Female Knights

Female Knights There are plenty of fierce women who have battled their way through history in politics and warfare. Although from an academic standpoint women could not generally carry the title of knight, there were still many women in European history who were part of chivalric orders and performed the duties of female knights without the formal recognition. Key Takeaways: Female Knights During the Middle Ages, women could not be granted the title of Knight; it was reserved for men only. However, there were many chivalric orders of knighthood that admitted women and female warriors who performed the role.Documented stories of women- primarily high-born- prove that they donned armor and directed troop movement in times of war. Chivalric Orders of Europe The word knight was not just a job title, it was a social ranking. For a man to become a knight, he had to be formally knighted in a ceremony, or receive an accolade of knighthood for exceptional bravery or service, usually in battle. Because neither of these were typically the domains of women, it was rare for a women to carry the title of knight. However, in parts of Europe, there were chivalric orders of knighthood that were open to women. During the early medieval period, a group of devout Christian knights joined together to form the Knights Templar. Their mission was twofold: to protect European travelers on pilgrimage in the Holy Land, but also to carry out secret military operations.  When they finally took the time to write down a list of their rules, around 1129 C.E., their mandates mentioned a pre-existing practice of admitting women to the Knights Templar. In fact, women were permitted as part of the organization during its first 10 years of existence. Lorado / Getty Images A related group, the Teutonic Order, accepted women as Consorores, or Sisters. Their role was an auxiliary one, often related to support and hospital services during times of war, including on the battlefield. In the mid-12th century, Moorish invaders laid the town of Tortosa, Spain, under siege. Because the towns menfolk were already off at battle fighting on another front, it fell to the women of Tortosa to set up defenses. They dressed in mens clothing- which was certainly easier to fight in- picked up weapons, and held their town with an array of swords, farm implements, and hatchets. In the aftermath, Count Ramon Berenguer of Barcelona founded the Order of the Hatchet in their honor. Elias Ashmole wrote in 1672 that the count granted the women of Tortosa numerous privileges and immunities: He also ordained, that at all publick meetings, the  Women  should have precedence of the  Men; That they should be exempted from all Taxes; and that all the Apparel and Jewels, though of never so great value, left by their dead Husbands, should be their own. It is not known whether the women of the Order ever fought in any battles other than defending Tortosa. The group faded into obscurity as its members aged and died out. Women in Warfare During the Middle Ages, women were not raised for battle like their male counterparts, who typically trained for warfare from boyhood. However, that doesnt mean they didnt fight. There are numerous examples of women, both noble and lower-born, who defended their homes, their families, and their nations from attacking outside forces. Margaret of Anjou directed troops during the War of the Roses. Hulton Archive / Getty Images The eight-day siege of Jerusalem in 1187 relied on women for success. Nearly all of the citys fighting men had marched out of town three months earlier, for the Battle of Hattin, leaving Jerusalem unguarded but for a few hastily-knighted boys. The women, however, outnumbered men in the city by nearly 50 to 1, so when Balian, Baron of Ibelin, realized it was time to defend the walls against the invading army of Saladin, he enlisted the female citizens to get to work. Dr. Helena P. Schrader, Ph.D. in History from the University of Hamburg, says that Ibelin would have had to organize these untrained civilians into units, assigning them specific, focused tasks. ... whether it was defending a sector of the wall, putting out fires, or ensuring that the men and women doing the fighting were supplied with water, food and ammunition. Most astonishing, his improvised units not only repulsed assaults, they also sortied out several times, destroying some of Saladin’s siege engines, and two or three times chasing the Saracens all the way back to the palisades of their camp. Nicholaa de la Haye was born in Lincolnshire, England, around 1150, and inherited her fathers land when he died. Married at least twice, Nicholaa was the castellan of Lincoln Castle, her family estate, despite the fact that each of her husbands tried to claim it as their own. When her spouses were away, Nicholaa ran the show. William Longchamps, a chancellor of Richard I, was heading to Nottingham to battle against Prince John, and along the way, he stopped at Lincoln, laying siege to Nicholaas castle. She refused to yield, and commanding 30 knights, 20 men-at-arms, and a few hundred infantrymen, held the castle for 40 days. Longchamps eventually gave up and moved on. She defended her home again a few years later when Prince Louis of France tried to invade Lincoln. Women didnt just show up and perform the duties of knights in defensive mode. There