Download PDF | Gary Dickson - Children's Crusade_ Medieval History, Modern Mythistory-Palgrave Macmillan (2007).
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Preface
A sudden and inexplicable outpouring of crusading enthusiasm inflamed and unsettled troops of male and female youths, along with grownups, mothers with babes-in-arms, and the occasional family of peasants or townspeople, dislodging them from the towns and villages of early thirteenth-century France and Germany, severing their links with the strongest man-made force on earth, daily life, and sending them on a fervent quest to the Holy Land. This was the Children’s Crusade, obscurely famous and famously obscure, one of the least understood but most memorable incidents of the crusading epoch.
In its successive guises and mutations it was the first popular crusade, the first medieval youth movement, the first Shepherds’ Crusade, an ecstatic processional enthusiasm, a search for the True Cross, a charismaticallyled Holy Land pilgrimage, an unarmed crusade of peasants and urban laborers, a collective migration of impoverished dreamers, folk art.
Born illegitimate at a time when crusading fervor gripped every level of European society, the Children’s Crusade sprang to life in an era of extraordinary religious creativity. Amongst the period’s most creative religious figures were the Poor Man of Assisi, St. Francis; St. Clare of Assisi, runaway and disciple of Francis; and of course the greatest of papal crusaders, Innocent III. No history of the Children’s Crusade can ignore them.
But history is not the whole story. The Children’s Crusade was also a child of the medieval imagination. The enthusiasts themselves were self-imagined, enclosed in a mythic world. Their earliest chroniclers incorporated mythic motifs into their fragmentary accounts. Already by mid-century a few talented writers were transmuting history into mythistory. Which means that by the time the Children’s Crusade bid farewell to the Middle Ages and sailed into modernity, mythistory prevailed.
Nowadays what most people remember about it, besides its name, is an image of starry-eyed youngsters pitting themselves against the harsh realities of a pitiless world, exchanging their homeland, their freedom, and their lives for an impossible dream of Jerusalem regained. Gustave Doré, catching sight of these doomed runaways through the lens of late nineteenth-century French romantic medievalism, visualized fragile, fresh-faced, androgynous young people, dressed in flowing garments, gazing rapturously round and about, their mouths open in acclamation and song, one lad clasping his hands in prayer, another crossing his arms above his breast (Figure 1). Their apparent leaders, three youths heading an endless column, carry shepherds’ crooks. As the youths stream into a faraway, Italianate city, young aristocratic ladies, glance downwards from a raised loggia at the vast processional troop of peasant innocents. Whether their glances are impassive or compassionate is hard to say. Diagonally opposite these gentlewomen a sinister clerical figure positions himself near the front rank of the child-pilgrims, armed with a tall processional cross. Is this mesmeric, attentive figure their puppet master, their Svengali—the Pied Piper of these Lost Boys? What cannot be denied is that Gustave Doré was inspired by the mythistorical—not the historical—Children’s Crusade.
This mythistorical “Children’s Crusade” is one of the most evocative verbal artefacts to have come down to us from the Middle Ages. Centuries of usage have given it a name. That name—repeated in fiction and encyclopedias; on the web and the History Channel—is engraved in historical scholarship as well as in popular consciousness. Only a fool would tamper with it. But as we all know from commercial packaging, even standard brands sometimes mislead us about exactly what lies within. The “Children’s Crusade” is just such a label. Neither “children” (Latin pueri), nor “crusade” (Latin peregrinatio, iter, expeditio, crucesignatio, etc.) is either entirely wrong, or wholly right. Both require clarification.
One of the most puzzling features of the historical Children’s Crusade of 1212 remains largely unexplored. Out-of-control peasant crusaders in 1096, 1251, 1309, and 1320, swept through the Jewish communities in their paths, pillaging, massacring, and forcibly baptizing Jews. So why did the Children’s Crusade alone leave no trail of Jewish corpses behind it? As Sherlock Holmes knew, dogs that do not bark are worth investigating.
Wonder and amazement accompanied these youthful, unconventional crusaders, attracting the attention of the chroniclers. Although generally hostile towards what was, after all, an unauthorized crusade, these same clerical chroniclers mythistoricized it so memorably that they preserved it from historical oblivion. But like mummification or formaldehyde, mythistoricization subtly—or not so subtly—distorts as well as preserves. Once provided with a mythistoricized afterlife, however, the Children’s Crusade found a permanent niche in the uncatalogued and hopelessly cluttered museum that is the European and American imagination.
“Imagination always exerts a gravitional pull on historical events, bending them into confabulations, fictions, myths.”! Imagination is the key to the transformative process which turns historical events into mythistory. But the secret is out. The postmodernists have let the cat out of the bag. In its hubristic imposition of order and coherence, historiography, too, re-imagines the past.
