Christian children in a morbid revisiting of the crucifixion of Jesus. This charge,
called “blood libel” by historians, led to massacres of Jews in cities in England,
France, Spain, and Germany. In this way, Jews became convenient and vulnerable
scapegoats for Christian guilt and anxiety about eating Christ’s flesh.
After the Fourth Lateran Council, Jews were easy to spot as well. The council
required all Jews to advertise their religion by some outward sign, some special dress.
Local rulers enforced this canon with zeal, not so much because they were anxious to
humiliate Jews as because they saw the chance to sell exemptions to Jews eager to
escape the requirement. Nonetheless, sooner or later Jews almost everywhere had to
wear something to advertise their second-class status: in southern France and Spain
they had to wear a round badge; in Vienna they were forced to wear pointed hats.
CRUSADES
Attacks against Jews coincided with vigorous crusades. A new kind of crusade was
launched against the heretics in southern France; along the Baltic, rulers and
crusaders redrew Germany’s eastern border; and the Fourth Crusade was rerouted
and took Constantinople.
Against the Albigensians in southern France, Innocent III demanded that northern
princes take up the sword, invade Languedoc, wrest the land from the heretics, and
populate it with orthodox Christians. This Albigensian Crusade (1209–1229) marked
the first time the pope had offered warriors who were fighting an enemy within
Christian Europe all the spiritual and temporal benefits of a crusade to the Holy Land.
In the event, the political ramifications were more notable than the religious results.
After twenty years of fighting, leadership of the crusade was taken over in 1229 by
the Capetian kings. Southern resistance was broken and Languedoc was brought
under the control of the French crown. (On Map 6.4, p. 206, the area taken over by
the French crown corresponds more or less with the region of Toulouse.)
Like Spain’s southern boundary, so too was Europe’s northeast a moving frontier,
driven ever farther eastward by crusaders and settlers. By the twelfth century, the
peoples living along the Baltic coast—partly pagan, mostly Slavic- or Baltic-speaking
—had learned to make a living and even a profit from the inhospitable soil and
climate. Through fishing and trading, they supplied the rest of Europe and Rus’ with
slaves, furs, amber, wax, and dried fish. Like the earlier Vikings, they combined
commercial competition with outright raiding, so the Danes and the Saxons (i.e., the
Germans in Saxony) both benefited and suffered from their presence. It was Saint
