9 stories from this place.
Walram von Jülich, Archbishop of Cologne from 1332 to 1349, was the senior Catholic ecclesiastical authority for the entire lower Rhineland during the Black Death. He had personal authority sufficient to prevent the 1349 anti-Jewish massacres in his archdiocese. He chose not to use it.
Read the story →Count Emicho of Flonheim led the unofficial 'German Crusade' of 1096 — the substantial armed band that conducted the Mainz, Worms, and Cologne massacres of Rhineland Jews. The army never reached Constantinople. King Coloman of Hungary destroyed it in a series of military engagements in late summer 1096. Emicho himself survived and returned home in disgrace.
Read the story →The medieval Cologne Jewish ritual bath — a 13.5-metre-deep stone shaft sunk to reach groundwater — was rediscovered during 1956 building works in the cathedral-square excavations. It is substantially the only substantially intact 12th-century mikveh north of the Alps and substantively defines the standing archaeology of the medieval Cologne Jewish community.
Read the story →Mass psychogenic illness — the modern medical term for what older eras called collective madness — has been documented continuously across Europe and the rest of the world for at least seven hundred years. The clinical pattern is the same. The cultural framing changes.
Read the story →In the spring of 1096, before the First Crusade reached Asia, an army of pilgrims spent six weeks killing the Jewish communities of the Rhine.
Read the story →In July 1374, after a major Rhine flood, hundreds of people in Aachen began to dance in the streets and could not stop. The plague moved with them up the river.
Read the story →Cologne's Jewish community had stood since the fourth century. On the night of Saint Bartholomew, August 1349, a mob ended it in a few hours.
Read the story →Six weeks before the plague reached the city, the council of Strasbourg deposed its mayors, replaced them, and burned the city's Jewish community alive.
Read the story →In the summer of 1349 thousands of penitents marched through plague-stricken Europe flogging themselves twice a day. The Pope banned them within months.
Read the story →