Women in the Medieval Court: Consorts and Concubines

By Rebecca Holdorph

A surprising look at women who wielded power in medieval Europe, from queens to concubines to abbesses.

Medieval society might expect the elite women who decorated its courts to play the role of Queen Guinevere, but many of these women had very different ideas. Great queens, who sometimes ruled in their own right, fought wars and forged empires. Noblewomen acted behind the scenes to change the course of politics. Far from cloistered off from the world, powerful abbesses played the role of kingmaker. And concubines had a role to play as well, both as political actors and as mothers of children who might change a country’s destiny. They experienced tremendous success and dramatic downfalls. This book tells the stories of women from across medieval Europe, from a Danish queen who waged political war to form a Scandinavian empire to a Tuscan countess who joined her troops on the battlefield. Whether they wielded power in battle, from a convent, or from a throne—or even in the bedchamber—these women were far from damsels in distress waiting for their knights in shining armor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9781526739827

Book preview

Introduction

In early 1077, the Holy Roman Emperor Heinrich IV stood bare-headed in the snow outside a fortress called Canossa set atop a rocky outcrop in northern Italy. He had made the dangerous crossing over the winter Alps to see the man inside the fortress, Pope Gregory VII, in a time of desperation. Heinrich and Gregory had been locked in conflict for several years, and when the pope finally excommunicated Heinrich, his nobles had enough. They informed Heinrich he would need to have his excommunication lifted or lose his throne. Inside Canossa, Gregory was being hosted, protected and advised by Canossa’s ruler – the ruler of all Tuscany and one of the most powerful nobles in Europe. Her name was Matilda. When Heinrich was finally allowed inside the fortress after three days of humiliation in the snow, it was she who admitted him. When he was permitted to bow before the pope and beg forgiveness, it was in her court that he prostrated himself. When Heinrich took up arms against the pope once more, it was her army that defeated him, with Matilda herself in command. Matilda’s defeat of Heinrich – on the battlefield, in medieval halls of power, eventually in the public imagination – was a defining moment of medieval history.

Few of us have heard of Matilda of Tuscany. She was unknown to me before I began researching this book. To me, she epitomises the reasons why we study medieval women. Even as society recognises the importance of women’s history more and more, the dominant narrative is one of ‘exceptional’ women who managed to navigate their society to achieve positions of power far outside the ordinary. For every Eleanor of Aquitaine, it seems there were dozens of kings, dukes, popes, and bishops engaged in the conflicts of their day.

The reason this is the case is that historians still rarely look for the women. But when we do, they are easy to find. They step out of the woodwork of history, ready to take their place. They are less clearly defined than many of their male counterparts, a result of male bias in surviving records. This is evidence of the patriarchal society in which they lived, which did its best to deny them a voice or identity beyond wife or mother. But the more we look, the more we find them. The more we understand of their contexts – of their conflicts, goals, successes, failures – the more these women begin to emerge as powerful, independent actors in their own rights. A new picture begins to emerge of women who dealt with enormous challenges and pressure, but who were not without strength, not without independence, and certainly not without power. In this book, we will meet some of them.

How do we study medieval women? It is not difficult to find documents dating from the Middle Ages. Literally millions survive – they can even be purchased on eBay. The problem is not one of quantity, but of quality. The sorts of documents that families or governments saved to pass down to future generations were usually legal or financial: land grants, wills, financial accounts, court records. By and large, medieval women did not exist as separate legal entities. Their roles are often erased because the surviving documentary record reflects the activities from which women, simply because they were women, were barred.

Other types of sources discuss women more often, but they bring issues of interpretation. Religious writers such as Thomas Aquinas – who described women as ‘defective and misbegotten’ – had much to say about them.¹ Little of what they say is good; unsurprising given the church’s distrust of women and their dangerous sexuality. Medieval chroniclers, men who created the historical record of their time, usually focused on their fellow men, but they discussed women when their paths intersected with great events. Many chroniclers, especially in the early Middle Ages, were also religious men, however, so much of their work requires careful interpretation.

But the fact that so many men had so much to say about women speaks volumes: if women were behaving in the ways that these men advocated, would there have been a need to spill so much ink on the subject? The sheer volume of anti-woman work produced suggests women everywhere, at all levels of society, occupied a place of power that was far from what these men considered the ideal.

