This article is part of the Crusades series.

First Crusade

Second Crusade

Third Crusade

Fourth Crusade

Albigensian Crusade

Children's Crusade

Fifth Crusade

Sixth Crusade

Seventh Crusade

Eighth Crusade

Ninth Crusade

Northern Crusades

The Children's Crusade (1212) is the name given to a possibly fictional and curious attempt to 'free' the Holy Land inspired by the 12-year old French boy Stephen de Cloyes. Several conflicting accounts of this event exist, and the facts of the situation continue to be a subject of debate among historians.

One story of the Children's Crusade contends that Stephen de Cloyes began preaching at Saint-Denis, 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, possibly as many as 20,000 children joined him. He led his followers southwards towards Marseille, it is said he believed that the sea would part when he would arrive, so that he and his followers could march to Jerusalem, which did not happen. At Marseille two merchants gave passage on seven boats to as many of the children as would fit. The children were taken to Tunisia and sold into slavery.

Other sources contend that the tale is a union of two smaller movements of children from France and Germany in the early 13th century. Nicholas, a German shepherd boy, is said to have led a group of approximately 20,000 children across the Alps (most of them died from exposure, starvation, kidnapping, murder, etc.) and into Italy. However, their hopes on reaching there never bore fruit, and what few may have reached the Holy Land were most likely sold into slavery and prostitution.

Some historians speculate that the entire crusade is fiction, as there is no real evidence that any such event occurred, in the 13th or in any other century. Research done in the early 1980s indicates that the Children's Crusade began as a misinterpretation of a 1212 religious movement among the landless poor.

In the early 1200s, bands of wandering poor started cropping up throughout Europe. These were folks displaced by economic changes at the time which forced many poor peasants in northern France and Germany to sell off their land. These bands were referred to as pueri (the children) in a condescending manner, in the same spirit as a white person in the 1950s American South might refer to an African American man as "boy".

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' biblical journey.

This, however, was not a prelude to a holy war. At the end of the summer of 1212, the pueri peacefully disbanded and disappeared from history.

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 this time -- the chroniclers assumed that the pueri must have been Crusaders, in their innocence returning to the foundations of Crusading characteristic Peter the Hermit and meeting the same sort of tragic fate.

External links

• Chronica Regiae Coloniensis - a (supposedly) contemporary source
• The Children's Crusade: Fact or fable?

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• The Children's Crusade is the sub-title of Slaughterhouse-Five, a book by Kurt Vonnegut.

• Children's Crusade is also the title of a song on the 1985 album The Dream of the Blue Turtles, by the British musician Sting. The song uses the cultural reference of a "lost generation" in the contexts of World War I and modern-day heroin abuse.