Shepherds' Crusade (1320)

The Shepherds' Crusade of 1320, also known as the Pastoureaux of 1320 (French: Pastoureaux, "little shepherds"), was a popular rising in France that began as a self-organized crusade of peasants and ended in massacres of Jewish communities in southern France and the Crown of Aragon. The historian Malcolm Barber notes that the rising receives little attention in most histories and is a relatively small-scale event for which the sources are limited, yet argues that it has wider implications than are generally recognised.^[1]

The movement is named after, and often compared with, an earlier Shepherds' Crusade of 1251. Accounts of the 1320 movement disagree on several points, including who led it, how many Jewish communities were destroyed, and how it ended; these disagreements are set out below.

Origins and the march north to south

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, the crusade was preached during the reign of Philip V by a suspended priest and an unfrocked monk, who told a band of peasants that the monarchy was neglecting the liberation of Palestine.^[2] The same entry says the movement, like its 1251 predecessor, began with sincere mystics but soon drew "ruffians of every description", and that its members wore rags and carried sticks and knives.^[2]

The band marched on Paris, where it freed prisoners from the Châtelet, then moved through Berry, Saintonge, and Aquitaine. The Catholic Encyclopedia puts its strength at about 40,000 people.^[2] The same source says the group planned to embark at Aigues-Mortes, as Louis IX had done, and then march on Avignon to confront the papal excommunication of the movement.^[2]

Violence against Jewish communities

The Jewish Encyclopedia dates a "second" wave of Pastoureaux violence to the spring of 1320. It describes a mob assembling near Agen on the banks of the Garonne and proceeding to Toulouse, killing Jews they met on the way.^[3] At Toulouse, it reports, Jews who had taken refuge in the Château-Narbonnais were killed unless they accepted baptism. At the castle of Verdun-sur-Garonne, besieged Jews are said to have chosen to kill one another rather than be taken, the last two throwing themselves from the battlements.^[3] The Catholic Encyclopedia reports the same episode at Verdun, giving the number of Jews as five hundred, and adds that town populations sometimes applauded the killing of Jews.^[2]

The Jewish Encyclopedia lists destroyed communities including Castel-Sarrasin, Agen, Albi, and Mont-de-Marsan, and counts 110 Jewish communities in southern France as wiped out.^[3] It reports that Pope John XXII condemned the movement but that attacks continued.^[3]

Spread into Aragon

The Jewish Encyclopedia reports that the violence reached Spain, with a total massacre of the Jewish community of Tudela in Navarre and seventy killed at Lérida.^[3] A 1997 review of David Nirenberg's Communities of Violence records Nirenberg's figure of 337 Jews killed in the royal castle of Montclus, in the Crown of Aragon.^[4]

End of the movement

The Catholic Encyclopedia says the seneschal (royal governor) of Carcassonne drove the crusaders into nearby marshes, where hunger dispersed them. It adds that later military action led to executions, and that scattered bands continued to ravage southern France for years.^[2] The Jewish Encyclopedia gives a different ending: it says the movement's leader was mortally wounded before Montpellier, and that a king of Aragon suppressed the crusaders in Spain, with 2,000 of them dying.^[3]

Interpretation

Historians differ on why the movement turned on Jews. The reviewer of Nirenberg's book says Nirenberg disputes the view, associated with Barber, that the violence was "irrational hysteria" driven by "collective mentalities". Nirenberg instead reads it as social conflict expressed through competing interpretations of kingship, bodies, Jews, and the nature of evil in a Christian society.^[4] The same review reports that Nirenberg's archival work finds the violence confined to a small area, with the exception of Montclus, and that he identifies a royal "construction of complicity" driven by fiscal interests rather than broad popular support for antisemitic violence.^[4]

Disagreements among sources

The two encyclopedia entries were published in 1906 and 1911 and rely on older chronicles and regional histories. The disagreements could be settled by checking them against the contemporary sources and archival records that Barber and Nirenberg draw on, which this article has not been able to consult directly.

Sourcing note

This article rests on two early twentieth-century encyclopedia entries, the abstract of Barber's 1981 article, and a 1997 review of Nirenberg's book. The full texts of Barber and Nirenberg were not accessible when it was written. Details commonly given elsewhere, including the causes of the rising, the royal response in 1321, and the role of lepers, are omitted until they can be tied to sources that have been read directly.