The Destruction of Jerusalem, known also as Titus and Vespasian, represents one anonymous writer’s attempts to situate the city of Jerusalem as a central pivot point in history: a sacred city of God’s chosen people, the site of the execution of God’s son, and later the divine vengeance for this act upon God’s chosen people that represents God’s rejection of salvation for the Jews in favor of the Gentiles and Christians, represented by the future Roman emperors Titus and Vespasian. Like many Roman historical epics, Destruction seeks to inscribe a divine, salvific meta-narrative onto human events. The poem is inspired by the historical events of 70 CE and the Jewish War undertaken by the Romans against a rebellious province, Judea. Replete with miraculous healings, cannibalism, graphic violence, and detailed accounts of siege tactics, it presents an historical romance akin to works such as Richard Coer de Lion, Siege of Jerusalem, or the Middle English Charlemagne romances. At over five thousand lines, Destruction seeks to present an authoritative, comprehensive account of the fall of Jerusalem, drawing on a complex range of vernacular and Latin sources to do so.

Yet the poem’s form and content both contribute to its ongoing marginalization. This position is not helped by the opinions of the few scholars who study it: Phyllis Moe refers to the poem as “an artistic failure,” while Early English Texts Series editor J. A. Herbert observes that the poem “is intended to be octosyllabic . . . but our author cannot have had a very fine sense of rhythm.” In addition to the poem’s clunky language, it amplifies the antisemitism found in works like the Middle English Siege of Jerusalem, making the poem both difficult and troubling for contemporary readers. Indeed, Destruction is usually referenced only in comparison to Siege of Jerusalem, almost always to suggest that Siege is comparatively the superior and more complex work. Yet, as Maija Birenbaum notes, “In its uniquely affective, participatory rendition of the fall-of-Jerusalem narrative, the poem [Destruction] engages with fourteenth-century discourses about the importance of the sacraments, specifically penance; cultural and spiritual anxieties about Jews and heretics; and fears of divine vengeance for the sins of Christendom.” The poem provides a crucial, if troubling, perspective in ongoing conversations on Crusades literature, Middle English popular romance, and medieval antisemitism. With this edition, then, we hope to bring renewed scholarly attention to this overlooked work.

We deviate here from the title previously given to the poem by editors; that is, we have inverted Herbert’s “Titus and Vespasian, or the Destruction of Jerusalem” to call the poem simply The Destruction of Jerusalem. This is, of course, itself an argument, and we suggest that this is a more appropriate way to designate the poem. To begin with, this title is entirely editorial; headings given to the poem in manuscripts emphasize either the place of Jerusalem or the violence against Jews, rather than the work’s Roman characters. Inverting the traditionally-given title, then, brings modern practice more into keeping with medieval notions of what the poem is indeed about. It places the focus on the violence that is at the poem’s heart. Further, our title links this poem more closely to Early Modern performances and versions of the legend, suggesting the poem’s continuity both with its sources and with later adaptations of the narrative.

The Plot

Like many Middle English works, Destruction is episodic, and the transitions between episodes are often quite abrupt. There are two distinct versions of the poem, a short and a long version; the long version includes an extended prologue and two substantial digressions from the central plot. The first, an account of the birth and early life of Pontius Pilate, appears from line 1483 to line 1622. The second, from line 4461 to line 4858, describes the life of Judas Iscariot, including his birth, abandonment, adoption, and murder of his adopted brother. Judas makes his way to Jerusalem and befriends Pilate. He unknowingly kills his father in a fight and marries his mother, who sends him to Jesus to repent of these sins when they discover that they are related. The episode then describes Judas’s eventual death by hanging himself after his betrayal of Jesus.

In the long version of the poem edited here, the first 910 lines serve as a lengthy prologue, retelling several key episodes in the life of Jesus familiar from the Gospels. The first describes Nicodemus’s encounter with Jesus, in which Jesus tells him about the future destruction of Jerusalem. The next episode describes Jewish officials who ask Jesus to whom their taxes should be paid; Jesus asks whose image appears on their coins. When the Jews tell them that Caesar appears on them, he advises them to pay their taxes to Caesar but render God what is owed to Him. Then, the officials challenge Jesus by bringing him a woman caught committing adultery. Jesus responds by writing in the earth and then admonishes that the one of them who is without sin should deliver her punishment, and the officials all creep away. Jesus then tells the woman to go and to keep herself from sin in the future. In the next episode, the Jews question Jesus’s authority, because they have the law from their ancestors; Jesus responds that he could destroy and raise their temple in three days, which angers the assembly. Jesus continues to defend himself against the charge of Sabbath-breaking for healing on the Sabbath. From there, the poem details events of the Passion, emphasizing an episode in which Jesus entered the courtyard of the temple and, angry at seeing trade and the exchange of coins there, turned over the tables and drove the sellers out. Because of this deed, the poem claims, those whom Jesus admonished led the group that captured Jesus and eventually put him to death.

After these Biblical episodes, the poem transitions to events occurring in Jerusalem after Jesus’s death. The central episode here is the martyrdom of St. James the Less, drawing heavily on the Legenda Aurea. James, Bishop of Jerusalem, lives a holy life of preaching; indeed, he is so earnest and spends so much time in prayer that the skin on his knees becomes hard from so much time on bare stone. One Passover, the Jews admonish James to stop his preaching, but James preaches all the more, with even greater enthusiasm. Enraged, the Jews strike him with a fulling staff, and James bleeds to death in his church. From there, the poem describes nine others signs, astrological and prophetic, that occur in Jerusalem to foretell the city’s destruction. These signs continue through line 1156 of the poem.

Following this lengthy opening, the poem gives an account of Pontius Pilate’s treachery and abuse of power in Jerusalem. When Pilate learns that the emperor Tiberius intends to exile him from the city, he sends a messenger, Nathan, to Rome with a letter defending Pilate and recounting Jesus’s death. Nathan is blown off course en route and eventually lands in Bordeaux. In Bordeaux, we learn that the king, Vespasian, is ill, suffering from leprosy and a swarm of wasps that have lived in his nose since his birth. Nathan meets Vespasian’s son, Titus, who explains that Tiberius is dead and Nero is now emperor in Rome. Titus agrees to help Nathan reach Rome if Nathan can offer any aid to Vespasian. In response, Nathan laments that there was one who could help in Jerusalem, but that man has been killed. Nathan then retells the story of Jesus to Titus and Velosian, Vespasian’s steward. The digression on the life of Pontius Pilate falls here. After this, the plot returns to following Nathan, who completes his errand in Rome and returns to Jerusalem.

After Nathan departs Bordeaux, Velosian goes to the king and seeks permission to go to Jerusalem on Vespasian’s behalf. Velosian intends to seek some object that once belonged to Jesus, hoping that such an object could heal Vespasian’s condition, as well as to make sure he can recognize Pontius Pilate in case Vespasian and his forces ever find themselves attacking Pilate. In incredible pain and discomfort, Vespasian agrees, and Velosian travels to Jerusalem. Upon arrival, Velosian meets Jacob, a secret Christian living in the city, and explains Vespasian’s situation. Jacob introduces Velosian to Veronica, a woman healed by Jesus who has secretly kept a cloth bearing the image of Jesus’s face. Veronica agrees to accompany Velosian to Bordeaux, since Pilate has been persecuting both her and Jacob because Pilate suspects they are Christians. Before Velosian and Veronica depart, however, Velosian asks Jacob if any of Jesus’s torturers are still alive. Jacob explains that he sees them in the street every day and calls them together, and these torturers detail the violence they did to Jesus before his death. Velosian tells them he will tell the story everywhere he can, and once the torturers depart, he vows to bring Vespasian to Jerusalem to avenge their deeds if Vespasian regains his health.

Velosian and Veronica travel to Bordeaux, and upon arrival, Veronica meets Clement, a disciple of Peter’s who has fled Rome in exile. When Veronica is summoned before Vespasian, she brings Clement with her, explaining that he can speak words and perform deeds that she cannot. Clement gives a sermon to Vespasian and his court, preaching Christian doctrine. Evidently moved by this preaching, Vespasian vows that if he is healed, he will go to Jerusalem and avenge the death of Jesus. Veronica then presents the cloth to Clement, who bids Vespasian to kiss it. Vespasian is instantly healed, and he rewards Veronica and Clement with land and money. Clement warns Vespasian that he should be baptized before he leaves for Jerusalem, but Vespasian instead makes his son Titus and his men swear to accompany him. Vespasian and Titus receive leave from Nero to go to Jerusalem, leaving Clement in control of Bordeaux. They depart, with Vespasian promising to be baptized upon his successful return. They leave Bordeaux with Clement’s blessing.

Titus and Vespasian go first to Acre, take the city easily, and continue to Jaffa. The citizens of Jaffa do not willingly surrender, and many of them kill each other rather than submitting to Vespasian and Titus’s army. One man, Japhel, survives and joins their forces, and Vespasian gives him a place of honor both because he is related to the emperor of Rome and because he knows the geography of the area well. Citizens flee from the surrounding area, seeking shelter inside Jerusalem. A frightened Pilate summons the king of Galilee, Archilaus, to help him, and Archilaus advises Pilate to hole up inside Jerusalem’s secure walls. Vespasian’s forces put the city under siege, and Archilaus encourages Pilate to go to the city walls and challenge Vespasian, which he does. Vespasian takes offense at the challenge, telling Pilate that he will regret it and admonishing Archilaus for siding with Pilate. The fighting begins as Vespasian’s forces construct and deploy various siege weaponry. The war lasts for seven years. In the fifth year of the siege, Nero dies in Rome and Vespasian is chosen his successor. A messenger rushes to Jerusalem to bring the news to Vespasian, and Vespasian departs to be crowned. He returns as quickly as he can to the war.

