Creating Cistercian Nuns: The Women's Religious Movement and Its Reform in Thirteenth-Century Champagne

5. One and the Same Passion: Convents and Crusaders

147 q Chapter 5 One and the Same Passion Convents and Crusaders Late in the summer of 1192, ships began to return to the southern ports of France and Italy bearing crusaders and pilgrims who had defended the Holy Land after the city of Jerusalem had fallen to Saladin. Among the knights, lords, squires, and retainers was an Englishwoman of middle age, Margaret of Beverley, sometimes known as Margaret of Jerusalem,who had undertaken a pilgrimage in the mid-1180s only to be caught up in the warfare of the Third Crusade. Margaret had been born in Jerusalem in the mid-twelfth century when her parents were on pilgrimage. She returned with them to England as an infant and grew up in Beverley,caring for her younger brother Thomas after their parents died. When Thomas entered the entourage of Thomas of Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, and then joined the Cistercian order as a monk at Froidmont in France,Margaret returned to the East. Shortly after arriving in Jerusalem as a pilgrim, Margaret participated in the fifteen-day defense of the city, taking up arms to fight alongside the Christian crusaders. When Jerusalem fell in the summer of 1187, she was taken captive by Saladin’s forces and ransomed—only to be taken captive again and this time forced to perform hard labor for the Muslims for fifteen months. Finally, by chance, she was among a group of Christians freed through the generosity of a Christian merchant from Tyre. She suffered Muslim captivity one final time, after which she made her way to the shrine 148 ONE AND THE SAME PASSION of Saint Margaret of Antioch to give thanks for her release. From there, she undertook a longer pilgrimage down the Levant coast, living in poverty and suffering for Christ.1 As she traveled throughout the Holy Land she wore only a rough tunic and carried a small Psalter,her sole possessions.2 Traveling by foot, clad in a manner that anticipated a monastic conversion,she fulfilled her pilgrimage and visited other shrines in the Holy Land. She arrived in Acre in the summer of 1191, as Richard I, king of England, concluded the treaty with Saladin that brought the Third Crusade to a close.3 After this she traveled from Acre to Compostella, then to Rome, and finally to the Cistercian abbey of Froidmont in the diocese of Beauvais to find her brother.4 Shortly after their reunion,she joined the Cistercian nunnery of Montreuil-lesDames outside of Laon, where she lived for eighteen years as a Cistercian lay-sister (conversa) until her death sometime around 1214.5 What is known about Margaret’s extraordinary life comes from the vita that Thomas of Froidmont (d. 1225) composed for his sister in prose and verse during the years after her death.6 She offered an example of the new spirituality of suffering and sacrifice for Christ, and the verse text may have been composed partly for liturgical use to commemorate her death.7 Thomas lauded his sister foremost for the suffering she endured in the East, fighting for Christ, surviving as a captive and a poor pilgrim, and after her return to France living as a conversa in the Cistercian order. As Christoph Maier has argued, suffering emerges as a main theme in her vita, specifically “sacrificial suffering...represented by her willingness to accept the mortal dangers 1. For the narrative of these events, see Thomas of Froidmont, Hodoeporicon et pericula Margarite Iherosolimitane, in Paul Gerhard Schmidt, “‘Peregrinatio periculosa.’Thomas von Froidmont über dei Jerusalemfahrten seiner schwester Margareta,”in Kontinuität und Wandel:Lateinische Poesie von Naevius bis Baudelaire: Franco Munari zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Ulrich Justus Stache, Wolfgang Maaz, and Fritz Wagner (Hildeshein, 1986), 461–85. 2. Ibid., 481, vv. 133–38. 3. Ibid., 483–84, vv. 195–204. 4. Ibid., 484, vv. 208–20. 5. “Ingressa est igitur monasterium Virginum, cui nomen est Monasteriolum, in episcopatu Laudunensi,conversa,ibique per annos duodeviginti conversata est,frequenter atque fortiter salutando Mariam, que multum laboravit in nobis, maxime quando ipsius animam mortis Christi amaritudo amarissima pertransivit.” Ibid., 474–75; on the date of her death, see 471, n. 19. 6. On the manuscript tradition, see the remarks ibid., 467–69, esp. n. 18. A copy of the vita appears to have been among the manuscripts in the Collection Clairvaux, although it is no longer extant. 7. See M. de Florival, “Un pèlerinage au XIIe siècle: Marguerite de Jérusalem et...