Children's Crusade Of 1212 Essay

Children’s Crusade of 1212

A lot of people wonder what part children played in the Children's Crusade against the Muslims. Hundreds upon thousands of young children left their work, no matter what it was, to march to the city of Jerusalem. In their fantasy of fighting for their Holy City, many did not realize the dangers of the journey. In fact, so many young people died, that the returning group seemed minuscule. It could have been easily avoided if not for the aggressiveness that was displayed. This event became one of the most tragic times of the medieval era. The Children’s Crusade was unnecessary and thousands of innocent children died or were sold into slavery because of thoughtless actions (Trueman). By definition, the Children’s

Of course, Stephen accepted. Once again, not everything went exactly as planned. There was a storm on their journey, and two of the ships crashed. The five surviving ships kept sailing to where they thought was Palestine, but turned out to be Sardinia, Italy. There they learned that they had been tricked. They were brought there by an agreement with William the Pig, Hugh the Iron, and a Saracen group from Africa. They were then sold into slavery, some taken to the Algerian coast, and others taken to Egypt

He was from Cologne, Germany. A second notable feature is that in this crusade, there were more women participating than the last crusade. The group traveled from Cologne to Rome in order to visit the Pope. To do this, they had to travel through the Alps, in which many died. When Nicholas and all of the other children reached the Pope, they marched in with an intent to have the Pope sanctify the crusade. He did not. Both major rulers, the king and the pope, publicly rejected the twelve-year-old “leaders” of the Children’s Crusades, but the children were stubborn and proceeded anyways (Kreis). In this crusade, children died on the journey because of the cold. Later on, a few of the group members wandered about and found some ships. Nobody knows what happened to the children who went on those ships. The ones who did not go on the vessels attempted the journey back home. Most of them, as expected, died. Not much is known about this crusade compared to the other, but they were both tragic events. This was also unprecedented, especially after the first failed attempt