THE “Zeal OF God”: THE REPRESENTATION OF ANGER IN THE LATIN CRUSADE ACCOUNTS OF THE 1096 RHINELAND MASSACRES Kate McGrath In 1096, as the first Crusaders under the leadership of Emicho and others began their march to the Holy Land, they participated in a series of violent massacres of Jewish communities throughout the Rhineland.1 As Jonathan Riley-Smith has outlined, the attack began in early May when the army associated with Emicho attacked the Jewish inhabitants of Speyer.2 More attacks by Emicho’s men followed in Worms and Mainz. The violence then expanded to include other armies who attacked Jewish communities in various cities, such as Cologne, Trier, Metz, and even Prague.3 There is no longer any doubt among modern historians that these attacks were not perpetuated by hordes of peasants, who were poorly organized and lacked military discipline, but instead, these attacks had a very clear connection with the crusading mission that initially inspired the participants.4 The Hebrew accounts of these Rhineland massacres by the participants of the so-called People’s Crusade have been extensively analyzed by modern 1 Parts of this chapter are taken or adapted from my doctoral dissertation. For a fuller treatment, see Kate McGrath, Medieval Anger: Rage and Outrage in Eleventh- and Twelfth- Century Anglo-Norman and Northern French Historical Narratives (Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 2007). Parts of it were also presented at the 2004 Midwest Medieval History Conference and 2005 International Congress for Medieval Studies. I am very grateful to the participants of those conferences, especially Matthew Gabriele and C. Matthew Phillips, for their insights into my work, and I am also very grateful to Marina Rustow and Stephen D. White for their suggestions on early versions of this work for my dissertation. 2 Jonathan Riley-Smith, “The First Crusade and the Persecution of the Jews,” Studies in Church History 21 (1984): 51. Emicho has been traditionally identified as Count of Leiningen, though scholars now believe that he is more likely to have been Count of Flonheim. See Albert of Aachen, Historia Ierosolimitana, ed. and trans. Susan Edgington (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 51, n. 66. 3 Riley-Smith, “The First Crusade,” 52. 4 Ibid., 56. See also M.D. Coupe, “Peter the Hermit: A Reassessment,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 31 (1987): 37–45; Robert Chazan, “The Anti-Jewish Violence of 1096: Perpetrators and Dynamics,” in Religious Violence Between Christians and Jews: Medieval Roots, Modern Perspectives, ed. Anna Sapir Abulafia (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 21; and E.O. Blake and Colin Morris, “A Hermit Goes to War: Peter and the Origins of the First Crusade,” in Monks, Hermits and the Ascetic Tradition, ed. W.J. Sheils (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 79–107. 26 kate mcgrath scholars, who have exposed the sources “to the sharpest tools of literary criticism.”5 The same level of analysis has not been as consistently applied to the Latin accounts of these attacks, perhaps because of their scarcity in the body of Crusade chronicles.6 After all, they are only treated in any significant way by a couple of Latin Crusade chroniclers, namely Albert of Aachen and Ekkehard of Aura.7 In addition, these accounts pale in com- parison to the rhetorical power of the Hebrew accounts, which work to memorialize the dead and construct the mourning of the survivors. The Latin accounts nevertheless provide an important resource for under- standing the motivations for the events of 1096 and for their role in the larger history of the First Crusade. Indeed, it is not possible to have a full understanding of how these events were understood by Christian contem- poraries of the Crusaders without them. It is important, moreover, to contextualize the accounts of the mas- sacres in light of the stated purpose of their texts, namely to tell the story 5 Jeremy Cohen, “From History to Historiography: The Study of the Persecutions and Constructions of Their Meaning” [Hebrew], in Facing the Cross: The Persecutions of 1096 in History and Historiography [Hebrew], ed. Yom Tov Assis, et al., The Ben-Zion Dunur Institute for Research in Jewish History (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2000, viii. For more on the Hebrew chronicles, see also Robert Chazan, “The Hebrew First- Crusade Chronicles,” Revue des Etudes Juives: Historia Judaica 133 (1974), 235–254; Chazan, God, Humanity and History: The Hebrew First Crusade Narratives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Chazan, “The Hebrew First Crusade Chronicles: Further Reflections,” American Jewish Studies Review 3 (1978): 79–98; Shlomo Eidelberg, The Jews and the Crusaders: The Hebrew Chronicles of the First and Second Crusades (Hoboken, NJ: KTAV Publishing House, Inc., 1977); and Anna Sapir Abulafia, “The Interrelationship between the Hebrew Chronicles on the First Crusade,” Journal of Semitic Studies 7, no. 2 (1982): 221–239. 6 One of the clear exceptions to this is Kenneth Stow, who discusses the Christian Latin sources at length. See Stow, “Conversion, Apostasy, and Apprehensiveness: Emicho of Floheim and the Fear of the Jews in the Twelfth Century,” Speculum 76, no. 4 (2001): 911– 933. The historiography on the Rhineland massacres is quite extensive. Effective reviews are offered by Benjamin Kedar in “Crusade Historians and the Massacres of 1096,” Jewish History 12, no. 2 (1998): 11–31; and Kedar, “The Forcible Baptisms of 1096: History and Historiography,” Forschungen zur Reichs-, Papst-und Landesgeschichte: Peter Herde zum 65. Geburstag von Freunden, Schülern und Kollegen dargebracht, ed. Karl Borchardt und Enno Bünz (Stuttgart: Anton Hieresmann, 1998), vol. 1, 187–200. 7 The Rhineland massacres are of course discussed by other Latin sources. The other sources, however, tend to be histories of particular regions or cities that work the mas- sacres into their local history. This paper will not treat such accounts of the massacres, as they functioned in very different ways than they do in the Crusade chronicles. A good treatment of the Gesta Treverorum, which is one such source, is Robert Chazan, “Christian and Jewish Perceptions of 1096: A Case Study of Trier,” Jewish History 13, no. 2 (1999): 9–22. See also Tuomas Heikkilä, “Pogroms of the First Crusade in Medieval Local Historiography: The Death of Archbishop Eberhard of Trier and the Legitimation of the Pogroms,” Medieval History Writing and Crusading Ideology Ed. Tuomas M. S. Lehtonen and Kurt Villads Jensen (Finland: Finnish Literature Society, 2005), 155–162..