The poem then shifts briefly to events inside Jerusalem. Within the city, Pilate accuses Jacob of helping Vespasian’s forces, and Jacob is imprisoned. When Jacob’s daughter Marie realizes her father is missing, she prays to Jesus that Jacob will be delivered, and Jesus releases him from his prison. Jacob leaves the city and eventually reaches Vespasian’s forces, where Velosian immediately recognizes him and speaks for him. Jacob is able to provide the force with valuable strategic advice, which they quickly take. Many in the city, including Josephus, an advisor to Pilate, sneak out to attack. Josephus is injured in the battle that follows, but he survives because he is secretly Christian.

Inside the city, resources have begun to fail, notably food, leading to mass starvation and suffering. A Christian woman named Marie and her companion Clarice heed an angel’s advice and cook and eat Marie’s deceased daughter. Pilate is horrified and forbids the people to eat their children, advising them instead to eat their gold and silver. They do so, but mass cannibalism continues in the city.

Jacob leaves Vespasian’s camp and goes to the city wall to investigate what is happening inside Jerusalem. He meets Josephus on the wall, and Josephus confesses his faith and describes the wretched conditions inside the city to Jacob. Josephus claims that the Jews would have surrendered already if Vespasian had been baptized, but that they will not surrender to a non-Christian. When Jacob goes back to Vespasian with his report, Josephus returns to Pilate and the assembled Jews to advise that they yield the city. Many of the Jews instead kill themselves and each other as a means to end their suffering. Those who survive bid Pilate to give up the town, claiming that they are suffering due to their sin in the persecution and death of Jesus.

Josephus and several companions escape the city and take shelter in a cave, but without resources, they are quickly reduced to killing and eating each other. When only Josephus and one companion remain, Josephus kills his companion in self-defense and leaves the cave, making his way to Vespasian’s forces. At first, Vespasian orders him bound, but Josephus is quickly released when the Romans discover that Josephus is Christian. Josephus then heals Titus of a serious illness, earning honor for himself among the Romans.

After this, the Romans take the city. Pilate pleads with Titus to preserve his position, but Vespasian’s forces show him no mercy, binding him to await punishment. Titus and his men begin to destroy the city, and in the process they find a place where the wall seems unusually thick. When they break the wall, they discover that Joseph of Arimathea, who buried Jesus and spoke against the Jews, has been walled in for the entire seven-year siege. The Romans release Joseph and show him great honor, along with other Christians found in the city. Vespasian then conducts a massive sale of the Jewish survivors, selling them thirty for a penny and encouraging the Christians to chop them open and extract the treasure that Pilate told them to eat earlier in the poem. Pilate himself is sealed alive in a barrel and sent to Viene to be imprisoned. Upon arrival, Pilate is removed from his barrel and put in prison, where he receives only water and rough bread for food except on holy days. After some time in prison, Pilate begs a guard for a paring knife and kills himself with it. His guards seal Pilate in the barrel again and toss it into the water. However, Pilate’s punishment does not end here: demons torment Pilate by tossing the barrel around, and those who pass the barrel are frightened by the shrieks and other noise. Eventually, the local clergy and people come to the shore of the water and pray, and Pilate’s barrel is secured in a hole in the rock. After this, the poem’s second major digression, on Judas Iscariot, unfolds.

After describing Pilate’s death, the poem then returns to Vespasian, who rewards his men for their faithfulness. Vespasian, Titus, and their army return from Jerusalem and are baptized. Vespasian confirms Clement as Pope. The last episode recounts a “miracle” that occurs when several surviving Jews return to the site of Jerusalem to rebuild the city. After two divine warnings in which red crosses appear first on the ground and then on the clothing of the Jews, the Jews return to the site for a third time and are killed when fire suddenly springs out of the ground.

The Historical Siege: Josephus and the Jewish War (66–72 CE)

In this section we will examine some of the key contexts for our romance. We will start with the history of the event itself, then turn our attention to the historiography of the event in Josephus’s Jewish War; finally, we will examine the later reception of Josephus’s Jewish War.

For Jews, the War in Judea was a cataclysmic event that culminated with the destruction of Herod’s expansion of the Second Temple. On the other hand, for the Flavian dynasty (69–96 CE), the war provided a basis for their claims to the imperial throne after the disastrous civil discord in Rome of the so-called “year of the four Emperors,” 69 CE. Within a few decades, by the end of the first century CE, the early Christians would grow more eager to distinguish themselves from the Jewish faith and people, as figures like Saul (later Paul) of Tarsus expounded the Gospel to Gentiles. These Christians saw the destruction of the Temple as a sign of the greater validity of their faith: now Christianity had “superseded” Judaism, with a new covenant for all people. This idea could quickly turn anti-Judaic, as Christian writers began to blame the people of Judea for rejecting Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah and for responsibility for his execution at the hands of Pontius Pilate (for which the Gospel of John provides a particularly pointed example).

Looking at these three responses to the war — Jewish grief at the destruction of the Temple, Roman imperial triumph, and Christian supersessionism — it may seem hard to uncover any relatively unbiased narratives of the war. What makes this even more difficult is the fact that there is only one main ancient source for the conflict, the Jewish War of Flavius Josephus. Josephus, a Jewish priest and one-time rebel leader who surrendered early in the war to Vespasian, wrote a history of the war in seven books within about a decade of its conclusion. It is the rare history that is, in a sense, written by a loser in the war — for example, Josephus’s grief at the fall of the city and the Temple is palpable. Since Josephus did join up with Vespasian, and acted as an envoy for Titus during the siege of Jerusalem, his Jewish perspective is mixed with a Roman, Flavian one. In addition, actual Flavian monuments that provide a more propagandistic perspective remain in Rome; the Arch of Titus is one particularly famous example.

In the space of this introduction, we can only briefly recount the conflict’s vicissitudes. Nevertheless, this will provide a historical “baseline” by which we may better evaluate the changes of later authors and romances. We will begin by discussing the central cultural importance of the Temple for ancient Judaism. Then we will examine the cultural tensions that sparked the Jewish revolt, and the outcome of the war itself, by turning to our main source, Josephus.

Rome and Jerusalem

In antiquity, the Temple was the center of Jewish faith, where sacrifice was carried out to God every day in the morning and afternoon. The first Temple had been constructed by Solomon sometime in the tenth century BCE and survived for roughly 400 years, before its destruction in the Babylonian sack of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, which began the Babylonian exile. After the return of the Jews to Jerusalem several decades later, when Cyrus and the Persians had conquered Babylon in turn, a new Second Temple was constructed by the end of the sixth century BCE. This structure was greatly expanded by Herod the Great in the 20s BCE as part of a building program to strengthen his hold and position in Jerusalem. Herod was viewed with suspicion by native Jews partly because he owed his power to dispensations of the Romans, as he and his father successively impressed Caesar, Antony, and then Octavian. Herod also replaced the previous, Jewish, Hasmonean dynasty that had ruled for a century, though under Roman sufferance for its last few decades. Another problem for Herod was that he was an Idumaean, a nearby people who been forcibly converted to Judaism during an expansionary period in the Hasmonean dynasty; while he had been raised Jewish, his religious commitment was viewed with skepticism by his Jewish subjects. Thus, expanding the Temple was a way for Herod to both demonstrate his political power and commitment to the Jewish faith. What remains of the Temple today is part of the massive foundational platform Herod built for his expanded Temple, now known in modern Jerusalem as the “Wailing Wall.”

An elite priestly caste, the Saducees, arranged sacrifice and maintained the temple complex. The complex itself was divided into several areas. Various outdoor courts were set aside for different groups — one for gentiles, one for Jewish women, one for Jewish men, one for priests. Another court, the Temple Court, was set aside for sacrificial offerings. Inside the Temple were three chambers: the ulam (antechamber); the hekhal (sanctuary), where the menorah, the showbread, and incense altar were located; and the Holy of Holies, where the ark of the covenant was originally placed. These last two chambers were separated from the rest of the Temple structure and access to them was highly restricted — only the high priest could enter the Holy of Holies and even then only on Yom Kippur (the day of atonement). Jews living outside Jerusalem in various parts of the Mediterranean, who could not easily attend Temple services, sent money to Jerusalem each year towards Temple upkeep, a tithe of a half shekel. Transport of the proceeds of this Temple tax to Jerusalem could be hazardous — liable to banditry or the avarice of local potentates along the way. For example, Josephus tells us that Mithridates VI Eupator once seized 800 talents of Jewish money (an enormous sum) from the island of Cos in 88 BCE. Another incident occurred in 62 BCE, when the Roman governor of Syria, Flaccus, confiscated a large stash of Jewish gold bound for Jerusalem, as a defense speech by Cicero tells us. Later, the Jews got a decree from Julius Caesar that the money for this tithe was protected, but after the destruction of Herod’s Temple, Vespasian redirected these proceeds to the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus in Rome as the fiscus Judaicus, or Jewish tax.

