Editing Peter the Hermit (section)

===To Jerusalem===

[[File: Roman du Chevalier du Cygne f176v Pierre l'Ermite.jpg|thumb|Peter the Hermit shows the crusaders the way to Jerusalem. French illumination (about 1270).]]
When the princes arrived, Peter joined their ranks as a member of the council in May 1097, and with the little following which remained they marched together through [[Asia Minor]] to [[Jerusalem]]. While his "paupers" never regained the numbers previous to the [[Battle of Civetot]], his ranks were increasingly replenished with disarmed, injured, or bankrupted crusaders. Nonetheless, aside from a few rousing speeches to motivate the Crusaders, he played a subordinate part in the remaining history of the First Crusade which at this point clearly settled on a military campaign as the means to secure the pilgrimage routes and holy sites in [[Palestine (region)|Palestine]].

Peter appears, at the beginning of 1098, as attempting to escape from the privations of the [[siege of Antioch]]—showing himself, as [[Guibert of Nogent]] says, a "fallen star." Guibert and other sources go on to write that Peter was responsible for the speech before the half-starved and dead Crusaders which motivated their sally from the gates of Antioch and their subsequent victory over the overwhelmingly superior Muslim army besieging the city. Thus, having recovered his stature, in the middle of the year he was sent by the princes to invite [[Kerbogha]] to settle all differences via a duel,<ref name=EB1911/> which the emir subsequently declined.

In 1099 Peter appears as the treasurer of the alms at the [[siege of Arqa]], and as leader of the supplicatory processions around the walls of Jerusalem [[Siege of Jerusalem (1099)|before it fell]], and later within Jerusalem which preceded the Crusaders' surprising victory at the [[Battle of Ascalon]] (August). At the end of 1099, Peter went to [[Latakia]], and sailed thence for the West. From this time he disappears from the historical record. [[Albert of Aix]] records that he died in 1131, as prior of a church of the Holy Sepulchre which he had founded in France.<ref name=EB1911/>