According to some witnesses, at the centre of the ‘great rumour’, as one contemporary called it, was the charismatic preaching of a diminutive, ageing Picard evangelist known as Peter the Hermit. In Lorraine, during and immediately after the crusade, he was regarded as having inspired the whole enterprise. This cannot entirely be dismissed, not least because, whatever his status, he managed to raise armies months before anyone else, in person led one of them to Constantinople and was thereafter accepted by the princes as a member of the expedition’s elite, if only in a minor capacity. Peter had experience as a preacher of apostolic poverty. It was later claimed that he was a pilgrim to the Holy City who had been entrusted with a letter from heaven to rouse Christians to liberate Jerusalem and a request from the patriarch of Jerusalem to send western help which he conveyed to Pope Urban. In fact, Patriarch Symeon may have been in Constantinople when Peter was supposed to have passed through on pilgrimage. It may or may not have been chance that one of the first contacts the Christian army made in northern Syria in 1097–8 was with the exiled patriarch, who then promptly wrote a letter to the west appealing for further military aid, perhaps an echo, repeat or inspiration of the Peter the Hermit story.
The hints of distinctive features in Peter’s appeal – apocalyptic, populist, visionary, charismatic – in contrast to the uniform outline of the theologically focused message emanating from the pope reflected in most chronicles and charters – authority, penance, pilgrimage, cross, war – may be taken as a sign of Peter’s insignificance or the reverse. Even hostile witnesses attest to the popular if naive element in his following. Part of the motive for the massacres of the Rhineland Jews identified in Jewish sources was a crude, vindictive and violent assertion of Christian supremacy and lust for vengeance for Christ Crucified; many of these pogroms were the work of contingents associated with Peter. That there was little or no such barbaric persecution of Jews by the armies recruited by Urban and his agents may point to a distinct difference of tone and content in Peter’s preaching. However the evidence is viewed, Peter played a prominent and semi-independent role in at least some theatres of propagandizing and recruiting for the Jerusalem expedition. The Lorraine perspective contained in the chronicle of Albert of Aachen is probably as valid as others which ignore Peter.44
It is incontestable that the armies he inspired were on the road by Easter 1096 (13 April); even the anonymous chronicler attached to Bohemund placed Peter’s as part of the ‘official’ campaign.45 To organize, equip and supply perhaps up to 30,000 troops and non-combatants at the end of winter and in spring, following poor harvests, some local famines and plagues in the previous year, suggests that Peter must have begun preaching before Clermont and that his powers of organization were of an order beyond his image of a dishevelled hedge priest. It is possible that Urban appointed him to preach the Jerusalem journey weeks before Clermont: the pope had been discussing his plan with potential leaders at least as early as August 1095. It is notable that Peter’s itinerary, from Berry through the Orléannais and Champagne to Lorraine and the Rhineland, avoided those areas visited by the pope. Peter, in a more demotic style, appealed to audiences not dissimilar to the pope’s. He recruited a number of significant lords, one of whom, Walter, lord of Boissy Sans Avoir, whom he despatched with eight knights and a large company of infantry in early March, was already in Constantinople in July 1096, no mean logistical effort. The forces Peter raised lacked the tight social authority lent by the presence of many great lords. His preaching campaign, which he combined with leading an army, apparently operated apart from the hierarchy of religious houses that so crucially underpinned Urban’s efforts: unlike the pope, Peter is absent from surviving monastic charters.46 His message was revivalist, probably peppered with visions and atrocity stories. These were neither new nor exclusive to Peter. The Limousin chronicler and pilgrim Adhemar of Chabannes had peddled stories of persecution, assassination and murder of Christians by the Muslim rulers of the Holy Land seventy years earlier. The memory of the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre may have formed part of a propaganda campaign by the monks of St Peter’s Moissac, visited by Urban himself in May 1096.47
On arrival in the Rhineland, Peter appears to have delegated his own preaching commission to a local priest, Gottschalk, who, demonstrating that he was no rabble-rousing bumpkin either, in turn recruited a large army in southern Germany, which reached Hungary via Bavaria only to be massacred in late July by the Hungarian army, outraged at the violent and indiscriminate foraging. Gottschalk’s force may have been intended as the right flank of Peter’s own army, predominantly comprised of Frenchmen and led by lords from Chartres and Champagne, which marched through the Rhineland in April before travelling down the Danube to Hungary and across the Balkans to reach Constantinople on 1 August. It is possible that Peter also delegated recruitment to another German, Volkmar, whose contingent followed a route to Peter’s north, through Saxony and Bohemia before being dispersed