While it is doubtful that Titus and Vespasian intended from the outset to destroy the Temple, there is debate about whether its destruction was accidental, or if Titus and his generals decided to destroy it after the frustrations of a long siege. Certainly Judaism was a tolerated faith in the Roman empire, even if individual Romans looked askance at Jewish culture and customs. Either way, the Temple has remained a potent cultural symbol (and its location a site of simmering interfaith conflict) to this day. The Jewish war functionally ended with the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. It began there as well in 66 CE, when a young priest ordered that the daily sacrifices for the health of the Roman emperor were to cease. This was a response to Roman exaction of Temple funds and, when combined with other rising tensions in the region, sparked the war that would consume the region for the next several years.

The background and causes of the war are complex, and ultimately go back to the origins of the Hasmonean dynasty in the Maccabean revolt of the mid-second century BCE (famously retold in 1 and 2 Maccabees in the Old Testament, and in the context of the story of Hannukah). Put simply: certain revolutionary parties in Judea exploited increased cultural tensions between Jews and Romans to spark a revolt against the Romans, and that revolt was brutally suppressed by Vespasian and Titus. Josephus adds that civil discord between the revolutionary parties and those who wanted to maintain the status quo also debilitated the Jewish state, making it easy for the Romans to win the war.

For centuries, Judea had been a small region caught up in other empires — Persian, Seleucian, and then Roman. Given the limitations of communication and travel in antiquity, and the political changes and upheavals occurring at the imperial centers, Judea and Jerusalem did have periods of comparative independence. The most notable one was the Hasmonean dynasty of 140–37 BCE. The roots of the dynasty were found in the revolt of Judah Maccabeus in the 160s BCE. As retold in 1 and 2 Maccabees and in the first book of Josephus’s War, the Jews reacted against the attempts of the Seleucian king Antiochus IV to exert control on the region. Eventually, after years of conflict, Seleucid energies were needed elsewhere to defend their kingdom against rival powers (including Rome), and Judah’s brother Simon took power in Jerusalem as high priest and prince of Israel, founding the Hasmonean dynasty.

Simon and his successors began to expand aggressively, which created untold resentments between the Jews and neighboring Greeks, Samaritans, and Idumeans, and as a result the Roman general Pompey the Great was enthusiastically welcomed by non-Jews of the region when he clipped the wings of Hasmonean control. Eventually, constant infighting doomed the Hasmonean dynasty and the Idumean adventurer Herod replaced them, founding his own dynasty after successively winning the support of Caesar, Antony, and finally Octavian (the later emperor Augustus).

Rome’s entry onto the scene changed the political dynamics. First, it conquered and absorbed the Seleucid empire and by extension Judea. Second, in the figure of Pompey the Great, Rome adjudicated in a civil war between rival fraternal claimants to the Hasmonean throne. Herod’s rise to power was aided by his adept maneuvering between factions in the Roman civil wars. This meant, however, that Herod owed his power to, and Judea remained a part of, the Roman Empire. Herod’s own expansionist tendencies did much to exacerbate Gentile and Jewish tensions that had barely recovered from Hasmonean ambitions.

For the Romans, Herod fulfilled the role of client king — a local potentate who could keep his people under control and do Rome’s bidding as necessary, obviating the need for a Roman governor or military legate in the region. While Herod was a ruler of some talent, shown primarily in an enthusiastic liquidation of any potential rivals to the throne and in appointing unknowns to the high priesthood, his descendants were judged by the Romans to be unfit for rule and so in 6 CE, upon Herod’s death, Judea was formally absorbed into the Roman Empire and a procurator was appointed to rule over the Judeans. A procurator was not a governor per se, but more of a bureaucratic administrator, who might have a few cohorts at his command to keep the peace but would be outranked by a legate or official Roman governor, in this case the governor of Syria, the main Roman province in the region. The most famous procurator of the Judeans was, of course, Pontius Pilate. Pilate was not a bad procurator by Roman standards, and was certainly not as antagonistic to the Jews as his successors could be, nor the craven and calculating moral monster of the Destruction of Jerusalem.

The procurators and other officials sent by Rome were, as often in such cases, of varying quality. The Jews expected that they could have some outlet for complaints with the local Roman governor, or ultimately even appeal to the Emperor himself (Josephus, in fact, had just returned from such a mission when he found himself a general in Galilee). A larger issue, however, was Jerusalem’s loss of any kind of regional supremacy. Without a Herodian monarch, the center of power for the Roman officials had switched to nearby Caesarea, while Jerusalem remained a religious center of some importance, due to the presence of the Temple. With Jerusalem’s importance and power in the region diminished, there were legitimate Jewish fears that other peoples in the region, particularly the Samarians, would let vent the long simmering resentments over Hasmonean and Herodean rule. Given the fact that Roman auxiliary forces (locals drafted into military units to supplement and assist the actual Roman army) were made up of these locals and not Jews (due to an exemption for Jewish men from military service), there was plentiful opportunity for abuses both trivial and large. With a procurator like Pontius Pilate in the 30s CE, who strove to keep up good relations with the Jews, these resentments and fears of lost status could be minimized. With someone like the later procurator of the 50s CE, Gessius Florus, who cared little for Jewish opinion and was assigned by Nero primarily to acquire money for the imperial treasury, these resentments and fears flared up. Even though the legate at the time, Cestius Gallus, had tried to maintain good relationships with Jewish elites and technically outranked Florus, the latter’s remit from Nero constrained Gallus’s options to keep the peace.

The Romans respected Jewish monotheism as a traditional religion of some antiquity, and in return the Jews offered sacrifices to God daily on behalf of the emperor’s health. Nevertheless, most Romans found Jews to be a strange, highly insular people, and the references in Latin literature to Jews tend to be contemptuous in one way or another. The emperor Nero shared this contemptuous attitude towards the Jews, and his youth (diminishing the prospect of a new ruler, short of war or assassination) seemed to rule out the viability of diplomatic missions to redress Jewish grievances. In short, by the mid-60s, many Jews in Jerusalem found themselves with diminished regional status, at the implacable mercy of the Romans, and victims of harassment and abuse by the local auxiliary forces. For some, like the revolution-minded Zealots, therefore, war and revolt may have seemed the only option. The regional elites of Jerusalem and Judea, the class that Rome relied on to keep order in the provinces, were unable to tamp down this revolutionary activity, particularly when the Zealots began assassinating their opponents.

The Outbreak of War

For these reasons, by 66 CE, the region was a tinderbox. One day, some Greeks began sacrificing birds in front of a local synagogue. Enraged by this sacrilege against Jewish custom, a priest at the Temple in Jerusalem stopped prayers and sacrifices for the emperor’s health. For this sign of loyalty to cease was a strong signal of potential revolt. Florus, who cared only for his mission of raising funds for Nero, immediately made things worse by leading a detachment of soldiers into the Temple and removing seventeen talents from it, a significant amount of money. This outrage plunged the city into reactionary unrest and mockery of the procurator (some people passed a basket around collecting money for Florus, jeering that he must be poor and that is why he stole from the Temple). In response, Florus sent in soldiers to arrest city leaders, who he had whipped and crucified. At this, Jewish rebels rose up and overwhelmed the garrison inside the city, while Agrippa II and his sister Berenice, Herodians who had tried to calm the Jews, fled to Galilee. Next, militants spread out over the region, destroying Roman symbols and terrorizing Romans and pro-Roman inhabitants. Some militants even took over the fortress of Masada. Florus fled, leaving to Cestius Gallus, the legate in Syria, the burden of restoring order.

Unlike Florus, Gallus maintained cordial relations with the Jerusalem elite, as any good Roman governor should have done. He expected that, with some quick retaliatory mop-up operations of rebelling militants in the area, he could arrange a cessation of hostilities and restore order. Upon arrival at Jerusalem, with Agrippa II and Berenice in tow, Gallus’s hopes were dashed, and those of Agrippa and Berenice dashed yet again — Judean militants even attacked the baggage train of Cestius’s force as they approached Jerusalem. Disappointed by his exclusion from the city and lacking supplies and forces for an extended siege, Gallus turned back towards the seat of his power at Antioch in Syria. The rebels, emboldened by their previous attack on the baggage train and on Gallus’s exclusion from Jerusalem, attacked the Roman forces in an ambush in the Beit-Horon pass. The Jews’ defeat of Gallus’s Roman force all but ensured a forceful response from Rome. Judea was now committed to war.

A frustrated and shamed Gallus returned to Antioch to plan for a more forceful response in the spring, sending some forces and cavalry to keep order amongst the cities of the Decapolis, a group of ten Hellenistic foundations, and in Galilee. In the meantime, the emperor Nero had lost faith in Gallus and recognized the need for new leadership to settle the issue. Nero faced a perennial problem of Roman emperors; he needed to find a general capable of battling the revolutionary Jews, but one who would not outshine the emperor and become, willingly or not, a threat to imperial power. He settled on the seasoned, capable non-entity Titus Flavius Vespasianus. Vespasian took his son Titus with him, and (like Gallus), brought Agrippa and Berenice as well, in order to make the most out of connections to the local elite. At the very least, the Romans would have expected to raze a few towns and then, based on Gallus’s experience there, to besiege Jerusalem. This would fulfill the basic policy need: when the Roman Empire was disrespected, reprisal was, if not always swift, always brutal — a way to both punish the initial transgression and to warn any other province or people thinking of rebelling against Roman rule.

