Military orders and powerful women in the Christian Levant

Abstract

In the Christian East, religious military orders have obviously had interactions with women in leadership roles as queens, princesses and noble women. The relationship between military orders and aristocratic women varies in relation to the power these women actually had in Latin states in the East, the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia and the Latin Empire of Constantinople including Frankish Morea. As such, we must clearly distinguish between women who ran a state or governed a fiefdom by themselves and those under the guardianship of others. This difference influences the attitudes that representatives from the orders displayed towards these noble women. In this study, we are interested in these different types of situations, such as the relationship of the military orders with women in positions of power such as the Queens of Jerusalem Melisende and Sibylla, the Queen Joanna of Naples, who was also Princess of Morea, and other important women. We also examine the very delicate diplomatic intervention by the order of the Hospital concerning the Princess of Tyre, Zapel, sister of the Armenian King, Ochin I and wife to the Governor of Cyprus, Amaury of Tyre, in order to free the King of Cyprus, a prisoner in Armenia. For queens and princesses who were not independent, especially when they were young, we could determine in several cases the level of involvement of military orders in their marriage. The cases examined are representative of the wide range of types of relationships that military orders had with ladies of high social standing in the Christian East.