The Children’s Crusade

In the Rhineland, a boy called Nicholas heard of Stephen’s preaching and began himself to preach the same message in front of the shrine of the Three Kings in Cologne. However, his message was that instead of force, the Germans would achieve their aim by talking to the infidel. Within a few weeks an army of German children gathered in Cologne. The German children were a little older than the French and there were more girls in the group. There were also more boys from the nobility and a number of vagabonds and prostitutes.

The children split into two groups. Nicholas led the first party of twenty thousand children along the Rhine and through Switzerland. They crossed the Alps by Mount Cenis. The children had an arduous journey and many died. Less than a third of those who had set off arrived at Genoa at the end of August. The Genoese authorities, suspecting a German plot, would only allow them to stay for one night but said that any who wanted to stay permanently could. The next morning the sea, as it hadn’t for the French, didn’t part. Many of the disappointed children accepted the Genoese offer but Nicholas and a greater number continued their journey expecting the sea to open elsewhere. When they reached Pisa, two ships bound for Palestine offered to take several of the children. Nothing further is known of those who went with the ships.

Nicholas, still believing his miracle would happen, carried on to Rome. Pope Innocent was greatly moved by the piety but embarrassed by their folly. He told them to return home and wait until they had grown up and could fight for the Cross. The Children’s Crusade was never officially a true crusade as the pope did not bless it. The Catholic Church did nothing to stop the Children’s Crusade even though it knew it was doomed to failure. Was it because the Church believed that the kings and emperors would be shamed by the actions of the children and start a proper crusade to capture Jerusalem.

There is little known about the return journey. The girls especially could not face the difficult journey home and stayed in Italy. Only a few of the children got back to the Rhineland but Nicholas was probably not one of them. The parents of the children who had died insisted that his father, who had encouraged Nicholas, be arrested and he was taken and hung.

The second German group were no more fortunate. They faced great hardship on their journey and finally reached the sea at Ancona. When the sea failed to divide, they moved on to Brindisi. Here a few were given passage on ships sailing to Palestine but the rest began their journey home though only a tiny number returned.

In 1230, a priest arrived in France from the East. He had been one of the priests on Stephen’s Crusade and had travelled with them to Marseille and embarked with them on the ships. They had run into bad weather two days out and two of the ships were wrecked and all the passengers drowned. The surviving ships soon found themselves surrounded by a Saracen squadron from Africa, where they were told they had been sold into captivity. Some of them were taken to Algeria and spent the rest of their lives there in captivity. Others were taken to Egypt and sold to the governor at Alexandria to work on his estates. The priest said that seven hundred of them were still living there.

A small group were taken to Baghdad and eighteen of them were martyred for refusing to accept Islam. The luckier ones, like the priests, who were literate were bought by the governor of Egypt as interpreters, teachers and secretaries and did not try to convert them. These slaves were kept in Cairo quite comfortably. Eventually this one priest was released and allowed to return to France. After he had told the parents all he could he disappeared into obscurity.

Several accounts say that the children were deceived into boarding the ships the believed were going to take them to the Holy Land. The truth is probably that they were sold into slavery before they had even set out. Apart from the particular wickedness of the situation, this is very similar to other instances of child slave trading.

A later story says that the two merchants from Marseille were the same two who were hanged a few years later for attempting to kidnap the Emperor Frederick for the Saracens.