PETER THE HERMIT, the first mover of the great mediaeval drama of the CRUSADES (q.v.), was of gentle birth, and a native of Amiens, where he was born about the middle of the 11th century. Having been educated at Paris, and afterward in Italy, he became a soldier. After serving in Flanders without much distinction, he retired from the army, married, and had several children; but on the death of his wife he became a monk, and ultimately a hermit. In the course of a pilgrimage to the holy land about 1093, he was moved by observing that the holy sepulcher was in the hands of the infidel, as well as by the oppressed condition of the Christian residents or pilgrims under the 'Moslem rule; and on his return, spoke so earnestly on the subject to pope Urban H., that that pontiff warmly adopted his views, and commissioned him to preach throughout the west an armed confederation of Christians for the deliverance of the holy city. Mean in figure, and diminutive in stature, his enthusiasm lent him a power which no external advantages of form could have commanded. "He traversed Italy," writes the historian of Latin Christianity, "crossed the Alps, from province to province, from city to city. He rode on a mule, with a crucifix in his hand, his head and feet bare; his dress was a long robe, girt with a cord, and a hermit's cloak of the coarsest stuff. He preached in the pulpits, on the roads, in the market-places. His eloquence was that which stirs the heart of the people, for it came from his owen—brief, figurative, full of bold apostrophes; it was mingled with his own tears, with his own groans; he beat his breast: the contagion spread throughout his audience. His appealed to every passion—to valor and shame, to indignation and pity, to the pride of the warrior, to the compassion of the man, the religion of the Christian, to the love of the brethren, to the hatred of the unbeliever aggravated by his insulting tyranny, to reverence for the Redeemer and the saints, to the desire of expiating sin, to the hope of eternal life." The results are well known, as those moral marvels of enthusiasm of which his tory presents occasional examples. All France, especially, was stirred from its very
depths; and just at the time when the enthusiasm of that country had been already kindled to its full fervor, it received a sacredness and an authority from the decree of a council held at Clermont, in which Urban himself was present, and in which his cele brated harangue was but the signal for the outpouring, through all western christen dom, of the same chivalrous emotions by which France had been borne away under the rude eloquence of the hermit. For the details of the expedition we must refer to the article CRUSADES, our sole present concern being with the personal history of Peter. Of the enormous but undisciplined army which assembled from all parts of Europe, one portion was committed to his conduct, the other beino. under the command of a far more skillful leader, Walter the pennyless. Peter placed himself at their head, mounted upon his ass, with his coarse woolen mantle and his rude sandals. On the march through Hungary, They became involved in hostilities with the Hungarians, and suffered a severe defeat at Semlin, whence they proceeded with much difficulty to Constantinople. There the emperor Alexis, filled with dismay at the want of discipline which they exhibited, was but too happy to give them supplies for their onward march; and near Nice they encountered the army of the sultan Solyman, from whin they suffered a ter rible•defeat. Peter accompanied the subsequent expedition under Godfrey, but worn out by the delays and difficulties of the siege of Antioch, he was about to githdraw from the expedition, and was only retained in it by the influence of the ot^ leaders, who foresaw the worst results from his departure. Accordingly, he had a share, although not marked by any signal distinction, in the siege and capture of the holy city in 1099, and the closing incident of his .history as a crusader was an address to the victorious army delivered on the mount of Olives. He returned to Europe and founded a monas tery at Huy, in the diocese of Liege. In this monastery he died, July 7, 1115.