Anche le donne erano cavalieri? Gli archeologi fanno scoperte inaspettate nelle sepolture dei monaci guerrieri medievali

It’s not massively unsurprising, in battle graveyards there’s always a couple of women buried in a way which suggests they were combatants, this is true across the whole of Eurasia. But it does not mean it was normal, it was probably still very unusual for women to be fighting on the frontline

TLDR:

Archaeologists discovered the remains of a woman among warrior monks of the Order of Calatrava at Zorita de los Canes castle in Spain, raising questions about her role. Her skeleton bore battle injuries and she seemed to have died due to these injuries. Her skeleton showed the signs of being trained with a sword and she might have worn some kind of armor when she died. Her diet consisted of less protein than the men but researchers ruled out the possibility that she was a servant called upon to join combat as there is no signs that indicate this kind of physical activities on her bones. Research indicates her as a warrior of about forty years of age, just under five feet tall, neither stocky nor slender, and skillful with a sword.

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This is big if true.

Did the monks know that she was a woman, maybe even from the beginning, and accepted her as such and trained and associated with her?

Women were never knights in the strict sense. They were admitted to chivalric orders but never assigned the role of knights (and trained and used as such – by the orders. Many fathers on the other hand might have trained their own daughters in horsemanship and fighting skills though. Many aristocratic women knew how to use a bow or a spear to hunt, and some hunted big games such as boars, like Isabella I who invented the mobile military hospital or her granddaughter Mary of Hungary – her paternal grandfather Maximilian I of the HRE made a point in training her and her sister-in-law in hunting and using weapons, right there in his “military innovation center” of Innsbruck with its weapon arsenals , which helped her to develop into a very remarkable “military woman” later. Mary and her generals were the ones who actually organized the legendary Dutch navy, although today rarely remembered as such.).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_of_Hungary_(governor_of_the_Netherlands)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_of_Hungary_(governor_of_the_Netherlands))

Actually women who fought and possessed fighting skills were not rare, and females of high ranks who commanded vassals and knights were not rare in the Medieval Age either.

There were many glorious examples, but what really impresses me is people like Nicola de la Haie who presided over the important Lincoln Castle:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicola_de_la_Haie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicola_de_la_Haie)

In 1216 (she was born around 1150) when she was at a ripe old age, she begged King John to let her retire. But he replied, “My dear Nicola, I want you to hold on to the castle as you have so far, until I decide otherwise.” The thing was that it would not be easy to find an equally skilled castellan, who knew the castle, the men, terrain. So she worked until 1226 when she retired, and died in 1230.

It was like it was not anything abnormal. It was just a job.

Or this story of Flemish women who worked as spies and messengers against the armies of my man Maximilian:

[https://www.the-low-countries.com/article/flemish-female-spies-watching-maximilians-every-move/](https://www.the-low-countries.com/article/flemish-female-spies-watching-maximilians-every-move/)

They were not prostitutes as some might expect. They were middle class women who worked for the government and organized and paid as such.

/

LOL, some guys on this site being oversensitive to any history related to women. Did I call for women to be assigned to commanding posts in your military forces or equal ratio of such and such or something? Or maybe we should only post women-related history if these women’s jobs were maidservants, paramours and nuns….??

There’s multiple story of women having to lead the defense of their husband castle while they were on crusade and i m sure some even went on the battlefield.

In France we have a story of a woman shooting an arrow to her father who came to attack her husband’s castle while he was away on crusade.

An interesting case if DNA can back up the osteological analysis. However I’m afraid the headline is a tad click baity, and the focus of the study was not the sex of the individual. It seems to be an interesting result as part of the rest though.

Arise Ser Brienne

Maybe they were just fighting for their survival? Knight orders were typically very elitist. Most men were excluded. Of course women of noble birth might have had an easier time being part of the order than a man of simple birth. But I very much doubt that there were fully fledged female knights. It’s probably more so that women in positions adjacent to power (wives of political and military leaders) commanded enough respect to lead some military engagements, especially in situations were their husbands were no longer present.

the title is the regular clickbait and should not be taken serious

This is about Knightly Orders, and not about regular knights (neither as social title nor the mounted warrior). The unexpected point here is that the religious orders even today are split into male and female orders so finding a female body among dead males with battle injuries isn’t expected

yet the body showed a different diet meaning the female wasn’t eating the same as the others so not necessarily lived with them and/or had the same social status but was trained

female knights aren’t unknown and members of orders being trained for defence isn’t something new as well
in this case the “surprise” is that there is a good chance that a single female died in the same battle as other males