PETER the Hermit, the apostle of the first Crusade, was descended from a good family, and was born at Amiens in France about the middle of the eleventh century. The first part of his career was passed in obscurity. He served without distinction in the army of the counts of Boulogne, and then retired into the privacy of married life. It was not until 1095, after he had kindled and fostered a fanatical zeal in the solitude of a hermitage, that the real force of his character began to appear. Happening about that time to be on a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre, and feeling enraged at the indignities offered by the Moslems to the scenes of sacred history, he formed the arduous project of wresting Palestine from the infidels. To return to Europe and lay his plan before the Supreme Pontiff was his first measure. The Pope approved of the enterprise, and sent him forth to preach a crusade. A bare-headed, bare-footed, little, shrivelled old man, mounted on an ass, wrapped in a coarse garment, girded with a rope, and bearing a heavy crucifix in his hand, Peter the Hermit rode forth to summon Christendom to arms. As he addressed the people that everywhere thronged his path, he rose to the highest fervour of enthusiasm. His lively imagination conjured up the scenes of profanity transacted in the Holy City; his keen eye kindled martial fire among the populace; he burst out at intervals into wrapt ejaculations to heaven; he drowned his voice betimes in a tempest of sighs and tears. How he succeeded in raising the first Crusade, and how he failed in conducting the expedition, is given under CRUSADES. The subsequent part of the Hermit's career is merged in
obscurity. He died in 1115 in a monastery which he had founded in the diocese of Liège. (See Gibbon's History.)