Gary Dickson Portobello Edinburgh
2007 C.E.
Acknowledgements
Expressing my gratitude to those who have assisted me in my research is not a duty but a pleasure. As long ago as 1977, the organizers of the Stirling Conference of the Scottish Medieval Group allowed me to air some of my half-formed—actually, half-baked—notions about the Children’s Crusade under the chairmanship of Abelard’s biographer, Michael Clanchy. Coincidentally, he was again my chairman when I spoke about the pueri to the Earlier Medieval Seminar of the Institute of Historical Research, London, in 1992. Within and well beyond these two dates, I hazarded various ideas on medieval revivalism and popular crusades at seminars and conferences too numerous to specify. To their organizers may I extend my blanket gratitude, especially as some of them had the additional burden of editing my prose. My attendance at these academic tribal gatherings was in several instances due to the partial or total benefaction of the Travel and Research Committee of the University of Edinburgh, which, in addition, enabled me to visit libraries and archives in Paris, Chartres, and Chateaudun in connection with this study. The Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland subsidized my hunt for the elusive pueri in the Rhineland and Liége. The British Academy funded my appearance at the Tucson conference of the Medieval Academy of America.
In Chateaudun, my efforts were aided by the President of the Société Dunoise, Bernard LeGrand, and its Librarian and Archivist, Didier Caffot. In Chartres, I was assisted by the diocesan archivist Abbé Pierre Bizeau as well as staff members of the municipal library and the departmental archives. Equally helpful were the municipal librarians of Saint Quentin. As for Paris, it is best to maintain a diplomatic silence. In Rome, the Vatican librarians and archivists were unfailingly helpful and courteous, as were their counterparts in the British Library, London. Expert bibliographical scholars of Liége and the Rhineland benevolently guided me towards books and articles I would otherwise have overlooked. As always, the staff of the National Library of Scotland, and of the University of Edinburgh’s Inter-Library Loans and its Special Collections gave service above and beyond the call of duty.
Particular individuals deserve to be singled out for their exceptional contribution to this book. Nicole Bériou then of the University of Paris- Sorbonne (Paris IV) generously provided me with a transcription of a new manuscript text relating to the pueri; Jessalynn Bird, then of Queen’s College, Oxford, discovered Otto, the last puer, while Andrea Tilatti of the University of Udine pursued him through the archives. As the endnotes testify, John P. Renwick of Edinburgh, Voltaire scholar par excellence, repeatedly responded to my queries. For emergency linguistic first aid, Edinburgh scholars—Philip Bennett, Jonathan Usher, and especially the patient and expert medieval Latinist Alan Hood—are owed a special vote of thanks. Finally, I am very grateful to Jonathan Riley-Smith of Cambridge for his perceptive comments on the completed typescript.
But to list the names of all those who shared their knowledge and wisdom with me—Edinburgh colleagues, first and foremost, but also old friends throughout the U.K., the U.S.A., France, Germany, and Italy—would overstretch these pages and try my publisher’s patience. Please forgive your anonymity here. I look forward to thanking you in person.
Such acknowledgement doubles as formal exculpation. I take sole responsibility for any shortcomings found herein.
To my teachers, all now deceased, Gavin Langmuir of Stanford, Roberto Lopez of Yale, and Denys Hay of Edinburgh, is owed whatever merit this book may have. And to my wife—what can I offer? My apologies, or my thanks?
Introduction
The turbulence of the Sixties protest movements, the drug-friendly love-ins of the flower children, and the drift of tiny but frightening direct-action groups like the Weathermen into “urban guerrilla warfare” generated a powerful counter-current of hostility against American youth culture in general and young radicals in particular.
Agatha Christie’s Passenger to Frankfurt in 1970
Agatha Christie published Passenger to Frankfurt in 1970, when she was eighty. Nearly all the critics panned it, but Passenger to Frankfurt remained on the New York Times best-seller list for twenty-seven weeks. Miss Christie’s biographer attributes its brisk sales to the fact that it “was timely:... everything seemed upside down... [Christie] hit raw nerves.” Into her tirade against Sixties youth culture disguised as a novel, Agatha Christie poured her readings of European history, conversations with California prophets of hippiedom, and gloomy meditations on exploited innocence and perverted idealism.!
Trying to summarize Passenger’s convoluted plot risks bringing on a migraine; but the plot is immaterial. What matters is what lies at the heart of the book. An international youth movement is conspiring to undermine the civilized world. The youthful conspirators are a gaggle of neo-Nazis, pop-music fans, drug addicts, pushers, revolutionaries, nihilists, and dangerous dreamers—as unappealing an assortment of young undesirables as any octogenarian could wish for. A worldly-wise diplomat, Sir Stafford Nye (Miss Christie’s mouthpiece as the voice of reason), dubs this unsavory gang of young people the “‘children’s crusade ala mode’,” expatiating: “‘this whole business is rather like the children’s crusade. Starting with idealism, starting with ideas of the Christian world delivering the holy city from pagans, and ending with death. Nearly all the children died. Or were sold into slavery. This will end the same way unless...’”* But in “this business” death would not be the fate of selfsacrificial, young crusade heroes. Far from it. Instead, the murderous outcome of twisted idealism would be the death of countless others. Victims no longer, these youngsters are now the willing perpetrators of up-to-date horrors.
