The First Crusade began in 1096 with massacres of Jews along the Rhine, and its penultimate act in 1099 was the killing of nearly all of Jerusalem’s inhabitants—men, women, and children. The events sparked serious discussion among contemporary witnesses and continue to do so among scholars today. Jeremy Cohen has suggested that there is much artifice in the Hebrew narratives in Sanctifying the Name of God: Jewish Martyrs and Jewish Memories of the First Crusade (Philadelphia, 2004). Cohen does not question the scale or brutality of the pogroms, concluding that the accounts expressed the utter horror and guilt felt by the survivors. Most twelfth-century observers condemned the killing of the Jews and distinguished its perpetrators from the real crusaders. Chazan, European Jewry, provides the best interpretation of massacres as results of mob violence. Matthew Gabriele o.ers an eschatological interpretation in “Against the Enemies of Christ: The Role of Count Emicho in the Anti-Jewish Violence of the First Crusade,” in Christian Attitudes toward the Jews in the Middle Ages: A Casebook, ed. Michael Frassetto (New York, 2006), 84–111.
Almost all the dozen chroniclers who wrote books about the Crusade in the twenty years following Jerusalem’s capture acknowledge it, sometimes with disbelief or disgust or denial, but always with discomfort. Ekkehard does mention the cannibalism in the universal chronicle attributed to him (published as Frutolfs und Ekkhards Chroniken und die anonyme Kaiserchronik, ed. Franz-Josef Schmale and Irene Schmale-Ott [Darmstadt, 1972], 151–52). At some point during this activity—as we shall see, the sources diverge signi*cantly—an indeterminate number of soldiers ate from the flesh of enemy dead.
Crusader Cannibalism: The Evidence
“After our leaders had seen this [the eating of the dead], they had the pagans moved outside the city gates. There they piled them into a mound and later set fire to them” (Peter Tudebode, Historia de Hierosolymitano itinere, ed. J. H. Hill and L. L. Hill, intro. and notes trans. Philippe Wol. (Paris, 1977), 124–25). Besides specifying that the Franks were eating Muslims, this new information gives the cannibalism a secretive, anarchical quality, performed without the knowledge of the leaders and immediately suppressed on discovery. Phrased in these terms, what happened at Ma‘arra seems comprehensible: shocking, sad, but easily explicable, especially from a medieval perspective. For eleventh-century Europe was not a society free of homegrown cannibalism. In 1069, according to John of Worcester, as a result of William the Conqueror’s harrying of the north, “famine so prevailed that men ate the 2esh of horses, dogs, cats and human beings” (The Chronicle of John of Worcester, ed. and trans. P. McGurk, vol. 3 (Oxford, 1998), 11). In the first, around the millennium, “the famine had become so savage that grown sons ate their mothers while women did the same to their babies, lost to all maternal love” (Rodulfus Glaber, Historiarum libri quinque, ed. John France (Oxford, 1989), 2.17.82–83).
Three other monks famously rewrote the Gesta Francorum—Guibert of Nogent, Robert the Monk, and Baudry of Bourgueil—all of them around 1107 (Riley-Smith, First Crusade, 135–52). Each of them, more directly than the Gesta, Tudebode, or the Monte Cassino writer, expresses a sense of horror at the cannibalism (Baudry of Bourgueil, Historia Hierosolymitana, RHC Oc. 4:3.26.86–3.27.87; Guibert of Nogent, Dei gesta per Francos, ed. R. B. C. Huygens, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis (hereafter CCCM) 127A (Turnhout, 1996), 6.9.241; and Robert the Monk, Historia Hierosolimitana, RHC Oc. 3:8.8.850).
The third writer in this group, Baudry of Bourgueil, acknowledges occurrences of cannibalism somewhat reluctantly. “It is said, and has been con*rmed, that many ate Turkish 2esh, that is, human flesh” (Baudry, Historia, 3.27.86). So far the chroniclers agree on the essential facts of the cannibalism: that it occurred after the siege and that it was born of despair and famine. They disagree about its relative secrecy, with most writers implying that it happened in dark corners of the city, but with the Monte Cassino compiler saying that human 2esh was being traded openly.
The other independent source, Ralph of Caen, traveled to the East after the Crusade and met two of its heroes, the Italian Norman warriors Bohemond and Tancred. About the latter he wrote a biography, The Deeds of Tancred, completed sometime between 1112 and 1118.⁵⁶ When Ralph recalls the cannibalism of Ma‘arra, he transforms it into a grisly public spectacle: “I have heard them say that a lack of food compelled them to make a meal of human 2esh, that adults were put in the stewpot, and that boys were skewered on spits. Both were cooked and eaten” (Ralph, Gesta Tancredi, 97.675).
The Byzantine princess Anna Comnena places the cannibalism earlier still, during the People’s Crusade led by Peter the Hermit. As this ragtag army devastated the lands around Nicea, she writes in language reminiscent of Ralph’s and Gilo’s, “they cut in pieces some of the babies, impaled others on wooden spits, and roasted them over a *re; old people were subjected to every kind of torture” (The Alexiad of Anna Comnena, trans. E. R. A. Sewter (London, 1969), 10.6.311).
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