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Dear Richard, Call it the people's, peasant's, popular crusade, what you will. But it was the first response to an official crusade; it was never repudiated by the papacy; and there were knights on board--not many, it is true, but some. The best recent treatment is J. Riley-Smith, 'The First Crusade and the Persecution of the Jews', in W.J. Sheils (ed.) Persecution and Toleration (Studies in Church History, 21) (Oxford, 1984), pp. 51-72. This should be supplemented with Idem., The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading (London, 1986). On popular crusades in general, see: F. Cardini,"Per una ricerca...crociate popolari," Quaderni Med., 30 (1990), 156-67. Cardini, however, is far too dominated by Norman Cohn's utterly and irretrievably lost, Paradigm Lost. As for your second query, 'what is the best refutation of the alphandery and dupront argument that the crusades was essentially an apocalyptic millenarian movement', that depends upon whether or not anything as important as this was 'essentially' about one thing and only one thing. There was certainly a prophetic element about it; but there were other motifs as well. (Why can't ordinary people be credited with some of the complexity always lavished on intellectuals? It just ain't fair; it just ain't democratic.) When I someday finish marking the heaps and heaps of essays I have still to mark, I'll be resuming work on 'Popular Crusades or Crusading Revivalism?' in which I try to address some of the questions posed by what can be called "the idea of a popular crusade". Gary Dickson University of Edinburgh %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%