France & Spain, c. 1270

Christendom and European Jewry:

The pauperes who took part in the People’s Crusades saw their victims as well as their leaders in terms of the eschatology out of which they had made their social myth. In a sense, the idea of a wholly Christian world was as old as Christianity itself. Yet, because of this idea, Christianity has remained a missionary religion which has insisted that the gospel, or ‘good news’ of Christ the Redeemer, must be shared with the whole of humanity before the ‘End Times’ and that the elimination of disbelief must be achieved through conversion of the disbelievers. The messianic hordes which began to form in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, however, saw no reason at all why that elimination could not equally well be achieved by the physical annihilation of the unconverted. In the Chanson de Roland, the famous epic which is the most impressive embodiment of the spirit of the First Crusade, this new attitude is expressed quite unambiguously:

The Emperor has taken Saragossa. A thousand Francs are sent to search thoroughly the town, the mosques and synagogues. With iron hammers and axes they smash the images and all the idols; henceforth there will be no place there for spells or sorcerers. The King believes in God, he desires to serve him. His bishops bless the water and the heathen are brought to the baptistry. If any one of them resists Charlemagne, the King has him hanged or burnt to death or slain with the sword.

In the eyes of the pauperes, the smiting of the Muslims and the Jews was to be the first act in that final battle which, as had been already revealed in the eschatological literature of the Jews and early Christians, was to culminate in the smiting of the Prince of Evil himself. Above these desperate hordes, as they moved about their work of massacre, there loomed large the figure of the Antichrist, who at any moment may set up his throne in the Temple at Jerusalem: even amongst the higher clergy, there were those who spoke in these terms. Though these fantasies had little to do with the political priorities of Pope Urban, they were even attributed to him by chroniclers struggling to describe the atmosphere in which the First Crusade was launched. It is the will of God, Urban is made to announce at Clermont, that through the labours of the crusaders, Christianity shall flourish again in Jerusalem in these last times, so that when Antichrist begins his reign there, he will find enough Christians to fight. 

As the infidels were allotted their roles in the eschatological drama, popular imagination transformed them into demons. In the dark days of the ninth century, when Christendom was clearly gravely threatened by the advance of Islam, a few clerics had sadly decided that Mohammed must have been the ‘precursor’ of a Saracen Antichrist and saw in Muslims, in general, the ‘ministers’ of Antichrist. As Christendom launched its counter-offensive against an Islam which was already in retreat, popular epics portrayed Muslims as monsters with two sets of horns (front and back) and called them devils with no right to live. But if the Saracen, and his successor the Turk, retained in popular imagination a certain demonic quality, the Jew was an even more horrifying figure. Jews and Saracens were generally regarded as closely akin, if not identical; but since the Jews lived scattered throughout Christian Europe, they came to occupy by far the larger part in popular demonology. Moreover, they occupied it for much longer, with consequences which have extended down the generations and which include the massacre of more than six million of European Jews in the mid-twentieth century.

By the time they began to take on demonic attributes the Jews were far from being newcomers to western Europe. Following the disastrous struggle against Rome and the destruction of the Jewish nation in Palestine, mass emigrations and deportations had carried great numbers of Jews to France and the Rhine Valley. Although they did not attain the same level of cultural eminence and political influence there as they did in Muslim-dominated Spain, their lives in the early Middle Ages were not difficult. From the Carolingian period onwards there were Jewish merchants travelling to and fro between Europe and the Near East with luxury goods such as spices, incense and carved ivory; and there were also many Jewish artisans. There is no evidence to suggest that, after the tribulations of both communities under the Romans in the first and early second centuries, the Jews were regarded by their Christian neighbours with any particular hatred or dread. On the contrary, social and economic relations between Jews and Christians were harmonious, personal friendships and commercial partnerships between them not uncommon. Culturally, the Jews went a long way in adapting themselves to the various countries they inhabited. Yet they remained Jews, refusing to be assimilated into the populations amongst which they lived.

