Children's Crusades. Children's Crusade Children's Crusade 1212

While digging on the Internet I found an interesting article. Or rather, this is an essay by a 4th year student at Smolensk Pedagogical University, Kupchenko Konstantin. While reading about the Crusades, I came across a mention of the Children's Crusade. But I didn’t even suspect that everything was so terrible!!! Read to the end, don't be afraid of the volume.

Children's Crusade. How it all began

Gustave Dore's Children's Crusade

Introduction

« It happened right after Easter. Before we even waited for Trinity, thousands of youths set off on their journey, leaving their jobs and their homes. Some of them were barely born and were only in their sixth year. For others, it was time to choose a bride for themselves; they chose feat and glory in Christ. They forgot the worries entrusted to them. They left the plow with which they had recently blasted the ground; they let go of the wheelbarrow that was weighing them down; they left the sheep, next to which they fought against the wolves, and thought about other adversaries, strong in the Mohammedan heresy... Parents, brothers and sisters, friends stubbornly persuaded them, but the firmness of the ascetics was unshakable. Having laid the cross on themselves and rallied under their banners, they moved towards Jerusalem... The whole world called them madmen, but they moved forward».

This is roughly how medieval sources tell the story of the event that shook up the entire Christian community in 1212. In the hot, dry summer of 1212, an event occurred that is known as the Children’s Crusade.

Chroniclers of the 13th century described in detail feudal quarrels and bloody wars, but did not pay close attention to this tragic page of the Middle Ages.

Children's campaigns are mentioned (sometimes briefly, in one or two lines, sometimes devoting half a page to their description) by over 50 medieval authors; Of these, only more than 20 are trustworthy, since they either saw the young crusaders with their own eyes. And the information from these authors is very fragmentary. Here, for example, is one of the references to the children’s crusade in a medieval chronicle:

"Called the Children's Crusade, 1212"

« Children of both sexes, boys and girls, and not only small children, but also adults, married women and girls went on this expedition - they all came in crowds with empty wallets, flooding not only all of Germany, but also the country of the Gauls and Burgundy. Neither friends nor relatives could in any way keep them at home: they resorted to any tricks to get on the road. Things got to the point that everywhere, in villages and right in the fields, people left their guns, throwing down even those they had in their hands, and joined the procession. Many people, seeing this as a sign of true piety, filled with the Spirit of God, hastened to supply the wanderers with everything they needed, distributing food and everything they needed. The clergy and some others who had a more sound judgment and denounced this walk were fiercely rebuffed by the laity, reproaching them for unbelief and claiming that they opposed this act more out of envy and stinginess than for the sake of truth and justice. Meanwhile, any work begun without proper testing by reason and without the support of wise discussion never leads to anything good. And so, when these crazy crowds entered the lands of Italy, they scattered in different directions and scattered throughout the cities and villages, and many of them fell into slavery to the local residents. Some, as they say, reached the sea, and there, trusting in the crafty shipmen, they allowed themselves to be taken to other overseas countries. Those who continued the campaign, having reached Rome, discovered that it was impossible for them to go further, since they did not have support from any authorities, and they finally had to admit that their waste of strength was empty and in vain, although, however, no one could remove from them the vow to commit a crusade - only children who had not reached conscious age and old people bent under the weight of years were free from it. So, disappointed and embarrassed, they set off on their way back. Having once been accustomed to marching from province to province in a crowd, each in his own company and never stopping the chants, they now returned in silence, one by one, barefoot and hungry. They were subjected to all kinds of humiliation, and more than one girl was captured by rapists and deprived of her virginity».

Religious authors of subsequent centuries, for obvious reasons, passed over the terrible plot in silence. And enlightened secular writers, even the most malicious and merciless, apparently considered the reminder of the senseless death of almost one hundred thousand children a “low blow”, an unworthy technique in polemics with clergy. Venerable historians saw in the absurd enterprise of children only obvious, indisputable stupidity, on the study of which it was inappropriate to expend mental potential. And therefore, in solid historical studies devoted to the crusaders, the children's crusade is given, at best, only a few pages between descriptions of the fourth (1202-1204) and fifth (1217-1221) crusades.

So what happened in the summer of 1212?First, let's turn to history, briefly consider the reasons for the Crusades in general and the campaign of children in particular.

Causes of the Crusades.

For quite a long time, Europe looked with alarm at what was happening in Palestine. The stories of pilgrims returning from there to Europe about the persecution and insults they endured in the Holy Land worried the European peoples. Little by little, a conviction was created to return to the Christian world its most precious and revered shrines. But in order for Europe to send numerous hordes of various nationalities to this enterprise for two centuries, it was necessary to have special reasons and a special situation.

There were many reasons in Europe that helped bring the idea of ​​the Crusades to fruition. Medieval society was generally distinguished by its religious mood; the crusades were a unique form of pilgrimage; great importance The rise of the papacy also had a bearing on the crusades. In addition, for all classes of medieval society, the crusades seemed very attractive from a worldly point of view. Barons and knights, in addition to religious motives, hoped for glorious deeds, for profit, for the satisfaction of their ambition; merchants hoped to increase their profits by expanding trade with the East; oppressed peasants were freed from serfdom for participating in the crusade and knew that during their absence the church and state would take care of the families they left behind in their homeland; debtors and defendants knew that during their participation in the crusade they would not be pursued by creditors or courts.

A quarter of a century before the events described below, the famous Sultan Salah ad-Din, or Saladin, defeated the crusaders and cleared Jerusalem of them. The best knights of the Western world tried to return the lost shrine.

Many people of that time came to the conviction: if adults burdened with sins cannot return Jerusalem, then innocent children must complete this task, since God will help them. And then, to the joy of the pope, a child prophet appeared in France and began preaching a new crusade.

Chapter 1. Young preacher of the children's crusade - Stephen of Cloix.

In 1200 (or maybe the next year) near Orleans in the village of Cloix (or maybe in another place) a peasant boy named Stephen was born. This is too similar to the beginning of the fairy tale, but this is only a reproduction of the negligence of the chroniclers of that time and the discrepancy in their stories about the children's crusade. However, a fairy-tale beginning is quite appropriate for a story about a fairy-tale fate. This is what the chronicles tell us.

Like all peasant children, Stefan helped his parents from an early age - he tended cattle. He differed from his peers only in his slightly greater piety: Stefan visited church more often than others, and cried more bitterly than others from the feelings that overwhelmed him during liturgies and religious processions. Since childhood, he was shocked by the April “movement of the black crosses” - a solemn procession on St. Mark’s Day. On this day, prayers were offered for the soldiers who died in the holy land, for those tortured in Muslim slavery. And the boy burst into flames along with the crowd, furiously cursing the infidels.

On one of the warm May days of 1212, he met a pilgrim monk coming from Palestine and asking for alms.The monk began to talk about overseas miracles and exploits. Stefan listened in fascination. Suddenly the monk interrupted his story, and then unexpectedly he was Jesus Christ.

Everything that followed was like a dream (or this meeting was the boy’s dream). The monk-Christ ordered the boy to become the head of an unprecedented crusade - a children's crusade, for "from the mouths of babies comes power against the enemy." There is no need for swords or armor - to conquer Muslims, the sinlessness of children and God's word in their mouths will be enough. Then the numb Stephen accepted a scroll from the hands of the monk - a letter to the King of France. After which the monk quickly left.

Stefan could no longer remain a shepherd. The Almighty called him to a feat. Out of breath, the boy rushed home and dozens of times recounted what had happened to him to his parents and neighbors, who peered in vain (because they were illiterate) at the words of the mysterious scroll. Neither ridicule nor slaps on the head cooled Stefan's zeal. The next day he packed his knapsack, took his staff and headed to Saint-Denis - to the abbey of Saint Dionysius, patron of France. The boy correctly judged that it was necessary to gather volunteers for the children’s hike in the place of the greatest concentration of pilgrims.

And so, early in the morning, a frail boy walked with a knapsack and a staff on a deserted road. The "snowball" started rolling. The boy can still be stopped, restrained, tied up and thrown into the basement to “cool off.” But no one foresaw the tragic future.

One of the chroniclers testifies " according to conscience and truth" that Stefan was" an early matured scoundrel and the nest of all vices"But these lines were written thirty years after the sad ending of the crazy idea, when in hindsight they began to look for a scapegoat. After all, if Stephen had a bad reputation in Cloix, the imaginary Christ would not have chosen him for the role of a saint. It is hardly worth calling Stephen a holy fool, as Soviet researchers do. He could simply be an exalted, trusting boy, quick-witted and eloquent.

Along the way, Stefan stayed in cities and villages, where he gathered dozens and hundreds of people with his speeches. From numerous repetitions, he stopped being timid and confused in his words. An experienced little speaker came to Saint-Denis. The abbey, located nine kilometers from Paris, attracted thousands of crowds of pilgrims. Stefan was received there very well: the holiness of the place was conducive to expecting a miracle - and here it is: the child Chrysostom. The shepherd boy smartly recounted everything he had heard from the pilgrims, deftly knocking tears out of the crowds who had come to be moved and cry! "Lord, save those suffering in captivity!" Stephen pointed to the relics of Saint Dionysius, kept among gold and precious stones, revered by crowds of Christians. And then he asked: is this the fate of the Tomb of the Lord himself, daily desecrated by infidels? And he snatched a scroll from his bosom, and the crowds buzzed when the youth with burning eyes shook before them the immutable command of Christ addressed to the king. Stephen recalled the many wonders and signs that the Lord showed him.

Stephen preached to adults. But in the crowd there were hundreds of children, who were then often taken with them by their elders on their way to holy places.

A week later, the wonderful youth became fashionable, having withstood intense competition with adult talkers and holy fools.His children listened with fervent faith. He appealed to their secret dreams: about military exploits, about travel, about glory, about serving the Lord, about freedom from parental care. And how it flattered the ambition of teenagers! After all, the Lord chose not sinful and greedy adults as his instrument, but their children!

The pilgrims dispersed to the cities and villages of France. The adults quickly forgot about Stefan. But the children excitedly talked everywhere about their peer - a miracle worker and orator, capturing the imagination of the neighboring children and giving each other terrible vows to help Stefan. And now the games of knights and squires have been abandoned, the French children have begun the dangerous game of the army of Christ. The children of Brittany, Normandy and Aquitaine, Auvergne and Gascony, while the adults of all these regions quarreled and fought with each other, began to unite around an idea that was not higher and purer in the 13th century.

The chronicles are silent whether Stephen was a lucky find for the pope, or whether one of the prelates, or perhaps the pontiff himself, planned the appearance of the boy saint in advance. Whether the cassock that flashed in Stephen’s vision belonged to an unauthorized fanatic monk or a disguised messenger of Innocent III is now impossible to find out. And it doesn’t matter where the idea of ​​a children’s crusading movement arose - in the bowels of the papal curia or in children’s heads. Dad grabbed her with an iron grip.

Now everything was a good omen for the children's hike: the fertility of frogs, clashes between packs of dogs, even the beginning of a drought. Here and there “prophets” appeared, twelve, ten, and even eight years old. They all insisted that they were sent by Stefan, although many of them had never seen him. All these prophets healed the possessed and performed other “miracles”...

The children formed troops and marched around the neighborhood, recruiting new supporters everywhere. At the head of each procession, singing hymns and psalms, there was a prophet, followed by an oriflamme - a copy of the banner of St. Dionysius. Children held crosses and lit candles in their hands, and waved smoking censers.

And what a tempting sight it was for the children of the nobility, who watched the solemn procession of their peers from their castles and houses! But almost every one of them had a grandfather, father or older brother who fought in Palestine. Some of them died. And here is an opportunity to take revenge on the infidels, gain glory, and continue the work of the older generation. And children from noble families enthusiastically joined the new game, flocking to banners with images of Christ and the Ever-Virgin. Sometimes they became leaders, sometimes they were forced to obey an honorable peer-prophet.

