She was six years old when the Crusaders broke through the gates of Jerusalem.
For three days she hid in a cellar with her mother and her two younger sisters, listening to the screams above her.
On the fourth day the screams stopped, and that’s when the real nightmare began.
For centuries, we have been told heroic stories about the Crusades.
Noble Christian knights who fought to reconquer the Holy Land.
Warriors of God, marching under holy banners.
Heroes who defended their faith.
But nobody talks about what these heroes did to the women they found in the conquered cities.
This is the story that history books don’t tell us.
What really happened when the Crusaders came to the city?
Fortunately, we know the answer to that and will start with the worst-case scenario.
The Fall of Jerusalem 1099.
July 1099.
After weeks of siege, the Crusader armies finally broke through the walls of Jerusalem.
What happened next was one of the best-documented atrocities in medieval history.
For three days and three nights, the crusaders went from house to house, from street to street, killing everyone they found.
But they didn’t just kill.
First, they selected the women.
A chronicler named Rimon of Aguil was indeed present.
He travelled with the Crusaders and wrote down what he saw.
Here’s what he said.
The carnage was so great that our men waited ankle-deep in blood.
There were wonderful things to see.
Wonderful things.
He described mass murder and rape.
Muslim and Jewish women were dragged from their homes.
The elderly, the mothers and grandmothers, were usually killed immediately.
They were worthless to the soldiers, but the young women were abducted.
Some were raped directly on the street, while the warm bodies of their families lay beside them.
Others were taken to the Crusader camps outside the city.
The soldiers held her there for days and passed her around among the troops.
A Muslim chronicler, Inni Athir, writes that the Crusaders raped women in mosques and killed children in their mothers’ laps.
He describes how mothers tried to protect their daughters and were killed for it.
How girls as young as 10 or 11 were dragged away screaming and begging for their lives.
Rimond of Agil wrote that after the massacre the Crusaders went to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to pray.
still covered in blood, still with the women they had captured.
They prayed to thank God for their victory.
Think about it.
They raped and murdered their way through a city and then immediately went to church to celebrate.
It is estimated that between 40,000 and 70,000 people died in Jerusalem during those three days.
No one knows how many women were raped, but medieval sources mention countless women who were captured.
Some of these women were later sold in slave markets, while others were kept as concubines by crusaders who had settled in the region.
Most of them were never heard from again, and Jerusalem wasn’t even the worst city.
Not by a long shot.
The sack of Maada in 1098.
Near Jerusalem was Maada, a small Syrian town that had made the mistake of resisting the Crusaders.
In December 1098, the Crusaders under the leadership of Boemund of Taranto besieged Maara.
The city held out for two weeks.
When the walls finally fell, the Crusaders were furious.
Furious that the city had dared to resist.
Angry that the siege had lasted so long.
They took out their anger on the population.
The chronicler Radul of Kan, another eyewitness, described what happened.
In Maara, our troops cooked Hainatic adults in cooking pots.
They impaled children on sticks and grilled them.
Yes, you heard right.
Cannibalism.
The crusaders were starving and turned to cannibalism.
The siege had lasted for weeks and supplies were running low.
So when they invaded Maada, they not only raped and looted, they ate people.
But before the cannibalism, before the killing, they selected the women.
Fulcher von Chartel, another chronicler of the Crusades, mentions that women of all ages were taken along to the delight of the soldiers.
The younger ones were housed in temporary camps, and the soldiers took turns with them at night.
One report describes how crusaders set up a market in the city center where captured women were displayed and traded among the soldiers.
Like baseball cards.
I would exchange these for those women who survived the first attack; they faced a choice that was not a real choice.
Either to become a concubine of a crusader or to be sold as a slave.
Either way, they would never see their family again.
Some women chose a third option.
They killed themselves.
Muslim sources describe mothers who threw themselves and their children from buildings to avoid capture.
Women who drank poison, groups of women who locked themselves in buildings and set them on fire.
Maada was destroyed.
The crusaders moved on, leaving nothing but ashes and bones.
And European chronicles hardly mention it.
Rimond von Aguil writes three sentences about Maara.
Three sentences for a city that has disappeared from the map.
Antioch 109.
Antioch was one of the largest cities in the medieval world.
When the Crusaders conquered it in June 1998, they found a city full of wealth, culture and people.
They took everything.
The siege of Antioch lasted eight months.
When the city finally fell, the crusaders had camped outside the walls for so long that many were starving and plagued by disease.
They were desperately searching for supplies, food, and money, and women could be transformed into all three.