This refusal to be assimilated, which has been repeated by so many generations since the first dispersals began under the Assyrian Empire in the sixth century BC is quite a unique phenomenon in history. Save to some extent for the Gipsies and perhaps peoples of ‘Celtic’ origin, there seems to have been no other people who, scattered far and wide over a long period of time, possessing neither a nation nor territory of its own, nor even any great ethnic homogeneity, has yet persisted indefinitely as a cultural entity and identity. The solution to this ethnographic puzzle is most likely to be found in its religion which not only, like Christianity and Islam, taught its followers to regard themselves as the Chosen People of a single omnipotent God, but also taught them to regard the most overwhelming persecutions – defeat, destruction, desecration, dispersal – not just as immediate signs of divine displeasure for sinfulness, but also as guarantees of future communal bliss.

What made the Jews remain Jews was, it seems, their absolute conviction that the Diaspora was but a preliminary expiation of communal sin, a preparation for the coming of the Messiah and the return to a transfigured Holy Land, albeit belonging to a remote and indefinite future, given the destruction of the Jewish state. For the very purpose of ensuring the survival of the Jewish religion, a body of ritual was developed which effectively prevented Jews from mixing with other people. Intermarriage with non-Jews was prohibited, eating with non-Jews made very difficult, and it was even an offence to read a non-Jewish book.

These circumstances help to explain how European Jewry persisted through so many centuries of dispersal as a clearly recognisable community, bound together by an intense feeling of solidarity, somewhat aloof in its attitude to outsiders and jealously clinging to the taboos which had been designed for the very purpose of emphasising and perpetuating its exclusiveness. Nevertheless, this self-preservative, self-isolating tendency cannot begin to account for the peculiarly intense and unremitting hatred which has been repeatedly and almost continuously directed against the Jewish people more than against any other ethnic group. What accounts for that is the wholly fantastic, stereotypical image of the Jew which suddenly gripped the imagination of the new masses at the time of the first crusades.

The Eschatology of the Medieval Church:

Official Catholic teaching had prepared the way. The Church had never ceased to carry on a vigorous polemic against Judaism. For generations, the laity had been accustomed to hearing the Jews bitterly condemned from the pulpit as perverse, stubborn and ungrateful because they refused to admit the divinity of Christ, as bearers also of a monstrous hereditary guilt for the murder of Christ. Moreover, the eschatological tradition within Christianity had long associated the Jews with the Antichrist himself. Already in the second and third centuries theologians were foretelling that the Antichrist would be a Jew of the tribe of Dan. This idea became such a commonplace that in the Middle Ages it was accepted by scholars such as Thomas Aquinas. Antichrist, it was claimed, would be born in Babylon, would grow up in Palestine and would love the Jews above all peoples. He would return to the Temple for them and gather them together from their dispersion. The Jews for their part would be the most faithful followers of Antichrist, accepting him as the Messiah who was to restore the nation.

If some theologians looked forward to a general conversion of the Jews, most maintained that their blindness would endure to the end and that at the Last Judgement they would be sent, along with the Antichrist himself, to suffer the torments of hell for all eternity.  In the stock Antichrist-lore produced in the tenth century, the Jew of the tribe of Dan became still more sinister. He would be the offspring of a harlot, whose womb would be entered by the Devil in spirit form, thereby ensuring that the child would be the very incarnation of Evil. Later, his education in Palestine would be carried out by sorcerers and magicians, who will initiate him into the black art and all iniquity.

When the old eschatological prophecies were taken up by the masses of the later Middle Ages all these fantasies were treated with deadly seriousness and woven into an elaborate mythology. Just as the human figure of Antichrist tended to merge into the wholly demonic figure of Satan, so the Jews tended to metamorphose into the demons attendant on Satan. In drama and picture, they were often shown as devils with the beard and horns of a goat, while in real life ecclesiastical and secular authorities alike tried to make them wear horns on their hats. Conversely, Satan himself was often portrayed with ‘Jewish features’ and was referred to as ‘the father of the Jews’. The Christian populace was convinced that the Jews worshipped Satan in the synagogue in the form of an animal, invoking his aid in making black magic. Jews were thought of as demons of destruction whose one object was the ruin of Christendom, dyables d’enfer, ennemys du genre humain, as they were known in French miracle-plays.

