by Guy Stagg
The most successful crusade evangelist was Peter the Hermit, an ageing preacher from Picardy. He was not really a hermit, though he dressed in robes and went barefoot or rode a mangy donkey. But he was austere, refusing to eat bread and keeping to a strict diet of fish and wine. During the winter of 1095 Peter toured round Germany, calling for the conquest of the Holy Land. His sermons attracted enormous crowds of carters and bakers, butchers and tanners, surgeons, masons, stewards and cooks, as well as physicians, marshals, chamberlains, constables, notaries, scribes and clerics of every class. These audiences were said to tear the hair from his donkey as if it was a sacred relic.
A story spread that Peter, not Urban, was the true author of the First Crusade. According to legend he visited Jerusalem as a young man and was appalled at the treatment of pilgrims by the city’s Muslim rulers, vowing to return with an army.
By the spring of 1096 he had collected almost twenty thousand followers. The generals of the campaign’s four largest forces were still deciding whether or not to take part, so Peter set off alone.
From Cologne the People’s Crusade marched down the Danube, attracting more pilgrims wherever they stopped. In their wake came a loose band of armies led by a priest named Folkmar and various minor noblemen – Gottschalk, Emich of Flonheim and Walter Sans Avoir.
The journey was a catastrophe. Thanks to propaganda about avenging the death of Christ, Jewish communities were killed all along the route. There were massacres at Speyer and Worms, Mainz and Metz, and forced conversions in Magdeburg and Prague. Local Christians were treated little better. Because the armies left in a hurry, they were not adequately supplied, forcing them to raid the surrounding countryside.
Many of these soldiers never made it beyond Hungary. Folkmar’s forces were destroyed at Nitra, and Gottschalk’s surrendered at Pannonhalma. The rest ran into trouble in Bulgaria, with Walter Sans Avoir’s men routed north of Belgrade and Peter the Hermit’s battered near Niš. When the survivors reached Constantinople, they began torching palaces and stealing the lead from local churches, until they were shipped across the Bosphorus and pitched camp outside Helenopolis.
Medieval chroniclers dismissed the People’s Crusade as a mob of unruly peasants. However, the image this conveys – of farmhands downing tools to march for Paradise – is misleading. Unlike pilgrimage, crusading was not open to all classes. Despite their ragtag leadership, the social make-up of these armies was little different from the campaign’s later forces. Although the chroniclers knew this, they wanted to distance Peter’s disastrous mission from the heroic deeds that came after. But the evangelist’s shambolic advance party betrayed the ugliness of the entire movement, for underneath the pious guise of pilgrimage this was a vicious war of conquest.
However, pilgrimage was more than an excuse. The pilgrims’ belief in the special sanctity of Jerusalem was what turned their campaign into a holy war. After all, the city had little strategic value: faith alone made it precious. A place becomes sacred when people are willing to die for it, the blessing not built in stone but bled into the earth. And my own journey was stained by that same act of sacrifice, because on entering the Levant the history of sacred travel becomes a record of conquest. Though I wanted to make sense of the walk using pilgrim traditions, as I neared Jerusalem those traditions grew ever more ugly.
Enver thought the People’s Crusade deserved the horrors waiting for them on the far side of the Bosphorus. This was the prim little man I met in the lakeside town of İznik, who had winking eyes, pointed teeth and a nervous spasm of a smile. He claimed that he was a teacher, a scholar, a student of all the world, and he called the crusaders pirates.
‘The West was the third world! The East was the first world! We had the silks, the spices, the sciences. Europe wanted them too.’
We met in a cafe near the lake’s edge, where I was plotting my route over the Anatolian Plateau. From here I would hike some seven hundred kilometres south via the Yenişehir Plain, the Domaniç Mountains, the Kütahya Plain and the Taurus Mountains, reaching the Mediterranean coast in a month’s time.
