..they count for nothing

When Pope Urban II called for the First Crusade at the Council of Claremont in 1095, he called for an organized defensive just action against the terrors of the Turks. Nowhere in any of Urban's speeches and letters is there a call to convert the Mohammedans.

The First Crusade was mainly a Gallic action. But several unorganized herds, confused mobs really, mostly Teutonic in origin, left immediately for Jerusalem in the Spring of 1096. "The name of Peter the Hermit, the Picard, of Walter the German knight, of Leisingen, of the Turbingen lord, and of Volkmar are best remembered among these incompetent robbers...their pillage and worse had made difficult the path the regular Crusaders were to follow...They massacred the Jews of the Rhine by way of send-off, storming or failing to storm the palaces of the bishops who would protect such victims, murdering in particular the Chief Rabbi of Mayence to prove their contempt for the special protection of him by the great lay rulers, the Emperor and the Duke of Lorraine.

Their anarchy filled the spring of '96. They trailed off in successive mobs eastward to die well-merited deaths at the hands of the outraged peasants of the Danube whom they despoiled, or at the hands of the Turks in the salty dust of Anatolia. In the military story of the Crusades they count for nothing."[2]


[2] The Crusades by Hilaire Belloc, TAN books, (c)1937, p.20-21