There are episodes in history that we must look squarely in the face, however painful, because to forget them would be a second injustice to the victims. This is one of them. In the spring and summer of 1096, before the main body of the First Crusade had even set out for Jerusalem, bands of crusaders devastated the prosperous Jewish communities of the Rhine valley, in present-day Germany, in one of the most atrocious massacres Europe had known until then. The name forever bound to that horror was that of a German nobleman: Count Emicho. Come with me, dear readers, to one of the blackest chapters of the dawn of the Crusades, the one I recount in my novel «The Crusade of Peter the Hermit».
A perverse logic
When Pope Urban II called for the crusade in 1095, his message was clear: to march east, thousands of kilometres away, to fight the Muslims and liberate the Holy Land. But along the way, in certain minds poisoned by fanaticism, greed and hatred, a monstrous line of reasoning arose, one that the chronicles of the time passed down to us.
The argument, in the mouths of those crusaders, ran something like this, and it is worth reproducing it to grasp the magnitude of the crime and to condemn it without reservation:
«Why go and fight the enemies of Christ at the end of the world, when right here among us live the very people who killed Him? Let us begin God's work at home.»
It was an abominable justification, with not the slightest grounding either in official Christian doctrine or in the most elementary morality. But it served as a pretext for what was in truth a mixture of religious fanaticism, of greed (the Jewish communities were prosperous and there was much to plunder) and of sheer mob violence. Under that excuse, the bands fell upon the Jews of the Rhine cities.
Count Emicho, the face of the horror
The most sinister of those ringleaders was Count Emicho of Flonheim-Leiningen, a Rhenish nobleman who gathered a large host under his command and led it from city to city sowing death. The chronicles, both Christian and the harrowing Hebrew chronicles that left a record of the disaster, point to him as the chief author of the worst massacres.
Emicho and his men swept through the great cities of the Rhine valley, where ancient and cultured Jewish communities flourished: Speyer, Worms, Mainz, Cologne. In each of them the same pattern of horror repeated itself, with variations: the assault on the Jewish quarters, the plunder, and the massacre of men, women and children who refused to renounce their faith and be forcibly converted. Mainz in particular was the scene of one of the most appalling slaughters, with the annihilation of much of its Jewish community, one of the most important in Europe.
The toll was devastating. Thousands of Jews were murdered in those weeks of 1096 along the Rhine. Entire communities, with centuries of history behind them, were wiped off the map. For their scale and their savagery, those massacres rank among the worst outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence Europe had ever seen, and they left a very deep wound in the memory of the Jewish people.
The other executioners: Gottschalk and Folkmar
Emicho did not act alone. Other bands, led by equally fanatical figures, joined the horror. The chronicles name a German monk called Gottschalk, who gathered his own host and left a trail of violence, and a priest called Folkmar (Volkmar), who led another group eastward, as far as Bohemia, attacking Jewish communities along the way.
That a count, a monk and a priest should be among the ringleaders says a great deal about how fanaticism can corrupt every rank of a society. They were not merely soldiers or bandits: there were churchmen, who should have been preaching charity, leading massacres. The poison of hatred respected neither habit nor title.
Those who tried to save them
Amid so much darkness, it is only just to remember also those who tried to halt the barbarity, because their existence proves that the horror was not inevitable and that decency is always possible. The official hierarchy of the Church had neither ordered nor approved those massacres; on the contrary, several bishops tried to protect the Jews of their cities, risking their authority and even their safety to do so.
In my novel I portray the figure of Bishop Adalbert, whom I call «an angel in the midst of hell» for his efforts to shelter the persecuted. Several prelates opened the doors of their palaces to give refuge to the Jews fleeing the mobs, and some managed to save a portion of them. Others, however, failed: in Mainz, despite the attempts at protection, the enraged crowds stormed even the archbishop's compound, the compound of Ruthard, an ambiguous figure whose role (somewhere between charity and the suspicion of greed for Jewish wealth) is still debated today. Episcopal protection, where it was attempted, often was not enough against the fury of the mobs.
The martyrdom of the communities
The Hebrew chronicles that survived the disaster left a heartrending testimony of those days. Faced with the dreadful choice their attackers imposed on them, forced conversion to Christianity or death, many members of the Jewish communities chose to die rather than renounce their faith. There were scenes of unbearable drama, of entire families who preferred to perish faithful to their beliefs rather than be baptised by force.
That sacrifice was engraved on the memory of Judaism as one of its most painful episodes of martyrdom. It is not for an article of historical outreach to dwell on the most terrible details; it is enough to say that what happened on the Rhine in 1096 was a human tragedy of the first order, and that the victims deserve to be remembered with respect and sorrow, not reduced to a footnote in the epic of the Crusades.
The fall of Emicho
What became of Count Emicho? His story had an ending that his contemporaries did not hesitate to read as a punishment. After the Rhine massacres, Emicho led his host eastward, intending to follow the route to the Holy Land by crossing Hungary. But the king of Hungary, Coloman, alarmed by the violence and disorder of that rabble, refused him passage through his kingdom.
Emicho tried to force his way in and laid siege to a Hungarian border stronghold near Moson. And there his undisciplined army was defeated and scattered by the Hungarians. The host that had sown terror among the defenceless fell apart the moment it faced real soldiers. Emicho returned to his lands in disgrace, without having so much as set foot in the Holy Land. Many chroniclers of the time, both Christian and Jewish, saw in that humiliating defeat the hand of divine justice punishing the man guilty of so many crimes. The man who had justified his massacres by invoking the will of God was, according to his own contemporaries, abandoned by that very God in whose name he had murdered.
Why it must be remembered
The Rhineland massacres of 1096 are an episode that long remained in the shadow of the great epic of the Crusades, that narrative of knights and heroic deeds. But they are an inseparable part of history, and to silence them would be to fail both the truth and the memory of the victims. Historians today regard them as one of the first great chapters of large-scale antisemitic violence in medieval Europe, a sinister precedent of persecutions that, sadly, would be repeated in the centuries that followed with ever more catastrophic consequences.
It is worth remembering too that those crimes did not represent the official doctrine of the Church, that there were Christians, bishops, neighbours, who risked a great deal to protect their Jewish fellow citizens, and that the chief culprit ended up defeated and disgraced. But none of that brings back to life the thousands of innocents who were murdered, nor does it erase the stain of what happened.
I chose to recount these events in «The Crusade of Peter the Hermit», with the respect and the rawness they deserve, because I believe historical fiction serves this purpose too: to keep time from erasing what should never have happened, and to make the names of the victims weigh more, in memory, than those of their executioners. If you wish to know this story and the whole complex and tragic beginning of the First Crusade, you will find it in my book. History as it was never told to you, including in its darkest pages.