As the fire of crusading enthusiasm spread across Europe in 1096, tens of thousands of Latin Christians prepared to leave their homes and take up the long road to Jerusalem. The first crusaders began setting off from France and Germany in late spring, small bands of peasants and a few knights, often inspired by popular preachers like Peter the Hermit, that gradually coalesced into a number of larger, loosely formed contingents. This initial wave of ‘pilgrims’ has come to be known as the People’s Crusade.
Few among them could have truly understood the sheer, daunting scale of the journey on which they had embarked. Driven by a surge of spontaneous enthusiasm, most set out with little forethought or preparation. Jerusalem, their goal, lay thousands of kilometres away, across harsh terrain, much of it held by enemy forces. Lacking the financial resources even to consider taking ship over the Mediterranean, they had but one option – to walk the entire way. It was an extraordinarily foolhardy undertaking that would see many of them dead or destitute before they had even left the West.
There was one obvious route to follow in the initial stages, the ancient pilgrim road to Asia Minor that ran along the River Danube into the recently converted kingdom of Hungary. But while still in their homelands many of these ‘poor’ crusaders became embroiled in one of the blackest, most bloodthirsty episodes in all medieval history. Revealing the full power of the crusading message to inspire horrific violence and incite profound racial hatred, these ‘soldiers of Christ’ turned their weapons against an ‘enemy’ near at hand – the Jews of Europe. This flood of anti-Semitism spread like a contagion from the crusaders to the local Christians of central and eastern Europe. Together they conspired to perpetrate a series of murderous attacks upon the Jews, a people who had for generations lived in peace among them, in what has been called ‘the first holocaust’.1
The pogroms began as early as December 1095 with anti-Semitic riots in Rouen, and by early 1096 anxious French Jews were warning their German brethren to be wary of these new crusaders. Just a few months later, between May and July 1096, the Rhineland Jews fell victim to sadistic persecution as a tide of anti-Jewish sentiment swept eastwards through Germany and beyond. Beginning in Speyer, incidents soon followed at Trier, Metz, Regensburg and Cologne, among other cities, with perhaps the most infamous and disturbing attacks taking place at Worms and Mainz. Historians long believed that these atrocities were the work of uncontrolled peasant mobs, a vile distortion of the crusading ideal at the hands of the undisciplined, illiterate masses.2
The unsettling reality is that, although peasants did make up a large proportion of the People’s expedition, most contingents in this first wave of the crusade were actually led, and quite efficiently controlled, by knights, many of them powerful Latin aristocrats. Indeed, a Jewish eyewitness recorded that his people had been abused by ‘both princes and common folk [who] placed an evil sign upon their garments, a cross, and helmets on their heads’.3 One of the largest groups gathered at Mainz in late May: Germans led by the powerful noble Emicho, count of Leiningen; Swabians under Count Hartmann of Dillingen; and a well-equipped and well-organised army of crusaders from France, England, Flanders and Lotharingia, including the notable lords Drogo of Nesle and William theCarpenter. Certainly no rabble, this contingent, thousands strong, was a potent military force. Even princes from the main, second wave of the crusade may have been guilty of anti-Semitic tendencies, as Godfrey of Bouillon is reported to have extorted 500 silver pieces from the Jews of Mainz and Cologne in return for promises of protection that he failed to fulfil.4
The pogroms of 1096 were not simply random, rogue incidents, nor were they necessarily misrepresentative of the ideals that drove many First Crusaders. But why did an expedition preached as a war of reconquest against Islam result in the murder of Jews? Even Latin contemporaries were unsure, one noting:
I know not whether by a judgement of the Lord, or by some error of mind, they rose in a spirit of cruelty against the Jewish people scattered throughout these cities and slaughtered them without mercy . . . asserting it to be the beginning of their expedition to Jerusalem and their duty against the enemies of the Christian faith.5
Two forces seem to have been at work, stimulated by the crusading message that Urban had shaped. Characterising Muslims, the expedition’s projected enemies, as a sub-human species, the pope harnessed society’s inclination to define itself in contrast to an alien ‘other’. But tapping into this innate well-pool of discrimination and prejudice was akin to opening Pandora’s Box. A potentially uncontrollable torrent of racial and religious intolerance was unleashed.
