A man wakes up one morning convinced that God has marked him. Not with words, but with apocalyptic dreams and a sacred mark plainly visible on his body, a scar or burn in the shape of a cross on his chest. Something he and those around him read as proof that he is the chosen one, like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. His mission is to cleanse and purify Europe of its enemies before the end of days arrives, and the first step of that purification is to exterminate the Jews who had lived for generations, door to door, alongside their European Christian neighbours.
The man marked by God and Christ gathers a mass of thousands of ruthless people willing to kill them in his name. He tears through city after city in the same corner of Germany where he was born and raised, leaving thousands of corpses of men, women and children in his wake. And when someone finally has the guts to stand up to him and give battle, the chosen one flees the Matrix and hides in his castle. That man's name was Emicho, count of Flonheim and Leiningen, and he acted in the heart of the Middle Ages, in 1096. Eight hundred and thirty-seven years later, another man who spoke the same language and had been born close to Emicho's own lands followed almost the same script, with the same conviction that he was fulfilling a providential destiny, the same mass drunk on racism and collective violence, and, in the end, the same cowardice before the terrible consequences of what he had unleashed. That other man was Austrian, and his name was Adolf Hitler.
Who was Count Emicho of the Rhineland
In May 1096, some months before the forty thousand crusaders under Peter the Hermit had even left Cologne bound for the Holy Land and Jerusalem to launch the so-called People's Crusade, a minor Rhenish nobleman named Emicho von Flonheim-Leiningen gathered under his command several thousand countrymen, ruined petty nobles, mercenary soldiers and adventurers with nothing left to lose, under the pretext of joining the crusade against the Muslim infidels themselves. But they were not on their way to Jerusalem yet. Before that, they decided to deal systematically with the "enemies of Christ" closer to hand: the Jewish communities of Speyer, Worms, Mainz, Cologne, Prague and many others.
What followed was no spontaneous outburst of violence but a well-orchestrated campaign, city by city, over several weeks. Thousands of Jews — men, women, children and entire families — were tortured and killed, hanged, put to the sword or burned alive in their homes, businesses and synagogues. Because of this, many more took their own lives together with their families rather than accept the forced baptism and conversion to Christianity imposed on them to save their lives, or fall into the hands of the mob. The real death toll is uncertain and varies widely by source, and historiography itself treats these figures as orders of magnitude rather than fixed numbers: in any case, we are talking about thousands of victims. For much of modern historiography, this was the first large-scale, organised and documented "pogrom" — a Russian word meaning devastation or the violent destruction of a community — in European history: the first link in a long chain of antisemitic violence that would not break until the mid-twentieth century, and which seems to be back again in the twenty-first.
The sign and the sacred mission nobody asked him for
What sets Count Emicho apart from a simple violent medieval warlord is how he presented himself. According to the chronicles of the time — most cited is that of Albert of Aachen — Emicho carried, or claimed to carry, a cross-shaped mark on his body that he interpreted as a divine sign: proof that he had been chosen to play a leading role in the final drama of human history, within the apocalyptic tradition of the "Last Emperor" who was to purify the world before the Parousia — that is, the Second Coming of Christ on Earth, the resurrection of all the dead (like some zombie apocalypse) and the Last Judgement — set against, centuries later, the Final Solution devised by that other man who arrived eight centuries afterwards.
Emicho was not just another noble after loot — although there was plenty of loot too, in gold, silver, jewels, money and precious stones, since the Jewish communities, legally barred from owning land and from almost every Christian craft guild, had for generations been pushed towards trade and finance — Christians, after all, were forbidden by a particular reading of Scripture from working as bankers and moneylenders well into the Renaissance — and many prospered despite all the restrictions that made them second-class citizens. That diabolical count was, in the eyes of his followers and probably in his own, the instrument of a grand divine plan. That self-perception is what turns a local massacre into something far more dangerous: a movement born with a claim to eternity, capable of dragging thousands of ordinary people into committing atrocities that, taken individually, they would never have imagined, let alone carried out.
The mechanism behind the making of a killer mob
The renowned historian Norman Cohn — Jewish, British, and one of the most respected academic figures of the twentieth century in the study of millenarian mystical movements — devoted a large part of his book, The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957), to exactly this: tracing how the horrific Rhineland massacres of 1096 share a striking psychological and social structure with that of the great totalitarian movements of the twentieth century — communism, Nazism and fascism. A leader who believes himself — and manages to convince others he is — anointed by a higher mystical force. A mass that finds in collective violence a form of ecstasy, belonging, and revenge for certain envy and frustration born of watching the thriving prosperity of some — the Jews in medieval Germany, say, or the tsar and the nobility in revolutionary Russia — set against the misery of others. And a "purification" presented as the necessary step before the arrival of a new world, whether the Kingdom of God, the Soviet Union, or a Third Reich dreamed of as lasting a thousand years.