It was believed that in preparation for the final struggle Jews held secret, grotesque tournaments at which, as soldiers of the Antichrist, they practised stabbing. Even the ten lost tribes of Israel, whom Commodianus had seen as the future army of Christ, became identified with those hosts of the Antichrist, the peoples of Gog and Magog, described as living off human flesh, corpses, babes ripped from their mothers’ wombs and all the most disgusting reptiles. Dramas were written in which Jewish demons were shown as helping Antichrist to conquer the world until, on the eve of the Second Coming and the beginning of the Millennium, the Antichrist and the Jews would be annihilated together amidst the rejoicing of the Christians. During the performances of such dramas armed force was needed to protect the Jewish quarter from the fury of the mob. Popes and Councils might insist that, although the Jews ought to be segregated and degraded until the day of their conversion, they must certainly not be killed, but these imprecations made little impact on the turbulent masses already embarked, as they thought, on the prodigious struggles of the Last Days.

Trade, Money-lending and Usury:

Hatred of Jews has too often been attributed to their role as money-lenders, so it is worth emphasising how slight the connection really was. The fantasy of the demonic Jew existed before the reality of the Jewish money-lender, whom it helped to produce. As, in the age of the crusades, religious intolerance became more and more intense, so too the economic situation of the Jews rapidly deteriorated. At the Lateran Council of 1215, it was ruled that Jews should be debarred from all civil and military functions and from owning land; these decisions were incorporated into Canon Law. As merchants too the Jews were at an even greater disadvantage, since they were unable to travel without risk of being murdered. Besides, Christians themselves began to turn to commerce and they very quickly outstripped the Jews, who were debarred from the Hanseatic League and could not compete with the Italian and Flemish cities.  For richer Jews, money-lending was the one field of economic activity which remained open to them. As money-lenders, they could remain in their homes, without undertaking dangerous journeys; and by keeping their wealth in a fluid state they might, in an emergency, be able to flee without losing it all.  Moreover, in the rapidly expanding economy of western Europe, there was a constant and urgent demand for credit. The lending of money at interest, stigmatised as ‘usury’, was forbidden to Christians by Canon Law. The Jews were, of course, not subject to this prohibition, and were therefore encouraged and even compelled by the authorities to lend their money against securities and were commended for carrying out this necessary function.

Jewish money-lending was, however, of transitory importance in medieval economic life. As mercantile capitalism developed, Christians began to ignore the canonical ban on money-lending. Already by the middle of the twelfth century, the merchant bankers of the Low Countries were making large loans at interest and the Italians were expert bankers. The Jews were unable to compete with them, especially because the cities as well as the territorial princes and lords, all taxed them severely, so much so that the Jewish contribution to the royal exchequer was ten times what their numbers warranted. Once again, the Jews found themselves at a huge disadvantage. Although individual Jewish money-lenders were able from time to time to amass considerable fortunes, arbitrary levies soon reduced them to poverty again. In any case, rich Jews were never numerous; most were ‘lower- middle-class’ and many were poorer. At the end of the Middle Ages, there was very little Jewish wealth in northern Europe to share in the prodigious development which followed upon the discovery of the New World.

Some Jews turned from high finance to small-scale money-lending and pawnbroking. Here, there were some grounds for popular hatred. What had once been a flourishing Jewish culture had by that time turned into a terrorised society locked in perpetual warfare with the greater society around it; it can be taken for granted that Jewish money-lenders often reacted to insecurity and persecution by deploying a ruthlessness of their own.  But already, long before that happened, hatred of the Jews had become endemic among the European masses. Even later, when a mob set about killing Jews it never confined itself to the comparatively few money-lenders but killed every Jew it could lay hands on. On the other hand, any Jew, money-lender or not, could escape massacre by submitting to baptism.

