Peter the Hermit
Peter the Hermit preached the crusade to the poor before the knights had packed, led forty thousand of them to Constantinople ahead of any army, and was away from the camp when the Turks killed nearly all of them. He was a small man from near Amiens, said to have been a soldier and to have tried a pilgrimage to Jerusalem before 1095 and been turned back, who rode a donkey, went barefoot, ate no bread or meat, and had a way of speaking that made people give him their goods. The chroniclers say the crowds pulled hairs from the donkey for relics. After Urban II's sermon at Clermont in November 1095 he went through Berry, Champagne and Lorraine and gathered a following that was not what the pope had meant: peasants with their families, townsmen, a few knights under Walter Sansavoir, and no supply. They left Cologne at Easter 1096, months before the barons, and other bands that had heard him massacred the Jews of the Rhineland on the way. His own column fought its way through Hungary and Bulgaria and reached Constantinople in August, where Alexios Komnenos fed them, kept them out of the city, and ferried them across the Bosporus to be rid of them. In October, while Peter was back in the capital asking for supplies, the host marched from its camp at Civetot towards Nicaea and Kilij Arslan's Turks destroyed it in a morning; a few thousand survived behind a wall at the shore. He attached himself to the barons' army when it came, and at Antioch in January 1098, starving, he tried to desert and was brought back by Tancred. The leaders still sent him in June as their envoy to the emir Kerbogha, who refused terms. He preached to the army on the Mount of Olives before the assault on Jerusalem in July 1099, went home, and founded a house of canons at Neufmoustier near Huy, where he died in 1115. The People's Crusade is his name for the thing he could start and not control.
- Lived: 1050 CE – 1115 CE
- Nationality: French
- Roles: preacher, crusader