by the Hungarians in late June. To Peter’s preaching may be attributed the participation of numerous other German lords, in particular the Swabian count Emich of Flonheim and Count Hartmann of Dillingen-Kybourg, who joined forces with lords from the Ile de France as well as, apparently, some Englishmen. Even if these groups took the cross independent of Peter, his contribution was significant, possibly papally authorized and suggestive of just how much is unknown about the genesis of the First Crusade. Peter, a man of some learning and habitually boastful, may have spent his retirement at the abbey of Neumoustier in Lorraine embroidering his own legend. The tragedy of the subsequent military failure of all of his contingents and Peter’s own equivocal fortitude during the sieges of Antioch ensured the relegation of his initial contribution by writers eager to emphasize the successes of their favoured leaders for didactic purposes. Yet between the two extremes, those returning to Lorraine from the Jerusalem adventure in 1099 did not dismiss him; some even remembered him as its ‘primus auctor’.48
Urban’s initiative, like that of Gregory VII, could have been still-born. That it was not indicates a social and cultural predisposition to accept his radical concept of guiltless, meritorious violence and a skilful publicity campaign. Both are evident in the events of 1095–6. However, the question of timing remains. Why did 1095 strike Urban II as the ‘acceptable year of the Lord and the day of vengeance of our God’ (Isaiah 61:2)? Western aristocratic arms-bearers had been anxious for their souls for generations; Greek emperors had been asking for and receiving western military aid for decades; campaigns against Muslims in Spain, Sicily or north Africa had become an increasingly common feature of western Mediterranean warfare; church discipline of secular society had been at least notionally acknowledged though the Peace and Truce of God movement in many areas; papal thinking on holy war and penance had a long pedigree. Yet a convergence of circumstances persuaded Urban to recast Alexius’s appeal; and the immediate context of 1095 allowed for its success.
There is little direct evidence that, as was later alleged, the pilgrim route to Jerusalem or the treatment of Jerusalem pilgrims had deteriorated since the conquest of much of Asia Minor and parts of northern Syria by the Seljuk Turks since the 1070s. Among Near Eastern observers, there are traces of anxiety about western (i.e. for them primarily Byzantine) threats. The Persian Naser-e Khosraw, a visitor to Palestine in 1046/7, recorded that the Fatimid rulers of Egypt had garrisoned the Nile Delta port of Tinnis ‘as a precaution against attacks by Franks and Byzantines’. A century later, the Aleppan historian al-Azimi (d. 1161) referred to Frankish and Byzantine pilgrims being prevented by strong-arm tactics from reaching Jerusalem in 1093/4, adding, ‘those of them who survived spread the news about that to their country. So they prepared themselves for military invasion.’49 The neatness with which this account mirrors western propaganda invites suspicion. Visiting Jerusalem was always dangerous and ran the risk of violent confrontation, as the 1064/5 German pilgrims discovered when attacked at Ramla. There is no evidence of pilgrimages drying up in
the 1090s. Roger count of Foix happily set out for Palestine in late April 1095; the Norman Odard’s pilgrimage actually coincided with the crusade itself.50
Nonetheless, even if conditions had not in reality become more difficult, perceptions may have altered. The First Crusade did not open up the Near East to westerners. There is more and more evidence that Asia Minor as well as the Balkan areas of the Byzantine empire were crawling with French, Italians and Germans. Large numbers of south Italian Normans had entered and stayed in the service of Alexius I after the failure of the Norman campaign against him in the Balkans in 1081. When Bohemund and his force arrived in Byzantium in 1097, they were among friends and relations. Many in the post-Conquest Anglo-Saxon aristocratic diaspora had found their way into the imperial Varangian guard. The Greeks positively encouraged western knights to enter imperial employment, such was their admiration of western military tactics: this enthusiasm helped lose them the battle of Manzikert against the Seljuk Turks in 1071, when western levies under the Norman Roussel of Bailleul deserted. The pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the late 1080s of Robert the Frisian, count of Flanders, led to his sending Alexius a force of 500 knights around 1090: his son, Robert, was one of the leaders of the 1096 expedition. By the early 1090s Alexius may have been employing thousands of western troops in Asia Minor, for whom he constructed at least one base, at Kibotos, and possibly planned another, at Nicomedia, under the supervision of a Frankish monk. Western clerics as well as soldiers and pilgrims were apparently familiar figures at the Byzantine court, some of whom also made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. After the final conquest and settlement of Sicily in 1092, a process to which Alexius paid close attention, Norman troops were more available than for a generation. While after the Council of Piacenza, Urban II looked northwards, Alexius’s gaze may have been resting firmly on the south, as it had for over a decade.
