Children's Crusade

The Children's Crusade, by Gustave Doré

The Children's Crusade begun in 1212, is the movement initiated by one or two boys, who claim to have been inspired by a vision of Jesus. Both of these boys mobilized other "children" for a crusade to peacefully convert Muslims in the Holy Land to Christianity and find the True Cross. These bands of children marched over the mountains into Italy, a group reached Rome and were blessed by the Pope, some children died on the way to the Holy Land, while others were later sold into slavery, or drowned at sea. Several conflicting accounts exist, and the facts of the situation continue to be a subject of debate among historians. Template:Crusade

The long-standing view

Although the common people held the same strong feelings of piety and religiousness that moved the nobles to take up the Cross in the thirteenth century, they did not have the finances, equipment, or military training to actually go on crusade. The repeated failures of earlier crusades frustrated those who held the hope to recover the True Cross and liberate Jerusalem from the "infidel" Muslims. This frustration led to unusual events in 1212 C.E. in Europe.

The traditional view of the Children's Crusade—depending on the chronicler—is a version of events with similar themes. A boy began preaching, either Stephen in France and/or Nicholas in Germany, claiming that he had been visited by Jesus and told to lead a Crusade to peacefully convert Muslims to Christianity.Through a series of supposed portents and miracles he gained a considerable following, in some accounts as many as 20,000 children. He led his followers southwards towards the Mediterranean Sea, where it is said he believed that the sea would part when he arrived so that he and his followers could march to Jerusalem, but this did not happen. Two merchants gave passage on seven boats to as many of the children as would fit. However, the children were either taken to Tunisia and sold into slavery, or died in a shipwreck on the island of San Pietro (off Sardinia) during a gale. In some accounts, they never even reached the sea before dying or giving up from starvation and exhaustion.

Modern research

Oriflamme banner carried by the Children's Crusade

Modern research has challenged the traditional view, asserting that the Children's Crusade was neither a true Crusade nor made up of an army of children. The Pope did not call for it, nor did he bless it. It was an unsanctioned popular movement, whose beginning and ending are hard to trace.

According to recent research there seem to have been two movements of people in 1212, one in France and the other in Germany. The similarities of the two allowed later chroniclers to lump them together as a single tale.

In the first movement, Nicholas, a ten-year-old shepherd from Germany, led a group across the Alps and into Italy in the early spring of 1212. Hundreds and then thousands of children, adolescents, women, the elderly, the poor, parish clergy, and the occasional thief joined him in his march south. He indeed believed that God would part the waters of the Mediterranean and they would walk across to Jerusalem to convert the Muslims with love. The common folk praised them as "heroes" as they passed through their towns and villages, but the educated clergy criticized them as being "deluded."

The second movement was led by a 12-year-old shepherd boy named Stephen de Cloyes near the village of Châteaudun in Frace, who claimed in June, 1212 that he bore a letter from Jesus for the French king. Stephen had met a pilgrim who asked for bread, and when he received the bread he—who was really Jesus—gave the boy a letter for the king. No one knows the content of the letter, but it is doubted that the king, Phillip II, would want to lead another crusade at that time.

Attracting a crowd of over 30,000, Stephen went to Saint-Denis where he was reportedly seen to work miracles. On the orders of Philip II, and on the advice of clerics of the University of Paris, the crowd was sent home, and most of them went. None of the contemporary sources mentions this crowd heading to Jerusalem.

In August, Nicholas' group reached Lombardy and other port cities. Nicholas himself arrived with a large group at Genoa on August 25. To their great disappointment the sea did not open for them, nor did it did allow them to walk across the waves. Here, many probably returned home, while others remained in Genoa. Some may have marched to Rome, where Pope Innocent III indeed praised their zeal but released them from their supposed vows as crusaders. The fate of Nicholas is unclear. Some sources say that he joined the Fifth Crusade, others reported that he died in Italy.

