The true gentleman? Correct behaviour towards women according to Christian and Muslim writers: from the Third Crusade to Sultan Baybars

Yvonne Friedman’s research has shown that in the context of the crusades, normal behaviour towards women of any religious belief was to take them prisoner: sometimes as captives taken after a defeat; sometimes as the deliberate goal of a slave-hunting raid. Yet the norm was not necessarily the ideal. This article discusses the works of contemporary and near-contemporary Christian and Muslim commentators on the Third Crusade and later and concludes that treatment of women was an important measure of a leader’s moral worth. Muslim writers depicted devout Islamic leaders as treating Christian women with mercy rather than killing them, allowing them to show their subject as merciful, and thus fulfilling the duties of Islam. In contrast, Christian writers on the crusades believed that, although women should be treated with kindness, any close association with women would expose their heroes to accusations of immorality or religious pollution, so made less of merciful treatment of women. Nevertheless, for both Christians and Muslims this honourable behaviour was depicted as extending primarily to noblewomen: the normal fate of non-noble women was death or captivity