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The gathering of nations was unequalled since the building of Babel's Tower. The participants, unable to communicate in their myriad of languages and dialects, communicated at first through crude sign language. Some, unable to make themselves understood, laid one finger beside another in the shape of a cross to show that they wished to join the pilgrimage.15
AN UNCOOKED GOOSE
These unsophisticated people attracted the sneering comments of clerics, such as Guibert of Nogent. He described rather condescendingly and as a nine days wonder how a "little woman" (presumably meaning a peasant woman) had undertaken the journey to Jerusalem. Waddling behind her "...taught in I know not what new school..." and acting in a way that its unreasoning nature should not have permitted, came a goose.
The report spread with lightning speed through castles and cities that geese had been sent by God to conquer Jerusalem, and people began to believe that the woman was not leading the goose, but rather that the goose was leading the woman.
The validity of this most medieval reasoning was tested at Cambrai. The woman walked through a gauntlet of onlookers into the church right up to the high altar, and the goose followed under its own volition.
Guibert relates that the goose died in Lorraine soon afterwards. The wretched beast, he adds, would have been more sure of getting to Jerusalem if its mistress had eaten it on the eve of the departure for the East.16
Pell mell, the throng raced eastwards, gathering more adherents in Germany, and plunging into the land of the Hungarians.
Here took place the first of the tragic encounters that was to mar this first great movement towards freedom by the peasants of Europe.
(The killing of Jews in Germany in May 1096 although sparked by the crusaders' passage, can not be attributed to their doing. It was really a local incident carried out by recalcitrants).17
The men and women who had laboured as virtual slaves or who had eked out meagre existences in crude towns and villages as artisans were suddenly freed. Had not the Pope promised at Clermont, in a speech repeated in many forms subsequently:
"If those who go thither lose their lives on land or sea during the journey, or in battle against the pagans, their sins will at once be forgiven; I grant this through the power of God conferred on me..."18
Here was an offer which, given some consideration, placed temptation in the path of those with little to lose by yielding. If every sin was forgiven through the act of pilgrimage, what was forbidden? Freed from the obligation to work for the rest of their (brief) lives, why should the fruits of the earth not be taken at will? And where they were going to was itself Heaven: Jerusalem was seen as the interface of Heaven and Earth, a golden city in the epicentre of the universe. It was here that the Tree of Life had been planted in the earthly paradise, from which grew the Cross which later served as the sacrificial instrument for the Son of God, through which he had purged the world and offered the hope of a new life in Heaven. 19
To survive all and reach Jerusalem - just beyond the next ridge or through the next forest - was to take a direct short cut to eternal bliss.
For those peasants who gave it any thought at all, the prospects must have sent their senses reeling.
In the sun lit summer of Hungary, the peasants at last broke out, their greed for the good things in life, without the obligation of work or guilt, set free. Guibert of Nogent testifies to their excesses. It was apparently the custom in Hungary for several years' grain harvest to be stored in ricks in the fields, a sight to delight the pilgrims, who in recent years had found grain harder to come by than ever. The hospitable inhabitants of the region readily handed out to the first of the newcomers provisions of every kind.
But not content with the kindness with which they were received and "impelled by a kind of fury that was a madness", the foreigners began to trample underfoot the provisions they were offered and then the very inhabitants of the country. The pilgrims torched the granaries, and fearless of the consequences, the men raped the young girls of the country, kidnapped wives from their homes, and heaped contempt on their husbands and fathers. 20
The rapine was checked only when a representative of the Greek empire, Nicetas, beat off an attack on Sofia, and turned the tables on the pilgrims, driving many of them into a river where they drowned. Presumably, many pilgrim women and children died in this attack along with their men. Men, women and children were also seized in the aftermath of the battle and spent the rest of their lives in slavery in the region.21
Meanwhile, Peter escaped in the company of some Germans and about seven thousand other survivors who pressed on to safety in Constantinople. There he was reinforced by a band of Italian pilgrims who had advanced before him and by countless other pilgrims who had followed separate routes.
The scattered bands of Peter's surviving followers had arrived at the hub of the medieval world.
What they saw surpassed their imaginings, and many must have been convinced that they had already reached the Holy City on earth.
The metropolis of Constantinople-Byzantium was the true heir of the Roman Empire. Girded in an impenetrable fortress on the shores of the Bosphorus sound, this city state had held the barbarians in check while Rome's Forum decayed into a cow pasture. Hundreds of thousands of people lived in prosperity and amidst a flowering culture, and through its port passed the wealth of the world's trade.
The extant Emperor, Alexius Comnena, was a powerful politician and an expert military strategist, as well as a respected soldier.
He had dammed the invasions of the Turks as they pressed across what is modern day Turkey to the very shores of the Bosphorus. And he had sent to the Pope for a mercenary Frankish army to bolster his mighty multinational forces in turning the tide to regain
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