Wandering poor

Later chroniclers embellished these events into what became known as the Children Crusades. However, research suggests the participants were not primarily children. In the early 1200s, bands of wandering poor were commonplace throughout Europe. These were people displaced by economic changes at the time which forced many poor peasants in northern France and Germany to sell their land. These bands were referred to as pueri (Latin for "boys") in a condescending manner. Such groups were involved in various movements, from the heretical Waldensians to the theologically acceptable Franciscan, to the so-called "children's crusaders."

Another view, held by John Boswell, relates that children were regularly abandoned by their parents. "Abandonment of children—by leaving them, selling them, or consigning them to someone else—was practiced... by parents of all social classes, because of poverty, incest, shame, self-interest, inheritance, or to improve the child's future," Boswell explains. "Most children were rescued and survived due to "the kindness of strangers." This could account for the great numbers of children or young people supposedly wandering throughout Europe, eagerly responding to an "adventure" fueled by religious passion to liberate the Holy Land.

Thus, in 1212, a young French puer named Stephen and a German puer named Nicholas separately began claiming that they each had similar visions of Jesus. This resulted in bands of roving poor being united into a religious protest movement which transformed this forced wandering into a religious journey. The pueri marched, following the Cross and associating themselves with Jesus' biblical journey.

Thirty years later, chroniclers read the accounts of these processions and translated pueri as "children" without understanding the usage. So, the term "Children's Crusade" was born thirty years after the actual events. However, according to researcher Matthew Paris, one of the leaders of the Children's Crusade actually did became "Le Maître de Hongrie," the leader of the Shepherds' Crusade in 1251.

Historiography

Peter Raedts's (1977) analysis is considered the best source to date to show the many issues surrounding the Children's Crusade. According to Raedts, there are only about 50 sources from the period that talk about the Children's Crusade, ranging from a few sentences to half a page. Raedts categorizes the sources into three types depending on when they were written: contemporary sources written by 1220, sources written between 1220 and 1250 when memories of the events may have been first-hand, and sources written after 1250 by authors who received their information second or third generation. Raedts does not consider the sources after 1250 to be authoritative, and of those before 1250, he considers only about 20 to be authoritative. It is only in the later non-authoritative narratives that a "Children's Crusade" is implied by such authors as Beauvais, Roger Bacon, Thomas of Cantimpré, Matthew Paris and others.

Prior to Raedts there had only been a few academic publications researching the Children's Crusade. Most of them either uncritically accepted the validity of relatively late sources. The earliest were by G. de Janssens (1891), a Frenchman, and R. Röhricht (1876), a German. They did analyze the sources, but did not apply this analysis the story itself. German psychiatrist J. F. C. Hecker (1865) did give an original interpretation of the Crusade, regarding is as the result of "diseased religious emotionalism." American medievalist D. C. Munro (1913-14) was the first to provide a sober account of the Children's Crusade without legends. Later, J. E. Hansbery (1938-9) published a correction of Munro's work claiming the Children's Crusade to have been an actual historical Crusade, but it has since been repudiated as being itself based on an unreliable source. P. Alphandery first published his ideas about the Children's Crusade a 1916 article, which was expanded to book form in 1959. He considered the event to be an expression of the medieval "Cult of the Innocents," as a sort of sacrificial rite in which children gave themselves up for the good of Christendom. His sources have also been criticized as biased. Adolf Waas (1956) saw the events as a manifestation of chivalric piety and as a protest against the glorification of the holy war. H. E. Mayer (1960) further developed Alphandery's ideas of the Innocents, saying children were thought to be the chosen people of God because they were the poorest, recognizing the cult of poverty he said that "the Children's Crusade marked both the triumph and the failure of the idea of poverty."

Norman Cohn (1971) saw it as a millennial movement in which the poor tried to escape the misery of their everyday lives. He and Giovanni Miccoli (1961) both noted that the contemporary sources did not portray the participants as children. It was this recognition that undermined earlier interpretations.

Other accounts

Beyond the analytical studies there interpretations and theories about the Children's Crusades ave been put forth.

Norman Zacour in the survey, A History of the Crusades (1962), generally follows Munro's conclusions, and adds that there was a psychological instability of the age, concluding that the Children's Crusade "remains one of a series of social explosions, through which medieval men and women—and children too—found release."

