Margaret of Beverley
Though Eleanor of Aquitaine formally took up the cross and went on Crusade in 1147, she had no direct military involvement, and it was not until the mid-1180s that a woman first fought against the Saracens in the Holy Land. That remarkable woman was Margaret of Beverley (c.1150-1215), who was actually born in Palestine while her parents were on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Although she spent most of her early life in Beverley, Yorkshire, Margaret returned to the Holy Land as soon as she could after raising her orphaned brother, Thomas, a monk who later became her biographer.
In 1187, Margaret was in Jerusalem when it was besieged by Saladin (1137-93), the first Sultan of Egypt and Syria. Instead of cowering in fear or ministering to the men, as was expected of a woman, Margaret got stuck in: ‘I wore a breastplate like a man; I came and went on the ramparts, with a cauldron on my head for a helmet. Though a woman, I seemed a warrior, I threw the weapon’. Margaret was also wounded during the siege: ‘a millwheel fell near me; I was hit by one of its fragments; my blood ran… the scar remains’.
She was captured by Saladin shortly afterwards, and spent the next 15 months as a slave. ‘I was forced to carry out humiliating tasks; I gathered stones, I chopped wood. If I refused to obey, I was beaten with rods’. When her freedom was bought by a benevolent passerby, Margaret returned to Antioch, but again found herself trapped in a city besieged by Saladin. She managed to escape, and returned to England in 1192 following a peace treaty Saladin and Richard the Lionheart. Margaret’s bravery was incredible: without any martial training, she fought Saladin’s fearsome army, then survived cruel enslavement.