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doubtful. Therefore, it is better to conquer first, and then bring the women. It would be preferable, under these circumstances, for the women to stay at home where they cannot be a hindrance or a danger to the common enterprise. And the earliest known letter of agreement by the Crusaders, dating from the Second Crusade of 1147, is similarly suspicious of female temptaton. This agreement was drawn up by northern Crusaders - Scandinavians, Scots and English - about to set off for Lisbon. Their agreed regulations forbade any kind of display of clothing - presumably a direction mainly aimed at women - or that women should be allowed to go about in public at all (surely a difficult dictum given that the Crusade involved a journey away from home).5
Clerical antagonism to women crusaders grew out of a social context of confusion and struggle for survival.
Northern Europe at this moment was barely emerging from a period of instability unparalleled in its recorded history. Following the collapse of the Western Roman empire in the fifth century, half a millennium of chaos had ensued, a time when judicial and social order was achieved only occasionally and briefly. King Charlemagne became Emperor Charlemagne in 800, and during his lifetime his armies and his diplomacy had ensured that there was a resurgence of the arts of civilization in the Frankish lands of Western Europe.
In Britain, the Anglo Saxons - having first extinguished the last flickering lights of Roman life - set about building their own civilization amongst the ruins. This reached a peak of learning and domesticity under the crown of Alfred in the ninth century.
In Rome itself, the Papacy had barely kept alive classical arts and learning as barbarian horsemen from the North raged at the city gates.
But despite such attempts to bring about a measure of regulated justice, of peaceable arts and of refined living, the barbarians remained dominant throughout the world between the Arctic Sea and the Mediterranean. The last major Viking incursion into the heartland of medieval Europe had been defeated only in 1066. Many of the men who took up arms for Christ in 1097 were the sons of those Northmen who had devoted their lives to rapine and slaughter.
Eleventh century castles, one of the most symbolic architectural structures of the middle ages, were mainly stockades made from wood and dirt. Buildings for domestic use were small and crudely designed. There were few retail outlets for consumables, such as markets. Most purchases by castle dwellers would have been from the occasional travelling chapmen. Medicine was all but non-existent. Clothing was made from wool, the skins of animals or from linen made in Ireland. Monasteries were usually remote from the few major settlements, turning their back on the half-savage people who were as much of a threat to the monks as they were possible fields for sewing the word of God. There was virtually no consistent application of laws. Learning was crude and limited: the monks responsible for the well-being of parishes were often as ignorant as those whom they professed to guide. Villages were frequently isolated from the wider world: incestuous marriages were therefore a commonplace. Pagan practices took place side by side with the Christian practices that had been loosely imposed by the Church, so that eventually pagan and Christian became indissolubly intertwined.
All this was likely to continue as long as Europe continued to be battered by the bands of roving land pirates thrown up by a society dominated by uneducated men with a lust for gold, glory and blood. William the Conqueror, most successful of the land pirates, had a low opinion of his own Norman French, who made up the largest and most influential part of the knights' army of the First Crusade. He thought that when under the rule of a kind but firm master, they were the most valiant of people, but otherwise they brought ruin on themselves by raiding each other.
"They are eager for rebellion, ripe for tumults, and ready for every sort of crime..."6.
This was the universally held assessment of medieval observers.
And all the evidence suggests that Frankish women shared all the best and worst qualities of their menfolk.
BETTER TO DIE THAN BE CONQUERED
The reasons for Urban calling for a military expedition to the East are complex and have been widely debated. They range from political expediency to changes in the turbulent social structure of Europe.
There was, for example, a surplus of mainly young, warlike men, attested in the words of the pope and of many other commentators. Violence for its own sake was a habit of life that took centuries to harness and subdue. As Bertrand de Born wrote in the twelfth century, fighting and bloodshed was the sole delight of noble young men:
I love to see amidst the meadows, tents and pavilions spread, and it gives me great joy to see, drawn up on the field, knights and horses in battle array... Maces, swords and helms of different colours, shields that will be split and shattered as soon as the fight begins and many vassals struck down together, and the horses of the dead and wounded roving randomly. And when battle is joined, let all men of good lineage think of nothing but the breaking of heads and arms, for it is better to die than to be conquered and live. I tell you, I find no such pleasure in food, or in wine, or in sleep, as in hearing the shout 'On!' 'On!' from both sides, and the neighing of riderless steeds, and the cries of 'Help!' 'Help!' and in seeing men, great and small, go down on the grass.
It may have been the continual disruption to peaceful life by such wandering warriors that prompted the pope to call the crusade:
"...Let those who have hitherto been accustomed to fight wrongfully in private strife against the faithful, now combat the infidel... "
Another seed of the call to arms may have been the continual attacks on Christian pilgrims to the Holy Sites surrounding Jerusalem in Palestine, and especially a particularly outrageous attack on a nun.
Islamic Arabs had overrun Jerusalem, former outpost of the Roman Empire, in the seventh century. At first, Arabic overlordship had been characterized by tolerance and benign dictatorship. Pilgrims moved through the region with relative freedom, until in the eleventh century a new group, the Turks, infiltrated the region from the east. With the arrival of these nomads in the Holy Land there were increasingly frequent disruptions to the pilgrim routes. This included the misfortunes that befell a major German pilgrimage of
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