PETER THE HERMIT, a priest of Amiens, who may, as Anna Comnena says, have attempted to go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem before 1096, and have been prevented by the Turks from reaching his destination. It is uncertain whether he was present at Urban's great sermon at Clermont in o95; but it is certain that he was one of the preachers of the crusade in France after that sermon, and his own experience may have helped to give fire to his eloquence. He was an emotional revivalist preacher: his very ass became an object of popular adoration; and thousands of peasants took the cross at his bidding. The crusade of the pauperes, which forms the first act in the first crusade, was his work; and he himself led one of the five sections of the pauperes to Constantinople, starting from Cologne in April, and arriving at Constantinople at the end of July 1o96. Here he joined the only other section which had succeeded in reaching Constantinople—that of Walter the Penniless; and he crossed to the Asiatic shore in the beginning of August. In spite of his warnings, the pauperes began hostilities against the Turks; and Peter returned to Constantinople. In his absence the army was cut to pieces by the Turks ; and he was left in Constantinople without any followers, during the winter of 1096-1097, to wait for the coming of the princes. He joined their ranks in May 1o97,
and marched with them through Asia Minor to Jerusalem. But he played a very subordinate part in the history of the first crusade. He appears, in the beginning of 1098, as attempting to escape from the privations of the siege of Antioch—showing himself, as Guibert of Nogent says, a "fallen star." In the middle of the year he was sent by the princes to invite Kerbogha to settle all differences by a duel; and in 1 o99 he appears as treasurer of the alms at the siege of Arca (March), and as leader of the supplica tory processions in Jerusalem which preceded the battle of Ascalon (August). At the end of the year he went to Laodicea, and sailed West. Albert of Aix records that he died in 1151, as prior of a church of the Holy Sepulchre which he had founded in France.
The legend which made Peter the instigator of the first Crusade, relating how Christ appeared to him in the Church of the Sepulchre, appears in the pages of William of Tyre. Raymond of Antioch caused the Chanson des Chetifs to be composed in honour of the Hermit and his followers, soon after 1130. It also appears in the pages of Albert of Aix, who wrote somewhere about I13o; and from Albert it was borrowed by William of Tyre.