Civetot, 1096: The End of the People's Crusade

A Seljuk ambush at Civetot in October 1096 destroyed the People's Crusade and killed the lords who led it, months before the main armies arrived.

14 September 2026 · Part of The Crusades — a guide to 11 articles →

On 21 October 1096, a Seljuk force under Kilij Arslan I ambushed several thousand crusaders three miles from their camp at Civetot, on the Gulf of Nicomedia, and killed most of them, including the lord who had led the expedition's advance contingent across two continents. Walter Sansavoir, lord of Boissy-sans-Avoir, had set out from France seven months earlier at the head of one of the first armed bands to answer Pope Urban II's call at Clermont. He never saw the main crusading army, and neither did the two other lords the chronicles name among the dead at Civetot that autumn. Their deaths came almost a full year before Godfrey of Bouillon's forces reached the walls of Nicaea.

An advance guard with no land to lose

Walter Sansavoir's epithet was not a figure of speech. Boissy-sans-Avoir, his lordship west of Paris, was modest even by the standards of minor French nobility, and the name attached to him — "without possessions" — followed him east. When Peter the Hermit's preaching drew thousands of poor pilgrims across northern France and the Rhineland in the winter of 1095–96, Walter organized one of the first bands to actually leave, departing in March 1096, weeks ahead of Peter's own, much larger following.

The logic was practical. A smaller, earlier group could move faster and forage more easily than the tens of thousands who would follow. Walter's contingent crossed Germany and Hungary without serious incident — King Coloman of Hungary, wary of the disorder these bands could cause, let them pass on condition of good behaviour — and it was only in Byzantine territory, near Belgrade, that supply disputes turned violent. A clash over foraging killed some of Walter's men before the Byzantine governor at Niš intervened, provisioned the column, and escorted it on to Constantinople, where it arrived around mid-July 1096.

Waiting at the emperor's expense

Emperor Alexios I Komnenos had asked the West for soldiers, not a crowd of the poor, and he treated Walter's arrival as a problem to be managed rather than a relief force. He held the group outside the walls, supplied it, and waited for Peter the Hermit's larger host, which reached Constantinople in early August after a march that had turned genuinely bloody at Semlin and Niš. Once the two groups had combined — an uneasy mixture of French, German, Italian and Lombard bands with no agreed command — Alexios ferried the whole assembly across the Bosporus and settled it at a fortified supply base the Latin sources call Civetot, on the Gulf of Nicomedia. His instructions were explicit: wait for the organized baronial armies, and do not provoke Kilij Arslan I, the Seljuk sultan whose capital at Nicaea lay barely fifty miles away.

Not everyone in the camp died in battle. Albert of Aachen's chronicle, in the sixth chapter of his first book, records that Walter of Poissy, lord of Poissy and one of the expedition's own commanders, did not live to see the disaster that followed — he died of illness in the camp, one of an unknown number the sickness took before the Turks did. The chronicle gives no further detail; where a cause is not recorded beyond the fact of the illness, that silence is the whole of what survives.

The fort at Xerigordos

Camp discipline did not hold. French bands raided toward Nicaea for plunder and food, and in September a mixed force of German and Italian pilgrims — estimated at several thousand — marched some four days from Civetot under Rainald of Broyes, lord of Broyes, and seized a small Turkish fort called Xerigordos, intending to use it as a forward base. Kilij Arslan responded quickly, sending a relief force that cut off the fort's water supply, which lay outside its walls. After eight days without water, the garrison capitulated on 29 September.

Albert of Aachen's sixteenth chapter counts Rainald of Broyes among those killed when the fort fell, and that is the account this record follows; other tellings of the same siege describe Rainald surrendering and accepting conversion to save his life before the garrison was killed or enslaved regardless, and the sources do not resolve which came first. What is not disputed is the outcome for almost everyone else inside the walls: those who refused conversion were killed, and the women and children among them were taken into slavery.

