Popular Crusade

Forwarding started by the call to the First crusade of the pope Urbain II with the Council of Clermont in 1095.

The call of Clermont receives a broad diffusion in popular environments: the name of Pierre the Hermit remained attached to this preaching near crowd but of other “prophets” took the head of bands leaving for Jerusalem without awaiting the official date. Since ten years bad harvests, famines and epidemics which struck the Rhenish areas and the north of France explain this exodus. The first bands, left under control Gautier Have-nots then Pierre the Hermit as of April 1096, arrive a few months later at Constantinople without too many incidents (close to 150 000 men and women). More serious violences are the fact of Germanic groups which bait themselves at the beginning against the Jewish communities, massacring them in spite of the opposition of certain bishops. Continuing their depredations in way, the majority of these groups will be destroyed or dispersed by the Hungarian before arriving at Byzance.

During the tour of the popular crusade of the Juifs are massacred in the Rhineland, plunderings and slaughters are perpetrated in Hungary and in the Byzantine Empire: eight hundred Jews are killed with Worms, more than thousand with Mainz. With Cologne, the synagog is destroyed but the archbishop protects the Jews by hiding them in his castles and helping them to disperse with the surroundings. The majority will be found and assassinated. More than 5000 are killed on the whole.

The popular crusade of Pierre the Hermit and Gautier Have-nots, arrived in front of Constantinople in July 1096, request to be transferred onto the Asian coast. At the beginning of August, it crosses the the Bosphorus with Byzantine ships. Incompetent to buy his supply, it starts by devastating the Christian villages, launches raids in Turkish territory to be mainly massacred with the camp of Civitot in October (close to 20 000 people), while the survivors (two to three thousand men) are brought back to Constantinople by the Byzantine boats.

Random links: