But it is the children who most interest us to-day. We must find a motive which could excuse an atrocious crime and hold it for righteousness. That motive we find in the Crusades; and it has been often suggested that in the “Children’s Crusade” we find the real foundation of the episode.
Although we nowadays number the Crusades in a charming regularity and order, probably the people who took part in them did not realise that they were anything but episodes in a furious and weary struggle which, up to 1212 at least, had had little more result than disaster and destruction. Children saw their fathers dragged away to the East, and, lost in a gloomy fog of war and despair, mostly disappear for ever. Their mothers and their priests told them that daddy had gone to get back the tomb of Christ and save it from wicked men; and the world was sunk in misery and poverty and despair; up to 1212 at least, the war had had no further result than the capture of Acre in 1191, the elevation of Saladin to a pinnacle of romantic glory, the barbarous quarrels among Christians, and the frightful attack upon Constantinople which had led to the destruction in hideous circumstances of that once glorious city in 1204. In 1212 the grown men of Europe had become heartily sick of the weary struggle, and it occurred to the clergy that, since it seemed likely that the tomb of Christ could never be recovered by sinful men—and if you read Gibbon you will see that many of the Crusaders were exceedingly sinful, Cross and all—it was only right to try if the innocence of little boys might not be able to prevail over the powers of evil. It is not suggested that the clergy really encouraged the “Children’s Crusade,” though some people seem to think that they did. All the authorities that Hecker was able to consult show that the saner of the clergy were as much horrified by this result of the neurasthenia of the time as the parents.
In Germany a little boy named Nicholas, of whom we know nothing but his name, appeared in July, 1212, and gave out that he was sent directly from God to lead the children to the Holy Land. Vast numbers crowded to follow him in spite of everything that the parents could do to keep the little people at home. Finding that the boys were determined to go, the parents, with true German forethought, provided them with “harlots” to keep them company and entertain them on the way. Personally I believe that for this unpleasant word we should read “nurses,” for the average age of the boys seems to have been rather under twelve than over. There was a considerable number of older men and women, whose morals suffered sadly. They crossed the Alps in straggling swarms dignified by the name of armies; they wore Crusaders’ uniform and bore themselves as soldiers of the Cross; some little girls joined them in boys’ clothes—even then they couldn’t keep the girls from following the boys into mischief, just as to-day we cannot keep them from playing that most dangerous game for girls, Rugby football; the total number of the children was at least 30,000; their real starting-point was Cologne, which you reach from Hamelin, as I have said, after you cross the Koppelberg. Many of them starved in the Alps or were eaten by wolves; crowds of robbers infested them and ate their substance and seized their clothing; they reached Genoa and were mocked at by the sensible Italians, who were sadly wanting in that faith which should lead little boys to victory against black men who rode about on horses and carried big swords and shouted to Allah as they fought. The armies scattered, and it is possible that stragglers reached Transylvania and formed the basis for one verse of the “Pied Piper.” Some certainly settled in Genoa and became ultimately rich and prosperous, but some of them tried to return home through the wolves and mountains, only to find their friends as mocking as the Italians, for nothing fails like failure. Some reached Innocent III, the pope, and after having been made by that astute statesman to swear that they would become Crusaders when they grew up, were told to go back home again. A few sturdy little fellows reached Brindisi and found that the sea would not divide before them; they were sold as slaves to the Saracens, and thus reached the Holy Land, but in far other guise than that of conquerors. Very few of them all ever saw their mothers again.
This is what many people now believe to have been the real basis of Browning’s poem, though it is quite possible that he did not know it himself but intended it to refer to one of the idle legends of sorcery that I have mentioned. If he had known it was a thing so tragic would he have treated it in so jocular a vein?
Even more pitiful was the tragedy of the French children in the same year when the world really seems to have gone mad. The leader was a little shepherd boy of twelve, named Stephen. Matthew Paris in ponderous language calls him a bad little boy—I suppose he had stolen some cleric’s apples or done something else equally atrocious. The children in their madness called him St. Stephen; and he worked miracles. One morning in July, 1212, he thought he saw Christ, who not only accepted a piece of bread from Stephen’s grubby hand, but gave him a letter to the king, and told him to lead an army of children to the Sepulchre. The king of France ordered Stephen not to be silly, and forbade other little girls and boys to attend his meetings, and the parents, so far as they could, put them under lock and key. Just so and with as little success might we confine behind a feeble mediæval lock to-day a little boy who wanted to go swimming. Very few little girls joined Stephen. The heart-broken parents did everything that they knew to keep their little sons at home, and some of the boys were killed in a mad crush to get a lock of Stephen’s hair; in response Stephen promised that the Mediterranean would open before them and allow them to reach the Holy Land dry-shod. The richer parents sent guides; the poorer boys found their own way to the sea. The unhappy mothers could not tell us their feelings when they saw their sons thus dragged away by suggestion; because they could not write; but one would like to know what clerk it was whom Stephen saw and thought to be Christ. He, apparently, was the direct cause of Stephen’s delusion; he, and his letter.[16]
At length they reached Marseilles and found the Mediterranean as blue as ever and as treacherous. Two shipowners met them while they were wondering why the sea had not even a tide, far less showed signs of opening for little boys. Let us give these shipowners their glorious names; they were William Porcus and Hugh Ferreus. They welcomed the boys and joined in their services, behaving, to the boys’ eyes, as true Christians. Stephen rejoiced in them, for all through the south of France he had met nothing but robbers and most unchristian men. William the Pig and Iron-hearted Hugo offered to take them to Palestine on shipboard for sheer love of God, as it seemed unlikely that the sea would open to give them passage as Stephen had promised. The little boys filled seven large ships and set forth joyfully and with cheerful shouts, singing hymns of victory. Two of the ships were wrecked in a storm off St. Pierre’s Rock, near Sardinia, and every boy on board was drowned. They were the lucky ones, because in time the survivors reached a strange and savage land which was not Holy, but was Egypt, where black men came on board and bought them all as slaves; and not one of those little boys ever reached France again. The usual stories were set afoot that some of them had been martyred rather than turn Moslem; but all that is known for certain is that eighteen years later seven hundred of them were still alive—but no longer little boys. It does not require much knowledge of Egypt to picture the tree of knowledge of which those little boys had been forced to eat. The extraordinary thing is that neither French nor German boys seem to have known of the deeds of the others.
The only light in the gloom is that the free-thinking Emperor Frederick II afterwards laid hands upon William and Hugo and hanged them ingloriously with several other scoundrels. Probably he did this on general principles, and not on account of the little boys.
Of course the frightful episode of the Children’s Crusade is merely an instance of the extraordinary suggestibility of children. You can do anything with a little boy if you work upon his imagination and subject him to “mass-suggestion.”