But their course was of short duration. At the town of Altenburg, on the confines of Hungary, which they attempted to storm, they were seized with a sudden panic and fled in all directions, being slaughtered like sheep. Emicon got together a small band, whom he led home again; a few others were led by their chiefs southwards, and joined the princes of the Crusade in Italy. None of them, according to William of Tyre, found their way to Peter the Hermit. Once across the Dardanelles, Peter’s troops, who amounted, it is said, in spite of all their losses, to no fewer than a hundred thousand fighting men, fixed a camp on the shores of the Gulf of Nicomedia, and began to ravage the country in all directions. The division of the booty soon caused quarrels, and a number of Italians and Germans, deserting the camp, went up the country in a body, and took possession of a small fortress in the neighbourhood of Nicæa, whose garrison they massacred. Then they were in their turn besieged, and, with the exception of their leader, Renaud, or Rinaldo, who embraced the Mahometan faith, were slaughtered to a man. The news of this disaster roused the Christians, not to a sense of their danger (which they could not yet comprehend), but to a vehement desire for revenge. They made the luckless Walter lead them against Nicæa, and issued forth from their camp _en masse_, a disordered, shouting multitude, crying for vengeance against the Turks. But their end was at hand. The Sultan of Nicæa placed half his army in ambuscade in the forest, keeping the other half in the plain; the Christians were attacked in the front and in the rear, and, cooped up together in confusion, badly armed, offered very slight resistance. Walter himself fell, one of the first; the carnage was terrific, and of all the hundred thousand whom Peter and Walter had brought across the Dardanelles, but three thousand escaped. These fled to a fortress by the sea-shore. The bones of their comrades, whitened by the eastern sun, long stood as a monument of the disaster, pointing skeleton fingers on the road to Jerusalem—the road of death and defeat.
Only three thousand, out of all these hordes, certainly a quarter of a million in number, which flocked after Peter on his mule! We can hardly believe that all were killed. Some of the women and children at least might be spared, and without doubt their blood yet flows in the veins of many Hungarian and Bulgarian families. But this was only the first instalment of slaughter. There remained the mighty armies which were even then upon the road. As for Peter, whose courage was as easily daunted as his enthusiasm was easily roused, he fled in dismay and misery back to Constantinople, having lost all authority, even over the few men who remained with him. He inveighed against their disorders and their crimes, and he declared that these were the causes of their defeat. He might have added that his own weakness, the vanity which led him to accept the _rôle_, offered him by an ignorant crowd, of general as well as preacher, was no less a cause of disaster than the disorder which it was his business to check and combat day by day. His disappointment was such as would be enough to kill a really proud and strong man; but Peter was not a strong man; in the hour of danger he bent like the reed to the storm; the violence of the tempest once past, however, like the reed, he lifted up his head again. He could preach endurance, but he could not himself endure; his faith required constant stimulants, his courage the fresh fire of continual success. Peter lifted up his head again when he saw the splendid array of Godfrey and Raymond; but his old authority with the chiefs was gone. Like a worn-out tool, he had served his purpose and was cast aside. He had no more voice in their councils—no more power over their enthusiasm. He lapsed into utter insignificance, save once, when we find him actually trying to desert the army at Antioch and endeavouring to run away; and once, later on, when he received the brief ovation from the native Christians in the hour of final triumph at Jerusalem. He returned, it may be added, in safety to France when the war was over, and spent sixteen years more in honourable obscurity, the head of a monastery. Never in the world’s history, with the exception of Mohammed alone, has one man produced an effect so great and so immediate; and seldom has one man wielded an instrument so potent as Peter, when he set forth at the head of an army which wanted only discipline to make it invincible.