Armies of Heaven (9 page)

As such, the study of the apocalypse was inseparable from the study of history. In the same way that some modern historians have seen all events as leading toward the triumph of a social or economic philosophy (communism or democratic capitalism, for example) and tried to locate evidence for their beliefs in historical narrative, so historians in the Middle Ages used history to isolate evidence of the divine plan at work. And the climax of the divine plan, illustrated in frescoes and sculptures in churches all across Europe, was the Apocalypse.

Throughout the early Middle Ages, people inevitably lived with an awareness of their world's fragility and the certainty of its end. But at particular times, this sense of inevitability turned into imminence. With the right conjunction of unusual events and unscrupulous leaders, the eyes of ordinary people could begin to see in even the most workaday circumstances indications of divine or diabolical wrath. The previous list of apocalyptic signs, for example, ends with the rather bland, yet somehow sinister observation that in 1096 horses were born with really
large teeth—“so large that they ought to have appeared only on three-year-old stallions.”

Omens, like this last one, exist in the eye of the beholder, and in 1096 people everywhere beheld omens. On an overcast day in Beauvais—when the clouds, to a level-headed observer, might look like a crane or a stork—an unruly and anxious mob, primed by their own priests and their bishop, began to buzz with the revelation that a cross had appeared in the clouds, sent from heaven to call or guide them to Jerusalem. They wanted to go to the Holy Land, not to redeem their sins or to perform penance but to carry out God's work—or, rather, to carry out his orders.
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Sometimes God even spoke directly. As word of the crusade spread, men and women by the hundreds claimed that Christ had branded their bodies with crosses, including at least one man who said that he had received a cross on his eyeball. Some people recognized these signs for what they were: bodily disfigurements or else pitiful tattoos made in haste in green or red ink and intended to raise money. But faked or not, the miracles were widespread and popular, even providing entrée into polite society and high office. One man named Baldwin, for example, who had received a cross on his forehead, or more likely cut one into it, survived the journey to the East and became archbishop of Caesarea, even though years later the scar on his head continued to ooze pus.
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If miraculous crosses failed to stir audiences, preachers, fund-raisers, and con artists turned to animals. Some venerated a she-goat supposedly infused with the Holy Spirit. Others paid reverence to a goose whose owner claimed that the bird was leading her to Jerusalem. Owner and pet made their public debut in Cambrai when the goose followed its lady to the cathedral's high altar. There she announced that the bird understood her desire to go east and that it intended to accompany her. A solemn request for donations likely followed. “Lo and behold!” the contemporary historian Guibert of Nogent observed, “The rumor flew as if on the wings of Pegasus and filled castles and cities with the story that God was sending geese to free Jerusalem!” The goat and goose may have been “detestable to the Lord and unthinkable to the faithful,” but many “stupid people” believed them.

Ridiculous as these preachers sound, they had a discernible impact. The woman with the goose, for example, appears in both Christian and
Jewish chronicles. The Christian writers were content with simple ridicule. A Jewish writer, however, added one important detail: In Mainz, a city along the Rhine, the woman's presentation agitated some of her audience members. Enraged, but probably unsure why, they cornered a group of Jews and asked, “How will you be saved? Behold the wonders that the Crucified does for us!” They all then charged at the Jews and tried to kill them.
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Sites of anti-Jewish violence at the time of the First Crusade

Little seems to have come of this individual attack, but shortly thereafter, on May 25, 1096, an army of crusaders, composed mainly of foot soldiers and a handful of knights, arrived at Mainz and demanded that the Jews accept baptism or death. The Jews tried to buy the pilgrims off with bribes, as they had done in the past, but this army's enigmatic and fanatical leader, Emicho of Flonheim, “a most noble man and in that region a most powerful one, too,” refused their offer.

At first the burghers at Mainz seemed to rally around the Jews, but after two days of a minor siege, some of them decided to throw open the gates. The pilgrims viewed the burghers' surrender as a miracle. They said to one another, “Behold the gates have been opened by themselves. All this the Crucified has done for us, so that we might avenge his blood on the Jews.” And a general slaughter began.

Many Jews opted to kill themselves rather than suffer death at their enemies' hands: “They fell upon one another, brothers and sons, women, mothers and sisters, and died amidst mutual slaughter. Mothers with sons nursing at their breasts cut their throats with knives, horrible to say, and others they threw from the walls.” By one reckoning, 1,014 Jewish men, women, and children died in one day. And the pogrom at Mainz was only one of several outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence, committed mainly along the Rhine in the spring of 1096. Similar incidents occurred at Speyer, Worms, and Cologne. There are also records of pogroms connected to the crusade occurring as far west as Rouen and as far east as Prague.
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Peter the Hermit seems to have played an important role in inspiring these attacks. He may not have directly encouraged pilgrims to kill Jews, but he stirred up their passions about Jerusalem and turned the thoughts of ordinary men and women to the need to avenge the sufferings of Christ. He also threatened Jews in order to get supplies and, presumably, money from them. At the city of Trier, for example, Peter arrived on April 10, 1096,
with a letter from French Jews suggesting that all German Jews would find it in their interest to give his armies full support in their expedition. The “or else” clause of the letter was left to the imagination. But like John the Baptist, Peter prepared the way. Other preachers and knights bore most of the direct responsibility for the massacres. Some of them we can name (Folkmar, Gottschalk, Emicho—whom we will meet again in the next chapter); most of them we will never know.
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Contrary to popular stereotype, most of the leaders of these pogroms were only secondarily interested in extorting money from the Jews. They were mainly concerned with striking a blow for Christianity, and they were willing to spare the Jews who accepted baptism. For example, outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence in Regensburg on May 23, 1096, and in Trier around June 1, 1096 (about two months after Peter had extorted supplies from them), led to mass conversions rather than mass murder. In the case of Trier, the bishop's followers apparently imprisoned the Jews and kept a close watch on them lest another series of heroic suicides and martyr-doms occur before they could be converted. The next day the bishop's followers led the Jews to the churches and forcibly baptized them. In Regensburg the Jews, by this point having heard news of the other pogroms in Germany, resignedly accepted baptism, with no casualties.
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The primary goal in all these pogroms was thus not the confiscation of funds but the destruction of Judaism. For most of the crusaders—or perhaps we should say simply “for most of the Christians” because many of the attackers would not have been pilgrims to Jerusalem but simple believers caught up in the spirit of the age—the spur to violence would have been a simple desire for revenge. The Jews had killed Christ, they believed, and ought to be punished accordingly.

