God's War: A New History of the Crusades (18 page)

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.
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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.

The orderliness of Peter’s forces stands in contrast with what followed. In mid-May, his lieutenant Walter Sans Avoir, marching only days ahead of him, negotiated a safe-conduct with the new Hungarian King Coloman, including access to markets, an important privilege as the early summer, before the harvest, were the hungriest months in the middle ages. There was trouble at Semlin on the Hungarian border over purchases of arms. Once they were across the Byzantine frontier, the hazards of early summer campaigns were exposed, Walter being refused market facilities at Belgrade, causing an affray in which sixty pilgrims died. However, the Byzantine military authorities recognized Walter as an ally and, to prevent further pillaging, provided food and an escort to Constantinople, which he reached about 20 July 1096 to await Peter. It says much for Alexius’s involvement in the project that he was so accommodating, not least as he must have been expecting the westerners to arrive some months later, when local provisions would have been more plentiful.

The speed in conveying Water Sans Avoir to the imperial capital shows the Greeks knew that Peter the Hermit’s larger force was only days behind, presenting a potentially dangerous competition for food. Although his regime rested on recent military success against the Pechenegs in the Balkans and some moderate successes in Asia Minor and the Aegean, Alexius I had witnessed too many political coups, one of them his own in 1081, to feel entirely secure. In 1094–5 there was a Balkan invasion across the Danube by Cumans, trouble in Serbia (directly on the crusaders’ line of march), stirrings of a tax revolt and a dangerous conspiracy in the army to replace Alexius by Nicephoras Diogenes, son of the Emperor Romanus IV (1068–71), the loser at Manzikert. Pressure on food in the strategically vital Balkan provinces and, still more, in the capital itself, could erode Alexius’s precarious support.
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Alexius needed western aid but could not allow it to disrupt his delicate political arrangements. A hungry, resentful population in
Constantinople would have been very dangerous. Alexius determined to push the crusaders into Asia as quickly as possible to minimize the risk. It was less, as his daughter Anna Comnena claimed half a century later, that the emperor feared a western attack, more that he was wary of food riots or dissident Greeks recruiting the foreigners to overthrow him. From the first Alexius attempted to control his unexpectedly numerous allies through a mixture of hospitality, generosity and firm direction, careful always not to commit too many of his own stretched resources to their cause.

Peter the Hermit’s army left Cologne on 20 April. It was large, perhaps as many as 20,000 including non-combatants; the line of march in the Balkans was at least a mile long. Its passage through central Europe was rapid, averaging over seventeen miles per day, with twenty-five miles on good roads.
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Most of the pilgrims walked or rode, Peter apparently on his talismanic donkey, although some travelled down the Danube by boat. At Regensberg on 23 May, Peter’s followers orchestrated a mass forced baptism of the city’s Jews in the Danube. Unsurprisingly in view of the expedition’s propaganda, crusaders adopted a belligerent attitude to any who stood in their way, physically or ideologically. This emerged starkly when Peter’s army sacked Semlin in the second week of June after concerted assaults led by heavily armed knights and Godfrey Burel’s infantry. Again, the trouble arose from disputes over supplies – apparently rumours of the ill-treatment of Walter’s followers and an argument over the purchase of a pair of shoes sparked a riot that led to armed intervention – and anxiety over the prospects of help across the frontier in Byzantium. Although capable of storming a city and accompanied by carts full of treasure, under pressure Peter’s army lacked discipline.