We are in the high Sixties. We hear the sound of embassy windows shattering. “‘Again [deplores a female dinner-guest] it is those terrible students... they fight, resist the police—go marching, shouting idiotic things, lie down in the streets... We have them like a pest everywhere in Europe’.”> Outbursts of youthful violence are coupled with threats of apocalyptical violence to come. Interspersed with bursts of action are musings about the medieval arch-villain, the Old Man of the Mountain, leader of the Assassins, together with ruminations upon that distant time “when a yearning towards crusades swept... all over Europe’.” Behind the crusades, we learn, were dreams and, more frightening still, visions.4
Agatha Christie thus imaginatively reworks the traditional picture of the misguided, pathetic, wide-eyed young people who ran off to join the Children’s Crusade of 1212 into a photofit image of the young terrorists of the late Sixties. Rather than naively succumbing to devils, they were demonic themselves. Trick photography or historical mirage it may have been, but a good number of Miss Christie’s readers saw contemporary events reflected in her pop-art picture. Implausibly but—all credit to her—ingeniously, Passenger to Frankfurt refashions a medieval tale to fit snugly inside a modern one.
That a popular writer like Agatha Christie (1890-1976) was able to allude to the thirteenth-century Children’s Crusade, confident that it would not flummox her twentieth-century readers, is remarkable. It would have astounded the medieval chroniclers who foresaw not a glimmer of posthumous longevity issuing from it. Obituarists for juvenile folly, they carved their last words like epitaphs:
After a short time all that came to nothing, because it was founded upon nothing.°... Their journey was brought to nought.®... But they succeeded not at all. For all, in different ways, were ruined, died, or returned.”
This is the way the chroniclers saw it. All that this overwhelming nullity left behind was disillusionment, discomfiture, and death. But the Last Judgment of the medieval chroniclers was overturned by subsequent generations. There was a trade-off. What the pueri (boys, children; youths, youngsters) lost historically, they gained mythistorically.
Mythistory
According to the respected Chicago world-historian and former President of the American Historical Association, William H. McNeill, man is such a producer of myths, and myths are so basic and necessary an element of group cohesion, that historians, sharing the assumptions of their audiences, and addressing their concerns, cannot help but write “mythistory.”® The moderate triumphalism of McNeill’s own Rise of the West, unashamedly subtitled A History of the Human Community, is a case in point.? Though this view of “mythistory” seems too despairing a relativism and perhaps too easy a cultural determinism, who can doubt that before historians became self-conscious demythologizers or postmodernists, myths, both as overarching explanations, and as self-contained narrative episodes, pervaded historical literature.
Mythistory, in fact, has a long history. Some would castigate its effects on historical writing as pernicious or subversive. Perceptively describing the mythistoricizing process, Roland Barthes argues that “myth... abolishes the complexity of human acts.”!° Myth, in other words, simplifies, clarifies, and reduces historical complexity to an essential meaning. Does that fatally undermine historiography or merely make it digestible?
Medieval historiography welcomed incidents which explored or confirmed the mysterious, sacral, or providential dimension to human affairs, the universe of wonder. Material of this sort found its true home in exempla, entertaining moral anecdotes inserted into sermons; in collections of miracula, miracle stories; and in mirabilia, antique legends and amazing tales. Wonders, marvels, and miracles, far from being intruders, were frequently honored guests in medieval annals and chronicles. Thirteenthcentury historical anecdotalists such as Caesarius of Heisterbach and Thomas of Cantimpré presented “True Stories”—didactic, mythistoricized versions of private and public events—predigested for sermons. From this world of moralizing, theologizing, cautionary, prognosticating, wundergeschichten (miracle tales or “histories”), a select number of medieval mythistories outlived the Middle Ages and entered the modern world. One was called the Children’s Crusade.
Sounding suspiciously like mystery, “mythistory” is not easy to vocalize in English unless it is either lisped or split in two, as in myth-[pause] history. Not by any means is the word a neologism. If anything, it is an archaism. As early as 1731, “mythistory” was defined as “history mingled with false fable and tales.”!! Unlike fable or folklore, however, or myths pure and simple, mythistories occur in real chronological time and real geographical space. Then again, unlike legends, their closest kin, mythistories are not so much additives (history plus) as new creations, hybrids. Nor do mythistories necessarily adhere to a biographical core, as so many legends do. Again, unlike legends, normally we do not encounter mythistories in an open-ended narrative cycle. An intriguing character like the Wandering Jew wanders in and out of mythistory as well as learned or folkloric legend, !* and probably is wandering still. Conversely, a mythistorical figure like the Pied Piper (or Ratcatcher) of Hameln is typically confined to a self-contained, non-cyclical, anecdotalized episode rather like the Children’s Crusade. Accused of musically bewitching and luring away the vanished children of Hameln, the Pied Piper has also been implicated in the disappearance of the—equally enchanted?—Lost Boys of 1212. Then, too, like the pueri, their near-contemporaries, the technicolored, mythistorical, twelfth-century English Green Children, are part and parcel of the grand, recurring mythic motifs centered upon uncanny or exceptional children.!%
Myths have always surrounded the child prodigy or wunderkind and the puer-senex, the Wise Child with an old man’s head on his shoulders. A perfect example is the runaway, twelve-year-old Jesus discovered by his distraught parents listening and putting questions to the venerable doctors of the synagogue (Figure 2). There are echoes of the missing boyJesus in some accounts of the Children’s Crusade. One English chronicler, for example, maintains that none of the pueri was older than twelve.!4 Medieval ideas of childhood, combining notions of purity, divine election, and martyrdom, were strengthened by contemporary allegations of the Jewish ritual murder of Christian boys and by the cult of the Holy Innocents, themselves martyrs for the sake of the Christ child. These were mythic motifs lying in wait to impregnate historical events.
