Why the war for the Holy Land turned out to be a complete failure for Christians: the Poor Crusade

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The fact that the Holy Land was in the hands of the Saracens greatly worried the Catholic Church. In 1096, Pope Urban II called on all Christians to go on a crusade. Then he had no idea what a catastrophe this idea would turn out to be.

Waiting for heavenly punishment

In 1096 the Cathedral of Clermont took place. It went down in history thanks to the speech of Pope Urban II, who explicitly stated that the Holy Land must be freed from all infidels. The key point in that speech was that not only Muslims, but also adherents of all other religions fell under the papal "repression".

Did Urban realize that his words would lead to the mass history of the majority of Christians living in Europe? There is no answer to this question. Because of careless words, the fragile peace in the West collapsed. Christians decided that first they needed to deal with all the inhabitants of Europe who adhered to different religious views. The priests supported this venture.

I must say that the Pope expected that the Europeans would go to beat the Saracens closer to the fall of 1096. But he miscalculated. Thousands of people immediately after the fiery speech decided that it was time for them to go. The first official crusade was attended by the poorest segments of the population: peasants and ruined knights. The first and the second initially saw in the distant lands only an opportunity to improve their dire financial situation, and the speeches of the priests served only as an excuse.

In general, the end of the eleventh century for Europe turned out to be, to put it mildly, difficult. People were severely mowed down by drought and hunger. And the outbreak of the plague became the crown of suffering. Preachers at all corners tirelessly repeated about the approaching end of the world and God's punishment. Someone told stories about the racing horsemen of the apocalypse. In general, Europeans were preparing for the worst. When a lunar eclipse occurred, and after a short time there was also a meteor shower, then mass hysteria reached its climax.

Unexpectedly, the clergy stepped in. They explained both natural phenomena as "divine signs", which should be interpreted as follows: the Lord wants Christians to unite and go to the East to free the Holy Land from Muslims. And only yesterday the people, doomed to certain destruction, seized on this idea. Which is not surprising, because at the end of the tunnel a light dawned - the hope of salvation.

Researchers and historians to this day cannot come to a consensus on the number of people who took part in the first crusade. According to various sources, there could have been about three hundred thousand poor crusaders. Moreover, not only men, but also women and even children went to fight the infidels.

A huge motley army had to be led by someone. Formally, Urban was the leader, but he did not take part in the campaign. And so the role of the commander got to Peter of Amiens, nicknamed the Hermit. It is known that he was a hermit monk who, prior to the Cathedral of Clermont, led a modest and unremarkable life.

The appeal of the Pope inspired Peter, and he began to visit the cities and villages of northern France and Flanders with sermons. In front of people, the monk always performed in white robes in order to play on the psychological factor. In addition, his words were so eloquent that the exhausted and impoverished inhabitants of Europe saw in him almost a prophet of God.

I must say that Peter for his time was an intelligent and far-sighted man. When rumors about the "prophet" reached him, the Hermit began to support them in every possible way. Therefore, he began to talk about a vision in which God called to go to the East.

The people believed in Peter. And he soon became the recognized leader of the Crusade. Under his leadership, a huge, but unarmed and untrained crowd gathered, which for the most part dreamed of only crazy wealth. The hermit, of course, understood everything, but closed his eyes to this. He had no choice.

Since Peter himself was only good at oratory, he needed an assistant from the military environment. And so quickly found in the face of the French knight Walter. The representative of the nobility was mired in debt, for which he received the nickname Golyak. The only way out of this predicament for Walter was the Crusade.

"Tempest" in Europe

The motley army went to Jerusalem. In addition to the lack of suitable weapons and armor, the army had another serious problem - an acute shortage of supplies. The fact is that the poor simply did not have enough funds for this.

The crusaders quickly found a way out of the situation. They just started to plunder all the villages and cities that came across on the way. Naturally, at first the soldiers tried to diplomatically “persuade” the mayors to allocate funds for “the cause of God,” but when they refused, brute force was used. The crusaders left behind smoking ruins and piles of corpses. Moreover, the religion of the victims did not play any role. But especially the Jews got it.

Interethnic conflict has been brewing for a long time. A year before the speech of Urban II in France, minor skirmishes developed into a full-fledged confrontation. Christians with particular anger staged pogroms in the Jewish communities of the largest cities. But then the clergy somehow managed to reconcile the opponents. But now everything has changed. Christine, remembering the words of the Pope about the war with all infidels, came off in full. Nobody could stop the flywheel of religious repression. Whether Jews or Muslims, they all became the main enemies of the crusaders.

The fiercest battles were fought in France and Germany. Moreover, rich and influential people took the side of the crusaders. In France, for example, Duke Gottfried of Bouillon even stated that first you need to get rid of all the Jews, and only then go to Jerusalem with peace of mind.

Jews were robbed and killed without the slightest regret. It seemed that Christians no longer needed any Crusade and the Holy Land. Especially "noble" crusaders put the Jews before a choice: either they accept Christianity, or they will be executed.

