The children's crusade is the name given to the popular movement in 1212 in historiography.
Middle Ages
The legendary Children's Crusade provides an excellent idea of the extent to which the mentality of the people of the Middle Ages differed from the worldview of the present. Reality and fiction were closely intertwined in the mind of a 13th century man. The people believed in a miracle. Nowadays, the idea of a children's crusade seems to us wild, then thousands of people did not doubt the success of the enterprise. Although, we still do not know if this actually happened.
It would not be true to believe that the clergy was able to captivate only the greedy knighthood and the equally greedy Italian merchants by the struggle for Jerusalem. The crusader spirit was also sustained in the lower strata of society, where the fascination of his myths was especially strong. The young peasants' march was the embodiment of this naive commitment to him.
How it all began
At the beginning of the 13th century, there was a strong conviction in Europe that only sinless children could liberate the Holy Land. Incendiary speeches of preachers who mourned the seizure of the Holy Sepulcher by the "infidels" found a wide response among children and adolescents, usually from peasant families in Northern France and Rhine Germany. Adolescent religious fervor was fueled by parents and parish priests. The pope and the higher clergy opposed the enterprise, but they could not stop it. Local priests tended to be as ignorant as their flock.
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Ideological inspirers
1212 June - in the village of Cloix, near Vendôme in France, a certain shepherd boy named Stephen of Cloix appeared, who declared himself a messenger of God, who was called to become the leader of Christians and to re-conquer the promised land; the sea was to dry up before the army of spiritual Israel. Allegedly, Christ himself appeared to the boy and handed the letter to the king. The shepherdess walked all over the country everywhere, causing stormy enthusiasm with his speeches, as well as miracles performed by him in front of thousands of eyewitnesses.
Soon, preacher boys appeared in many localities, they gathered around them whole crowds of like-minded people and led them with banners and crosses, with solemn songs to Stephen. If someone asked the young madmen where they were going, they answered that they were going “across the sea, to God”.
The king tried to stop this madness, ordered to return the children home, but this did not help. Some of them obeyed the order, but the majority did not pay attention to it, and soon adults were involved in the event. Stefan, who was already traveling in a chariot hung with carpets and surrounded by bodyguards, was approached not only by priests, artisans and peasants, but also by thieves and criminals who "took the true path."
In the hands of slavers
1212 - in two streams, young travelers headed to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Several thousand French children (maybe up to 30 thousand people, if you count the adult pilgrims), led by Stephen, arrived in Marseille, where cynical slave traders loaded them onto ships. Two ships sank during a storm off the island of San Pietro near Sardinia, while the remaining 5 were able to reach Egypt, where the shipowners sold their children into slavery.
Many of the captives allegedly ended up in the court of the Caliph, who was amazed at the stubbornness of the young crusaders in his faith. Some of the chroniclers argued that later both slave owners who transported children fell into the hands of the enlightened emperor Frederick II, who sentenced the criminals to be hanged. At the conclusion of a treaty in 1229 with Sultan Alkamil, he may have been able to return some of the pilgrims to their homeland.
Crossing the Alps
In those same years, thousands of German children (maybe up to 20 thousand people), headed by 10-year-old Nicholas from Cologne, went on foot to Italy. Nicholas's father was a slave owner who also used his son for his own selfish purposes. When crossing the Alps, two-thirds of the detachment died from hunger and cold, the rest of the children were able to reach Rome, Genoa and Brindisi. The bishop of the last of these cities strongly opposed the continuation of the march by sea and turned the crowd in the opposite direction.
He and Pope Innocent III freed the crusaders from their vows and sent them home. There is evidence that the pontiff only gave them a reprieve to fulfill their plans until they reached adulthood. But on the way home, almost all of them died. According to legend, Nicholas himself survived and even fought at Damietta in Egypt in 1219.
And it could be so …
There is another version of these events. According to her, French children and adults nevertheless succumbed to the persuasion of Philip Augustus and went home. The German children, under the leadership of Nicholas, reached Mainz, where they were able to persuade some to return, but the most persistent continued on their way to Italy. Some of them arrived in Venice, others in Genoa, and a small group was able to reach Rome, some children showed up in Marseille. Be that as it may, most of the children disappeared without a trace.
Children's crusade in history
These gloomy events probably formed the basis of the legend about the rat-catcher-flutist, who took all the children away from the city of Gammeln (Pied Piper of Hamelin). Some Genoese patrician families even traced their ancestry from German children who remained in the city.
The improbability of this kind of event makes historians believe that the "Crusade of Children" was actually called the movement of the poor (serfs, laborers, day laborers) who gathered in the Crusade and who failed in Italy.