When Enver saw my map, he asked where I was going, but I struggled to answer. This was my first conversation for several days, as few villagers on the Anatolian Plateau understood English, and I had been walking in a state of uneasy vigilance: every sentence a test, every stranger a trial. Speaking Turkish, Enver’s voice was mumbling, but in English he boomed, interrupting my reply and offering to show me round.
It was Monday morning, ten o’clock. Although I had twenty-five kilometres to hike that day, I could spare an hour or two.
First we went to Hagia Sophia. Like its Istanbul namesake, the church was built in the sixth century by the Emperor Justinian. But this building was modest in comparison, its walls a weathered mix of brick and stone, its base sunk below street level. The plaster was gone, the mortar too, and the stone so worn it was soft to touch.
‘You have to feel the history,’ said Enver, pressing my fingers against the wall. ‘I like to feel my hands on all the history. Most people, they never know history. Why? Because they walk everywhere with their hands in their pockets.’
Inside, the arches and domes were also of brick, rippled with dirt as if lifted from the lakebed. A mihrab dented the room’s southern wall, and a dwarf minaret was tacked onto the north-west corner. Below the niche a scowling man in his mid-sixties was laying out a prayer mat on a wooden floor.
I had not appreciated that the building was being used for worship. When I mentioned this to Enver, he raised his arms in mock innocence. ‘Sometimes museum, sometimes mosque. Who can tell?’
At that point the scowling man turned in our direction and shouted a few words of Turkish. My guide raised his arms a second time.
‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘I have a loud voice.’
Outside was a garden of palms, cypresses and exposed foundation stones. Enver led me back through the door, still discussing his tactile theory of history. Then his phone rang. The first time he ignored it; the second time he answered. On the other end I heard a woman’s voice, high-pitched and pleading. From the way Enver muttered into the cupped mouthpiece, I knew his wife was calling.
He hung up. ‘Now where do we see?’
‘Perhaps I should go—’
‘The tiles!’ Enver boomed, so we went to see the tiles.
Many of Turkey’s grandest mosques were decorated with İznik tiles. Until the seventeenth century the town’s workshops were famous, but as demand for imperial mosques petered out, the industry declined. However, a few workshops remained in a neighbourhood of narrow streets. Their interiors were a confusion of vases, plates, bowls and saucers, with quartz tiles pinned to the walls. Each tile was decorated with a verse from the Qur’an, forming a fragile lattice of Arabic lettering. The colours were complicated: cobalt and turquoise, viridian and coral, or glazed white like a new set of teeth. The shapes were complicated too: tulips and carnations, lotus leaves and saz leaves, spidery strands of ivy and the feathers of a peacock’s tail.
As we looked round the workshops, Enver’s phone rang a third time. The pleading voice was now accompanied by the sound of splashing water. I wondered if a pipe had burst and his home was flooded, but my guide seemed unconcerned, muttering something else and hanging up again.
By now I was eager to get away, so I asked Enver if he needed to leave. Rather than reply, he started bellowing questions that he answered himself. Did Enver think Tayyip Erdoğan was a good prime minister? Enver did think Tayyip Erdoğan was a good prime minister. Erdoğan was not a conservative; he was not a dictator; he was proud of Turkey’s history. Would Enver be fasting for Ramadan? Enver would be fasting for Ramadan. It was duty. It was tradition. Most young people did not fast any more; they were lazy; they watched too many American TV shows. What history did Enver think young people should learn in schools? They should learn Ottoman history. In particular, the reigns of Osman I, Murad I, Mehmed II and Suleiman I. Yes, Suleiman the Magnificent. Remem
ber, the Ottoman Empire lasted six centuries; the Turkish Republic was not even a hundred. We should be proud of the Ottoman Empire. All Turkey should be proud.
By the time Enver finished interviewing himself, we had reached the last workshop. ‘Now where do we see?’ he asked.
‘I really need to get away—’
‘The walls!’ Enver boomed, so we went to see the walls.
