The next weeks were filled with unusual activity. If Count Volkmar of Gretz was going to Jerusalem, along with more than a thousand of his people, he would leave little to chance. For his wife and daughter, eight wagons and sixteen draft horses were provided filled with enough equipment to serve them and the six servants who would care for them. Eight additional wagons carried foodstuffs, implements and armor. Besides the servants for the countess, an even dozen serfs marched on foot to care for the count and Wenzel of Trier. In addition, eight grooms brought along some two dozen riding horses for the minor knights associated with the count, and these were followed by about a thousand men consisting of merchants and farmers, monks and ordinary serfs. About a hundred women wanted to join the procession, but this number diminished after Matwilda had weeded out the known prostitutes.
On Sunday morning, May 24, 1096, the Gretz contingent formed up outside the city gates, an orderly crowd of peasants waiting for the arrival of Gunter and his men from the north. At about ten o’clock outriders appeared, soon followed by a host of some six thousand, and it was quickly apparent that the care which Count Volkmar had given to the selection of the men from Gretz had not been duplicated by Gunter when he chose the volunteers at Cologne; for he appeared with a rabble. Thieves, men sprung from jail and notorious prostitutes were conspicuous. There were gangs of debtors who had shaken free of their creditors, and peasants who would hoe the fields no more. Boredom was banished and the frenzy of unknown adventure was high as Gunter, now splendid in new armor and a red tunic with a blue cross, spurred his horse through the wagons and the cattle. He was attended by eleven knights, and these were not rabble but hardened young men capable of defending themselves and the unruly crowd they led.
“Did you ever see such an army?” Gunter cried with animal joy as the knights rode up to welcome the new recruits.
Volkmar made no reply, but as the mob pressed in upon his own well-disciplined people he suggested, “Let Wenzel bless us as we start,” and all uncovered as the priest intoned, “Dear God, protect this holy army as we march to Jerusalem to recover it from the infidel. Strengthen our arms, for we fight Your battle. Sweet Jesus, lead us, for we wear Your cross. Death to the infidel!”
The multitude echoed, “Death to the infidel!” and at this unfortunate moment a Jew of Gretz who sold clothes in the market happened to pass the gates, and Gunter cried, “Great Jesus! Why should we ride to Jerusalem to fight His enemies there and leave His greater enemies here to prosper?”
And in the heat of the moment he dashed with a loud cry through the gates and with one swipe of his great sword slashed off the head of the unsuspecting Jew. The mob howled its approval, and men from the north started spurring their horses into the city, followed by thousands on foot.
“Kill the Jews!” they bellowed.
A Jewish woman was coming to market, and a lancer ran her through, using his tremendous strength to toss her in the air, where she hung suspended for a terrible moment, her eyes still seeing the sudden mob beneath her. The crowd shrieked and she descended sickeningly toward the street, where they trampled her to death.
Volkmar, sensing what must follow, tried to fight his way back into the city, but he was powerless. “Stop!” he begged, but none would listen.
The mob was after Jews but could not have explained why. In the obligatory Easter sermons they had listened to ill-informed priests crying, “The Jews crucified Jesus Christ and God wants you to punish them.” From learned discourses delivered by bishops they had discovered that in the Old Testament, Isaiah himself had prophesied that a Virgin would give birth to Jesus Christ, and that the Jews had stubbornly rejected the teaching of their own Book: “For this sin they shall be outcast forever.” And in their daily life they watched as the Jew lent money, which honest men were forbidden to do, and some had known at first-hand the interest which moneylenders charged. But stronger than any of these complaints was the inchoate suspicion, not often expressed in words, that in a world where all decent men were Christian, there was something intolerably perverse in a group who clung obstinately to an earlier religion which had been proved an error. The Jews were a living insult to the trend of history, and if one helped exterminate them, he must be doing God’s work. Therefore, when Gunter pointed out the folly of marching to Jerusalem to confront God’s enemies while the greater foe stayed here in Gretz, he awakened a score of latent hatreds.
“Kill the Jews!” the mob roared, storming its way through the gates, and local residents—who had no specific cause for cursing Jews—were caught up in the frenzy and suddenly turned informer. “In that house a Jew lives!” Like locusts the mob descended upon the house, killing, pillaging and laying waste.
“Get the moneylender!” cried a man who had never borrowed from any Jew, and like a monstrous animal the crowd turned with one accord and swept into the southern corner of the city, where a Christian led them to Hagarzi’s four-storied house. Fortunately the banker was absent, but soldiers flushed out his daughter, whom they ran through with two lances, throwing her far over their shoulders. As she flew in the air it became evident that she was pregnant, and women shrieked approvingly, “With that one you caught two!” And they stamped her to pieces.
“The synagogue!” they shouted, and this low building so unlike a church infuriated them, for when they came to that holy place they found that some sixty-seven Jews had taken refuge inside. “Burn them all!” the mob screamed, and about the entrances chairs and scraps of wood were placed, drenched with oil, and set afire. When gasping Jews tried to fight their way free they were greeted with lances jabbing them back into the flames. All perished.