are several accounts of queens who traveled into the field with their armies in times of war. Eleanor of Aquitaine, the Queen of both France and England, led a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. She even did it while dressed in armor and carrying a lance, although she didnt personally fight. During the War of the Roses, Marguerite d’Anjou personally directed the actions of Lancastrian commanders during battles against Yorkist opponents while her husband, King Henry VI, was incapacitated by bouts of madness. In fact, in 1460, she defeated the threat to her husband’s throne by calling on the Lancastrian nobility to assemble a mighty host in Yorkshire that ambushed York and killed him and 2,500 of his men outside his ancestral home at Sandal Castle. Finally, its important to note that over the centuries, there were countless other women who donned armor and rode into war. We know this because although medieval European writers documenting the Crusades emphasized the notion that pious Christian women did not fight, the historians of their Muslim opponents wrote of crusading women battling against them. The Persian scholar Imad ad-din al-Isfahani wrote, a woman of high rank arrived by sea in late autumn 1189, with an escort of 500 knights with  their forces, squires, pages and valets. She paid all their expenses and also led them in  raids on the Muslims. He went on to say that there were many female knights among the Christians, who wore armour like the men and fought like men in battle, and could not be told apart from  the men until they were killed and the armour was stripped from their bodies. Although their names have been lost to history, these women did exist, they simply were not granted the title of knight. Sources Ashmole, Elias. â€Å"The Institution, Laws Ceremonies of the Most Noble Order of the Garter Collected and Digested into One Body.†Ã‚  Early English Books Online, The University of Michigan, quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A26024.0001.001?viewtoc.Nicholson, Helen, and Helen Nicholson. â€Å"Women and the Crusades.†Ã‚  Academia.edu, www.academia.edu/7608599/Women_and_the_Crusades.Schrader, Helena P. â€Å"Surrender of Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187.†Ã‚  Defending the Crusader Kingdoms, 1 Jan. 1970, defendingcrusaderkingdoms.blogspot.com/2017/10/surrender-of-jerusalem-to-saladin-in.html.Velde, Francois R. â€Å"Women Knights in the Middle Ages.†Ã‚  Women Knights, www.heraldica.org/topics/orders/wom-kn.htm.

Defining the Middle Ages

Defining the Middle Ages One of the most frequently asked questions about medieval history is, When did the Middle Ages start and end? The answer to this simple question is more complicated than you might think. There is currently no true consensus among historians, authors, and educators for the precise dates- or even the general dates- that mark the beginning and end of the medieval era. The most common time frame is approximately 500-1500 C.E., but you will often see different dates of significance marking the eras parameters. The reasons for this imprecision become a little more clear when one considers that the Middle Ages as a period of study has evolved over centuries of scholarship. Once a Dark Age, then a romantic era and an Age of Faith, medieval times were approached by historians in the 20th century as a complex, multifaceted era, and many scholars found new and intriguing topics to pursue. Every view of the Middle Ages had its own defining characteristics, which in turn had its own turning points and associated dates. This state of affairs offers the scholar or enthusiast the opportunity to define the Middle Ages in the manner that best suits his own personal approach to the era. Unfortunately, it also leaves the newcomer to medieval studies with a certain amount of confusion. Stuck in the Middle The phrase Middle Ages has its origins in the fifteenth century. Scholars of the time- primarily in Italy- were caught up in an exciting movement of art and philosophy, and they saw themselves embarking on a new age that revived the long-lost culture of classical Greece and Rome. The time that intervened between the ancient world and their own was a middle age and, sadly, one they disparaged and from which they disassociated themselves. Eventually the term and its associated adjective, medieval, caught on. Yet, if the period of time the term covered was ever explicitly defined, the chosen dates were never unassailable. It may seem reasonable to end the era at the point where scholars began to see themselves in a different light; however, this would assume they were justified in their view. From our vantage point of considerable hindsight, we can see that this was not necessarily the case. The movement that outwardly characterized this period was in reality limited to the artistic elite (as well as to, for the most part, Italy). The political and  material culture  of the world around them had not radically changed from that of the centuries preceding their own. And despite the attitude of its participants, the  Italian Renaissance  did not spontaneously burst forth from  nowhere but was instead a product of the preceding 1,000 years of intellectual and artistic history. From a broad historical perspective, the Renaissance cannot be clearly separated from