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1065 led by Bishop Gunther. During this journey, the pilgrims were attacked in Syria. Especially shocking was the rape of an abbess. She was described by the chronicler of Bishop Altmann of Passau as a noble woman, physically imposing and spiritually minded. Against all the best advice, she resigned her post and took the pilgrimage. She was captured by Arabs and in the sight of all, raped until she died. This event, says the author, was a scandal to the Christians everywhere.7
Thus, there was a situation where a desire to protect non combatants coincided with the rise of a large fighting force charged with restless energy but no direction.
But the response of the warriors gathered at Clermont in 1095 was immediately overshadowed by the pilgrimage of the hitherto unseen people of Europe.
It was not the knights but the ordinary men, women and children who straightway decamped en masse for the east.
Here was a revolution that dwarfed in comparison the later peoples' uprisings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. For untold centuries they had been subjugated by the locust nobles. Now, they seized their destinies, despite the call to arms not being directed at them.
And all seems to have been due to the work of a ragged hermit, who won a special place in the hearts of medieval women.
PETER'S ARMY SETS OUT
Peter the Hermit emerges mysteriously from the shadows in the north of France as soon as the pope's speech was made in the south. Later suggestions were that the very idea of the crusade was his in the first place, a concept developed from his personal experiences in the Holy Land.8
Other suggestions have it that he was simply a runaway monk with an eye to the main chance.9
Howbeit, while the great men slowly made their preparations during the winter, the ordinary people threw off the bondage of their poverty and followed in the train of Peter.
Peter was a remarkable character, a mixture of evangelist and charlatan. Dressed in a simple woollen tunic covered with a homespun cloak, he rode a mule. His arms and feet were bare, he ate no bread, but lived on wine and fish. He wandered through the smaller towns of northern France preaching everywhere to the commons. They showered Peter with gifts and praised his saintliness with unparalleled fervour, perhaps explained by centuries of repression combined with recent decades of famine, plague and storm wrack. At the moment that Peter appeared, there was a general shortage of food, effecting even the nobles.
The people were ripe for a sea change in their lifestyle, and they focussed their hopes on Peter. He responded with Messiah-like humility, giving back all the gifts. And Guibert notes that he was particularly attentive towards the women, acting as a kind of marriage broker. He persuaded prostitutes to return to their husbands, aiding reconciliation by giving the couples gifts from those offered to him. Guibert comments that his wonderful air of authority enabled him to restore peace and good understanding between those men and women who had become estranged. He bore a charisma, so that everything he did seemed to have a touch of divinity about it, and people began to pluck hairs from his mule as relics.
Within weeks, the whole of northern France was in a ferment, the people inflamed with burning zeal to rescue the holy places. No matter the cost, people freed themselves of the shackles of their few possessions.
...some of them had nothing, or almost nothing, with which to buy the many things they needed.10
One of the immediate results of the peoples' frenzy to equip themselves and set out was massive inflation. Previously expensive goods were sold at buyer's prices. Guibert reports seven sheep being sold for five deniers, whereas usually the price for a single sheep was at least six.11
The equipment of this peasant's army was laughable to the commentators of the day.
"...poor people shoeing their oxen as though they were horses, harnessing them to two-wheeled wagons on which they piled their scanty provisions and their small children, and which they led along behind them. And as soon as these little children saw a castle or a town they eagerly asked if that was the Jerusalem towards which they were journeying." 12
William of Malmesbury wrote that:
"...not only were the Mediterranean countries fired by the enthusiasm, but all who dwelt in the utmost lands or among savage nations. The Welshman left his forest hunting, the Scotsmen forsook his friendly lice, the Dane abandoned his endless drinking bouts, the Norwegian deserted his raw fish. The husbandman left the fields, houses were emptied of their inmates, whole cities went abroad...you might have seen husband and wife and all their children on the march; you would have laughed to see them, furniture and all, setting off in carts. The roads were too narrow, the ways too strait, for those who took the journey.13
These comments make it clear that the peasant's pilgrimage was for everybody, not just the noble men, which was contrary to the expectations of the church. The pope's views that only men were expected to go are further suggested in a letter written to the inhabitants of Bologna on 19 September 1096 about provisions for clerics and monks to go on crusade. They were to go only with the authority of their bishop. No mention is made of nuns in these instructions. Similarly, the pontiff provided for civilian men to go only under the condition that if they were newly married, they had to have their wives' consent: the expectation was obvious that this journey was to be solely a male activity.14
Later promulgations attempted to clarify the position more clearly: the second Crusade forbade the presence of concubines, and the third forbade women of any rank or station.
But Peter's pilgrimage was for all classes, estates and people, and for Christians from throughout the north. Even the Scots, says Guibert, savages unversed in the arts of war, came bare legged wearing cloaks of shaggy skins and carrying sacks of provisions hanging from their shoulders.
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