They were the lucky ones, for now the Crusaders started flushing out Jewish women. Old ones they killed on the spot, running them through with daggers. Younger ones they stripped naked and raped time after time in the town square, with all applauding. Then, in disgust, they hacked off the girls’ heads.
For two sickly hours the Crusaders stormed through the streets of Gretz, killing and maiming and defiling. When at last they leaned weary on their swords, with blood on their tunics and smoke in their eyes, they justified their slaughter to each other: “It would have been folly to leave for Jerusalem when the men who crucified our Saviour stayed behind to grow rich.” When they withdrew from the city they left behind eighteen hundred dead Jews and the beginning of a heritage that would haunt Germany forever.
In the dreadful silence that followed, when the great knights were gone and the priests, one sturdy Jew wearing cloth from Venice and a fur collar crept out from the refuge into which he had fought his way some hours before and started moving cautiously through the alleys. He saw the gutted synagogue with its sixty-seven charred skeletons. He saw his offspring strewn across the streets. He saw the smoldering memorials and the frightened, bewildered faces of the neighborhood Christians whom he had often befriended. They recognized him as a Jew, one of the great men of their city, but they were so sated with killing that no one raised his hand against the pitiful man. We leave him there—an honest banker—beginning to pick up the hideous shreds of his life, moving with glassy eyes through the alleys of Gretz; but we do not abandon him, for he will be with us again and again. His name is Hagarzi of Gretz, a fugitive groats maker from the town of Makor, and to his neighbors, when the grandeur of his courage is recognized, he will continue to be known as God’s Man.
When the Crusaders camped that night beside the Rhine, Count Volkmar left his wife and went to the tent of the captains, where he accosted his brother-in-law, who lounged in a chair, demanding, “How dare you kill the Jews of my city?”
Gunter, relaxed after the exciting day, had no desire for argument. “They are the known enemies of God,” he explained, not raising his voice, “and in this tent we have just sworn that when we have passed none will live along the Rhine.” The knights showed that they supported this resolve.
Volkmar, appalled by the coldness of this evil decision, grasped Gunter’s arm. “You must no
t encourage the men,” he pleaded. “Look at the madness they performed in Gretz.”
Patiently Gunter brushed away his brother-in-law’s hand. “I’m sorry the fire from the synagogue burned some of your city,” he apologized, determined that no argument should mar the profitable day.
Volkmar dragged him to his feet. “You must prevent such riots,” he commanded. “You’re not to kill Jews.”
Gunter was annoyed. He was taller than Volkmar, heavier, younger. But he merely removed his brother’s arm and slumped back into his seat. “It would be folly to leave the Jews behind. They crucified Christ and they must not grow rich while we are absent fighting.” He turned from the count, dismissing him, but such contempt Volkmar would not tolerate, and he roughly dragged Gunter to his feet; but the young blond warrior had had enough. Raising his powerful right hand he pushed it into his brother’s face and shoved with force. Volkmar was driven back. He staggered and fell. Reaching for his sword he would have unsheathed it, but was prevented from doing so by Gunter’s knights, who closed in on him and lifted him to his feet, rushing him from the tent. Gottfried, the foolish one with no chin, found bravery and shouted from the tent flaps, “Bother us no more. Gunter leads this army and we shall leave not one Jew alive.”
Up the Rhine surged the Crusaders, led by Gunter with his cross of blue, and wherever they struck, Jews were slaughtered. At Mainz, at Worms, at Speyer there were killings to make a man sick. At the head of the murderers rode Gunter, shouting that God Himself had ordained the destruction of His enemies. In small towns Jews huddled together in one house and were burned alive. In cities they crept into protected quarters and were chopped to death as bold knights coursed among them. In one town the Jews assembled, and with knives sharpened as the Torah demanded for ritual slaughter, methodically cut their own throats so that the floors were slippery with blood when the Crusaders crashed down the door.
“Filthy infidels—to do such a thing!” the knights protested, but their rage reached its apex when Jewish mothers slit the throats of their own babies rather than wait for the crusading lances.
“They’re animals,” Gunter bellowed. “What mother would kill her own babe?”
We can speak accurately of these matters because Wenzel of Trier recorded them in his chronicle of the German Crusade:
Most strange in this chain of death was the fact that except for a few Jews who were killed in the heat of first assault, all could have saved their lives and their souls by the simple act of converting to the True Faith, but this they obstinately refused to do, preferring to maintain their abominable error rather than to accept salvation. I myself offered not less than four thousand Jews the love and peace of my Lord Jesus Christ, but obstinately they turned their backs upon me, crying, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one,” and our Christians had no other choice but to slay them.
Sickened by the killings my Lord Volkmar tried repeatedly to break away from the army and return home, but I was forced to remind him that he had sworn an oath to capture Jerusalem and if for any reason he refused to honor that oath he would be forever excommunicate, so he had no escape but to keep with us and I consoled him: “Is it not better that an honest man should ride with Gunter, endeavoring to restrain him?” But even so, I believe that my Lord Volkmar would have left us had not his wife Matwilda pleaded with him that it was his duty to remain, so that what later happened to the countess was in a sense of her own doing.
