God's War: A New History of the Crusades (19 page)

The destruction of the Jews of Mainz attracted the most detailed attention, later held up to Jewish audiences as a model of fortitude under persecution and of holy martyrdom. Mainz was a major centre of Jewish learning and culture as well as business. Jewish leaders were prominent in commerce; the chief rabbi, Kalonymos, on good terms with the archbishop and recognized by the emperor. On Emich’s appearance before their gates, which the archbishop had ordered to be shut against him, some townspeople provoked riots. The Jewish leaders bribed the archbishop to protect them and tried to buy off Emich with a gift of seven
pounds of gold, to no avail. The gates were opened on 26 May; the killing and looting lasted two days. The archbishop reneged on his promise of protection and fled; the Jews sheltering in his palace, despite initial vigorous armed resistance, were slaughtered with the rest. The search for money and Jews throughout the city was thorough. The synagogue was destroyed in the mayhem; some Jews apostatized; others chose suicide. The story of the young mother Rachel’s sacrifice of her four children, circulated for the edification of the faithful in the twelfth century, is grim. Her youngest, Aaron, terrified at seeing the deaths of his siblings, begged his mother to spare him, running away to hide under a box.

When this pious woman had completed sacrificing her three children to their Creator, she raised her voice and called to her son: ‘Aaron, Aaron, where are you? I will not spare you either, or have mercy on you.’ She drew him out by his feet from under the box where he had hidden and slaughtered him before the Exalted and Lofty God.
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Surrounded by the still-twitching corpses of her children, Rachel waited to be found by the Christians; before killing her, they demanded, ‘Show us the money you have in your sleeves’. Hers was not the only horrific death. Rabbi Kalonymos and fifty others escaped to seek asylum at the archbishop’s country retreat across the Rhine at Rudesheim. Archbishop Ruthard, pusillanimous and discreditable to the last, tried to exploit the rabbi’s predicament by offering protection only in return for conversion. Kalonymos, so furious at this self-seeking betrayal that he tried to assault the archbishop, was butchered with his companions. The amount of loot gained by Emich’s men and the local Christians is unknown; perhaps about a thousand Jews died.

By the time Emich reached Cologne on 29 May, lessons had been learnt, local Jews having dispersed across the countryside or sought shelter from friendly Christians in the city, hoping to avoid trouble during the following weekend and Whit Sunday (1 June). The synagogue was burnt and the Torah Scrolls desecrated, but casualties among the Jews were light, the quest for booty more obvious: a wealthy Jewish woman, Rebecca, was murdered when found trying to smuggle gold and silver to her husband in hiding with a Christian family.
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The Jews who had fled the city were soon being hunted down, attacks being recorded in Neuss, Wevelinghofen and elsewhere in the neighbourhood. With the
best plums picked, Count Emich and his men turned south and east, along the Main towards the Danube and Hungary. Denied entry into Hungary at Wiesselberg in mid-July, Emich discovered that thuggery and bullying cut no ice against an organized armed enemy. Settling down to an elaborate siege, Emich and his French and Swabian allies showed tactical expertise and engineering skill in constructing pontoon bridges and siege-engines but, on a rumour of the approach of King Coloman, morale disintegrated. His men beginning to flee, Emich and his knights were unexpectedly worsted by a sortie from the Wiesselberg garrison, the count only escaping because of the speed of his mount. The army dissolved; the French nobles returned west to seek other routes and new leaders; Emich went home.

The Rhineland pogroms of May did not end with Emich’s departure. Whether pursued by other bands of
crucesignati
or by opportunist locals, the area around Cologne continued to suffer depredations for some weeks. In June attacks spread down the Moselle to Trier and Metz, where over twenty Jews died. It was high summer, and, if not necessarily as scorching as the dry year of 1095, tempers could have frayed as hunger increased; shortages for crusaders implied shortages for the locals; prices rose in the wake of the levying of armies. A lead had been provided by Count Emich’s butchers, with their sanctimonious, bloodied aprons of righteousness. In late June and July, further attacks occurred in the Cologne region and to the north, at Xanten, Mehr, Eller and Geldern. The descriptions of the assailants are vague. In places such as Mehr, neighbours played a key role in the Jews’ ordeal. By late summer, the outbursts of hate had died away, perhaps as the harvest came in. Followers of Godfrey of Bouillon, recruited from adjacent regions, whose leader had done his own blackmailing of the Jews of Mainz and Cologne, caused no trouble; perhaps they thought the Jews had nothing left worth plundering.