Many girls also joined the movement, who also dreamed of the Holy Land, exploits and freedom from parental authority. The leaders did not drive away the “girls” - they wanted to gather a larger army. Many girls dressed up as boys for safety and ease of movement.

As soon as Stefan (May had not yet expired!) announced Vendôme as a gathering place, hundreds and thousands of teenagers began to converge there. With them were a few adults: monks and priests, going, in the words of the Monk Gray, “to plunder to their heart’s content or to pray to their heart’s content,” the city and village poor, who joined the children “not for Jesus, but for the sake of a bite of bread”; and most of all - thieves, sharpers, various criminal rabble who hoped to make money at the expense of noble children, well equipped for the journey. Many adults sincerely believed in the success of the campaign without weapons and hoped that they would get rich booty. There were also elders with the children who had fallen into their second childhood. Hundreds of corrupt women hovered around the offspring of noble families. So the detachments turned out to be surprisingly motley. And in the previous crusades, children, old people, hordes of Magdalenes and all sorts of scum took part. But beforethey were only a makeweight, and the core of Christ’s army consisted of barons and knights skilled in military affairs. Now, instead of broad-shouldered men in armor and chain mail, the core of the army was made up of unarmed children.

But where were the authorities and, most importantly, parents looking? Everyone was waiting for the children to stop freaking out and calm down.

King Philip II Augustus, a tireless collector of French lands, an insidious and far-sighted politician, initially approved of the children’s initiative. Philip wanted to have the pope on his side in the war with the English king and was not averse to pleasing Innocent III and organizing a crusade, but he just didn’t have enough power for that. Suddenly - this idea of ​​children, noise, enthusiasm. Of course, all this should ignite the hearts of barons and knights with righteous anger against the infidels!

However, the adults did not lose their heads. And the children's fuss began to threaten the peace of the state. The guys leave their houses, run to Vendôme, and are really going to move to the sea! But on the other hand, the pope remains silent, the legates are agitating for the campaign... The cautious Philip II was afraid of angering the pontiff, but nevertheless turned to the scientists of the newly created University of Paris. They answered firmly: the children must be stopped immediately! If necessary, by force, for their campaign is inspired by Satan! Responsibility for stopping the campaign was removed from him, and the king issued an edict commanding the children to immediately throw nonsense out of their heads and go home.

However, the royal edict did not make an impression on the children. In children's hearts there was a ruler more powerful than a king. Things have gone too far; shouting can no longer stop him. Only the faint-hearted returned home. The peers and barons did not risk using violence: the common people sympathized with this idea of ​​the children and would have risen to their defense. It would not have happened without riots. After all, the people have just been told that God's will will allow children to convert Muslims to Christians without weapons and bloodshed and, thus, free the “Holy Sepulcher” from the hands of infidels.

In addition, the pope declared loudly: “These children serve as a reproach to us adults: while we sleep, they joyfully stand up for the holy land.” Pope Innocent III still hoped to awaken the enthusiasm of adults with the help of children. From distant Rome, he could not see the frenzied children's faces and, probably, did not realize that he had already lost control of the situation and could not stop the children's campaign. The mass psychosis that had gripped the children, skillfully fueled by the clergy, was now impossible to contain.

Therefore, Philip II washed his hands of the matter and did not insist on implementing his edict.

There was a groan of unhappy parents in the country. The funny, solemn children's processions around the area, which so touched the adults, turned into a general flight of teenagers from their families. Few families, in their fanaticism, themselves blessed their children for the disastrous campaign. Most fathers flogged their offspring, locked them in closets, but the children gnawed ropes, undermined walls, broke locks and ran away. And those who could not escape fought in hysterical, refused food, wasted away, fell ill. Willy-nilly, the parents gave up.

The children wore a uniform of sorts: gray simple shirts over short pants and a large beret. But many children could not afford even this: they walked in whatever they were wearing (often barefoot and with their heads uncovered, although the sun almost never set behind the clouds that summer). The participants in the campaign had a cloth cross of red, green or black sewn onto their chests (of course, these units competed with each other). Each detachment had its own commander, flag and other symbols, which the children were very proud of. When the troops with singing, banners, crosses cheerfully and solemnly passed through towns and villages on their way to Vendôme, only locks and strong oak doors could keep their son or daughter at home. It was like a plague swept through the country, killing tens of thousands of children.

Enthusiastic crowds of onlookers vigorously greeted the groups of children, which further fueled their enthusiasm and ambition.

Finally, some priests realized the danger of this idea. They began to stop the detachments where they could persuade the children to go home, assuring them that the idea of ​​a children’s trip was the machinations of the devil. But the guys were adamant, especially since in all major cities they were met and blessed by papal emissaries. Reasonable priests were immediately declared apostates. The superstition of the crowd, the enthusiasm of children and the machinations of the papal curia defeated common sense. And many of these apostate priests deliberately went with children doomed to inevitable death, like seven centuries later, teacher Janusz Korczak went with his students into the gas chamber of the fascist Treblinka concentration camp.

Chapter 2. Way of the Cross of German children.

The news of the boy prophet Stephen spread throughout the country at the speed of pilgrims on foot. Those who went to worship in Saint-Denis brought the news to Burgundy and Champagne, from there it reached the banks of the Rhine. In Germany, their “holy youth” was not slow to appear. And there the papal legates zealously began processing public opinion in favor of organizing a children's crusade.

The boy's name was Nicholas (we only know the Latin version of his name). He was born in a village near Cologne. He was twelve, or even ten years old. At first he was just a pawn in the hands of adults. Nicholas's father energetically pushed his child prodigy into being a prophet. It is not known whether the boy's father was rich, but he was undoubtedly guided by low motives. The chronicler monk, a witness to the process of “making” the child prophet, calls Father Nicholas “ roguish fool“We don’t know how much he earned from his son, but a few months later he paid for his son’s deeds with his life.

Cologne- the religious center of the German lands, where thousands of pilgrims often flocked with their children, was the best place to launch agitation. In one of the churches of the city, the zealously revered relics of the “Three Kings of the East” - the Magi who brought gifts to the infant Christ - were kept. Let us note a detail whose fatal role will become clear later: the relics were capturedFrederick I Barbarossa during his siege of Milan. And it was here, in Cologne, at the instigation of his father, that Nicholas proclaimed himself the chosen one of God.

Further events developed according to an already tested scenario: Nicholas had a vision of a cross in the clouds, and the voice of the Almighty ordered him to gather the children for a hike; the crowds wildly welcomed the newly-minted boy prophet; Immediately followed by his healing of the possessed and other miracles, rumors of which spread with incredible speed. Nicholas spoke on church porches, on stones and barrels in the middle of squares.

Then everything went according to a well-known pattern: adult pilgrims spread the news about the young prophet, children whispered and gathered in teams, marched around the outskirts of different cities and villages and finally left for Cologne. But the development of events in Germany also had its own characteristics. Frederick II, himself still a youth who had just won the throne from his uncle Otto IV, was at that time the pope’s favorite, and therefore could afford to contradict the pontiff. He resolutely forbade the idea of ​​children: the country was already shaken by unrest. Therefore, children gathered only from the Rhineland regions closest to Cologne. The movement snatched from families not just one or two children, as in France, but almost everyone, including even six- and seven-year-olds. It is this little one that, already on the second day of the hike, will begin to ask the elders to take care of them, and in the third or fourth week they will begin to get sick, die, and, at best, stay in roadside villages (due to ignorance of the way back - forever).

The second feature of the German version: among the motives for the children’s campaign, the first place here was occupied not by the desire to liberate the “holy land,” but by the thirst for revenge. Quite a lot of valiant Germans died in the Crusades - families of any rank and status remembered the bitter losses. That is why the detachments consisted almost entirely of boys (although some of them turned out to bedressed as girls), and the sermons of Nicholas and other leaders of local detachments consisted more than half of calls for revenge.

Detachments of children hastily gathered in Cologne. The campaign had to begin as soon as possible: the emperor is against, the barons are against, parents are breaking sticks on the backs of their sons! Just behold, the tempting idea will fall through!

The residents of Cologne showed miracles of patience and hospitality (there was nowhere to go) and provided shelter and food to thousands of children. Most of the boys spent the night in the fields around the city, groaning from the influx of criminal rabble who hoped to profit by joining the children's campaign.

And then the day came for the ceremonial performance from Cologne. End of June. Under the banner of Nicholas there are at least twenty thousand children (according to some chronicles, twice as many). These are mostly boys twelve years old and older. No matter how much the German barons resisted, there were more scions of noble families in Nicholas’s troops than in Stefan’s. After all, there were much more barons in fragmented Germany than in France. In the heart of every noble teenager, brought up on the ideals of knightly valor, a thirst for revenge burned for a grandfather, father or brother killed by the Saracens.

The people of Cologne poured out onto the city walls. Thousands of identically dressed children are lined up in columns in a field. Wooden crosses, banners, and pennants sway over the gray sea. Hundreds of adults - some in cassocks, some in rags - seem to be captives of the children's army. Nicholas, the commanders of the detachments, some of the children from noble families will ride in carts, surrounded by squires. But many young aristocrats with knapsacks and staves stand side by side with the last of their slaves.

Mothers of children from remote towns and villages wept and said goodbye. The time has come for the Cologne mothers to say goodbye and cry - their children make up almost half of the participants in the campaign.

But then the trumpets sounded. The children sang a hymn to the glory of Christ of their own composition, which, alas, has not been preserved for us by history. The formation moved, trembled - and moved forward to the enthusiastic cries of the crowd, the lamentations of mothers and the murmur of sensible people.

An hour passes - and the children's army disappears behind the hills. Only the singing of a thousand voices can still be heard from afar. The Cologne people disperse - proud: they have equipped their children for the journey, and the Franks are still digging!..

Not far from Cologne, Nicholas's army split into two huge columns. One was headed by Nicholas, the other by a boy whose name was not preserved in the chronicles. Nicholas's column moved south along a short route: through Lorraine along the Rhine, through western Swabia and through French Burgundy. The second column reached the Mediterranean along a long route: through Franconia and Swabia. For both of them, the Alps blocked the way to Italy. It would have been wiser to go over the plain to Marseille, but the French children intended to go there, and Italy seemed closer to Palestine than Marseille.

The detachments stretched for many kilometers. Both routes ran through semi-wild regions. The people there, not numerous even at that time, huddled close to a few fortresses. Wild animals came out onto the roads from the forests. The thickets were swarming with robbers. Children drowned in dozens while crossing rivers. In such conditions, entire groups ran back home. But the ranks of the children's army were immediately replenished with children from roadside villages.

Slava was ahead of the participants in the campaign. But not all cities fed them and allowed them to spend the night, even on the streets. Sometimes they drove them away, rightly protecting their children from the “infection”. The boys sometimes went without alms for a day or two. Food from the knapsacks of the weak quickly migrated to the stomachs of those who were stronger and older. Theft in the units flourished. Broken women swindled money from the offspring of noble and wealthy families; sharpers robbed children of their last penny, enticing them to play dice at rest stops. Discipline in the units fell day by day.

We set off early in the morning. In the heat of the day, we took a break in the shade of trees. While they walked, they sang simple hymns. At halts they told and listened to stories full of extraordinary adventures and miracles about battles and campaigns, about knights and pilgrims. Surely among the guys there were jokers and naughty people who ran after each other and danced when others collapsed after a multi-kilometer hike. Surely the children fell in love, quarreled, made peace, fought for leadership...

At a bivouac in the foothills of the Alps, near Lake Leman, Nicholas found himself at the head of an “army” almost half the size of the original. The majestic mountains only for a moment with their white caps of snow enchanted the children, who had never seen anything of such beauty. Then horror gripped their hearts: after all, they had to rise to these white caps!