The Demonisation and Scapegoating of Jews:

Jews were not the only ones to be killed. The pauper hordes, inspired by the eschatology of the Last Days, soon turned on the clergy as well. Here again, the killing was carried out in the belief that the victims were agents of the Antichrist and Satan whose extermination was a prerequisite for the Millennium. Martin Luther was not the first to hit upon the idea that the Antichrist who sets up his throne in the Temple can be no other than the Pope in Rome and that the Church of Rome was, therefore, the Church of Satan. Even by ‘orthodox’ theologians, as we would now regard Luther, Jews were seen as wicked children  who stubbornly denied the claims and affronted the majesty of God, the Father of all; and in the eyes of sectarians who saw the Pope as Antichrist the clergy too was bound to seem a traitorous brood in rebellion against their father. But the Jew and the cleric could also themselves very easily be seen as father-figures. This is obvious enough in the case of the cleric, who after all is actually called ‘Father’ by the laity. If it is less obvious in the case of the Jew it is nevertheless a fact, for even today the Jew – the man who clings to the Old Testament and rejects the New, the member of the people into which Christ was born, is imagined by many ‘isolated’ Christians as typically, like Fagin in Dickens’ Oliver Twist, as an old Jew, a decrepit figure in old, worn-out clothes.

Integrated into the eschatological fantasy, Jew and cleric alike became father-figures of a most terrifying kind. That monster of destructive rage and phallic power whom Melchior Lorch portrays wearing the triple tiara and carrying the keys and the papal cross was seen by millenarians in every ‘false cleric’. As for the Jews, the belief that they murdered Christian children was so widespread and so firmly held that not all the protests of popes and bishops could ever eradicate it. If we examine the picture of Jews torturing and castrating a helpless and innocent boy (see below), we can appreciate with just how much fear and hate the fantastic figure of the bad father could be regarded. And the other stock accusation brought against the Jews in medieval Europe – of flogging, stabbing and pulverising the host – has a similar significance. For if from the point of view of a Jew an atrocity committed on the host would be meaningless, from the point of view of a medieval Christian it would be a repeat of the torturing and killing of Christ. Here too, then, the wicked (Jewish) father is imagined as assaulting the good son; this interpretation is borne out by the many stories of how, in the middle of the tortured wafer, Christ appeared as a child, dripping blood and screaming.

 

To these demons in human form, the Jew and the ‘false cleric’ was attributed every quality which belonged to the Beast from the Abyss – not only his cruelty but also his grossness, his animality, his blackness and uncleanliness. Jewry and clergy together were depicted as forming the foul black host of the enemy which stood opposite the clean, white army of the saints, the children of God that we are, the poisonous worms that you are, as a medieval rhymester put it. The saints knew that it was their task to wipe that foul black host off the face of the earth, for only an earth which had been so purified would be fit to carry the New Jerusalem, the shining Kingdom of the Saints.

The European ‘civilization’ of the later Middle Ages was always prone to demonising peripheral communities, but at times of acute disorientation, this tendency became especially marked. Hardship, poverty, distress, wars and famines were so much a part of everyday life that they were taken for granted and could be faced in a sober, stoical manner. But when a situation emerged which was not only menacing but also completely out of the ordinary run of experience, when people were suddenly confronted by hazards which were unfamiliar, unpredictable and uncontrollable, they tended to fly into the fantasy world of demons. If the threat was sufficiently overwhelming and the disorientation widespread and acute, the resulting psychological atmosphere could be one of mass delusion of the most dangerous kind. This is what happened in 1348 when the Black Death reached Europe. It was at once concluded that some group of people must have poisoned the water supply. As the plague continued to spread, people became more bewildered and desperate, and they began to look for a ‘scapegoat’. Suspicion fell first on the lepers, then the poor, the rich and the clergy, before the blame finally came to rest on the Jews, who were thereupon almost exterminated.

The People’s Crusade of 1320: A Trail of Terror…

Set in this context, the last of the People’s Crusades can be seen as a first attempt to usher in a different type of millenarianism which aimed, rather confusedly, at casting down the mighty and raising up the poor. By the first quarter of the fourteenth-century crusading zeal was more than ever a monopoly of the very poor. The Kingdom of Jerusalem had come to an end and Syria had been evacuated; the Papacy had exchanged the mystical aura of Rome for the security of Avignon; political power in each country was passing into the hands of hard-headed bureaucrats. Only the restless masses between the Somme and the Rhine were still stirred by old eschatological fantasies which they now transfused with a bitter truculence. Very little was required to launch these people upon some wholly unrealistic attempt to turn these fantasies into realities. In 1309 Pope Clement V sent an expedition of the Knights Hospitallers to conquer Rhodes as a stronghold against the Turks; the same year saw a very serious famine in Picardy, the Low Countries and along the lower part of the Rhine. The two circumstances taken together were sufficient to provoke another People’s Crusade in that area. Again, armed columns appeared, consisting of miserably poor artisans and labourers with an admixture of nobles who had squandered their wealth. These people begged and pillaged their way through the countryside, killing Jews and also storming castles in which nobles sheltered their valuable sources of revenue. These included the fortress of the Duke of Brabant, who only three years earlier had routed an army of insurgent cloth-workers and, it was reported, had buried its leaders alive. The Duke at once led an army against the crusaders and drove them off with heavy losses.

