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Authors: John Julius Norwich
Tags: History, Non-Fiction
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through the gates only in small, strictly-controlled parties of sightseers — complaints were already pouring in of robberies, rapes and lootings. Clearly the army could not be allowed to remain; and since it refused to return whence it had come it must continue on its way. On 6 August the whole force was ferried across the Bosphorus under heavy escort and left to look after itself.
The end of the story can be quickly told. At Nicomedia - now Izmit -a mere fifty miles from the straits, the French and the German sections quarrelled and separated, a smaller Italian contingent siding with the Germans. Both sections then continued around the Gulf of Nicomedia to the village of Cibotus, a few miles east of the modern Yalova. With this as their base, they settled down to ravage the local countryside, the French penetrating as far as the walls of Nicaea itself - by now the Seljuk capital - killing, raping and occasionally torturing 1 the local inhabitants, all of whom were Christian Greeks. Their success aroused the jealousy of the Germans, who pushed well beyond Nicaea - confining their bestiality, however, to the Muslim communities - and captured a castle known as Xerigordon. It proved to be their downfall. Xerigordon was set high on a hill, its only water supplies outside the walls; so that when at the end of September the Seljuk army laid siege to the castle the defenders were doomed. For a week they held out; on the eighth day, by which time they were drinking not just the blood of their horses and donkeys but even each other's urine, they surrendered. Those who apostatized had their lives spared and were sent off into captivity; the rest were massacred.
When the news reached Cibotus it caused something approaching panic; and morale was not improved by reports arriving soon afterwards that the Turks were advancing on the camp. Some advised that no action could be taken till the return of Peter, who had gone to Constantinople for discussions; but he gave no sign of coming, and as the enemy continued to approach it became clear that a pitched battle was inevitable.
1 The story that they roasted Christian babies on spits can probably be discounted, though it was widely believed at the time.
On 21 October, the entire Crusading army of some twenty thousand men marched out of Cibotus - straight into a Turkish ambush. A sudden hail of arrows stopped it in its tracks; the cavalry was flung back on to the infantry, and within a few minutes the whole host was in headlong flight back to the camp, the Seljuks in pursuit. For those who had remained at Cibotus - the old men, the women and children and the sick - there was little chance. A few lucky ones managed to take refuge in an old castle on the seashore, where they barricaded themselves in and somehow survived, as did a number of young girls and boys whom the Turks appropriated for their own purposes. The rest were slaughtered. The People's Crusade was over.
The rabble army that had followed Peter the Hermit across Europe in the summer of 1096, only to be annihilated on the plains of western Asia Minor a few months later, was in no way typical of the armies of the First Crusade. Over the next nine months Alexius Comnenus was to find himself the unwilling host to perhaps another seventy or eighty thousand men, and a fair number of women, led by some of the richest and most powerful feudal princes of the West. The challenges presented by this horde - economic, logistic and military, but above all diplomatic — were unparalleled in Byzantine history; the Empire was fortunate indeed in having at its head during this most critical period a man possessed of sufficient tact and intelligence to meet them, with what proved to be a quite extraordinary measure of success.
The basic problem was one of trust - or rather the lack of it. Alexius simply did not believe in the high Christian motives professed by most of the leaders of the Crusade. His unhappy experience of Roussel of Bailleul and
The end of the story can be quickly told. At Nicomedia - now Izmit -a mere fifty miles from the straits, the French and the German sections quarrelled and separated, a smaller Italian contingent siding with the Germans. Both sections then continued around the Gulf of Nicomedia to the village of Cibotus, a few miles east of the modern Yalova. With this as their base, they settled down to ravage the local countryside, the French penetrating as far as the walls of Nicaea itself - by now the Seljuk capital - killing, raping and occasionally torturing 1 the local inhabitants, all of whom were Christian Greeks. Their success aroused the jealousy of the Germans, who pushed well beyond Nicaea - confining their bestiality, however, to the Muslim communities - and captured a castle known as Xerigordon. It proved to be their downfall. Xerigordon was set high on a hill, its only water supplies outside the walls; so that when at the end of September the Seljuk army laid siege to the castle the defenders were doomed. For a week they held out; on the eighth day, by which time they were drinking not just the blood of their horses and donkeys but even each other's urine, they surrendered. Those who apostatized had their lives spared and were sent off into captivity; the rest were massacred.
When the news reached Cibotus it caused something approaching panic; and morale was not improved by reports arriving soon afterwards that the Turks were advancing on the camp. Some advised that no action could be taken till the return of Peter, who had gone to Constantinople for discussions; but he gave no sign of coming, and as the enemy continued to approach it became clear that a pitched battle was inevitable.
1 The story that they roasted Christian babies on spits can probably be discounted, though it was widely believed at the time.
On 21 October, the entire Crusading army of some twenty thousand men marched out of Cibotus - straight into a Turkish ambush. A sudden hail of arrows stopped it in its tracks; the cavalry was flung back on to the infantry, and within a few minutes the whole host was in headlong flight back to the camp, the Seljuks in pursuit. For those who had remained at Cibotus - the old men, the women and children and the sick - there was little chance. A few lucky ones managed to take refuge in an old castle on the seashore, where they barricaded themselves in and somehow survived, as did a number of young girls and boys whom the Turks appropriated for their own purposes. The rest were slaughtered. The People's Crusade was over.
The rabble army that had followed Peter the Hermit across Europe in the summer of 1096, only to be annihilated on the plains of western Asia Minor a few months later, was in no way typical of the armies of the First Crusade. Over the next nine months Alexius Comnenus was to find himself the unwilling host to perhaps another seventy or eighty thousand men, and a fair number of women, led by some of the richest and most powerful feudal princes of the West. The challenges presented by this horde - economic, logistic and military, but above all diplomatic — were unparalleled in Byzantine history; the Empire was fortunate indeed in having at its head during this most critical period a man possessed of sufficient tact and intelligence to meet them, with what proved to be a quite extraordinary measure of success.
The basic problem was one of trust - or rather the lack of it. Alexius simply did not believe in the high Christian motives professed by most of the leaders of the Crusade. His unhappy experience of Roussel of Bailleul and
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