Frederick I Barbarossa

In 1157 he declared the Jews in the Crown's protective custody 'because they pertain to our chamber'; during the Third Crusade he reportedly gave the Jews a decree of protection.

As monarchs centralized power, Jews came to depend on royal authority. Frederick I Barbarossa made this explicit in 1157, declaring that the Jews were in the Crown's protective custody 'because they pertain to our chamber'. In 1234 Frederick II declared the empire's Jews to be servi, 'serfs', of the royal treasury.1 In the Second and Third Crusades (1140s and late 1180s) the violent attacks were not repeated. Bernard of Clairvaux, the Second Crusade's spiritual leader, actively protected the Rhineland Jews, and Ephraim of Bonn, author of a chronicle of that campaign, described nothing resembling the sweeping violence of the first. Eleazar of Worms related in memoirs of the Third that the Jews won from Emperor Frederick Barbarossa a decree that anyone who killed a Jew would be killed and that joining the Crusade was no excuse.2