Fundamental to the idea of mythistory is generic location. Authenticating historiographical forms or genres have always provided a purpose-built, ideal habitat for mythistories. Despite the distancing techniques employed by medieval annalists, chroniclers, and historians (e.g. “it is said that”), the placement of mythistories in a generic context was more than camouflage. After all, historiography from its Herodotean inception was universally paraded as truth-telling. Constantly reiterated from classical antiquity to the Middle Ages, veracity was its sterling silver. “Histories,” Isidore of Seville (d. 636) declares, “are true things that have taken place.”!5 Once embedded in historical narrative, stories acquired historicity by contact. On the one hand, authors of medieval epics and romances brazenly sought to appropriate the truth-claims which gave medieval historical writing its cultural prestige and authority. On the other, sophisticated medieval chroniclers and self-conscious medieval historians, following in the footsteps of their Greco-Roman predecessors, tirelessly insisted that historiography was a true record of the past. Not only that, it was the sole truthful mode of representing that which had occurred before or during the historian’s lifetime. This claim to unique and exclusive primacy was supported, not only by authoritative classical texts, but also—something which should never be forgotten, but often is—by biblical histories (the Book of Chronicles, Kings, Luke’s Acts of the Apostles, among others). Scriptural histories were nothing less than the canonical vessels of God’s truth. Wholly conscious of the dignity of their craft, medieval chroniclers and historians passed up few opportunities to trumpet it.
Once mythistoricized, the narrative of the Children’s Crusade was not so much history deformed, as history outgrown, transfigured. Disengaged from linear events, liberated by mythic motifs, the medieval runaways, now equipped for time travel, hurtled through the centuries. Then, every so often the pueri would be released from suspended animation and taken on a tour of the ever-multiplying cultural media—encyclopedias; histories, both scholarly and popular; verse; illustrations; children’s literature, novels for grown-ups; music; films; TV documentaries. Such a moment came not so long ago when the culturally mummified spirit of these forever youthful crusaders stirred and reawakened. Mythistory, history’s stepchild, had come of age. It was now the proud parent of metaphor.
From mythistory to metaphor: Sixties resurrection
“Tireless, peripatetic, full time crusaders” was how the Director of the CIA, Richard Helms, reporting to President Lyndon Johnson, summed up America’s leading anti-war activists in 1967.!© Many of these activists, joined by thousands of university students—“college kids” to headline writers—streamed into Senator Eugene McCarthy’s anti-war campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in the months leading up to the New Hampshire primary of March, 1968. Post-grads, undergrads, veterans of many a demonstration for black civil rights or against U.S. policy in Vietnam, all marched together under McCarthy’s banner on campuses across the country. The press christened their movement a “children’s crusade.” Journalistic shorthand triumphed. The label stuck.
Its meaning was clear. Just as the naive idealism of the medieval youngsters resulted in their abject failure, so, too, would Eugene McCarthy’s youthful, well-intentioned but unworldly, campus crusaders suffer the same fate. The beauty of the metaphor was its taut way of allowing journalists to praise, pity, and mock McCarthy’s college kids all at the same time. Meanwhile, “Clean for Gene” was the watchword. College students wanting to doorstep prospective voters first had to shave off their beards. Their enthusiasm transfigured their hero. No longer was the Senator from Minnesota an “unsatisfactorily stiff and proud academic” figure.!7 No, now he was the messianic leader of anew, American-style Children’s Crusade. Consciously or not, he evoked the thirteenth-century leader of the German pueri, Nicholas of Cologne, whose dream it was to lead his followers across the Mediterranean Sea, just as Moses once had led the Children of Israel across a less daunting body of water. Like another Moses (or a latter-day Nicholas of Cologne), Senator McCarthy proclaimed: “My strategy is to walk through the Red Sea dry-shod. Any of you who want to follow me before the waters close in are welcome to do so.”!8 Campaign apocalypticism indeed.
Eugene McCarthy’s fervent supporters of 1968, along with the emergence of the young radicals and hippies of the late Sixties and early Seventies, gave the medieval pueri their 15 minutes of fame.
There was enormous anxiety about whether the prevailing culture could hold the young... It became easy to imagine that the whole of youth was regressing, or evolving, into—what? Barbarism? A new society unto itself, a Woodstock Nation? A children’s crusade?!?
With its title on so many lips, The Children’s Crusade by George Zabriskie Gray (1870) was reprinted, unrevised, in 1972. It was now deemed marketable. A less commercially-minded reason why a book of such amateurish scholarship should be back in print a full century later was offered by the journalist and political commentator Thomas Powers in his Foreword to Gray. His answer, more or less, was look around. The present crisis justifies, indeed demands, such a book. Powers goes on to highlight the uncanny parallels between the young American radicals of the Sixties and their youthful medieval forerunners. The same moral idealism fired and inspired them both. Both were utterly convinced of the rightness of their cause. Both were youthful idealists and moral crusaders. Analogous to the Children’s Crusade, he argued, were the civil rights movement, the anti-war demonstrations, and the McCarthy campaign of 1968.29 To Powers, the only diference between the thirteenth-century pueri and their young American counterparts of the Sixties was that the medieval youngsters paid the higher price for their idealism.?!
