Peter the Hermit departed Cologne with his following on around 20 April. He had a much larger following than Walter’s and it grew bigger as he passed through villages that lay along the Danube River. By the time Peter arrived in Oedenburg, the gateway into Hungary, his force numbered more than 20,000 pilgrims. King Coloman must have forgiven the first wave of crusaders for the trouble they caused in Semlin, or else news of their attempted theft did not reach him. He granted Peter and his followers food, other supplies and safe passage through his kingdom on condition they would not pillage and commit murder.
All went well until they entered Semlin. Steven Runciman credited Peter the Hermit as being a genuinely pious and
humble man; he sought to build friendly relations with the kings and bishops of Europe because he wanted safe passage for himself and his followers. He did not, according to Runciman, wish his followers to pillage and murder their way through the various villages.
In Semlin, a dispute over the sale of a pair of shoes escalated into a pitched battle in which Geoffrey Burel, a knight, led an attack on the town, killing four thousand Hungarians.
Albert, a chronicler of the First Crusade, painted a much different picture of the events that transpired in Hungary. Word of what the Hungarians had done to several of Walter’s men, reached Peter at Oedenburg, but Peter refused to believe that fellow Christians would do such a thing to their own men until he “saw hanging from the walls the arms and spoils of the sixteen companions of Walter who had stayed behind a short time before, and whom the Hungarians had treacherously presumed to rob.” At the site of their clothes and arms, Peter “urged his companions to avenge their wrongs.”
They raised their banners high and attacked the Hungarians, letting loose a hail of arrows from their bows. The Hungarians, completely caught off guard and unprepared for battle, gathered their strongest knights, who numbered about seven thousand. But they were quickly overwhelmed by Peter’s far more numerical force. Four thousand Hungarians were massacred in that pitched battle, while, Albert wrote, only one hundred pilgrims perished.
After their quick victory, Peter and his followers remained in the city for a few days where they gathered enough grain, sheep, cattle, horses and wine to feed and supply the entire army. But then Peter learnt that King Soloman was marching on Semlin with an army to avenge his slain people. Taking all their newly acquired supplies, Peter hastened with his followers to the Save River, but they found very few boats to carry them safely across the river. On the other side, Nicetas ordered his Pecheneg mercenaries to restrict the crusaders’ crossing to one area. Desperate to get away from the Hungarian king’s army, the crusaders repelled the Pecheneg mercenaries; they sank the boats that carried Pechenegs and slay those who had not drown. Very few of Nicetas’ mercenaries escaped the wrath of Peter and his pilgrims.
Furious and unstoppable, the crusaders descended upon Belgrade, a prosperous city in Bulgaria. There, they found the city abandoned. The townspeople, after undoubtedly hearing about the brutal massacre in Semlin, fled the city. They were wise to do that, for many–if not most–of them would have been slaughtered. Peter and his followers pillaged the city and then razed it to the ground.
Sources Used:
Krey, August C. The First Crusade: The Accounts of Eye-Witnesss and Participants. Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1921
Runciman, Steven. A History of the Crusades: The First Crusade. Vol.1. Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1951
