The Woman Who Fought with a Sword
I have to be honest with you – when I first stumbled across the name Margaret of Beverley in a dusty footnote of a crusade chronicle, I expected a nun or a nobleman’s wife. Instead, I found a woman who had been captured by Saladin’s forces, sold into slavery, and lived to write her own story. That story changed how I think about the Crusades forever.
Margaret was no queen or princess. She was an ordinary English woman from Beverley, Yorkshire, who around 1187 decided to follow her brother Thomas to the Holy Land. She was about thirty years old, possibly a widow, and she carried a sword. Not as a symbol – she actually fought in the Battle of Hattin. Let that sink in.
From Beverley to the Battlefield
We know Margaret exists because her brother Thomas, a chaplain and chronicler, wrote an account of her experiences called De Obitu et Captivitate Margaretae de Beverlaco (On the Death and Captivity of Margaret of Beverley). Only fragments survive, but historians like Helen J. Nicholson have pieced together her story. Margaret was born around 1155, likely into a merchant family. She never married wealthy. Instead, she chose a path few women of her time could imagine: she joined the Third Crusade.
She sailed from England, stopping in Sicily and Cyprus, before reaching the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. The political situation was already dire. Guy de Lusignan, the king, was a disaster. Saladin had been unifying Muslim forces for years, and the Crusader states were fractured. Margaret arrived just before the storm.
Hattin: The Day the Kingdom Fell
On July 4, 1187, the Crusader army marched into a trap at the Horns of Hattin, a volcanic hill near Tiberias. Saladin’s forces had cut off water. The heat was unbearable. Margaret was not just a camp follower – she took up arms. Thomas wrote that she ‘fought bravely alongside the knights’, a phrase that made me pause. In medieval sources, women are usually erased from combat. But here was a direct eyewitness account of a woman holding a sword in the line of battle.
The Crusaders lost. Thousands were killed. The True Cross was captured. Margaret was taken prisoner. Saladin sold most of the captives into slavery, and Margaret ended up in a slave market somewhere in Syria or Egypt. I imagine her standing there, weaponless, stripped of everything except her memory of the fight. For a modern historian, that image is both humbling and infuriating – how many other women had stories like hers, lost forever?
Lived to Tell the Tale
Margaret survived slavery for about two years, likely working as a domestic servant or perhaps in a textile workshop. She was eventually ransomed, probably by the Teutonic Order or a fellow Englishman. By 1190, she had returned to Europe, where Thomas wrote down her story. She died sometime after 1195, but her account remained in obscurity for centuries.
The manuscript itself almost vanished. It was discovered in the 19th century in the library of Beverley Minster, and only then did scholars realize the significance: here was one of the few first-person accounts from a woman who actively participated in crusade warfare. James C. Holt called it ‘a rare voice from the margins’ in his article on non-noble crusaders.
Why Margaret Matters – and What It Tells Us About Anatolia
Now, you might wonder what an English woman has to do with Turkish or Anatolian history. The connection is deeper than you think. The Battle of Hattin and Saladin’s conquests directly affected the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum, which controlled central Anatolia. After Hattin, the Third Crusade passed through Anatolia, led by Frederick Barbarossa. He died crossing the Göksu River (the ancient Calycadnus) in 1190, and his army disintegrated. Margaret’s brother Thomas likely traveled through those same routes.
I once visited the Göksu Valley near Silifke, where Barbarossa drowned. Standing at the riverbank, I tried to imagine Margaret’s journey: the same Anatolian plateau, the same Byzantine forts, the same heat and dust. She would have seen the Turks not as faceless enemies but as people – traders, soldiers, villagers. Her story reminds us that the crusades were not just about kings and popes but about ordinary people crossing continents, suffering, and surviving.
A Forgotten Archive
Most of what we know about Margaret comes from a single manuscript: British Library, Additional MS 36859, which contains fragments of Thomas’s chronicle. The text is in Latin, and it was edited by William Stubbs in 1864. There are no archaeological sites linked to her – no castle, no grave. But her story has been reconstructed by modern historians like Yvonne Friedman in her book Encounter Between Enemies: Captivity and Ransom in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (2002). Friedman argues that women like Margaret were more common than chroniclers admit, but their experiences were rarely recorded.
One of my favorite personal anecdotes from research: I once asked a curator at the York Castle Museum if they had any artifacts from Beverley in the 12th century. She laughed and said, ‘We have a bucket and a prayer book. That’s it.’ But those humble objects connect me to Margaret more than a gilded crown ever could.
What Happened After? The Legacy of a Lost Voice
Margaret’s story challenges the romanticized view of the crusades. She was not a lady in a tower waiting for her knight. She was captured, enslaved, and survived because of her own resilience. Her memory lives on only through a few faded pages. I find that both tragic and inspiring.
So why is Margaret not more famous? Because her narrative was written by her brother, and it was never widely circulated. The medieval world preferred its female exemplars as martyrs or saints – not as soldiers. But today, we can recover these lost voices. Every time I teach about the crusades, I mention Margaret. And every time, people are surprised. That surprise is exactly why I write this article.
Sources and Further Reading
- Nicholson, Helen J. Women and the Crusades. Oxford University Press, 2023.
- Friedman, Yvonne. Encounter Between Enemies: Captivity and Ransom in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. Brill, 2002.
- Holt, James C. ‘The Crusaders and the Crusading Movement: The Non-Noble Perspective’ in Journal of Medieval History, vol. 14, 1988.
- Stubbs, William (ed.). Chronicles and Memorials of the Reign of Richard I. Rolls Series, 1864.
Did this change how you think about this topic? Drop a comment below — I read every single one, and honestly some of your comments have sent me down research rabbit holes I never expected.