God's War: A New History of the Crusades

By the time Peter the Hermit entered Cologne on 12 April 1096, Easter Saturday, considerable numbers from northern and eastern France, Lorraine and the Rhineland were already mobilized. Walter lord of Boissy-sans-Avoir in the Ile de France was preparing to leave the city immediately after Easter; on 15 April he set out on the traditional pilgrim route up the Rhine and Neckar to Regensberg and down the Danube to Hungary and the Balkan routes to Constantinople. With him was an infantry force, mainly French, led by eight knights, seemingly an advance guard for Peter’s larger army of levies raised on his march from Berry through the Ile de France and Champagne to the Moselle and the Rhine. Already, Peter had attracted a smattering of French nobles and volunteers from the towns he had visited. Some have seen his force as more of a pilgrimage than a military operation, yet, apart from Walter Sans Avoir, Peter established a military command under Godfrey Burel of Etampes, Reynald of Broyes from Epernay, Walter Fitz Waleran of Breteuil in the Beauvaisis and Fulcher, brother of the vidame of Chartres.⁴ His concentration on the urban centres of Lorraine and the Rhineland was not fortuitous. Arriving at Trier on the Moselle in early April, Peter bullied the local Jewish community into supplying provisions by showing a letter from French Jews urging them to accede to his demands: news of threatened or actual violence against northern French Jewish communities had probably already filtered through. From Trier, Peter headed north, down the Moselle, to Cologne on the Rhine, probably as much in search of funds and supplies as of men. Cologne possessed a large Jewish community, which at about this time was being blackmailed into subsidizing Godfrey of Bouillon’s expedition. A major commercial centre, although hardly on a direct route from Trier to the Danube and Constantinople, the city provided a convenient muster point for Lorraine recruits, including some German knights.

Peter’s movements displayed deliberation and control. He may have threatened the Jews of Trier and elsewhere by anti-Jewish preaching, but his forces abstained from organized attacks on them, unlike the troops of the armies collected in his wake and scavenging local citizens. Even if, as hostile commentators maintained, his followers were ‘the leftover dregs of the Franks’ with children in tow who, ‘whenever they came upon a castle or city, asked whether this was Jerusalem’, Peter, a small but charismatic figure, unafraid and competent later to negotiate in person with the Byzantine emperor and the atabeg of Mosul, displayed neither ignorance nor naivety.⁵ He was either well briefed or able to extemporize with skill in delegating further recruitment to the priest Gottschalk. He, in turn, raised an effective and well-funded force, 15,000 strong according to Albert of Aachen, with as many knights as infantry, sufficiently impressive and organized for King Coloman I of Hungary to negotiate a truce and the surrender of their arms, providing him with the opportunity, eagerly embraced, to massacre them at Pannonhalma in early July.

Peter may also have encouraged Count Emich of Flonheim, whose followers began killing Jews in Speyer on 3 May, although his army travelled north, down the Rhine, while Peter’s, days earlier, had passed in the opposite direction. Emich’s muster with significant contingents from northern France occurred at Mainz in late May, by which time Peter was far down the Danube. However, the obscurity of the gathering of Emich’s south German and French force suggests local recruitment. Peter, Gottschalk or Urban may have had a focusing effect; so too did local interest, traditions and contacts. As a child, Guibert of Nogent had known one of the knights later killed at Antioch, Matthew from the Beauvaisis, who had served the Byzantine emperor.⁶ His example may have exerted as much influence as Peter’s evangelism, garbled accounts of Urban II’s call to arms or rumours of a millennial holy war.