History & Science

Medieval illumination depciting the People’s Crusade (part of the First Crusade) and the resulting slaughter of most of the ‘crusaders’.

Pope Urban II planned the departure of the crusade for August 15, 1096, but months before this, a number of unexpected bands of peasants and low-ranking knights organized and set off for Jerusalem on their own. The peasant population had been afflicted by drought, famine, and plague for many years before 1096, and some of them seem to have envisioned the crusade as an escape from these hardships. Spurring them on had been a number of coincidental meteorological occurrences beginning in 1095 that seemed to be a divine blessing for the movement: a meteor shower, aurorae, a lunar eclipse, and a comet, among other events. An outbreak of ergotism, which usually led to mass pilgrimages anyway, had also occurred just before the Council of Clermont. Millenarianism, the belief that the end of the world was imminent, popular in the early 11th century, experienced a resurgence in popularity. The response was beyond expectations: While Urban might have expected a few thousand knights, he ended up with a migration numbering up to 40,000 Crusaders of mostly unskilled fighters, including women and children…

…on the morning of October 21, the entire army of 20,000 marched out toward Nicaea, leaving women, children, the old and the sick behind at the camp. Three miles from the camp, where the road entered a narrow, wooded valley near the village of Dracon, the Turkish army was waiting. When approaching the valley, the crusaders marched noisily and were immediately subjected to a hail of arrows. Panic set in immediately and within minutes, the army was in full rout back to the camp. Most of the crusaders were defeated; children and those who surrendered were spared, however. Thousands of soldiers who attempted to fight back were defeated. Three thousand…were lucky enough to hole up in an old abandoned castle. Eventually the Byzantines sailed over and raised the siege; these few thousand returned to Constantinople, the only survivors of the People’s Crusade.

- enWikipedia