But there can be no doubt of the personality of Peter, and of his tremendous influence in exciting the populace to engage in the crusades after they were decreed in the councils of Rome. His labors in the great cause seem to have been limited to certain districts of France, for it is scarcely credible that a man of strange language could have thrown the spell of his rhapsodies over people living beyond the Rhine. Peter the Hermit was of small stature, with long beard prematurely whitened by the rigors of his life,—for he was not yet fifty years of age,—with deep and penetrating eyes, fired by the enthusiasm that filled his soul. He travelled from place to place with uncovered head and bare feet, mounted upon a mule. The churches proving too small, the people thronged about him in the market-places and fields, where they drank from his lips wrath for the Moslem, pity for the Christian martyrs, whose blood he painted as flowing in the streets of Jerusalem, and hope of eternal reward if they should take the cross and sword. In the frenzy of speaking he wept, wounded his own flesh with the violence of his gesticulation, and exhausted his physical strength in the rhapsody of speech, as he called upon the saints in heaven and the inanimate rock of Calvary to cry out against the apathy of the Christian world. The people were readily persuaded, and attributed the response of their own passion, already inflamed by alarming events, to the preacher’s miraculous gifts. They pressed about him that they might receive some heavenly grace from touching his person, and preserved as sacred relics the hairs they pulled from the tail of his mule. Very opportunely there arrived at Rome in the year 1095 an embassy from Alexius, the Greek emperor at Constantinople, begging assistance against the Turks, who were threatening the shores of the Bosporus. In his fright, or in the disingenuous diplomacy for which the Greeks were noted, Alexius offered to reward the Western warriors with the treasure of his capital, and even suggested that the empire they saved from the Mussulman might one day become the prize of the Latin. Urban summoned a synod at Piacenza, where the Greek messengers addressed in the open fields the crowd of ecclesiastics and laymen, which was so vast that neither the plazas nor churches of the city could contain them.