The First Crusade was also styled, perhaps most forcefully by popular preaching, as a war of retribution to avenge the injuries supposedly meted out against Christendom by Islam. This message, itself a ghastly distortion of reality, was ripe for further manipulation. The dreadful power of these twin impulses was underscored by a Jewish near-contemporary. Recreating a discussion of ideology among a group of crusaders, he imagined them proclaiming:
Behold we journey a long way to seek the idolatrous shrine and take vengeance upon the Muslims. But here are the Jews dwelling among us, whose ancestors killed [Jesus Christ] and crucified him groundlessly. Let us take vengeance upon them. Let us wipe them out as a nation. Israel’s name will be mentioned no more. Or else let them be like us and acknowledge [Christ].6
Cloaked in an aura of divine sanction, these Latins gave free rein to long-simmering animosity, subjecting the followers of Judaism to a ruthless programme of violence, extortion and forced conversion. Wherever they went, the crusaders’ blind hatred, greed and bloodlust infected local Christian townspeople, turning them against their Jewish neighbours. In all this, the German Church maintained a disapproving but largely ineffectual stance. Its bishops knew full well that Rome did not advocate the victimisation of Jews and that canon law explicitly prohibited forced conversion. Some, like the bishop of Speyer, duly worked to protect imperilled Jewish citizens, offering them shelter and support. Yet others looked on unmoved or, worse still, collaborated in the attacks.7
Of all the crusaders implicated in this inexcusable episode, none eclipsed the notoriety of Emicho of Leiningen, the self-styled champion of this holocaust. Decades later one Jewish observer recalled how:
Count Emicho, the persecutor of all Jews, may his bones be ground up between iron millstones . . . became head of the bands and concocted the story that an emissary of [Christ had] given him a sign in the flesh indicating that, when he would reach Byzantium, [Christ would] crown him with a royal diadem.8
His crimes and those of his followers were recorded with distressing clarity by both Jewish and Christian contemporaries. Today their words afford us a tangible and disquieting sense of the shock, fear and horror associated with these incidents. Most powerful is the Hebrew chronicle written soon after 1096 by an anonymous Jew based in Mainz, many of the details of which are confirmed by the early-twelfth-century Rhineland Christian historian Albert of Aachen.9
Having been largely thwarted at Speyer by the efforts of its bishop, Emicho’s band descended upon the city of Worms on 18 May 1096. According to the Mainz Chronicle, they soon hit upon a devious scheme to incite the local populace to carnage:
They took a ‘trampled corpse’ of theirs, which had been buried thirty days previously, and carried it through the city, saying, ‘Behold what the Jews have done to our comrade. They took a gentile and boiled him in water. They then poured the water into our wells in order to kill us.’10
By the time violence erupted in the streets, many Jews, forewarned by the events in Speyer, had already sought the protection of the bishop of Worms. They looked on from the sanctuary of his palace, as those of their brethren that had chosen to remain at home were ‘killed like oxen and dragged through the market places and streets like sheep to the slaughter’. Only those who accepted forced conversion to the Christian faith were spared. Their own safety was, however, short lived. Emicho’s mob laid siege to the bishop’s domicile, and once they broke in the purge continued. Some Latins seem to have been killing their ‘enemy’ on sight, but most sought first to compel them to accept Christianity using the most brutal tactics. The Mainz Chronicle described the suffering of Isaac of Worms:
They put a rope around his neck and dragged him throughout the entire city, through the mud of the streets, up to the place of their idolatry. His soul was still bound up in his body. They said to him: ‘You may still be saved. Do you wish to convert?’ He signalled with his finger – for he was unable to utter a word with his mouth, for he had been strangled – saying: ‘Cut off my head!’ and they severed his neck.