In 1315 a universal failure of crops was driving the poor to cannibalism and long processions of naked penitents cried to God for mercy. Millenarian hopes flared high and in the midst of the famine a prophecy circulated which foretold that, driven by hunger, the poor would in that same year rise in arms against the rich and powerful and would overthrow the Church and a great monarchy. After much bloodshed, a new age would dawn in which all men would be united in exalting one single Cross. It is not surprising that when in 1320 Philip V of France halfheartedly suggested yet another expedition to the Holy Land the idea was at once taken up by the desperate masses, even though it was wholly impracticable and was rejected out of hand by the Pope. An apostate monk and an unfrocked priest began to preach the crusade in northern France to such good effect that a great movement sprang up as suddenly and unexpectedly as a whirlwind. A large part was also played by prophetae who claimed to be divinely appointed saviours.  Jewish chroniclers, drawing on a lost Spanish source, tell of a shepherd-boy who announced that a dove had appeared to him and, having changed into the Virgin, had hidden him summon a crusade and had promised it victory.

As in the first Crusade of the Pastoureaux in 1251, the first to respond were shepherds and swineherds, some of them mere children. So this movement too became known as a Shepherds’ Crusade. But once again, the genuine crusaders were joined by male and female beggars, outlaws and bandits, so that the resulting army became turbulent. Before long, numbers of Pastoureaux were being arrested and imprisoned; but always the remainder, enthusiastically supported by the general populace, would storm the prison and free their brethren. When they reached Paris these hordes terrified the city, breaking into the Chatalet, assaulting the Provost and finally, on a rumour that armed forces were to be brought out against them, drawing themselves up in battle formation in the fields of St Germain-des-Pés. As no force materialised to oppose them to oppose them they left the capital and marched south until they entered the English territories in the south-west. The Jews had been expelled from the Kingdom of France in 1306 but here they were still to be found; as the Pastoureaux marched they killed Jews and looted their property. The French King sent orders that the Jews should be protected, but the populace, convinced that this massacre was holy work, did everything to help the crusaders. When the governor and the royal officials at Toulouse arrested many Pastoureaux the townsfolk stormed the prison and a great massacre of the Jews followed. At Albi, the consuls closed the gates but the crusaders forced their way in, crying that they had come to kill the Jews, and were greeted by the populace with wild enthusiasm. In other towns, the authorities themselves joined the townsfolk and the crusaders in the massacre. Throughout south-west France, from Bourdeaux in the west to Albi in the east, almost every Jew was killed.

France and Spain, c. 1328

When they reached Avignon, having turned their violence upon the clergy, Pope John XXII excommunicated the Pastoureaux and called upon the Seneschal of Beaucaire to take to the field against them; these measures proved effective. People were forbidden, on pain of death, to give food to them, towns began to close their gates and many of the ‘shepherds’ perished miserably of hunger. Many others were killed in battle at various points between Toulouse and Narbonne, or captured and hanged from trees in twenties and thirties. Pursuits and executions carried on for three months. The survivors split up and crossed the Pyrenees to kill more Jews, which they did until the King of Aragon led a force against them and dispersed them. More than any earlier crusade, this one was felt while it lasted to threaten the whole existing structure of society. The Pastoureaux of 1320 struck terror into the hearts of all the rich and privileged.

Sources:   

András Bereznay (2001), The Times History of Europe. London: Times Books.

Norman Cohn (1970), The Pursuit of the Millenium. St Alban’s: Granada Books.