History of the Crusades.

the Crusades. needs. Last week we saw Pope Urban II call upon the princes or nobility of Europe to march to the holy lands

and take Jerusalem in the name of Christianity.

At the same time that Pope Urban was appealing to the aristocrats of Europe, there was another man traveling around France calling for participants in a crusade to the Holy Lands.

His name was Peter the Hermit and his target audience was not the nobility of Europe,

but the people on the opposite end of the social scale, the peasants.

Edward Gibbon, in the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, reports that Peter the

hermit was from a good French family and had received military training in the French county of Beloane.

After visiting the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem as a pilgrim,

Peter had then renounced the sword and the world,

dedicating his life to the sole purpose of driving the Muslim occupiers out of the Holy Lands.

Except that may not have been the case. Peter certainly preached that he had been to Jerusalem,

but in his impassioned speeches that were designed to whip up religious fervor, he made lots of claims which weren't

exactly true, as we will see.

So what do we know about Peter the Hermit?

He was a short energetic persuasive religious man with a knack for preaching to crowds.

He was one of those quaint figures of the Middle Ages. He was short, skinny, unwashed, and rode a donkey. His clothes were simple and homespun and he went barefoot. He didn't eat much. He refused to eat bread or meat and ate mostly fish and drank wine and spent a good deal of his day in fervent prayer.

Travelling through northeastern France and across to Germany, Peter preached to the masses at every opportunity.

Whipping up anti-Muslim sentiment, he described in lurid terms

the horrors besetting Christian pilgrims in the Islamic states and decried the desecration

of sacred Christian holy places in Jerusalem.

With every speech at each town or village it's likely that his stories became more and more embellished until no listener could fail to be moved

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