The beginning of the 13th century is not the calmest time in the history of Europe. Many still dreamed of the return of the lost Holy Sepulcher, but during the IV Crusade, it was not Jerusalem that was captured, but Orthodox Constantinople. Soon the armies of the crusaders will again go to the East and suffer another defeat in Palestine and Egypt. In 1209, the Albigensian Wars began, one of the consequences of which was the creation of the papal Inquisition in 1215. Livonia was conquered by the Swordsmen. Nicaea fought against the Seljuks and the Latin Empire.
In the year of interest to us in 1212, the Czech Republic received the "Golden Sicilian Bull" and became a kingdom, Vsevolod the Big Nest died in Russia, the kings of Castile, Aragon and Navarre defeated the army of the Caliph of Cordoba at Las Navas de Tolos. And at the same time, some absolutely incredible events are taking place, which is difficult to believe, but still have to. We are talking about the so-called Crusades of children, which are mentioned in 50 quite serious sources (of which 20 are reports of contemporary chroniclers). All descriptions are extremely short: either these strange adventures were not given much importance, or even then they were perceived as an absurd incident that should be ashamed of.
Gustave Dore, Children's Crusade
The appearance of the "hero"
It all began in May 1212, when an unremarkable shepherd boy named either Etienne or Stephen met with a monk returning from Palestine. In exchange for a piece of bread, the stranger gave the boy some incomprehensible scroll, called himself Christ, and ordered him, having gathered an army of innocent children, to go with it to Palestine in order to free the Holy Sepulcher. At least, this is how Etienne-Stephen himself told about those events - at first he was confused and contradicted himself, but then he entered the role and spoke without hesitation. Thirty years later, one of the chroniclers wrote that Stephen was "an early matured villain and a breeding ground for all vices." But this evidence cannot be considered objective - after all, at that time the deplorable results of the adventure organized by this teenager were already known. And it is unlikely that Etienne-Stephen's activities would have had such a success if he had such a dubious reputation in the vicinity. And the success of his preaching was simply deafening - not only among children, but also among adults. To the court of the French king Philip Augustus at the abbey of Saint-Denis, 12-year-old Stephen came not alone, but at the head of a numerous religious procession.
“The knights and adults did not manage to free Jerusalem because they went there with dirty thoughts. We are children and we are clean. God has departed from grown-up people mired in sins, but he will open the sea waters on the way to the Holy Land in front of children of pure soul”, - Stephen declared to the king.
Young crusaders, he said, did not need shields, swords and spears, for their souls are sinless and the power of Jesus' love is with them.
Pope Innocent III initially supported this dubious initiative, stating:
"These children serve as a reproach to us adults: while we sleep, they joyfully stand up for the Holy Land."
Pope Innocent III, lifetime portrait, fresco, Subiaco monastery, Italy
Soon he will repent of this, but it will be too late, and the moral responsibility for the death and mutilated fate of tens of thousands of children will forever remain with him. But Philip II hesitated.
Philip II August
A man of his time, he was also inclined to believe in all kinds of signs and miracles of God. But Philip was the king of not the smallest state and a hardened pragmatist, his common sense opposed participation in this more than dubious adventure. He knew well about the power of money and the power of professional armies, but the power of Jesus' love … It was customary to hear these words in a sermon in a church, but to seriously count on the fact that the Saracens, who had repeatedly defeated the knightly armies of Europe, would suddenly surrender to unarmed children, was, to put it mildly, naive. He eventually turned to the University of Paris for advice. The professors of this educational institution showed prudence, rare for those times, deciding: the children should be sent home, for this whole trip was an idea of Satan. And then something happened that no one expected: the shepherd from Cloix refused to obey his king, announcing the gathering of new crusaders in Vendome. And Stephen's popularity was already such that the king did not dare to oppose him, fearing a riot.
Stephen's sermon
Matthew Paris, an English chronicler, wrote of Stephen-Etienne:
“As soon as peers see him or hear how they followed him in countless numbers, finding themselves in the networks of devilish intrigues and singing in imitation of their mentor, they leave their fathers and mothers, nurses and all their friends, and, most surprisingly, they could not stop neither the bars, nor the persuasion of the parents."
Moreover, hysteria turned out to be contagious: other "prophets" from 8 to 12 years old began to appear in different cities and villages, who claimed to be sent by Stephen. Against the background of general insanity, Stephen himself and some of his followers even "healed the possessed." Processions with the singing of psalms were organized under their leadership. The participants of the campaign dressed in simple gray shirts and short pants, as a headdress - beret. A cross was sewn on the chest of fabric of different colors - red, green or black. They performed under the banner of St. Dionysius (Oriflamme). Among these children were girls disguised as boys.
Participants in the Children's Crusade
The Crusades of 1212: "Children's" in Name Only?
However, it should immediately be said that the "children's crusades" were not entirely and not entirely childish. Back in 1961, Giovanni Mikolli noticed that the Latin word pueri ("boys") was used at that time to refer to commoners, regardless of their age. And Peter Reds in 1971 divided all the sources, which narrate the events of the 1212 campaign into three groups. The first included texts written around 1220, their authors were contemporaries of the events and therefore these testimonies are of particular value. In the second - written between 1220 and 1250: their authors could also be contemporaries, or - use eyewitness accounts. And, finally, the texts written after 1250. And it immediately became clear that the "children's" campaigns are called "children's" only in the writings of the authors of the third group.
Thus, it can be argued that this campaign became a kind of repetition of the Crusade of the poor peasants in 1095, and the boy Stephen was the "reincarnation" of Peter of Amiens.
Stephen and his crusaders
But, unlike the events of 1095, in 1212 a huge number of children of both sexes really went on the Crusade. The total number of "crusaders" in France, according to the calculations of historians, was about 30,000 people. Among the adults who went on a hike with their children, according to their contemporaries, there were monks whose goal was to "plunder to their hearts and pray enough", "elders who fell into their second childhood", and poor people who went "not for Jesus, but for the sake of bread bite. ". In addition, there were many criminals who were hiding from justice and hoping to “combine business with pleasure”: to rob and prey in the name of Christ, while receiving a “pass to heaven” and forgiveness of all sins. Among these crusaders were impoverished nobles, many of whom decided to go on a campaign to hide from creditors. There were also the younger sons of noble families, who were immediately surrounded by professional swindlers of all stripes, sensing the possibility of profit, and prostitutes (yes, there were also many “harlots” in this strange army). It can be assumed that children were needed only at the first stage of the campaign: so that the sea parted, the walls of the fortresses collapsed and the Saracens who fell into madness obediently put their necks under the blows of Christian swords. And then boring things were to follow and children were completely uninteresting: the division of booty and land, the distribution of posts and titles, the solution of the "Islamic question" on the newly acquired lands. And adults, presumably, unlike children, were armed and ready to work with swords a little if necessary - so as not to distract the wonderworker who led them from the main and main task. In this motley crowd, Stephen-Etienne was revered almost as a saint; he set off in a brightly painted carriage under a canopy, escorted by young men from the most "noble" families.
Stefan at the beginning of the hike
Meanwhile in Germany
Similar events unfolded at this time in Germany. When rumors of the "wonderful shepherd boy" Stephen reached the banks of the Rhine, an unnamed shoemaker from Trier (a contemporary monk called him "a tricky fool") sent his 10-year-old son Nicholas to preach at the Tomb of the Three Wise Men in Cologne. Some authors argue that Nicholas was mentally disabled, almost a holy fool, blindly fulfilling the will of his greedy parent. Unlike the disinterested (at least at first) boy Stefan, the pragmatic adult German immediately organized a collection of donations, most of which he sent into his own pocket without hesitation. Perhaps he intended to limit himself to this, but the situation quickly got out of control: before Nicholas and his dad had time to look back, they had 20 to 40 thousand "crusaders" behind them, who still had to be taken to Jerusalem. Moreover, they set out on a campaign even earlier than their French peers - at the end of June 1212. Unlike the hesitant French king Philip, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II immediately reacted sharply negatively to this venture, banning the propaganda of a new Crusade, and thus saved many children - only natives of the Rhine regions closest to Cologne took part in this adventure. But there were more than enough of them. It is curious that the motives of the organizers of the French and German campaigns turned out to be completely different. Stephen spoke of the need to free the Holy Sepulcher and promised his followers the help of angels with fiery swords, Nicholas called for revenge for the dead German crusaders.
Children's Crusades Map
The huge "army" that set out from Cologne was later divided into two columns. The first, led by Nicholas himself, moved south along the Rhine through Western Swabia and Burgundy. The second column, headed by another, unnamed, young preacher, went to the Mediterranean Sea through Franconia and Swabia. Of course, the campaign was extremely poorly prepared, many of its participants did not think about warm clothes, and food supplies soon ran out. The inhabitants of the lands through which the "crusaders" passed, fearing for their children, whom these strange pilgrims called with them, were unfriendly and aggressive.
Illustration from the book "Stories of Other Lands" by Arthur Guy Terry
As a result, only about half of those who left Cologne managed to reach the foothills of the Alps: the least persistent and the most prudent lagged behind and returned home, remained in the cities and villages they liked. There were many sick and dead along the way. The rest blindly followed their young leader, not even suspecting what awaited them ahead.
Children's crusade
The main difficulties awaited the "crusaders" during the passage through the Alps: the survivors claimed that dozens, if not hundreds of their comrades died every day, and there was not even the strength to bury them. And only now, when the German pilgrims covered the mountain roads in the Alps with their bodies, did the French "crusaders" set off.
The fate of the French "crusaders"
The path of Stephen's army passed through the territory of his native France and turned out to be much easier. As a result, the French were ahead of the Germans: a month later they came to Marseille and saw the Mediterranean Sea, which, despite the sincere prayers daily offered by the pilgrims entering the water, did not part before them.
