The history of the campaign was fully summarized on the basis of about 50 existing sources only in 1977 by the Dutch medievalist Peter Redts from the University of Nijmegen. Until now, it is often transmitted in the wildest forms, but we will stick to the scientific one.
Foolish shepherdesses
The history of the campaign was fully summarized on the basis of about 50 existing sources only in 1977 by the Dutch medievalist Peter Redts from the University of Nijmegen. Until now, it is often transmitted in the wildest forms, but we will stick to the scientific one.
So, around 1220, a shepherdess appeared in Germany and France almost simultaneously. Each of them had a vision of Jesus Christ, who said that only children could go and occupy Jerusalem without weapons, while the Saracens would convert to Christianity.
One boy, Nicholas of Colony, was preaching in Germany. He was endowed with an unprecedented gift of eloquence. For several weeks in Kolony (then on the territory of Germany) 20 thousand followers gathered - children, teenagers and young men who were ready to follow Nicholas to the Holy Land.
The second shepherd boy, Stephen of Clois, preached about the same in France. In his version, he got this information from a letter from Jesus to the king of France - he supposedly had to hand it over. 30 thousand followers gathered around Stephen. Many of them also bore some kind of material gift from God.
This whole demonstration went to King Philip II at the Abbey of Saint-Denis, but he, asking, to his honor, advice at the University of Paris, ordered everyone to return home. Stephen did not obey, and prayed in different cities, attracting new followers, children and adults. By the time of the campaign, Stefan's group was, most likely, in the region of 15 thousand people.
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Hike to the sea
The German shepherd led his adepts across the Alps to Italy, where, according to Nicholas, the sea should part for the children so that they could freely reach the Holy Land. Only a third of the children reached the sea through the Alps, the rest froze or died for some other reason, and also returned home discouraged.
A total of 7 thousand children came to Genoa at the end of the summer.
Seeing that the sea did not part, many were disappointed and also began to disperse, but most of the villages were waiting by the sea. They were more fortunate than the French.
A few days later the good Genoese agreed to provide them with shelter. Most of the "hikers" took advantage of this, and Nicholas went with the rest of the group first to Pisa, and from there to the Papal States, where the pontiff told the children to return home and behave well. On the way home, Nicholas was hanged by the evil parents of his dead adepts.
The French group found it easier on the way - they did not need to travel in the mountains.
Having survived on alms, the kids got to Marseille. And only there they realized that there was a slight inconsistency in their plan - there was not a single idea how to swim across the sea in such a crowd. Many turned back.
In a particularly wild, but true-to-life narration of the story, it is written that a significant number of girls were taken to port brothels, boys to ships and port work, and a significant group of children by "kind" Sicilian merchants loaded onto several ships and sent to the Middle East, where they immediately upon arrival fell into slavery.
How could this happen?
The children's crusade, for all its insane character, cannot but be called an amazing phenomenon. Historians have always been interested not only in how it happened, but also why.
American medievalists Dana Munro and Norman Zakur believe that the Children's Crusade is one of a series of social explosions through which people found liberation in the dark Middle Ages. The Frenchman Paul Alfandri, in his book Christianity and the Idea of the Crusades, considers the Children's Crusade as an expression of the medieval cult of the Innocent - a kind of sacrifice ritual in which the Innocent give themselves up for the good of Christendom.
German Catholic scholar Adolf Vaas believes that the Children's Crusade was an expression of knightly piety against the glorification of holy war. But the Italian historian Giovanni Miccoli expressed an original point of view that in fact the sources did not describe the participants of that crusade as children. These were not necessarily children in our understanding. For example, the word used in the sources to refer to the participants in the hike is translated rather as "guys" rather than children. This view partially coincided only with the theory of Norman Cohn, who saw in this phenomenon the chiliastic movement of the poor. Even so, it should be borne in mind that the participation of children in wars in those days was not unusual. Teenagers 13-14 years old were often not nominally married and were already considered young men - warriors.