Walter "Golyak" ( Gautier Beggar , Gautier Sans Avoir, Walther von Habenichts ) - French knight , so named for his poverty; the leader of a motley, indiscriminate crowd that came out of Lorraine in the spring of 1096 to liberate Jerusalem , preceding the real crusaders (see Peasant Crusade ). This crowd beat Jews along the Rhine and, robbing and robbing, passed through Hungary and Bulgaria ; having suffered greatly along the road, she reached Constantinople , where she was friendly received by the emperor Alexey . Walter, unwittingly, but forced to reckon with the opinion of the crowd, crossed over to Asia , against the advice of the emperor, and under Nicaea on October 21, 1096 he was defeated, in which he himself died, with most of his people.
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Historical records tell the following about Walter and the first crusaders:
“ After the Clermont Council , bishops , priests and monks launched a war sermon with the“ infidels. ” Monk Peter Amiensky (the Hermitage), who called for the participation of ordinary people in Northern and Middle France, as well as in Rhine Germany, became the most popular among the common people. Under the influence of his sermons in the early spring of 1096, tens of thousands of poor people rose to "holy pilgrimage." They were led by Peter the Hermitage , the ruined knight Walter Golyak from Northern France and the priest Gottschalk from the Rhineland. Unbridled crowds, armed only with batons, scythes, axes, without food supplies, the participants of the march went along the Rhine and the Danube and further south to Constantinople. The dark, starving peasant masses, joined by many different adventurers from impoverished chivalry, passing through the possessions of the Hungarians, Bulgarians, Greeks, robbed the inhabitants of food, plundered, killed, raped; in the Rhine cities, the robber knights organized Jewish pogroms . The local population gave a vigorous rebuff to unexpected newcomers. Crusaders suffered heavy losses. A heavily thinned peasant army in the summer of 1096 arrived in Constantinople. Here it behaved just as unbridled. Alexey Komnin hurried to send the peasants to the other side of the Bosphorus , to Asia Minor. Not expecting the approach of the main forces of the Crusader Knights, the poor rushed forward. In October 1096, the Seljuk army lured the peasant detachments into an ambush and almost completely killed them. Thus, the naive illusions of the peasants, who dreamed of accomplishing a religious feat and attaining liberation, broke up at the first encounter with reality ” [1] .
Nickname
In addition to the common version, according to which Walter is considered a ruined knight, there is also another. It is adhered to by a number of historians who authored works on the history of the Crusader wars (in particular, the British historians Riley-Smith and Tierman ). According to the latter, Walter's nickname is not a material condition ( fr. Sans - without, fr. Avoir - property, that is, the poor, golyak), but points to the area he ruled - Boissy-San-Avoir [2] .
Notes
- ↑ History of the Middle Ages: In 2 vols. / Ed. S.D. Skazkina. Vol. 1. M., 1977. P. 203-204
- ↑ Christopher Tyerman. Chapter 2. Crusades in the eastern Mediterranean // [1] = The Crusades: A Very Short Introduction. - Oxford University Press, 2005. - 184 p. - ISBN 978-0-19-280655-0 .
Literature
- Walter Goljak // Encyclopedic Dictionary of Brockhaus and Efron : 86 tons. (82 tons and 4 extra.). - SPb. , 1890-1907.