the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, thanks to the work of historians such as  Jacob Burkhardt  and Voltaire, the Renaissance was considered a distinct time period for many years. Yet recent scholarship has blurred the distinction between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It has now become much more important to comprehend the Italian Renaissance as an artistic and literary movement, and to see the succeeding movements it influenced in northern Europe and Britain for what they were, instead of lumping them all together in an imprecise and misleading age. Although the origin of the term middle ages may no longer hold the weight it once did, the idea of the medieval era as existing in the middle still has validity. It is now quite common to view the Middle Ages as that period of time between the ancient world and the early modern age. Unfortunately, the dates at which that first era ends and the later era begins are by no means clear. It may be more productive to define the medieval era in terms of its most significant and unique characteristics, and then identify the turning points and their associated dates. This leaves us with a variety of options for defining the Middle Ages. Empires Once, when political history defined the boundaries of the past, the date span of 476 to 1453 was generally considered the time frame of the medieval era. The reason: each date marked the fall of an empire. In 476 C.E., the  Western Roman Empire officially came to an end  when the Germanic warrior  Odoacer  deposed and exiled the last emperor,  Romulus Augustus. Instead of taking the title of  emperor  or acknowledging anyone else as such, Odoacer chose the title King of Italy, and the  western empire  was no more. This event is no longer considered the definitive end of the Roman empire. In fact, whether Rome fell, dissolved, or evolved is still a matter for debate. Although at its height the empire spanned territory from Britain to Egypt, even at its most expansive the Roman  bureaucracy  neither encompassed nor controlled most of what was to become Europe. These lands, some of which were virgin territory, would be occupied by peoples that the Romans considered barbarians, and their genetic and cultural descendants would have just as much impact on the formation of western civilization as the survivors of Rome. The study of the Roman Empire  is  important in understanding medieval Europe, but even if the date of its fall could be irrefutably determined, its status as a defining factor no longer holds the influence it once had. In 1453 C.E., the  Eastern Roman Empire  came to an end when its  captial  city of Constantinople fell to invading Turks. Unlike the western terminus, this date is not contested, even though the Byzantine Empire had shrunk through the centuries and, at the time of the fall of Constantinople, had consisted of little more than the great city itself for more than two hundred years. However, as significant as Byzantium is to medieval studies, to view it as a  defining  factor is misleading. At its  height, the eastern empire encompassed even less of present-day Europe than had the western empire. Furthermore, while Byzantine civilization influenced the course of western culture and politics, the empire remained quite deliberately separate from the tumultuous, unstable, dynamic societies that grew, foundered, merged and ​​warred  in the west. The choice of Empires as a defining characteristic of medieval studies has one other significant flaw: throughout the course of the Middle Ages, no  true  empire encompassed a significant portion of Europe for any substantial length of time.  Charlemagne  succeeded in uniting large portions of modern-day France and Germany, but the nation he built broke into factions only two generations after his death.  The Holy Roman Empire  has been called neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire, and its emperors certainly did not have the kind of control over its lands that Charlemagne achieved. Yet the fall of empires lingers in our perception of the Middle Ages. One cannot help but notice how close the dates 476 and 1453 are to 500 and 1500. Christendom Throughout the medieval  era  only one institution came close to uniting all of Europe, though it was not so much a political empire as a spiritual one. That union was attempted by the Catholic Church, and the geopolitical entity it influenced was known as Christendom. While the exact extent of the Churchs political power and influence on the material culture of medieval Europe has been and continues to be debated, there is no denying that it had a significant impact on international events and personal lifestyles throughout the era. It is for this reason that the Catholic Church has validity as a defining factor of the Middle Ages. The rise, establishment, and ultimate fracturing of Catholicism as the single most influential religion in  Western  Europe offers several significant dates to use as  start- and end-points for the era. In 306 C.E.,  Constantine  was proclaimed Caesar and became co-ruler of the Roman Empire. In 312 he converted to Christianity, the once-illegal religion now became favored over all others. (After his death, it would become the official religion of the empire.) Virtually overnight, an underground cult became the religion of the Establishment, forcing the once-radical