The Jewish elite knew this well and realized that, as much as they themselves deplored the actions of the militants, a penalty would have to be paid and much suffering would ensue, as often happens in war: famine, disease, rape, pillage, sieges, and sacks. Forced into a defensive situation and dreading the arrival of a retaliatory force in the next campaign season, they appointed leading citizens to go out into the region and prepare other cities and towns for the oncoming Roman onslaught. One of these “generals” (for lack of a better term) was the future historian Josephus, who took responsibility for Galilee. Though his exact activities and motivations differ between the earlier account in War and the later one in the Life, Josephus seems to have done his job competently, despite rivalrous intrigues against him by the notorious John of Ghiscala, who would go on to cause much misery in Jerusalem before the war was done. In fact, Josephus presents himself as Vespasian’s most tenacious opponent in the third book of the Jewish War.

As Vespasian arrived, he knew he would have to be prepared for a siege at Jerusalem, with all the investment of manpower and resources that such an operation would entail. This was all the more reason to ensure the surrounding countryside was secure first, not least to avoid a repeat of the ambush of Gallus’s forces that had led to Vespasian’s appointment. Thus, Vespasian began by securing the region of Galilee, which would eventually bring him into contact with Josephus. Upon his arrival in Galilee, most of the cities and towns sent delegates immediately and allowed the placement of garrisons. Part of this was tactical, of course — it was all they could do to avoid the punishing force of the Roman army. Other towns tried to hold out, but those too, like Iotapata, fell to the Romans in the end. Nevertheless, though he was in nearly full control of Galilee by this point without the need for actual military activity, Vespasian still made sure there was minatory and retaliatory violence — Gallus’s losses in the ambush at Beit-Horon had to be avenged, after all.

For whatever reason the city of Iotapata was marked for especial punishment. Josephus’s remit had been to prepare the cities of the region for just this eventuality. Though he had already successfully fled Iotapata, Josephus returned to the city as the Roman army approached and, perhaps hoping he could negotiate a settlement, chose to face the siege with the people of that city. Whatever else one may think of Josephus, this was a brave choice. He held out until the city fell before being captured in somewhat mysterious circumstances that would haunt his later career. Briefly brought before Vespasian, Josephus claimed that he was versed in prophecy and predicted Vespasian’s eventual accession to the Roman throne. Vespasian, understandably seeing this as the rankest flattery, had Josephus put back with the other prisoners. When Josephus’s alleged prediction was ultimately proven actually prescient, he was released and made part of the Flavian retinue. Josephus’s membership in the Jerusalem elite would allow him the opportunity to fulfill a similar diplomatic role as Agrippa II and Berenice had attempted for Gallus.

With Galilee secure, Vespasian moved further south, receiving the surrender of other towns in the region, Jerusalem excepted — though rich Jerusalemites escaped as they were able to Vespasian and his forces. With just about the entire region secure, Vespasian could bide his time, surround Jerusalem, and prepare as thoroughly as he could for a siege. However, the forces of civil discord active in both the city of Jerusalem itself, and in the larger Roman world, were ready to completely change the character of the war.

The Next Phase: Civil Discord in Rome and Jerusalem

While Vespasian was reestablishing Roman authority in the province of Judea, the center of Roman power was in upheaval, culminating in the chaos of the so-called “year of the four Emperors,” 69 CE. In 68 CE, Julius Vindex, the governor of Gaul, had revolted against Nero, supported by Galba, the nearby governor of Hispania Terraconensis, one of the Roman provinces in Spain. Though Vindex’s revolt ultimately failed, enough of the military and civil authorities in Rome had tired of Nero’s reign, with its pretentions to artistry and the bloodletting that followed the exposure of the conspiracy of Piso in 65 CE. Tried and condemned in absentia, Nero committed suicide and Galba took the throne. Galba was overthrown in turn by the forces of Otho, who had been frustrated by Galba’s choice of heir. In the meantime, Vitellius declared for the throne in Germania. Defeated in an engagement with Vitellius’s forces at Bedriacum, Otho committed suicide rather than prolong a hopeless conflict. The senate confirmed Vitellius as emperor, though his reign began with ill omens.

At this point, the legions in Egypt declared for Vespasian, along with the legions in Syria and Vespasian’s own in Judea. The governor of Syria, Gaius Lucius Mucianus, also supported Vespasian. Emboldened by their support, Vespasian left the command of the Jewish war to his elder son Titus, and left for Egypt to take command of the legions there. Control of Egypt gave Vespasian a distinct advantage, both because of the province’s wealth and because it was the most important grain supplier for Rome. His position was further strengthened when the legions on the Danube also declared for him. Marcus Antonius Primus led these legions in an invasion of Italy, defeating Vitellius’s forces at the second battle of Bedriacum. An increasingly desperate Vitellius was soon caught and killed, and Vespasian’s forces took the city, though Vespasian himself remained in Egypt. On December 21, 69 CE the Senate declared Vespasian the new Emperor, the fourth and final man to ascend to the throne that fateful year.

Back in Judea, Titus continued to prepare for the eventual siege of Jerusalem. Inside the city itself, various factions struggled for power, and the arrival of John of Ghiscala, fleeing Vespasian’s military operations in Galilee that resulted in Josephus’s capture, made matters inside the city worse. Various rival factions were packed into the city, which was nominally controlled by the Judean Free Government led by the priest Ananus ben Ananus. It was under their authority that Josephus had gone out to secure Galilee. When John of Ghiscala arrived in Jerusalem, he led the Zealots in taking control of large parts of the city, began fighting with the Judean Free Government, and executed any who advocated surrender to the Romans. The Zealots next lured a force of 20,000 Idumaeans into the city with a false message that the Judaean Free Government had already reached terms of surrender with Rome. The Zealots and Idumaeans attacked the forces of the Judean Free Government, killing Ananus ben Ananus, countless civilians, and seizing the Temple. John later tricked and killed the original leader of the Zealots and began a despotic rule of the city. In response, the remnants of the Free Government invited the rebel warlord Simon bar Giora into the city. Simon had led the forces that defeated Gallus earlier in the conflict, but the Free Government still distrusted Simon and expelled him from Jerusalem. Simon fled to Masada, but eventually left that fortress too, in order to engage in banditry around Idumaea, before coming to Jerusalem once more. Simon and John’s respective forces now began a bitter civil war, only joining together when it became clear that the Roman army now led by Titus were investing for a long siege.

All of this was terrible enough for the poor civilians still trapped in the city (most of the wealthy elite would have fled much earlier in the conflict). The Zealots proceeded to make things far worse by burning the food supplies in the city to further induce everyone to fight against the Romans rather than surrender. As the siege began in earnest, there were probably about one million people, by Josephus’s estimate, still within the city walls.

The Fall of Jerusalem and the End of the War

By the summer of 70 CE, the siege had been going on for seven months. The suffering inside was ineffably terrible. Titus finally breached the city, aided by the collapse of several walls. The forces of Simon held the upper city, while John and his Zealots occupied the Temple. In July, Titus finally breached the third wall, which had been put up before the siege had begun and was the weakest of all. Though it is debated whether the destruction of the Temple was intended by the Romans or not, it burned to the ground on July 29–30, 70 CE, with monumental consequences for the Jewish and Christian faiths. The city was put to the torch, and Simon and John were captured. Both were marched in the triumph back in Rome, along with treasures looted from the Temple and city, like the Menorah. But while John was sentenced to life imprisonment, Simon was executed at the climax of the triumph.

Even though the Flavians, imperial father Vespasian, and his general son Titus celebrated a triumph after the fall of Jerusalem, the rebellion was not fully stamped out — pockets of resistance remained at Herodium and Machaerus. Finally, there were the forces still at the well-placed fortress of Masada, strategically placed atop a plateau. These rebels held out against the Roman forces until 72 CE. Determined to stamp out every vestige of the revolt, the Romans, now led by Lucius Flavius Silva, built a circumvallation (or enclosing wall) around the plateau to prevent any supplies from getting in or people from getting out. Next, they transported vast amounts of earth in order to construct a siege ramp up to the redoubt itself. When they finally broke through, the Romans found that nearly all of the inhabitants had killed themselves. The remains of the Roman siege works can still be seen at Masada today. This was the bitter end to the first Jewish War.

In the aftermath, Vespasian instituted the fiscus Judaicus, a tax upon Jews which essentially redirected the half-shekel tithe to the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus in Rome. He also ordered the Temple of Onias in Egypt to be destroyed, lest that become another center of insurrection. There would be two other major Jewish revolts in the Roman empire. In 117 CE, the Kitos war enflamed Jewish communities across the Eastern Mediterranean for two years before its eventual repression. Finally, in 132 CE, a revolt erupted in Judea led by Simon bar Kokhba, which was also suppressed. Afterwards, the emperor Hadrian built a Roman colony, Aelia Capitolina, on the site of the ruins of Jerusalem. Aelia Capitolina remained the name of the site until the seventh century CE and survives as the Arabic name for Jerusalem (Iliyā).

Josephus and the Jewish War

The Jewish War (66–72 CE) is the rare ancient conflict where a participant wrote an account of the event afterwards. Josephus thus joins a group of ancient historians that includes Thucydides (a clear and obvious model in many ways for Josephus) and Julius Caesar. Josephus’s text was written in Greek and eventually translated into Latin (perhaps by Cassiodorus) and adapted into Latin by later writers, in particular the author called Pseudo-Hegesippus. In this section we will consider the life of Josephus, his corpus of works, and their transmission into later Latin translations and adaptations.