Powers was not alone in finding the idea of a reborn Children’s Crusade compelling. Indeed, during the American Sixties and early Seventies metaphorical crusades were plentiful. Although, for the most part, their body-count was lower than that on the distant battlefields of medieval crusades, this is not to deny that the “crusades” for civil rights and against the Vietnamese war also had their honorable casualties—martyrs some would say—like Medgar Evers (1963) or the students of Kent State (1970).
The fact remains that no matter how nobly men and women struggled in their respective causes, these were only metaphorical “crusades.”
Yet this was not something new. America can boast of a long and proud tradition of metaphorical crusading, either for a great cause or against a perceived enemy of the people. These “crusades” began with Thomas Jefferson’s call for a “crusade against ignorance” (1786)? and gained momentum with the nineteenth-century’s “crusade for abolition.” A pro-slavery advocate lashed out at the “clerical fanatics... [who] have... invited all men to join in the holy crusade [against slavery]” (1861).7% The one common quality which the American anti-slavery “crusade” shared with the First Crusade of 1095-99 was that both were uniquely successful.
American metaphorical crusading thundered full-steam ahead with the Temperance movement’s “crusade” against the demon rum in the later nineteenth century, culminating in Prohibition (1919-33), a success which failed. While the outcome of America’s late-twentieth-century “crusades” against poverty and drugs is still in doubt, the fate of the early twenty-first century’s “crusade against terror” remains anyone’s guess. Not unexpectedly, the use of the highly-charged word “crusade” with its Christian and colonialist associations in the Middle East has prompted angry protests by Muslims.”4 However, American metaphorical crusading has generally elicited admiration, if not for the nature of any particular cause, then for the idealism of its adherents. Viewed as battles joined for the noblest of reasons, fought for the purest of motives, they have become the American secular or civic-religious equivalents of the medieval holy wars.25 Thereby an imagined past could be enlisted in the service of the present.
“The primary function of metaphor is to provide a partial understanding of one kind of experience in terms of another.”° That is fine, providing partial is emphasized, and the danger signals warning of misunderstanding are kept switched on. Historical metaphors invite anachronism, for historians the deadliest of the deadly sins. Thanks to the postmodernists, writers of history are now very well aware of how readily tropes—figures of speech, metaphors in particular—have infiltrated historiography.2” We have been warned. Metaphors need to be taken metaphorically.
When Gray’s grizzled Children’s Crusade came back from the dead in 1972, Thomas Powers celebrated its rebirth with a ringing endorsement, which denied any need of revision. Nothing of importance has been learned about the Children’s Crusade since the time Gray wrote his book.8 Really? Between 1870 and 1972 eight substantial essays on the pueri were added to the scholarly canon, making Gray’s inadequacies embarrassingly clear. Long before its second coming, his book was superseded.9
It was also during the mid-Sixties that the eminent crusade historian and bibliographer Hans Eberhard Mayer called attention to a remarkable lacuna in crusade scholarship—the absence of an acceptable modern study of the Children’s Crusade.*° Despite the fact that all the signs were pointing to a continuing popular interest in the subject,?! no new book on the peregrinatio puerorum—the pilgrimage or crusade of the pueri—has appeared. Why?32
In search of evidence
Why indeed? First impressions are encouraging. Over fifty narrative texts written in Latin prose before 1301 refer to the extraordinary enthusiasm of the pueri.*3 So if the Children’s Crusade left such a rich textual trail behind it, where are the packs of historians baying at the scent?
Across half of medieval Europe, from Scotland to Italy, from Brittany to Austria, wherever monks, hungry for news, feasted on incidents in the great world beyond the cloister, monastic scriptoria were at work. In regions too remote to catch a glimpse of the pueri, monastic chroniclers copied and embellished the texts that reached them, for medieval chroniclers shared the same work ethic as the early medieval masons who quarried Roman antiquities for building materials. Creative recycling encouraged the migration of texts from one manuscript codex to another. Then, too, pilgrims, merchants, travelling clerics, peasants returning from market, brought rumors and good stories, stirred and mixed with scraps of information. Yet some solid, newsworthy items got through. For example, certain Austrian chroniclers, though at some distance from the route of the pueri, were surprisingly well-informed.
Unsurprisingly, however, the contemporary chroniclers best placed to note the passing of the pueri were situated relatively near the pilgrims’ line of march—i.e., north-central France, Lotharingia, the Rhineland, and northern Italy—in major cities such as Liége, Cologne, Piacenza, and Genoa, or in abbeys dotted along their path. Some of these chroniclers were very probably eye-witnesses. Coming face-to-face with the pueri, did they ask: “What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?” Then, having put them to the question, did they transcribe their answers faithfully, or—as ventriloquists in the guise of reporters have done for centuries—did they put their own words in their mouths?
