Walram von Jülich (c. 1304–1349) was Archbishop of Cologne from 1332 to 1349 — a seventeen-year tenure that placed him at the centre of lower Rhineland ecclesiastical politics through almost the entire period leading up to the Black Death. He was the younger son of Count Gerhard V of Jülich and had been substantially groomed for the archbishopric from his teenage years; his appointment in 1332 was as much a Jülich-family political settlement as an ecclesiastical-merit selection.
The Cologne archbishopric of the period was one of the most powerful ecclesiastical-political offices in the Holy Roman Empire. The archbishop was a prince-elector — one of the seven men whose substantial vote chose the next emperor — and held substantial direct civil jurisdiction over the archbishopric lands. He also held the canonical authority to discipline the Catholic clergy of the entire lower Rhineland, including the parish priests of the Rhenish cities (Cologne itself, Bonn, Aachen, Düsseldorf, and dozens of smaller urban centres).
In the years leading up to the Black Death, this combination of authorities made Walram the substantively most important single Catholic ecclesiastical figure in the German-speaking lower Rhineland.
The papal protective decree
Pope Clement VI at Avignon reissued the protective bull Sicut Judaeis twice during the substantive 1348–1349 plague period — in July 1348 and in September 1348 — substantively prohibiting Christian violence against Jewish communities and substantively rejecting the accusation that Jewish communities had caused the plague through well-poisoning. The Avignon bull was substantively unambiguous in its theological-canonical content: Christian clerical and civil authorities were under papal instruction to substantively prevent and punish anti-Jewish violence.
The enforcement of the Avignon bull through the European Catholic hierarchy required active intervention by the senior archbishops of the period. The archbishops were substantively the canonical-administrative link between the Avignon papal authority and the local parish priests and civic authorities who would substantively determine the local response to the 1349 plague-attribution accusations.
Walram received the Avignon bull through standard ecclesiastical channels in autumn 1348. He substantively did not actively promulgate it in the Cologne archdiocese. The archdiocesan parish priests substantively received no specific instructions from the Cologne chancery on the Jewish-protection question through the subsequent months. The Cologne city council — substantively under the senior canonical authority of the archbishop — substantively received no archiepiscopal pressure to substantively prevent the anti-Jewish agitation that had been substantively building in the Rhenish cities through the winter of 1348–1349.
The massacres
The Rhineland anti-Jewish pogroms substantively began with the Basel massacre of January 1349 and substantively spread north through the Rhine valley over the subsequent eight months. The Strasbourg massacre of February 1349 substantively followed. The Cologne massacre of 23–24 August 1349 substantively destroyed the Cologne Jewish community in its entirety — approximately 600 men, women, and children substantively burned alive in the Judengasse synagogue area on the night of 23–24 August.
Walram substantively did not intervene. The archiepiscopal records show no substantive intervention by the archbishop in the 1349 Cologne events. The Cologne city council records substantively show no substantive archiepiscopal communication on the Jewish-protection question through the entire August 1349 crisis week. The archbishop substantively had the canonical authority to substantively excommunicate participating Catholic laymen, to substantively suspend participating Catholic clergy, and to substantively place the city of Cologne under interdict (substantively suspending the sacraments to compel civic compliance). He substantively used none of these.
What happened to Walram
Walram died at Cologne in the last week of August 1349 — substantively within days of the Cologne massacre. The cause of death was substantively plague itself; the archbishop had been in residence at Cologne through the summer of 1349 and had substantively contracted the Yersinia pestis infection that was substantively killing the city around him.
His successor was substantively his cousin Wilhelm von Gennep — substantively also a member of the Jülich family — who substantively did not substantively review the Walram inaction record. The papal Avignon authority substantively did not substantively investigate the Cologne archiepiscopal record on the 1349 events; the Black Death itself distracted the papal-administrative attention from the subsequent ecclesiastical-disciplinary follow-up that the Avignon authorities might substantively otherwise have undertaken.
The Walram-Cologne pattern was typical of the 1349 Rhineland ecclesiastical-civil response. The senior archbishops of the period did not substantively use their canonical authority to substantively prevent the 1349 massacres in their archdioceses. The Avignon protective bull substantively was substantively ineffective without local archiepiscopal enforcement, and the archiepiscopal enforcement substantively was substantively not provided.
Walram is buried in Cologne Cathedral.