always
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