Residents of the foothills greeted the children warily and sternly. It never occurred to them to feed the children. At least they didn't kill them. The grub in the knapsacks was melting. But that’s not all: in the mountain valleys, German children - many for the first and last time - met... the very Saracens whom they intended to baptize in the holy land! The vicissitudes of the era brought troops of Arab robbers here: they settled in these places, unwilling or unable to return to their homeland. The guys crept along the valley in silence, without songs, lowering their crosses. Here we should turn them back. Alas, only the rabble who clung to the children made smart conclusions. These scum had already robbed the children and fled, because what happened next promised only death or slavery among Muslims. The Saracens killed a dozen or so guys who lagged behind the detachment. But the children were already accustomed to such losses: every day they buried or abandoned dozens of their comrades without burial. Malnutrition, fatigue, stress and illness took their toll.

Crossing the Alps- without food and warm clothing - became a real nightmare for the participants of the hike. These mountains terrified even adults. Making your way along icy slopes, through eternal snow, along stone cornices - not everyone has the strength and courage to do this. When necessary, merchants with goods, military detachments, and clerics crossed the Alps to Rome and back.

The presence of guides did not save careless children from death. The stones cut my bare, freezing feet. Among the snow there were not even berries and fruits to satisfy hunger. The knapsacks were already completely empty. The crossing of the Alps, due to poor discipline, fatigue and weakness of the children, took twice as long as usual! Frostbitten feet slipped and did not obey, the children fell into the abyss. Behind the ridge a new ridge rose. We slept on the rocks. If they found branches for a fire, they warmed themselves. They probably fought over the heat. At night they huddled together to keep each other warm. Not everyone got up in the morning. The dead were thrown on the frozen ground - there was no strength even to cover them with stones or branches. At the highest point of the pass there was a monastery of missionary monks. There the children were slightly warmed up and welcomed. But where could we get food and warmth for such a crowd!

The descent was an incredible joy. Greenery! Silver of the rivers! Crowded villages, vineyards, citrus fruits, the height of a luxurious summer! After the Alps, only every third participant in the campaign survived. But those who remained, having perked up, thought that all the sorrows were already behind them. In this abundant land they will, of course, be caressed and fattened.

But it was not there. Italy met them with undisguised hatred.

After all, those whose fathers tormented these abundant lands with raids, desecrated the shrines and plundered the cities, appeared. Therefore, “German baby snakes” were not allowed into Italian cities. Only the most compassionate people gave alms, and then secretly from their neighbors. Barely three to four thousand children reached Genoa, stealing food and robbing fruit trees along the way.

On Saturday, August 25, 1212 (the only date in the chronicle of the campaign with which all chronicles agree), exhausted teenagers stood on the shore Genoese harbor. Two monstrous months and a thousand kilometers behind, so many friends buried, and now - the sea, and the holy land is just a stone's throw away.

How were they going to cross the Mediterranean? Where were they going to get money for the ships? The answer is simple. They don't need ships or money. The sea - with God's help - must part before them. From the first day of campaigning for the campaign, there was no talk of any ships or money.

Before the children there was a fabulous city - rich Genoa. Having perked up, they again raised high the remaining banners and crosses. Nicholas, who had lost his cart in the Alps and was now walking with everyone else, came forward and made a fiery speech. The boys greeted their leader with the same enthusiasm. Even if they were barefoot and in rags, with wounds and scabs, they reached the sea - the most stubborn, the strongest in spirit. The goal of the hike - the holy land - is very close.

The fathers of the free city received a delegation of children led by several priests (at other times during the campaign, the role of adult mentors is hushed up by the chroniclers, probably due to the reluctance to compromise the clergy who supported this ridiculous idea). The children did not ask for ships, they only asked for permission to spend the night on the streets and squares of Genoa. The city fathers, glad that they were not asked for money or ships, allowed the guys to stay for a week in the city, and then advised them to return to Germany in good health.

The participants of the hike entered the city in picturesque columns, again reveling in everyone’s attention and interest for the first time in many weeks. The townspeople greeted them with undisguised curiosity, but at the same time wary and hostile.

However, the Doge of Genoa and the senators changed their minds: no more weeks, let them get out of the city tomorrow! The mob was resolutely against the presence of little Germans in Genoa. True, the pope blessed the campaign, but suddenly these children are carrying out the insidious plan of the German emperor. On the other hand, the Genoese did not want to let go of so much free money. work force, and the children were invited to remain in Genoa forever and become good citizens of a free city.

But the participants in the campaign brushed aside the proposal that seemed ridiculous to them. After all, tomorrow is a journey across the sea!

In the morning, Nicholas's column lined up in all its glory at the edge of the surf. The townspeople crowded along the embankment. After the solemn liturgy, singing psalms, the troops moved towards the waves. The first rows entered the water up to their knees... up to their waists... And froze in shock: the sea did not want to part. The Lord did not keep his promise. New prayers and hymns did not help. As time went. The sun rose and became hot... The Genoese, laughing, went home. And the children still did not take their eyes off the sea and sang and sang until they were hoarse...

The permit to stay in the city was expiring. I had to leave. Several hundred teenagers, who had lost hope of the success of the campaign, seized on the offer of the city authorities to settle in Genoa. Young men from noble families were accepted into best houses like sons, others were taken into service.

But the most stubborn gathered in a field not far from the city. And they began to consult. Who knows where God decided to open the bottom of the sea for them - maybe not in Genoa. We must go further, look for that place. And it’s better to die in sunny Italy than to return to your homeland beaten by dogs! And worse than shame are the Alps...

The greatly depleted detachments of unlucky young crusaders moved further to the South-East. There was no longer any question of discipline; they walked in groups, or rather in gangs, obtaining food by force and cunning. Nicholas is no longer mentioned by chroniclers - perhaps he remained in Genoa.

The horde of teenagers has finally reached Pisa. The fact that they were expelled from Genoa was an excellent recommendation for them in Pisa, a city that rivaled Genoa. The sea did not part here either, but the inhabitants of Pisa, in defiance of the Genoese, equipped two ships and sent some of the children to Palestine on them. There is a vague mention in the chronicles that they safely reached the shore of the holy land. But if this happened, they probably soon died of want and hunger - the Christians there themselves could barely make ends meet. The chronicles do not mention any meetings between child crusaders and Muslims.

In the fall, several hundred German teenagers reached Rome, whose poverty and desolation after the luxury of Genoa, Pisa and Florence struck them. Pope Innocent III received the representatives of the little crusaders, praised them, and then scolded them and ordered them to return home, forgetting that their home was a thousand kilometers beyond the damned Alps. Then, by order of the head of the Catholic Church, the children kissed the cross, saying that, “having reached the age of perfection,” they would certainly finish the interrupted crusade. Now, at the very least, the pope had several hundred crusaders for the future.

Few participants in the campaign decided to return to Germany; most of them settled in Italy. Only a few reached their homeland - after many months, or even years. Due to their ignorance, they did not even know how to really tell where they had been. The Children's Crusade resulted in a kind of migration of children - their dispersion to other regions of Germany, Burgundy and Italy.

The second German column, no less numerous than Nicholas's, suffered the same tragic fate. The same thousands of deaths on the roads - from hunger, fast currents, predatory animals; the most difficult crossing of the Alps - true, through another, but no less destructive pass. Everything was repeated. Only there were even more uncollected corpses left behind: there was almost no general leadership in this column, and within a week the campaign turned into a wandering of uncontrollable hordes of teenagers hungry to the point of brutality. The monks and priests had great difficulty gathering children into groups and somehow restraining them, but this was before the first fight for alms.

In Italy, children managed to stick their noses into Milan, which for fifty years has barely recovered from Barbarossa's raid. They barely escaped from there: the Milanese hunted them with dogs like hares.

The sea did not part for the young crusaders even in Ravenna, nor in other places. Only a few thousand children made it to the very south of Italy. They had already heard about the pope’s decision to stop the campaign and planned to deceive the pontiff and sail to Palestine from the port of Brindisi. And many simply wandered forward by inertia, without hoping for anything. In the extreme south of Italy that year there was a terrible drought - the harvest was destroyed, the famine was such that, according to the chroniclers, "mothers devoured their children." It’s hard to even imagine what German children could eat in this hostile land, swollen with hunger.

Those who miraculously survived and made it to Brindisi, new misadventures awaited. The townspeople assigned the girls who participated in the campaign to sailor dens. Twenty years later, chroniclers will begin to wonder: why are there so many blond, blue-eyed prostitutes in Italy? Boys were captured and turned into semi-slaves; the surviving offspring of noble families were, of course, more fortunate - they were adopted.

Archbishop Brindisi tried to stop this coven. He gathered the remnants of the little martyrs and... wished them a pleasant return to Germany. The “merciful” bishop seated the most fanatical ones on several small boats and blessed them for the unarmed conquest of Palestine. The vessels equipped by the bishop sank almost in sight of Brindisi.

Chapter 3. Stations of the Cross of French Children

More than thirty thousand French children came out when German children were already freezing in the mountains. There was no less solemnity and tears during the farewell than in Cologne.

In the first days of the hike, the intensity of religious fanaticism among the teenagers was such that they did not notice any difficulties along the way. Saint Stephen rode in the best cart, carpeted and covered with expensive carpets. Young high-born adjutants of the leader pranced next to the cart. They happily rushed along the marching columns, conveying instructions and orders from their idol.

Stefan subtly grasped the mood of the masses of participants in the campaign and, if necessary, addressed them at rest stops with an incendiary speech. And then there was such a pandemonium around his cart that in this crush one or two children were certainly maimed or trampled to death. In such cases, they hastily built a stretcher or dug a grave, quickly said a prayer and hurried on, remembering the victims until the first crossroads. But they had a long and lively discussion about who was lucky enough to get hold of a scrap of St. Stephen’s clothing or a sliver of wood from his cart. This exaltation captured even those children who ran away from home and joined the crusading “army” not at all for religious reasons. Stefan's head was spinning from the consciousness of his power over his peers, from incessant praise and boundless adoration.

It is difficult to say whether he was a good organizer - most likely the movement of the detachments was led by the priests accompanying the children, although the chronicles are silent about this. It is impossible to believe that loud-mouthed teenagers could cope with thirty thousand “armies” without the help of adults, set up camps in convenient places, organize overnight stays, and give the troops directions in the morning.

While the young crusaders walked through the territory of their native country, the population everywhere received them hospitably. If children died during the campaign, it was almost exclusively from sunstroke. And yet, gradually fatigue accumulated, discipline weakened. To maintain the enthusiasm of the participants in the campaign, they had to lie every day that the detachments would arrive at their destination by evening. Seeing some fortress in the distance, the children excitedly asked each other: “Jerusalem?” The poor fellows forgot, and many simply did not know, that it was possible to reach the “holy land” only by swimming across the sea.

We passed Tours, Lyon and came to Marseilles almost in full force. In a month, the guys walked five hundred kilometers. The ease of the route allowed them to get ahead of the German children and be the first to reach the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, which, alas, did not open up for them.

Disappointed and even offended by God, the children scattered around the city. We spent the night. The next morning we prayed again on the seashore. By evening, several hundred children were missing from the detachments - they went home.

Days passed. The Marseilles somehow tolerated the horde of children that fell on their heads. Fewer and fewer “crusaders” came to the sea to pray. The leaders of the expedition looked longingly at the ships in the harbor - if they had money, they would not have disdained now the usual way of crossing the sea.

The Marseilles began to grumble. The atmosphere was heating up. Suddenly, according to the old expression, the Lord looked back at them. One fine day the sea parted. Of course, not in the literal sense of the word.

The sad situation of the young crusaders touched two of the most eminent merchants of the city - Hugo Ferreus and William Porcus (Hugo the Iron and William the Pig). However, these two devilish figures with their gloomy nicknames were not at all invented by the chronicler. Their names are also mentioned by other sources. And out of pure philanthropy, they provided the children with the required number of ships and provisions.