Life of Josephus

What we can know of Josephus’s life comes from those parts of the War where he is a participant in the action (first as a leader in the siege of Jotapata, later as a prisoner-turned-advisor in the camp of the Flavians). Late in his life, presumably safely ensconced in Rome on the outer fringes of the new dynasty, Josephus composed a text appended to the Antiquities which scholars call the Life of Josephus. Rather than an autobiography in our sense, it is really an apologia against the calumnies of another participant in the war, whose own writings are no longer extant, as well as rather revised account of Josephus’s actions during the revolt from 66–72 CE. Oftentimes, when Josephus describes an event in the Life which he had earlier written about in the Wars, the account in the Life is markedly different from his earlier work. This is not a case of better research or a more detached approach to the conflict years removed, but rather the result of different goals and audiences for the two texts. Nevertheless, these divergences have vexed scholars over the years, especially when trying to put together a convincing account of the early stages of Vespasian’s campaigns, much less the life of the author of our main surviving historical account of the conflict.

What we can confidently say about Josephus is that he was born around 37 CE, and was descended from a priestly family on his father Matthias’s side and from the Hasmonean dynasty on his aristocratic mother’s side. Such parentage and noble lineage ensured a wealthy and comfortable upbringing for Josephus and his elder brother, named Matthias after their father. In the Life he describes a typical elite upbringing, and rather too schematically limns his education in the major “schools” of Jewish thought in the first century CE — the Saduccees, the Pharisees and the Essenes.

It is worthwhile to pause for a moment to outline these three schools, both for their importance to ancient Jewish culture (Saduccees) and later Jewish, rabbinical culture (arising out of the Pharisees), and because membership in the sects tended to reflect class distinctions. The Saduccees were primarily composed of the priestly elite and handled the maintenance and sacrifice at the Temple. They kept firmly to the Mosaic law or “written Torah” and eschewed the eschatological beliefs of the other sects. They also tended to be more in favor of Hellenization, and those trying to make peace with Rome would largely be of this group. The Pharisees for their part resisted Hellenization, tended to be of non-elites (Josephus reports they enjoyed broad lower class support), and emphasized the oral Torah — laws and interpretations — over the written one. Members of this sect would tend to want to resist Roman power. With the fall of the Second Temple, Rabbinical Judaism would evolve out of the Pharisaic sect. The last and smallest group, the Essenes, were a more eschatological, communitarian group. They lived apart from others, focusing more on purity than even other Jewish sects. It would not be too far off the mark to call these communities “monastic” in character, or at least monastic avant la lettre, with their commitments to asceticism and (for priests) celibacy. The famous “Dead Sea Scrolls” were produced by Essenes.

Josephus’s first major role in adulthood was membership in an embassy to the emperor Nero, to argue for the release of twelve Jewish priests. While he was in Rome, events in Jerusalem had spiraled out of control. Almost as soon as he returned to Judea, Josephus found himself as governor of Galilee, responsible for its defensive preparations for the expected retaliatory action by the Romans. Although we cannot be sure, given how Josephus changes his account between War and Life, he may have also been sent by the elites in Jerusalem to feel out sentiment in Galilee, to see if a large-scale conflict with Rome could yet be avoided and a few guilty parties turned over for punishment — for Rome could not let the successful ambush of a legion go unrevenged.

While in Galilee, Josephus successfully fortified major settlements and cities in the region in preparation for the expected Roman retaliation. In both War and Life, Josephus describes his wrangling with John of Gischala for control of Galilee. Their contest is left unresolved, even if Josephus gets the last laugh in his work with his vicious and caustic characterization of John, who becomes one of the leading villains in Josephus’s Jewish War. While Josephus would leave Galilee in Roman custody, John would later make his way to Jerusalem to become a pox upon the city and its population, especially in his murderous rivalry with Simon Bar Giora, who emerges as the other lead antagonist in Josephus’s account.

The downfall of Jotapata was but a detour in the inexorable march of Vespasian’s legions across Galilee. As the city fell, Josephus found himself in a cave with forty other survivors. These holdouts rejected Roman calls for surrender and Josephus suggested a method of collective suicide by counting out amongst the forty lots, where the person who took the first lot would be killed by the one who chose the second. Josephus keeps this account suitably vague (he would have to, since he survived), but somehow Josephus ended up as one of the last two alive and convinced his fellow survivor to just forget about the whole thing. Leaving the cave and the bodies behind, Josephus became a Roman prisoner. He cannily prophesized (suddenly in possession of a heretofore unmentioned gift of divination) Vespasian’s eventual accession to the throne, which later led to his release and elevation amongst the non-military coterie in the Flavian camp. He would prove most useful as an ambassador to the Jews of Rome, though his efforts (as in the romance) were in vain.

After the war, Josephus went back to Rome with his new patrons. He seems to have been present at the Flavians’ triumphal parade; in fact, he provides us with the fullest account of a Roman triumph we possess. He received lands around Jerusalem from the Flavians and resided in one of their domiciles in Rome (likely one owned earlier by Vespasian). He composed all of his extant works during this Roman retirement. Especially for his later works, he benefitted from contact with several leading personages in Rome and boasted of Titus’s personal approval of the War. Nevertheless, it would seem that he was on the fringes of Flavian patronage. He probably died around 100 CE.

As Steve Mason asserts, Josephus is not a sure guide to reconstructing the events of the Jewish War. Nevertheless, he is our only substantial guide, sometimes assisted by archaeology. However, Josephus is not a historian in our modern sense of academic history. History, in antiquity, was a branch of rhetoric. While writers self-professedly strove to present the truth, much leeway was given to the individual writer of history in filling in the picture, according to the principle of to eikos or “what is probable.” Josephus, first and foremost, is a literary artist, one whose art involved commemorating the past. Like our romance, Josephus sees the fate of the Temple and Jerusalem as an act of divine vengeance. However, unlike our romance, Josephus attributes this to the civil discord plaguing the city, especially the battles between Simon and John, rather than the execution of Jesus. But like our romance, Josephus sees the Roman army led by Vespasian and Titus as the instrument of God’s will.

The Corpus and its Transmission

We possess four works of Josephus, all in Greek. The cultural polemics of Against Apion, where Josephus defends the value of Jewish culture against a Hellenic detractor, will not concern us here. Most important for our purposes is the Jewish War, a text in seven books that was likely started soon after the war’s effective conclusion (i.e., after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, but before the fall of Masada in 72 CE) and finished by the end of the 70s CE. This text starts from the origins of the Hasmonean dynasty in the second century BCE and concludes with the fall of Masada in 72 CE. The twenty books of Jewish Antiquities trace Jewish history from Adam and Eve to the outbreak of the Jewish War (therefore, here too there is overlap and variation with the narrative in War). The Life of Josephus was apparently conceived as an appendix to this later work. Both the Antiquities and Life date to the 90s CE.

As with most surviving works of Greco-Roman antiquity, we owe the preservation of Josephus’s text to the hard work of Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. There is also a Hebrew transmission, the Sefer Yosippon. The Greek text would have been preserved in the Eastern part of the Roman Empire (what modern historians call the Byzantine Empire, which outlasted the empire in the west for nearly a thousand years). The seven main witnesses to the Greek text of War are from the eleventh century CE — which means there is still another millennium of transmission between our earliest extant texts and Josephus himself, for which we have no testimonia or evidence. Latin translations and adaptations were made in Late Antiquity. A passage from Cassiodorus’s Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning tells us that the scholar and statesman had had the Antiquities of Josephus translated by monks at his monastery Vivarium, while ascribing a translation of the War alternately to Jerome, Ambrose, or Rufinus. There is nothing in their surviving works or testimonia that suggest Ambrose or Jerome ever attempted a translation of the Jewish War themselves, and the earliest records of attribution to Rufinus date to the fifteenth century. As Cassiodorus is writing in the sixth century CE and refers to earlier translations of the War, it would seem the Latin translation would date to the fourth or fifth century CE (300s–400s), though absent any other information beyond the mere existence of the text and the lone testimonium from Cassiodorus, this must remain a guess.

In late antiquity the most notable adaptation was by Pseudo-Hegesippus, a text that seems to date from the fourth century (300s) CE, usually called De Excidio Urbis Hierosolymitanae (On the Destruction of the City of Jerusalem), in five books, reduced from the original seven of Josephus. A somewhat compressed account of the war, it mixes elements of Josephus’s Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities with Christian material. The author generally follows the thread of Josephus’s account, while explicitly figuring the destruction of the city and the Temple as divine retribution for the death of Christ, rather than Josephus’s emphasis on God’s anger at Jewish discord. Because of this shared sense of God’s divine anger, it is not too difficult for an author like Pseudo-Hegesippus and later Christians to use Josephus’s narrative for their own Christian ends.

One factor that allowed the text of Pseudo-Hegesippus to endure is the fact that it was often ascribed to Josephus in antiquity. By the ninth century it had been (mistakenly) identified with the second-century CE Greek Christian apologist Hegesippus (hence the modern addition of Pseudo). Claiming that a text was written by an established famous author was one way to help it find an audience. However, its association/confusion with Josephus’s original was also the source of its authority on the subject for centuries. Thus, when it comes to deducing the source of different details of the war in texts like The Siege of Jerusalem or our Destruction, it can be very difficult to determine whether it is derived from the Latin translation of Josephus’s original or Pseudo-Hegesippus. It is likely that the author of Destruction encountered Josephus through the Latin translation mentioned by Cassiodorus, Ps.-Hegessipus, or more probably a mixture of both. Though work on both traditions is limited, there is hope that more work will be done to expound these neglected aspects of Josephus’s reception.

