The flight of these swarms of humanity eastward had three consecutive features which should be noted. First, it was a crusade of the crowd, which began in March, 1096; secondly came the more orderly military movement, under the great feudal chieftains, which began in the subsequent autumn; and thirdly, the enterprise became consolidated on national lines, under the kings, who gradually acquired power and took command of their various peoples. This last feature, however, did not appear until the second crusade, nearly half a century later. THE FIRST CRUSADE. CHAPTER X. THE CRUSADE OF THE CROWD. The eloquence of Peter served him in the stead of more orderly methods of enlisting the people. Untrained masses of men, women, and children followed him from place to place, and about Easter to the number of upward of sixty thousand crossed the Rhine. Walter, surnamed the Penniless, assumed the leadership of the advance portion of this impatient throng. The people, however, cared little for any authority save that of the imagined divine presence, which would appear through pillars of cloud and fire to direct them in emergency. The fears of the more cautious were silenced by a saying of Solomon, “The grasshoppers have no king, yet they go forth in companies.” A goose and a goat were led at the head of the motley procession, under the fanatical delusion that in these creatures resided some super-human wisdom. It has been suggested that this superstition was due to the importation of Manichean notions, since the goose was the Egyptian symbol for the divine sonship, and the goat represented the devil—the opposing principles of good and evil as conceived by this Eastern sect. The first vengeance of the marching crowd was inflicted upon the Jews, whose historic infidelity excited the wrath, or whose accumulated wealth tempted the cupidity, of the ill-provided host. In the cities of what is now western Germany this unfortunate people were pillaged and massacred to such an extent that, says Gibbon, “they had felt no more bloody stroke since the persecution of Hadrian.” The crusaders’ appetite for plunder thus whetted, they passed on to the ruder countries of Hungary and Bulgaria, where they took a forceful revenge upon a people of kindred Christian faith for refusing to supply them with provisions. This provoked a bloody retaliation, under which the advanced crusaders were scattered, more than two thirds of their number perishing in the defiles of the Thracian mountains.