The miracle promised to you, St. Stephen broadcast from the platform in the city square, has happened! We simply misunderstood God's signs. It was not the sea that had to part, but the human heart! The will of God is revealed to us in the actions of two venerable Marseilles, etc.

And again the guys crowded around their idol, again they tried to snatch a piece of his shirt, again they crushed someone to death...

But among the children there were many who tried to quickly get out of the crowd in order to quietly sneak out of blessed Marseille. Medieval boys had heard enough about the unreliability of ships of that time, about sea storms, about reefs and robbers.

By the next morning, the number of participants in the hike had decreased significantly. But it was for the best; those who remained sat comfortably on the ships, clearing their ranks of the faint-hearted. There were seven ships. According to the chronicles, a large ship of that time could accommodate up to seven hundred knights. Thus, we can reasonably assume that no fewer children were placed on each ship. This means that the ships took about five thousand children. With them were no less than four hundred priests and monks.

Almost the entire population of Marseille poured out to see the children off. After the solemn prayer service, ships under sail, decorated with flags, accompanied by chants and enthusiastic cries of the townspeople, majestically sailed from the harbor, and now they disappeared over the horizon. Forever.

For eighteen years nothing was known about the fate of these ships and the children who sailed on them.

Chapter 4. Tragic ending. What remains in the memory of Europeans about the children's crusade.

Eighteen years have passed since the departure of the young crusaders from Marseille. All deadlines for the return of the participants in the children's campaign have passed.

After the death of Pope Innocent III, two more crusades ended, and they managed to capture Jerusalem from the Muslims by entering into an alliance with the Egyptian Sultan... In a word, life went on. They forgot to even think about the missing children. To throw out a cry, to rouse Europe in search, to find five thousand guys who may still be alive - this never occurred to anyone. Such wasteful humanism was not the custom of that time.

The mothers have already cried. Children were born seemingly and invisible. And a lot of people died. Although, of course, it is difficult to imagine that the hearts of the mothers who took their children on a hike were not aching from the bitterness of a senseless loss.

In 1230, a monk who had once sailed from Marseilles with his children suddenly appeared in Europe. Released from Cairo for some merit, mothers of children who had disappeared during the campaign flocked to him from all over Europe. But how much joy did they have from the fact that the monk saw their son in Cairo, that the son or daughter was still alive? The monk said that about seven hundred participants of the campaign were languishing in captivity in Cairo. Of course, not a single person in Europe lifted a finger to redeem the former idols of the ignorant crowds from slavery.

From the stories of the runaway monk, which quickly spread throughout the continent, the parents finally learned about the tragic fate of their missing children. And this is what happened:

The children, crowded in the holds of the ships that sailed from Marseille, suffered terribly from stuffiness, seasickness and fear. They were afraid of sirens, leviathans and, of course, storms. It was the storm that struck the unfortunates when they passed Corsica and went around Sardinia. The ships drifted towards St. Peter's Island at the southwestern tip of Sardinia. At dusk, children screamed in horror as the ship was tossed from wave to wave. Dozens of those on deck were washed overboard. Five ships were carried past the reefs by the current. And two flew straight onto the coastal rocks. Two ships with children were blown to pieces.

Fishermen immediately after the shipwreck buried hundreds of children's corpses on a desert island. But such was the disunity of Europe at that time that news of this did not reach either the French or German mothers. Twenty years later, the children were reburied in one place and the Church of the New Immaculate Infants was erected on their mass grave. The church became a place of pilgrimage. This went on for three centuries. Then the church fell into disrepair, even its ruins were lost over time...

Five other ships somehow made it to the African coast. True, it nailed them in Algiers harbor... But it turned out that this is where they were supposed to sail! They were clearly expected here. Muslim ships met them and escorted them to the port. Exemplary Christians, compassionate Marseilles Ferreus and Porcus donated seven ships because they intended to sell five thousand children into slavery to the infidels. As the merchants correctly calculated, the monstrous disunity between the Christian and Muslim worlds contributed to the success of their criminal plan and ensured their personal safety.

What is slavery among the infidels, the children knew from creepy stories, which were carried throughout Europe by pilgrims. It is therefore impossible to describe their horror when they realized what had happened.

Some of the children were bought up at the Algerian bazaar, and they became slaves, concubines or concubines of wealthy Muslims. The rest of the guys were loaded onto ships and taken to Alexandria markets. The four hundred monks and priests who were brought to Egypt with their children were incredibly lucky: they were bought by the elderly Sultan Malek Kamel, better known as Safadin. This enlightened ruler had already divided his possessions between his sons and had leisure for scholarly pursuits. He settled Christians in the Cairo palace and forced them to translate from Latin into Arabic. The most educated of the learned slaves shared their European wisdom with the Sultan and gave lessons to his courtiers. They lived a satisfying and comfortable life, but they could not go beyond Cairo. While they were settling into the palace, blessing God, the children worked in the fields and died like flies.

Several hundred little slaves were sent to Baghdad. And it was possible to get to Baghdad only through Palestine... Yes, the children did set foot on Holy land. But in shackles or with ropes around the neck. They saw the majestic walls of Jerusalem. They walked through Nazareth, their bare feet burning the sands of Galilee... In Baghdad, the young slaves were sold. One of the chronicles says that the Baghdad caliph decided to convert them to Islam. And although this event is described according to the stencil of that time: they were tortured, beaten, tormented, but not one betrayed their native faith - the story could be true. The boys, who, for the sake of a high goal, went through so much suffering, could well have shown an unbending will and died as martyrs for the faith. There were, according to the chronicles, eighteen of them. The caliph abandoned his idea and sent the remaining Christian fanatics to slowly dry out in the fields.

In Muslim lands, young crusaders died from illness, from beatings, or they settled down, learned the language, gradually forgetting their homeland and relatives. They all died in slavery - not one returned from captivity.

What happened to the leaders of the young crusaders? Stephen was heard of only before his column arrived in Marseille. Nicholas disappeared from sight in Genoa. The third, nameless, leader of the child crusaders disappeared into obscurity.

As for the contemporaries of the children's crusade, then, as we have already said, the chroniclers limited themselves to only a very cursory description of it, and the common people, having forgotten their enthusiasm and delight in the idea of ​​​​the little madmen, fully agreed with the two-line Latin epigram - literature honored the hundred thousand lost children in just six words:

To the shore stupid
The child's mind leads.

Thus ended one of the worst tragedies in European history.

Material taken from here http://www.erudition.ru/referat/printref/id.16217_1.html slightly shortened and removed the situation in Europe at the beginning of the 13th century. and an excursion into the history of the Crusades. The book "The Crusader in Jeans" about the events described above can be found on Librusek. By Thea Beckman.

No scrupulously accurate evidence from contemporaries about the children’s campaign has been preserved. Because history is overgrown with many myths, speculations and legends. However, it is certain that the initiators of such an enterprise are Stefan from Cloix and Nicholas from Cologne. Both were shepherd boys.

The first said that Jesus himself appeared to him and ordered him to deliver a certain letter to the King of France, Philip II, so that he would help the children in organizing the campaign. According to another version, Stefan accidentally met one of the nameless monks who pretended to be a god. It was he who captivated the child’s mind with divine sermons, ordered the liberation of Jerusalem from the “infidels” and returned it to the Christians, and handed over the same manuscript.

Stephen. (wikipedia.org)

The shepherd began to preach so fervently that many teenagers and even adults began to follow him throughout France. Soon the young speaker was able to reach the royal court of Philip II. The king became interested in the idea of ​​arranging for children because he was seeking favor from Pope Innocent III in the war with England. But Rome remained silent for a long time, and the European monarch abandoned this intention.

Holy Sepulcher

However, Stephen did not stop, and soon a large procession of teenagers with banners moved from Vendôme to Marseille. The children sincerely believed that the sea would part before them and open the way to the Holy Sepulcher.

The children followed Stefan and Nicholas. (wikipedia.org)

A hard journey through the Alps

In May of the same year, a certain Nicholas organized his campaign from Cologne. Their path lay through the rugged Alps. About thirty thousand teenagers moved towards the mountains, but only seven were able to get out of there alive. Even for an army of adults, making the way through these mountains was not easy. In addition, the matter was aggravated by difficult passes and transitions. The children dressed too lightly and did not prepare sufficient supplies of provisions, and therefore many froze and died of hunger in this area.

But even in the Italian lands they were not greeted joyfully. The Italians still had fresh memories of the devastating campaigns of Frederick Barbarossa after the previous crusade. And the German children, enduring losses and hardships, barely made it to coastal Genoa.

Italian cities. (wikipedia.org)

The child crusaders did not at all believe that the sea, after numerous prayers, would not part for them. Then many participants settled in trading city, while others went down the Apennine Peninsula to the residence of the Pope in order to receive from him all-powerful support and patronage. In Rome, the children managed to achieve an audience, at which Innocent, to the chagrin of Nicholas, strongly recommended that the young crusaders turn home. The return journey through the Alps turned out to be even more difficult: very few returned to the German principalities. The available evidence regarding the fate of Nicholas varies: some claim that he died on the way back, and others that he disappeared after visiting Genoa. Thus, none of the German child crusaders reached the Holy Land.

And from Vendôme to Marseille

As noted earlier, Stephen of Cloix led the crusade from the city of Vendôme. Despite the fact that they were helped by the Franciscan Order and that the harsh Alps were away from their route, the fate of the French children was no less tragic. And in coastal Marseille, where they reached from the starting point, the sea did not open the way for the crusaders. Therefore, the teenagers had to resort to the help of certain Hugo Ferrerus and Guillemot Porcus, two local merchants who offered to deliver them to the Holy Land on their ships. It is known that the children boarded seven ships, each of which could accommodate seven hundred people each. After that, no one ever saw the children in France.

Children's Crusade. (wikipedia.org)

Some time later, a monk appeared in Europe, claiming that he accompanied the children all the way. According to him, all participants in the campaign were deceived: they were brought not to Palestine, but to the shores of Algeria, where they were later driven into slavery. It is quite possible that the Marseille merchants agreed in advance with the local slave traders. And it is possible that some of the young crusaders nevertheless reached the walls of Jerusalem, but no longer with a sword in their hands, but in shackles.

Kurt Vonnegut: "The Children's Crusade"

The Children's Crusade of 1212 ended in complete failure. He greatly impressed his descendants and contemporaries and was reflected in art. Several films have been made about this event, and Kurt Vonnegut, describing his experience of the bombing of Dresden, called the book “Slaughterhouse-Five or the Children’s Crusade.”

For the first time at the very beginning of the 11th century. Pope Urban II called on Western Europe for crusades. This happened in the late autumn of 1095, shortly after the gathering (congress) of churchmen ended in the city of Clermont (in France). The Pope addressed crowds of knights, peasants, and townspeople. monks gathered on the plain near the city, calling for a holy war against Muslims. Tens of thousands of knights and poor villagers from France responded to the pope’s call; all of them went to Palestine in 1096 to fight against the Seljuk Turks, who had recently captured the city of Jerusalem, considered sacred by Christians.

The liberation of this shrine served as a pretext for the Crusades. The crusaders attached cloth crosses to their clothes as a sign that they were going to war with a religious goal - to expel the infidels (Muslims) from Jerusalem and other sacred places for Christians in Palestine. In reality, the goals of the crusaders were not only religious. By the 11th century. land in Western Europe was divided between secular and ecclesiastical feudal lords. According to custom, only his eldest son could inherit the lord's land. As a result, a large layer of feudal lords who did not have land was formed.

They were eager to get it in any way. The Catholic Church, not without reason, feared that these knights would encroach on its vast possessions. In addition, the churchmen, led by the Pope, sought to extend their influence to new territories and profit from them. Rumors about the riches of the countries of the Eastern Mediterranean, which were spread by pilgrim travelers who visited Palestine, aroused the greed of the knights. The popes took advantage of this, throwing out the cry “To the East!”

