ABSTRACT
Only two letters of the First Crusade (of those collected by Heinrich Hagenmeyer) contained a reference to vengeance. In one, sent by the lay leaders of the crusade to Pope Urban II from Antioch in September 1098, the crusaders claimed “we the Hierosolymitani of Jesus Christ have avenged the injury [done to] the highest God.”4 e second letter, written by Pope Paschal II to the Pisan consuls in 1100, stated that “the Christian people … most strenuously avenged [ Jerusalem] for the tyranny and yoke of the barbarians and, with God helping, restored those regions, sanctied by the blood and presence of Jesus Christ, to their former renement and majesty with adornment and veneration.”5 ese two letters show the presence of the idea of crusading as vengeance at the cusp between the eleventh and twelh centuries, but to a limited degree, since the vast majority of the letters made no connection between the First Crusade and vengeance. In addition, the two letters dier in their assumption of what constituted the injury that deserved vengeance. While the letter from the lay leaders of the First Crusade simply stated that they had avenged an unspecied
2 Similarly, later texts do not show the same division of evidence that led me to discuss eyewitness accounts and non-participant accounts separately in this chapter.
