people rushed into the enterprise, including old men, women with children, prostitutes.
Peter and his horde of peasants were too impatient to wait for the lords and knights who were coming together in military array. Without any organisation or commissariat the simple multitude set out for their tremendous walk in the spring of the year 1096. After they had crossed Austria and passed the confines of civilisation, they still had 600 miles of forest and wilderness to traverse in Hungary and Bulgaria before they could reach Constantinople. They came on like a swarm of locusts eating up the countries they passed through. We can neither blame them nor the people of these lauds when we see that raids of hunger provoked retaliation and slaughter. The multitude was divided into two parts for better provisioning—half under Peter, and half under another leader, Walter the Penniless. They were in a pitiable plight when they reached Thrace, and all might have perished if the Emperor Alexius had not sent to rescue them.
We can understand with what disgust the citizens of Constantinople viewed the approach of the ragged host. Alexius was glad to ship them across the Bosphorus as quickly as possible. There they would have been killed outright, if it had not been for the dissentions that had broken out among the Turks. But even as things were, a great number—Gibbon accepts the figure at "three hundred thousand"—perished before a single city was rescued from the infidels.
In August a more regular army followed, under Hugh the Great, Count of Vermandois; Robert of Normandy, the eldest son of William the Conqueror; Stephen of Chartres, said to own as many castles as there are days of the year; Raymond of many titles; Bohemond, son of Robert Guiscard; Tancred, the perfect knight of chivalry celebrated in Tasso's poem; but, above all, Godfrey of Bouillon, Duke of Lorraine, a man who combined a spirit of genuine, unselfish religious devotion with the talents of a great