The slaughter of the Jews continued until one afternoon two girls about seventeen years of age stood side by side until the rapists were upon them, then carefully slit each other’s throats. It was impossible for two people to kill each other in this manner, but the Jewish girls had done it.
“For God’s sake, stop!” Volkmar pleaded for the hundredth time, and when his wife saw the two dead Jewesses, of the same age as her daughter Fulda, but prettier even in death, she ran to them and kissed their ashen lips; and the killing ceased—but thirty thousand Jews were dead, and the great Crusade had been launched in blood.
The march through Austria was more peaceful, for when the attention of the knights was no longer distracted by Jews they were free to look among the women who had accompanied the march, and each found one or two who promised well on the long journey. And there were pleasant nights in the hayricks and under the stars. Gunter kept the young woman he had picked up on his initial survey as well as a prostitute from Speyer; but Volkmar stayed with his wife and daughter, praying that somehow the rabble of which he found himself an unwilling part would finally stumble into Constantinople, where the real armies would be assembling.
But in Hungary, Gunter and his Germans ran into trouble. Barely a month had elapsed since the hordes of Peter the Hermit, marching without money, had caused ill will by trying to live off the land, snatching what they needed from Hungarian peasants, and Gunter’s men were about to harvest the hatred thus engendered. At the first town the Crusaders found that local merchants had closed their shops, knowing that they would not be paid if they kept them open, and there was no food. Gunter solved this by shouting an order: “Break open the shops and help yourselves.” There was moderate fighting and some two dozen Hungarians were killed.
“By God!” Gunter cried as he assembled his men at the far end of town. “They meant to give us trouble and we are the Lord’s men!”
“Let’s go back and destroy the place,” one of his assistants proposed, and for a moment the angry mob hesitated on the verge of another slaughter, but Count Volkmar succeeded in luring them down the river and a massacre was avoided. Of the leading knights, he was the oldest, and certainly the sagest, so he pointed out to his younger associates that their main job was not to brawl with Hungarians but to reach Constantinople with as many fighting men as possible. “The enemy is in Asia,” he kept reminding them.
But when at the second town the citizens—prewarned by messengers from the first—barricaded the gates, refusing to allow any Crusader to enter, Gunter shouted, “Open the gates now or we’ll burn them down.” The Hungarians refused and a great fire was started, and whenever a Hungarian tried to escape he was shot with arrows and the town perished.
From that day on, it was war between Hungary and the Crusaders. When the latter reached a town they found it evacuated, with all food gone. Starvation threatened. Ruthless Hungarian raiders stalked the stragglers, killing off the weaker Germans. Horses and wagons were destroyed and such constant pressure was maintained that Gunter lost one man in eight.
With groans of relief the disorganized columns finally straggled into Bulgaria, where those recently converted Christians were willing to extend the Crusaders one chance: the first Bulgarian town sent emissaries to welcome the marchers, but a priest warned Wenzel: “Tell your knights to behave, or there must be trouble.” Wenzel summoned Gunter and Volkmar and said, in words which he later recorded in his chronicle:
“My Lords, we have seen in Hungary what ill returns a want of Christian grace can bring, and I pray you, direct your men to behave as an army of God should, and let us be gentle with the Bulgarians, for they worship the same Jesus Christ that we do, and let us be an example to them of what the brotherhood of the cross signifies.” But either they did not heed my words or their men did not listen, for after the gates were opened and the market made available, our men, sore and famished from the wars in Hungary, descended upon the poor Bulgarians like heathen, taking their wares for the asking. The townsmen, a vigorous people, defended themselves ably, and a fighting began in which many were killed, and the Crusaders became enraged and chased through houses seeking for women, which they treated most shamefully, killing many. It was a pity that day to be wearing the cross of God.
The retaliation was inexorable. If the raiders of Hungary had been remorseless, those of Bulgaria were worse, and on the afternoon of July 15, 1096, a barefoot crowd of peasants swept down and isolated the contingent in which Count Volkmar and his family traveled, taking some seven hundred Germans prisoner. To
his horror the count watched as the Bulgarians started methodically to chop off the heads of all, but he was saved by a knowing peasant who cried, “For this one and his family we can get ransom.” And Volkmar was led away to prison at Sofia.
In some ways this was the best thing that happened to him during the Crusade, for while he languished in jail with his wife and daughter, waiting for Wenzel to appear with the ransom money, Gunter and his knights struggled and slaughtered their way through Bulgaria, losing almost a third of their army. And when they finally did reach Constantinople they found their way barred by the great wall of that city.
“Open the gates, or we’ll tear the city down!” Gunter blustered, whereupon the Byzantine Christians dispatched a skilled army which punished the Germans badly, killing off another nine hundred. Much chastened, the Crusaders were admitted to the marvelous capital of the east just in time to join up with Peter the Hermit as he boarded a small fleet which would ferry him from Europe to Asia. With deep emotion Gunter stood in the bow of his boat, waiting to leap ashore in Asia and start the real march to Jerusalem. Of the sixteen thousand pilgrims who had started with him from the Rhine less than nine thousand remained, but as the boats touched shore these cried with great voice. “It is God’s will! Let us crush the infidel.” The Crusade was formally under way.