477 – Deus Did Not Vult: The People’s Crusade

Welcome to the British History Podcast.

My name is Jamie, and this is episode 477.

Deus Did Not Volt: The People's Crusade.

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Everyone in England was angry with Rufus.

He was fining, taxing, and now torturing his way through the country.

And as for Rufus, he was mad at everyone in England, which was why he was fining, taxing, and torturing his way through the country.

And the thing is, this wasn't making Rufus feel any better, and it was making everybody else even more angry.

But public anger doesn't do much unless it's put into action.

And due to the nature of feudal society, the actions of aristocrats have far more consequences than the feelings of the general public, since the nobility had a virtual monopoly on violence.

But despite the fact that Rufus was unpopular even amongst the nobility, thanks in no small part to the fact that he had escalated recently to literally chopping noble balls off and calling that justice, the Norman aristocracy of England still wouldn't move against the king.

Now, I've read historians who imply, and one who outright claims, that the Anglo-Norman aristocracy was cowed into submission by Rufus' unhinged brutality.

And that's a tidy theory.

Fear breeds compliance, and so spare the rod, spoil the realm.

But I don't buy it.

First off, if fear alone guaranteed obedience, the conqueror wouldn't have spent his reign stomping out rebellion after rebellion.

And second, history is full of tyrants who go too far, and many of them end up dangling by their ankles for it.

And third, well,

authoritarian parenting and authoritarian kingship both often fail for the same reason.

Cruelty alienates people.

It doesn't unite them.

So while I have no doubt that the Salisbury Court would have been terrifying and horrific to witness, I think the story of the Anglo-Norman submissiveness is much more complicated than a simple tale of win fabulous cash and prizes with this one simple trick.

For example, I suspect that the fecklessness of Mowbray's allies had a much bigger impact upon the rebellious mood within England.

I mean, when Mowbray plotted his rebellion, he had enjoyed widespread support.

And yet when it came down to executing that rebellion, those supposed allies lost their nerve and joined the forces of Rufus instead.

And something like that is gonna have a chilling effect on anyone else who's looking to start the next rebellion.

And if you're a colonizing Norman aristocrat who's looking to overthrow the colonizing Norman king of England, and you're a member of a feudal society that restricts authority and military experience to the upper echelons,

and you're part of a regime that has deliberately exterminated pretty much all non-Norman members of said upper echelons.

Well, any plot for violent revolution is going to be contingent on gaining Anglo-Norman support.

After all, who else are you going to recruit for your fight?

The English peasantry?

Unlikely.

So I suspect that the low rebel morale has at least as much to do with the Norman aristocracy showing itself to be spineless as it did to Rufus showing himself to be a violent nutcase.

But even then, I think there was something else that played a much bigger role in preserving peace for the remainder of Rufus's reign.

Because there was something that was happening at this very same moment that was shaping virtually every element of society, from the very bottom all the way up to the very, very top.

And it was a thing that was having a direct impact on the availability of violent men who might want to take part in any would-be rebellion.

Because Pope Urban II and his supporters had started their roadshow and were promoting their latest venture, the First Crusade.

And this idea was taking Europe by storm.

In large part, because in a way, this had been coming for a very long time.

Now, it's easy to imagine medieval people living in a vacuum and being largely unaware of what was going on outside of their own villages.

But that is a bit of a fallacy.

These people didn't have the internet, but information still traveled.

Rumors still spread.

And the stories that were coming out of the East had been getting worse and worse.

You see, one thing to understand about European culture at this point in history was the importance of pilgrimage.

Medieval European Christians believed in the power of traveling to physical locations that were described in the stories of the Bible.

And so they would go in search of spiritual enlightenment or forgiveness of their sins, or even in hope of getting physical healing.

There were so many pilgrims traveling to the Holy Land that there was an entire economy built up to support them.

People even enjoyed special legal protections when they went on pilgrimage.

But over the years, these trips were becoming more difficult and much more dangerous.

One of the biggest causes for this change was the rise of the Seljuk Turks.

You see, as they gained regional power, they began to come into close contact with European people who were going on pilgrimage.

And it wasn't going well.

Now, technically, the Seljuks accepted the Christians.

But in practice, this acceptance was less than the benign tolerance that you might be hoping for.

The authorities were, at best, neglectful when it came to Christians and their safety, having basically no interest in going out of their way to defend pilgrims.

