Sans Avoir, Peter established a military command under Godfrey Burel of Etampes, Reynald of Broyes from Epernay, Walter Fitz Waleran of Breteuil in the Beauvaisis and Fulcher, brother of the vidame of Chartres.4 His concentration on the urban centres of Lorraine and the Rhineland was not fortuitous. Arriving at Trier on the Moselle in early April, Peter bullied the local Jewish community into supplying provisions by showing a letter from French Jews urging them to accede to his demands: news of threatened or actual violence against northern French Jewish communities had probably already filtered through. From Trier, Peter headed north, down the Moselle, to Cologne on the Rhine, probably as much in search of funds and supplies as of men. Cologne possessed a large Jewish community, which at about this time was being blackmailed into subsidizing Godfrey of Bouillon’s expedition. A major commercial centre, although hardly on a direct route from Trier to the Danube and Constantinople, the city provided a convenient muster point for Lorraine recruits, including some German knights.
Peter’s movements displayed deliberation and control. He may have threatened the Jews of Trier and elsewhere by anti-Jewish preaching, but his forces abstained from organized attacks on them, unlike the troops of the armies collected in his wake and scavenging local citizens. Even if, as hostile commentators maintained, his followers were ‘the leftover dregs of the Franks’ with children in tow who, ‘whenever they came upon a castle or city, asked whether this was Jerusalem’, Peter, a small but charismatic figure, unafraid and competent later to negotiate in person with the Byzantine emperor and the atabeg of Mosul, displayed neither ignorance nor naivety.5 He was either well briefed or able to extemporize with skill in delegating further recruitment to the priest Gottschalk. He, in turn, raised an effective and well-funded force, 15,000 strong according to Albert of Aachen, with as many knights as infantry, sufficiently impressive and organized for King Coloman I of Hungary to negotiate a truce and the surrender of their arms, providing him with the opportunity, eagerly embraced, to massacre them at Pannonhalma in early July.
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.6 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.7 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.8 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.9 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.
