   #copyright

Children's Crusade

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Military History and War;
Religious disputes

                                     Crusades
   First – People's – German – 1101 – Second – Third – Fourth –
   Albigensian – Children's – Fifth – Sixth – Seventh – Shepherds' –
   Eighth – Ninth – Aragonese – Alexandrian – Nicopolis – Northern –
   Hussite – Varna

   The Children's Crusade is the name given to a variety of fictional and
   factual events in 1212 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 view

   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 on the island of
   San Pietro (off Sardinia) during a gale. 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 research 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 shepherd from Germany, 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 failed to 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 Rhône to Marseille 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" named Stephen de Cloyes
   near the village of Châteaudun who claimed in May 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.
   The Children's Crusade, by Gustave Doré
   Enlarge
   The Children's Crusade, by Gustave Doré

   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 "boys") 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 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.

   According to Matthew Paris, one of the leaders of the Children's
   Crusade became "Le Maître de Hongrie," the leader of the Shepherds'
   Crusade in 1251.

Historiography

Scientific studies

   Prior to Raedts, there had only a few scientific publications
   researching the Children's Crusade. The earliest were by Frenchman G.
   de Janssens (1891) and German R. Röhricht (1876). They analyzed the
   sources but did not analyze the story. American medievalist D. C. Munro
   (1913-14), according to Raedts, provided the best analysis of the
   sources to date and was the first to significantly provide a
   convincingly sober account of the Crusade sans legends. Later, J. E.
   Hansbery (1938-9) published a correction of Munro's work, but it has
   since been discredited as based on an unreliable source. German
   psychiatrist J. F. C. Hecker (1865) did give an original interpretation
   of the crusade, but it was a polemic about "diseased religious
   emotionalism" that has since been discredited.

   P. Alphandery (1916) first published his ideas about the crusade in
   1916 in an article, which was later published in book form in 1959. He
   considered the crusade to be an expression of the medieval cult of the
   Innocents, as a sort of sacrificial rite in which the Innocents gave
   themselves up for the good of Christiandom - however he based his ideas
   on some of the most untrustworthy sources.

   Adolf Waas (1956) saw the Children's Crusade 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 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."

   Giovanni Miccoli (1961) was the first to note that the contemporary
   sources did not portray the participants as children. It was this
   recognition that undermined all other interpretations (except perhaps
   Cohn's).

   Norman Cohn (1971) saw it as a chiliastic movement in which the poor
   tried to escape the misery of their every day lives.

   Peter Raedts 1977 analysis is considered the best source to date to
   show the many issues surrounding the Children's Crusade.

Popular accounts

   Beyond the scientific studies there are many popular versions and
   theories about the Children's Crusades.

   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 the Children's Crusade "remains one
   of a series of social explosions, through which medieval men and women
   - and children too - found release."

   Steven Runciman gives an account of the Children's Crusade in his A
   History of the Crusades Raedts notes that "Although he cites Munro's
   article in his notes, his narrative is so wild that even the
   unsophisticated reader might wonder if he had really understood it".

   Donald Spoto, in a book about Saint Francis, said monks were motivated
   to call them 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.

In the arts

     * Gabriel Pierné's La Croisade des Enfants (1902), a seldom-performed
       oratorio masterpiece featuring a children's chorus, is based on the
       events of the Children's Crusade.
     * Gian-Carlo Menotti's opera The Death of the Bishop of Brindisi
       (1963) 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 traveller.
     * 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.
     * David George's novel The Crusade of Innocents (2006) 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.
     * Bryce Courtenay's novel Sylvia (2006) Fictional story loosely based
       around the Children's Crusade.

   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Crusade"
   This reference article is mainly selected from the English Wikipedia
   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
   of authors and sources) and is available under the GNU Free
   Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.
