It was in the spring of the year 1096, that Peter set out for Judea, at the head of a promiscuous assemblage of 80,000 men, with sandals on his feet, a rope about his waist, and every other mark of monkish austerity. Soon after, a more numerous and better disciplined force of 200,000 followed, including some able and experienced leaders. Godfrey of Bouillon, Robert, Duke of Normandy (son of William the Conqueror of England), the Counts of Vermendois, Toulouse, and Blois, are a few of the more illustrious. The progress of this immense mass of human beings on their journey was marked by misery and famine. They had vainly trusted to Heaven for a supernatural supply of their wants, and in their disappointment they had plundered all that came in their way. ‘So many crimes and so much misery,’ says Mr. Hallam, ‘have seldom been accumulated in so short a space, as in the three years of the first expedition;’ and another historian says that a ‘fresh supply of German and Italian vagabonds,’ received on the way, were even guilty of pillaging the churches. It is certain that before the hermit reached Constantinople, the number of his forces had dwindled down to 20,000. Alexis Comnenus, then emperor of Constantinople, who had applied to the states of Europe for assistance, without much hope of obtaining it, in order that he might be enabled to resist a threatened attack by the Turks upon himself, was surprised and terrified at the motley group of adventurers who had now reached the shore of his dominions. He readily afforded them the means for transporting themselves across the Bosphorus, and performed the same friendly office to the larger force which followed under Godfrey and others; glad, apparently, to have the barbarians of the north, as his subjects called them, out of his dominions. The Sultan Solyman met the army of the hermit, if army it could be called, and cut the greater part of it to pieces on the plains of Nicea. The second host proved more successful. In spite of their want of discipline, their ignorance of the country, the scarcity of provisions, and the excess of fatigue, their zeal, their bravery, and their irresistible force, enabled them twice to overthrow old Solyman, to take his capital Nice, and after an obstinate resistance, the city of Antioch also (1098). At length (1099) they reached Jerusalem, much diminished in numbers, and broken in spirit; but with persevering assiduity they proceeded to lay siege to the city, and in six weeks they became its masters. Their cruel conduct to the inhabitants attests the barbarous feelings of their hearts. ‘Neither arms defended the valiant, nor submission the timorous; no age nor sex was spared; infants on the breast were pierced by the same blow with their mothers, who implored for mercy; even a multitude of ten thousand persons who surrendered themselves prisoners and who were promised quarters, were butchered in cold blood by these ferocious conquerers.