What at first sight looks like a treasure trove of original sources is in reality less promising than the aggregate number of items in the dossier suggests. Out of a total of fifty-six chronicle entries in Latin prose dating from the thirteenth century, fifteen, including replicates, consist of a bare one or two printed lines. These annalistic notices merely label the event, state the year it occurred (oftentimes the wrong year), and nothing more.*4 True, knowing the annalist’s monastic house helps in tracing the diffusion of information, while an interpretation can be encapsulated in a single phrase. Thus Herman of the Bavarian abbey of Niederaltaich, writing about sixty years after the pilgrimage of the pueri, mockingly dismisses it as a “ridiculous expedition of children” (derisoria expedicio puerorum), to which he appends two lines of verse: “In the year one thousand, two hundred, and twelve,/ Foolish children (stultorum puerorum) marched on pilgrimage (iter) to the sea.” Iter and especially expeditio were synonymous with crusade. Of course Herman knew it, but to him, this was not a true crusade; it was a Feast of Fools, and had these stultorum puerorum ever managed to take ship, Herman might have called it a Ship of Fools.
Next come eighteen, short-to-middling notices of the pueri (including replicates), comprising approximately three to six printed lines. A good illustration is the last entry in the chronicle of Sicard (d. 1215), Bishop of the northern Italian town of Cremona. At once terse, enigmatic, and intriguing, it announces the arrival of “an infinite multitude of paupers coming from Germany” led by a “child (infans) younger than ten” who declare that “without a ship they would cross the sea and recapture Jerusalem.” Sicard never claims to have gazed upon this huge horde of German paupers or their infant leader with his own eyes; nor does he place them in his home city of Cremona, nor anywhere else in Italy.
Sicard was Innocent III’s legate in Lombardy, and during 1212 he was occupied with papal business, mainly in northeastern Italy, including Treviso.*° There his presence could coincide with a reported sighting of the pueri recorded in a late thirteenth-century chronicle from Salzburg. According to the Austrian chronicler, Pope Innocent sent cardinals to Treviso to repulse an expedition made up of a multitude of men and women of various ages, heading overseas.>” Now if this chronicler was well-informed, and if Sicard was that papal agent (legate, rather than cardinal)—twin hypotheses impossible to confirm—then, just possibly, Sicard’s chronicle entry was based on more than hearsay.
One formidable obstacle blocks Sicard’s credibility: the implausibly tender years of his anonymous wee commander. Could this little chap really be Nicholas of Cologne, the acknowledged leader of the Rhenish pueri? Nicholas’s age is not mentioned elsewhere, although it is true that one German chronicler calls him a little boy (puerulus).38 The image of an infant leader is striking. Even more striking is the realization that without him the notion of a youth movement vanishes, for without a little child to lead them, Sicard’s “infinite multitude” of German paupers turns into an undifferentiated mass of poor folk. No doubt that the demography of medieval Europe means that a very high percentage of these German immigrants were bound to have been young people. The question arises: did Sicard hear rumors about (or choose to exaggerate) the wondrous youth of their leader as a vivid device for thrusting the youthfulness of this army of German paupers into the spotlight? Or had this bedraggled invading host—whether or not it was the contingent led by Nicholas of Cologne—actually chosen a “child younger than ten” to lead them?
Whatever was the case, this swarm of poor migrants arriving in Italy unannounced in 1212 could only belong to the Children’s Crusade. Their German origins and raggle-taggle status perfectly match contemporary accounts from Piacenza and Genoa. And if further confirmation were needed, we have their faith in a sea-crossing without ships and their ambition to reconquer Jerusalem. Following the French phase of the movement, both of these themes repeatedly resurface in the sources. Hence Sicard’s mass of impoverished Germans must have been the peregrinatio puerorum—or a sizable contingent thereof—in its final stages.
The meatiest chronicles can be tasted last. Totalling twenty-three relatively extended passages, these run from around seven printed lines to a solid paragraph. Yet here, too, things are not quite what they seem. None of these relatively longer narratives present us with a trustworthy exposition of causes and consequences, let alone a reliable itinerary of the peregrinatio puerorum from its inception in northern Europe to its termination, not many months later, at the shores of the Mediterranean. Nonetheless, these chroniclers often bravely attempted to present an overview, indeed an interpretation, of the movement from its beginning to its end, despite the fact that their information was unequal to the task.°? What the best of these scattered fragments of an unwritten narrative do manage to achieve, all the same, is to whet our appetite for more.