L. Gumilyov also believes that at this time a passionary impulse occurred in Western Europe and this overheated society needed to be cooled through expansion.

In the 12th century. the knights had to equip themselves for war many times under the sign of the cross in order to retain the captured territories. However, all these crusades failed. At the beginning of the 13th century, the idea began to spread throughout the cities and villages of France, and then in other countries, that if adults were not allowed to free Jerusalem from the “infidels” for “their sins,” then “innocent” children would be able to do it .

Pope Innocent III, the instigator of many bloody wars undertaken under the religious banner, did nothing to stop this crazy campaign. On the contrary, he stated: “These children serve as a reproach to us adults: while we sleep, they joyfully stand up for the Holy Land.” The crusade was also supported by the Franciscan order.

The Children's Crusade began with the fact that in June 1212, a shepherd boy named Stephen (Etienne) appeared in a village near Vendôme, who announced that he was a messenger of God and was called to become a leader and again conquer the Promised Land for Christians: the sea was supposed to dry up before the army of spiritual Israel.

On one of the warm days of May 1212, Stephen met a pilgrim monk coming from Palestine and asking for alms.

The monk accepted the offered piece of bread and began to talk about overseas miracles and exploits. Stefan listened in fascination. Suddenly the monk interrupted his story, and then suddenly dropped that he was Jesus Christ.

Everything that followed was like a dream (or this meeting was the boy’s dream). The monk-Christ ordered the boy to become the head of an unprecedented crusade - a children's crusade, for "from the mouths of babies comes power against the enemy." And then the monk disappeared, melted away

Stefan walked throughout the country and everywhere caused stormy enthusiasm with his speeches, as well as with the miracles that he performed in front of thousands of eyewitnesses. Soon, boys appeared in many places as crusade preachers, gathered around themselves whole crowds of like-minded people and led them, with banners and crosses and with solemn songs, to the wonderful boy Stephen. If anyone asked the young madmen where they were going, he received the answer that they were going overseas to God.

Stefan, this holy fool, was revered as a miracle worker. In July, singing psalms and banners, they set off for Marseilles to sail to the Holy Land, but no one thought about ships in advance. Criminals often joined the army; playing the role of participants, they lived off the alms of pious Catholics.

The madness that gripped French children also spread to Germany, especially in the Lower Rhine regions. Here came the boy Nikolai, who was not yet 10 years old, led by his father, also a vile slave trader, who used the poor child for his own purposes, for which later “together with other deceivers and criminals he ended up, as they say, on the gallows.” Nikolai appeared with a machine on which was a cross in the form of the Latin "T", and it was announced that he would cross the sea with dry feet and establish in Jerusalem the eternal kingdom of peace. Wherever he appeared, he irresistibly attracted children to him. A crowd gathered in 20 thousand boys, girls, as well as a disorderly rabble and moved south through the Alps.On the way, most of it died from hunger and robbers or returned home, frightened by the difficulties of the campaign: nevertheless, several thousand still reached Genoa on August 25. Here they were unfriendly driven away and forced them to quickly continue their campaign, because the Genoese were afraid of any danger to their city from the strange army of pilgrims.

When a crowd of French children reached Marseilles, singing hymns, they entered the suburbs and headed through the streets of the city straight to the sea. The inhabitants of the city were shocked by the sight of this army, looked at them with reverence and blessed them for the great feat.

The children stopped on the seashore, which most of them saw for the first time. Many ships were in the roadstead, and the sea stretched into an endless distance. The waves rushed onto the shore, then moved away, and nothing changed. And the children were waiting for a miracle. They were sure that the sea must make way for them and they will move on. But the sea did not part and continued to splash at their feet.

The children began to pray fervently... time passed, but there was still no miracle.

Then two slave traders volunteered to transport these “advocates of Christ” to Syria for “God’s reward.” They sailed on seven ships, two of them were wrecked on the island of San Pietro near Sardinia, and on the remaining five the merchants arrived in Egypt and sold the pilgrims - the crusaders as slaves. Thousands of them came to the court of the Caliph and were worthily distinguished there by the steadfastness with which they persisted in the Christian faith.
Both slave traders later fell into the hands of Emperor Frederick II and were sentenced to death by hanging. Moreover, this emperor, as they say, succeeded, as they say, in concluding peace in 1229 with Sultan Alkamil, again to restore the freedom of a large part of these unfortunate child pilgrims.

Children from Germany, under the leadership of Nicholas, expelled from Genoa, reached Brindisi, but here, thanks to the energy of the local bishop, they were prevented from undertaking a sea voyage to the East. Then they had no choice but to return home. Some of the boys went to Rome to ask the Pope for permission from the crusader vow. But the Pope did not fulfill their request, although, as they say, he had already ordered them to abandon their crazy enterprise; now he gave them only a postponement of the crusade until they came of age. The return journey destroyed almost the entire remainder of this children's army. Hundreds of them fell from exhaustion during the journey and died pitifully on the highways. The worst fate, of course, befell the girls, who, in addition to all other disasters, were subjected to all kinds of deception and violence. Several managed to find shelter in good families and earn their own food in Genoa with their own hands; some patrician families even trace their origins to the German children who remained there; but the majority died in a pitiful manner and only a small remnant of the entire army, sick and exhausted, ridiculed and desecrated, saw their homeland again. The boy Nicholas allegedly survived and later, in 1219, fought at Damietta in Egypt.

Children's Crusade of 1212

In June 1212(?), in a village near Vendôme (France), a shepherd boy named Stephen appeared, who announced that he was a messenger of God, called to become the leader of Christians and again conquer the Promised Land; the sea had to dry up before the army of spiritual Israel. He walked throughout the country and everywhere caused a storm of enthusiasm with his speeches, as well as with the miracles that he performed in front of thousands of eyewitnesses.

Soon, in many places, boys appeared as preachers of the cross, they gathered around themselves whole crowds of like-minded people and led them, with banners and crosses, with solemn songs, to the wonderful boy Stefan. If someone asked the young madmen where they were going, they received the answer that they were going “overseas, to God.” Their parents and prudent clergy, who wanted to keep the children from their enterprise, could do nothing, especially since the masses expected great things from this crusade and sharply condemned those who thought differently because they did not understand the trend The Holy Spirit in children, who, by their purity alone, seemed called upon to once again return the Holy Sepulcher, lost due to the sinfulness of their ancestors.

Finally, the king of France tried to suppress this nonsense by ordering the young fools to return home. Some of them followed this order, but the majority did not pay attention to it and soon adults were also involved in this fantastic event. He was approached not only by priests, artisans and peasants, but also by thieves and criminals who “took the right path.” The campaign grew more and more intense. “He was led by a shepherd boy on a chariot hung with carpets, surrounded by bodyguards, and behind him up to 30,000 pilgrims and pilgrims.”

When the crowd reached Marseilles, two slave traders volunteered to transport these “christ’s champions” to Syria for “God’s reward.” They sailed on seven ships, two of them were wrecked on the island of San Pietro near Sardinia, and on the remaining five the merchants arrived in Egypt and sold the pilgrims - the crusaders as slaves. Thousands of them came to the court of the Caliph and were worthily distinguished there by the steadfastness with which they persisted in the Christian faith.

Both slave traders later fell into the hands of Emperor Frederick II and were sentenced to death by hanging. Moreover, this emperor, as they say, succeeded, as they say, in concluding peace in 1229 with Sultan Alkamil, again to restore the freedom of a large part of these unfortunate child pilgrims.

The madness that gripped French children also had an effect in Germany, especially in the Lower Rhine regions. Here came the boy Nikolai (Nicholas), who was not yet ten years old, led by his father (slave trader) who used the child for his own purposes, for which he was subsequently hanged along with other deceivers and criminals.

Wherever Nikolai appeared, he irresistibly attracted children to him. As a result, a crowd of twenty thousand boys and girls, as well as a disorderly rabble, gathered, which moved south through the Alps. Along the way, most of them died from hunger and robbers or returned home, frightened by the difficulties of the campaign: nevertheless, thousands more reached Genya on August 25. Here they were unkindly driven away and forced to quickly continue their campaign, because the Genese were afraid of any danger to their city from the strange army of pilgrims.

After this, they reached Brindisi, but here, thanks to the energy of the local bishop, they were prevented from undertaking a sea voyage to the East. Then they had no choice but to return home. Some of the boys went to Rome to ask the pope for permission from the vow of the cross. But the pope did not fulfill their requests, although he ordered them to abandon their crazy enterprise; now he gave them only a postponement of the crusade until they came of age. The return journey destroyed almost the entire remnant of this children's army. Hundreds of them fell from exhaustion in the country and died pitifully on the highways. The worst fate befell, of course, the lot of the girls, who, in addition to all sorts of other disasters, were also subjected to all kinds of deception and violence. Several managed to find shelter in kind families and earn food for themselves with their own hands. In Genya, some patrician families even trace their origins to the German children who remained there; but still, only a small remnant of the entire army, sick and exhausted, ridiculed and desecrated, saw their homeland again. They say about Nicholas that he allegedly fought at Damietta in Egypt in 1219...

Bibliography

To prepare this work, materials were used from the site http://scientist.nm.ru/

Children's Crusade

The famous medievalist historian Jacques Le Goff asked: “Were there children in the medieval West?” If you look closely at works of art, you won’t find them there. Later, angels would often be depicted as children and even as playful boys - half angels, half cupids. But in the Middle Ages, angels of both sexes were depicted only as adults. “When the sculpture of the Virgin Mary had already acquired features of soft femininity, clearly borrowed from a specific model,” writes Le Goff, “the baby Jesus remained a terrifying-looking freak who was of no interest to either the artist, the customer, or the public.” Only at the end of the Middle Ages did an iconographic theme spread, reflecting a new interest in the child. In conditions of high child mortality, this interest was embodied in a feeling of anxiety: the theme of the “Massacre of the Innocents” was reflected in the spread of the holiday of the Innocent Murderers, under whose “patronage” foundling homes were located. However, such shelters appeared no earlier than the 15th century. The Middle Ages barely noticed the child, having no time to be touched or admire him. Having left the care of a woman, the child immediately found himself thrown into exhausting rural labor or military training - depending on his origin. In both cases the transition was carried out very quickly. Medieval epic works about the childhood of legendary heroes - Sid, Roland, etc. - depict the heroes as young people, not boys. The child comes into view only with the appearance of a relatively small urban family, the formation of a more personality-oriented burgher class. According to a number of scientists, the city suppressed and shackled the independence of women. She was enslaved by the hearth, while the child was emancipated and filled the house, school and street.

Le Goff is echoed by the famous Soviet researcher A. Gurevich. He writes that according to the ideas of the people of the Middle Ages, a person does not develop, but moves from one age to another. This is not a gradually prepared evolution leading to qualitative shifts, but a sequence of internally unrelated states. In the Middle Ages, a child was looked at as a small adult, and no problem of development and formation of the human personality arose. F. Aries, who studied the problem of attitudes towards children in Europe in the Middle Ages and in the early period of the New Age, writes about the ignorance of the Middle Ages of the category of childhood as a special qualitative state of a person. “Medieval civilization,” he asserts, “is a civilization of adults.” Until the 12th and 13th centuries, fine art saw children as adults of reduced size, dressed in the same way as adults and built like them. Education is not age-appropriate, and adults and teenagers are taught together. Games, before becoming children's games, were knightly games. The child was considered the natural companion of the adult.

Having left the age classes of primitiveness with their initiation rites and forgotten the principles of education of antiquity, medieval society for a long time ignored childhood and the transition from it to adulthood. The problem of socialization was considered solved by the act of baptism. Glorifying love, courtly poetry contrasted it with marital relations. Christian moralists, on the contrary, warned against excessive passion in relations between spouses and saw sexual love as a dangerous phenomenon that must be curbed, since it cannot be completely avoided. Only with the transition to modern times, the family begins to be viewed not as a union between spouses, but as a unit that is entrusted with socially important functions of raising children. But first of all, this is a bourgeois family.

