Peter the Hermit was not tall, not handsome, not educated in theology, and rode a donkey instead of a horse. He ate nothing but fish and drank nothing but wine. He had spent years on pilgrimage, seen Jerusalem under Turkish rule, and come home burning with conviction that something had to be done. In a series of sermons across France and Germany in 1095 and 1096, he gathered two hundred thousand people — farmers, women, children, monks, knights — and led them east toward Jerusalem. Most of them died before they got there. But behind them came an actual army, and that army took the city.
Peter the Hermit had been to Jerusalem and come back changed. He had made the pilgrimage sometime before 1095 — a difficult, dangerous journey from France through the Byzantine Empire and into the Holy Land, which had recently passed from relatively tolerant Arab rule to the Seljuk Turks, who had much less patience for Christian visitors wandering around their conquered territory. He had seen Christian pilgrims mistreated. He had seen churches neglected and holy sites in the hands of people who did not consider them holy. He had prayed in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre where Christ was said to have been buried, and he came home unable to stop thinking about what he had seen. When Pope Urban II called for a crusade at the Council of Clermont in November 1095 — a formal campaign to recapture Jerusalem from the Turks — Peter's private conviction and the Church's public call found each other at exactly the right moment.
Peter the Hermit's preaching tour through France and Germany in 1095-96 generated a spontaneous popular movement — the People's Crusade — that preceded the organized military campaign. Most of his followers never reached Jerusalem.
The Sermon That Moved a Continent
Peter was physically unimpressive. He was small, thin, and barefoot. He rode a donkey. He wore a rough hermit's robe. He was not a theologian or a bishop or a man of formal ecclesiastical standing. What he had was conviction of the kind that people can hear in someone's voice from fifty yards away. He began preaching in Berry in central France. People came to hear him and wept. Some kissed his donkey. He preached in Champagne, in Lorraine, in Germany. Everywhere he went the crowds gathered and many of them immediately decided to go with him to Jerusalem. Nobody had organized this. There were no logistics, no supplies planned, no military structure. People left their farms in the middle of the plowing season. Women with children attached themselves to the column. Elderly monks who had no business on a military expedition joined. A small number of actual knights came too, but the overwhelming majority of the gathering army were ordinary people who had heard Peter preach and decided that going to Jerusalem was what God wanted them to do. By the spring of 1096 he had somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 people — ancient sources give wildly different numbers — marching east. It was the largest unplanned human movement in medieval European history.
The People's Crusade: What Happened When Enthusiasm Met Reality
The march through Germany produced atrocities. Groups within Peter's following attacked Jewish communities in the Rhineland, killing thousands on the reasoning that the enemies of God were present at home as well as in Jerusalem. Peter himself reportedly tried to stop some of these massacres and failed. The killing happened anyway. Through Hungary and into the Byzantine Empire, the column struggled. Food ran short. Some groups took what they needed from local populations. The Byzantine emperor Alexius, who had originally asked the Pope for help against the Turks, found himself managing a quarter-million hungry and increasingly desperate pilgrims tramping through his territory. He provided food, kept them moving, and got them across the Bosphorus into Asia Minor as quickly as possible. In Asia Minor, the Seljuk Turks were waiting. The People's Crusade was destroyed almost immediately. The Turks were professional cavalry soldiers. Peter's followers were mostly untrained farmers. A force that marched into Turkish territory was ambushed and cut to pieces. Another force met the main Turkish army and was annihilated. Of the hundreds of thousands who had followed Peter out of France and Germany, the vast majority were killed, enslaved, or simply lost somewhere along the roads of the eastern Mediterranean. Peter himself survived. He had remained at Constantinople during the final disasters and was not among the dead.