Of course, there are still ways of researching women’s history in the Middle Ages. Reading between the lines of official documents does much to illuminate women’s lives. Some women were independent and powerful enough to leave behind their own legal records. From time to time, important sets of documents have survived through accidents of history. Even more rarely, women’s own writing survives. In the twelfth-century, troubadour Marie de France created romantic lyrics that were well known in her own time; the Byzantine princess Anna Komnene’s Alexiad was a powerful assertion of her own power, as well as one of our best surviving sources of the First Crusade.

Historians generally use a combination of evidence for women’s lives. Legal and financial records can be of great use. Letters, when they survive, are helpful, though most letters are formal documents written by scribes, created with the understanding they might be kept and read publicly. As such, the contents rarely tell us much about the personal views of the sender, but may reveal more of a sense of how that person wished to be perceived. Art, monuments and tombs, and literature also offer clues to how women wished to be remembered.

Chronicles, the history books of the Middle Ages, mention women who played roles in the crucial happenings of their time. This can be useful, but their words are best taken with a grain, sometimes a shaker, of salt. For medieval writers, the ‘truth’ did not always mean an accurate depiction of events precisely as they occurred. For one thing, many chronicles were commissioned by powerful families, with the expectation that the writer would depict members of the family – men and women – in a positive light. For another, many writers offer a didactic interpretation of events, with the goal of revealing the universal truths and divine plans that underpinned them. Most considered it reasonable to amend or embellish their telling of events to illuminate those truths.

This is a book about women and power. It would be disingenuous to sugar-coat the fact that medieval women lived in a patriarchal society that preferred to limit women to the roles of wife or mother and denied them access to authority. Several theoretical viewpoints prevalent in medieval Europe meant that women, even those born into the highest levels of society, had enormous obstacles to overcome to exercise personal agency. Medieval society was diverse – not everyone experienced these ideas identically – but most people living in the Middle Ages would find them familiar.

Medical and scientific views on women were a wellspring of misogynist thought. The male body was held to be an exemplar, the female body an inverted, deviant version. This explained why a male body has a penis and testicles, while the female has the ‘opposite’: a vagina and ovaries. The humour system, which held that four humours – phlegm, blood, black bile, yellow bile – should be balanced throughout the body, assigned different humours to men and women. Men were associated with yellow bile, making them naturally more ambitious and dominant, while women were charmingly associated with phlegm, which explained their calm, submissive, cold, and moist natures.

Knowing these basic ideas, we begin to see the seeds of the political and social subjection of women in biological theory. Just as women were inferior to men physically, so were they inferior mentally and emotionally. Men were assertive, powerful, in control of their emotions. Women were mentally feeble, naturally submissive, talkative, and their emotions, particularly their sexual appetite, were difficult to control.²

These views interacted with religious views on women, which generally split women into the two categories of ‘virgin’ or ‘whore’. These opposing views were epitomised by the most famous women of the Bible: Eve and the Virgin Mary. Eve represented the dangers lust and lack of control posed to men. The twelfth-century thinker Andreas Cappelanus wrote, ‘a woman may be eminent in distinction and rank and a man most cheap and contemptible, but if she discovers that he is sexually virile she does not refuse to sleep with him. But no man however virile could satiate a woman’s lust by any means.’³

Counterbalances to Eve were the Marian cult and the notion of courtly love. The Virgin Mary was a safe subject of adoration because she was so opposite to Eve – one could worship Mary and condemn Eve at the same time. Courtly love provided a secular counterpoint to the cult of the Virgin: just as he might pray to the Virgin, a man could adore his lady love. The cult of the Virgin Mary raised the status of women in society to an extent, but only so far: all women had the potential to emulate Mary, but all also had the sin of Eve within them.⁴

These ideas underpinned the legal limitations of medieval women. Women were necessary for reproduction, but their pesky sexuality might go wild at any moment, so husbands exercised strict control over wives, and fathers over daughters. They could not think rationally, so they could not represent themselves legally or own property. They were shallow-minded and prone to gossip, so it was best they stay at home. Concentrating on the running of the household and raising children – two things that they were naturally gifted at – prevented women from creating chaos in society. The good, pure, generous, spiritual, beautiful ones might be admired, but never trusted.