And this disinterest was obvious to everyone.

Consequently, Seljuk communities along the Pilgrim's Road quickly realized that they could take advantage of the situation and extract payments from the Christians in exchange for a grant of passage.

Now, some might call this a toll, others might call it extortion.

But what it wasn't, though, was a guarantee of safety.

At most,

this was just an agreement that you wouldn't be turned around right then and there.

And as you might imagine, as this went on unabated, there were others others who realized that if the authorities would let them get away with extorting pilgrims, then they might be able to get away with far more.

And as a result, there were increasing stories of pilgrims being abused, robbed, attacked, sold into slavery, or even outright killed.

As a result, failed pilgrimages were becoming increasingly common.

And imagine putting all of your wealth into the hope that you would reach the Holy Land.

Dedicating a huge amount of money, resources, time, and physical safety on the hope that you will receive some sort of salvation when you're there, or have a disease cured, only to be robbed on the road and then forced to turn back with nothing to show for it.

How mad would you be?

And as more and more pilgrimages failed, it became much more likely that these stories weren't just some rumor about someone from a place you'd never heard of.

And instead, you might know someone in your town, or maybe in your neighboring town, who had a personal, embittered tale to share about their experiences on pilgrimage, or perhaps a story of someone who never made it back.

Adding fuel to the fire was the fact that the Byzantine emperor, Alexios I,

was up to his neck in Seljuk problems.

And at the close of the century, he was finding himself at serious risk of losing everything.

So he'd been reaching out to the West in search of aid.

Now, one of our major sources for this development is a letter from Alexios to Count Robert of Flanders.

And this letter stands out for a number of reasons, not the least of which because it contains shockingly inflammatory statements about the violation of virgins and the sodomizing of bishops.

But, unfortunately for historians, and frankly, fortunately for those bishops, this letter is almost certainly a forgery.

However, while that letter was likely fake, we do know that Emperor Alexios was seeking aid, and his messages probably carried their own inflammatory statements to inspire support, because we do know that Western nobles like Count Robert of Flanders had been sending him hundreds and hundreds of knights in an effort to support Byzantium.

And honestly, it wouldn't be too hard for the emperor to find inflammatory material.

The Seljuk Turks were a militaristic expansionist empire.

And as we've become all too aware with our discussions about the Normans, those societies tend to be dicks to their neighbors.

So this situation had been threatening to boil over for a long time.

And eventually, Emperor Alexios reached out to Pope Urban II

and was all, dude, I need help.

Like, for real, this is getting bad.

And if Constantinople falls, you're probably going to be next.

And the Pope, receiving this message, clearly saw it as a religious and biblical crisis.

Though I doubt Emperor Alexios saw it the same way.

For him, the Seljuks were an imperial threat.

When he sought help, what he probably had in mind was something closer to what he'd already been receiving from Europe, just on a slightly bigger scale.

But overall, basically the same that had been done in the past.

So Mercs, lots and lots of Mercs.

But Pope Urban II had something else in mind.

He wanted to promote papal authority.

Specifically, his papal authority.

None of that anti-Pope Clement nonsense.

And he wanted to do it through a mass mobilization of the most violent members of society, and done on a scale that would have been difficult to even comprehend.

A biblical scale.

And so while Alexios was expecting a reasonable amount of mercs, Urban and his allies were whipping up the First Crusade.

And with all the stories of atrocities that were circulating around, this idea was kind of selling itself.

You see, the fact is that while from our vantage point in the present, it's easy to look at the Crusades and see all of the horror and hypocrisy of it all, that's not how the people of the time would have seen it.

Nor was it how their culture would have informed them about the problem.

The people of Europe were marinating in stories of atrocity and abuse, especially once the Pope's roadshow got got into full swing.

And so for them, this wasn't a complicated and messy story of medieval people doing medieval bullshit that really wasn't all that different from what was happening at home for centuries.

Nor was it another step on the church's evolution towards a sort of imperial power.

No,

this

was good versus evil.

This was saving Christ from the clutches of Emperor Palpatine before he zaps him with force lightning.

This was Thanos was back, and the Pope is asking everyone to do that cool on your left scene.

And don't you want to be there when Falcon says on your left?

Hell, don't you want to be the guy who says on your left?

Hell yeah, you do.

And even if you didn't think this was an end times level conflict and you were just a violent medieval jerk who liked to do jerky medieval violence, there was also the fact that Pope Urban was offering guilt-free violence.

