Queens of Jerusalem : The Women Who Dared to Rule

The year is 1187 and Saladin's armies are besieging the holy city of Jerusalem. He has previously annihilated Jerusalem's army at the battle of Hattin: it is only a matter of time until the city will fall. Inside, a last-ditch defence is being led by an unlikely trio: the leader of the church, a single Lord named Balian of Ibelin, and Sibylla, Queen of Jerusalem. Sibylla's husband is Saladin's captive, and for many months now she has witnessed her kingdom slowly crumbling. This siege is her last chance to save her kingdom, or at least her people. Queen Sibylla cuts a mysterious and forlorn figure in the chronicles of this period. She was the last in a long line of formidable female rulers to rule in Outremer before the fall of Jerusalem. Y

et for all the many books written about the crusades and Christian states of Outremer, one thing is conspicuously absent: the stories of women. Queens and princesses are too often presented as only passive transmitters of land and royal blood. In reality, women ruled, conducted diplomatic negotiations, made military decisions, forged alliances, rebelled, and undertook architectural projects. Sibylla's grandmother Queen Melisende of Jerusalem was the first queen to seize real political agency in Outremer and rule in her own right. She defied the conventions of her time, outmanoeuvring both her husband and her son to claim real power in her Kingdom. She ruled the Kingdom of Jerusalem when it reached its greatest territorial extent.

Melisende was just one of four princesses of Jerusalem, the daughters of the Armenian Princess Morphia of Melitene. The lives of her three sisters and their descendents were no less intriguing. Alice of Antioch mounted no fewer than three rebellions against her male would-be overlords, and forged alliances with Muslims. Hodierna of Tripoli left her husband in a lovers' spat and was implicated in multiple assassination plots, her life inspiring the writing of Troubadours across the sea in Europe. Yvette of Bethany was held hostage by enemy Saracens for a full year in her childhood, and eventually became so significant a figure in the world of Outremer that one traveller referred to a king of Jerusalem simply as 'the father of the Abbess of Bethany'.

The lives of this trailblazing dynasty of royal women, and the crusading Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, are the focus of Katherine Pangonis's debut book. In Queens of Jerusalem Katherine Pangonis explores the role women played in the governing of the Middle East during periods of intense instability, and how they persevered to rule and seize greater power for themselves when the opportunity presented itself.