This is the bad news, but there was good news, too. Lack of power was a constant, but it varied across time and place. Medieval France’s strict interpretation of Salic Law meant women could neither inherit the throne, nor transmit their claim to a son. Next door, in the kingdoms of medieval Iberia, women inherited the throne and ruled in their own right regularly throughout the Middle Ages. In addition to these queens regnant, elite women at all levels of society inherited and wielded power independently of men. While English law dictated that women could only inherit from their fathers if they had no brothers, in Spain, fathers might split off parts of their property to create lands for their daughters.

Women’s inheritance of titles was a relatively rare event, and we should remember that even the most progressive medieval societies preferred men to inherit when possible. Many women, however, were up to the challenge of circumventing the constraints placed on them by society, so wielded surprising power. In recent years, the numbers of these ‘exceptional’ women have grown so greatly that scholars now recognise that most women understood and utilised the mechanisms by which the gentler sex might exercise autonomy in a society that – in theory – denied it.

It is important to recognise the distinction between power and authority, a similar distinction between what today we think of as personal and positional power. Authority is the capacity to secure obedience which derives from a publicly-recognised title to do so. Power is the ability to actually influence events. Many medieval women whose names we remember today had power in that they could influence decisions, but no authority in the form of a title they held in their own names.⁵ This book will examine the ways that these women exercised power, despite lacking authority. Other women, though they were a minority, did inherit their own titles, so they held authority. This book will also examine whether these women successfully transformed the authority that came with their titles into real power.

What is power? We often think of power as using force to change someone else’s actions. For medieval women, we sometimes have to search out more subtle expressions of power. It might be the ability to set goals and take actions towards those goals, whether successful or not. We might see power in the strategies that women employed to overcome the roadblocks society placed in their way. When we see women taking action in society – founding religious institutions, forming relationships with men or with other women, commissioning works of literature, or indeed sitting on a throne in their own right – these are forms of power.⁶

Ultimately, medieval society was forced to contend with ideologies about women that conflicted and overlapped. It was a patriarchal society that theoretically believed women were inferior to men in all ways, but in actuality allowed women to exercise considerable power and authority. This can be confusing, but medieval Europe was not unique in this regard. We still navigate the gaps between our theories of how society should work, and the reality of how it does work, all the time.

This is a book about women in the courts of medieval Europe, but the term ‘court’ is something of a misnomer for much of this period. The court we often imagine – a central meeting-point where the great and good congregated around the royal family, a locus of government and intrigue – is mostly an invention of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. What eventually morphed into the court began as the royal or noble household, the officials and servants who resided with a ruler. That ruler might be mostly static, preferring to stay in one location, but more often they travelled throughout the lands they ruled, their household in tow. This was a large group, but nowhere near the hundreds who would come to reside in the royal courts of the Renaissance and beyond. Nobles at all levels of society, from the royal family down, had households, and these were the focus of power in the Middle Ages.

In this book, I explore how medieval women accessed that power. This is an enormous topic, even once we limit ourselves to women of the upper classes. Women of the peasant and emerging middle class had their own means of accessing power, but they were not members of the courts or households from which formal authority emanated, which is the topic of this book. To explore how women experienced their world, I have focused not on theory – though theory underpins many of my interpretations – but on the lives of real women. The book is divided into four sections, focused on noblewomen, consorts, reigning queens, and concubines, respectively. Each section has a dedicated cast of ‘characters’ comprised of real women.

Medieval Europe was a remarkably diverse society. The Middle Ages lasted from approximately the year 500 to 1500. Medieval culture stretched from the steppes of Russia and the Caucasus to Iberia, and as far north as Scandinavia and Iceland. Trade routes connected Europe to Africa and China. I have tried to reflect this diversity as much as possible, pulling women into my cast who lived from approximately 1000 to 1500, and from locations that range from Norway to Georgia.

Ultimately, however, my personal area of study is England of the later Middle Ages. Even as we acknowledge the diversity of the medieval world, most research still focuses on the traditional ‘hotspots’ of England, France, Italy, and Spain, and this is reflected in this book. When looking at women outside my areas of expertise, I relied heavily on the work of other scholars, so I have been limited to women who have biographies or extensive research dedicated to them. This means that women on the outskirts of the medieval world are less well represented. Additionally, I am not an expert on every ‘character’ – though I am on some – and so am greatly indebted to fellow scholars who have dedicated years of research to these women.

