People's Crusade destroyed at Civetot

October 21, 1096

Peter the Hermit's followers, having crossed the Bosphorus ahead of the knights, were lured into an ambush by Kilij Arslan's Turks at Civetot in Bithynia and slaughtered. Perhaps twenty thousand died. Peter himself had remained in Constantinople. His followers' bones whitened the Anatolian roads for years afterward, a grim warning that the princes' armies passed on their march toward the Holy Land.