It is at Worms that we first hear reports of entire Jewish families committing suicide in order to avoid the Latins’ swords or the noose of Christianity. By 20 May the Jews of Worms had been all but eradicated.11
Then on 25 May Emicho trained his dreadful gaze upon the city of Mainz. Here the Jewish population again tried to take refuge with the local archbishop. Albert of Aachen wrote that he finally agreed to offer them shelter after payment of an ‘incredible amount of money’, but then did little to resist Emicho’s band once it had forced its way into the city:
Breaking the bolts and doors, they killed the Jews, about 700 in number, who in vain resisted the force and attack of so many thousands. They killed the women, also, and with their swords pierced tender children of whatever age and sex . . . Horrible to say, mothers cut the throats of nursing children with knives and stabbed others, preferring them to perish thus by their own hands.12
Less than a month after the first contingents set out, this first wave of the crusade had crushed the Rhineland Jews with merciless efficiency and barbaric glee. Even to this day, dirges honouring the victims of these massacres are recited in synagogues around the globe. Emicho’s band, and numerous other groups of crusaders like them, had given an early indication of what dark horrors this holy war might bring.
For Emicho at least, the crusade was nearly over. In August his powerful army, laden down with booty, reached the borders of Hungary upon the banks of the Danube. Refused entry because of their reputation for rapacious brutality, they laid siege to the border fortress of Wieselberg for three weeks, demonstrating considerable military aptitude, but all to no avail. The king of Hungary eventually routed them in battle and their band fragmented. Emicho fled back to Germany, while some of his key followers, like Drogo of Nesle, Thomas of Marle and William the Carpenter, found their way to Italy, where they later hooked up with the second wave of crusader forces.
Other sections of the People’s Crusade traversed eastern Europe with less difficulty. Walter Sansavoir enjoyed a relatively easy and uneventful passage. Peter the Hermit, at the head of a large band of French and Germans, may have been involved in the anti-Semitic pogrom at Cologne, but managed to reach the Balkans by midsummer. Numerous other bands, of which no detailed records survive, also made the journey. Collectively, however, this first wave of the crusade had gained a well-earned reputation for violence and volatility.13
The armies of the great princes mobilised between August and December 1096. More than 40,000 knights and footsoldiers, accompanied by a mass of non-combatants, set out for the Holy Land. This mass migration created an unprecedented upheaval in Latin society. In less than half a year, a whole swathe of European aristocracy vanished, many never to return. Countless lordships and households were stripped of men and left in the care of wives, family, monasteries or the Church. Across western Christendom, crusaders swallowed their fears and left their old lives behind them. For many, leave-taking was an emotional experience. One northern French crusader recalled how ‘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’, but nevertheless she mourned the loss of her spouse ‘who she was losing in this life as if he were already dead’.14
Although this second wave of crusaders was somewhat better prepared and organised than the first, there still remains a question mark over the degree of logistical planning entered into by the princes, primarily because our sources reveal little on the subject. Most would have had some idea of what route they might take to the East. Bohemond, for one, had a good knowledge of the Balkans, while Robert of Flanders’ father had completed a pilgrimage to Jerusalem only a few years earlier, and Robert must have heard tales of the journey. Pope Urban’s advice to the princes seems to have been to set out after the mid-summer harvests had brought in supplies and head for Constantinople, where they could expect guidance and assistance from the Byzantine emperor Alexius I Comnenus. Many crusaders may even have expected the emperor to assume overall leadership of the expedition at this point. A collective decision certainly appears to have been made to muster the disparate crusader armies at the great capital of Byzantium, an obvious choice given that the city was a natural stopping-off point on the overland route to the Levant, and that one of the crusade’s central goals was to bring aid to the Greeks.