Destruction in the Middle Ages: The Vengeance of Our Lord Tradition

Though Destruction has its ultimate origins in the writings of Josephus, Eusebius, and Pseudo-Hegesippus, accounts such as the one in Destruction were increasingly common from the twelfth century onward, with a proliferation of similar tales across genres and languages in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Old and Middle French prose Vengeance de Nostre-Seigneur exists in over forty-five manuscripts, and the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries saw over twenty-three editions. Notably, this version as well as the poetic Venjance de Nostre Seigneur lack the episode about Judas, the account of Pontius Pilate’s birth, and the closing episode in which the Jews return to the site of Jerusalem.

Destruction weaves together a vast array of sources, the majority of them Latin. The most frequently used include the Vindicta Salvatoris, dated to around 700 CE; Jacobus de Voragine’s incredibly popular Legenda Aurea or Golden Legend, a thirteenth-century compendium of saints’ lives; and the Gospel of Nicodemus, a noncanonical account of the events in Jerusalem after the death of Jesus. The four Gospels themselves, as well as the Book of Acts, provide much of the remainder of the poem’s source material.

Four versions of this narrative exist in Middle English: the short and long versions of Destruction, the alliterative Siege of Jerusalem, and Roger d’Argenteuil’s Bible en françois. The best known of these, the alliterative Siege, shares some key source texts with Destruction, though it is roughly a third of its length. As Adrienne Williams Boyarin notes, besides their similar subject matter, the poems share very little in common. Nonetheless, as Siege is a more familiar text for many readers, it may be helpful to address some of the crucial differences between these versions here.

Perhaps the most notable difference between Siege and Destruction is how Destruction reinforces binaries that Siege selectively blurs, especially around each poem’s treatment of its Jewish characters. Boyarin notes that Siege condemns Jews at many points in the text while expressing sympathy for their suffering at other moments. In contrast, Destruction Christianizes any character meant to be seen as virtuous — notably Jacob, Josephus, and Veronica — while categorizing all the poem’s villains as Jewish, including Pontius Pilate and Herod. Titus and Vespasian themselves are the only characters who complicate this binary: they espouse Christianity and are seen as God’s agents in enacting revenge, but they remain unbaptized until the end of the poem. Likewise, Siege contains far less opening apparatus designed to praise Jesus and vilify the Jews. Siege tends to renarrate Christian doctrine more briefly, whereas the telling and retelling of key narratives is central to Destruction: the poem contains multiple references to the disciples speaking in tongues from the Book of Acts, as well as considerably expanding Clement’s preaching to Vespasian.

On the whole, then, Destruction is invested in reinforcing Christian religious structures, which partially explains the poem’s preoccupation with Vespasian’s deferred baptism. As one who has not been baptized, Vespasian remains a “Saracen” until after Jerusalem has been defeated, and the Jews of the city repeatedly refer to him as such. Belief in Jesus may effect miraculous healing in Destruction, but only the sacraments confer Christian status. As Munro notes, the poem’s closing material — in which Vespasian honors the Christians who endured in Jerusalem, confirms Clement’s status as Pope, and constructs Christian churches — seems to be unique to Destruction. These moments align the poem especially strongly with the Middle English romance tradition; indeed, these acts, especially the establishment of churches, appear in a range of romances, transforming Vespasian from Roman emperor to romance hero. Like Gowther or Havelok, Vespasian returns home to live a religiously and politically virtuous life; Christian dominance is established, his faithful men are rewarded with lands and wealth, and he lives out his life in Rome before leaving his status as emperor to his son Titus. Vespasian’s deeds make Destruction a champion of religious orthodoxy at a moment when English poetry seems particularly concerned with such orthodoxy. From its preoccupation with baptism to its detailed attention to the vernicle as a relic to its ending confirmation of Clement’s papacy, Destruction promotes institutional orthodoxy throughout.

Cannibalism Historical and Literary

Destruction’s story of Maria’s cannibalism of her child, familiar to readers of Siege, originates in Josephus, where it is the culmination of the horrors of Titus’s siege that Josephus describes in book 6. As with other historians in antiquity, Josephus resorts to a number of stock episodes and scenes to flesh out his description of the siege, including cannibalism, but no other surviving ancient historian goes into the kind of horrifying detail that Josephus does in this episode. While Josephus was present outside the city during the siege, he would not have been privy to precise information about what was happening in the city, though he might have had opportunities after the war’s conclusion to interview survivors. The cannibalism episode is gruesome enough that Josephus even highlights it as a report that reached the Roman camp and disgusted Titus himself, a detail that Siege and Destruction do not include.

Cannibalism has a greater cultural force in medieval than in ancient literature. The ancient Greeks and Romans typically discussed cannibalism in two distinct contexts. The first was as an extreme marker of cultural difference. Several ancient ethnographies of areas in and around ancient Scythia (roughly modern Eastern Europe and northern Iran) mention a tribe called the Androphagoi or Anthropophagi, about whom not much more is known than their descriptive tribal name, Greek for “man-eaters.” Herodotus also tells of some peoples (the Issedones and the Indians) who consume the flesh of their dead relatives, though this is presented as a specific funerary cultural practice, as opposed to a general gastronomic practice for the Androphagoi, as their name would indicate.

The more common context for cannibalism in ancient sources is during the deprivations of siege warfare, as in Josephus’s infamous account, and by extension his many imitators, from Pseudo-Hegesippus and the Sefer Yosippon, through the Vengeance tradition, down to Destruction. Thucydides, writing in the late fifth and early fourth centuries BCE, is our earliest surviving example of cannibalism during a siege. In his description of the siege of Potidea (which finally fell in 429 BCE) during the Peloponnesian war, Thucydides tells how the people in the city, after their grain supplies had given out, were desperate enough to eat their fellow citizens. Such is the typical cannibalism in siege scene — driven by the deprivations of a protracted military operation, men inevitably are driven to extremes: war, as Thucydides tells us, is a harsh teacher. There are accounts of cannibalism that feature in three other sieges: Scipio Aemilianus’s siege of Numantia in 133 BCE; Sulla’s siege of Athens in 87–86 BCE, during the Mithridatic wars; and Gnaeus Pompey’s siege of Calagurris in 72 BCE. Plutarch’s Lucullus provides a slight twist on the siege theme. In this case, Mithridates VI Eupator, King of Pontus, is besieging the city of Cyzicus. The Roman general Lucius Licinius Lucullus successfully cuts off Mithridates’s supply lines to the point where the conditions in his own camp become worse than those of the besieged, even as his own advisors attempt to deceive him. Soon enough Mithridates discovers the truth, which includes cannibalism on the part of his soldiers. In all these cases, the emphasis is on the horror of an extended siege and the gruesomeness of this grim act, and the stories from the siege of Numantia, fragmentary as they are, remain the most chilling outside of Josephus. Like us, the ancients regarded cannibalism with, at minimum, strong distaste.

While most of these references are brief, with minimum condemnation or exculpation, two ancient accounts stand out. First, of course, is Josephus’s account of Maria and her child, which we discuss below. About a century earlier, Julius Caesar, in his account of his wars in Gaul, describes a speech of an especially fierce Gaul named Critognatus, during the climactic siege of Alesia that finally broke the revolt of Vercengetorix:

Quid ergo mei consili est? Facere, quod nostri maiores nequaquam pari bello Cimbrorum Teutonumque fecerunt; qui in oppida compulsi ac simili inopia subacti eorum corporibus qui aetate ad bellum inutiles videbantur vitam toleraverunt neque se hostibus tradiderunt.

[What, therefore, is my plan? To do that which our ancestors did in the war with the Cimbri and Teutones, one that is utterly unequal to this war: men who locked themselves away in their towns and compelled by a similar want of resources nourished themselves with the bodies of those who seemed, because of their age, useless towards the war effort — nor did they hand themselves over to the enemy.]

Caesar’s prefatory remarks emphasize the “singular and nefarious cruelty” (propter eius singularem et nefariam crudelitatem, 7.77.2) of the speech — it is in fact the entire reason Caesar records it (all the more notable because it is one of the rare speeches in direct discourse in all of Caesar’s extant writings). Like the other examples, this is contextualized in a siege; like the Numantines earlier or the Usipi later, the weaker are to be consumed first to support the strong. For Caesar’s immediate purposes, this allows him to continue his characterization of the Gauls as “barbarians” and use it to justify his conquests in the region. It is also an especially memorable summation of a key antithesis in The Gallic War, book 7 between libertas (freedom) and servitus (servitude) — so repulsive is the latter to the Gauls that they would turn to cannibalism before surrender, as Critognatus proposes.

While Caesar’s is the most memorable extant passage concerning cannibalism in Latin, it is Josephus’s infamous account in the Jewish War that really captured the medieval imagination. While these authors were writing for either primarily a Greek audience, or a Roman one, Josephus, as a Hellenized Jewish resident in Rome, seems to have intended his work to be read by all three of these possible audiences: Roman, Greek, and Jewish. As Honora Chapman demonstrates in her reading of Maria’s episode, Josephus draws upon both the Hellenic cultural tradition (e.g. Thucydides) and Hebrew scripture in rendering this episode. For all its horror, then, this episode provides a stimulating locus to see how Josephus negotiates these competing cultural traditions. As such, it also makes a good text to see how these cultural traditions are reshaped in the Latin translations, the Vengeance tradition, and Destruction.

