“Although I feel honoured by the visit, I cannot entertain grasshoppers. I have heard of your wild enterprise; I know that you have no provisions with you, and that you beg and steal. Return therefore to your country, or I will treat you as enemies!”
The envoys rode back with the King’s answer. But Peter would not turn back.
“Forward! forward! Crusaders and Christians!” he cried, and the whole host crossed the frontier. The Hermit rode on an ass at the head of them, and knew not what went on behind him—robbery, drunkenness, and licence.
The King learned what had happened, and rode out with all his knights. When he saw this mass of ragged rascals, drunk and savage, but all wearing the red cross, he fell in a rage and attacked them. Those who did not fly were trampled underfoot and sabred down so mercilessly, that, out of the sixty thousand, only three thousand reached Constantinople, among whom was the Hermit.
“We have sown our blood,” he said; “our successors will reap.”
The Emperor of Constantinople had certainly for a long time waited for help from the West against the wild Seljuks, but he had expected armed men. When he now received a rabble of three thousand beggars and vagabonds, many of them wounded, he resolved to get rid of these guests as honourably as possible. He set them in flat-bottomed boats, and shipped them across to Asia Minor. “Thence you have a straight road to Jerusalem,” he said. But he did not say that the Seljuks were encamped on the opposite coast. Accordingly, the rest of them were massacred by the wild hordes near Nicasa—in the same town in which, during the early days of Christianity, so many fateful debates had taken place.
But the Hermit escaped, and returned to Constantinople, where he waited for the great army of the Crusaders. He waited a whole year, just as confident of victory and undismayed as before.
In the little town Tiberias, on the shore of the Lake of Gennesareth sat the old Jew Eleazar, with his family, prepared to celebrate the Passover, or the Exodus from Egypt. It was the tenth day of the month Nisan of the year 1098. The lake shone clear, and its banks were green; the oleanders were in blossom, the lilies had sprung up in the pleasant season when the earth rejoices.
It was evening; all members of the family were dressed as though for a journey, with shoes on their feet and staves in their hands. They stood round the covered table on which the roasted lamb smoked in a dish surrounded by bitter lettuce. The ancestral wine-cup was filled with wine, and white unleavened bread laid on a plate close by.