Peter the Hermit was a knight of gentle birth from Picardy: “dwarfish, of mean figure, quick-witted, and with a sharp but kindly eye, he was free spoken, and not wanting in eloquence”[495]--a man better fitted for the cloister, in which the shy and sensitive found refuge in those rough times, than for the shock of battle. At the age of forty-four he left his monastery at Huy, near Liége, in the year 1094 A. D., and went as a pilgrim to Jerusalem, which was then in the power of the Turk. The misery which Eastern Christians and Western pilgrims had suffered for seventeen years from the wild Tartars and Kharezmians who formed the Seljuk garrison was approaching its culmination. It is said that the Turks often invaded the churches, dancing on the altars, treading under foot the sacred chalices, wrecking their fury on the marble of the sepulchre, and dragging the patriarch from his throne by the beard.[496] The only hope for Christians lay in help from Europe. “When the cup of tribulation is full,” said the patriarch Simeon to Peter, “God will send the Christians of the West to help the Holy City.” The time and the man were at hand; and as the little hermit knelt before the sepulchre there came to him a voice that said, “Arise, Peter; the time is come. Go forth and tell the tribulations of My people. The time is come that My servants should be succoured, and that My holy places should be free.” We all know what was the effect on the history of the world that followed Peter’s determination to obey the Voice: how his passionate faith and “eloquence” set Western Europe on fire; how at the Council of Clermont, in November 1095, the “truce of God” was proclaimed among princes; how the letters from the Eastern Christians were read; how Peter testified to their wrongs; how Pope Urban II. sanctioned his mission; and how the assembly rang with the shout of “Diex el volt.” I have devoted another volume to the story of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, and it is here proposed to treat only the history of the city itself under its Latin kings.[497] A few words are, however, needed to give the thread of events preceding the conquest.