Given Josephus’s use of Thucydides as a model, it is likely that Josephus was familiar with the ancient historian’s account of the siege of Potidea, and certainly with the horrors of more recent sieges like Sulla’s siege of Athens, or Scipio Aemilianus’s siege of Numantia. For Greco-Roman historians, bare events (e.g. a siege, a pitched battle) were elaborated by writers of history to provide an entertaining and didactic read for their audience. Cannibalism was a stock resource for this kind of elaboration, but generally not on the scale of Josephus’s narrative in Jewish War, book 6.

To elaborate this episode, Josephus draws upon Jewish tradition, where not only cannibalism but specifically that of a mother eating her own children frequently figures as part of God’s punishment of the Israelites for their failure to keep with Jewish law. Two representative examples come from Leviticus 26:28–29:

I will also go against you with opposite fury, and I will chastise you with seven plagues for your sins, so that you shall eat the flesh of your sons and of your daughters.

And Jeremias 19:9, where the context is specifically a city under siege:

And I will feed them with the flesh of their sons, and with the flesh of their daughters: and they shall eat every one the flesh of his friend in the siege, and in the distress wherewith their enemies, and they that seek their lives shall straiten them.

These examples are in the context of warnings from God for Jews to keep within the law. There is one specific case mentioned at 4 Kings 6:28, again in the context of a siege. Here, Samaria is being besieged by King Ben-hadad of Syria, and a woman complains to the King of Israel:

And the king said to her: “What aileth thee?” And she answered: “This woman said to me: ‘Give thy son, that we may eat him today, and we will eat my son tomorrow.’ So we boiled my son, and ate him. And I said to her on the next day: ‘Give thy son that we may eat him.’ And she hath hid her son.” When the king heard this, he rent his garments.

Beyond the horrific nature of the cannibalism itself, what is most striking about this passage is that the woman’s complaint is not about the deprivations of the siege and the terrible lengths it drove her to, but of her neighbor’s dishonesty and deception at not keeping up her end of the child-devouring bargain.

While it is curious that an educated Jewish writer like Josephus would claim that Maria’s horrible deed was “of such a kind that has never been recorded by Greeks or barbarians, awful to tell and unbelievable to hear,” given the earlier story from 4 Kings 6:28, Chapman notes that in keeping with Josephus’s historiographical goals, making claims in his preface for the uniquely great nature of the Jewish war, it is important to omit an earlier Jewish example, the better to emphasize the unique awfulness of Maria’s desperate meal. Thus, Jewish readers can recognize Josephus’s careful alignment with Hebrew scripture, apt for his contention that God’s wrath is responsible for the fall of Jerusalem because of the civil discord within. Meanwhile, for his Greco-Roman readers, this scene is a particularly vivid and grotesque example of a “stock scene” in siege narratives.

As Merrall Price has noted, this account of maternal cannibalism exists across the spectrum of fall-of-Jerusalem narratives; by the thirteenth century, the story was well-known enough as an exemplum of maternal depravity for Dante, Boccaccio, and perhaps even Chaucer to refer to it obliquely and assume their audiences’ familiarity with it. However, Destruction integrates several crucial changes. In earlier versions, such as that of Eusebius, the child cannibalized is a boy, which, combined with the mother’s name, Maria, suggests Eucharistic overtones. By the time the narrative reaches the Vengeance of Our Lord tradition, however, new variants appear; in the French Vengeance de Nostre-Seigneur, Marie is not Jewish but an African Christian convert encouraged by her friend Clarice to cook and eat part of Clarice’s son, a deed Marie only agrees to upon urging by an angel, much like Destruction’s narrative. In this, Destruction differs from Siege, as well as Josephus, his Latin translation, Rufinus’s translation of Eusebius into Latin, and Pseudo-Hegesippus, all of whom omit Clarice and the exhorting angel. We would venture that the Vengeance tradition, and Destruction, perhaps see the reference to 4 Kings in the original account, and brings their story more in line with that story with the addition of Clarice. Combined with the prevalent mother-devouring-child imagery from other biblical sources (as in Jeremias and Kings), this version allows Destruction to figure the downfall of Jerusalem as part of God’s divine plan, foretold in scripture.

Historical accounts of cannibalism during the First Crusade are pervasive, and Geraldine Heng has linked the narratives in chronicles of the period to medieval romance as a genre. In her reading of the account in Siege, Bonnie Millar notes that in eating her child, “[b]y breaking social taboos [Marie’s] actions convey the breakdown of social systems. This is something to which she has been driven by society.” In making this action divinely approved, Destruction sanctions the siege and the extreme conditions within the city of Jerusalem, fitting them neatly into God’s prophesied plan for the city’s downfall. Millar suggests that the narrative in Destruction is simplified in several ways that fit the poem’s emphasis on horror, suggesting that in this episode, “[t]he emphasis is placed on the fact that Mary must do this against her will to fulfil the judgement decreed upon Jerusalem by God,” a necessary outcome of Marie’s Christian, rather than Jewish, background in Destruction.

Medieval English Antisemitism and Its Contexts

In part because of the broad network of sources it draws on, Destruction has links to a variety of literary traditions circulating in medieval England. The scholarship on English anti-Judaic sentiment is substantial, and we cannot hope to examine it all here; nonetheless, an overview detailing the theological and historical situation of Jewish communities in relation to late medieval England contextualizes Destruction’s treatment of its Jewish characters.

As many critics have observed, medieval Christians were aware that their own faith developed from and existed in opposition to Judaism: that is, Judaism was the necessary precursor to Christianity, yet its continued existence presented a challenge to notions of Christianity as universal. This tension led to particular vitriol leveled at Judaism and Jews in the literature and theology of the period as well as to violence against Jewish communities. As Geraldine Heng has recently suggested, “Jews functioned as the benchmark by which racial others were defined, measured, scaled, and assessed.” This marginalized status was exacerbated by their proximity; while Muslims might occupy Jerusalem, Jews were to be found in communities across Europe. Their geographic position made Jews a convenient way for Christians to present alterity, thus endangering actual Jews. As Bale succinctly puts it, “medieval antisemitic representations allow us to see that which medieval Christians were not, or did not want to be.”

The position of Jews in medieval England was particularly fraught. Jews were essential to the developing English credit market, which made them uniquely endangered by Christian views of wealth and a target of resentment for anyone who needed financing; at the same time, they were imagined by Christians as ideologically subordinate, further justifying their murder and legal mistreatment. Though it is unclear whether Jews were originally linked to the English crown, they quickly came to be associated with royal authority, and in 1275, Edward I referred to English Jews as the king’s serfs, which made any rights and protections offered to Jewish communities subject to royal whim. Scholars have noted that anti-Jewish sentiment resulted in legal action against Jews earlier in England than on much of the continent. England was the first European power to enforce the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215’s Canon 68, which required that Jews wear identifying markers on their clothing, with a law introduced by King Henry III on 30 March 1218. Late twelfth-century England also saw multiple waves of violence against Jewish communities by Christians, notably in Lincoln (1189–90), York (1190), Bury St. Edmunds (1181), Norwich (1144), and London (1276). Of particular interest to readers of this poem, Jewish responses to violence wielded against them were sometimes linked to the 70 CE events at the fall of Jerusalem. As Anthony Bale explains, “William of Newburgh, the most eloquent Christian chronicler of the [1190 York] incident, reports that the leader of the York Jews, Rabbi Yom Tov of Joigny, modelled his speech and actions on those of the suicidal Zealots led by Eleazar at Masada (73 CE), as narrated by Josephus (c. 37–100 CE) in De bello Judaico.” The events surrounding the fall of Jerusalem held imaginative power for both Christians and Jews in the Middle Ages, serving as an affirmation of triumphant Christian violence and a model of Jewish resistance.

England was also the first European power to officially expel Jews, who were removed from the country by royal edict of Edward I in 1290. As Bale notes, however, this seeming turning point had little to no impact on English antisemitism, which continued to thrive in England’s cultural products. Spectral, virtual, though legally absent, Jews featured strongly in English cultural production, available for repeated marginalization in post-Expulsion literature by Christians. Though Destruction of Jerusalem long postdates official expulsion, it is one of many antisemitic literary texts that circulated in England in the later Middle Ages. Thus, Destruction and works like it — including most famously Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale but also the Book of John Mandeville, Croxton Play of the Sacrament, and others — continued to circulate and imaginatively shape notions of English identity.