The Semlin affair put the Greeks on their guard, evacuating Belgrade, leaving it open to plunder. After a forced crossing of the river Save, the pilgrims reached Nish, the provincial capital, on 27 June, where the crisis of supplies became critical. The Byzantine governor Nicetas negotiated a market for Peter’s men in return for hostages, significantly including the military commanders Godfrey Burel and Walter Fitz Waleran. When this broke down, Nicetas imposed order by force; after a failed attempt to restore peace by Peter, his forces were scattered by a concerted Greek assault. Chastened, Peter led the survivors along the road to Sofia; at the evacuated town of Bela Palanka they regrouped and gathered the local harvest. At Sofia, on 7 July, Peter was met by an escort from
Alexius that hurried them towards Constantinople, making sure they never stopped anywhere for more than three days. The battles at Nish, which cost perhaps as much as a third of his force, had been caused by Peter and his commanders losing control, particularly, Albert of Aachen recorded, of the young men.
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Communications along the line broke down, a sign of inexperienced leadership faced with such a large and disparate force, lacking the cohesion exerted by wealthy magnates. Exhausting marches; uncertain food supplies; alien territory and people; discomfort, fear and the prospect of hunger soured idealism. Yet, once chaperoned by the Greeks and provided with secure provisions, Peter’s army regained its integrity; Adrianople was reached by 22 July and Constantinople on 1 August, just five months after Peter’s first rallying of pilgrims in the Ile de France over a thousand miles behind.

The shambles in the Balkans served as a prelude to disaster. Alexius advised Peter against pressing forward immediately. Evidently abreast of events in the west, some princes and probably the pope having written to him of their plans, Alexius urged waiting for the arrival of the rest of forces being assembled. Reunited with Walter Sans Avoir and reinforced by some Italian levies, Peter was provided with a well-supplied base that Alexius used for western mercenaries at Kibotos, on the Gulf of Nicomedia just across the Sea of Marmora from the capital. There, the usual difficulty of countering boredom in an army camp was exacerbated by regional rivalries and the proximity of territory controlled by the Seljuk Turks, whose capital in Asia Minor was at Nicaea, only twenty-five miles away. With Peter now reduced to a diplomatic role in negotiating the level and cost of regular supplies with the Byzantine authorities in Constantinople, leadership devolved on to the separate captains in whose interest it was to engage in lucrative pillaging of the locality, regardless of whether the victims were Greek Christians or Muslims. The objectives were food, booty and action. It was a truism of medieval warfare that an armed force was never more vulnerable than when foraging. In September, French raiders penetrated to the walls of Nicaea. Not to be outdone, a contingent of Germans and Italians, under an Italian called Rainaldo, ranged further afield, seizing a castle at Xerigordo near Nicaea. There they were trapped and massacred by Seljuks from Nicaea, allegedly only those who surrendered and embraced Islam escaping to lead lives as captives and slaves, one of them being Rainaldo himself.

Disorderly conduct and confused leadership were not the sole prerogatives of these early crusade armies; a year later the princes fared little better during some of the darker days at the siege of Antioch. The populist nature of the whole enterprise now emerged, not for the last time, as a potent force in tactical decisions. Walter Sans Avoir and most of the other leaders at Kibotos argued against any precipitate response to the Xerigordo disaster, but popular demand for revenge found a spokesman in Godfrey Burel, the majority prevailing over the cautious leadership. The popular agitation provoked the main body of the crusaders to advance from Kibotos towards Nicaea. By now the Seljuk Sultan Kilij Arslan was sufficiently alarmed to take personal direction of his forces. In a series of fast-moving engagements on 21 October, a significant proportion of the Christian knights were isolated and killed, including Walter Sans Avoir, pierced, so Albert of Aachen recorded, by seven arrows, and Reynald of Broyes.
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With the elite of knights broken, the Christians were either massacred or fled, the Turks overrunning the camp at Kibotos three miles away within minutes. Only the arrival of a Byzantine relief force saved the remnants of the Christian army that had found refuge in a deserted castle on the shore; a large proportion of these would appear to have been knights.

Although not directly responsible for the catastrophe, Peter the Hermit’s role as a leader was at an end, his presence during the rest of the campaign receiving distinctly muted acknowledgement in the eyewitness accounts. Yet his contribution, ultimately insignificant militarily, demonstrated that the journey to the east was not a fool’s errand. His troops had held together as a viable force for months despite their difficulties with supplies, which were the result of timing as much as anything. He had accomplished a long march with thousands of ill-assorted followers, negotiated with local rulers and secured the patronage and favour of the Greek emperor. The tragic failure of his army in Asia pointed to the requirements for success: united leadership; significant numbers of knights; respect for the enemy; and, above all, adequate and secure supplies, of food, water, war materials and horses.