I begin by looking at noblewomen. Their stories, the pressures they faced and successes they achieved, provide a foundation to discussing the lives of queens consort, reigning queens and concubines in subsequent sections. In looking at both noblewomen and queen consorts, I have split the section between ‘private’ and ‘public’ activities. In medieval culture, the line between public and private is blurry – after all, this was a culture where a royal couple’s sex life was of national importance. Despite this limitation, drawing this distinction provides a foundation to look at women’s inner and outer lives.

The portraits I have drawn are often done in broad strokes. I have had to make difficult decisions about who to include – I want my readers to have the same pleasure I did meeting women they knew little about – and what to discuss. In some places, I examine individuals and events in detail; in others, I provide generalisations. This is a book designed to invite the reader in, to provide a thorough, if broad, overview of women’s lives and the conclusions we can draw about them. This is a book about individuals who experienced real joys and sorrows, who overcame challenges, or who failed, who had goals, which might or might not be met. This is a book about real women, who were sometimes remarkably like us, but often not, who scrambled for agency and individuality in a world that denied it to them. This is a book about power.

Section One

Noblewomen

Cast of characters:

Matilda of Tuscany (1046–1115)

The daughter of Boniface III, Margrave of Tuscany and his wife Beatrice of Lorraine, Matilda became margravine of Tuscany in her own right as her father’s only living heir. Matilda married twice, firstly Godfrey IV, Duke of Lower Lorraine (d. 1076), and secondly to Welf II, Duke of Bavaria (1072–1120). The second marriage ended in separation after only a few years. Matilda had no living children who survived her. She was a contemporary of Anna Komnene, Evpraksia of Kiev (Section Two) and Urraca of León (Section Three).

Anna Komnene (1083–1153)

The eldest child of Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos and Empress Eirene Doukaina, Anna was born in the Purple Room of Constantinople’s imperial palace. As a young child, she was betrothed to Constantine Doukas, but she instead married Nikephoros Botaneiates after Constantine’s early death. They had four children. Anna is best known for composing the Alexiad, an epic chronicle documenting her father’s reign, and for her failed coup upon her father’s death. She was a contemporary of Matilda of Tuscany, Evpraksia of Kiev (Section Two) and Urraca of León (Section Three).

Marie of France (1145–1198)

The eldest daughter of the infamous Eleanor of Aquitaine and her first husband, Louis VII of France, Marie was a French princess. She married Henri I, Count of Champagne in 1164, and they had four children. Following her husband’s departure for the Holy Land and his early death, she acted as regent of Champagne. Marie was an active patron of literature. She was a contemporary of Berengaria of Castile (Section Three).

Alice de Lacy (1281–1348)

The only child and heiress of Henry de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, and Margaret Longespée, Countess of Salisbury, Alice de Lacy became countess of Lincoln and Salisbury in her own right. She married Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, a grandson of Henry III of England. The marriage was unhappy, and the couple had no recorded children. Following Thomas’s execution in rebellion against King Edward II, Alice married twice more, first to Ebulo Lestrange, then to Hugh de Frene, but outlived both husbands. Alice died in 1348, possibly an early victim of the Black Death.

Cecily Neville (1415–1495)

The youngest daughter of Joan Beaufort and her second husband Ralph Neville, Earl of Westmorland, Cecily Neville married Richard, Duke of York. The couple had at least twelve children, including kings Edward IV and Richard III. Cecily lived through all major events of the Wars of the Roses, and through her many siblings and children, was related by blood or marriage to most of the major players. She was a contemporary of Margaret of Anjou (Section Two), and a granddaughter of Katherine Swynford (Section Four).

Introduction

Before we can discuss queens, ruling women, or concubines, a look at noblewomen lays groundwork for understanding other roles women might play in the medieval court. Like their sisters elsewhere, women of the noble class played a complicated game of exercising power without appearing to exercise power. Unlike these other women, the evidence for noblewomen is more limited, and I have had to focus on women who were major players – some of these women were more small-scale queens than mere nobles – in order to provide detailed information.