Emich of Flonheim’s campaign against the prosperous Jewish communities was deliberate, far from mindless vandalism. The rhetoric, not least that recorded in the harrowingly full Jewish accounts of the pogroms, was religious, but the motive may have been financial. It was not that the crusaders were in debt to the Jews, merely that many had sold or pledged their patrimonies and still faced further expense. For leaders such as Emich, cash meant power and authority. Locals, including some bishops, erstwhile protectors, exploited the crusaders’ greed
by extorting protection money from the helpless Jews as well as looting. The Mainz community offered Emich money to spare them and delayed their own fate by throwing coins at their ravaging persecutors. Albert of Aachen drily commented that the pilgrims had slaughtered the Jews ‘more from avarice than for the justice of God’, a sin to which he attributed their later travails in the Balkans.
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The lust for money alone cannot explain the consistent flouting of canon law and religious teaching witnessed by the repeated forcible conversions. Nothing in official Christian doctrine justified slaying Jews. Pope Alexander II had explicitly prohibited it when drawing a careful distinction between them and Muslims in 1063. No justification of holy war could embrace victimization of those whom the Christians ruled anyway, hence the repeated attempts to blame the Jews of subversion and plotting the destruction of Christendom to excuse persecution. However, the preaching of the cross emphasized meritorious Christian violence, the legitimacy of revenge and religious vendetta and the suffering of Christ Crucified. Christian sources record how such messages were translated into a gospel of indiscriminate religious hate. Crusaders at Rouen thought it absurd to campaign against God’s enemies in the east ‘when in front of our eyes are the Jews, of all races the most hostile to God’. Albert of Aachen noted that recruits to Emich’s army at Mainz insisted that killing the Jews was the first act of their campaign against the ‘enemies of the Christian faith’. The Christian love Urban may have preached to justify his Jerusalem project was reserved for Christians; the obverse of this message of charity was intolerance and violence. According to a disapproving German witness, Ekkehard of Aura, the persecutors were zealous Christians who ‘took pains to destroy utterly the execrable Jews’ either by death or forced conversion.
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Not only were Jewish communities ransacked for money and goods, their synagogues, Torah Scrolls and cemeteries were repeatedly desecrated. Jews believed the incentive for their attackers was religious. In general, Jews were enemies of the church; in particular they killed Christ. When the gates of Mainz were opened to them, Emich’s followers were reported by one Hebrew source as exulting, ‘All this the Crucified has done for us, so that we might avenge his blood on the Jews.’
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All three Hebrew chronicle sources for the pogroms agree on the persistence of the theme of vengeance for the Crucifixion. Thus the mixture of demotic religious
propaganda and material greed combined to create an obscene cocktail of butchery and bigotry.

Yet the anti-Jewish persecutions reflected more than mob violence and hysteria. The chronicle attributed to Solomon bar Simson, a Mainz Jew writing
c.
1140, recorded that those who set out for the Holy Land ‘decorated themselves prominently with their signs, placing a profane symbol – a horizontal line over a vertical one – on the vestments of every man and woman whose heart yearned to go on the stray path to the grave of their Messiah’. The butchers of the Mainz community are described as raging ‘in the name of the crucified one’ and carrying banners of the cross.
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Just as much as a shared campaign, a shared pogrom cements identity on a group. Crusaders possessed a special sense of identity; already by June 1097 one wrote of ‘the army of God’.
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In the early days of 1096, this uniqueness of purpose and community sought and found expression, warriors of the cross fighting for Christ. Theological niceties were irrelevant and, in any case, the clergy travelling with the crusaders may have encouraged the outrages while those in the towns affected were rarely able to sustain the orthodox line. The massacre of the Jews was just the first of many articulations of the corporate spirit of crusading. There also existed a local political dimension. Henry IV had explicitly and repeatedly forbidden the Jews to be harmed; they were under his protection. Emich’s attacks represented a challenge to Henry’s authority, an assertion of his independence, made easier by the emperor’s absence in Italy. The political dividends of the upheavel of 1096 may not have been confined to the papacy.