Hell, it was even better than that.

The Pope was promising that you would be forgiven for whatever shady things you'd done in your life if you would just go east and do some violence on behalf of Christ.

And on top of that, now you wouldn't be fighting for some garbage lord that you didn't even really care about all that much.

You would be fighting for the Lord.

So yeah, this idea caught like wildfire, with our scribes reporting an insanely huge mobilization across Europe.

Consequently, when historians point out that the rebellions against Rufus stopped at the dawn of 1096, I think it would be incredibly foolish to ignore the fact that this was the exact same time that an army was already recruiting for the first crusade.

Large numbers of knights in England were seeking to go east, with some of the more prominent members of Mowbray's failed rebellion rushing to be first in line.

And it wasn't just former rebels.

Even Duke Robert of Normandy heard the call.

Now,

why would Robert want to go on crusade?

Well, Robert, for all his flaws, appears to have been the somewhat nice member of the House of Normandy.

Not great, none of them were great, but of the group, he was probably the good one.

And taking up the cross and going on crusade was viewed during these times as brave, heroic, and a pious thing to do.

So, as the chronicle notes, Robert heard the Pope's call, and like many chivalric nobles of this era, he zealously answered.

Though I do have to point out, that Orderic Vitalis, who f ⁇ ing hated Robert, had a very different take.

Orderic says that things hadn't been going well for poor old shortpants.

And while the monk wasn't very nice about it, he also wasn't wrong.

Robert had been reigning over Normandy for about nine years at this point, and they had not been good years.

It was pretty much just one long string of rebellions, wars, diplomatic incidents, and violence.

And that is just the stuff that involves his brothers.

It gets even worse when you include all the things involving his neighbors and that nest of vipers he called vassals.

And Orderic adds that his current war with Rufus, which had ground into a stalemate, was due to get worse thanks to large numbers of Robert's own vassals abandoning him, either for the cross or even worse, for the Duke's rivals.

And so, in an effort to get out of this bind, Orderic says that Duke Robert decided to take up the cross and go crusading.

Essentially, Orderk is arguing that while the Crusade was heroic and pious, the way that Robert went on crusade was actually selfish and cowardly.

But that seems completely out of character for Robert.

Robert had been fighting rebellious barons and rebellious brothers for nearly a decade now, and he hadn't shown any indication that he wanted to quit.

Hell, out of the brothers, he was the only one to have defeated the bastard in the field.

So I'm not inclined to give Orderic the benefit of the doubt here.

And instead, I'm guessing that Robert decided to take up the cross because taking up the cross was what a good knight did in 1096.

But that being said, going on Crusade was expensive.

Like, eye-wateringly expensive.

Because it wasn't like Short Pants was going alone.

Now he would need to kid out all of the troops that he was bringing with him.

And he'd also need to arrange transportation for the long journey east, organize provisions for said journey, handle all manner of logistical issues.

And that's before they actually even got to the front and started fighting.

At which point, they would need even more supplies.

Because war is a very expensive hobby.

On top of that, Robert would also need to make provisions for the governing of Normandy in his absence, since he was unmarried and didn't have any children.

And that was a tricky task, but Robert had a solution for all of this.

He would make peace with Rufus, and he would allow him to govern Normandy while he was on crusade in exchange for a one-time payment of 10,000 marks of silver.

Or, as Malmsbury says, in all caps, Robert pawns Normandy.

Because Malmsbury also hated Robert.

But to be clear here, Robert wasn't selling Normandy.

Despite charging roughly double the amount that he had charged Henry for the Cotentin in 1086, this was a pledge, a short-term lease.

When Robert came back from Crusade in about three to five years, Normandy would be returned to him.

That was the plan.

And to make the strongest pitch possible, Robert entrusted the negotiations to the papal envoy, Abbot Gernton.

And this was likely because that's who Robert thought would best convince Rufus.

But an abbot is honestly a weird choice.

Because with the exception of that brief period where Rufus thought he was lying on his deathbed, the king had never had much of a need for God, nor much respect for God's mortal bureaucracy.

The only man of the cloth that Rufus even tolerated anymore was Ranolph Flambard, and Ranolph was less of a man of God and more of the wolf of Wall Street combined with the sheriff of Nottingham.

Seriously, Ranolph Flambard was much less about sermons and much more about imposing taxes, firing folks, seizing properties, and all the shady things that are generally known to day as working in real estate.