These tensions rise to the surface especially in texts that focus on the city of Jerusalem. Jews are sometimes erased entirely from literary depictions of the city central to all three Abrahamic faiths imagined as displaced from the holy city; at other times, they are strongly linked to Muslims, who had political control over the region for the vast majority of the later Middle Ages. Destruction resists both these urges, placing its Jews in Jerusalem — though a Jerusalem under Roman authority — and presenting them as a distinct community. Narratives about Jerusalem served a devotional purpose, giving Christians the chance to engage in narrative travel as a kind of meditative exercise. As Susanne Yeager has argued, Jews were both central to literary constructions of Jerusalem and considered a danger to the city. Roger Nicholson likewise notes that Jerusalem is central to notions of European Christendom in the same way as Troy narratives were crucial to developing ideas of national identity. The poem’s crusading echoes are thus very much in keeping with its antisemitism, and these echoes extended beyond literary production. As Susanna A. Throop notes, the First and Second Crusades included attacks against Jews; she also describes a forged papal encyclical, allegedly by Pope Sergius IV (1009–1012), that claimed that Titus and Vespasian’s destruction of Jerusalem foreshadowed Crusading victory. Thus, it is possible to read Destruction alongside texts of the period that celebrate Crusading ideologies and imagine a successful reconquest of Jerusalem despite the poem’s first-century setting. These fantasies about Jerusalem hold particular sway in English contexts. As Yeager has suggested, “portrayals of Jerusalem articulated expressions of incipient national identity in late medieval England . . . English writings about travel to the holy city were part of a much larger project of constructing England in the image of Jerusalem.” Destruction follows in the same trajectory as English works such as Richard Coer de Lion, The Book of John Mandeville, or its counterpart text, Siege of Jerusalem. Thus, English identity and English antisemitism are entangled: Destruction, in seeking to rid Jerusalem of Jews, fashions a literary expulsion for the Holy Land that mirrors the legal expulsion of Jews from England several hundred years before.

While the existing scholarly literature on Destruction tracks its reinterpretations of Latin sources, the poem’s connections to medieval drama have been historically overlooked. These parallels make sense given Destruction and the cycle plays’ shared interest in reproducing and translating Biblical narratives for vernacular audiences, as well as the shared source material; further, many of the Biblical stories reproduced in Destruction also appear in English cycle plays. The episode of the woman taken in adultery, for example, appears in the York, N-Town, and Chester Plays. Diane Munro has identified several other passages that may well draw on the dramatic tradition, including the detail that Pilate’s wife’s dream came from Satan (present in Chester and N-Town Plays) and Mary’s presence at the ascension of Jesus (present in Wakefield and York Cycles). Even the detailed violence with which the crucifixion is narrated and renarrated might be familiar from its dramatizations within the cycle plays; as Michael Livingston notes, the cycles included entire plays focused on the torture of Jesus. Patricia A. DeMarco suggests that these depictions of the Passion are indeed designed to be traumatizing and that they are thus crucial to Christian identity formation. Yet key to the use of Crucifixion narratives as a mechanism for Christian identity formation is its antisemitism: as Bale observes, “In popular religion, the Passion was reduced to a series of sensational and often crude moments of violence and degradation . . . In texts and images of the Passion we find the most violent and widespread antisemitic images, serving not only to represent Jews as the killers of Christ but also to vitiate and objectify the Jewish image more generally.” While there is not an English dramatic version of the siege and destruction of Jerusalem, the narrative was dramatized on the continent, especially in French, as Steven Wright has discussed. From its vernacularizing of Latin source material to its preservation in multiple versions across many manuscripts, Destruction was clearly imagined for a wide and interested medieval English Christian public.

For Destruction, the destruction of the temple is unequivocally the preordained consequence of Jewish condemnation of Jesus. In its retelling of Jesus’s lament over Jerusalem (lines 695–720), the poem narrates this account of the end times as a more focused, specific account of the city’s destruction by Roman siege. Indeed, the poem is notable for its repeated assertions that readers should not pity the Jews because their suffering and justification is preordained vengeance. These assertions are crucial to the poem’s antisemitism, serving as excuse and justification for its most violent passages.

Manuscripts and Editions

There are twelve manuscripts of Destruction of Jerusalem. While this fact alone is not necessarily proof of wide readership, the number of extant manuscripts is nonetheless noteworthy, particularly as Destruction seems to survive in more copies than Siege and many works are preserved in a single copy. The majority of manuscripts are of the somewhat unwieldy long version described above, although several of these are incomplete.

Long Version Manuscripts:

• A: London, British Library, MS Additional 36523, fols. 1r–71r
  • Complete; second quarter of fifteenth century
  • 10 ½ by 7 inches
• L: Oxford, Bodleian, MS Laud Misc. 622, fols. 1r–21v, 71v–72v
  • Complete: first 680 lines appear at end of MS; dated to around 1400
  • 11 ¾ by 10 ¼ inches
• C: London, British Library, MS Harley 4733, fols. 40v–127r
  • Complete except a small gap, lines 4702–4730; around 1460
  • 8 by 5 inches
• D: Oxford, Bodleian, MS Digby 230, fols. 195r–223v
  • Complete; middle of fifteenth century
  • 15 ¾ by 10 ½ inches
• O: New Haven, Beinecke Library, MS Osborn A.11, fols. 1r–38v
  • Partial: contains lines 1–4875, with a gap from lines 3719–75; early fifteenth century
  • 9 ¾ by 6 3/8 inches
• Addit: London, British Library, MS Additional 36983, fols. 216r–255r
  • Complete: however, lines 2201–2382 transposed with lines 3820–4002; circa 1440s
  • 11 ¼ by 8 ½ inches
• Douce: Oxford, Bodleian, MS Douce 126, fols. 69r–84r
  • Partial: begins at line 3913 and continues to end; first half of fifteenth century
  • 9 by 6 ½ inches
• Douce 78: Oxford, Bodleian, MS Douce 78, fols. 19r–76v
  • Partial: contains only the first 2295 lines; late fifteenth century
  • 8 ¼ by 5 ¼ inches
• Cov: Coventry, City Records Office MS 325/1, fols. 98r–129v
  • Partial: contains lines 80–5039; mid-fifteenth century
  • 12 2/3 by 7 ½ inches

Short Version Manuscripts:

• P: Cambridge, Magdalene College, Cambridge University, MS Pepys 2014 (formerly Pepys 37), fols. 23r–35v
  • Late fourteenth/early fifteenth century
  • 10 7/10 by 7 1/5 inches
• M: New York, Pierpont Morgan, MS M.898, fols. 1r–100r
  • Fifteenth century
  • 5 5/8 by 3 7/8 inches
• B: London, British Library, MS Additional 10036, fols. 2r–61v
  • Early fifteenth century (circa 1425)
  • 6 by 3 ¾ inches

Previous Editions:

• Fischer, Rudolf, ed. “Vindicta Salvatoris.” Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 111 (1903), 285–98 and 112 (1904), 25–45. [using P as the base manuscript]
• Herbert, J. A., ed. Titus & Vespasian: or The Destruction of Jerusalem in Rhymed Couplets: Edited from the London and Oxford MSS. London: Roxburghe Club, 1905. [using A as the base manuscript]
• Munro, Diane A. “An Edition and Study of Portions of MS Laud Misc. 622 of the Bodleian Library.” Ph.D. Dissertation: Aberdeen University, 1977. [a partial edition of L that includes Destruction]
• Wilson, John Holmes, ed. “Titus and Vespasian: A Trial Edition of the Osborne Manuscript.” Ph.D. Dissertaton: Yale, 1967. [using O as the base manuscript]

We have selected Bodleian Library MS Laud 622, abbreviated as L, as our base text. The earliest extant version of the poem, dated to around 1400, the manuscript is in reasonably good condition, with some damage to the outer margins and several small holes. Pricking and ruling is sometimes faintly visible, but not consistently so. Destruction appears on folio 1r, but this is not the beginning of the poem. Folios 65–72 contain the first 680 lines of the poem, with two lines of the poem appearing as a single line of text; a punctus indicates where the line break should be. Though these folios appear at the back of the manuscript, they contain the start of the poem; thus, the first line in the book is line 681, and the poem continues through folio 21v. As it appears from folio 1 to folio 21, the poem is copied in double columns, with blue capitals surrounded by rubrication. However, the early lines that appear on folios 65–72 are considerably more compressed: the poem is again written in two columns, but with couplets sharing a single line, and the margins are dramatically reduced. We have compared L against all long version manuscripts of the poem, with major variants detailed in our textual notes.

Previous editions tend to be based on a single manuscript or else collate manuscripts from both the long and short versions of the poem. Phyllis Moe has argued that the short version of the poem should be privileged, largely because its narrative holds together more neatly without the digressions of the longer version. It is certainly the case that that short version’s narrative is somewhat more coherent; however, given that the majority of manuscripts are of the long version, we have here chosen to edit the more frequently preserved version of the text. L is notable for the works alongside which Destruction appears: Laud 622 also contains Kyng Alisaunder, a life of Saint Alexis, Adam Davy’s visions of Edward III, a single-folio account of the Holy Land, and various biblically-inspired material, including “Fifteen Tokens before the Day of Judgment.” As Nicole Clifton has suggested, then, the manuscript may serve as a sort of compendium of writings about the Middle East, broadly imagined. Laud’s manuscript context emphasizes the extent to which the poem links current discourses of crusade, antisemitism, and pious violence. It also contextualizes the seemingly long prologue on Jesus’s Passion, making these lines part of its presentation of the geographic area’s history.

In our editorial practice, we have followed Middle English Texts Series guidelines as follows:

• thorn (Þ) has been modernized to th;
• yogh (ȝ) has been modernized to g, gh, or y as appropriate;
• Middle English the has been emended to either the or thee as sense demands;
• we have normalized u/v and i/j to their modern spellings to facilitate reading.

Punctuation is editorial. Several paraph markings appear in the margin of the text, which are noted in the Textual Notes. Breaks in the text indicate decorated capitals in the base manuscript, which are also recorded in the Textual Notes.