An interesting fact: the contemporaries of the first Crusade recalled that hatred of the Jews was not caused by religious differences at all. The main reason was their wealth. Thousands of poor, ragged and hungry peasants saw in the Jews a chance for a comfortable life. The authorities allowed them to engage in usury, so they had large quantities of money. And this "business" was not available to Catholics. And now it's time for revenge. Class hatred turned out to be stronger than anything human. In addition, among the crusaders there were many who took loans from the Jews themselves. Accordingly, one blow with a club or a knife could "extinguish" this bondage.

Of course, the Jews tried to buy them off. But the more money they gave, the more the crusaders demanded of them. Among the Catholic madness, there were still those Christians who managed to keep their minds. Emperor Henry IV tried to protect the Jews, but failed. The Bishop of Mainz, Germany, Ruthard hid the unfortunate in the castle, and then tried to stop the angry crowd. As a result: the castle was taken, the Jews were killed. It is not known whether the bishop himself survived or not.

The bloody footprints of the crusaders stretched across western Europe. How many Jews they killed - nobody knows. Even Jewish chroniclers got confused in the calculations.

Slowly but surely, Christians moved eastward. On their way lay the lands of Hungary. King Kalman I the Scribe knew perfectly well that the arrival of the Crusaders would bring only misfortune and destruction to his land. And he sent them to meet his knights. Kalman personally met in Walter Golyakov, whose soldiers were the first to approach the Hungarian border. The king demanded that peace be observed, promising that otherwise the crusaders would meet with his knights. Golyak, naturally, agreed. But he could not fulfill the condition. The army simply ignored his orders.

The first blow of the crusaders was taken by the Czech prince Břetislav II. His army managed to win, although it suffered heavy losses. In parallel, several Christian groups began to plunder and burn down Hungarian villages. Kalman answered quickly - his knights defeated Walter's army. And instead of tens of thousands of soldiers, only a few hundred remained at his disposal. With them, he somehow managed to get to Constantinople.

An army followed in Hungary, led by the Hermit. His soldiers knew about the fate of their predecessors, so this time the path through the possessions of Kalman passed without serious incidents.

Fight for the Holy Land: a sad ending

In the fall of 1096, a motley army of crusaders camped under the walls of Constantinople. It is estimated that more than one hundred and fifty thousand people gathered at the capital of Byzantium. But they could not be called an army. Fatigue and anger reached their climax. Every now and then mutinies broke out, which ended in the fact that a detachment broke away from the army, leaving for "free navigation."

Such allies were of no use to the Byzantine emperor Alexei Kominin. He was expecting a mighty army of knights from Europe, but he waited for greedy and evil peasants who had no idea how to fight. Because of the crusaders, relations between the emperor of Byzantium and the Roman couple deteriorated greatly. Komnenos considered such "help" to be a personal insult.

Meanwhile, the situation at the walls of Constantinople was heating up. The peasants raided not only the nearby villages, but also broke into the city itself. They plundered merchant quarters, desecrated churches … Komnenos was furious. They failed to come to an agreement with the Hermit and Golyak. The leaders of the Crusade of the poor just shrugged their shoulders and asked to be patient. The emperor did not tolerate it. His warriors forced the Europeans to board ships and land on the opposite side of the Bosphorus, that is, in the lands bordering on the possessions of the Muslims.

The Crusaders set up camp near the city of Tsivitot. Peter and Walter tried to unite the army into a single fist to go to the liberation of the Holy Land, but the idea failed. Every day the army literally melted away. The squads of the poor turned into gangs of bandits who traded in murder and robbery. Gradually they got to the Muslim lands, where they disappeared without a trace. It turned out that the Saracens are not villagers and it is not so easy to fight them. The knight Renaud de Bray was personally convinced of this. He raised an uprising against the Hermit, gathered an army of several tens of thousands of peasants around him and went to the main Seljuk city - Nicaea. He was personally met by Sultan Kylych-Arslan I. In fact, there was no battle. The Muslims dealt with the crusaders in a matter of minutes. A couple of weeks later, the Saracens destroyed Walter's army. Almost all the crusaders were killed, including Golyak. So sadly ended the Crusade of the poor.

As for Peter of Amiens, he did not participate in that battle. The hermit remained in Civitot. And when he learned about the defeat, he returned to Europe altogether. Peter settled in the north of France, founded a monastery and no longer excited the minds of ordinary people with sermons. It is known that the spiritual leader of the first Crusade in 1115 did not die.

Another interesting thing: there is a version that Urban II announced the Peasant Crusade not at all with the aim of liberating the Holy Land. Some historians are sure that he sent hundreds of thousands of poor people to certain death on purpose in order to "unload" Europe. There were so many beggars that they threatened either with hunger or mass uprisings. And so, they got rid of unnecessary mouths, hiding behind good intentions.