The mysterious woman among 23 warrior monks

Researchers have studied the mortal remains of 25 individuals buried between the 12th and 15th centuries in Zorita de los Canes, Guadalajara, Spain. Exhumed from the castle cemetery of this town, the skeletal remains have allowed the research team to determine the diet, lifestyle and causes of death of the warrior monks members of the Order of Calatrava. The results have determined that 23 of the individuals died in battle and that the knights of the order followed a diet typical of medieval high society, with a considerable intake of animal protein and marine fish, in an area far from the coast. Unexpectedly, it was discovered that one of the individuals was a woman.

The study was carried out by a team made up of, among others, Carme Rissech, from the Rovira i Virgili University (URV) in Tarragona, and Patxi Pérez-Ramallo, from the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany.

Embraced by one of the curves that the Tagus River makes as it passes through the Spanish province of Guadalajara, the remains of the Zorita de los Canes castle remain on the same hill where the emir Mohamed I of Córdoba ordered, in the year 852, its construction. The fortress, built to defend the emirate from Christian attacks, changed hands twice until 1124 when it was definitively conquered by the knights of the Knights Templar (the Templars). Fifty years later, Alfonso VIII of Castile ceded the fortress to the newly founded Order of Calatrava, a Cistercian military and religious order, with the task of defending the border, at that time delimited by the Tagus, from Almohad incursions.

When Carme Rissech, a researcher at the Department of Basic Medical Sciences at the URV, was told that they were sending her the remains of Calatrava’s knights, she could not believe that they were really knights. Within the framework of the MONBONES project, which studies the diet and lifestyle of the Middle Ages in monasteries, his project colleagues had analyzed the presence of isotopes of carbon 14 and nitrogen 15 in the bone remains of the 25 individuals. They also studied animal remains, found around the castle, which complement the information provided by the isotopes and helped to imagine the customs of the people who inhabited the castle between the 12th and 15th centuries. Once she had the remains in the laboratory, Rissech studied them to determine the age, sex, morphology and state of health of the individuals and to understand their lifestyle and the causes of death.

Of the 25 skeletons studied, 23 had marks compatible with violent deaths. These were mainly penetrating puncture injuries and blunt injuries and were found in the parts of the body that were most vulnerable and unprotected by the armor of the time. “We have observed many injuries on the upper part of the skull, on the legs and on the inside of the pelvis (of the coxal bone), which agrees with the hypothesis that they are warriors,” explains Rissech. Studying the bone proportions was when he realized that, among those warriors, there was a woman.

Typically, the skeletons of men and women have specific characteristics that differentiate them. “The morphology of the bones of the face and the birth canal, inside the pelvis, are the most obvious examples,” explains Rissech. In some individuals, these differential attributes may not be decisive when making a sexual identification, but these remains leave little margin for error. Who was that woman? Was she part of the order? Did she have the same status as the other knights?

The mortal remains were exhumed in the cemetery of the Zorita de los Canes castle, in Guadalajara, Spain. (Photo: Carme Rissech / URV)

On the one hand, the research team determined that the injuries observed in the woman indicate that she was present in the battle and that she died, since there is no bone remodeling in the injuries. “She possibly died in a manner very similar to that of male knights, and it is likely that she wore some type of armor or chain mail,” Rissech notes. On the other hand, she did not present the same nutritional indicators as some of the individuals analyzed: “We observed a lower level of protein consumption in the case of this woman, which could indicate a lower status within the social group,” she reflects. Some researchers have defended the hypothesis that it could be a member of the service who would have had to fight in a case of necessity, but the URV researcher does not believe this: “The work of the service would have left marks on the bones of this woman, indicators of physical activity that we could verify today.”

Instead, his skeleton had attributes similar to those of the other warrior monks, whose job it was to train in the use of the sword; an activity that leaves verifiable marks that, in this case, have been observed. “I attribute these remains to a female warrior, but more analysis is needed to determine to what extent this woman is contemporary with the other knights,” Rissech points out. According to the researcher, we must imagine her as a warrior of about forty years old, just under one meter and fifty centimeters tall, neither robust nor thin, and skilled with the sword.

Researchers from the University of Barcelona (UB) and the archaeologists who directed the excavations also participated in this study. The research is part of the MONBONES project, which seeks to offer a new historical perspective on the way of life, diet, health, economy and society in monastic contexts from the 14th to the 19th centuries from a multidisciplinary perspective (zooarchaeology, anthropology, documentation and molecular analysis).

The study is titled “Unraveling social status in the first medieval military order of the Iberian Peninsula using isotope analysis.” And it has been published in the academic journal Scientific Reports. (Source: URV)