According to Gurevich, a special understanding of the human personality is manifested in the specific attitude towards childhood in the Middle Ages. Man, apparently, is not yet able to recognize himself as a single developing entity. His life is a series of states, the change of which is not internally motivated.

A general analysis of attitudes towards children in the Middle Ages will help us understand such an episode as the children's crusade. It is now difficult to imagine that parents would let their children go on foot, either to Rome or to the Middle East. Maybe for a medieval person there was nothing extraordinary in this? Why little man not try to do what the big one can do? After all, the little one is the same son of the Lord as the big one. On the other hand, isn’t this whole campaign nothing more than a fairy tale, composed already when they began to write anything about children?

The legendary children's crusade gives an excellent idea of ​​how different the mentality of the people of the Middle Ages was from the worldview of our contemporaries. Reality and fiction were closely intertwined in the head of a 13th-century man. The people believed in miracles. Moreover, he saw and created them. Now the idea of ​​a children's hike seems wild to us, but at that time thousands of people believed in the success of the enterprise. True, we still don’t know whether it happened or not.

The Crusades themselves became an entire era. The most heroic and at the same time one of the most controversial pages in the history of chivalry, the Catholic Church and all of medieval Europe. The event, carried out “to please God,” least of all corresponded in its methods not only to Christian ethics, but also to ordinary moral norms.

The beginning of the crusades in the East was caused by several serious reasons. Firstly, this is the plight of the peasantry. Oppressed by taxes and duties, and having experienced a number of terrible disasters in the form of plague and famine over the course of several years (from the late 80s to the mid-90s of the 11th century), the common people were ready to go as far as they wanted just to find a place where they could eat food. food.

Secondly, the knightly class also experienced difficult times. By the end of the 11th century there was almost no free land left in Europe. The feudal lords stopped dividing their possessions between their sons, switching to the system of primogeniture - inheritance only by the eldest son. A large number of poor knights appeared, who, by their origin, did not consider it possible to engage in anything other than war. They were aggressive, rushed into any adventure, turned out to be mercenaries during numerous civil strife, and simply engaged in robbery. In the end, they had to be removed from Europe; there was a need to consolidate knighthood and direct its warlike energy somewhere “outside”, to solve external problems, since further effective management of European territories by kings, large feudal lords and the church was becoming very problematic.

The third factor is the ambitions and material claims of the Catholic Church and, first of all, the papacy. The unification of believers with some idea objectively led to the strengthening of the power of Rome, since the idea came from there. The campaign to the East promised the pope’s “interception” of the religious initiative in Eastern Europe near Constantinople, strengthening the position of Catholicism.

Also, such a military event promised enormous wealth to the church, feudal lords, and even the poor. Moreover, the church not only at the expense of war booty itself, but also at the expense of rich donations and European lands of the crusaders who went to war.

The most convenient and, it seems, obvious pretext was a campaign under the banner of war against the “infidels” - that is, against the Muslims. The immediate reason for the start of the campaign was the appeal of the Byzantine emperor Alexei Komnenos for help to Pope Urban II (1088–1099) (his name before taking the papal rank was Oddon de Lagerie). The Byzantine Empire suffered from the combined attack of the Seljuk Turks and Pechenegs. Basileus addressed the “Latins” as brothers in faith. Even without this, since the 70s of the 11th century, the idea of ​​​​the need to liberate the Holy Sepulcher, which was located in Jerusalem captured by the Turks, was in the air. Thus, the gaze of believers, who since the time of Augustine turned to heavenly Jerusalem, i.e., the Kingdom of God, turned to earthly Jerusalem. The dream of future heavenly bliss after death is intricately intertwined in the minds of Christians with specific, earthly rewards for righteous labors. The organizers of the crusades used these sentiments.

The Pope lifted the excommunication from the Byzantine Emperor Alexei, which until then had been imposed on him as a schismatic. In March 1095, the pontiff once again listened to Alexei's ambassadors at the Council of Piacenza, and in the summer of 1095 Urban II went to France. For some time he negotiated with the southern French monasteries, members of the most influential Cluny congregation, large feudal lords and authoritative priests. Finally, on November 18, a church council began in the city of Clermont-Ferrand in Auvergne. As often happened, in the city where such an important forum took place, there were a lot of visiting people. In total - about 20 thousand people: knights, peasants, vagabonds, etc. The Council discussed, in general, exclusively church problems. But at its end on November 26, Urban II, not far from the city on a plain under open air gave a speech to the people, which made the Clermont Cathedral so famous.

The pope called on Catholics to take up arms for the war against “the Persian tribe of Turks... who reached the Mediterranean Sea... killed and carried away many Christians.” The liberation of the Holy Sepulcher was declared a separate task. Dad tried to make the war seem like an easy walk, promising rich booty. Jerusalem, according to him, was a place where milk and honey flow, in the East everyone will receive new lands, which in cramped Europe are not enough for everyone. The Pontiff called for abandoning internal strife for the sake of the common cause. Urban II was extremely specific and straightforward. Everyone who went on a campaign was forgiven their sins (including future sins committed during a godly war). The Crusaders could count on going to heaven. The pope's speech was constantly interrupted by an enthusiastic crowd shouting: “God wants it this way!” Many immediately vowed to go on a hike and attached crosses made of red cloth to their shoulders.

The church took upon itself the protection of the lands (and, naturally, the management of affairs) of the departed crusaders, their debts to creditors were declared invalid. Feudal lords who did not want to go on a campaign had to pay off with rich gifts in favor of the clergy.

The news of the start of the campaign quickly spread throughout Europe. Probably, the pope himself did not expect such an effect from his speech. Already in the spring of 1096, thousands of poor people from the Rhine lands set off on their journey. Then the knights also flocked to the East. Thus began the First Crusade.

In total, united in six large groups, tens of thousands of people set out on this campaign. First, separate detachments set off, largely composed of poor people, led by Peter the Hermit and knight Walter Golyak. Their first “charitable” deed was Jewish pogroms in German cities:

Trier, Cologne, Mainz. They also caused a lot of trouble in Hungary. The Balkan Peninsula was plundered by the “soldiers of Christ.”

The crusaders then arrived in Constantinople. The most numerous detachment moving from southern France was led by Raymond of Toulouse. Bohemond of Tarentum went with his army to the East across the Mediterranean Sea. Robert of Flanders reached the Bosphorus by the same sea route. The number of crusaders who gathered in different ways in Constantinople probably reached 300 thousand. Emperor Alexei I of Byzantium was horrified by the prospect of unbridled looting in the capital that opened before him. And there was no particular hope that the Latins would only return to him the lands taken away by the Muslims. Through bribery and flattery, the emperor obtained a vassal oath from most of the knights and tried to send them on their further journey as soon as possible. In April 1097, the crusaders crossed the Bosphorus.

Walter Golyak's first detachment had already been defeated in Asia Minor by that time. But other troops that appeared here in the spring of 1097 easily defeated the army of the Sultan of Nicaea. In the summer, the crusaders split up: most moved towards the Syrian city of Antioch. In early July 1098, after a seven-month siege, the city surrendered. Meanwhile, some French crusaders established themselves in Edessa (now Urfa, Türkiye). Baldwin of Boulogne founded his own state here, stretching on both sides of the Euphrates. This was the first crusader state in the East.

In Antioch, the crusaders, in turn, were besieged by the emir of Mosul, Kerbuga. Hunger began. Exposed to great danger, they left the city and were able to defeat Kerbuga. After a long feud with Raymond, Antioch was taken over by Bohemond, who, even before its fall, managed to force the rest of the crusader leaders to agree to transfer this important city to him. Soon, a war between the crusaders and the Greeks of the coastal cities began in Asia Minor, who hoped to get rid of not only the Muslim dictatorship, but also the new Western masters.

From Antioch, the crusaders moved south along the coast without any special obstacles and captured several port cities along the way. The path to Jerusalem opened before the knights, but they did not immediately move to the desired city. An epidemic broke out - far from the last during the Crusades. The “army of Christ” lost many people every day without any battles. The leaders split up and their troops scattered throughout the surrounding areas. Finally, departure from Antioch was scheduled for March 1099.

Godfrey of Bouillon and the Count of Flanders set out for Laodicea. The entire army united under the walls of Arhas, the siege of which had already been begun by Raymond. At this time, ambassadors from the Cairo Caliph, who had recently become the ruler of Jerusalem, arrived to the crusaders. They declared that the gates of the holy city would open only to unarmed pilgrims. This did not in any way affect the plans of the Europeans. Having taken Arkhas, they continued to move towards the main goal. At that time, the Christian army numbered up to 50 thousand people. These were already battle-hardened warriors, and not the rabble of the first stage of the Crusades. But they looked at Jerusalem, which opened before their eyes, with the same childish delight and awe as any person of that era. The riders dismounted from their horses and walked barefoot; cries, prayers and the thousand-fold repeated cry of “Jerusalem!” announced to the district.

The crusaders settled in three detachments: Godfrey, Robert of Normandy and Robert of Flanders - to the northeast of the city, Tancred - to the northwest, Raymond - to the south. Jerusalem was defended by an Egyptian garrison of 40 thousand people. The city was thoroughly prepared for the siege: food was prepared, wells throughout the surrounding area and the bed of the Kidron River were filled up. The knights faced great problems. They suffered from thirst and heat, there was a treeless area around them, they had to send expeditions to remote areas for forests, from which huge siege engines, ladders and battering rams were built. Logs from which rural houses and churches in the area were made were also used. But from Genoa, merchants promptly sent ships with food and qualified carpenters and engineers.

The Saracens defended themselves staunchly, poured boiling tar on their opponents' heads, threw stones at them, and hit them with arrows. The Crusaders resorted to a variety of tactics. Once they even made a religious procession around the impregnable fortress. The decisive assault began on July 14, 1099. At night, Godfrey's warriors secretly moved their camp to the eastern part of Jerusalem, which was less well defended by the Saracens. At dawn, at a signal, all three parts of the army began to move. Colossal rolling towers moved towards the walls of Jerusalem from three sides. But after a twelve-hour battle, the Muslims managed to repel the enemy. Only the next day a bridge was finally built from Gottfried’s tower onto the wall, over which his warriors burst into the city. The knights managed to set fire to the Saracens' defenses. Soon both Raymond and Tancred were in Jerusalem. This happened at three o'clock in the afternoon, on Friday, on that day of the week and at the time when the Savior died on the cross.

A terrible massacre and no less terrible robbery began in the city. In a week, the “pious” conquerors destroyed about 70 thousand people. And they, with prayers and sobs, with bare feet and bare heads, atone for their sins in the Church of the Resurrection in front of the Sepulcher of Christ.

Soon, in a battle with a large Egyptian army at Ascalon, the united crusader army defended its main conquest. The Crusaders captured most of the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. On the captured territory, the knights created four states: the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the County of Tripoli, the Principality of Antioch and the County of Edessa. The main ruler was King Gottfried of Jerusalem, but the rest behaved quite independently. The rule of the Latins, however, turned out to be short-lived.

From the very beginning, the Crusades were a gamble. Huge heterogeneous troops under the leadership of ambitious kings, counts and dukes, often at odds with each other, with an ever-waning religious zeal, thousands of kilometers from their homeland must have experienced insurmountable difficulties. And if during the first campaign the Europeans managed to stun the Muslims with their pressure, then they created a strong system here government controlled, and then they were unable to defend their conquests.

In 1137, the Byzantine Emperor John II attacked and captured Antioch. In 1144, the strong emir of Mosul, Imad ad-din Zengi, took the county of Edessa, an outpost of the Christian world in the East. Difficult times have come for other knightly states. They were attacked from all sides by the Syrians, Seljuks and Egyptians. The king of Jerusalem lost control over his own vassal princes.