İznik’s medieval walls were still standing, as well as its gates and defensive towers. My guide led the way along a road of potholed asphalt, between vans trimmed in mudstain and cars with scuffed snouts. Everything in the town seemed to be coming apart. The timber houses with orange-brick extensions. The concrete apartments painted a dirty pink. The shop stalls crowding the roadside, selling cleaning products and cooking utensils and an extraordinary number of chainsaws. Overhanging the stalls were balconies with rusted banisters and signs displaying half-familiar names – Durgut Collection, Japon Pazarı, Marmara Salonu, Ziraat Bankası, Beymen Business – but some of their letters were missing, and most of their backlights broken.
The Yenişehir Gate guarded the road south from the city. Its gatehouse was gone, but the tower remained, a rounded brick structure with its top blown off. Nearby stood a pair of stone arches and several shed-sized chunks of masonry.
Enver was describing the scale of the original fortifications – six thousand paces long, forty cubits high etc. – when his phone rang a fourth time. Again the pleading voice, again the splashing water, and a wailing sound that was perhaps a siren. I wondered if his house was on fire, but then Enver muttered the word turist and I realized why he could not go home. Whatever the crisis, his duty as host came first.
‘Now where do we see?’ Enver asked after hanging up.
‘I’m off, Enver.’
‘Off?’
‘I have to go.’
My host would not hear of it, insisting I stay the rest of the day and stay the night too. Tomorrow we would drive to Bursa, first capital of the Ottoman Empire. The day after we would visit Eskişehir, the oldest city in Anatolia. And surely I needed a guide for the Yenişehir Plain?
I shook my head, shook his hand, said thank you, said goodbye.
Enver bowed, his expression a mixture of frustration and relief. The nervous smile twinged his lips, and then he bustled down a side street, running his hand over the medieval walls and booming more questions to himself. Forty cubits high. Six thousand paces long. Strong enough to keep back a pilgrim army.
Autumn 1096. The People’s Crusade were camped outside Helenopolis. Meanwhile, Peter the Hermit was in Constantinople, negotiating with Alexios Komnenos. Although the main forces of the First Crusade had just set off from Western Europe, Peter’s advance party refused to wait. In early September they began raiding the Christian villages round İznik – formerly the Greek settlement of Nicaea, now the capital of the Rum sultanate. However, the city was too well defended for the raiders to take unsupported. Instead, six thousand German and Italian soldiers pushed south into Seljuk territory, occupying a deserted castle called Xerigordon. In response, the Sultan of Rum, Kilij Arslan, ordered his army to lay siege to the site.
The sultan’s forces surrounded the castle and cut the water. The crusaders stayed put, however, halving their rations once, twice, and one more time. Supplies ran dry, but they still held on. The Gesta Francorum records how:
they bled their horses and asses and drank the blood; others let their girdles and handkerchiefs down into the cistern and squeezed out the water from them into their mouths; some urinated into one another’s hollowed hands and drank; and others dug up the moist ground and lay down on their backs and spread the earth over their breasts to relieve the excessive dryness of thirst.
This wretched situation lasted for eight days. Eventually the crusaders surrendered and Turkish soldiers overwhelmed the castle. Anyone who refused to convert was killed.
Confused reports made their way back to the camp at Helenopolis. The first claimed that the German and Italian detachment had captured Nicaea, the second that they had been destroyed. When it was confirmed that the sultan’s forces were pushing north, the remaining crusaders marched out to meet them.
At first light on 21 October the entire army – perhaps fifty thousand men – filed into the Yalak Valley. If you want to picture the scene, another campaign might come in handy. The Norman Conquest occurred three decades earlier, and its soldiers were recruited from similar regions. What you need to imagine is the Bayeux Tapestry unrolled over the Turkish countryside. Men moving like puppets, their bodies cut from cloth, their swords and lances embroidered wool. Perhaps they sang as they marched, the words embroidered too in cramped Latin surtitles.
