History of the Journey to Jerusalem
A long Latin history of the First Crusade and the early kingdom of Jerusalem by a cleric of Aachen who never went east. It gives a Latin narrative of the attacks on the Jews of the Rhineland in 1096.
Read the text at sourcebooks.fordham.edu ↗The same extract in A. C. Krey, The First Crusade, 1921, pp. 54–56 (Internet Archive) ↗A Hebrew account of the attack on the Jews of Mainz, in translation (Fordham Medieval Sourcebook) ↗
Little is known of Albert. A. C. Krey, introducing his translation, says that Albert by his own admission never visited the Holy Land, that he drew on the spoken and written testimony of those who had, and that his work, which runs to 1120, was written at some point between that year and the middle of the century. Krey adds that its value has been much disputed.
His account of the massacres at Cologne and Mainz is that of a Christian cleric of the region writing a generation later. He condemns the killing and says that the attackers acted from greed. Hebrew accounts from the Jewish communities themselves also survive; one, on Mainz, can be read in translation at the Fordham Sourcebook.
Cited in
- 1095 to 1099, firm date