not be impleaded in any civil court, except on criminal charges, or
disputes relating to land" ("Europe during the Middle Ages," Hallam, pp.
29, 30). Thus fanaticism and earthly pleasures and benefits all pushed
men in the same direction, and Europe flung itself upon Palestine. Men,
women, and children, poured eastwards in that first crusade, and this
mixed vanguard of the coming army of warriors was led by Peter the
Hermit and Gaultier Sans-Avoir. This vanguard was "a motley assemblage
of monks, prostitutes, artists, labourers, lazy tradesmen, merchants,
boys, girls, slaves, malefactors, and profligate debauchees;" "it was
principally composed of the lowest dregs of the multitude, who were
animated solely by the prospect of spoil and plunder, and hoped to make
their fortunes by this holy campaign" (p. 232). "This first division, in
their march through Hungary and Thrace, committed the most flagitious
crimes, which so incensed the inhabitants of the countries through which
they passed, particularly those of Hungary and Turcomania, that they
rose up in arms and massacred the greatest part of them" (Ibid). "Father
Maimbourg, notwithstanding his immoderate zeal for the holy war, and
that fabulous turn which enables him to represent it in the most
favourable points of view, acknowledges frankly that the first division
of this prodigious army committed the most abominable enormities in the
countries through which they passed, and that there was no kind of
insolence, in justice, impurity, barbarity, and violence, of which they
were not guilty. Nothing, perhaps, in the annals of history can equal
the flagitious deeds of this infernal rabble" (Ibid, note). Few of these
unhappy wretches reached the Holy Land. "To engage in the crusade and to
perish in it, were almost synonymous" (Hallam, p. 30), even for those
who entered Palestine. The loss of life was something terrible. "We
should be warranted by contemporary writers in stating the loss of the
Christians alone during this period at nearly a million; but at the
least computation, it must have exceeded half that number" (Ibid). The