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It becomes relatively easier in twelfth century documents  to discern women participating in the Crusades. Evidence about the First Crusade is sketchy at best, and often remote from the events themselves. In contrast, later women are more frequently recorded by chroniclers writing at first hand. Often, indeed, the scribes were direct participants in the matters they describe.
As well, and not least importantly, the Second and Third Crusades felt the impact of a particular woman who was remarkable both for her personality and her role in history.
The Second Crusade may fairly be called the Queen's Crusade, for it was dominated by the character of the Queen of France, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Her story is woven through the lives of thousands of others - men and women, great and small: she is too important to ignore.
Pre-eminent amongst the men and women of her time - more than Suger, Henry II,  Barbarossa or St Bernard - she is the spirit of her century. It is all but impossible to search the chronicles of the era without treading the paths  she defined.

Eleanor, however, was by no means the first member of her family to embark for Palestine, although she is the best remembered.
Never was there such a brawling, self absorbed, fascinating and arrogantly superior brood as her family. Quite rightly, the Plantagenets - the dynasty she created, along with her second husband Henry II - are more often associated with the Devil than with the opposite end of the Christian spectrum.
And much the same held true with her parental family, the rulers of the Aquitaine. Her ancestors had helped quicken the soul of Europe to the possibilities of Crusade.
It might fairly be said that the blood of Crusaders already ran hot in the veins of the beautiful and passionate  Queen Eleanor when she was still the young bride of Louis, King of France.

Her paternal grandfather, William IX of Aquitaine, had set the example. William had belatedly but vigorously joined in the crusades in 1101.
He also seems to have shocked and outraged the more pious residents of Christian Outremer. William was no choir boy: his exploits are described above. They are characterised by a supreme indifference to the rights of others, and particularly the women in his life.Yet, in the most ironical of all twists, he was possibly partly responsible for bringing to France the idea of singing the praises of women. Music had previously been almost totally devoted to the praise of god or of battle (often simultaneously, as in the Song of Roland written c.1050 by a monk).
The Aquitaine was abuzz with that novel idea by the middle of the twelfth century. Within a generation it had ravished the rest of Europe, and still does in various forms to the present.

William IX seems to have been the first well known recipient of these ideas, perhaps garnered during his sojourn in the East, or perhaps infiltrating to his Duchy through the cultural barriers at the borders of reconquered Spain.
William was no milk and water poet, overawed by the beauty of his mistress's brow. Quite the contrary. He boasted without shame that he could earn his living as a lover in any marketplace, and according to William of Malmesbury he planned to build a nunnery of whores at Niort with the most beautiful of the ladies as its abbess.1
A contemporary described him as the most courtly of men in the whole world, as well as one of the greatest deceivers. He could write good poetry and sing well, and was given to wandering the world seducing women.2
Samples of the poems he wrote begin with the boast that he will write of large portions of joy, love and youth.
He is as good as his lusty word. In one such poem, he imagines himself pretending to be half witted. Strolling in the street he meets two married women, who like his looks and try to extract a word from him. He replies in nonsense: they are satisfied that he's just the man for them, so they hide him beneath their cloak and smuggle him into the house of one of them. After a spiced supper, with plenty of wine, they begin to have second thoughts. They decide to test his supposed dumbness. Finding a cat, they command William to undress, and then drag the cat's claws across his back. He had more than a hundred wounds that day, but says not a word. His wounds are soothed in a bath - if he is to be believed, the bathing went on for eight days - and his ardour is tried no less than 188 times.
William is credited with being the first lyric poet in any modern European language. Given that his spirit was Byronic rather than Wordsworthian, he must have caused a stir amongst the ladies of Outremer.
It must be admitted, however, that as a warrior, he was disastrous.
Time and again he and his army found itself in impossible positions in the journey through Anatolia, ambushes and false marches which William only escaped with the

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