After capturing the city, the Crusaders herded together the Muslim and Orthodox Christian populations.
They separated the men from the women.
Most of the men were killed or abducted as forced laborers.
The women were rated according to their value.
Medieval slave markets operated according to a clear hierarchy.
Young women between 12 and 25 years old were the most valuable.
They were sold to wealthy buyers in Christian-controlled areas or kept as concubines.
Women between 25 and 40 were valued less, but still had value as domestic workers.
They were sold to households in the Crusader states.
Women over 40 were considered virtually worthless.
Many were simply killed.
They had no economic value for the soldiers, and feeding them cost resources.
A Genoese merchant named Kaafaro Rustiko di Caski Felone actually kept records of the slave trade in Antioch.
His ledgers, kept in Italian archives, list hundreds of women who were sold by crusaders in the weeks following the fall of the city.
He sets the prices.
Girl about 14 years old sold for four Bessons.
Woman with child, about 20 years old, sells for two Bessons.
A group of five women of different ages sold together for eight vouchers.
Some of these women were bought by Italian merchants and shipped to Europe.
They worked as maids in wealthy households in Venice, Genoa, or Pisa.
Others were sold locally to crusaders who settled in the region.
Crusader chronicles mention unruly prisoners who were publicly punished to make the others obedient.
These punishments included beatings, branding, and public humiliation, all aimed at breaking their will.
One report describes a woman in Antioch who repeatedly tried to escape.
After her third attempt, they cut off her feet and displayed her as a warning to other captured women.
She lived for two more years before she died from an infection.
The message was clear: resistance brings suffering.
The massacres in the Rhineland, 1096.
In the year before the main armies of the Crusaders reached the Holy Land, they were swept by a wave of enthusiasm in Europe.
Thousands of peasants, minor knights, and religious zealots decided to join the crusade.
However, some of them concluded that they did not have to wait until they reached Muslim territories to begin their holy war.
They targeted Jewish communities in the Rhineland, cities such as Mainz, Warms, Speyer and Cologne.
These were wealthy Jewish communities that had lived in Germany for centuries.
The Crusaders gave them the choice of converting to Christianity or dying.
Most refused, so the crusaders killed them.
But before the murders, there was violence against women.
Hebrew chronicles from this period, written by Jewish survivors, describe in horrific detail what happened.
In Mainz, crusaders broke into Jewish houses and demanded conversion.
If families refused, they raped the women in front of their husbands and children.
Some Jewish women preferred the martyrdom of conversion or rape.
The chronicles describe mothers who killed their own children to save them from baptism or worse.
Women who threw themselves into rivers, entire families who died together.
Thousands of Jews died in the Rhineland even before the Crusades reached Jerusalem.
And the violence against Jewish women established a pattern that would be repeated throughout the Crusades.
Religious differences became a license for sexual violence.
In 1191, King Richard I of England, Richard the Lionheart, is remembered as one of the greatest heroes of the Crusades.
Brave, noble, a warrior king.
But nobody talks about what he did in Akon.
In July 1191, the city of Akon capitulated after a long siege to the crusaders led by Richard and Philip II of France.
The surrender terms included an enormous ransom.
2000 gold coins, the release of 1600 Christian prisoners, and the return of the true cross.
Saladin, the Muslim leader, agreed to the terms, but asked for time to raise the ransom.
Richard gave him 30 days, but Saladin had difficulties.
The sum was enormous.
He managed to deliver some of it along with some prisoners, but he couldn’t raise everything immediately.
Rechard grew impatient.
On August 20, 1191, he ordered the execution of 2700 Muslim prisoners.
Men, women, and children.
They were all killed in the presence of Saladin’s army.
But before the executions, Richard’s soldiers searched the prisoners and took out the young women.
Chronicles from this period mention that these women were distributed among the troops before the massacre.
What that means is obvious.
They were raped and then either kept as slaves or sold.
Some were shipped to Christian territories to work as maids.
Others were kept as concubines in the Crusader camps.
A few were even brought back to Europe.
Richard the Lionheart is celebrated in English history.
There are statues of him in front of the Parliament building in London.
He is a symbol of English courage and honor.
But in Akon he was responsible for mass executions and sexual slavery, and history has simply forgotten this part.
The Children’s Crusade of 1212.
In that year, a movement swept through France and Germany.
Thousands of children, some as young as ten, believed they had been called by God to reconquer Jerusalem.
Their leaders told them that where adult warriors had failed, the purity of children would succeed.
God would part the Mediterranean Sea for them.
