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instead boasted that he would take as plunder everything the Christians had and “eat their flesh and drink their blood.” To add visual insult, he unwound his turban and tied it, as if a chain, around the bishop of Bamberg’s neck. Normally a restrained man, Gunther threw one punch and knocked the duke unconscious. Before his followers could react, the Germans wrestled them all to the ground and tied them up so tightly that their wrists bled, doing the same to the seven others in the upper room and to the ten down below. The pilgrims then boldly paraded their captives along the city’s ramparts in clear view of the enemy camp, for a time discouraging any fresh assaults.
    Escape remained impossible until, miraculously, a small Egyptian army attacked the Turks and rescued the Christians. The prince of Babylon was grateful to those who had inflicted such a wound against his enemies. To the Germans, unfamiliar with the confessional differences of Islam, it seemed a miracle: “Satan had cast out Satan.” 14
    The story as it reaches us is part epic adventure and part yellow journalism, the facts lost to repeated retellings and inevitable exaggeration. Even so, such a story would have provided useful imaginative fodder for preachers hoping to inflame Christian passion. The Turks, or, more generally, the Saracens, were money-crazed killers, blood-drinking cannibals, who preyed upon pilgrims, men of God, ordinary women and children, not to mention nuns. A war was already occurring in the Holy Land, incited by the “enemies of Christ.” The Church of the Holy Sepulcher was in danger. Pilgrims were being molested, in some cases literally. If something were not done soon, no right-thinking person would ever be able to visit Jerusalem again. A few preachers, recalling the echoes of pogroms past, even claimed that the Saracens had already tried to destroy Christ’s tomb and had nearly succeeded. 15
    That the disaster of 1065 had occurred against a background of apocalyptic expectation would have sharpened the general sense of anger at
home. Untroubled by Christ’s failure to return, audiences would have been more excited by the fact that it had almost happened. Thirty years before the First Crusade formally began, the dream of a journey to the East, a pilgrimage of vengeance, would have been alive in the Christian imagination.

The Sermons of Peter the Hermit, 1095–1096
    The man who exploited these emotions and stories most effectively was a priest named Peter. Once a hermit, he may have been a pilgrim to Jerusalem in the early 1090s, or he may have simply invented stories after listening to other pilgrims’ tales. Among modern historians, Peter has not enjoyed an enthusiastic reception, on the basis of either integrity, courage, or importance. From the perspective of some contemporary writers, however, particularly those who lived in German-speaking lands, Peter was the inventor of the crusade.
    According to a highly respected historian named Albert of Aachen, writing around 1108, Peter was inspired to preach the crusade because of his own experience in the Holy Land. While visiting the Lord’s Sepulcher for the sake of prayer, “he saw with a sad heart things wicked and unmentionable, and trembled in spirit, and called down on these sights God the avenger.” Peter took his complaints to the spiritual leader of Jerusalem, the patriarch, who lamented his own powerlessness in the face of the Turks, saying that the strength of the Christians in that city was “to be reckoned as no more than that of a tiny ant, against the pride of so many.”
    Help had to come from the West. The patriarch instructed Peter to carry home news of Jerusalem’s plight and beg for help. No less a figure than Christ Himself reiterated this message, appearing to Peter in a vision at His own Sepulcher and ordering Peter to obtain patriarchal letters sealed with the sign of the cross. It was not