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| THE SECOND MILLENIA |
| AD 1000 -- AD 2000 |
Peter the Hermit, and the story of the First Crusade.
Peter the Hermit was a French Evangelist, and the "brains" behind the First Crusade.
He was an unkempt little man in rags who, in 1094, began riding a donkey across France, flashing a scrap of parchment he said was written by Jesus Christ himself, a note demanding that Christian Europe rise up and pry the Holy City of Jerusalem from the Turkish Empire. By 1096, this little man had formed The People's Crusade. He had gathered a motley army of 40,000 ill-equipped men, women, and children, and marched eastward with his associate Walter the Penniless (really), and about a dozen actual knights.
Marching under Papal Banner, the undisciplined and hungry mob moved across the land like locusts, pillaging, and killing as its numbers gradually succumbed to starvation, illness, and exposure, until a final slaughter by a Moslem army near Constantinople. They were still 1000 miles short of their goal.
Peter the Hermit survived the massacre and saw his ambition realized: Jerusalem wrenched from the hands of "the infidel" by a SECOND band of crusaders -- the Baron's Crusade -- Christian knights who put the city to sword in 1099, in what is seen today as one of the greatest crimes of history. Forty thousand people massacred at one time, on July 17, 1099.
He dies -- she dies -- everybody dies. Hacking away with swords. Bodies. Everywhere.
Despite losing his flock, Peter the Hermit retained his reputation as a holy man, and lived out his life quietly, dying peacefully in Constantinople in 1115. People still call him a saint.
Imagine staggering 4,000 miles on bloody feet to rescue a holy city from infidels. It's worth while mentioning that he was also known as Cucu Peter.