They would march to Jerusalem without fighting.
That was nonsense.
But thousands believed it.
Two main groups formed.
One of them, in France, was led by a shepherd boy named Stefan von Clois.
The other one, in Germany, was led by a boy named Nikolaus.
Thousands of children left their homes and marched south towards the Mediterranean.
Her parents couldn’t stop her.
The local authorities didn’t know what to do.
When the French group reached Marseille, they were greeted by two merchants.
H, the Eisner, and William the pig trader.
The merchants offered to transport the children to the Holy Land free of charge out of Christian charity.
The children boarded seven ships.
The ships sailed south.
They never reached Jerusalem.
Instead, the merchants sold them all to slave traders in Algeria and Egypt.
Decades later, the chronicler Alberich von Trontain wrote about what had happened, piecing together the accounts of the survivors.
The children were sold in North African slave markets.
The boys were sent to work or to military training.
The girls were sent to harems.
Some of these children were only 1 or 9 years old.
One report describes how 700 children were sold at a single auction in Alexandria.
The girls were inspected like cattle, their teeth were checked, their bodies were examined, and finally they were sorted according to age and appearance.
The traders who arranged this, Youer and William the pig trader, made a fortune.
They were never punished.
The Church condemned the Children’s Crusade as a misguided undertaking, but the human traffickers faced no consequences and the crusaders paid little attention.
They were too busy planning the next military campaign.
The Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204.
The Fourth Crusade never reached the Holy Land.
Instead, in 1204 the Crusader armies attacked Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire.
A Christian city.
Why?
Politics, money, and opportunism.
The Crusaders were broke and Constantinople was rich.
On April 12, 1204, the Crusaders broke through the city walls.
What followed were three days of horror that shocked even medieval chroniclers.
Nikas Roniates, a Byzantine historian who witnessed the sack, wrote: “They spared nothing and no one.
They raped women in the streets, in churches, even nuns in convents.
Nuns in their own convents, raped by crusaders claiming to be soldiers of Christ.”
Roniates describes how older women were abused in front of older women.
Mothers were attacked while holding their children.
Girls just entering puberty were dragged from their homes.
The crusaders did not see the Byzantine Christians as fellow believers.
They saw them as Greeks and Orthodox cats.
The Byzantine Empire never fully recovered.
Constantinople was so weakened that it fell to the Ottoman Turks 250 years later.
The Fourth Crusade destroyed one of Christendom’s greatest cities, and the soldiers who did it walked away rich, powerful, and unpunished.
The Second Crusade, 1147.
The Second Crusade is primarily remembered for its failures in the Holy Land.
However, on their way there, the Crusaders stopped in Portugal to help King Afonso the Conqueror recapture Lisbon from the Muslims.
In October 1147, after a four-month siege, Lisbon surrendered.
The terms were clear: the Muslim population was allowed to leave the city safely with their possessions.
The Crusaders ignored these terms.
As soon as the gates opened, the Crusaders poured into the city.
They went from house to house, killing Muslim men and taking the women.
An English priest named Raul traveled with the Crusaders.
He wrote an eyewitness account entitled “The Exponationer Lonenzi: The Conquest of Lisbon.”
He describes the scene as follows: “Our men spared neither age nor gender.
They killed Muslims in their homes and took women as they pleased.
The screaming continued all night.”
Raul attempted to justify this by saying that the Muslims deserved it because they had occupied Christian lands.
would have.
But even he admits that the violence went too far.
Most of the women captured in Lisbon were sold into slavery.
Some ended up in Christian households across Europe, others were taken on ships bound for the Holy Land.
In a surviving letter from a Portuguese nobleman, the purchase of a Moorish girl, about 15 years old, captured in Lisbon, as a gift for his wife is mentioned.
He describes her as a piece of furniture.
Human life reduced to nothing.
If we add it all up, over 200 years of Crusades, nine major campaigns, dozens of smaller expeditions.
Hundreds of cities were conquered, sacked, or destroyed.
How many women were raped?
How many were enslaved?
How many disappeared into harems, monasteries, or unmarked graves?
We will never know the exact number.
Medieval chroniclers didn’t bother to keep such records.
They only counted the knights killed in battle, the conquered cities, and the relics recovered.
To them, women weren’t worth recording.
And this legacy lives on.
Even modern conflicts in the Middle East still reference the Crusades.
ISIS used images of the Crusaders to recruit fighters.
Political leaders still use the language of the Crusades when they talk about military interventions.
History is slowly repeating itself in a different font.
So this is what the Crusader armies really did to captured women.