For Emicho of Flonheim and his followers, the motive was subtler. More than military, his mission was messianic. According to a Jewish chronicler, Emicho “concocted a story that an emissary of the Crucified had come to him and had given him a sign in his flesh”—presumably a cross (one suspects that Emicho's tattoo must have been elaborate and detailed to have inspired such fanatical devotion)—“indicating that, when he would reach Byzantium, then He [Jesus] would come to him [Emicho] himself and crown him with the royal diadem and that he would overcome his enemies.” This passage is rife with prophetic meaning. In popular
medieval legend, during the Last Days a Christian leader, sometimes called the Last World Emperor, would unite his people in the Eastern and Western worlds before going to Jerusalem to wear his crown. It was this same legend that had inspired Henry IV to consider conquering not just Rome but Byzantium and Jerusalem, too. The Last Emperor legend also caused the unnamed false prophets in 1095 and 1096 to declare that the Emperor Charlemagne had returned from the dead. Perhaps Emicho himself was one of these prophets. Perhaps, more simply, Emicho believed that he himself was Charlemagne. Whatever the case, he told his followers that God had chosen him to liberate and rule Jerusalem, and they responded most immediately by killing Jews.
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As for the Jews who converted and survived, the outcome was predictable: “In 1096, the Jews of many provinces became Christians, and then walked away from their Christianity.” “Some [converts] later returned to Judaism,” another chronicler observed with palpable regret. This sort of surprise or disappointment is difficult for a modern observer to fathom. If Jews were forced to renounce their faith and accept baptism at sword-point, they most certainly would return to Judaism at the first possible opportunity.

One explanation for such disappointment is that the writers believed that the legal system had failed them. Church law—although it forbade the use of force to convert Jews—held that baptism was permanent: once a Christian, always a Christian, however conversion came about. But after the fires of 1096 had burned out and the crusaders had left to meet their fates in the East, the Emperor Henry IV overruled custom and law, permitting Jews to abandon Christianity and return to their faith (as the Jews had also done after the pogroms in 1009).
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But more than a failure in justice, these relapses also represented a failure in prophecy, and in history, too. The Jews
had
to convert. There was no other fate imaginable for this stubborn remnant of what seemed to eleventh-century Christians an outmoded religion. History, logic, and the Apocalypse dictated it. After all, at the beginning of the Last Days (and surely in 1096 the Last Days had begun) the Jews would finally recognize their error and embrace Christianity. The Last Emperor legend made this point with especial clarity. In the Last Days, the “King of the Greeks and Romans” will arise to conquer all of the kingdoms of the
Christians, before taking his fight to the pagans. He will devastate their cities “and destroy the idols in their temples and call all the pagans to baptism, and in all their temples the cross of Jesus Christ will be raised. Whoever does not adore the cross will be punished with the sword, and after 120 years all the Jews will convert to the Lord, and his sepulcher will be made glorious.” Just as predicted, Christ's anointed king had ridden through Germany, slaughtering the enemies of the faith and leading the Jews to conversion, all in the name of making glorious the tomb of Christ.

Yet unaccountably, history had failed. The scourge of God had passed, and the Jews had quietly returned to the anachronism that was their religion. And they had done so with the active connivance of a Christian emperor who himself imagined on occasion that he might fulfill the same prophecies.
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In the summer of 1096, however, there seemed to have been no failure. Quite the contrary, German crusaders left their homelands believing that they had made significant progress toward solving the Jewish problem. In retrospect, twelfth-century historians viewed these pogroms as mistakes and wanted to separate them from the serious, and more successful, business of crusading. They decided, by and large, to blame the killings on commoners, who “had a zeal for God, not founded in knowledge.”

We must wonder, however, if some of the princes—the respectable crusaders, as it were—were involved as well. Godfrey of Bouillon did threaten to take revenge on the Jews of Mainz and Cologne for their ancestors' murder of Christ, but the Jews successfully bought him with one thousand marks of silver. He also received a reprimand from Henry IV for his actions. It would be surprising if Godfrey had been the only prince to have tried this ploy. Evidence for pogroms in central and southern France is slight, but not altogether lacking. Count Fulk of Anjou, the man who preferred to stay at home rather than seek Jerusalem, did associate pogroms with his fellow aristocrats and on the model practiced by Emicho of Flonheim. About Godfrey, Raymond, Robert of Flanders, Robert of Normandy, and the rest, he wrote, “In the beginning of such a great journey they compelled whatever Jews they found either to accept baptism or to die a sudden death.” Perhaps if the conversions had proved more enduring, we would now have more evidence celebrating princely attempts to bring an end to Judaism. The future leaders of the crusade would in that case
have worked alongside Folkmar, Gottschalk, and Emicho rather than standing to one side and watching with mild distaste as their social inferiors surrendered to these base instincts and brutal prejudices.
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