Early Middle Ages and Crusades
First massacre of the First Crusade
Mai 1096·Rouen
The toll is reproduced exactly as the source states it — never rounded, never added to another. Tolls overlap from one event to the next.
Jews gathered in a church, ordered to be baptized or killed (Guibert de Nogent)
Rouen was, according to the account of Guibert de Nogent, the first place where the crusaders turned against the Jews. The abbot recounts that men on the point of departing for the East found it absurd to go and fight the enemies of the faith far away while leaving behind them, before their very eyes, a people whom they held to be such.
They gathered the Jews of the city into a church, where the choice was given to them between baptism and death. Guibert learned of the episode from a monk of his circle, himself a Jew converted in his childhood on that occasion: it is an indirect testimony, but it is contemporary.
No Hebrew chronicle describes Rouen; the Rhenish accounts, highly detailed, take no notice of northern France. It is from this imbalance of sources that the uncertainty arises about the extent of the French violence in that year.
- Period :
- Early Middle Ages and Crusades
- Type :
- Massacre
- Region :
- Western Europe
- Country :
- France
Guibert de Nogent, De vita sua ; chroniques normandes.