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THE DARK SIDE OF CHRISTIAN HISTORY
bubonic plague, struck in the fourteenth century, the Church explained that Jews were to blame and prompted attacks upon them.54 A whole folklore developed claiming that Jews kidnapped and ate Christian children in Jewish rituals of cannibalism, and that Jews stole and profaned the blessed Christian sacraments. These were the same tales that Romans once told of the hated Christians, the same tales that Christians would tell of witches, and the same tales Protestants would tell of Catholics.55 Pogroms, the raiding and destroying of Jewish synagogues and ghettos, became a common demonstration of Christian righteousness. Jews were easy targets for they had never been embraced by Christian society. Under the feudal system, a ceremony of investiture involving a Christian oath excluded Jews from working the land and sent them into commerce and crafts in the towns. However, with the rapid population expansion of the eleventh and twelfth centuries and the consequent influx of people to the cities, artisan guilds were established, each with its own patron saint. Jews were again driven from the crafts into what fields remained: banking, money-changing and moneylending.56 Persecuting Jews, therefore, also became a convenient means of getting rid of one's creditors. Religious arguments were taken up by indebted kings to justify their confiscation of Jewish property and their expulsion of Jews from their domains.57 Anyone who held power became a likely target for the Church. The Knights Templar, a group originally formed to protect crusaders, gained political influence and became known as trustworthy moneylenders.58 They were also thought to have brought back with them Gnostic, Kabalistic, and Islamic mysteries. Threatened by the Templars' growing political power, suspicious of their seemingly independent religious beliefs, and jealous of their wealth, both Church and kings had reason to persecute them. As with the Jews, incredible stories began to