Children Crusade ?! What the heck ?!!

[LeftEyeNine]

I was playing again my favorite TW today, Medieval Total War (unbeatable all-time, 3D sucks..). I generally used to ignore the notifications about religious incidents in the medieval times. However this time, I catched up them all.

One of them was about the persuasion of children to Crusades, ending most of their lives as slavery in the port of Venice. More information please on this stunning subject..

Thanks in advance..

[KukriKhan]

Here

Kind of an oversimplified version of the stories of the 2 (German and French) Childrens Crusades of 1212.

[Viking]

Thanks for the info Kukri.

What`s so funny about this is that I actually saw this feature for the first time in MTW for just a few hours ago, and knew by only reading the title what this thread was all about. Weird..

[LeftEyeNine]

How wise can a shepherd be to gather 30000 children and make them flock after him ?? I still can not think of 30.000 young boys gathered and marching somewhere.. Is it a proved reality ?

* Thanks for the great link, Kukri..

[master of the puppets]

ever heard of the "peid piper"

minstril wanders into rat infested town and wants to help people. so makes rats follow him out of town and into river where they drown. demands payment from topwnsfolk but in greed mayor denies once, minstril returns and demands again mayor turns him away and he threatens a horrible fate if they do not pay. demands 1 more time but when he is not payed he plays his flute and marches all they children out of the town. they are never seen again.

this fairy tale is based on the crusade. monks would go to towns and cause supposed miracles, and he would rally the men of the town to go on the crusade and later many children tried a similar crusade. follow the monks out of town and onto the long journey leading to enevitable enslavment.

[edyzmedieval]

I doubt there was a Children Crusade.....

In the historical books and other original manuscripts, everywhere you notice the word "puer" which means kid. But many historians believe that "puer" had another meaning in those times.

So, I doubt there was a crusade of such kind.

[Bartix]

Here

Kind of an oversimplified version of the stories of the 2 (German and French) Childrens Crusades of 1212.

As a priest, it is unlikely that he would have knowingly told a lie

Very amusing, I think.

[Meneldil]

This Children Crusade is probably a myth. As edyz said, 'puer' could mean a lot of things, including young knight, homeless people, etc.

[Colovion]

The Children's Crusades may have included Children, but they were largely just peasants and non-military folk which were attempting to get to the Holy Land.

Perhaps their intelligence at heeding the call is indicative of the journey's title.

[LeftEyeNine]

Well, actually, these things you say sound more rational to me..

[Colovion]

upon further review, the wiki has some interesting insights:

link

The Children's Crusade is the name given to a variety of fictional and factual events in 1212 AD that combine some or all of these elements: visions by a boy, children marching to south Italy, an attempt to free the Holy Land, and children being sold into slavery. Several conflicting accounts exist, and the facts of the situation continue to be a subject of debate among historians.

The Long Standing Story

The long-standing view of the Children's Crusade is some version of events with similar themes. A boy began preaching in either France or Germany claiming that he had been visited by Jesus and told to lead the next Crusade. Through a series of supposed portents and miracles he gained a considerable following, including possibly 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. The children were either taken to Tunisia and sold into slavery, or died in a shipwreck. In some accounts they never reached the sea before dying or giving up from starvation and exhaustion. Scholarship has shown this long standing view to be more legend than fact.

Modern Research

According to more recent research1 there seems to have been two movements of people in 1212 in France and Germany. The similarities of the two allowed later chroniclers to lump them together as a single tale.

In the first movement Nicholas, a German shepherd, led a group across the Alps and into Italy in the early spring of 1212. About 7,000 arrived in Genoa in late August. However, their plans didn't bear fruit when the waters did not part as promised and the band broke up. Some left for home, others may have gone to Rome, while still others may have traveled down the Rhone to Marseilles where they were probably sold into slavery. Few returned home and none reached the Holy Land.

The second movement was led by a "shepherd boy"2 named Stephen de Cloyes near the village of Châteaudun who claimed in June that he bore a letter for the king of France from Jesus. Attracting a crowd of over 30,000 he went to Saint-Denis where he was seen to work miracles. On the orders of Philip II, on the advice of the University of Paris, the crowd was sent home, and most of them went. None of the contemporary sources mentions plans of the crowd to go to Jerusalem.

Later chroniclers embellished these events. Recent research suggests the participants were not children, at least not the very young. In the early 1200s, bands of wandering poor started cropping up 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 "children") in a condescending manner, in much the same way that people from rural areas in the United States are called "country boys."

In 1212, a young French puer named Stephen and a German puer named Nicholas separately began claiming that they had each had similar visions of Jesus. This resulted in these bands of roving poor being united into a religious protest movement which transformed (in their minds) this forced wandering into a religious journey. The pueri marched, following the Cross and associating themselves with Jesus's biblical journey. This, however, was not a prelude to a holy war.

Thirty years later, chroniclers read the accounts of these processions and translated pueri as "children" without understanding the usage. So, the Children's Crusade was born. The resulting story illustrates how ingrained the concept of Crusading was in the people of that time— the chroniclers assumed that the pueri must have been Crusaders, in their innocence returning to the foundations of crusading characteristic of Peter the Hermit, and meeting the same sort of tragic fate.

[LeftEyeNine]

Thank you very much, Coloviol.. Now everything's clear..