He was even involved in the construction of the Tower of London.

That was the type of holy men that Rufus seemed to appreciate.

But when it came to actual theological types, well, the king didn't seem to get along with them all that well, and nothing about his behavior outside of that brief moment where, again, he seemed to be concerned that he might be literally dying, gives me the sense that he was religious at all.

Instead, Rufus, like his father, appears to have had a much more transactional relationship with the church.

So, if anything, I'm guessing that the papal envoy hindered the negotiations rather than helping them.

But

Robert was offering one hell of a deal.

Because Rufus won in Normandy bad.

Like, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.

And Robert was offering to just give it to him in exchange for just one payment and sure it was only for the time that the Duke was on crusade but well

this was Robert and these days even going on pilgrimage was dangerous as hell and Robert here was planning on going to war in a place that he had never fought a war in against an enemy that he had never faced.

And it was an enemy that was apparently so dangerous that Byzantium, who were familiar with these guys, were begging for aid.

So Rufus knew that chances are, once Robert left, he wasn't coming back.

And even if he did come back, well, Rufus would be holding the duchy, not Robert.

All Robert would be holding is a brother's promise to give it back.

And we all know how Rufus felt about promises.

And brothers.

So, naturally, Rufus jumped at the offer and he set about raising funds for it.

Though 10,000 marks was not a minor amount of money.

And it wasn't like the king had a big war chest to pull from.

Money had been flying out of the door for years.

He'd been bribing Norman barons to convince them to turn on Robert.

He'd been helping finance an insurgency against King Donald III of Scotland.

He'd been raising armies and waging war in Wales, Normandy, and even back home in England.

Rufus had also been building castles all across his kingdom, including the Tower of London.

This king liked to spend.

Now, of course, because he liked to spend, he had also gotten pretty good at finding rather creative ways for raising money.

For example, Many of the most powerful churchmen of England had been installed by the conqueror back in his day, which meant that recently there had been a flood of bishops and other prominent religious figures who had been dying of old age.

And in response, Rufus had been letting those positions remain vacant.

Because if they weren't filled, then he could just pocket the revenue for himself.

That's why Durham still lacked a bishop, for example.

And Rufus was doing something similar with lay positions as well.

You might recall that when Mowbray Mowbray was imprisoned, the king just pocketed the earldom of Northumbria for himself.

Essentially, Rufus was emptying out the major institutions of the nation so he could loot them at his leisure.

Sounds familiar.

But despite adopting a governmental policy of seizing earldoms and bishoprics, all of that cash was gone again, and so he needed more.

And thankfully, he had the power to raise taxes.

Though there was a bit of a problem with that.

Rufus had already tried to offset his expenditures with increased taxes in the past.

And actually, his previous tax policy had been so ruthless that famine was sweeping throughout England.

But, at the same time, Normandy wasn't gonna buy itself.

And if he didn't jump on the opportunity that his brother Zeal created, then someone else might.

He needed that cash.

And so he doubled the national taxes on land.

Sorry, kids, no eggs today.

Daddy wants his parade.

And Malmsbury says that as the king went after his vassals for funds, he was merciless.

Quote, first taking their money, then their land, neither the poor man's poverty nor the rich man's abundance protecting him.

He so restricted the right of hunting, which he had formerly allowed, that it became a capital offense to take a stag.

End quote.

And he adds that Rufus wasn't just severe in his taxation, he was also cruel and tactless in his approach, which only further fueled the public's anger towards him.

And in response, the Norman aristocrats of England did

nothing.

Despite the reported widespread discontent, there is no indication of any kind of kinetic opposition from barons or other officials to this new tax.

And again, I suspect that the crusade must have played a big role in that.

After all, the most bellicose members of the aristocracy were arming up and preparing to go fight for God in the East.

So Rufus and his taxes were small potatoes compared to the spiritual war that they were being conscripted into.

And so this guild was collected without any organized opposition.

But get this, as his officers returned to court with their haul, they quickly realized it wasn't enough.

Rufus had already taxed the public to Helenbach.

And at a certain point, you're just trying to squeeze blood from a stone.

But thankfully, while the general public were bone dry, there was another group who was still soaked in cash.

The church.

So while Duke Robert was preparing to go on crusade and fight for the glory of God, his younger brother, King Rufus, was telling God that it was time to stop being such a freeloader and pay up.

