Ioveta
After Baldwin's capture and release from Muslim captivity in 1124, the four-year-old princess was handed over by her family as a hostage in his place until he paid his ransom the following year.
[3] Both the County of Edessa and the Kingdom of Jerusalem were crusader states, established after the victory of Latin Christian invaders over the Muslim rulers of the Levant.
[8] Queen Morphia's decision to include Ioveta among the hostages sent to Timurtash suggests that the young princess was expected to be well treated, which was "an established tradition within Islam".
[11] In modern historiography, Ernoul's chronicle is often seen not as an accurate representation of events in the Latin East but as propaganda intended to spur Europeans to assist in the crusades for the Holy Land.
[12] Sultan Shah ibn Radwan, eager to maintain good relations with neighboring rulers, released Ioveta and the other children when Baldwin returned to Shaizar with his ransom in March 1125.
[15][16] The only unmarried man of appropriate rank left in the Latin East was Joscelin of Edessa, with whom Ioveta had shared her captivity, but they were second cousins and so too closely related to marry.
Yvonne Friedman, relying on Ernoul's account, believes that the rumors of sexual impropriety during her captivity rendered Ioveta unmarriageable in the eyes of her family.
[17] Erin Jordan notes that no medieval source, including Ernoul, suggests that there was any correlation between Ioveta's captivity and her becoming a nun.
[10] In any case, this was a common path for the younger children of royal and noble parents; it demonstrated the family's piety and connected them to religious leaders, who exhibited significant influence.
[22] Melisende lavishly endowed Bethany with estates, gold, silver, precious stones, and silk, making it wealthier than any other monastery or church in the kingdom.
[24] As abbess, Ioveta enjoyed more independence than her married sisters; although a queen, princess, and countess respectively, Melisende, Alice, and Hodierna were constrained in their exercise of power by their male relatives.
[24] She maintained contact with foreign religious communities too, sending a piece of the True Cross to the Fontevraud Abbey in France.
[27] The authority she exercised was both spiritual and secular in nature, and Ioveta was one of the rare 12th-century women (especially in the East) to use her own seal; her only contemporary to do so was her sister the queen.
[29] She then moved to her fief of Nablus, close to Bethany and Ioveta, but remained an active and influential participant in state affairs.
[36] King Amalric was forced to separate from his wife, Agnes of Courtenay, who soon remarried;[37] shortly after he sent their daughter, Sibylla, to Bethany to be brought up by Ioveta.
[35] Since Sibylla was then second in line to the throne, after the king's son, Baldwin, Jordan concludes that the royal family continued to hold Ioveta in high esteem even after Melisende's death.
