38 ISLAM AT WAR
When the western troops came to the Eastern Empire, they would come
with an idea different from Alexius’s. They would come to create con-
quests in their own name and to acquire land for themselves, not for the
old empire. Thus, the crusaders came as a response to Emperor Alexius,
but not the one that he wanted.
In the modern mind, the Crusades are poorly and erroneously defined.
Virtually everything thought about them is wrong. The Crusades were not
a war; they were a series of wars. They were not fought between the
“Saracens” and the Franks, they were fought between Turk and Syrian
and Egyptian and Byzantine and Mongol and at least three “crusader”
kingdoms, most of whom allied with and against each other at various
times. The alliances only rarely followed along religious lines. The Cru-
sades were also not national wars in any sense at all. They were medieval
wars in which the feudal overlords of cities, castles, or provinces made
war against each other with greed as the motivator and loot as the object.
The Crusades were not religious wars. Lands were conquered not for
Christ or Allah, but for warlords. The followers of a religion were as likely
to be killed by their co-religionists as by their infidel opponents.
The first of the Crusades to descend upon the Muslim world was that
of Peter the Hermit. Peter was viewed as a deeply religious man and a
powerful speaker. He undoubtedly believed himself inspired, and inspiring
he was. He gathered and then led a crowd of some 30,000 souls on a
larcenous and murderous rampage across France, Germany, Hungary, and
into the empire. Alexius was courteous but glad to see the mob depart
into Asia, as he had clearly hoped for an army of crusading soldiers, not
a swarm of felons.
When Peter’s crusade moved south from Constantinople into Anatolia,
it entered the lands recently conquered by the Seljuqs. Here the inhabitants
were Christians, for the Byzantines had held Anatolia for hundreds of
years, and the Seljuqs for less than twenty. The crusaders, who had come
to slaughter Muslims, immediately began systematic forays of looting and
murder against the local country folk—all of whom were Christians—and
set their eyes on the city of Nicaea, only some forty miles from Constan-
tinople. This was the capital of the Seljuq Turk, Kilij Arslan, whose father
had conquered the area and broken the Byzantine army.
When the crusaders, or “Franks” as the Turks called them, had foraged
all of the available food near their camp, they moved against Nicaea en
masse. Kilij Arslan ambushed the poorly equipped and undisciplined mob,
and by the end of the day, the crusade was over. Most were captured or
killed, but Peter the Hermit would survive to preach in the armies that
were following. This battle,fought outside of Nicaea in 1096, was to be