Now, recently, both the Bishop of Worcester and the Bishop of Hereford had died because the old guard was doing what old guards all eventually do.

And since Rufus needed money, you would expect the king to do what he was doing elsewhere and pillage the revenues of those two bishoprics.

But he didn't.

Instead, he quickly appointed Samson, the brother of Archbishop Thomas of York, to the Bishopric of Worcester, and Gerard, the nephew of Bishop Wakellen of Winchester, to the Bishopric of Hereford.

So why the sudden turnabout?

Well, if you're familiar with the map of Britain, or you're just British, you might have noticed that both of these bishoprics are on the border of Wales.

And the Welsh frontier was a huge problem for Rufus, because the Welsh had this ruddy king pegged.

And no matter what he did, the Boyos managed to best him every single time.

And those two men that Rufus appointed weren't just relatives of other bishops.

They were royal clerks who had served him for years.

So they were loyal.

Rufus wasn't staffing up the Welsh border for religious reasons.

He was installing loyalists who would help him buttress royal power in the notoriously unstable Welsh marches.

And by picking figures who were also dynastically linked to major religious figures, he also wasn't likely to get much pushback from Anselm and others.

And so, while Rufus was imposing a merciless tax system, and while he was demanding that the church increase its payment so he could buy a lease on Normandy, He also wasn't so single-minded that he forgot that just across the border in Wales were a group of tough, wiry people who had developed a knack for kicking him in the teeth.

But unfortunately, with those bishoprics out of the king's hands, the increased taxes and demands for aid were now even more critical for the king's big real estate deal.

And eventually, once he realized they weren't paying out at a scale that he needed, the Red King dropped all finesse and went full loot and burn.

He issued extortionate demands, which, as Malmsbury reports, got so bad that bishops and abbots went to court, quote, in great numbers, end quote, to complain about it.

The churchmen said that they simply couldn't raise the demanded funds from the populations under their control, quote, unless they drove away their wretched husbandmen altogether, end quote.

Essentially, the clergy were saying that the only way that they could pull off these payments was to seize literally everything from the farmers who served them down to their homes.

And Rufus and his courtiers listened to this and flew into a rage, angrily pointing out that for a bunch of paupers, they sure did have a lot of gold and silver lying around their churches, and also in their cathedrals and their abbeys and their homes.

Apparently, the king and his entourage even went so far as to mock the clergy for having shrines, quote, full of dead men's bones, end quote.

So yeah, while the rest of Europe was crying, Deus Volt, Rufus and his boys were all, give me your gold and silver, Padre.

But I guess you creeps can keep the bones.

Given how much power the king had and how distracted Christendom was by the crusades, the holy men weren't in any place to argue.

So we're told that gold ornaments were torn off shrines, crucifixes were seized, chalices were melted.

Everything of value was taken and rendered down so the king could get his hands on Normandy.

So what did the church do in response?

Well, they called a synod in Rouen, and they declared, with all the gravity that they could muster, that the men of Europe needed to get their hair cut.

From now on, short, manly hairstyles only, no luscious dude locks allowed.

I kid you not.

The church was declaring war on the fierce flow,

casting it as anti-Christian.

And this apparently heretically sexy look was being sported by many of the men in the king's orbit.

But Rufus, of course, did not give a rat's ass.

Those dusty old men could complain about fashion all they wanted.

And if the churchmen had to stare at a courtier's devastatingly attractive mane while they handed over their sacred crosses for tax collection, well, all the better.

And so, the seizures continued.

And quote, almost everything which the holy parsimony of their ancestors had saved was consumed by the rapacity of these freebooters, end quote.

Rufus was engaging in one of the biggest and most ruthless liquidations of the Norman era of England, acquiring the dubious honor of being one of the most tax-heavy monarchs of that house, all in order to finance his continental aspirations.

It was honestly a strange parallel to what was gathering steam on the continent.

Because all over Europe, nobles were doing whatever they could to raise funds to join the Pope's War, what was beginning to be called the Prince's Crusade.

And a staggering amount of financial resources and manpower were being dumped into this thing, such that even if you weren't going east to fight, your life was still transformed by this event.

Though again, the public had been primed for this.

So while the taxes and seizures weren't popular, what they were for was.

The Pope's allies, capitalizing on recent events, were carrying his message all throughout Christendom.

