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