Battle of Civetot, 1096: the end of the People's Crusade

The First Crusade is remembered for the capture of Jerusalem in 1099. Its first wave never got close. In the autumn of 1096 tens of thousands of ordinary men and women who had followed Peter the Hermit across Europe crossed into Anatolia ahead of the knightly armies, and within three months almost all of them were dead or enslaved.²

Peter the Hermit's army

When Pope Urban II called for a crusade in 1095, Peter, a preacher from Amiens, carried the message through France and Germany. He promised that an army marching to free Jerusalem would be under God's protection, and crowds followed him. The Church had in mind knights who could equip and lead armies; Peter recruited everyone, and most of his followers were peasants and townsfolk with little equipment and no training. The Crusades Reference Library puts his following at between twenty and forty thousand men, women and children when they left Germany.³

The march east was violent. Bands connected to the movement attacked Jewish communities, and Peter's own column fought with Hungarians and Bulgarians on the way, losing thousands to battle, hunger and accident. Walter Sans Avoir's group reached Constantinople in late July 1096 and Peter's at the start of August.⁴

Across the Bosporus

Emperor Alexios I Komnenos had asked the West for soldiers, not for a crowd he had to feed. He urged Peter to wait for the knightly armies, but when the crusaders began plundering the suburbs of Constantinople he had them ferried across the Bosporus, on 6 August according to Derek Davison. They settled in a camp at Civetot, which Anna Komnene, the emperor's daughter and historian, places near the small town of Helenopolis.⁵

Without firm leadership the host split along lines of language. French bands raided the country around Nicaea, the capital of the Seljuk sultan Kilij Arslan I, and a German group seized the castle of Xerigordos in September. The sultan's troops besieged it and took it back; the Crusades Reference Library says about six thousand crusaders had held it and were killed, while Anna Komnene writes that the sultan put some of the defenders to the sword and took others captive.⁶

21 October: the ambush

What drew the main body out of camp is told two ways. Davison and Anna Komnene say the Turks spread a false report, by letter in Davison's version and by two agents sent to the camp in Anna's, that the Germans had taken Nicaea and were dividing its riches, and the crusaders rushed off to share the loot. The Crusades Reference Library says that when news of the slaughter at Xerigordos arrived, about twenty thousand set out for Nicaea for revenge. Either way they marched without order straight into Turkish ambushes.⁷

On 21 October 1096 the Seljuk army fell on the column on the road to Nicaea, routed it and drove it back toward the camp, where women, children and the sick had stayed behind. Most of the crusaders were killed, or captured and sold into slavery. A few thousand reached a nearby fortress and held out until a Byzantine force arrived and took them back to Constantinople.⁸

Where was Peter?

The sources disagree about Peter himself. Davison and the Crusades Reference Library say he had gone back to Constantinople to seek help from the emperor and missed the battle. Anna Komnene writes that Peter escaped the massacre with a few others and took refuge in Helenopolis, where the Turks tried to catch him until the emperor sent ships to rescue him. Either way, he survived and joined the main crusading armies, preached to them at Antioch and before Jerusalem, and returned to Europe, where he founded the monastery of Neufmoustier.⁹

The pyramid of bones

Nobody counted the dead. The Crusades Reference Library says that all but a small band of the twenty thousand who marched on Nicaea were massacred. Anna Komnene, writing years later, describes the bodies piled into what she calls not a mound but a mountain, a pyramid of bones, and says that later the bones were used to fill the walls of a fortress. Her account is vivid and second hand, and her figures elsewhere, such as 80,000 foot and 100,000 horse for Peter's own following, run far beyond other estimates, so it is best read as a picture of the scale of the disaster rather than as a count.¹⁰

Civetot ended the People's Crusade. Davison calls it a test case that European leaders should have learned from. The Crusades Reference Library judges that Peter was a better speaker than leader: his preaching inspired thousands, and his leadership cost thousands of them their lives and soured relations between Byzantium and the crusaders who came after. On the same date centuries later, two very different armies decided the fate of Japan at Sekigahara in 1600 and of the seas at Trafalgar in 1805.¹¹