The children’s crusade is a name given to a variety of events that occurred in 1212. What events are fact and what has been fictionalized, is still not known. There are actually two crusades involved in these stories.
The first crusade starts in France with a twelve year old boy named Stephen of Cloyes. Stephen turned up in the court of King Phillip of Franc claiming to have a letter from Christ, ordering him to organize a crusade. Since Stephen was a peasant, he would not have been able to read or write. If there was a letter, he would not have been able to write it on his own or bean able to read what it said. King Phillip was not impressed. He told Stephen to leave and to come back when he was older.
Stephen did not let this stop him, though. He began preaching to the children about the letter and his desire to go to the Holy Land. He told his followers that any time they had to cross a body of water, including the Mediterranean, the waters would part and they would walk across on dray land, protected by God.
By June 1212, Stephen had gathered 30,000 followers, all children. They marched south through France with absolutely no idea what to expect, while adults cheered them on. The march from Vedome to Marseilles was too much. Many had never walked that far, some died from exhaustion and many gave up.
When they reached the Mediterranean Sea, it did not part and they had to cross by boat. The children boarded seven boats in Marseilles and were never heard from again.
A priest, who had been traveling in Northern Africa many years later, said that he had met some of the surviving children who were now adults. These people had told him that two of the seven ships had sunk, killing everyone on board. Pirates had captured the other five, selling the children in to slavery. Since none of the children ever returned, the priest’s story seems unlikely. However; the priest believed God to be omnipresent and omnipotent and would have sent him to hell for lying, it is just as unlikely that the priest would have knowingly told a lie, he was probably just misinformed.
The second crusade takes place in Germany and is led by a boy named Nicholas. His following grew to 20,000. His dream was exactly the same as Stephen’s, take Jerusalem for Christianity. Nicholas’s crusade included religious men and unmarried women, so it was not truly a children’s crusade.
The journey south from Germany to Italy included a dangerous crossing of the Alps. Many of Nicholas’s followers died in the cold, those who survived continued to Rome. When they were in Rome, they met the Pope who praised their bravery, but told them that they were too young to take on such a dangerous venture. Many returned to Germany and most perished on the journey back. A few continued to the port of Pisa where they boarded a ship and continued to the Holy Land, never to be heard from again.
Exactly how much of these stories are true and how much is fictionalized is unclear. These stories are almost eight hundred years old. During that time they have been taken apart and put back together again so many times that even historians have a problem with them. According to recent research, these crusades did not even involve children, but peasants. The Latin word pueri, used to originally describe the people involved in these crusades, means “boy”, but is also used as a derogatory slang (similar to calling a grown man a boy) used to describe the poorest of the peasants.
The crusades were a very dark time. It would have been scary for adults to join them and even scarier for children. We may find that these stories are completely fiction or that they are completely true someday, but no matter what, these are sad stories.
Sources of information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children’s_Crusade
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/childrens_crusade.htm
