Europe: 1001-1212
Growing towns and intellectuality | Decline of Muslim Power in Spain | William of Normandy Defeats the Anglo-Saxons | English Kings and Resistance in Wales and Scotland | Europe and the First Crusade |Knights, Chivalry, Sadism and Impulsiveness | More Crusades and Heretics, 1144 to 1212
Al-Andalus (green) in the year 1000.Growing Towns and Intellectuality,,,
The year 1050 marks the beginning of what some describe as Europe's "High Middle Ages." During this century, Europe's climate was warming, which helped in the growing of food. In Europe's northwest and England's southeast, people benefited from a topsoil in river valleys that was rich and deep. Forests in Western Europe were being cleared. Towns were giving the countryside a new market for crops. Rural estates gained confidence that they could abandon economic self-sufficiency.
While agriculture remained feudal (owners of large estates ruling farm workers), society was benefitting from a spurt in mechanization and trade. In northern Europe an advance in technology came with the use of water wheels. Northern Europe had rivers that continued to run throughout the summer, providing power to water wheels that drove shafts, gears and cams. This power ground corn, sawed wood and operated bellows. Windmills also appeared. Winds were steadier than streams, which froze in winters. Windmills as a source of power appeared in Flanders and the Netherlands. And by now, Europeans were using cranks. The downside of the population growth that accompanied an increase in food was that towns were often densely packed with people, with no sewers, rain turning dirt streets into mud and diseases spreading more rapidly than it did where people were less densely distributed. With the spread of diseases, more people in towns might die than were born, but the populations of these towns were replenished by migrations from the countryside. A part of the rising population and increase in trade was an increase in people moving around. Merchants were seeking customers in more distant places. Nobles were traveling more from one of their estates to another. Clerics wandered in search of learning or to a place to begin an ascetic life. Young men went to Reims to study philosophy and some to Spain to study math. The roads of Europe were also traveled by peasants looking for land on which to settle. And on the road might be refugees from war, part-time soldiers or part-time bandits. In the towns was a seeking of order. Merchants sought a charter for their town – a guarantee of sorts – from great landowners or from monarchs. Monarchs offered towns protection from the jurisdiction of a nearby lord, and the towns offered monarchs a source of wealth, through taxation, that freed them from reliance on the nobles with whom they were in competition for power. Charters offered merchants guarantees of personal freedom and freedom from arbitrary seizure of property. Runaways from serfdom to a town might be considered free if they could elude capture while living in the town for a year. Meanwhile, fraternal and political clubs called guilds in a town helped create local regulations and government that suited the interests of its members. Some clubs built their own chapels and created their own schools. The craft guilds buried members who had died, and they cared for the widows and orphans of those who had been their members. And some towns hired military men for the sake of order. In places where the trend toward freedom was blocked, attempts were made to establish it through violence. In 1070 the people of Le Mans formed a commune and rose against their lord – a rebellion that failed. In 1077 people of the town of Cambrai rebelled against an Episcopal overlord. And in 1112 a bishop in England who tried to suppress a commune was hacked to pieces.Some towns were exceptionally successful in trade. Trade of the town of London extended to the European continent. The English town of York prospered. So too did Paris, Lyons, Marseille, Florence in Italy, Prague, Frankfort, Danzig,Cologne, Nuremburg and Krakow farther east, and Lisbon and Barcelona on the Iberian peninsula.
