about 1480, at Brussels, and the latest in 1847, edited by Dr. Giles, in 4 vols. 8vo.—R. H.
PETER of Cluny, also called Mauritius, and the Venerable, was born in Auvergne in 1092, and was abbot of Cluny and general of his order in 1121. He is famous as the protector of Abelard, whose funeral oration he delivered, and whose epitaph he wrote. He made or got executed a Latin version of the Koran, and wrote against the Mahometans, Jews, and heretics. He died in 1156.—B. H. C.
PETER the Hermit, whose name is so inseparably interwoven with the origin of the Crusades, was born about the middle of the eleventh century at Amiens, in the province of Picardy in France. He was of good birth; and having received his education at Paris and in Italy, he took military service under the counts of Boulogne, and was engaged in the war against Flanders in 1071. Quitting the profession of arms, he married, and became the father of several children; but on his wife's decease he retired, in the first instance to a convent, and then to a hermitage. Shut up there in solitude and silence, and brooding over the world of his own thoughts, imagination, which in Peter's case appears to have been a dominant influence, supplied fuel to the flame of enthusiastic reverie. He believed himself blest with special visions, and the subject of peculiar revelations. Next, undertaking in such a frame of mind a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, he was filled with grief on beholding the sufferings to which, at the hands of the Saracens, the pilgrims thither were exposed; and he resolved to announce their miseries to Christendom. "From Palestine," says Gibbon, writing in the spirit of the school to which the great historian belonged, "Peter returned an accomplished fanatic; but, as he excelled in the popular madness of the times. Pope Urban II. received him as a prophet, applauded his glorious design, promised to support it in a general council, and encouraged him to proclaim the deliverance of the Holy Land." Let us more justly style the hermit a sincere, impassioned enthusiast, devoid doubtless of either intellectual depth or penetration, yet none the less devoured with the fire of a consuming earnestness. "It may be noted," is the true remark of Neander, "as a peculiar trait in the life of these times, that men of mean outward appearance, and with bodily frames worn down by deprivation, were enabled by a fiery energy of discourse to produce the greatest effects. Peter the Hermit was a person of small stature and ungainly shape; still the fire of his eloquence, the strong faith and the enthusiasm which furnished him with a copious flow of language, made a greater impression in proportion to the weakness of the instrument." In a monkish cowl, with a woollen cloak over it, and riding barefoot on a mule, Peter traversed Italy, France, and other countries, everywhere rousing the enthusiasm that lay dormant in the hearts of all. At his summons awakened Europe rushed to arms, for the subjugation of the Infidel and the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre. During the council of Clermont, in 1095, the listening thousands shouted with one voice, "It is the will of God!" and impressed on their garments the sign of the cross. The first crusade became an accomplished fact. The departure of the expedition was fixed for the 15th August, 1096; but ere that period arrived, a mighty host, amounting to one hundred thousand persons, left France for the East, with Peter the Hermit at their head, and Walter the Penniless as his lieutenant. Peter was only an enthusiast and an orator; he possessed the power of rousing, not that of leading vast masses of men. His army was beaten and dispersed at Semlin by the Hungarians, with whom he had rashly involved himself in hostilities; and it was with difficulty that he conducted to Constantinople the scattered remnant of his followers. Hastened by the Emperor Alexius across to Asia, they fell an easy prey to Soliman, who totally defeated them on the plains of Nice. Peter, however, had remained behind at Constantinople. Throughout the first crusade the name of its great promoter is seldom prominent. At the siege of Antioch in 1097, his enthusiasm appears to have flagged, and he made an ineffectual attempt to leave the camp of the crusaders. But, after the capture of Antioch, he accompanied the christian army to Jerusalem, and delivered, we are informed, a discourse to the soldiers on the Mount of Olives. Returning to Europe, he founded a monastery near Huy, in the diocese of Liege, and there closed his strange and stormy career in peace. This singular personage died on the 7th July, 1115.—J. J.