And here's how Malmsbury describes it.

Quote, the report of this good resolution soon becoming general, it gently wafted a cheering gale over the minds of the Christians, which being universally diffused, there was no nation so remote, no people so retired as to not contribute its portion.

This ardent love not only inspired the continental provinces, but even all who had heard the name of Christ, whether in the most distant islands or savage countries.

End quote.

And then Malmsbury gets, um,

well, I'll let you hear it.

Quote, the Welshman left his hunting, the Scot, his fellowship with lice,

the Dane, his drinking party, the Norwegian, his raw fish.

End quote.

Holy shit, dude.

Did you get that from a scroll labeled casual bigotry for the chronically petty?

Anyway, he goes on, quote, lands were deserted of their husbandmen, houses of their inhabitants, even whole cities migrated.

There was no regard to relationship.

Affection to their country was held in little esteem.

God alone was placed before their eyes.

Whatever was stored in their granaries or hoarded in chambers to answer the hopes of the avaricious husbandsman or the covetous of the miser, all,

all was deserted.

End quote.

So, setting aside the bizarre slurs against his neighbors, in which, against all odds, the Welsh come out looking the best, what Malmsbury was describing here was a mass mobilization combined with a sort of 1940s war bonds on steroids situation.

He's not talking about princes, earls, and knights here.

He's talking about entire communities of freemen emptying out, homes abandoned, relationships severed, whole granaries of winter stores being handed over to the crusaders.

And anyone who didn't contribute every last cent?

They were cast as miserly, selfish, a traitor to Christ.

But

gathering those kinds of funds does take time.

And mustering armies also takes time.

And preparing the logistics to get your armies all the way to Byzantium?

Oh man, that takes a hell of a lot of time.

All of this stuff takes so much time and effort.

And the princes, the earls, the dukes, the barons, the knights, and everyone else involved in the prince's crusade knew this.

And so they didn't plan to leave on campaign until late summer.

But not everyone was thrilled thrilled with that kind of delay.

The fact was, a huge portion of the people who had heard the Pope's message weren't professional soldiers.

And so these delays didn't look like sensible preparations for a difficult war.

Instead, they looked like a lack of faith, especially to a French monk by the name of Peter the Hermit.

Now Peter was a

colorful fellow.

The story goes that years earlier, Peter went on pilgrimage, and he was not pleased with what he saw.

And so he went to the Patriarch of the Holy Sepulchre, you know, to lodge a complaint.

And the Patriarch basically said, yeah, man, preach it, but you know, what do you want me to do about it?

I basically have no power.

Hell, I have to keep paying ransoms just to avoid getting tortured.

So I don't know why you're telling me this.

I know it sucks ass here.

And so Peter said, all right, I'll sort this out for you.

I'm going to go and talk to the Pope, and then I'm going to talk to all the nobles of Europe and tell everyone what's going on here.

Then, later that night, he went to church and fell asleep while he was praying, and Jesus appeared to him.

Yeah, that Jesus.

And Big J said he was personally appointing Peter as God's messenger to spread stories of what was happening and inspire people to intervene.

That was his story.

Then later, Peter was back in Europe, and he was dressing very simply, and when he wasn't riding a donkey, he was walking barefoot.

I'm not kidding here.

That's apparently what he was doing.

And I gotta hand it to the guy.

The donkey and derelict couture look is top-notch branding, and it would have spoken in symbolic ways to a public that might not be able to read the Bible, but who were at least somewhat familiar with the imagery contained within it.

And everywhere that he went, he was preaching about how Christ must be defended in the Holy Land.

And naturally, he also included that bit about how Jesus deputized him like he was in the third act of a cowboy film.

And people loved it.

This guy became an overnight celebrity.

In fact, so many people were caught up by Peter's gift of the gab that there were whispers growing that he was a prophet.

And there were people who even believed that he, not Pope Urban II, was the source for the crusade.

Folks were even collecting hairs from his poor donkey and keeping them as relics.

Absolute pop culture phenomenon.

Peter was the hawk to a girl of the 11th century.

And it's likely that part of the secret sauce to this overnight sensation was that it was 1096,

which means that 1100 was just around the corner.

And people sometimes get real funny about round numbers, especially superstitious and religious people.

Across Christendom, doomsday beliefs and apocalyptic predictions were surging.