Many crusading nobles also made careful financial preparations for the expedition, liquidating property rights to free up portable wealth and accrue equipment and mounts. Archaeological and textual evidence indicates that the Latins brought a wide array of European coinage with which to trade during the journey east, seven separate currencies being noted in Raymond of Toulouse’s contingent alone.
Some thought may have been given to the need for naval support. Urban certainly sought to involve two of the great maritime powers of the age, sending envoys to the semi-autonomous Italian port of Genoa in July 1096 and later contacting its rival Pisa, but no precise evidence of these negotiations or their outcome survives. The vast majority of the second wave of crusaders chose not to make a direct sea crossing to the Holy Land, opting instead for predominantly landbased routes to Constantinople. Nonetheless, English, German and Genoese fleets did find their way into the eastern Mediterranean in the course of the crusade, although their exact relationship to the expedition is unclear.15
That seems to have been the extent of the Latin princes’ planning. They forsook complex logistical networks and the burden of long chains of supply. Rather than attempt to carry or bring in the vast quantity of food and equipment needed en route, they chose instead to survive through subsistence: in friendly territory, relying upon markets and what little they could forage from nature; in enemy lands, turning to wholesale scavenging and rampant pillage. This process of living off the land, often hand to mouth, helps to explain why the crusaders developed an increasingly voracious appetite for plunder as the expedition progressed. It also accounts for the campaign’s early shape and form.
One key consequence of the Latin approach to supply was that it made practical sense for the various contingents of the First Crusade to travel separately. If the pope had ever imagined that its forces would muster at a single location in the West, this idea soon fell by the wayside once the full scale of recruitment became clear. Gathered together, a host numbering in excess of 60,000 people might strip a region of resources in a day; broken down into smaller armies, there was a far better chance of survival. This consideration, alongside the natural tendency to congregate in ethnic and linguistic clusters and the lingering air of suspicion between old opponents like the northern and southern French, prompted the crusaders to march out of Europe in four fairly distinct groups.
It also followed that these armies, which were anyway setting out from distinct regions of the West, would have the best chance of success if they followed different routes to Constantinople. Travelling, as they would be, through allied Christian lands, they would hopefully have no need for massed military manpower and little to gain from following in each other’s footsteps down a broken but denuded path.
Thus it was that, from the late summer of 1096, the Latin princes led their forces to Byzantium along three major trans-European arteries, ancient pilgrim routes to the East that traced the crumbling remains of once great Roman roads. Hugh of Vermandois was the first to depart in late August, leading a relatively small band of followers over the Alps, down through Italy to the southern port of Bari, from whence he took ship across the Adriatic. Hugh may have been at the vanguard of the crusading host, but he arrived on the borders of Byzantium under the most inauspicious circumstances. His vessel foundered on the Dalmatian coast and, shipwrecked, he had to suffer the humiliation of being rescued by the Greeks.16
The main force of northern French crusaders, consisting of the combined armies of Robert of Normandy, Stephen of Blois and Robert of Flanders, set off along the same route to southern Italy in the early autumn, meeting up with Pope Urban along the way at Lucca in late October. By the time they reached the southern end of the peninsula they were informed that it was too late in the season to make a safe crossing of the Adriatic, but for some unknown reason Robert of Flanders refused to wait. He detached his army from the larger host and set sail into winter seas. His passage to Dalmatia and beyond must have been extremely uncomfortable, but no record of it survives. Robert of Normandy and Stephen, meanwhile, elected to sit out the winter. Their wealth enabled them to await spring in considerable comfort, but some of their followers were less fortunate. Fulcher of Chartres, a priest who began the crusade in Stephen’s army and later wrote one of the major Latin histories of the expedition, remarked of this period that ‘many of the common people who were left [to look after themselves] and who feared privation in the future sold their weapons and again took up their pilgrims’ staves and returned home as cowards’.