For the Jews, the Rhineland pogroms did not mark ‘the first holocaust’.
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There had been assaults before; neither did they mark the opening of a sustained campaign against the Jews. If now more wary and uneasy, the Ashkenazic Jewish communities of the Rhineland and northern Europe survived and thrived for generations, despite further atrocities attendant on the Second and Third Crusades. Jews continued to migrate into the areas of persecution. More conductive to intolerance was the growing exclusivity and general militancy of the western church. With the battles with Islam, in Spain and the east; the conversion of the Baltic; the elaboration of canon law; and the war against heresy, the persistence of a religious minority appeared more anomalous and, to some, more offensive. 1096 was only one part of this process. Ironically,
its impact on Ashkenazic memory was testimony to its lack of profound material effect on the victimized communities. It was to renewed and expanding Jewish congregations in the Rhineland itself that the image of the martyrs of 1096 spoke most eloquently, as in the liturgical prayer first mentioned by Ephraim, a twelfth-century rabbi in Bonn: ‘May the Merciful Father, who dwells in heaven, in his abundant mercies remember compassionately the pious and righteous and pure, the sacred communities who sacrificed themselves for the sanctification of the Divine Name’.
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THE SECOND WAVE, 1096–7

The failures and excesses of the bands travelling east in the summer of 1096 attracted scorn, contempt and ridicule but hardly impinged on the project’s popularity. By the date fixed by Urban II for departure, 15 August 1096, all three German expeditions had collapsed; Peter the Hermit’s troops were perched precariously in their base on the rim of western Asia, soon to be annihilated; none of the princes of the west had embarked. Yet Urban II had not yet returned to Italy and recruitment was gathering momentum across western Europe. Before stopped by their local bishop, the abbot and monks of Cerne in Dorset had invested thirty shillings in a ship to take them to Jerusalem. At the same time, the pope voiced anxieties about indiscriminate enlistment, especially by clergy and young husbands with itchy feet.
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Frustrated veterans of the first armies sought new comrades. By the end of the year, by land and sea, by boat, horse, wagon and on foot, perhaps another 50–60,000 had embarked for the east, casting the earlier efforts into a deep shade.

For each
crucesignatus
and those left behind, departure was a solemn moment. While most hoped to return, none could guarantee it. As he travelled south to rendezvous with the duke of Normandy and count of Blois in September 1096, Count Robert of Flanders was received at a monastery near Rheims by a procession of monks; there too a local magnate came to pay his respects.
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Most adieux lacked such grand ceremony, although many would have been witnessed by parish priest and villagers and accompanied by ritualized as well as genuine grief. Fulcher of Chartres, chaplain on the march to Count Robert’s companion Stephen of Blois, provided an imaginative, yet universal description:

What sighs, what weeping, what lamentation among friends when husband left wife so dear to him, his children, his possessions however great, his father, mother, brother and other relatives. But however many tears those remaining shed for departing friends and in their presence, none flinched from going… Then husband told wife the time he expected to return, assuring her that if by God’s grace he survived he would come back home to her. He commended her to the Lord, kissed her lingeringly, and promised her as she wept that he would return. She, though, fearing that she would never see him again, could not stand but swooned to the ground, mourning her loved one, whom she was losing in this life as if he were already dead. He, however, like one who has no pity – although he had – and as if he were not moved by the tears of his wife nor the grief of any of his friends – yet secretly moved in his heart – departed with firm resolution. Sadness was the lot of those who remained, elation, of those who departed.
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The first great western lord to set out for Jerusalem, somewhat paradoxically, was the brother of the king Urban II had excommunicated at Clermont. Hugh count of Vermandois was the younger brother of Philip I, the Fat. Distinguished only by blood, Hugh acted as a magnet for some of his brother’s leading vassals, including the king’s constable (Walo of Chaumont-en-Vexin) and seneschal (Gilbert of Garlande). The Ile de France was well represented in Hugh’s entourage, including later William the Carpenter of Melun, Thomas of Marle and Drogo of Nesle. Capetian interest was not entirely ideological. Participation in the expedition was agreed during a council at Paris in February 1096; in July, Hugh’s participation was announced to the pope by King Philip with his own submission to Urban’s judgement over his adulterous marriage (to the wife of the count of Anjou, to whom Urban had presented a golden rose during his preaching tour in March). Thus Urban’s Jerusalem scheme produced immediate and direct political gains for the wider papal cause by allowing Philip to be reconciled without losing too much face. The settlement suited both sides, Hugh receiving a papal banner to carry on his pilgrimage. The numerous recruits from the Paris region indicate another political benefit, this time for the Capetians, by providing a rare opportunity to exhibit practical leadership over their unruly vassals of the Ile de France, although Hugh hardly proved a dominant figure.