Europe was in the midst of a Y2K moment, and it was happening at the very same time that Peter, the Pope, and all of the Pope's allies were preaching that it was the duty of every man to fight the enemies of Christ.

This had cataclysm written all over it.

And so, yeah, obviously, Peter became massively popular and quickly acquired tens of thousands of followers.

Specifically, peasant followers.

He had a biblically sized mass of people who had no experience in fighting, no experience in campaigning, and no experience in long-distance travel.

But they did have faith.

And that was Peter's army.

Before he knew it, he had about 40,000 people from France and Flanders who had signed on for his People's Crusade.

And so it was go time.

So, while Rufus was still struggling to gather funds for Normandy, and while the Pope and his nobility were still making travel arrangements and counting coins, Peter the Hermit had already packed his donkey and launched the People's Crusade, departing in spring of 1096.

So, what enabled Peter to move so quickly while Pope Urban's forces were so agonizingly slow?

One word,

preparation.

Specifically, Peter didn't bother to do any.

Why spend months gathering supplies when it's the apocalypse and God would obviously provide?

I mean, Big J isn't going to leave his soldiers hanging when the end times are upon us.

And so they just went.

There was no organized baggage train, no coordinated provision strategy, not even a command hierarchy.

This was just an unorganized mob of 40,000 people who were all whipped up by apocalyptic fever with no experience, no resources, and no logistics as they were making their way across Europe.

And I want to say that this was a terrible plan, but there wasn't a plan.

So it was just terrible.

And it was about to get worse.

Contemporary chroniclers like Albert of Aachen tell us that upon entering the Rhineland, the Crusaders claimed that this, quote, was the beginning of their expedition and their duty against the enemies of the Christian faith, end quote.

And so, They immediately launched pogroms against the Jewish people within the towns and villages that they passed through.

Not long after that, Count Emek of Flanheim, who was a fan of Peter's, joined the movement and engaged in some of the most notorious acts on the Jewish population during this entire dark affair.

It's hard to know how many Jewish men, women, and children were killed by crusaders linked to Peter's movement, but it's estimated to be as many as 12,000.

And the stories that come out of this are horrific, with even chroniclers expressing shock at the development and wondering if maybe this was caused by madness or some sort of divine judgment.

But rather than hand-waving this away as mass insanity or Big J taking a brief detour back into his Old Testament version, let's instead look at this more critically.

Why did this happen?

Why were Jewish people targeted?

And why did it start while they were still in finging France?

Well, I know it's not fashionable these days to look at material conditions, with pop culture saying to focus entirely on culture wars, identity, and that sort of thing.

But I feel like material conditions matter a lot.

And the material condition that leaps out of the page to me is this.

These idiots didn't plan for their campaign.

And not planning is a big problem even when you're just dealing with a single household.

But when you're dealing with a population of 40,000 people, that's a humanitarian crisis.

Essentially, you're staring down the barrel of a mass casualty event.

These people needed resources, and it didn't matter how charismatic Peter was if he couldn't manifest food into their bellies, which he couldn't.

So that meant they needed to acquire resources or die.

And as they were on a mission from God that would relieve them of all of their sins, they had a fairly broad purview on how to go about their task, provided, of course, that they were fighting the enemies of God.

And pretty quickly, they determined that the Jewish people qualified.

The fact is that in moments like these, where mobs are starving and afraid, they look for enemies.

Turning inward and saying, hey, why did we trust Peter when he said we didn't need to prepare?

Well, that would raise too many uncomfortable questions.

It's much easier to aim that frustration at an outside enemy.

And this movement was powered by Deus Volt.

So it was a bit of a shock when they found out that Deus did not volt, or at least Deus was on the fence.

But, you know, God helps those who help themselves, so they helped themselves to the Jewish community's stuff.

And as for the Jewish people who had previously owned that stuff, well, a lot of them were just outright murdered, while others were given the dubious mercy of a forced conversion.

And as this went on, some of Peter's followers justified it by arguing that this was an ancient beef that went all the way back to Christ.

While others argued that they were fulfilling an ancient prophecy and that all the Jews needed to either convert, get their asses to Jerusalem, or die.

And still others were viewing their actions as a cleansing of a pure homeland.

Stop me when this starts sounding familiar.

But here's the thing with all of that.

I suspect that the most important element here was the fact that due to shitty laws and restrictions within Europe, the Jewish population had a lot of moneylenders within it, which meant they had resources.

