In the 1090s Emperor Alexius of Byzantium found his greatest enemy, the Turks, literally right across the river from him. Looking around for allies, he turned to the Christians in the west for help and appealed to Pope Urban II to ask the leaders under his pastoral care for assistance. The opening of the Crusades is in 1095 when Urban preached at the Council of Clermont and set in motion what would be a centuries-long process. Both he and Alexius were expecting a few leaders to head out with their trained knights, and many did: Duke Godfrey of Bouillon, Count Raymond of Toulouse, Count Stephen of Blois, Bohemond of Toranto...

However there was an offshoot that both Urban and Alexius didn't expect or wanted: the Peasants' Crusade. When word broke out about their Christian brethren fighting against the infidels, fervor overcame the people who wanted to break away from their miserable lives and believed they could find peace in the Holy Land. It as a mix of millenarianism, religious idealism, and ignorance. It ended with about a mass of 40,000 unorganized civilians who had no fucking idea where they were going, didn't know how to fight, had no weaponry to speak of, and with no proper leadership. When they appeared on Alexius' doorstep, he had no fucking clue how to deal a rowdy squabble who started stealing from his people for supplies. So he just shoved them all across the river and told them to wait there until the proper western leadership arrived. However they didn't listen to him and believing their faith would protect them attacked a Seljuk fort where they more or less were slaughtered.

I was reading a book about the crusades when I came across this line about the Peasants' Crusade: "On the whole their march was successful. It is eloquent of the good order which they maintained that their progress as far as Hungary was entirely without opposition and that the armies which followed them found no hostile feeling but instead were joined by many volunteers."^* My eyes popped out when I saw this. If there's anything I know about the Peasants' Crusade as they marched through Germany, it's this: They fucking slaughtered as many Jews as they could get their hands on along the way. The peasants were already in a zealous mindset with this march, and the movement allowed all of their bigotry to be unleashed on the Jewish population. There were forced conversions, theft of their property for supplies, and just plain murder and bloodshed. Not only did the author just completely skip over the massacres entirely, he painted a picture of an orderly march without much harassment of the general populace. Well, I guess technically he was right: The only people protesting these killings did it pro forma so there wasn't really a hostile feeling and yeah, lots of people joined in along the way to help out... killing people. The portrayal is so odd for me because there's no scholar today who would talk about the Peasant's Crusade without mentioning the Jews.

But then it occurred to me: This was written before 1933. The author Dana Munro was a famous medievalist who rose to prominence in the latter part of the nineteenth century and died in 1933. This book in particular was published posthumously in 1935. Because he lived before the Holocaust, because he was raised in a culture that was still pretty anti-Semitic, it's possible the atrocities of the Peasants' Crusade never really crossed his mind.

That's what we call "historiography" or the study of the study of history. A history of history if you will. It's interesting to see how historians themselves change viewpoints depending on their own society, what time period they lived, or what their own personal background was. Sensitivity to antisemitism definitely increased after the second World War, just as attention to racial tensions after the Civil Rights Movement or female subjugation after the Women's Rights Movement. George Armstrong Custer is an interesting example of this. Initially he was praised for his heroism, but as sympathy to the Native American plight arose people began to criticize him not only for his actions at Little Bighorn but also those during the Civil War and even just his personality. It fell to a low point during the Vietnam War when he was seen as a symbol of the Ugly American with no consideration for other cultures. But as Vietnam has slightly faded from our memory, his reputation has increased again.

Still, what the fuck man? Munro, there is no way you wrote the sentence "It is eloquent of the good order which they maintained." How the HELL did you think the Peasants' Crusade was good fucking order? Some of them were just following a donkey they thought was sacred and believed it was leading them to Jerusalem. There was no order to be found in that mess. Quite frankly, I'm impressed it even made it to Constantinople. You're a scholar; aren't you supposed to know this shit?

^* Dana Carleton Munro, The Kingdom of the Crusaders, (Port Washington, NY: Konnikat Press, 1935), 35.