Care-for-nothingness is one of man-kind's chief diseases, and if it plays so conspicuous a part in comparatively enlightened and favored communities, amidst the labors and the enjoyments of an advanced civilization, its influence was certainly not less in times of intellectual sloth and harshly monotonous existence.

To escape therefrom, to satisfy in some sort the energy and curiosity inherent in man, the people of the eleventh century had scarcely any resource but war, with its excitement and distant excursions into unknown regions.
Thither rushed the masses of the people, whilst the minds which were eager, above everything, for intellectual movement and for knowledge, thronged, on the mountain of St.Genevieve, to the lectures of Abelard.
Need of variety and novelty, and an instinctive desire to extend their views and enliven their existence, probably made as many crusaders as the feeling against the Mussulmans and the promptings of piety.
[Illustration: Crusaders on the March----386] The Council of Clermont, at its closing on the 28th of November, 1095, had fixed the month of August in the following year, and the feast of the Assumption, for the departure of the crusaders for the Holy Land; but the people's impatience did not brook this waiting, short as it was in view of the greatness and difficulties of the enterprise.

As early as the 8th of March, 1096, and in the course of the spring three mobs rather than armies set out on the crusade, with a strength, it is said, of eighty or one hundred thousand persons in one case, and of fifteen or twenty thousand in the other two.

Persons, not men, for there were amongst them many women and children, whole families, in fact, who had left their villages, without organization and without provisions, calculating that they would be competent to find their own way, and that He who feeds the young ravens would not suffer to die of want pilgrims wearing His cross.
Whenever, on their road, a town came in sight, the children asked if that were Jerusalem.

The first of these mobs had for its head Peter the Hermit himself, and a Burgundian knight called Walter _Havenought_; the second had a German priest named Gottschalk; and the third a Count Emico, of Leiningen, potent in the neighborhood of Mayence.