PETER the Lombard, as his name denotes, was a native of Lombardy. He was born near Novara in the earlier part of the twelfth century. Anselm, the great theologian of the eleventh century, as Peter was of the twelfth, was a native of the same district. The date of Peter's birth is unknown. In 1159 he was raised to the see of Paris, and the date of his death is only five years later, or 1164. There seems to be no materials for his biography; and his great reputation rests entirely on his famous books of "Sentences" which were designed to be and became gradually the manual of the schools. The books are four, and they range over the whole field of theology in the most comprehensive and exhaustive manner. The first treats "De Mysterio Trinitatis Sancti, de Deo uno et trino;" the second, "De rerum corporalium et spiritualium, creatione et formatione, aliisque pluribus eo pertinentibus;" the third, "De incarnatione Verbi aliisque ad hoc spectantibus;" and the fourth, "De sacramentis et signis sacramentalibus." "The period of systematizing scholasticism, and of endless commentary on the Sentences of the masters, commences with Peter Lombard," says Baur. Hase adds, "It was not so much on account of the ingenuity and depth displayed in the work in question, as in consequence of the position which its author occupied in the church, of his success in removing oppositions, and of its general perspicuity, that it became the manual of the twelfth century and the model of the subsequent one." Milman passes a similar, but somewhat higher judgment, upon him and his great work. "Peter adhered rigidly to all that passed for scripture, and was the authorized interpretation of the scriptures, to all which had become the creed in the traditions, law in the decretals of the church. He seems to have no apprehension of doubt in his stern dogmatism; he will not recognize any of the difficulties suggested by philosophy; he cannot or will not perceive the weak points of his own system. He has the great merit that, opposed as he was to the prevailing Platonism throughout the "Sentences" the ethical principle predominates. His excellence is perspicuity, simplicity, definiteness of moral purpose; the distinctions are endless, subtle, idle; but he wrote from conflicting authorities to reconcile writers at war with each other and with themselves."—T.
PETER MARTYR (Vermilio), an early protestant divine, was born at Florence in 1500. At the age of sixteen he entered the order of the canons regular of St. Augustine in the monastery of Fiesole. In 1519 he removed to a similar institution at Padua, and in 1526 he created great sensation by his preaching. Preferment flowed in upon him, he was elected abbot of Spoleto, then principal of a college in Naples, and lastly prior of a very rich abbey at Garcia. But his opinions were changing through his study of the works of the reformers, and his mind inclined to protestant views. As he was not a man to conceal his sentiments, the result was that he was summoned before a council of his order at Genoa. Anticipating what the result to himself would be, he did not obey the summons, but fled to Pisa, and thence to Zurich. The protestant clergy in that Swiss town gave him a hearty welcome, and soon afterwards he became professor of divinity at Strasburg. In 1547, and at the invitation of Cranmer, he with Bucer, Fagius, and others, came over to England. He was appointed to the chair of theology at Oxford in 1549, and while he laboured zealously in his vocation as a teacher, he was active in promoting the interests of the Reformation. On Queen Mary's accession, being ordered at once to quit the country, he returned and taught in Strasburg, removing in 1556 to Zurich. In 1561 he assisted at the famous conference at Poissy, and died at Zurich in the following year. Peter was a man of learning and very great industry, and according to all accounts very amiable. Of his numerous theological writings his "Loci Communes," and some of his commentaries, are best known at the present day. Peter had followed the example of Luther, and married a nun. She died during his residence at Oxford, but in the reign of Mary her bones were dug up and ignominiously thrust beneath a dunghill.—J. E.
PETER NOLASCO (St.), founder of the order of mercy for the redemption of captives, was born at St. Papoul in Languedoc, about the year 1189. From his earliest years he was noticed as being remarkably devout and charitable. He accompanied Simon de Montfort on the crusade against the Albigenses, and after Pedro, king of Arragon, had fallen on the field of Muret, was intrusted by De Montfort with the care and education of the young Prince James. In pursuance of this duty he went to Barcelona. Here he became aware of the detention of great numbers of christians among the Moors, and conceived the reso-
