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 a great crowd 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

Background: Peter the Hermit's army

When Pope Urban II called for a crusade at the Council of Clermont in November 1095, Peter, a preacher probably from Amiens, carried the message through France and into Germany, and crowds followed him. Peter took everyone who would come, and most of his followers were peasants and townsfolk with little equipment and no training; only a few hundred knights rode with them.³

The march east was violent. Walter Sans Avoir's band went first, and Peter's larger column followed along the same road. Food ran short, and the pilgrims fought with the Hungarians and the Bulgarians on the way; Albert of Aachen writes that some four thousand Hungarians fell when Peter's people stormed the border town he calls Malevilla, and the Crusades Reference Library gives a similar figure. Thousands of pilgrims died of battle, hunger and accident before the column reached Constantinople in August 1096.⁴ › Battle of Manzikert, 1071

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 before crossing into Asia. But the pilgrims began plundering the suburbs of the city; the Gesta Francorum says they pulled down and burned buildings and stripped the lead from church roofs, and the angry emperor had them ferried across the strait.⁵

They settled in a camp at the port of Civetot; Anna Komnene, the emperor's daughter and historian, places it near the small town of Helenopolis. Inland lay Nicaea, the seat of the Seljuk sultan Kilij Arslan I. Britannica notes that the sultan, a son of Suleiman, had recovered Nicaea in 1092, only four years before the crusaders came.⁶

Armies and commanders

The crusaders had no single commander. Peter was their spiritual leader and Walter Sans Avoir their nearest thing to a general, with a handful of knights among them. Albert gives the force that finally marched out as 25,000 foot and 500 knights in armor, the Crusades Reference Library about 20,000.⁷

Against them stood the Seljuk Turks of Kilij Arslan, whom Albert, confusing him with his father, calls Soliman. Both Albert and the Gesta describe them fighting above all with the bow.⁸

The battle in phases

Raids and Xerigordos

Without firm leadership the host split along lines of language. The Gesta says the Lombards and Germans separated from the French at Nicomedia and chose their own leader, Reinald; Anna calls the breakaway group Normans. French bands raided the country around Nicaea and drove off its herds, and Anna accuses them of atrocities against the local people. Then a German band seized the castle of Xerigordos, beyond Nicaea, and found it full of grain, wine and meat.⁹

The sultan's troops came at the end of September and besieged the castle. Cut off from water, the defenders suffered terribly from thirst, and when it fell they were killed or taken captive and sold. The Crusades Reference Library puts the force that had held it at about six thousand, Albert at three thousand foot and two hundred knights.¹⁰

21 October: the ambush

What drew the main body out of camp is told two ways. Anna Komnene says the Turks sent two men to the camp to spread the false news that the Normans had taken Nicaea and were plundering it, and the crusaders rushed off in disorder to share the loot. Albert of Aachen and the Crusades Reference Library say that when news of the slaughter at Xerigordos arrived, the rank and file forced their reluctant captains to march out for revenge, while Peter was away. Either way they marched toward Nicaea on the morning of 21 October.¹¹

The Turks were waiting on the road. The crusaders were broken and driven back toward the camp; Walter Sans Avoir was killed. The Turks followed into the camp and killed many of those who had been left behind there, the sick, the old and the unarmed, and carried off young women and boys as captives.¹²

Turning point: the last stand by the sea

A few thousand survivors escaped to an old fortress near the shore. Albert writes that they barricaded its empty gateway with shields and rocks and held out against showers of arrows; the Gesta says the Turks piled wood against it to burn them out, and the defenders set the wood alight so that the fire turned on the attackers. When the emperor learned of the disaster, he sent ships and troops across the strait, the Turks withdrew, and the survivors were saved.¹³

Where was Peter?

The sources disagree about Peter himself. The Gesta Francorum, Albert of Aachen, Britannica and the Crusades Reference Library all say he had gone back to Constantinople, unable to control the host, 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.¹⁴

Aftermath

Civetot ended the People's Crusade. Peter waited in Constantinople for the princely armies and marched with them across Anatolia in 1097. He was at the siege of Antioch, preached before the storming of Jerusalem in 1099, and returned to Europe, where he founded the monastery of Neufmoustier in what is now Belgium and died in 1115.¹⁵

Legacy and memory

Nobody counted the dead. The Crusades Reference Library says that all but a small band of those who marched on Nicaea were massacred. Anna Komnene, writing decades later, describes the bodies piled into what she calls not a mound but a mountain, and says that later the bones were built into the wall of a fortress. Her account is vivid and secondhand, and her figures run far beyond other estimates: she gives Peter 80,000 foot and 100,000 horse, where the Crusades Reference Library counts twenty to forty thousand followers and Albert 25,500 men under arms at Civetot. It is best read as a picture of the scale of the disaster rather than as a count.¹⁶

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. Anna, for her part, blamed the Latins' greed and indiscipline, and the Gesta Francorum, written from the crusaders' side, honored those who died at Xerigordos as the first martyrs of the crusade.¹⁷