Christian philosophers to rethink their attitudes toward the Empire. In 325, Constantine called the  Council of Nicaea, the first  ecumenical council  of the Catholic Church. This convocation of bishops from all over the known world was an important step in building the organized institution that would have so much influence over the next 1,200 years. These events make the year 325, or at the very least the early fourth century, a viable starting point for the Christian Middle Ages. However, another event holds equal or greater weight in the minds of some scholars: the accession to the papal throne of  Gregory the Great  in 590. Gregory was instrumental in establishing the medieval papacy as a strong socio-political force, and many believe that without his efforts the Catholic Church would never have achieved the power and influence it wielded throughout medieval times. In 1517 C.E.  Martin Luther  posted 95 theses criticizing the Catholic Church. In 1521 he was excommunicated, and he appeared before the  Diet of Worms  to defend his actions. The attempts to reform ecclesiastical practices from within the institution were futile; ultimately, the  Protestant Reformation  split the Western Church irrevocably. The Reformation was not a peaceful one, and religious wars ensued throughout much of Europe. These culminated in the  Thirty Years War  that ended with the  Peace of Westphalia  in 1648. When equating medieval with the rise and fall of Christendom, the latter date is sometimes viewed as the end of the Middle Ages by those who prefer an all-inclusive view of the era. However, the sixteenth-century events that heralded the beginning of the end of Catholicisms pervasive presence in Europe are more  frequently  regarded as the eras terminus. Europe The field of medieval studies is by its very nature eurocentric. This does not mean that medievalists deny or ignore the significance of events that took place outside of what is today Europe during the medieval era. But the entire concept of a medieval era is a European one. The term Middle Ages was first used by European scholars during the  Italian Renaissance  to describe their own history, and as the study of the era has evolved, that focus has remained fundamentally the same. As more research has been conducted in previously unexplored areas, a wider recognition of the importance of the lands outside Europe in shaping the modern world has evolved. While other specialists study the histories of non-European lands from varying perspectives, medievalists generally approach them with regard to how they affected  European  history. It is an aspect of medieval studies that has always characterized the field. Because the medieval era is so inextricably linked to the geographical entity we now call Europe, it is entirely valid to associate a definition of the Middle Ages with a significant stage in the development of that entity. But this presents us with a variety of challenges. Europe is not a separate  geological  continent; it is part of a larger land mass properly called Eurasia. Throughout history, its boundaries shifted all too often, and they are still shifting today. It was not commonly recognized as a distinct geographical entity  during  the Middle Ages; the lands we now call Europe were more frequently considered Christendom. Throughout the Middle Ages, there was no single political force that controlled all of the  continent. With these limitations, it becomes increasingly difficult to define the parameters of a broad historical age associated with what we now call Europe. But perhaps this very lack of characteristic features can help us with our definition. When the Roman Empire was at its height, it consisted primarily of the lands surrounding the Mediterranean. By the time  Columbus  made his historic voyage to the New World, the Old World stretched from Italy to Scandinavia, and from Britain to the Balkans and beyond. No longer was Europe the wild, untamed frontier, populated by barbarian, frequently migratory cultures. It was now civilized (though still often in turmoil), with generally stable governments, established centers of commerce and learning, and the dominant presence of Christianity. Thus, the medieval era might be considered the period of time during which Europe  became  a geopolitical entity. The fall of the  Roman Empire (c. 476) can still be considered a turning point in the development of Europes identity. However, the time when the migrations of Germanic tribes into Roman territory began to effect significant changes in the empires cohesiveness (the 2nd century C.E.) could be considered the genesis of Europe. A common terminus is the late 15th  century when westward   exploration  into the new world initiated a new awareness in Europeans of their old world. The 15th century also saw significant turning points for regions within Europe: In 1453, the end of the  Hundred Years War  signalled the unification of France; in 1485, Britain saw the end of the Wars of the Roses and the beginning of an extensive peace; in 1492, the Moors were driven from Spain, the Jews were expelled, and Catholic unity prevailed. Changes were taking place everywhere, and as individual nations established modern identities, so too did Europe appear to take on a cohesive identity of its own. Learn more about the early, high and late middle ages.