1096
Rhineland massacres begin
Followers of the People's Crusade under Count Emicho attacked Jewish communities in Mainz, Worms, and Cologne, slaughtering thousands. Bishops tried to shelter Jews but were often overwhelmed by mobs. The pogroms inaugurated a pattern in which Crusade mobilization was preceded by violence against Europe's Jewish communities. The Hebrew chronicles recording these events remain among the most harrowing testimonies of religious persecution in medieval literature.
People's Crusade destroyed at Civetot
Peter the Hermit's followers, having crossed the Bosphorus ahead of the knights, were lured into an ambush by Kilij Arslan's Turks at Civetot in Bithynia and slaughtered. Perhaps twenty thousand died. Peter himself had remained in Constantinople. His followers' bones whitened the Anatolian roads for years afterward, a grim warning that the princes' armies passed on their march toward the Holy Land.
Princes' Crusade departs Europe
The main Crusader columns under Godfrey of Bouillon, Raymond of Toulouse, Hugh of Vermandois, and Bohemond of Taranto set out for Constantinople by different routes. Between them they probably commanded fifty to a hundred thousand fighters and camp followers, one of the largest Western expeditions since Roman times. Emperor Alexios I watched their arrival with equal measures of hope and alarm, extracting oaths of fealty before allowing them passage.
People's Crusade sets out
Peter the Hermit, riding a donkey, led a huge crowd of unarmed French and Rhineland peasants east months before the formal Crusade was ready. Their march through Germany and Hungary left a trail of looted villages and pogroms against Jewish communities in the Rhineland. Few of them would ever reach the Holy Land.