Emicho envisioned that he would march on Constantinople and overcome the forces there, taking over the title of "last World Emperor" in accordance with canonical prophetic tradition.
All Christian armies, Latin and Greek, would then unite and march to seize Jerusalem from the Saracens thus prompting the Second Coming and denouement with the Antichrist.
Emicho's army attracted many unusual followers, including a group who worshipped a goose they believed to be filled with the Holy Spirit (see Women in the Crusades).
[4] This contradicts the often repeated narrative that Emicho's army was mostly composed of peasants and burghers who were ignorant and instinctively prejudiced against Jews, mostly for economic reasons.
Instead, there were a number of relatively educated and wealthy men, likely accompanied by clerics, in Emicho's army who would have known that forced conversions were forbidden according to the tenets of the Church.
For instance, when Peter the Hermit and his mob of Crusaders passed through these towns and threatened the Jewish population, they had been amenable to bribes and largely left the Jews free from harassment.
[6] Although Emicho has frequently been referenced in secondary and tertiary sources as having been present during the massacres of Jews in Cologne and Worms, there is sparse evidence in the primary accounts to support his involvement.
[7] The Jewish writer of the account known as the Mainz Anonymous mentions Emicho as having been in the rough vicinity of Speyer during the massacre there, but clearly notes he did not participate in the violence.
[9] Ultimately, however, the city gates were opened by sympathetic burghers within Mainz and the Jews were attacked despite the archbishop's best attempts to protect them.
Emicho and his men went to great lengths to hunt down and kill every refugee they could find in Mainz;[9] they intended to inflict maximal damage.
[9]This ideologically based hatred of Jews, along with the far higher death count, is what made the massacre in Mainz distinct from previous attacks in the Rhineland.
Certain historians have characterized these sentiments as part of the broader context of apocalyptic mythology, with the Crusaders anticipating an imminent end of the world, a "zero-sum game between good and evil”.
[9] This attitude is illustrated by a crusader's supposed remark to a Jew as written by the chronicler Bar-Simson: "You are the children of those who killed the object of our veneration, hanging him on a tree.
[14] Nevertheless, in medieval political thought, Saul was a complex character that was often employed in discussions of the nature of lay authority, and its derivation from the Church.