Who Cared? Locating Caregivers in Chronicles of the Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Crusades

The crusades were religiously-inspired armed expeditions. Many of those who took the cross needed care of some sort: whether they were ill, impaired, wounded, starving or exhausted. However, any reference to medical practitioners—medici or physici in Latin terminology—is unusual in the sources for the crusader expeditions. But as the scholarship of pre-modern medical occupations has shown us, it was not only people identified with explicitly ‘medical’ terminology who attended to ill health in the medieval period. Newer historiographical developments go even further, to suggest utilising a framework of practice to interpret ‘care’ in a way that will be shown to be particularly apt for the crusader context. Through the analysis of incidents in the crusader narrative sources that describe the administration of bodily care, this article will show that practitioners qua caregivers can be found throughout the crusader host.