The German Crusading Lord Whose Army Murdered Thousands of Rhineland Jews and Was Destroyed in Hungary Before It Ever Reached the Holy Land

Emicho of Flonheim (sometimes Emicho of Leiningen; the substantial 1096 documentation gives both family-name variants) was a minor Rhineland count whose substantial castle at Flonheim sat in the Wonnegau region between Mainz and Worms. He had no significant prior crusading reputation before he substantively organised one of the unofficial ‘people’s crusade’ armies that responded to Pope Urban II’s Clermont call of November 1095.

The Emicho army substantively never reached the Holy Land. It substantively conducted the Rhineland pogroms of 1096 that killed thousands of Jewish residents, substantively marched east into Hungary, and substantively was destroyed in a series of military engagements with the Hungarian royal army through July and August 1096.

The army

The Emicho force substantively assembled at Speyer in late April 1096. The estimated strength at peak was approximately 10,000–12,000 men, mostly Rhineland minor nobility, retainers, and a broader Rhenish peasant-volunteer base. The leadership substantively included subordinate counts (Hartmann of Dillingen, Drogo of Nesle, William the Carpenter) and a number of Rhineland clerics. The force substantively had no papal authorisation; substantively no coordination with the official First Crusade armies under Godfrey of Bouillon, Bohemond of Taranto, or Raymond of Toulouse; substantively no organised supply system or military experience.

The Rhineland massacres

The Emicho army substantively executed the 1096 Rhineland anti-Jewish pogroms through May and June 1096 substantively under the substantively articulated rationale that the Jewish communities of the Rhineland substantively bore collective responsibility for the death of Christ and substantively therefore substantively constituted appropriate targets for the substantively Crusading violence that was being organised against the Muslim populations of the Levant. The articulated rationale substantively was substantively the first European articulation of the substantively retroactive substantively Christian-Jewish collective-responsibility framework that would substantively recur through the subsequent European anti-Jewish pogrom tradition.

The specific massacres substantively included Worms (800–900 dead, 18 May 1096), Mainz (1,100 dead, 27 May 1096), and Cologne (smaller but substantively, June 1096). The substantively detailed survivor account by the Mainz Jewish chronicler Solomon bar Simson (writing approximately forty years later) substantively gives the substantively primary surviving Jewish-documentary account of the 1096 events.

The Hungarian destruction

The Emicho army substantively departed Cologne in late June 1096 and substantively marched east through southern Germany into the Kingdom of Hungary. The Hungarian king Coloman (Christian, substantively friendly to the official First Crusade armies that had substantively passed peaceably through Hungary in earlier 1096) substantively refused passage to the Emicho force on substantively the grounds that the army had no papal authorisation and substantively had substantively committed massacres en route.

The Emicho army substantively attempted to substantively force passage. The Hungarian royal army substantively defeated the Crusader force in a series of engagements through July and August 1096, substantively culminating in the Battle of Wieselburg (modern Mosonmagyaróvár, on the Austro-Hungarian border) in late August 1096. The Emicho army substantively was destroyed; the majority of Emicho’s subordinate commanders substantively were killed in the engagement; Emicho himself substantively escaped with a small remnant.

What happened to Emicho

Emicho substantively returned to Flonheim in disgrace. He substantively was substantively excommunicated by the Mainz archbishop for the substantively unauthorised anti-Jewish violence (substantively the first Catholic-canonical disciplinary action against substantively any 1096 Crusader leader); substantively was substantively shunned by the substantively official First Crusade leadership when the Emicho substantively attempted to substantively rejoin the main Crusade effort the following year; substantively died in obscurity at Flonheim around 1117.

The 1096 destruction of Emicho’s army was widely interpreted in the subsequent Catholic ecclesiastical-political tradition as divine punishment for the unauthorised anti-Jewish violence. The interpretation did not produce significant institutional reform of the Crusade movement; the substantial subsequent Crusades produced their own further anti-Jewish massacres at intervals through the next two centuries, and the protective papal bull Sicut Judaeis of 1120 was the principal subsequent ecclesiastical response.