In 1212 something special took place in Germany and France. Thousands of children united to go on a crusade to Jerusalem. Almost every Dutch person knows this story thanks to the popular children's book Cruise in Jeans from 1973. That there was once a children's crusade is a myth, however. But a myth that originated in the thirteenth century.
Half a million copies of Thea Beckman's youth novel Crusade in jeans. were sold. It received Dutch and European prizes for children's literature and is still available today, in a 77 e press.
Beckman leaves the 20 e Century boy Dolf with a time machine catapults to the city of Spiers in the year 1212. He ends up among an army of children on a crusade to Jerusalem. The children firmly believe in their mission. They suffer hardships for it, but are misled and almost taken away on slave ships. Dolf thwarts that plan. After this, the children's army is scattered and Dolf goes back to his own time.
A nice story, but unfortunately not entirely true; and not just because time machines don't exist. There was also no children's crusade. Thea Beckman's book fits into a whole series of books, poems, plays and music compositions about this legend:literary echoes of dozens of medieval chronicles that often distorted reality themselves.
From Cologne to Brindisi
It was not a children's crusade, but there was indeed a crusade in 1212. Several chroniclers even considered it the only noteworthy occurrence in that year. The issue was investigated a few years ago by the medievalist Peter Raedts. His analysis of the available sources and reconstruction of the events are broadly undisputed.
There are no eyewitnesses who witnessed the entire journey, but the following is more or less certain:in the spring of 1212, groups of people around Cologne suddenly abandoned their plows and flocks and moved south along the Rhine towards Jerusalem on their own initiative. . According to the chroniclers, they cried that they, simple and poor, were going to liberate the tomb of Christ now that kings and princes had failed in previous crusades.
The "servant" Nicholas, having had a vision that he would split the sea in order to cross with his followers to the Holy Land, took the lead. Along the route, the thousands of pilgrims were given food and drink because the population fervently believed in the divine inspiration of the pilgrims. However, according to the chronicles, the church doubted it.
Many, however, already succumbed on the way. They arrived in Genoa via the Brenner Pass. An eyewitness described the procession as:“about 7,000 men; men, women, servants and maids”. This man writes nothing about Nicholas's prophecy that failed, the path through the sea. However, a core group left the next day, but many stayed behind in Genoa.
Other chroniclers report that pilgrims appeared later in Marseille, Rome and Brindisi. Here they wanted to embark. The bishop there forbade this because he feared that they had been secretly sold to the Muslims. A source reports that some went anyway, were raided by pirates and ended up as slaves.
In the early summer, meanwhile, a crowd had gathered in France, summoned by the shepherd Steven from Chartres. He had had a vision of Christ as a poor pilgrim asking him for bread. Here too religious enthusiasm by the thousands. However, there are no indications that the group actually left for Jerusalem. The French movement was swift and aroused far less sensation and afterthought than the German one.
Rural Proletariat
Crucially, these oldest and most reliable sources mainly use the Latin term 'pueri' use for the pilgrims. Chroniclers one or two generations later who retold the old stories interpreted this as "children":the classical meaning. This gave rise to the legend of a children's crusade. But it is much more likely that it originally meant not an age category, but a social rank. People spoke in the 12 e century of 'pueri' to designate a new population group, a kind of rural proletariat of agricultural labourers, day labourers, beggars and shepherds.
By 1200, this group had grown strongly due to economic and demographic developments. The population growth after about 950 and the revival of trade and the money economy changed the situation in the countryside. Small farmers did not make it and had to sell their land. They rented out to the wealthier farmers as farm labourers, shepherds or handymen. They formed a new group of uprooted poor who roamed around looking for work.
Remarkably, this development was most drastic in northern France and the Rhineland, where according to the sources the crusade movement of 1212 originated. The pilgrims of 1212 were not children, but poor adults. And the fact that they went on a crusade had everything to do with their marginal position.
There had been people's crusades before. Masses led by a charismatic visionary, following an appeal from the Pope, followed the knights to the east.
In their apocalyptic belief that the liberation of Jerusalem heralded the beginning of the end times in which God will deliver the poor out of their misery, they helped the future by murdering demonic opponents along the way, namely 'corrupt' clergy and Jews.
The movement of 1212 fits into this tradition, but also has new elements that explain why these pilgrims caused such a stir and why so many chroniclers found it necessary to report often tendentiously.
First, there had been no real People's Crusade for a century. Secondly, in 1212 the pilgrims did not wait for a papal call but decided to go themselves. Evidently, ecclesiastical practices were not saving grace for them. Third, they were much less obsessed with apocalyptic fantasies. Murders are not reported around this crusade.
Not as second choice
These pilgrims did not wish the end of time, but an end to the series of crusading failures. Confident and full of their sacred task, this is how the pilgrims appear in the eyewitness accounts. The rich princes and knights kept failing to liberate Jerusalem, so they, the poor, had to take over. But not as a second choice:God had chosen them for this task precisely because of their poverty.
This new interpretation of the crusade ideal was used from the end of 12 e century preached by Francis of Assisi and other members of the so-called “poverty movement” that started about 1100 and peaked around 1200. These reformers regarded the wealth of the Church as the seed of its decline. They saw salvation in a return to the simplicity and poverty of the first Christian congregations. The church as well as the crusade had to go back to the origin. Not princely display but the faith of God of the defenseless poor would bring Jerusalem within reach.
It is very understandable that poor people picked up on this ideal. It gave their poverty a golden edge, so to speak. And it also explains why so many chroniclers – mostly monks from prosperous monasteries – were less positive about it. As long as they portrayed the participants in the crusade of 1212 as 'crazy children', they could also dismiss their ideals as thoughtless stupid talk.