Peter, however, accomplished in safety his pilgrimage to Jerusalem,[89] paid the piece of gold demanded at the gates, and took up his lodging in the house of one of the pious Christians of the Holy City. Here his first emotion[90] seems to have been indignant horror at the barbarous and sacrilegious brutality of the Turks. The venerable prelate of Tyre represents him as conferring eagerly with his host upon the enormous cruelties of the infidels, even before visiting the general objects of devotion. Doubtless the ardent, passionate, enthusiastic mind of Peter had been wrought upon at every step he took in the Holy Land, by the miserable state of his brethren, till his feelings and imagination became excited to almost frantic vehemence. After performing the duties of the pilgrimage, visiting each object of reputed holiness,[91] and praying in those churches which had the fame of peculiar sanctity, Peter, with his heart wrung at beholding the objects of his deepest veneration in the hands of the church's enemies, demanded an audience of the patriarch, to whom some Latin friend presented him. Simeon the patriarch, though a Greek, and consequently in the eyes of Peter a heretic, was still a Christian, suffering in common with the rest of the faithful in the Holy Land, and the hermit saw in him that character alone. The union--the overflowing confidence with which the hermit and the prelate appear to have treated each other--raises them both in our estimation; but it also throws an historical light upon the character of Peter, which places him in a more elevated situation than modern historians have been willing to concede to him. The patriarch Simeon, a man as famous for his good sense as for his piety, would not, surely, have opened his inmost thoughts to a wandering pilgrim like Peter, and intrusted to him a paper sealed with his own seal, which, if taken by the Turks, would have ensured death to himself and destruction to Christianity in Palestine, had he not recognised in the hermit "a man,"[92] to use the words of William of Tyre, "full of prudence and experience in the things of this world." This, however, was the case; and after long conversations, wherein many a tear was shed over the hapless state of the Holy Land, it was determined, at the suggestion of Peter, that the patriarch should write to the pope and the princes of the west, setting forth the miseries of Jerusalem and of the faithful people of the Holy City, and praying for aid and protection against the merciless sword of the Saracen. Peter, on his part, promised to seek out each individual prince, and to show, with his whole powers of language, the ills of the Christians of Palestine.