All medieval women were part of a web of identities. They were born into one family, married into another, produced another, if all went according to plan. Where men could chart their own course to a greater degree – though not to the degree that adults do today – these familial identities of daughter, wife, mother, and sometimes widow guided most women through life.

In this chapter, I am beginning with a chronological view of women’s lives, from childhood to motherhood. The next chapter will turn to their public lives as widows and more. For most aristocratic women, marriage was the hinge of their lives. Everything that came before marriage was about preparing for it – and with women able to marry as young as 12, there might be very little before marriage – and marriage dictated everything that came after it.

Marriage might have been the axis around which women’s lives revolved, but for many, it also eliminated whatever independence they experienced as children or teenagers. With a few notable exceptions, noblewomen disappear into the background during their marriages. This is partly because they were busy doing other things – frequent pregnancies and the demands of raising children leave little energy or time for other matters. It cannot be a coincidence that the women I discuss who are more visible during their marriages, Matilda of Tuscany and Alice de Lacy, were also those who had no surviving children. It is also the result of a legal system that all but erased women from the record: while their husbands lived, women’s actions took place under the mantle of their husbands’ protection. Nonetheless, the clues to how and why women acted in marriage are there, if we search carefully.

It was after their husbands died that each noblewoman came to the fore, whether she wanted to or not. In widowhood, noblewomen became individuals – legally, if not entirely in reality – for the first time. As mature actors, unencumbered by constraints of marriage, women’s goals, more clearly emerge. Widows were more likely to make independent decisions on managing their property, act in the political arena, patronise religious institutions or artists. The biggest decision facing widows was the question of whom they should take as their second husband; that a number of them decided against remarriage speaks volumes about they might have felt about marriage the first time around. But in addition to these new horizons, a life without a husband exposed women to ridicule, political attacks, and even physical assault.

Finally, after looking at the chronology of women’s lives, I will spend some time focusing specifically on the question of public life and power. The avenues of expression that women found varied greatly, ranging from the battleground, to literature, and of course to the game of politics. Women played political chess alongside their male counterparts, on the national and international stage. Both within the confines of marriage and without, they were individuals who acted on behalf of their families, husbands, children, and themselves.

Chapter One

Wife and Mother

My father was Alexios Komnenos, the most distinguished Emperor of the Roman people, whose trophies and valiant deeds and stratagems against the barbarians the whole earth cannot contain, as the divine word has it. My mother was Eirene, the great ornament of Empire, born of the Doukai, whose virtues dazzled the entire earth under the sun, rivaled in nothing and no-one.¹

Even today, our families of origin dictate, to an extent, the lives we live. But, as the words above from the will of Anna Komenene demonstrate, this was even more true for our ancestors in the medieval community. Family provided more than genetics, wealth, psychology, place of origin and other things that compose the melange that sets us on our path in modern society. Medieval family also provided an extensive network, a set of expectations about the role that one might play in the world, and most importantly, lineage.

As Anna Komnene’s will clearly illustrates, a medieval woman’s family of origin stuck with her for the rest of her life. Anna is perhaps an extreme example – her contemporaries might have considered her concern with her own lineage excessive – but it shows that a woman at the end of her life might still go back to the very beginning of life to define herself.

Family backgrounds and childhood

Anna Komnene’s parents laid out her path years before her birth. The Byzantine Empire was ruled by emperors, but those emperors did not necessarily inherit by means of primogeniture, the way most rulers of Western Europe did. Byzantium was technically a classless society, with every office open to every man, including the office of emperor itself. Most emperors attempted to name successors – often their sons – but the system was open to outside claimants. To become emperor, military success was crucial, one of the things that made women less attractive candidates for the imperial throne.²

And indeed, Anna’s father, the emperor Alexios I Komnenos, had come to the throne by seizing it, not through inheritance. In 1081, he led a coup d’etat that saw him replace the current emperor Nikephoros III. Shortly after becoming emperor, he married Eirene Doukaina, a member of the powerful Doukas family, to secure their support for his rule. Their daughter Anna was born in December of 1083, not long after the marriage.