Naturally, the fall of Edessa should have been a heavy blow for Christians. This event caused a particularly great resonance in France. King Louis VII the Young was quite romantic and at the same time militant. He was overcome by a thirst for exploits, which he had heard about since childhood. This impulse was supported by both Pope Eugene III and one of the most authoritative confessors in Europe - Abbot Clairvaux Bernard, a supporter of strict morals, teacher of both Eugene and Abbot Suger, an influential adviser to Louis. In the city of Wesel in Burgundy, Bernard convened a council, at which, in the presence of the king, on March 31, 1146, he delivered a fiery speech, calling on all Christians to rise up to fight against the infidels. “Woe to him whose sword is not stained with blood,” said the preacher. Immediately, many, and, first of all, Louis, laid crosses on themselves as a sign of readiness to go to new trip. Bernard soon arrived in Germany, where, after some struggle, he managed to persuade King Conrad III to support the new endeavor.

From the very beginning of the campaign (spring of 1147), the Germans and French poorly coordinated their actions, each pursuing their own goals. So, the French wanted to move to the East by sea, using the help of the Norman king of Sicily Roger, while the Germans agreed with the Byzantine emperor Manuel and were going to move by land through Hungary and the Balkans. Conrad's point of view won, and the angry Roger, already at enmity with Byzantium over Southern Italy, entered into an alliance with African Muslims and carried out a series of devastating raids on the Greek coast and islands.

The Germans were the first to reach Constantinople in September 1147, just like the last time, having managed to inspire horror with their looting along the way. Manuel, like Alexei Komnenos, did everything possible to ensure that the Latins quickly found themselves in Asia Minor. On October 26, the Germans suffered a crushing defeat from the Iconian Sultan near Dorileum in Anatolia. Returning to Nicaea, many thousands of Germans died of starvation. But to Louis’s soldiers, who arrived in the Byzantine capital a little later, Manuel told about Conrad’s amazing successes, causing them to envy. Soon the French found themselves in Asia Minor. At Nicaea the armies of the kings met and continued their journey together. Trying to bypass the sites of the recent Pre-Rilean tragedy, the monarchs led their troops through a complex detour through Pergamon and Smyrna. The Turkish cavalry constantly harassed the columns, the crusaders experienced a lack of forage and food. The matter was complicated and slowed down by the fact that Louis VII took with him a large retinue, completely inappropriate for a difficult campaign, a magnificent court headed by his beautiful wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine. The help of the Byzantine army turned out to be insufficient - apparently, Emperor Manuel, deep down in his soul, wanted the defeat of the crusaders. On July 3, 1147, a fierce battle broke out near the village of Hittin, west of Lake Genisaret. The Muslim army outnumbered the Christian forces. As a result, the crusaders suffered a crushing defeat. Countless numbers of them were killed in battle, and the survivors were taken prisoner. Only a few powerful fortresses in the north remained in Christian hands: Krak des Chevaliers, Chatel Blanc and Margat.

At the beginning of 1148, a greatly reduced crusader army arrived in Ephesus. From here Louis, with great difficulty, having withstood a series of battles, cold and heavy rains, reached Antioch in March 1148. His army made the last part of the journey on Byzantine ships. In Antioch, the French received a warm welcome, festivities and celebrations. Eleanor began an intrigue with the local ruler. Louis VII lost all inspiration, and his army lost the necessary fighting spirit.

Meanwhile, Conrad no longer thought about joint actions with his ally. With the King of Jerusalem Baldwin III, he agreed to act not at all against the emir of Mosul - the powerful offender of Edessa, for whose sake, it seemed, the whole campaign was launched - but against Damascus. The French monarch was forced to join them. The 50,000-strong Christian army spent a lot of time under the walls of the Syrian capital. Its leaders quickly quarreled among themselves, suspecting each other of treason and the desire to seize most of the potential spoils. The attack on Damascus prompted its ruler to enter into an alliance with another Muslim feudal lord, the Prince of Aleppo. The combined Muslim forces forced the Crusaders to retreat from Damascus.

In the fall of 1148, the Germans departed for Constantinople on Byzantine ships, and from there they went to Germany. Louis also did not dare to continue hostilities. At the beginning of 1149, the French crossed to Southern Italy on Norman ships, and in the fall of the same year they were already in their homeland.

The Second Crusade turned out to be a completely useless event. Apart from numerous losses, it brought nothing to its leaders and initiators - no glory, no wealth, no lands. The Abbot of Clairvaux, for whom the defeat of the campaign was a personal tragedy, even wrote a “word of justification” in which he attributed the disasters of the war to the crimes of Christians.

During the Second Crusade, similar local events were organized by some feudal lords in Europe. Thus, the Saxons attacked the Slavic tribes between the Elbe and the Oder, and a number of French, Norman and English knights intervened in Spanish affairs, fought against the Moors and captured Lisbon, which became the capital of Christian Portugal.

If you can imagine an “all-star game” in the Middle Ages, then it could well be called the Third Crusade. Almost all the bright characters of that time, all the most powerful rulers of Europe and the Middle East took direct part in it. Richard the Lionheart, Philip II Augustus, Frederick Barbarossa, Saladin. Each is a personality, each is an era, each is a hero of his time.

After the Second Crusade, things got even worse for Christians in the East. The leader and hope of the Muslim world became an outstanding statesman and the talented commander Sultan Saladin. First he came to power in Egypt, then he subjugated Syria and other territories in the east. In 1187, Saladin took Jerusalem. The news of this became a signal for the start of the next crusade. The Roman legates managed to convince the powerful sovereigns of France, England and Germany - Philip, Richard and Frederick - to move to the East.

The German Emperor had already chosen for the movement known path through Hungary and the Balkan Peninsula. His crusaders, led by the experienced and practical 67-year-old Barbarossa, were the first to set off on a campaign in the spring of 1189. Naturally, relations between the Germans and the Byzantines traditionally deteriorated as soon as the Latins found themselves on the territory of Byzantium. Clashes began and a diplomatic scandal broke out. Frederick seriously thought about besieging Constantinople, but in the end everything was more or less resolved and the German army crossed into Asia Minor. She was slowly but surely moving south when the irreparable happened. While crossing the Saleph River, the emperor drowned. This event made a depressing impression on the pilgrims. Many of them returned home. Those who remained moved towards Antioch.

The French and British agreed to march together. The cunning and subtle diplomat Philip, since the wars against Henry II Plantagenet, was in the most friendly relations with the young English king Richard I. The latter was the complete opposite of Philip. State affairs interested him insofar as. He was much more interested in war, exploits, and glory. The first knight of his time, physically strong, brave Richard the Lionheart was a short-sighted politician and a bad diplomat. But so far, before the campaign, the friendship of the monarchs seemed unshakable. It took them some time to prepare, within the framework of which a special tax was established in their countries on all segments of the population - the so-called Saladin tithe. Richard was especially diligent in raising money. They said that the king would have sold London too if a buyer had been found for him. As a result, a significant army was assembled under his command.

Philip Augustus and Richard set out on a campaign in the spring of 1190. Their path lay through Sicily. Already here the fragility of their union was revealed. Richard laid claim to this island. He began military operations against the Sicilians (more precisely, the Normans who owned the kingdom), because of whom he quarreled with the more peaceful Philip. Finally the British and French moved on. Philip's troops safely reached the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, and the British were caught in a storm, washing them to the shores of Cyprus. Richard recaptured the island from the usurper Isaac Comnenus and declared it his own. Soon he pledged it to the Templars. It was not until June 1191 that English forces arrived at Acre.

The main events took place near this coastal Syrian city. Actually, the fortress should not have been of great strategic value for Christians. At first (back in 1189), the Christian ruler of Jerusalem, Guido Lusignan, who was deprived of his city, got involved in the struggle for it. Gradually, all the detachments that came one by one from Europe joined him. One by one the Muslims crushed them. The siege dragged on, and what was essentially a Christian knightly city grew up near Acre. Acre was perfectly protected; food and reinforcements arrived there by sea from Egypt and by land from Mesopotamia. Saladin was outside the city and constantly raided the besiegers. The crusader troops suffered from disease and heat. The arrival of new forces, and especially Richard, inspired the crusaders to more vigorously conduct military operations. Mines were dug, siege towers were built... Finally, in July 1191, the fortress was taken.

The crusaders were prevented from developing success in the east by the usual strife. A dispute arose over the candidacy of the new king of Jerusalem. Philip supported the hero of the defense of Tyre, Conrad of Monferatti, Richard supported Guido Lusignan. There were also problems with the division of the spoils. The episode with Leopold of Austria became evidence of fierce contradictions. He hoisted his banner over one of the towers of Acre, and Richard ordered it to be torn down. Then, miraculously, a bloody clash between Christians was avoided. Philip, dissatisfied and irritated by Richard’s actions, and simply considering his mission completed, left for France. The English king remained the sole leader of the crusader army. He did not receive complete trust and approval for his actions. His relationship with Saladin was inconsistent. The Sultan was distinguished by great political tact and many truly chivalrous qualities that even Europeans valued in him. He was willing to negotiate, but when Richard was friendly with the enemy, he was suspected of treason. When he took more drastic steps, Christians also had every reason to be dissatisfied. So, after the capture of Acre, the knights presented Saladin with conditions for ransoming Muslim hostages that were too difficult for him: the return of all captured territories, money, the Tree of the Cross... Saladin hesitated. Then the angry Richard ordered the death of two thousand Muslims - an action that horrified their coreligionists. In response, the Sultan ordered the killing of the Christian prisoners.

From Acre, Richard moved not to Jerusalem, but to Jaffa. This path was very difficult. Saladin constantly disturbed the knightly columns. A big battle took place at Arzuf. Here Richard proved himself to be an amazingly brave warrior and a good commander. The knights completely defeated the numerically superior enemy. But the king was unable to take advantage of the results of this victory. The English monarch and the Sultan concluded a peace in 1192 that did not at all meet the goals of the campaign. Jerusalem remained in the hands of Muslims, although it was open to peaceful Christian pilgrims. In the hands of the crusaders, only a narrow coastal strip remained, starting north of Tire and reaching Jaffa. Richard, returning home, was captured in Austria by Leopold, who harbored a grudge against him, and spent two years in prison.

The Fourth Crusade clearly showed what goals the crusader army actually pursues and what its Christian piety is worth. It is not for nothing that Pope John Paul II had to relatively recently apologize to the Patriarch of Constantinople for the actions of the knights back in the 13th century.

The initiator of the next campaign was the active Pope Innocent III. In 1198, he began to agitate Western sovereigns and feudal lords to go again to liberate the Holy Sepulcher. The powerful monarchs of England and France this time ignored Innocent's proposal, but several feudal lords still decided to take part in the campaign. These were Thibault of Champagne, Margrave Boniface of Montferatta, Simon de Montfort, Baudouin of Flanders and others.

The crusaders agreed with the pope that the army should first go not to Syria and Palestine, but to Egypt, from where the Muslim world drew its strength. Since the knights did not have a large fleet, they turned to the leading naval power of that time - the Venetian Republic. The rich merchant cities of Italy from the very beginning of the Crusades took an active part in their organization. The Genoese, Pisans and Venetians transported supplies and people, being interested not only in specific rewards for these services, but also in strengthening their influence in the Eastern Mediterranean to the detriment of the interests of competitors: the Arabs and Byzantium. In 1201, the elderly (he was more than 90 years old!) Doge of Venice Enrico Dandolo promised to transport 25 thousand crusaders to Egypt and bring them supplies for three years for 85 thousand marks and half of the future booty. In May of the same year, Boniface of Monferatti, a practical and cynical man, became the leader of the crusaders. Soon he and Dandolo pushed Pope Innocent away from leading the campaign and focused on their own interests other than the original goals of the campaign.

