Bernard’s announcement of the Crusade (backed by a papal bull known as Quantum praedecessores) was followed by an intense spate of preaching and negotiation with possible military leaders. Knights and untrained civilians signed up in droves. And popular enthusiasm spilled over as before into zealotry, bigotry, and anti-Semitic attacks, in which a new generation of Jews in the Rhineland were beaten, robbed, mutilated, blinded, murdered, or hounded until they committed suicide.