Donald Spoto, in a book about Saint Francis, said monks were motivated to call the participants "children," and not wandering poor, because being poor was considered pious and the Church was embarrassed by its wealth in contrast to the poor. This, according to Spoto, began a literary tradition from which the popular legend of children originated. This idea follows closely with H. E. Mayer.

Church historian Steven Runciman gives an account of the Children's Crusade in his A History of the Crusades, in which he cites Munro's research. Raedts, however, criticizes Runciman's account misunderstanding Munro's basic conclusion.

In the arts

• La Croisade des Enfants (1902), a seldom-performed oratorio by Gabriel Pierné's, featuring a children's chorus, is based on the events of the Children's Crusade.
• The Children's Crusade (circa 1950), children's historical novel by Henry Treece based on the traditional view.
• The Death of the Bishop of Brindisi (1963), opera by Gian-Carlo Menotti, describes a dying bishop's guilt-ridden recollection of the Children's Crusade, during which he questions the purpose and limitations of his own power.
• Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), a novel by Kurt Vonnegut, references this event and uses it as an alternate title.
• Crusade in Jeans (Dutch Kruistocht in spijkerbroek), is a 1973 novel by Dutch author Thea Beckman and a 2006 film adaptation about the Children's Crusade through the eyes of a time traveler.
• An Army of Children (1978), a novel by Evan Rhodes that tells the story of two boys partaking in the Children's Crusade.
• "Children's Crusade" (1985), is a song by Sting that juxtaposes the medieval Children's Crusade with the deaths of English soldiers in World War I and the lives ruined by heroin addiction.
• Lionheart (1987), a little known historical/fantasy film, loosely based on the stories of the Children's Crusade.
• The Children's Crusade (1993)), comic series by Neil Gaiman.
• The Crusade of Innocents (2006), novel by David George, suggests that the Children's Crusade may have been affected by the concurrent crusade against the Cathars in Southern France, and how the two could have met.
• Sylvia (2006), novel by Bryce Courtenay, story loosely based around the Children's Crusade.
• Sea and Sunset, short story by Mishima Yukio.
• Fleeing the Children's Crusade"(2005), novel by Travis Godbold, tells the story of a 20th century Children's Crusade, Nazi Germany's fight against Soviet Bolshevism, and a teenage soldier's experiences in the Waffen SS at the end of World War II.

Notes

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Alphandery, P. La Chrétienté et l'idée de croisade. (French). A. Michel publ., 1995. ISBN 978-2226076298
• Boswell, John. The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance. University of Chicago Press, 1998. ISBN 978-0226067124
• Brundage, James trans. (from "Chronica Regiae Coloniensis Continuatio prima, s.a. 1213, MGH SS XXIV 17-18,") The Crusades: A Documentary History. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1962.
• Cohn, N. The pursuit of the millennium. Pimlico, 1993. ISBN 978-0712656641
• Giles, J.A., transl. Matthew Paris's English History: From 1235 to 1273. Vol. II. Henry G. Hohn, 1853. ASIN B000SIERYY
• Munro, D.C. "The Children's Crusade." American Historical Review, 19:516-24, 1913-14.
• Paris, Matthew. Illustrated Chronicles of Matthew Paris . Sutton Publishers, Ltd. 1987. ISBN 978-0862993047
• Raedts, Peter. "The Children's Crusade of 1212," Journal of Medieval History, vol. 3 1977.
• Runciman, Stephen. A History of the Crusades. 1951. The Children's Crusade. www.historyguide.org. Retrieved August 4, 2007.
• Russell, Frederick. "Children's Crusade," in Dictionary of the Middle Ages, 1989, ISBN 0-684-17024-8
• Waas, A. Geschichte der Kreuzzüge. 1956.
• Zacour, Norman. A History of the Crusades. 1962.

Links

• Chronica Regiae Coloniensis (supposed contemporary source. From the Internet Medieval Sourcebook. www.fordham.edu. Retrieved September 3, 2007.
• The Children's Crusade: Fact or fable?. www.straightdope.com. Retrieved September 3, 2007.

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