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of ferocious enmity were the Jews of the Rhineland towns. The pilgrims’ prime motives were theft and pillage, but underlying the savagery of their attack, which emerges in all the sources, Latin and Hebrew, was a hatred for a people who, like the infidels occupying Jerusalem, had denied Christ. More than a thousand Jews, men, women, and children, were killed in Mainz and many more in cities as far away as Prague which opened their gates to the pilgrims. When they passed on into Hungary on the road to the East, the pilgrims treated the local inhabitants as they had the Jews. In one village they impaled a young Hungarian boy who could not tell them where they could find food. See Runciman, History, vol. 1, p. 116.

32. See Runciman, History, vol. 1, pp. 106–7.

33. There were many foreigners in Byzantine service, most notably the Varangian Guard, composed first of Norsemen, and later of Normans. After 1066, many Anglo-Saxons left England and made a new life in the East.

34. Nor did the church approve of the massacres of Jews in the Rhineland by the popular Crusade. See Jacob R. Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World: A Source Book 315–1791, New York: Harper & Row, 1965, pp. 115–20.

35. Lyons, “Crusading Stratum,” pp. 147–61.

36. An Arab-Syrian Gentleman and Warrior in the Period of the Crusades: Memoirs of Us-amah ibn Munqidh, trans. Philip K. Hitti, New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, pp. 120–21.

37. Gesta Francorum, cited in France, Victory, p. 277.

38. The Church of St. Peter was being reconsecrated after its use as a mosque. Some doubted the authenticity of the relic but kept silent, because this manifest token of divine favor suddenly restored the spirits of the Crusaders.

39. Even the fresh horses that had been gathered along the way had mostly expired and been eaten.

40. Kerbogha’s army comprised many different detachments, including infantry spearmen and archers.

41. H. A. R. Gibb, The Damascus Chronicle of the Crusades, Extracted and Translated from the Chronicle of Ibn Al-Qalanisi, London: Luzac and Co., 1932, p. 47.

42. Harold S. Fink, Fulcher of Chartres: A History of the Expedition to Jerusalem 1095–1127, Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1969, pp. 112–13.

43. Ibid., p. 106.

44. Cited in Hillenbrand, Crusades, p. 71.

45. For the images of Jerusalem, see Dupront, Mythe, vol. III, pp. 1361–4.

46. There are suggestions that a Crusader embassy was negotiating in Cairo for a Christian protectorate over the city, such as the Byzantines had previously exercised, and as Emperor Frederick II was to conclude in 1229 for a period of ten years.

47. See Runciman, History, vol. 1, pp. 226–7.

48. The often quoted statement that the Crusaders walked “up to their knees in blood” was a metaphor. The similarity between so many of the descriptions of killing and atrocity, notably in the capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204 and then by the Ottomans in 1453, suggests that many of these statements are stylistic and not intended to be taken literally. See August C. Krey, The First Crusade: The Accounts of Eyewitnesses and Participants, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1921, pp. 257–62.

49. Gesta Francorum, cited by Elizabeth Hallam (ed.), Chronicles of the Crusades: Eyewitness Accounts of the Wars Between Christianity and Islam, Godalming: Bramley Books, 1996, p. 93.

50. See France, Victory, p. 356.

51. See Runciman, History, vol. 2, pp. 237–64.

52. For a good introduction to this topic, see Christopher Tyerman, The Invention of the Crusades, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998. By the late eighteenth century, the future president of the young United States Thomas Jefferson had turned the word into a figure of speech, calling for a “crusade against ignorance.”

53. “A holy war fought against those perceived to be external or internal foes of Christendom for the recovery of Christian property or in defence of the Church or Christian people”; see Riley-Smith, Short History, pp. xxviii–xxix. There were attempts to limit this plenary power, and Marsilio of Padua was only the most notable