The Glory of the Crusades (29 page)

425
Steven Runciman,
A History of the Crusades
, iii (Cambridge: 1951–1953), 130, in Tyerman,
God’s War
, 495.

426
Tyerman,
God’s War
, 553.

427
Phillips,
The Fourth Crusade
, 311.

428
Queller and Madden,
The Fourth Crusade
, 198.

429
John Paul II, “Welcome Address to the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I,” 3.
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_
ii/speeches/2004/june/documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_20040629_bartholomew-i_en.html
. Accessed November 1, 2013.

430
Ibid.

431
1 Cor 4:5.

432
John Paul II, “Welcome Address to the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I,” 3.
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_
ii/speeches/2004/june/documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_20040629_bartholomew-i_en.html
. Accessed November 1, 2013.

7

A Saint and a Sinner

He
[St. Francis of Assisi]
fought in the Crusade, in which he and he alone emerged the victor”

Arnaldo Fortini
433

His
[Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II]
conversation reveals that he does not believe in the Christian religion. When he spoke of it, it was to ridicule it.

Ibn al-Djusi
434

In early thirteenth-century Italy, the political environment among the various towns and cities was delicate and tense. When this situation turned into open warfare between the cities of Perugia and Assisi, many young men on both sides rushed to arms. The Battle of Collestrada ended in disaster for the smaller city of Assisi, with most of its forces captured by the Perugians. Among the captives was a twenty-year-old man from a wealthy Assisi family who had joined the fight with dreams of glory and honor. His name was Giovanni di Bernardone, called “Francesco” (Francis) by his father.
435

Francis suffered for a long year in a Perugian prison until he was finally released when his father paid a significant ransom. Several years later, Francis was traveling through the countryside near Assisi when he came upon an abandoned, dilapidated old church dedicated to the great eleventh-century saint Peter Damien. The young soldier knelt before the large painted crucifix to pray. During his prayer, Francis witnessed a miracle as the image of Christ came to life and instructed him, “Go, repair my house, which, as you see, is falling completely to ruin.”
436

Initially Francis believed the imperative from Christ concerned the specific church of Peter Damien, but the Lord’s plan was much greater. Francis spent time in prayer and finally came to the decision to renounce his family wealth in order to serve Christ completely by begging alms for his existence. This radical approach to holiness soon attracted others, and within five short years of his dramatic encounter in San Damiano, Pope Innocent III recognized his followers in a religious order known as the Order of Friars Minor, or the “Franciscans.”

St. Francis saw the need to evangelize those arrayed against Christendom, especially Muslims. Only two years after the papal approval of his religious order, the holy friar and several companions decided to risk martyrdom by preaching the gospel to Muslims in the Holy Land. However, their ship ran into bad weather, and they were forced to return home. Undaunted by this setback, Francis once more planned an expedition to North Africa. This time he walked to Spain in the hopes of seeking transport, but became ill and once more was forced to cancel his plans. It would take several more years before the holy friar from Assisi could fulfill his desire to preach the gospel to the adherents of Islam, and it was the occasion of another major Crusade that provided the opportunity.

The “Children’s Crusade”

The same century that witnessed the arrival of the holy man of Assisi and his brown-robed companions also gave birth to another movement motivated by deep piety. What history records as the “Children’s Crusade” occurred “at a time when Crusading fervor gripped every level of European society . . . [it] sprang to life in an era of extraordinary religious creativity.”
437
Often cited by critics to invalidate the Crusades, the so-called Children’s Crusade evokes images of toddlers and small children leaving their homes enthralled with the misguided and almost perverse prospect of participating in the grand adventure of military campaigns to the Holy Land. In a sense, the episode of the Children’s Crusade serves as an icon of modern reactions toward the entire Crusading movement. Today’s understanding of the Children’s Crusade and the Crusades in general is guided more by “mythistory” than actual history.

The term itself is a misnomer, for the event involved neither an army of children nor a Crusade. In essence the Children’s Crusade was an urban migration of young people who came from among the poor of society. Their poverty was not the reason for their migration;
438
rather, it came about through their adherence to the mainstream and popular acceptance of the Crusading movement. The participants of the Children’s Crusade were “shepherds, ploughmen, carters, agricultural workers, rural artisans [who were] without a settled stake in the land or community, rootless and mobile.”
439
Although young people were the primary (though not sole) participants, they were not children but rather teenagers and young adults. The movement was neither an armed pilgrimage (the participants carried no weapons) nor sanctioned by the Church, so it was not properly a Crusade. The Church showed little interest either positively or negatively in this youth movement. There were no condemnations, but no public pronouncements of support either.