The ambush and the end of the camp

Turkish agents reportedly slipped into the Civetot camp afterward and spread word that the raiding party had taken Nicaea itself and was dividing its riches — a rumor the surviving crusaders, hungry for the same plunder, chose to believe. Peter the Hermit was in Constantinople at the time, negotiating supplies with Alexios, and Walter Sansavoir is recorded arguing for patience until the sultan's real strength could be judged. He was overruled. On 21 October, some twenty thousand pilgrims, soldiers and camp followers marched out of Civetot toward Nicaea and into a wooded ravine where Kilij Arslan's army was waiting.

The ambush was total. Albert of Aachen's twenty-first chapter describes Walter Sansavoir fighting to the end and dying pierced by seven arrows, his mail hauberk unable to stop them. Most of the column was killed where it stood; a remnant of perhaps three thousand fled back toward the coast and held out in a ruined fortification until a Byzantine relief fleet, alerted by Peter the Hermit, evacuated them across the strait. Our record of these operations lists both Walter Sansavoir and Rainald of Broyes among the war's earliest noble deaths — men who never reached the campaigns their epitaphs are usually filed under.

Chronology

What was left of the People's Crusade

When the main armies reached Nicaea the following spring, chroniclers described a hill of bleached bones near Civetot as the only monument to the men who had gone ahead of them. Peter the Hermit survived — his absence from the camp that October was the accident that spared him — and he rejoined the crusade in a much-reduced role, present at Antioch and Jerusalem but never again leading an independent force. The disaster at Civetot is usually treated as a prelude, a cautionary chapter cleared away before the "real" First Crusade begins with the massacres its passage triggered in the Rhineland and, later, the sieges that built the crusader states.

That framing costs these men their own history. Walter Sansavoir, Walter of Poissy and Rainald of Broyes held real lordships in France before they mortgaged them to answer a papal summons, and each died in a way the chronicles recorded precisely because he was a lord, not one of the anonymous thousands beside him. Disease, siege and ambush killed them within seven months of leaving home, before Godfrey of Bouillon or the Knights Templar that followed the crusading movement had done anything to be remembered for. The crusader states these men never lived to see would stand for two centuries, through catastrophes as different as the sack of Constantinople in 1204 and the fall of Acre in 1291, and would depend at every stage on the labour of women who traveled with these same armies and are rarely named at all — a gap the crusading nobility's own record makes plain in its own way.

Conclusion

Civetot is remembered, when it is remembered at all, as a disaster that cleared the ground for the crusade proper — an undisciplined mob punished for ignoring an emperor's advice. That verdict is not wrong, but it flattens three men who held real titles and made a real journey into a single cautionary anecdote. Walter Sansavoir organized and led an army across two empires before he died fighting in a ravine near Nicaea. Rainald of Broyes held a captured fort for eight days without water before the sources lose track of exactly how he died. Walter of Poissy never reached a battlefield at all. None of them lived to see Jerusalem, and none of them is a name most accounts of the First Crusade bother to keep.

Frequently asked questions

Why did Walter Sansavoir leave France months before the main crusading armies? His band was one of several that set out in spring 1096, ahead of the baronial forces still mustering supplies and soldiers, on the reasoning that a smaller group could move and forage faster. That same speed left it without the numbers or discipline the later, organized armies had.

What happened to Peter the Hermit during the battle? He was in Constantinople negotiating supplies with Emperor Alexios I when the ambush occurred, so he was not present for it. He survived, later rejoined the main crusade when it reached Nicaea in 1097, and traveled with it to Antioch and Jerusalem, though he never again commanded an independent force.

Did anyone from the Civetot camp survive the ambush? A remnant of roughly three thousand escaped back toward the coast and held a ruined fortification until a Byzantine fleet, alerted by Peter the Hermit, rescued them and carried them back across the Bosporus. The great majority of the twenty thousand who marched out that morning did not.

Is Rainald of Broyes's death at Xerigordos disputed? Albert of Aachen counts him among those killed when the fort fell after an eight-day siege, which is the account this record follows. Other versions of the same episode describe him surrendering and converting to save his life first, and the surviving sources do not settle which is accurate.

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