It was early April 1097 before the princes led those who remained on to ships at Brindisi. At first it appeared that all their waiting had been in vain, for one of the first vessels to set sail ‘suddenly cracked through the middle for no apparent reason’ and promptly sank. Four hundred crusaders drowned, although it was later rumoured that some of their bodies, discovered washed up on the shore, were found to bear the mark of the cross ‘actually imprinted on the flesh . . . between the shoulders’, a ‘miracle’ that was taken to indicate their martyrdom and God’s unbroken approval. But at the time most onlookers were evidently horrified. Fulcher of Chartres noted that ‘many faint-hearted who had not yet embarked returned to their homes, giving up the pilgrimage and saying that never again would they entrust themselves to the treacherous sea’. The majority remained, and four days later, with the winds finally favourable, made the voyage without further incident, landing near Durazzo.17
The massed ranks of the southern French contingent set out from Provence in late November 1096 under the direction of Raymond, count of Toulouse and Adhémar of Le Puy. Raymond’s wealth and power had drawn in nobles from a wide orbit stretching across the county of Toulouse to include large sections of the duchy of Aquitaine. These included men possessed of considerable valour and skill at arms: Raymond, viscount of Turenne, whose father had just made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1091; Gulpher, lord of Lastours, from the Limousin; and the adventurous knight Raymond Pilet. Having marched into northern Italy, this force had a number of options. By travelling south they could, like their northern brethren, take ship across the Adriatic, but this would necessitate a considerable delay until spring. They might also have headed east along the Via Gemina, the Roman highway to Belgrade, where they could link up with the great pilgrim route south to Constantinople. As it was, for reasons unknown, they took a more unusual route, striking south-east along the remnants of a Roman road down through the untamed terrain of the Dalmatian coast.
One member of this army, Raymond of Aguilers, a cleric who seems to have acted as one of Raymond of Toulouse’s personal chaplains, wrote a history of the crusade from a Provençal perspective. He recalled this section of the journey with evident distaste, recording that they traversed ‘a forsaken land, both inaccessible and mountainous, where for three weeks we saw neither wild beasts nor birds [but encountered] barbarous and ignorant natives’. By the time they reached Durazzo in early February 1097, everyone was thoroughly exhausted.18
Duke Godfrey of Bouillon became the figurehead for crusaders from Lotharingia and Germany. As well as his ambitious brother Baldwin of Boulogne, this contingent included, among others, the formidable German warrior Reinhard III, count of Toul. Departing in the late summer of 1096, this army followed the same pilgrim route taken by much of the People’s Crusade, following the banks of the River Danube down into the heartlands of eastern Europe. But, upon reaching Hungary, Godfrey found, like Emicho of Leiningen before him, that the way ahead was barred. Choosing diplomacy over brute force, the duke dispatched one of his followers, Godfrey of Esch, who had taken the cross with his brother Henry, and was a former confidant of the king of Hungary, to negotiate passage. Although the king was initially reluctant after his experience of the People’s Crusade, stiff terms were eventually agreed and Duke Godfrey’s brother given as a temporary hostage to guarantee crusader discipline. The army eventually entered Hungary in September and enjoyed a peaceful passage to Belgrade.19
Living as they did on the fringes of the Byzantine Empire, the southern Italian Normans who congregated around Bohemond of Taranto had the shortest journey. Alongside Bohemond’s nephew Tancred, this small but powerful contingent included the likes of Roger of Barneville, a ferocious Sicilian lord who also spoke Arabic. One member of this force, whose name has never been conclusively identified and may have been a cleric or knight, wrote a third eyewitness account of the First Crusade. According to this anonymous history, known as the Gesta Francorum (The Deeds of the Franks), the army crossed the Adriatic in October 1096 ‘at Bohemond’s expense’ to land south of Durazzo, a considerable outlay, but one that no doubt confirmed his status as leader.20
By these diverse routes, the second wave of crusaders arrived on the outer reaches of Byzantium, one Greek contemporary later remarking that ‘like tributaries joining a river from all directions they streamed towards us in full force’.21