And this mob of zealous idiots realized that they were a vulnerable population that could be exploited, and thus they could seize said resources.

Everything else is set-dressing as far as I'm concerned.

And Count Emmek is probably the most intense example of that.

His gang of thugs engaged in some of the most notorious acts during the pogroms throughout the Rhineland.

And he took Peter's message and ran with it, declaring that he was chosen to fulfill the prophecy of the end times.

And so naturally, they needed to force the Jews to convert, or kill those who refused.

That way, Emek could become the emperor of the world and fight the Antichrist.

Yeah, that was what he thought.

And here's the thing about Emek and the pogroms throughout the Rhineland.

Traditionally, they're blamed on the ignorant poor.

But Emek was a count, and many of his followers were nobles.

His group was full of knights, counts, viscounts, you name it.

So while this was undoubtedly stupid and evil, This wasn't a low-class mob acting on their own volition.

This was a mob being directed and influenced, at least in my opinion, by a delusional psychopath and his noble supporters.

And their behavior gets dicey.

Emek and his gang didn't even really bother with conversions once they got going.

Instead, looking to maximize casualties.

Here's one description of Emek's behavior.

Quote, he had no mercy on the elderly, on young men and young women, on infants or sucklings, nor on the ill.

He made the people of the Lord like dust to be trampled.

Their young men he put to the sword, their pregnant women he ripped open.

You know,

just as Jesus would have wanted.

And this horror show continued east, and eventually they reached Hungary.

Now the Hungarians were fellow Christians, and so so they welcomed the Crusaders.

And seeing how they were short on supplies, they opened the stores of their granaries and offered their goods for sale.

And what did the People's Crusade do?

Well, according to Albert of Aachen, quote, they burned the public granaries we spoke of, raped virgins, dishonored many marriage beds by carrying off many women, tore out or burned the beards of their hosts.

None of them now thought of buying what he needed, but instead each man strove for what he could get by theft and murder.

End quote.

Now eventually, Emmek lost interest in this, and he decided to retire from his role as savior of the world and sole being capable of defeating the Antichrist.

And instead he just went back home to the Rhineland, where he was ridiculed for his failure.

And I think we can all guess who he blamed for that failure.

But despite a chunk of the party breaking off and returning home with their stolen booty, Peter and his people's crusade continued their inexorable march east.

Until finally, they reached their goal of Constantinople.

And Emperor Alexios was, um,

well, this was not what he was hoping for.

When he had written to the Pope, he had hoped for a large force of mercenaries to help him fight off the Seljuk Turks.

But rather than a professional army, what was parked outside of his walls was a barefoot mystic leading a mob of violent, disorganized peasants who had been looting, raping, and murdering their way across Europe and Byzantium.

And so Alexios was all, wow.

Uh, okay.

Well, welcome to Constantinople, guys.

Thanks for coming.

No, no, no, no, no, no, you cannot come in.

No, definitely you cannot come in.

We, um, well, you know, we're, we weren't quite ready for visitors, so uh, at least for now, maybe you should just stay out there, preferably stay very far out there,

really, no, further back, far from the city and its markets, and definitely our citizens.

Yeah, thanks.

And then, in an effort to keep them from going full crusader, the way they have been behaving in Hungary, France, Germany, and elsewhere, Alexios also had to make sure to feed and supply them.

Which means, Alexios had asked for support, and instead, what he had been given were about 40,000 people who were, at best, refugees.

They had no resources short of what they had stolen.

They apparently had no useful skills other than stealing stuff from fellow Christians and killing Jewish people.

And they clearly had no scruples.

These people were a liability, plain and simple.

And so Alexios and his council came up with an idea.

Peter and his followers believed that they had been called by God to liberate Jerusalem.

So

why not ferry them across the Bosporus?

These nuts weren't his problem anyway, and the longer they stuck around, the more likely it was that they would turn on Constantinople like they had turned on so many other communities before.

And so Peter and his people, armed with their faith and not much else, were ferried into Anatolia, Seljuk territory.

And I assume, Alexios looked out of one of the windows of the great palace as they departed and shouted, You got this, fellas.

Deus Volt, am I right?

Meanwhile, Rufus had finally gotten that 10,000 marks of silver together.

And so he crossed the channel and delivered it to Robert, who immediately rushed to join the mustering army.

It was September of 1096, and the First Crusade had just begun its March East.

And already, it was a complete...

shit show.

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