Although recent studies have shown that women played a larger part in European and American armies in early modern times than standard military histories have been prepared to acknowledge, it has never been suggested that they were regarded as combatants. Individual women who wanted to fight in the ranks had to cross-dress and “pass” as men. Cross-dressing was apparently not unknown even in medieval Christian armies, for, according to a Muslim chronicler, some of the crusaders killed in action in the twelfth century were discovered to have been women, but only after their corpses had been stripped on the field of battle. There were certainly no female fighting units, either then or later, in European armies. Therefore, the statement in a Castilian chronicle, written in the thirteenth century, that precisely such a unit served in the ranks of a Muslim army outside Valencia, has been dismissed as legend. The purpose of this article is to show that it must be taken seriously.

The question whether a free Moslem community survived, or was permitted to exist in the Balearic Islands, after their several submissions to direct Christian rule during the thirteenth century has suffered, hitherto, from the lack of documentary evidence. Those historians who affirm the presence of Saracens other than slaves have based their assertions almost exclusively on the information given us in the chronicles of James I and Marsilio, confining their statements thereby to Mallorca and Ibiza, and assuming only the presence of more or less free Moslem agricultural labourers or exaricos. Minorca, on the other hand, universally supposed to have been emptied of all her pre-conquest inhabitants except for an adequate supply of slaves. It is assumed that all who were able to buy their freedom at the agreed rate or who were allowed their freedom without paying for it, left for various parts of North Africa. The handful of published documents which have a bearing on the question discussed in this article have never, with a single exception, been commented on in this context, or, in one instance, have been wrongly interpreted. Apart from these, there is unpublished material in the Crown of Aragon Archives in Barcelona and the Historical Archives in Palma which goes some way towards providing the documentary evidence, for lack of which hitherto, the assertions based solely on the chronicles, at least where Mallorca is concerned, have perforce been both limited in scope and never quite untainted by conjecture. As for Minorca, the re-examination of an already published document will perhaps help to alter a picture created by evidence seeming to point exclusively towards the exodus from the island of all but Moslem slaves.