Jerusalem, the City of Herod and Saladin

by Walter Besant; Edward Henry Palmer

Here the first troubles began. The Governor of Belgrade refusing them permission to buy provisions, the army found themselves reduced to the greatest straits for want of food; and seeing no other way for help, they left the camp and dispersed about the country, driving in the cattle, and laying hands on everything they could find. The Bulgarians armed in haste, and slaughtered vast numbers of the marauders, burning alive a hundred and forty who had taken refuge in a chapel. Walter broke up his camp in haste, and pressing on, left those to their own fate who refused to obey his order to follow. What that fate was may easily be surmised. With diminished forces, starving and dejected, he pushed on through the forests till he found himself before Nissa, when the governor, taking pity on the destitute condition of the pilgrims, gave them food, clothes, and arms. These misfortunes fell upon them, it will be observed, in Christian lands, and long before they saw the Saracens. Thence the humbled Crusaders, seeing in these disasters a just punishment for their sins—they were at least always ready to repent—proceeded, with no other enemy than famine, through Philippopolis and Adrianople to Constantinople itself. Here the emperor, Alexis Comnenus, gave them permission to encamp outside the town, to buy and sell, and to wait for the arrival of Peter and the second army.

But if the first expedition was disastrous the second was far worse. Peter seems to have followed at first a somewhat different route to that of his advanced guard. He went through Lorraine, Franconia, Bavaria, and Austria, and entered Hungary, some months after Walter, with an army of forty thousand men. Permission was readily granted to march through the country, on the condition of the maintenance of order and the purchase of provisions; nor was it till they arrived at Semlin, the place where their comrades had been beaten, that any disturbance arose. Here they unfortunately saw suspended the arms and armour which had been stripped from the stragglers of Walter’s army. The soldiers, incensed beyond control, rushed upon the little town, and, with the loss of a hundred men, massacred every Hungarian in the place. Then they sat down to enjoy themselves for five days. The people of Belgrade, panic-stricken on hearing of the fate of Semlin, fled all with one accord, headed by their governor, and hurriedly carrying away everything portable; and Peter, before the King of Hungary had time to collect an army to avenge the taking of his city, managed to transport everything to the other side of the Danube, and pitched his camp under the deserted walls of Belgrade. There the army, laden with spoils of all kinds, waited to collect their treasures, which they carried with them on their march to Nissa. They stopped here one night, obtaining, as Walter had done, permission to buy and sell, and giving hostages for good conduct. All went well; the camp was raised, the hostages returned, and the army on its march again, when an unhappy quarrel arose between some of the stragglers, consisting of about a hundred Germans, and the townspeople. The Germans set fire to seven mills and certain buildings outside the town. Having done this mischief they rejoined their comrades; but the indignant Bulgarians, furious at this return for their hospitality, rushed after them, arms in hand. They attacked the rear-guard, killed those who resisted, and returned to the town, driving before them the women and children, and loaded with the spoil which remained from the sacking of Semlin. Peter and the main body hastened back on receiving news of the disaster, and tried once more to accommodate matters. But in the midst of his interview with the governor, and when all seemed to promise well, a fresh outbreak took place, and a second battle began, far worse than the first. The Crusaders were wholly routed and fled in all directions, while the carnage was indiscriminate and fearful. In the evening the unhappy Peter found himself on an adjoining height with five hundred men. The scattered fugitives gradually rallied, but one-fourth of his fighting men were killed on this disastrous day, and the army lost all their baggage, their treasures, and their stores; while of the women and children by far the greater number were either killed or taken captive. Starving and destitute, they straggled on through the forests, dreading the further vengeance of the Bulgarians, until they entered Thrace. Here deputies from the emperor met them, with reproaches for their disorderly conduct, and promises that, should they conduct themselves with order, his clemency would not be wanting.

Arrived at Constantinople, and having rejoined Walter, Peter lost no time in obtaining an audience from the emperor. Alexis heard him patiently, and was even moved by his eloquence; but he advised him, above all things, to wait for the arrival of the princes who were to follow. Advice was the last thing these wild hordes would listen to; and, eager to be in the country of the Infidels—to get for themselves the glory of the conquest—they crossed the Dardanelles, and pitched their camp at a place called Gemlik or Ghio.

The first effervescence of zeal in Europe had not yet, however, worked off its violence. A monk named Gotschalk, emulating the honours of Peter, had raised, by dint of preaching, an army of twenty thousand Germans, sworn to the capture of the Holy Land. Setting out as leader of this band, he followed the same road as his predecessors and met with the same disasters. It was in early autumn that they passed through Hungary. The harvest was beginning, and the Germans pillaged and murdered wherever they went. King Coloman attacked them, but with little success. He then tried deceit, and, persuading the Germans to lay down their arms and to join the Hungarians as brothers, he fell on them, and massacred every one. Of all this vast host only one or two escaped through the forests to their own country to tell the tale.

