Des commandements militaires féminins en guerre sainte: Marguerite de Provence et Sagar al-Durr lors de la septième croisade

For centuries, power in the Middle Ages has been thought of and written about from a male perspective. At its heart, war appears to be an exclusively male prerogative, a manifestation of the king’s power and virility. The crusading movement of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries did not escape this consideration. However, the stories of Marguerite de Provence and Sagar al-Durr during the Seventh crusade (1248-1254) show us how women of power could arise in such times of crisis. Respectively, as Queen of France and Sultana of Cairo, both assumed rulership and its military responsibilities, one acted as an effective regent whilst her husband was in the hands of the enemy, and the other ruled through a legal fiction involving her dead son and successfully orchestrated a transition between two regimes. Therefore, this article proposes a gendered reading of those events, exploring both the context and the terms of the two women’s military leadership and discusses its historiographical treatment. Deprived of acknowledgment in most medieval chronicles and also in modern works, these women’s contributions were concealed by improper readings of the source material. The silence that surrounds their military leadership can be explained by political reasons and a concern to maintain the accepted hierarchy among genders.