Alexios seized the imperial throne during a time of considerable turmoil, and his reign would see more of the same. In the generation before Anna was born, the Byzantine Empire had grown to cover all of what is today Asia Minor, Georgia, Armenia, the Balkans, and even parts of Italy. Its capital Constantinople’s strategic location on the Bosporus Straight connected Europe and Asia. Constantinople was a city of extraordinary wealth, with an abundance of palaces and churches and famously impregnable walls. But by the time Alexios came into power, Seljuk Turks had captured much of what is now Turkey, while the Normans had nibbled away at Byzantine lands in Italy. In 1095, midway through Alexios’s reign, the First Crusade began, marking the beginning of European expansion into the Middle East.

Feeling the need to further secure his rule, Alexios had his infant daughter betrothed to her young uncle Constantine Doukas, a member of Empress Eirene’s powerful family. This cemented the Komnenos-Doukas allaince, and immediately after the betrothal, the two were proclaimed co-heirs of Byzantium. Anna spent her earliest years as co-heiress to a great empire. It was short-lived, however: when her brother John Komnenos was born in 1087, he was immediately moved ahead of Anna in the line of succession. Constantine Doukas’s early death in 1095, when Anna was about 12, should have been the final blow. But Anna held on to the goal of becoming the ruler of the empire.³

The events of Anna’s childhood, sketchy though they are, show how family background and ambition were cogs of a machine that started working before a girl was born. Anna’s betrothal to Constantine Doukas was the result of her father’s need to solidify an alliance with a powerful family, and this first not-quite-marriage would go on to influence her decisions for much of her life, long after Constantine was dead.

Over 300 years later, another girl was born whose life was driven by events set in motion a generation before. In 1415, Joan Beaufort, Countess of Westmoreland, gave birth to her fourteenth child – her twelfth child with her second husband Ralph Neville – a girl she named Cecily. Cecily would live through the entirety of the Wars of the Roses, from the Southampton Plot in the year of her birth, to the Battle of Bosworth seventy years later. She was intimately involved in many of those events. She was a related by blood or marriage to all the major actors, and for several years was an important actor herself.

Although the circumstances that created the Wars of the Roses began in the reign of King Edward III – Cecily’s great-grandfather – the board was truly set in 1399. In that year, King Richard II, the grandson of Edward III through his eldest son Edward of Woodstock, the Black Prince, was deposed by his cousin, Henry of Bolingbroke, Duke of Lancaster. Henry was the son of Edward III’s third son John of Gaunt, giving him a good claim to the throne, though many thought it was not good enough. When Richard II was deposed there was another claimant: 8-year-old Edmund Mortimer, the great-grandson of Lionel of Antwerp, Edward III’s second son. Some argued this gave Edmund the superior claim to the throne, while others believed Henry had the better claim, as he was descended through a male line, while Edmund’s claim passed through a woman. In 1399, this was relatively unimportant: Henry of Bolingbroke had become King Henry IV.

Cecily’s mother Joan Beaufort was Henry IV’s half-sister, the daughter of John of Gaunt and his mistress Katherine Swynford. A few years before his death, John and Katherine married, and Joan and her three brothers were legitimised. With three new legitimate children, John of Gaunt wasted no time in securing their futures. Two of his sons were married to daughters of important English noble families and another began a dazzling career in the church. Joan, a young widow with two daughters already, married again to Ralph Neville, Earl of Westmoreland.

Ralph’s family were relatively new entries into the English nobility, having only been raised to the rank of earl in 1397, when Ralph and Joan married. Their marriage brought this emerging power into the powerful Lancastrian fold, and that power grew astronomically when Joan’s half-brother Henry became king. Overnight, Joan and Ralph became offshoots of the royal family, placing them in a new position of importance.

Ralph already had eight children by his first marriage, and he and Joan produced fifteen more. Henry IV used this large, new branch of the royal family to form alliances with other noble families across England. In medieval English law, children whose fathers had died became wards of their overlord, and Henry IV’s early reign saw a number of highly ranked noblemen executed for treason, creating more royal wards than usual. Joan and Ralph made a habit of buying these wardships: they assumed guardianship of the heir and his property, and they received profits of that property until the heir came of age. Most of these young boys were betrothed to Joan and Ralph’s daughters. It was an arrangement that benefitted everyone. Joan and Ralph arranged good marriages cheaply, without complicated marriage negotiations or large dowry payments. They could raise their wards to be loyal to them and the new royal house. The Nevilles benefitted, the new king benefitted, and the daughters benefitted. The only ones who might not have been entirely on board were the