In order to understand thoroughly the state of public feeling in
Europe at the time when Peter the Hermit preached the holy war, it
will be necessary to go back for many years anterior to that event. We
must make acquaintance with the pilgrims of the eighth, ninth, and
tenth centuries, and learn the tales they told of the dangers they had
passed, and the wonders they had seen. Pilgrimages to the Holy Land
seem at first to have been undertaken by converted Jews, and by
Christian devotees of lively imagination, pining with a natural
curiosity to visit the scenes which of all others were most
interesting in their eyes. The pious and the impious alike flocked to
Jerusalem, -- the one class to feast their sight on the scenes
hallowed by the life and sufferings of their Lord, and the other,
because it soon became a generally received opinion, that such a
pilgrimage was sufficient to rub off the long score of sins, however
atrocious. Another and very numerous class of pilgrims were the idle
and roving, who visited Palestine then as the moderns visit Italy or
Switzerland now, because it was the fashion, and because they might
please their vanity by retailing, on their return, the adventures they
had met with. But the really pious formed the great majority. Every
year their numbers increased, until at last they became so numerous as
to be called the "armies of the Lord." Full of enthusiasm, they set
the danger and difficulty of the way at defiance, and lingered with
holy rapture on every scene described in the Evangelists. To them it
was bliss indeed to drink the clear waters of the Jordan, or be
baptized in the same stream where John had baptized the Saviour. They
wandered with awe and pleasure in the purlieus of the Temple, on the
solemn Mount of Olives, or the awful Calvary, where a God had bled for
sinful men. To these pilgrims every object was precious. Relics were
eagerly sought after; flagons of water from Jordan, or paniers of