As soon as the army entered the valley, arrows filled the sky. The knights leading the march were worst hit, their hauberks pierced and their horses maimed. The terrain offered little cover from the massed archers, and the Turkish assault was so ferocious that the cavalry were driven back onto the columns of infantry. The infantry, in turn, were scattered. Despite commands to hold firm, the soldiers began to retreat. However, once the entrance to the valley was blocked, they were trapped. Walter Sans Avoir was slain, along with every other nobleman, while anyone who escaped was chased down on the plain or hounded into the sea.
So the tapestry was torn, the bodies shredded, and the river threaded with red.
After the crusader army was destroyed, the Seljuks pressed on towards Helenopolis. It was still morning when they reached the headland. Because the camp’s soldiers had joined the dawn march, the place was unguarded. The Turkish troops found women and children sheltering in tents. They killed them. They found the sick and elderly sleeping in beds. They killed them. They found monks, priests and nuns kneeling in prayer. They killed them. They killed anyone they found, except for a few young men and women who were taken as slaves and a handful of soldiers who were rescued by the Byzantine Navy. But of the thousands who joined Peter the Hermit’s pilgrimage through Europe – those great crowds hoping to march triumphant into the Holy City – almost none survived.
That was the story of the People’s Crusade.
The story does not end there, however, because the army’s failure had a profound impact on the crusaders who came after. Conquering Jerusalem was already an unlikely ambition. The utter defeat of the vanguard force made subsequent victories even more surprising.
It’s no coincidence that the Gesta Francorum opens with an account of this calamity, for it emphasized the miraculous nature of what followed. Later armies were often amazed by their success, and many became convinced that they were acting out divine will.
At the start of my journey I would have found this baffling, but moving south from İznik I began to understand. In Istanbul I had seen crowds running, streets burning and a camp cleared of life. I had experienced the thrill of history happening around me, as events cascaded beyond human control. And that fated feeling – at once exalted and inevitable – of surviving. It would not take much faith to believe that the outcome had already been decided, even directed from above. When you add in three years of starvation, exhaustion, injury and disease, interrupted by the odd bout of horrifying violence, anyone who survived might well assume they were God’s chosen.
The landscape also fed such fantasies. As I climbed onto the Yenişehir Plain, the horizon drew back – mountains and valleys falling away. Though I passed the odd farm building or petrol station, what I noticed most was the vacant space between these places. There was an indifference to the scenery, a vastness; I could walk two hours, four hours, ten, and my surroundings would barely change. And, stepping across that immense stage, it was easy to imagine that I was carrying out some divine command.
This insight encouraged no sympathy, only shame. After all, the crusaders’ belief that they were performing God’s work helped justify their appalling acts of brutality. By borrowing the rites of pilgrimage and giving their journey a penitential end, they intensified that sense of cosmic support.
Perhaps this was why I struggled to explain my pilgrimage to Enver: because he knew the bloody tradition in which the journey shared. And why I felt relieved to be leaving İznik behind. Enough history. Enough religion. Let’s forget about God for a while.
I was apprehensive about travelling in Turkey. The Anatolian Plateau was the loneliest stretch of my entire journey, and I felt wary about the solitude. Alone, any doubts about why I was walking would mount. Also, I did not know if Ramadan would make the journey more difficult, or whether I could cope in the heat. But high on the plateau the air was mild – the skies clear, the breeze cool, and the temperature falling low most nights. Everywhere I was offered bottles of water or bags of fruit, while the cafes brought mimed conversations and glasses of tea too sweet to finish. Having no language in common was a relief, because it freed me from any need to explain. I was reminded of that winter walk in France, when it seemed I could cross an entire continent on charity alone. However, the naive confidence of those early months had been replaced by a cautious resolve, and, hiking south from the Yenişehir Plain, I began laughing for no reason but gladness.