Take the Annales Stadenses, for example. It was composed between c. 1232 and 1256 by Albert, Abbot of Stade, a monastery located west of Hamburg in northern Germany, and so at a considerable distance from the route of the Rhenish pueri. Albert’s tone is neutral, remarkably so:
Around this time [1212] children (pueri) without a master, without a leader, ran together with eager steps from all the towns and cities of every region to parts beyond the sea. When people asked them where they were running, they answered, “To Jerusalem, to seek the Holy Land.” The parents of many of them confined them at home, but in vain; for they smashed their locks or walls and escaped. The Pope [Innocent III] heard rumors about them, and, sighing, said: “These children reproach us, for while we sleep they race to recover the Holy Land.” Even now it is unknown what happened to them. But many of them returned home, and when they were asked the reason for their journey, they said they did not know. Also around the same time naked women (nudae mulieres) ran through the towns and cities saying nothing.?°
Emerging everywhere, all at once, for no discernible reason, are leaderless bands of pueri. Albert provides them with no birthplace and no birthdate except for the year 1212. Their movements are unmappable. They run together “from all the towns and cities of every region.” That this was predominantly a peasant enthusiasm is left unsaid. Albert, however, does highlight what must have been the case. The crusade of the pueri, flowing from town to town, and from city to city, continued to pick up new recruits. Urban laborers and artisans, their families, and recent peasant immigrants to towns—all were swept along by a torrent of revivalist enthusiasm. Jerusalem was the magic name on their lips. The Holy Land was their land of dreams. Then Albert, magician-like, introduces another potent theme. Their parents, fearing the worst, imprison them, only for the pueri to stage a dramatic escape. Energized by the call for crusade, they break free. Like other contemporary escapees from parental control—Francis of Assisi (himself briefly a domestic prisoner) at twenty-four or so;4! Clare of Assisi at around seventeen or eighteen; and her still younger sister, later, as a Franciscan nun, renamed Agnes—the pueri were runaways in an age of religious runaways.*? For youngsters like these, running away was a conversionary experience, as it was for youthful converts to the crusade.
Now no less a figure than Innocent III steps forward. His self-reproachful, wholly fictive comment is Albert’s way of rebuking the Pope for his failure to recover the Holy Land. Perhaps it is also Albert’s way of interjecting a quiet note of sympathy. Writing twenty to forty years after the event, Albert discloses—“even now it is unknown what happened to them.” Such candor was far from typical. A good number of his fellow monks, hearing titillatingly blood-curdling rumors of the terrible fate of the runaway pueri, translated rumor into fact; so have modern writers.
Finally, what do we make of the mysterious silence of the returnees? Were they dazed, bewildered, traumatized, humiliated? Or were they just reluctant to share their vision with non-believers? Their silence leads us directly on to that of the mute nudae mulieres, the naked women depicted by Albert as silently running through anonymous towns and cities, as if retracing the itinerary of the pueri. Here the inexplicable explains the inexplicable.
Albert of Stade’s well-executed sketch of the peregrinatio puerorum is a work of art, rather than a mine of historical information. While little of Albert’s art is mythistorical, a number of the other longer narratives are saturated with mythistorical emplotments and awash with mythistorical motifs. Indeed, three of these texts are crucial. The essential mythistory of the Children’s Crusade rests upon them. Imaginative and gifted men of letters wrote them: the White Monk Alberic of Trois-Fontaines (d. after 1251); the Black Monk Matthew Paris (d. 1259); and the Black Friar Vincent of Beauvais (d. 1264). Elsewhere their works testify to their scholarly qualities and serious-mindedness, but not here.
Devoting a paragraph or so to the Children’s Crusade, they confabulate what in our time would be the synopsis of a gripping, action-packed screenplay “based on a real event.” As talented writers, they were doubly fortunate. They lived decades after the events in question; and had few facts at their disposal. Addicted to moralistic storytelling and lovers of the apt anecdote, they knew how to shape a story. Later medieval writers imbibed their rich concoctions without a second thought. These three, after all, were not anonymous nobodies, but reputable auctores (authors = authorities). It follows that these were the true accounts of what had befallen the pueri.
By the 1250s, when their work was completed, the pilgrimage-crusade of the pueri was well and truly mythistoricized. Thereafter, Alberic, Matthew, and Vincent were not only read, they were copied, paraphrased, embroidered. Their picturesque, thematically rich tales became the most widely diffused, most compelling, as well as the most authoritative representations of the Children’s Crusade. No subsequent writer, medieval or modern, novelist, poet, or specialist crusade scholar, has entirely freed himself or herself from their magic spell. Privileged ever afterwards, these classic mythistorical texts have been ranked amongst the most valuable “contemporary sources” for “the history of the Children’s Crusade.” Not for the first or last time, art has proved to be more intellectually and emotionally satisfying, and more durable, than life.