The crusaders gathered in a camp on the island of Lido, a few kilometers from Venice. It quickly became clear that the crusaders did not have enough money to pay for food. Then the Doge agreed with Boniface that the soldiers of Christ would pay Venice a favor - they would capture the rich city of Zadar on the Dalmatian coast, which then belonged to Hungary. Only a few knew about the agreement. All the crusaders were put on ships in the fall of 1202 and a month later they landed not near Egypt, but near Zadar, which the irritated knights easily took.

The Byzantine prince Alexei Angel arrived to the knights. His father Isaac, who was in alliance with the German emperor, had shortly before been overthrown and blinded by Alexius III Comnenus. The prince managed to escape, and now he asked for help from the crusaders. And for this he promised a rich reward, assistance in the campaign to the Holy Land and, finally, the restoration of the unity of the Greek and Roman Christian churches. So there was a reason to go to Constantinople. This idea was actively supported by Boniface and Dandolo. The Venetians had long had a grudge against the Byzantines. In trade and maritime terms, they were stronger and had great privileges in Constantinople for a long time, but more and more often misunderstandings arose between the Venetian merchants and the emperor, which cost the Italians large losses.

On June 23, 1203, the crusaders arrived at the Bosphorus and landed on the Asian coast, near Chalcedon. They then crossed over to Galata and established a fortified camp here. The Venetian ships, having broken through the famous chain blocking the entrance, burst into the Golden Horn Bay. By this time, the knightly army numbered about 40 thousand people, but due to illness, desertion and military losses, only about 15 thousand took part in the final distribution of the spoils.

Actually, there was no siege as such - all actions were concentrated on a relatively small area of ​​​​the city fortifications. The walls seemed completely impenetrable. Over the past seven centuries, they more than once defended the city from the Huns, Bulgarians, Slavs, Arabs and Turks, whose armies were significantly superior to the forces with which they besieged Dandolo and Boniface. But Constantinople did not have a sufficient number of defenders. In addition, in July, Alexei III fled the capital. Isaac returned to the throne. He and his son were in no hurry to fulfill their obligations to the Latins. They behaved more and more impudently towards the local residents, causing universal hatred. It ended with the fact that power in the capital in January 1204 was seized by the ardent opponent of the crusaders Alexey Duka, Alexey Angel was thrown into prison and killed. When asked by Western feudal lords whether the new emperor was going to pay the amount promised by his predecessors, he refused. The crusaders had another excuse to capture Constantinople.

In March, Boniface of Monferatti and Dandolo drew up a detailed plan of action, from which they did not retreat a single step. According to the agreement, the knights were to take Constantinople by storm and establish Latin rule there. The city was to be plundered and all the loot amicably divided between Venice and the French. The territory of the country was divided between them and the newly elected Latin emperor. The decisive assault began on April 9. Constantinople was taken on April 12, 1204. This date can be considered the true end of the Byzantine Empire, although it was formally restored sixty years later, after which it existed for another two centuries.

The crusaders staged a three-day bloody orgy in Constantinople. They killed, robbed, raped. Eyewitnesses of the events, even from the Latin side, described these three days with horror. The knights burned libraries, destroyed priceless works of art, took sacred objects out of churches, and did not spare either the elderly or children. And all this happened in a Christian city, as part of the Fourth Crusade, announced to fight the “infidels”! The Latin Empire was formed on the territory of Byzantium.

During the entire time of the Fourth Crusade, in fact, only small detachments of those leaders who at one time refused to join the crusaders in Venice arrived in the Holy Land from Europe. But these several hundred knights could do little to help their coreligionists. Their army carried out several minor punitive expeditions against the Muslim emir in the vicinity of Sidon, and their fleet plundered the Nile Delta Egyptian city Fuwu. As a result of these actions, a peace treaty was signed in September 1204 for a period of six years: Jaffa, taken from them in 1197, half of the territory of Sidon, and part of the city of Nazareth were returned to the Christians. In general, the Fourth Campaign only weakened the Christian East. The emerging Latin Empire divided its forces: Constantinople absorbed part of the subsidies intended for the Holy Land and attracted soldiers who could go to Syria.

In our opinion, there is nothing surprising in the fact that the story of the children's crusade was attributed to the time of the above-mentioned Pope Innocent III. His personality is extremely curious. The pope was distinguished by his indomitable energy, ambition, apparently sincere conviction that he was doing the right thing, and devotion to the Catholic Church. During his time on the papal throne, Innocent III organized many large-scale events. He interfered in the affairs of sovereigns throughout Europe, his hands reached out to England, the Baltic states, Galicia... The pope considered his main goal to consolidate the rule of the popes over Europe.

Innocent III (his name before accepting the tiara was Giovanni-Lothair Conti) succeeded Celestine III on the papal throne on January 8, 1198. It is curious that before this he was not even a bishop; he was only 38 years old, but the cardinals already considered him the best contender for the Holy See.

The Pope immediately began to solve problems with the enemies of the throne. To begin with, he dealt with the Roman aristocrats, while enjoying the full support of the ordinary urban population, among whom he was unusually popular. Then Innocent turned to Italian affairs, where the Germans traditionally fought with him for influence. The German barons, planted in various cities of the Apennine Peninsula by Emperor Henry VI, were forced to leave the Papal States. The Florentine cities formed an independent union, but papal sympathies were strong there too. Less than a year had passed before the Papal States, under the leadership of Innocent III, reached its greatest extent in its entire previous history. After Italy, it was the turn of the rest of Europe. As the historian N. Osokin writes: “For Innocent, in the entire West there was no person too poor, too insignificant and, conversely, a ruler too influential.” That is why he boldly entered into confrontation with the most powerful sovereigns, making extensive use of the sentiments in the lower classes, exploiting their religiosity, and, sometimes, ignorance and belligerence.

In carrying out his plans in relation to the rulers of contemporary Europe, Innocent met strong resistance. The pope strengthened his influence in Germany, England, France, Leon (one of the Spanish kingdoms), Portugal, and finally, the rebellious Languedoc (a region in the south of France) after a difficult struggle with politicians and the spirit of national identity.

There was complete confusion in Germany: there was a struggle for the imperial throne. The hopes of the parties were also connected with the actions of Innocent III; much depended on which of the three contenders he would support: Philip of Hohenstaufen, Frederick of Hohenstaufen or Otto IV, Duke of Brunswick, leader of the Welf party. Philip and Otto were elected to the throne by German princes almost simultaneously, each by his own party. A war began between the rivals. At first they did not pay attention to the direct heir, the son of the last emperor, Frederick. Innocent, after much deliberation, spoke out in favor of Otto, against whom almost all of central and southern Germany protested. His opponents sent the pope a rather harsh protest. “Perhaps the Holy Curia,” wrote the authors of this document, “in its parental tenderness considers us an addition to the Roman Empire. If so, then we cannot help but declare the injustice of all this...” But the curia thought so, so Innocent continued to defend his point of view. His namesake, the French king, who had just been humiliated by the pontiff, spoke in Philip’s favor, which will be discussed below. The situation was resolved in Otto's favor quite unexpectedly. On June 23, 1208, Philip of Hohenstaufen was killed by his personal enemy - one of the German feudal lords. Otto, however, did not live up to the pope's hopes. In 1210 he attempted to seize the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which included large parts of the Apennine Peninsula, and was excommunicated. This once again showed that the differences between the pontificate and the Holy Roman Empire are systemic. Whoever came to power in the empire, he invariably came into conflict with the pope over the right to interfere in the affairs of the church in his country and claims to certain disputed territories.

Much more harshly, Innocent III put in place the rebellious English monarch, who was the notorious John the Landless - a king who did not want to share his power with anyone, even with the Catholic Church. In 1205, John attempted to revoke the papal confirmation of the new Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the English Church. As a result, Innocent imposed an interdict on England. For medieval people, the cessation of all rituals and celebrations and the closure of temples was a disaster. For some time the English king fought: he ordered to seize, expel, hang and kill those clergy who submitted to the interdict. He confiscated their estates, encouraged robbery, but only achieved that he further alienated the population of the country against himself. In 1212, Innocent removed John from the throne and freed the English feudal lords from their vassal oath to their king. The monarch's anger turned to servility. He abandoned England in favor of Rome and received it back from the pope with the obligation of a large annual tribute.

The pope did not limit himself to England and Germany. It was under Innocent that the conquest campaigns of the Teutonic Order began in the territories settled by the Prussians and the Order of the Swordsmen in the lands of the Livonians. In both Prussia and Livonia, the crusades were accompanied by merciless devastation of the lands. The pope also fought to strengthen his influence in Spain.

One of Innocent’s strongest opponents in his time was the outstanding French monarch Philip II Augustus. Then the time came for the power of royal power, the process of unification of French lands was underway. Philip II successfully fought the British for the vast territories in France that had been ceded to them under Eleanor of Aquitaine, gained control of the possessions of feudal lords who went on crusades to the east, and established relations with the cities that he removed from the power of the barons. A lot has been done in the field of administrative and economic structure of the state. Such a king was naturally against Rome having great influence on French affairs. The reason for the clash between Philip and Innocent was the king's marriage problems. The latter did not love his wife Ingeborg, sister of the Danish king Knut. When Pope Celestine III refused Philip's request for a divorce, the king ordered Ingeborg to be locked up in a monastery, and he himself married the daughter of one of the Tyrolean princes. Having come to power, Innocent resolutely led the struggle to implement the papal order. In January 1200, the French clergy gathered for a council in Vienne. The Pope's legate declared that France was subject to excommunication for the sins of its king. Philip II Augustus was forced to yield. In 1202 the excommunication was lifted. They say the king said bitterly: “How happy Saladin is that he doesn’t have a dad.” Ingeborg was returned to court. But the French monarch harbored hatred for Rome and, undoubtedly, was not a reliable subject of the Curia.

Innocent III also had certain hopes of establishing his influence in Byzantium. It was during the reign of this pontiff that the bloody Fourth Crusade was organized, during which the crusaders defeated Constantinople. However, dad was dissatisfied with the cruelty they showed. Having learned about the wild atrocities of the French and Venetians, he punished the perpetrators with an excommunicating bull. But Innocent himself became the organizer of the no less bloody Albigensian campaign in the south of France, during which it was with his permission that the Inquisition began to operate. It is curious that King Philip did not personally participate in the wars against heretics. The battles with the Albigensians at the first stage were fought, in fact, by Rome and the crusading army it recruited. It is unlikely that the French king was delighted with the fact that a foreign army was ruling the territory of his kingdom.

Thus, the children's crusade, which allegedly occurred in 1212, may be most directly related to the history of Innocent's struggle with the German and French rulers. We are again dealing with some organized and probably armed groups called by the church, who gather in Germany and France and march along the roads of the domains of disobedient monarchs. Their goals in this case can be divided into formal and actual. Just as the participants of the Fourth Crusade went to Egypt and sailed to Dalmatia, the participants of the “children’s” campaign went to the Holy Land and reached Marseilles. And, perhaps, both the French and the Germans. The French even had a letter with them addressed to Philip II Augustus. What was in this document, what did the legates who secretly directed the campaign want to achieve? Performances of the king's regular forces in the Middle East? Their participation in the Albigensian War? Complete submission of the king to the pope? Or maybe the monarch was preparing another attempt to remove the church from solving the state problems of France, and the procession of thousands served as a preventive measure that kept him from this step? After all, since the pontiff can put colossal masses of common people under his banners (in addition to the main part of the “children’s army,” local formations marched along the roads of France), is it really possible to fight Rome?

“The childish mind leads to the foolish shore...” Children's Crusade 1212 To believe or not to believe in biblical story about the sea parting for Moses is a personal matter for everyone. But the thousands of children who, singing hymns, walked through the streets of Marseille straight to the sea, undoubtedly believed in it. They