Early Middle Ages and Crusades
Second Crusade (preaching by the monk Raoul)
1146-1147·Rhénanie, France
The toll is reproduced exactly as the source states it — never rounded, never added to another. Tolls overlap from one event to the next.
Cologne, Mainz, Worms, Speyer, Würzburg (1147), Carentan, Ramerupt, Sully
The preaching of the Second Crusade reopened the wounds of the first. A Cistercian monk, Raoul, traveled through the Rhineland calling for strikes against the enemies of the faith who were close at hand.
Cologne, Mayence, Worms, Spire, Wurtzbourg witnessed isolated killings and looting; in France, people were killed in Carentan, in Ramerupt — where Rabbenou Tam, grandson of Rachi and greatest Talmudist of his time, was wounded and left for dead — and in Sully. The communities took refuge in the imperial castles that Conrad III opened to them, notably Münzenberg, paying for their protection.
What distinguishes this wave from that of 1096 is the intervention of Bernard de Clairvaux: he wrote that Jews should neither be killed nor expelled, traveled himself to Mayence and silenced Raoul. The toll remained incomparable to that of the First Crusade, and the Hebrew chroniclers were grateful to him for it.
- Period :
- Early Middle Ages and Crusades
- Type :
- Military repression
- Region :
- Western Europe
- Country :
- Allemagne et France
Éphraïm de Bonn, *Sefer Zekhirah* ; Otton de Freising, *Gesta Friderici* ; lettres de Bernard de Clairvaux.