The First Crusade

The armies of the First Crusade were organized not as one military force but rather as separate militias, each commanded by a different individual authorized by the pope. There were also irregular armies. Some of these, not heeding the pope’s official departure date in August, left early. Historians call these loosely affiliated groups the People’s (or Peasants’) Crusade. Some of the participants were peasants, others knights. Inspired by the charismatic orator Peter the Hermit and others like him, they took off for the Holy Land via the Rhineland. This unlikely route was no mistake: the crusaders wanted to kill Jews, who, like the Muslims, did not accept Christ’s divinity. By 1095, three cities of the Rhineland—Speyer, Worms, and Mainz—had especially large and flourishing Jewish populations with long-established relationships with the local bishops.

The People’s Crusade—joined by local nobles, knights, and townspeople—vented its fury against the Jews of the Rhineland. As one commentator put it, the crusaders considered it ridiculous to attack Muslims when other infidels lived in their own backyards: “That’s doing our work backward.” The Rhineland Jews had to choose between conversion or death. Many Jews in Speyer found refuge in the bishop’s castle, but at Worms and Mainz hundreds were massacred. Similar pogroms—systematic persecutions of Jews—took place a half century later, when the preaching of the Second Crusade led to new attacks on the Jews.

After they had vented their fury in the Rhineland, some members of the People’s Crusade dropped out. The rest continued through Hungary to Constantinople, where Alexius Comnenus promptly shipped them to Asia Minor, where most of them died. In the autumn, the main armies of the crusaders began to arrive, their leaders squabbling with Alexius from the start.

Considering them too weak to bother with, the Turks spared the arriving crusaders, who made their way south to the Seljuk capital at Nicaea. At first, their armies were uncoordinated and their food supplies uncertain, but soon the crusaders organized themselves. They managed to defeat a Turkish army that attacked from nearby; then, surrounding Nicaea and besieging it with catapults and other war machines, they took the city on June 18, 1097.

Most of the crusaders then went toward Antioch, which stood in the way of their conquest of Jerusalem, but one led his followers to Edessa, where they took over the city and its outlying area, creating the first of the crusader states. Meanwhile, the main body of crusaders took Antioch after a long stalemate. From there, it was only a short march to Jerusalem. Quarrels among Muslim rulers eased the way. In early June 1099, a large force of crusaders amassed before the walls of Jerusalem; in mid-July, they attacked, breaching the walls and entering the city. “Now that our men had possession of the walls and towers, wonderful sights were to be seen,” wrote Raymond d’Aguiliers, a priest serving one of the crusade leaders. “Some of our men (and this was the more merciful) cut off the heads of their enemies; others shot them with arrows, so that they fell from the towers; others tortured them longer by casting them into the flames.”