The paper represents a shortened version of an article to be published in a volume on religious violence in the Middle Ages; the articles should reflect upon how ‘religious’ violence really was.
The article deals with two examples of violent crowds gathering to pursue religious goals and wandering through the lands, a phenomenon not uncommon from the late 11th century onward: 1. The so called Rintfleisch-pogroms that caused many deaths among the jewish population in the cities of Swabia and Franconia in the year 1298, and 2. the shepherds’ crusade of 1251 whose participants never reached the Holy Land but attacked clerics, monks, and sometimes Jews in several cities in France. If we want to find out to what extend religious ideas and non-religious motives stimulated the violent acts, it is crucial to take a look not only on the crowd itself, but on the cities and their citizens opening their gates to the crowd, too, on their reactions and the subsequent communication with authorities. It is a difficult task to reconstruct their motives as narrative sources give the best account of the events, while their authors were focused on interpreting these events with regard to religious narratives. Nevertheless, within these narratives the cities served as a stage for negotiating the legitimacy of violence. Not everyone agreed to kill Jews, while it seems that quite a lot of citizens did not worry about injuring and killing clerics, monks and scholars when not threatened by officials. All groups have in common that they were distinguished from the urban legal cosmos in one way or another, a fact that needs to be considered to the same degree as religious affiliations or the victims’ special position in the hierarchy of the church.