One more turbulent band followed, to meet the same fate; but this was the worst—the most undisciplined of all. Headed by a priest named Volkmar, and a Count Emicon, they straggled without order or discipline, filled with the wildest superstitions. Before their army was led sometimes a she-goat, sometimes a goose, which they imagined to be filled with the Holy Spirit; and as all sins were to be expiated by the recovery of the Holy Land, there was a growing feeling that there was no longer any need of avoiding sin. Consequently, the wildest licence was indulged in, and this, which called itself “the army of the Lord,” was a horde of the most abandoned criminals. Their greatest crime was the slaughter of the Jews along the banks of the Rhine and Moselle. “Why,” they asked, “should we, who march against the Infidels, leave behind us the enemies of our Lord?” The bishops of the sees through which they passed vainly interposed their entreaties. In Cologne and Mayence every Jew was murdered; some of the miserable people tied stones round their own necks, and leaped into the river; some killed their wives and children, and set fire to their houses, perishing in the flames; the mothers killed the infants at their breasts, and the Christians themselves fled in all directions at the approach of an army as terrible to its friends as to its foes.

But their course was of short duration. At the town of Altenburg, on the confines of Hungary, which they attempted to storm, they were seized with a sudden panic and fled in all directions, being slaughtered like sheep. Emicon got together a small band, whom he led home again; a few others were led by their chiefs southwards, and joined the princes of the Crusade in Italy. None of them, according to William of Tyre, found their way to Peter the Hermit. Once across the Dardanelles, Peter’s troops, who amounted, it is said, in spite of all their losses, to no fewer than a hundred thousand fighting men, fixed a camp on the shores of the Gulf of Nicomedia, and began to ravage the country in all directions. The division of the booty soon caused quarrels, and a number of Italians and Germans, deserting the camp, went up the country in a body, and took possession of a small fortress in the neighbourhood of Nicæa, whose garrison they massacred. Then they were in their turn besieged, and, with the exception of their leader, Renaud, or Rinaldo, who embraced the Mahometan faith, were slaughtered to a man. The news of this disaster roused the Christians, not to a sense of their danger (which they could not yet comprehend), but to a vehement desire for revenge. They made the luckless Walter lead them against Nicæa, and issued forth from their camp en masse, a disordered, shouting multitude, crying for vengeance against the Turks. But their end was at hand. The Sultan of Nicæa placed half his army in ambuscade in the forest, keeping the other half in the plain; the Christians were attacked in the front and in the rear, and, cooped up together in confusion, badly armed, offered very slight resistance. Walter himself fell, one of the first; the carnage was terrific, and of all the hundred thousand whom Peter and Walter had brought across the Dardanelles, but three thousand escaped. These fled to a fortress by the sea-shore. The bones of their comrades, whitened by the eastern sun, long stood as a monument of the disaster, pointing skeleton fingers on the road to Jerusalem—the road of death and defeat.

Only three thousand, out of all these hordes, certainly a quarter of a million in number, which flocked after Peter on his mule! We can hardly believe that all were killed. Some of the women and children at least might be spared, and without doubt their blood yet flows in the veins of many Hungarian and Bulgarian families. But this was only the first instalment of slaughter. There remained the mighty armies which were even then upon the road. As for Peter, whose courage was as easily daunted as his enthusiasm was easily roused, he fled in dismay and misery back to Constantinople, having lost all authority, even over the few men who remained with him. He inveighed against their disorders and their crimes, and he declared that these were the causes of their defeat. He might have added that his own weakness, the vanity which led him to accept the rôle, offered him by an ignorant crowd, of general as well as preacher, was no less a cause of disaster than the disorder which it was his business to check and combat day by day. His disappointment was such as would be enough to kill a really proud and strong man; but Peter was not a strong man; in the hour of danger he bent like the reed to the storm; the violence of the tempest once past, however, like the reed, he lifted up his head again. He could preach endurance, but he could not himself endure; his faith required constant stimulants, his courage the fresh fire of continual success. Peter lifted up his head again when he saw the splendid array of Godfrey and Raymond; but his old authority with the chiefs was gone. Like a worn-out tool, he had served his purpose and was cast aside. He had no more voice in their councils—no more power over their enthusiasm. He lapsed into utter insignificance, save once, when we find him actually trying to desert the army at Antioch and endeavouring to run away; and once, later on, when he received the brief ovation from the native Christians in the hour of final triumph at Jerusalem. He returned, it may be added, in safety to France when the war was over, and spent sixteen years more in honourable obscurity, the head of a monastery. Never in the world’s history, with the exception of Mohammed alone, has one man produced an effect so great and so immediate; and seldom has one man wielded an instrument so potent as Peter, when he set forth at the head of an army which wanted only discipline to make it invincible.

But now vexilla regis prodeunt; armies of a different character are assembling in the west. Foremost among them is that headed by Godfrey de Bouillon, Duke of Lorraine. Of him, and of his brother Baldwin, who accompanied him, we shall have to speak again. A word on the other chiefs of the First Crusade.

With the army of Godfrey were joined the troops of Robert Duke of Normandy and Count Robert of Flanders.

Robert, who had pledged his duchy for five years to his brother for ten thousands marks, we all know. He was strong, brave, and generous. But he had no other good quality. Had his prudence, his wisdom in council, been equal to his courage, or had his character for temperance and self-restraint been better, he would probably have obtained the crown of Jerusalem before Godfrey. As it was, he went out for the purpose of fighting; he fought well; and came home again, no richer than when he went. He was joined in Syria by the Saxon prince, Edgar Atheling, the lawful heir to the English crown; but the chroniclers are silent as to the prowess of the English contingent.