And it wasn't only Emicho. In those same ten or twelve weeks, another name our readers already know well from this blog joined Emicho and moved in the same orbit of violence: Thomas de Marle and Coucy, the nobleman we dedicated an article to on this very blog for having served as the real inspiration behind the villainous Ramsay Bolton in Game of Thrones, took part in the same climate of impunity that made it possible to commit all these atrocities against the Jews. These were not isolated events. They were all symptoms of the same disease.
The uncomfortable but real parallel
Eight hundred and thirty-seven years later, in the same cultural and linguistic region of Europe — the German-speaking world, stretching from the Rhine to the Danube — Adolf Hitler built his rise on a strikingly similar conviction: that a higher power, which he himself repeatedly called "Providence," had chosen and protected him to fulfil a sacred, historic mission. This is no forced reading, nor an invention of this Italian writer: it is a real thread running through all his speeches, growing more insistent as the years passed, until it became the ultimate justification for everything that followed. All the more so given that the Nazi regime, through its number two, Heinrich Himmler — the very man who devised the Final Solution to the Jewish question, incidentally — leaned heavily on certain mystical, occult and Aryan-mythological facets. To the point that, according to the legend popularised by Indiana Jones, loosely based on real expeditions carried out by the Ahnenerbe, a pseudoscientific organisation founded by Himmler himself, they genuinely launched a search for the Holy Grail.
The mechanism is the same one Cohn describes: the promise of a redemptive purification, the mass that finds meaning and belonging in collective violence, and an enemy — always the same one, eight hundred years apart — singled out as the obstacle standing between a dirty, unjust, corrupt world and its purified version, where everyone is rich and happy.
The same cowardice, eight hundred years apart
And the parallel doesn't stop at the mission: it runs all the way to the end.
When the troops of King Coloman I of Hungary intercepted Emicho's hordes near the border fortress of Moson, in what is now western Hungary, in June 1096, they crushed them almost entirely. Emicho, for his part, the man who had proclaimed himself the new emperor of Rome and instrument of the divine plan, did not die a martyr or at the head of his men: he was seen fleeing at full gallop from the battlefield the moment the assault began, as if he had seen a ghost, a vampire, or something of the sort, abandoning the mass of Christian fanatics who had followed him that far. Some believe that, on seeing the size of the Hungarian reserve forces waiting for him, he practically soiled himself.
Eight hundred and forty-nine years later, in a bunker beneath a Berlin in ruins, the man who for twelve years, from 1933 to 1945, had believed himself chosen by Providence did not surrender either, nor face the millions of Germans and Europeans he had dragged into catastrophe and death, nor answer for everything he had unleashed. He took his own life with a gunshot to the head, apparently, or so it is said, with his own Walther PPK pistol.
Neither of the two "chosen ones of destiny" died, in the end, the heroic, epic death they themselves had preached. Both, when the moment came to pay the price of their own mission, simply abandoned it.
Why this comparison matters
One point must be made very clear: this comparison is one of pattern and intent, not of magnitude. An eleventh-century mob armed with swords and shields, however brutal, is in no way comparable in scale, organisation or mechanism to an industrial state machine designed for the systematic extermination of an entire people. The Holocaust has no historical equivalent in scale, and any reading of this article that sought to blur that difference would be betraying its purpose entirely.
What they do share, and that is why it is worth looking at them together, is the psychological and rhetorical pattern that makes it possible for ordinary people to take part in the annihilation of their neighbours: the self-proclamation of a sacred mission, the mass that finds a sense of belonging in collective violence, and an enemy marked out in advance as the obstacle to be removed before the promised world can arrive. Recognising that pattern — on the Rhine in 1096 as much as in central Europe eight hundred years later — is perhaps the only real vaccine against someone repeating it once more, under another flag, in another century.
Sources and references
- Albert of Aachen, Historia Ierosolimitana — the principal chronicle of the 1096 Rhineland pogroms
- Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957) — the academic reference on the psychosocial structure of violent millenarian movements
- Guibert of Nogent, a contemporary chronicle on Thomas de Marle and the violence of the First Crusade
- Modern historiography on the providentialist rhetoric of Hitler's public speeches, 1930-1945
There is NO fiction in this article
Emicho of the Rhineland, the massacres of Speyer, Worms, Mainz, Cologne and Prague, the mark the count claimed to carry branded on his chest, and his defeat and flight at Moson in 1096 are all documented in contemporary chronicles and accepted by modern historiography. The comparison with twentieth-century events is an interpretive, reasoned reading by this article's author, David S. Matrecano, grounded in the facts and in serious academic historiography (Cohn), but it is not a confirmed historical fact in itself — and, as explained above, the whole article is only a comparison of behavioural patterns, never of magnitude.
Ibiza, August 2026