What is known for certain about the misnamed Children’s Crusade is that between Easter and Pentecost of 1212 young people in the Chartrain region of France (part of the Ile-de-France area near Paris), motivated by religious fervor, took the cross. The specific birthplace of the movement can be traced to the town of Chartres, which was an important religious and educational center in the thirteenth century. Chartres was not only a center of religious devotion but was also an area that specially embraced the Crusading movement. The Chartrain was a major recruiting area for the First Crusade and many of its famous citizens participated in that inaugural event, including Count Stephen of Blois and Fulcher, the First Crusade chronicler. Another reason for the launch of the Children’s Crusade may have centered on the failure of the nobility to achieve Crusade objectives, leading people to believe that the “failure of the experienced, rich and proud was to be redeemed by the innocent, pure and humble.”
440

The Leader

Motivated by the general Crusading fervor present in their region, young people and some older men of Chartres began their “itinerant processional” in the spring of 1212.
441
The group carried the typical items of religious processions: banners, candles, crosses, and censers, singing songs with Crusading themes, specifically asking the Lord God to “raise up Christendom!” and to “return to us the True Cross!”
442
The movement grew in strength and numbers when a charismatic youth from Cloyes, a town thirty-five miles south of Chartres, became the
de
facto
leader of the movement.

Stephen of Cloyes was a shepherd, a profession that medieval spirituality saw as pure and innocent. Stephen believed the Lord Jesus had appeared to him, giving him letters to be delivered to King Philip II Augustus. His divine mission became the specific objective of the youth in the Children’s Crusade and attracted more followers, perhaps as many as 30,000.
443
Stephen and his merry band eventually reached Paris, ninety miles away from Chartres. There they made known their desire to see King Philip to deliver the letters allegedly given to Stephen by the Lord.

The king did not meet the enthusiastic group of young people, but on June 24, 1212, he made known through his officials his command for them to return home to their families. With this kingly imperative, the story of Stephen of Cloyes and the Children’s Crusade in France comes to an end. Though disappointed by the king’s response, many of the French youth complied, but others ignored the command and continued their procession eastward toward the Rhineland.

The remnant of the French youth movement crossed the Rhine and gathered new members from among the German youth of the Rhineland. Unlike the French movement, which mostly contained young adults, the Rhineland expedition included a wide cross-section of society from urban workers to the elderly to mothers and infants and even entire families. What linked both the French and German movements was the complete absence of armed warriors or clergy. The Rhineland movement, just like the French one, began in a city well known as a pilgrimage site: Cologne, the largest and wealthiest German city in the thirteenth century, and one of four major pilgrimage destinations in Christendom.

Nicholas of Cologne

Just as the French element of the “Children’s Crusade” grew in numbers due to the charismatic leadership of Stephen of Cloyes, so too did the Rhineland movement from the leadership of Nicholas of Cologne. There is nothing known for certain about Nicholas’s background or motivations for leading the Rhineland element of the Children’s Crusade, but it is well accepted that he was a pious man who attracted thousands of people, perhaps as many as 7,000, to join him in taking the cross on an expedition to liberate Jerusalem.
444
Nicholas’s objective was to march to the sea to find transport to the Holy Land, and so he led the youth of the Rhineland across the Alps and into Italy in late July 1212.

Once in Italy, initial enthusiasm waned with the weariness of travel and the recognition of reality. As a result, many of Nicholas’s followers decided to end their participation by settling in Genoa, while others immigrated to Pisa. Still others, perhaps the remaining French element, left Italy for Marseilles where they hoped to find transport to the Holy Land. Instead, immoral merchants duped them into boarding ships bound for Alexandria where some were drowned in shipwrecks and others were sold into slavery.
445
The remaining youth went to Rome where they asked Innocent III to release them from their Crusade vow. Those younger than fourteen and the elderly were granted their request, but participants not in those categories were still held to their vow.
446
Nicholas was last sighted in Brindisi looking for transport to the Holy Land. It is possible that he fulfilled his Crusade vow by joining the Fifth Crusade and fighting in the Egyptian campaign of 1218–1221.
447

The Legacy of the Children’s Crusade

The Children’s Crusade was the first, but not the last, of the “popular” Crusades, or those undertaken by the non-noble or military classes. A generation after the Children’s Crusade, Christendom was witness to the Shepherd’s Crusade (in 1251, with another one in 1320). Unlike the Children’s Crusade, the other popular Crusades would be marked by violence as the participants attacked Jews and the clergy.

Despite its non-violent and deeply pious record, the assessment of the Children’s Crusade by contemporary writers was quite negative. The main criticism was that the movement amounted to nothing, because as one chronicler suggested, “it was founded upon nothing.”
448
Another chronicler focused on the fate of the participants, who “were ruined, died, or returned.”
449
Perhaps the criticisms were harsh because medieval people wanted to believe in the youth movement or wanted to believe that the pure and humble of heart could indeed succeed where the rich and prideful had failed. Crusade failures were looked upon harshly because medieval people cared deeply about the Holy Land.

The mythistory of the Children’s Crusade grew in the centuries after the movement as fourteenth-century chronicles recounted the event and added new fictitious and salacious details. Later chronicles maintained the mythistory while adding their own twists to the story; for example, the sixteenth-century German author, Johannes Bailius Herold (1514–1567) posited the outlandish tale that many of the “Children’s Crusaders” were noble girls disguised as boys.
450
Pietro Bizzarri added the bizarre twist that the children believed the Mediterranean Sea would part so they could walk to Jerusalem dry-shod.
451
The mythistory of the “Children’s Crusade” reached its height during the Enlightenment in the works of Voltaire who implicated the clergy and teachers of the youth in their ultimate demise: