page_title: Crusades
section_title: More recent research
hierarchical_section_title: Crusades / Fourth Crusade / Children's Crusade / More recent research
caption_attribution_description: English: The Childrens Crusade Deutsch: Der Kinderkreuzzug
context_page_description: The Crusades were a group of wars over religious views between the Christian and Muslim populations of Europe and West Asia. It started mainly due to a fight for areas thought to be Holy Land. Both Muslims and Christians considered the same lands holy for reasons like Jesus' resurrections and Muhammad visiting there. The eight big crusade expeditions occurred during 1096 to 1291. The Holy Land was still in a place that is very important for the three major monotheistic religions: Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. There are many important religious sites in the Holy Land. This is the land now called Israel.
  Jerusalem, Nazareth, Bethlehem and other religious sites fell under the control of Muslims during the Caliphate of Omar.
  There were many different crusades. The most important and biggest Crusades took place from the 11th century to the 13th century. There were 9 large crusades during this time. They are numbered 1 through 9. There were also many smaller Crusades. Some crusades were even within Europe. The smaller Crusades continued to the 16th century, until the Renaissance and Reformation.
  The word "Crusade" is related to the word "Cross", and means a Christian holy war.
context_section_description: 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 did not 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 travelled 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. In June of that year, the boy said that he had a letter for the king of France from Jesus. He could gather a crowd of over 30,000 and went to Saint-Denis. There 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 elaborated on these events. Recent research suggests those taking part 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. They  associated themselves with Jesus's biblical journey. This, however, was not a prelude to a holy war.
  At that time, chronicles were mostly kept by the Catholic Church. They were written in Latin.
  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, they returned to the foundations of crusading characteristic of Peter the Hermit, and met 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.
caption: The Children's Crusade, by Gustave Doré
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