The Great Events by Famous Historians [Volumes 1-14]

In 1070 the Seljuks took possession of Jerusalem, inflicting hardships on the pilgrims by intolerable exactions, insult, and plunder. Besides outraging Christian sentiment, they ruined the commerce of the western nations. Throughout Europe arose the cry for vengeance, and men's minds were fully prepared for an attempt to conquer Palestine when their leaders began to preach the sacred duty of delivering the Holy Sepulchre from the hands of the infidels.

At the Council of Clermont, in 1094, Pope Urban II depicted the miseries of Christians in Palestine, and, with a power of eloquence unsurpassed in his day, called upon those who heard him to wipe off from the face of the earth the impurities which caused them, and to lift their oppressed fellow-Christians from the depths into which they had been trampled. He urged them to take up arms in the service of the Cross, at the same time setting before them the temporal, no less than the spiritual, advantages that would accrue from the conquest of a land "flowing with milk and honey," and which, he said, should be divided among them. He likewise offered them full pardon for all their sins.

The enthusiasm of his hearers burst all bounds, and with one voice they cried: "God wills it! God wills it!" To all parts of Europe the fervor spread. The Pope was powerfully aided by an earnest and eloquent—if ignorant—monk, Peter the Hermit, of Amiens, who declared that he would rouse the martial spirit of Europe in the cause, and he himself was the first—with whatsoever of misguided zeal—to lead the way to the Holy Land.

The crusades are so called from the simple circumstance that the badge chosen for the movement was the cross, which Pope Urban bade the Christian warriors wear on their breasts or on their shoulders, as the sign of Him who died for the salvation of their souls, and as the pledge of a vow that could never be recalled.

In the enterprise to which Latin Christendom stood committed, the several nations or countries of Europe took equal parts; or, rather, no nation, as such, took any part in it at all; and in this fact we have the explanation of that want of coherent action, and even decent or average generalship, which is commonly seen in national undertakings. For the crusade there was no attempt at a commissariat, no care for a base of supplies; and the crusading hosts were a collection of individual adventurers who either went without making any provisions for their journey or provided for their own needs and those of their followers from their own resources. The number of these adventurers was naturally determined by the political conditions of the country from which they came. In Italy the struggle between the pope and the antipope went far toward chilling enthusiasm; and the recruits for the crusading army came chiefly from the Normans who had followed Robert Guiscard to the sunny southern lands. The Spaniards were busied with a crusade nearer home, and were already pushing back to the south the Mahometan dominion which had once threatened to pass the barriers of the Pyrenees and carry the Crescent to the shores of the Baltic Sea. About ten years before the council of Clermont the Moslem dynasty of Toledo had been expelled by Alfonso, King of Galicia: the kingdom of Cordova had fallen twenty years earlier (1065), and while Peter the Hermit was hurrying hither and thither through the countries of Northern Europe, the Christians of Spain were winning victories in Murcia, and the land was ringing with the exploits of the dauntless Cid, Ruy Diaz de Bivar. By the Germans the summons to the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre was received with comparative coldness; the partisans of emperors, who had been humbled to the dust by the predecessors of Urban, if not by himself, were not vehemently eager to obey it. The bishops of Salzburg, Passau, and Strasburg, the aged duke Guelph of Bavaria, had undertaken the toilsome and perilous journey: not one of them saw their homes again, and their death in the distant East was not regarded by their countrymen as an encouragement to follow their example. In England the English were too much weighed down by the miseries of the Conquest, the Normans too much occupied in strengthening their position, and the King, William the Red, more ready to take advantage of the needs of his brother Robert than to incur any risks of his own. The great movement came from the lands extending from the Scheldt to the Pyrenees. Franks and Normans alike made ready with impetuous haste for the great adventure; and tens of thousands, who could not wait for the formation of something like a regular army, hurried away, under leaders as frantic as themselves, to their inevitable doom.

Little more than half the time allowed for the gathering of the crusaders had passed away, when a crowd of some sixty thousand men and women, neither caring nor thinking about the means by which their ends could be attained, insisted that the hermit Peter should lead them at once to the Holy City. Mere charity may justify the belief that some even among these may have been folk of decent lives moved by the earnest conviction that their going to Jerusalem would do some good; that the vast majority looked upon their vow as a license for the commission of any sin, there can be no moral doubt; that they exhibited not a single quality needed for the successful prosecution of their enterprise is absolutely certain. With a foolhardiness equal to his ignorance Peter undertook the task, in which he was aided by Walter the Penniless, a man with some pretensions to the soldier-like character. But the utter disorder of this motley host made it impossible for them to journey long together. At Cologne they parted company; and fifteen thousand under the penniless Walter made their way to the frontiers of Hungary, while Peter led onward a host which swelled gradually on the march to about forty thousand.