Besides these Latin annalists and chroniclers, two official documents (one royal, one papal) also pertain to the crusade of 1212. In an age of increasing documentation on the part of church and state, this represents a pretty thin tally. An obvious example is the surviving registers of Innocent III, the Pope of the children’s crusade—a Pope famously hungry for information. These yield not a single item relating to the pueri. However, a precious document, previously overlooked, has recently turned up among the curial letters of Innocent’s successor, Honorius III. This papal letter of 1220 not only adds the name of a third puer, Otto, to the two others already on the short list (Stephen of Cloyes and Nicholas of Cologne); but also it carries the implication that the fate of Otto’s erstwhile companions was much more varied and probably less darklycolored than that painted by the mythistorians.*%
Additional pre-1301 sources include a French vernacular verse chronicle, which puts a question mark over the notion that all the pueri were penniless; and two exempla or sermon anecdotes (one emphatically positive, the other brutally negative), which exemplify different modes of pulpit broadcasting. More perplexing are the verses of the Chronicon thythmicum Austriacum or Austrian Rhymed Chronicle (to 1268). Its unknown author claims to reproduce the very words of the marching song sung by the German children en route to the Holy Land under the command of Nicholas of Cologne. If true, it would be the purest of pure gold, offering us unparalleled access to the heretofore hidden thought-world of the young Rhenish pilgrim-crusaders, male and female, revealing their innermost aspirations for eschatological peace, prophetic evangelism, and mystical sexuality.*4
Lastly comes an indispensable, although indisputably problematic chronicler, John Le Long or John of Ypres. His Chronica monasterii sancti Bertini or Chronicle of the Monastery of Saint-Bertin holds out no promise of laying bare the secret soul of the peregrinatio puerorum, as the Austrian Rhymed Chronicle does. Rather, it promises something almost as glorious— anchoring it securely in the exterior world of events. Before that, a major problem needs to be surmounted. According to the conventional rules of historical evidence, John Le Long’s statements must be kept farther than at arm’s length, at least until subjected to severe critical scrutiny. The reason is plain. John Le Long died in 1383. If the mythistory of the Children’s Crusade prevailed over its history from the 1250s onwards, how credible is a chronicler purveying stolen goods more than a century later? A strong case will be made in his defence nonetheless, because John Le Long’s testimony is indispensable. On what he says the detection of the obscure origins of the Children’s Crusade depends. Where he leads us, we must follow; and where he leads us is to the magnificent cathedral of Chartres.
History, mythistory, memory
So let us say amen to Hayden White: “One of the marks of a good professional historian is the consistency with which he reminds his readers of the purely provisional nature of his characterizations of events, agents, and agencies found in the always incomplete historical record.”45 The scattered, fragmentary, and enigmatic texts of the chroniclers of the peregrinatio puerorum intrigue us with what they say and frustrate us with their silence. All in all, the chroniclers have little to say about the aspirations and beliefs of the pueri; the circumstances governing the first stirrings of their movement; the traces of their footprints in northern France, then through Lotharingia and the Rhineland, until, over the Alps and destitute, they arrived in Italy, hoping for a miracle. Of their unmythistoricized fate, rigorous speculation is as good a guide as any. Overall, stray pieces of information and a few ambiguous phrases do not compensate for a lack of substantive material. Where are the defining landmarks of medieval reality—papacy, kingship, law, demography, rural economy, peasant society, urban development, scholastic theology, crusade preaching, and so on? There are occasional hints, but nothing more. Out of such exiguous material what kind of history can be fashioned? The positivists would have none of it.
The goal of late-nineteenth-century positivist historians was to construct a scientific history based upon a causal chain of factually ascertained events. For the positivists, the merest whiff of legend was obnoxious and repellent. Ruthlessly, historical wheat had to be separated from mythical chaff; the former to be used, the latter discarded. Any intermingling of the two was anathema, jeopardizing the scientific status of historiography itself. In 1902, the respectable French medievalist Achille Luchaire, having to decide on whether or not there really was a Children’s Crusade, felt compelled to defend the historicity of “this strange episode” against historians—positivist zealots, no doubt—who “have questioned [its] truth... [and] have seen in it only the stuff of which a popular legend is made.”*4°
The reign of positivism is well and truly over. Nowadays mythistory exists to be utilized, and certainly not discarded. To disjoin history from its Siamese-twin mythistory and send each of them off to separate households for adoption would be to misrepresent the past; indeed, to obstruct access to it, for the mythistoricizing of the chroniclers provides a port of entry into medieval mentalities. The social memory of the Children’s Crusade, moreover, is largely grounded in its mythistory, not its history. So mythistory, too, has become part of its history. Over the centuries, what the Germans term Leben und Nachleben—the historical existence of the pueri, bound together with their posthumous historical continuance—have become almost surgically indivisible. However we configure the mythistory, history, and memory of the crusading enthusiasm of 1212, we encounter the imaginings and observations of the thirteenth-century chroniclers.
What these writers offer us above all are impressions, representations, images. In telling us about the pueri, they hold up a mirror to their religious culture as well as to themselves. Through them we glimpse the wonder on the faces of the spectators, as they stare, astonished, ill-at-ease, uncertain, torn between approval and disapproval, at this unparalleled motio (movement: people in motion) of ever increasing crowds of peasants and townspeople, a multitude of self-proclaimed crusaders processing past them, led, conspicuously so, by the young. The rhetoric of revivalism flavoring their accounts, the chroniclers cannot help but reveal the impact of the enthusiasm of the pueri upon those who stared hard at them, amazed:
an outstanding thing and one much to be marveled at, for it is unheard of throughout the ages...4”7 marvelous and unheard of in the whole world...48 and this thing, unheard of in past ages, was a wonder to many...49 they and many other shepherd boys in many localities were held by... the common people in great veneration because they believed that they too could work miracles...°° A wonderful movement of youths... We believe that this was effected by magic arts...5! For it is said this boy had received a message from an angel that he and his following should recapture the Lord’s sepulcher from the... villainous Saracens.°2
The peregrinatio puerorum was unheard of, miraculous, and more ominously, magical. Despite the barbs of the positivists, the rhetorical tropes and mythistorical motifs of the thirteenth-century chroniclers have retained their freshness and power. It is their images and representations of the pueri which have been preserved—airbrushed or enhanced—in the albums of social memory.
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