Peter the Hermit’s failure looked like modest success when compared with the fate of the other large crusader bands that set out from the Rhineland area in the spring of 1096. Gottschalk’s army was destroyed at the beginning of July by an exasperated King Coloman in western Hungary at about the same time as Volkmar’s force was dispersed at
Nitra in the north after a career of Jewish persecution in Bohemia. The problem for the Hungarians was of order and supply. Each successive crusader army seemed less disciplined, more eager to plunder, commandeer markets and coerce locals. Beyond the scrutiny of chroniclers, a steady stream of ordinary pilgrims was flowing east, adding to the pressure on food stocks and forage. These material considerations dictated Coloman’s refusal in late July to allow the passage into his kingdom of Emich of Flonheim and his south and west German followers: with a more favourable supply position three months later, the king allowed Godfrey of Bouillon a negotiated passage. However, beyond provisions, Coloman may also have regarded Emich as a dangerous liability, his reputation for violence and flouting of royal authority preceding him. In the three months since embarking on his crusade, Count Emich had, in the eyes of many, indelibly stained the holy project by the systematic persecution of Jews.

THE JEWISH POGROM OF 1096

The Jews of northern Europe shared in the economic growth of the eleventh century, especially in the revival of urban life. Attracted from the Mediterranean regions, Ashkenazic Jews became established in market towns of northern France such as Troyes or Le Mans by the late tenth century, as well as in the towns of the Rhineland. New communities continued to be established, such as in England after 1066 or in Speyer in 1084; older ones, such as those of Rouen, Cologne or Mainz, flourished under the protection of local rulers or bishops eager to promote trade. Jewish banking became a feature of the expanding markets of the area. As well as direct involvement in trading goods, with increased long-distance commerce and the persistence of varying local currencies, weights and measures, the network of Jewish financiers proved useful. Judging by Rhineland evidence, interest rates were not exorbitant, 8 per cent in one example, Jewish credit being certainly more accessible and in the long term cheaper than obtaining cash from another source of bullion, religious houses.
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With success came dangers. In northern France there had been sporadic outbreaks of anti-Semitic persecution allied to forced conversions, in particular in the years 1007–12.
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As holders of movable wealth, Jews were targets for casual
as well as systematic larceny. As a religious minority, Jews remained tolerated if not accepted. A more consistent threat to their communities than persecution lay in conversions of successful and ambitious Jews to the majority faith, as occurred with sons of two famous Mainz rabbis. Privileged and protected status in the confined streets of eleventh-century towns presented its own problems: Bishop Rudiger’s charter establishing Jews at Speyer provided for a walled enclave to protect them from ‘the violence of the mob’.
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Such communal tensions played their part in the tragedy of 1096.

On 3 May 1096, the Jewish Sabbath, Count Emich’s troops attacked the Jews at Speyer, near to his estates, killing a dozen of them who refused baptism, before the bishop came to their rescue. One woman committed suicide rather than submit to the Christians. The persecutors received the help of townspeople, as Bishop John punished some of them by having their hands cut off, a penalty for theft. Those Jews who had fled to the surrounding countryside or had accepted baptism returned under the bishop’s protection, the apostates allowed to revert to Judaism; a new synagogue was begun. Steven Runciman rather astonishingly dismisses this episode as ‘not a very impressive attack’.
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Perhaps the walls prescribed in 1084 proved their use. Over a fortnight later, on 18 May, Emich arrived at Worms where he managed to mobilize more effective local assistance, including peasants from the countryside as well as burghers. Given the proximity of Emich’s own lands, the count was probably exploiting known local tensions. Jews found in their quarter were massacred, the Torah Scrolls desecrated; those who had fled to the protection of the bishop’s palace were besieged and, on 20 May, slaughtered. Some resisted forcible conversion, one of the bishop’s relatives being killed; others may have taken the route of suicide. Hundreds died.