The successor of Victor III. was Urban II., a pontiff of French extraction, who, following up the policy of his predecessors, endeavoured with all his influence to stir up the Christians against the infidels. But the Almighty often confides the execution of his most important designs to the hands of the humblest, and the honour of initiating the Crusades was not reserved for the occupant of the chair of St. Peter. It was destined to fall to the lot of a humble pilgrim, who, as the learned historian of these events tells us, was inspired only by his zeal, and whose only influence was the force of his character and his genius. This humble pilgrim was Peter of Acheris, better known as Peter the Hermit. Descended from a noble family of Picardy, but ungainly in body and short of stature, he had vainly sought happiness and peace in the most opposite conditions of society. At first he embraced the profession of arms, then he gave himself up to literature, then he married, and being soon left a widower, he entered into holy orders. Everywhere, however, he met with nothing but bitterness and deception. Having become at last, to use the expression of William of Tyre, “hermit both in deed and in name,” he sought in solitude, in fasting, and in prayer to forget the empty vanities of the world, and it was no doubt with a last hope of giving some practical effect to his fervent but barren devotion that he undertook his pious pilgrimage to Jerusalem. His habits of meditation and prayer had infused a burning ardour and an enlightenment into his soul. When he found himself on the very soil that had been pressed by the Saviour’s feet, when he witnessed the hardships and the humiliations inflicted on the worshippers of Christ by the infidels, when, above all, he heard the lamentations of the venerable Simeon, the patriarch of Jerusalem, and had wept with him over the terrible trials of the Eastern Church, indignation, grief, piety, and faith awoke in his heart the feeling that he must at all hazards devote his life to a special vocation. He resolved to devote himself to the protection of his brethren in Christ, and to the deliverance of the holy places.