A still from the film "The Crusade in Jeans", 2006 (about a modern boy who got in 1212)
Help was offered by two merchants - Hugo Ferreus ("Iron") and William Porkus ("Pig"), who provided 7 ships for further travel. Two ships crashed on the rocks of the island of St. Peter near Sardinia - fishermen found hundreds of corpses in this place. These remains were buried only 20 years later, the church of the New Immaculate Infants was built on the common grave, which stood for almost three centuries, but then was abandoned, and now its location is not even known. Five other ships safely reached the other coast, but did not come to Palestine, but to Algeria: it turned out that the "compassionate" Marseilles merchants had sold the pilgrims in advance - European girls were highly valued in harems, and boys were to become slaves. But the supply exceeded demand, and therefore some of the children and adults who were not sold at the local bazaar were sent to the markets of Alexandria. There Sultan Malek Kamel, also known as Safadin, bought four hundred monks and priests: 399 of them spent the rest of their lives translating Latin texts into Arabic. But one in 1230 was able to return to Europe and told about the sad end of this adventure. According to him, at that time there were about 700 Frenchmen in Cairo, who had sailed from Marseille as children. There they ended their lives, no one showed interest in their fate, they did not even try to redeem them.
But not all of them were bought in Egypt either, and therefore several hundred French "crusaders" nevertheless saw Palestine - on their way to Baghdad, where the last of them were sold. According to one of the sources, the local caliph offered them freedom in exchange for converting to Islam, only 18 of them refused, who were sold into slavery and ended their lives as slaves in the fields.
Germanic "crusaders" in Italy
But what happened to the German "children" (regardless of their age)? As we remember, only half of them managed to reach the Alps, only a third of the remaining pilgrims managed to pass through the Alps. In Italy, they were met with extremely hostility, the gates of cities were closed in front of them, alms were denied, boys were beaten, girls were raped. From two to three thousand people from the first column, including Nicholas, still managed to reach Genoa.
The Republic of St. George needed working hands, and several hundred people remained in this city forever, but the bulk of the "crusaders" continued their campaign. The Pisa authorities allocated them two ships, on which some of the pilgrims were sent to Palestine - and disappeared there without a trace. It is unlikely that their fate was better than that of those who remained in Italy. Some of the children from this column nevertheless reached Rome, where Pope Innocent III, horrified at their sight, ordered them to return home. At the same time, he made them kiss the cross in the fact that "having come to a perfect age," they would end the interrupted crusade. The remains of the column scattered across Italy, and only a few of these pilgrims returned to Germany - the only ones of all.
The second column reached Milan, which fifty years ago was plundered by the troops of Friedrich Barbarossa - a more inhospitable city for the German pilgrims was hard to imagine. It was said that they were poisoned by dogs there, like animals. Along the coast of the Adriatic Sea, they reached Brindisi. Southern Italy at that time was suffering from a drought that caused an unprecedented famine (local chroniclers even reported cases of cannibalism), it is easy to imagine how the German beggars were treated there. However, there is information that the matter was not limited to begging - gangs of "pilgrims" hunted for theft, and the most desperate even attacked villages and plundered them mercilessly. Local peasants, in turn, killed everyone they could catch. Bishop Brindisi tried to get rid of the uninvited "crusaders" by putting some in some fragile boats - they sank in sight of the city port. The fate of the rest was dire. The surviving girls were forced, like many of their peers from the first column, to become prostitutes - after another 20 years, visitors were surprised at the huge number of blondes in brothels in Italy. The boys were even less fortunate - many died of hunger, others actually became powerless slaves forced to work for a piece of bread.
The inglorious end of the chieftains of the campaigns
The fate of the leaders of this campaign was also sad. After the pilgrims were loaded onto ships in Marseilles, the name of Stephen disappears from the chronicles - their authors since that time know nothing about him. Perhaps fate was merciful to him, and he died on one of the ships that crashed near Sardinia. But perhaps he had to endure the shock and humiliation of the slave markets of North Africa. Did his psyche endure this test? God knows. In any case, he deserved all this - unlike thousands of children, perhaps unwittingly, but deceived by him. Nicholas disappeared in Genoa: either he died, or, having lost his faith, left his "army" and was lost in the city. Or perhaps the angry pilgrims themselves drove him out. In any case, from that time on, he no longer led the crusaders, which was so selflessly believed in him both in Cologne and on the way through the Alps. The third, who remained forever unnamed, the minor leader of the German crusaders, apparently died in the Alpine mountains, never reaching Italy.
Afterword
The most striking thing is that 72 years later the story of the mass exodus of children was repeated in the unfortunate German city of Hameln (Hameln). Then 130 local children left the house and disappeared. It was this incident that became the basis of the famous legend of the Pied Piper. But this mysterious incident will be discussed in the next article.