Almost at every step of their journey, the armies of 1096 to 1099 encountered expatriate westerners. When Bohemund’s nephew, Tancred, arrived at Adana in Cilicia in September 1097, he found a Burgundian, Welf, already in occupation with a force of Armenians. At Tarsus in the same month, Baldwin of Boulogne encountered a fleet of Flemish and Frisian pirates who claimed to have been plying their trade in those waters for eight years.51 More sensationally, after the Christian army had invested Jerusalem on 7 June 1099, in his camp facing the Damascus Gate, Duke Robert of Normandy received an unexpected visit from a fellow countryman living locally who offered his services to his natural lord. Twenty-two years before, Hugh Bunel had committed one of the most notorious murders of the day when he decapitated Mabel of Bellême at her castle of Bures, ‘where she was relaxing in bed after a bath’, this in revenge for her seizing his patrimony. Pursued by Mabel’s sons, William the Conqueror’s agents and bounty-hunters, Hugh had fled to Apulia, then Sicily, then Byzantium before, fearful of William’s ‘strong hand and long arm, he left the Latin world’. He had lived among Muslims for twenty years when the crusaders arrived at the walls of Jerusalem.52
Although Hugh Bunel’s cause célèbre prevented contact with the west, the presence of westerners as pilgrims, visitors, merchants, mercenaries and settlers in and beyond the Byzantine empire provided a growing medium for the transmission of news and intelligence, such as the English Jerusalem pilgrim Joseph, a Canterbury monk who met Greek-speaking friends at Constantinople, or Guillermus of Cormery, appointed by Alexius as chaplain to western troops stationed around Nicomedia in the early 1090s. The information reaching the west may have sounded an increasingly strident note in portraying the depredations of the Seljuk Turks, even if these were not in fact more onerous. There is evidence that at precisely this juncture Alexius himself played on the Jerusalem-sensitive emotions in the west by sending ‘frequent messages about the oppression of the Lord’s sepulchre and the desolation of all the churches’.53 In this context the story of Peter the Hermit spreading atrocity stories does not sound too unlikely; his may have been one of many such reports. The elements in Urban’s coup of 1095 begin to be apparent: the Greek appeal to the pope of March 1095, only the latest in a consistent series; increasing contacts with the east through pilgrims, mercenaries and correspondence with some of the higher nobility of the west; persistent rumours of persecution of pilgrims and attacks on eastern Christians perhaps reaching a crescendo through the accounts of travellers and Greek diplomats; the consolidation of Urban’s own historical and theological vision; the coincidence of the improved political position of Urban in Italy and France. The roles of Urban, Alexius and Peter the Hermit have often been placed in opposition as explanations of the events of 1095; perhaps instead they should be seen as complementary.
