Children's Crusade Research Paper

James Millette
Ms. Kelzer
World History
11/28/11

By June, 1212 about 30,000 kids under the age of twelve had showed up to support and go on the journey to capture back the holy land. (Kreis, Steven) Even wealthy children had snuck outside of their families to join. The children’s crusade seemed like it would be successful and had good intention, but had a huge lack of sense of leadership and planning. He had led him and his army into a dispute against all factors of nature. At him being so young of age, that had also caught up with him. It has been said that the children’s crusade was a set up to try and shame the king and his army to go and fight for the holy land. The Crusades were a series of religious wars, blessed by the
He had gone and preached promoting the crusade against Muslims of the east of Spain and had been turned down by nearly everyone who he had come across. After he had received the letter from Jesus he arrived at the entrance of Abbey of Saint-Dennis and had announced that he would lead an “army” of children to rescue the holy land. In the summer of 1212 three armies of children, each more than thirty thousand strong, setout from France and Germany, to walk to Jerusalem and rescue the Holy Sepulchre from the armies of Muslims. The leaders were children, boys only twelve or thirteen years old; they preached in churches, at shrines, and on highways. Now, this was an act that took major amounts of courage but children cannot lead other children and Stephen being only twelve years old, he wasn’t ready to lead
Mostly all of his army had set on foot and Stephen had designed a cart for himself. At his sides were several boys on horseback who were from richer families and could afford these things. It wasn’t fair to the other 30,000 kids that had to suffer on foot. Money distribution had become a huge issue. There was no money to buy food or water or any means of transportation anywhere. Stephen had also made his army believe that the sea would spread for them and they would be able to cross, none of this happened. A few days later, two merchants, Hugh the Iron and William the Pig, confronted Stephen with a deal. They offered to provide seven ships, to the mass of children, free of charge. All of the boys and girls boarded their ships and set out to Palestine. It took about 18 years until the story of the tragedy had been talked about The fact that Stephen was only twelve years old and had come from a poor peasant family really had an effect on his sense of power. It seemed as though people didn’t respect him. On top of that he didn’t know how to read nor write, he was in a way looked at as a fool even at such a young age. It was wrong for the king to even let him step foot out on his own. The morals of the king were that he would shame his own army into fighting the crusades, but this didn’t work and the king had sacrificed 30,000 other children’s