PETER THE HERMIT. - Born around 1050 in the diocese of Amiens, died at Neufmoutier (diocese of Liège) on 8 July 1115. He is the best known among the popular preachers of the First Crusade; but legend has taken hold of his name and has exaggerated beyond measure the part he played in the enterprise. He was not the initiator of the Crusade, nor was he the only one to lead the popular masses that rushed toward the East. It is therefore necessary to reduce to its proper proportion the importance attributed to him by contemporary accounts; those, for example, of Guibert of Nogent and of Albert of Aachen.

The monk P. was already known in the region where he lived for his austerity, when, following the Council of Clermont, he began to preach the reconciliation of Christians and to travel through the countryside of France as far as the region of Berry, promising salvation to the liberators of the Holy Sepulchre. Even women, children and the old wanted to join the crowd of those who, without provisions or weapons, began to follow P. the Hermit. He found himself joined also by a troop of Germans, led by Walter the Penniless. But P. could not prevent excesses from occurring: massacres of Jews in the German cities, devastation in Hungary. When P. the Hermit arrived on 1 August 1096 at Constantinople, many of his followers had died of hunger or destitution; the official Crusade of the barons had not yet left the West. The emperor Alexius I Comnenus received P. and, to rid himself of a suspect crowd, supplied him with the ships necessary for the crossing of the Bosphorus. Once in Asia, P. the H. succeeded even less than before in controlling his men, who, wholly ignorant, already thought they were near the end of the journey. They lost their way, instead, in the midst of an unknown country, infested by the Turks, who massacred a great number of them; others departed because of the climate. P. had to implore from the Emperor the aid of a contingent of Greeks, because otherwise they would all have perished. Those who managed to return to Constantinople waited for the arrival of the barons and joined their troops. P. had the good fortune to escape the dangers and return to the West and retire to Neufmoutier until his death. From then on he remained in the spirit of the people the symbol of the mystique of the Crusade.

Bibliography9 works

BIBL.: P. d'Outreman, La vie du vén. Pierre l'Ermite, Mons 1612; 2nd ed., Clermont 1895; H. Hagenmeyer, Peter der Eremite, Leipzig 1879 (French trans. by F. Raynaud under the title: Le vrai et le faux sur Pierre l'Ermite, Paris 1883); H. v. Sybel, Gesch. der ersten Kreuzungen, 2nd ed., Düsseldorf 1881; G. Kurth, Pierre l'Ermite, Liège 1892; R. Röricht, Geschichte der ersten Kreuzungen, Innsbruck 1901; L. Bréhier, L'Eglise et l'Orient au moyen âge. Les Crusades, 5th ed., Paris 1946; Y. Le Febvre, Pierre l'Ermite, Amiens 1946; A. Gieysztor, The rise of the Crusades, in Medievalia et humanistica, 5 (1948), 6 (1949).

Guglielmo Mollat

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Peter the Hermit

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