The scale of the reaction to the call to Jerusalem was impressive. While large armies were not unknown in western Europe in the eleventh century – William of Normandy collected perhaps as many as 14,000 men and up to 3,000 horses for his invasion of England in 1066 – the combination of forces being raised simultaneously in so many different regions struck contemporaries as remarkable and novel. The reasons for such a response have been much debated. Generalizations can mislead as motives varied and conflicted from person to person, class to class, region to region; evidence for individual or collective decisions is extremely patchy, transmitted through the prism of clerical interpretation, whether in chronicle, charter or correspondence. However, this does not disqualify such material, as lay attitudes often found inspiration and articulation from the clergy.
A central discussion revolves around the balance between material and ideological motives. Crudely, did crusaders embark for worldly or spiritual profit? In many senses this poses a false dichotomy. The Chanson d’Antioche a couple of generations later declared that those who served Jesus would receive gold.54 Subsequent accounts of Urban’s speech by those who heard it unapologetically portrayed him as offering material gain:
Take the road to the Holy Sepulchre, rescue that land from a dreadful race and rule over it yourselves, for that land that, as scripture says, floweth with milk and honey was given by God as a possession to the children of Israel. (Robert of Rheims before 1107)
You will get the enemies’ possessions, because you will despoil their treasures and either return victorious to your own homes or gain eternal fame, purpled with your own blood. (Baldric of Bourgeuil c.1108)55
The battle cry at Dorylaeum on 1 July 1097 already mentioned – ‘Stand fast all together, trusting in Christ and in the victory of the Holy Cross. Today, please God, you will all gain much booty’ – made good psychological and theological as well as tactical and logistic sense.56 The emphasis was as much on ‘standing fast’ in faith as on the necessary material rewards of military success. The rewards of service to God need not be restricted to the spiritual; given the service was military, it could not be if success were to be achieved.
However, that is not the same thing as saying that the Jerusalem expedition attracted recruits for mercenary reasons. As a song composed at the time of the First Crusade put it: ‘There we must go, selling our goods to buy the temple of God and to destroy the Saracens.’57 The peasant-hating Guibert of Nogent recalled the economic and financial hardships they suffered in selling their homes, vineyards and fields to raise money for the journey: ‘everyone bought high and sold low’.58 A similar fate could not be avoided by knights and nobles. Whatever his hopes for future gain, a crusader began his journey suffering capital losses in converting landed property into cash and war materials. The agricultural depression of the mid-1090s only exacerbated the problem. Even for those who did anticipate a land of milk and honey, the scale of the initial investment was sobering: no money; no crusade.
As most wished to return – demonstrably so with those who left charters behind – and as most survivors did just that, putative profits of settlement and colonization were hardly an issue. Of course, the rewards of successful campaigning were accepted eagerly; opportunities for profit were taken with alacrity. Genoese crusaders were quick to establish privileged tradi
ng status with Bohemund’s new regime in Antioch in July 1098. This does not mean they had taken the cross with this intent uppermost in their minds; the risks of committing a fleet to such a venture were very great. It was not as if those who took the cross did not know where they were going or were ignorant of the costs involved; their own, their neighbours’ and their relatives’ experiences in war and on pilgrimage prepared them. The crusaders’ financial balance sheet on setting out contradicts any easy economic reductionism. Terrestrial profits were more realistically those of honour, prestige and relics. The cliché of younger sons being drawn to the Jerusalem adventure contains no truth. Almost by definition the leaders were, if not all eldest sons, possessed of significant patrimonies of their own; this applied not only to the so-called princes but to the vital second-rank nobles whose retinues formed the military backbone of the armies, such as Raymond Pilet, lord of Alès in the Limousin, who emerged as an independent leader within the army from the summer of 1098. The evidence of land-hunger is local and unconvincing; internal colonization and expanding the areas of cultivation within western Europe catered for the expanding population. What is known of individual crusaders demonstrates no special appeal for younger sons; rather the opposite. Whole families departed together; some sixty families contributing more than one member to the expedition have been identified.59 Having broken one of the supposedly immutable rules of medieval life by mortgaging or selling patrimonies, such men were evidently moved by considerations other than the obviously material.
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