1-156-700 - Ann Ronan Picture Library/Heritage-Images

Scenes from the First Crusade, 1096-1099 (c1490). In the foreground of the main image, mounted knights unhorsed and killed in a melee of hand-to-hand fighting with (left) a man wielding a two-sided battleaxe or bipennis. In the right background reinforcements are streaming out of city gates. Inset (bottom left) Peter the Hermit (c1050-1115) pleads for help from the Byzantine Emperor Alexius I (1048-1118). The First Crusade was launched in 1095 by Pope Urban II, with the objective of regaining Jerusalem and the Holy Land from the Muslim Turks. Peter the Hermit was a French monk who led the first army of crusaders, the so-called People's Crusade. Rather than an army, the People's Crusade was more of a migration of ordinary people including women and children. On arriving in the lands occupied by the Seljuk Turks, riven by disputes and reduced in numbers by attacks from Slavs, Hungarians and others en route, most of the crusaders were massacred. Peter himself survived, as he was in Constantinople petitioning Alexius for assistance. He later joined the main cruader army that left Western Europe in 1096, and succeeded in capturing Jerusalem in 1099. From Passages fait Outremer (Overseas Voyages).