Decline of Muslim Power in Spain
The harmony and political unification that made Córdaba's grandeur possible ended in the eleventh century. Rahman III's successors, ruling caliphs, failed to maintain the dynasty's unity. The last Córdoba's Caliph was Hisham III. With different factions competing for power, the Cordoba Caliphate finally crumbled in 1031. The caliphate was dissolved, and independent Moorish kingdoms arose across Muslim Spain (al-Andalus). These petty kingdoms warred against each other, and Muslim kingdoms sought help in their wars by bringing onto their side Christian rulers in the peninsula's north. In a war between Toledo and Zaragoza, Toledo paid the Christian kingdom of Navarre to raid Zaragoza, and Zaragoza paid León-Castile to raid Toledo. Division among the Muslims made them weak and vulnerable to a move by the Christians to expand against them Religious zealotry inspired the Christians. Pope Alexander II viewed Muslims as an enemy. He wanted no cooperation or traffic with them. He looked forward to Christian domination of Spain. In 1062, Ferdinand I of León-Castile invaded Toledo with a large army. Ferdinand then invaded Badajoz. In 1063, Pope Alexander II was preaching reconquista as a Christian emergency. In 1064 a combined force of Italian, Norman, Frankish knights and Christian Spaniards besieged the Moorish city of Barbastro for forty days until it surrendered. Wikipedia describes the Crusaders as killing the surrendering soldiers following an agreement and their emerging from town. Then, "Crusade soldiers plundered and sacked the city without mercy." Thousands of the towns inhabitants were massacred and the rest were enslaved. Another massacre occurred in Valencia, where Muslims, after successfully defending their city, slaughtered Christians. The peaceful coexistence between Muslims, Jews and Christians that marked previous centuries and Córdoba's grandeur was in decline or something of the past. In Grenada in 1066 the Muslim poet Abu Ishaq rebuked the Berber ruler of the city for having a Jewish minister. No Muslim, he claimed, should be under the authority of a Jew or Christian. Muslims stormed the royal palace where Joseph had sought refuge, and they killed him. Jews of the town attacked. The 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia describes more than 1,500 Jewish families, numbering 4,000 persons, falling in one day.note25 So it went when religious differences were riled up and mixed with righteousness and perceptions of enemies in league with the devil. It presaged the nature of the Christian crusades that were to come in the 1100s
William of Normandy Defeats the Anglo-Saxons
Into the eleventh century, the king of Wessex was called "King of the English." Beginning in 1042 that king was Edward "the Confessor." He was the son of Emma of Normandy, giving him blood ties with the Nor'mans (northmen), former Vikings from across the English Channel in Normandy. England was enjoying prosperity. It was covered by as much farmland as it would have in the early years of the 20th century, and its population was as large – the result of good nutrition and a lot of exercise. But England's government was poorly organized, and political backwardness contributed to military weakness In January 1066, King Edward died. He was succeeded by the Earl of Wessex: Harold Godwinson, son of a powerful nobleman. This bothered a duke named William across the English Channel in Normandy. William had been King Edward's cousin, and Edward had promised to make him his heir. William believed that this gave him the right to rule in England. Norman aristocrats were having more surviving sons than they had land to divide among them, and they would try to solve their problem in a traditional way: by conquest. William planned an invasion of England. On October 13, 1066, with 5,000 Norman knights, William landed in England, near Hastings, on the shore of the English Channel, to press his claim to the throne of England. Troops under King Harold arrived exhausted, having just fought the Battle of Stamford Bridge, near York, against an invasion and challenge by Norwegians and King Harold's brother Tostig Godwinson. At Hastings, William's army defeated Harold's army, and King Harold was killed by an arrow, leaving William as the most powerful force in England. The Anglo-Saxons had not been well organized as a whole for defense, and William defeated the various revolts against what became known as the Norman Conquest. William of Normandy became King William I of England – while Scotland, Ireland and North Wales remained independent of English kings for generations to come The Normans were amazed by the wealth of England, William describing England as more wealthy than Gaul. William found local government administration to his liking, and he maintained the Anglo-Saxon judicial system. He also found serfdom – peasants working the lord's land and paying dues to the lord for use of his land. And William found slavery rampant. He allowed domestic slavery to continue about nine percent of England's population remaining in slavery, but he banned the sale of slaves for shipment overseas. What William had no interest in was Anglo-Saxon art, which he and his fellow Normans treated with contempt and much of which they destroyed.
William introduced England to an exchange of land for military service. He divided England's lands into 180 parcels, each of which was put under the supervision of an overlord who, in turn, rented out lands to Norman warrior-barons. England's Anglo-Saxon aristocracy was replaced by these Norman barons. The now deposed Anglo-Saxon nobles who had not died at Hastings were turned into serfs. Clergy from Gaul replaced Anglo-Saxon bishops and abbots.
The Normans erected castles around England as defensive power bases from which to extend control over the English. French words became a part of the English language, and Anglo-Saxon became a peasant dialect.
Without the mechanisms of a modern state, William spent much of his time moving around his realm for show and communications, acting as a court of appeals and demonstrating a greater authority than that held by the local lord
English Kings and Resistance in Wales and Scotland
William's dynasty, known as the House of Normandy, lasted until the mid-1100s. That was a little more than a century before another succession crisis, accompanied by anarchy, brought to power Henry II. Henry was the great-grandson of William I (William the Conqueror) but on the side of the family that would give a new name to England's dynastic rule: the House of Plantagenet. Henry was the first to use the title "King of England" as opposed to "King of the English." There were improvements in trade and in legislation under the Plantagenets, including the signing of the Magna Carta (Latin for Great Charter.) The latter came in 1215 when a frustrated landed aristocracy forced King John of England to sign a document they hoped would protect them from imprisonment or loss of property without a trial. People with power that common people did not have were making demands on their king's power. It was a reaction to the increased power of kings and the desire by nobles to mitigate an arbitrary use of that power. The English monarchs were Roman Catholics, and Pope Innocent III opposed the Magna Carta. He was not inclined to favor any demand for rights. Rights, he believed, belonged only to those with authority. He complained that the Magna Carta impaired King John's rights and dignity, and he annulled it partly on the grounds that John had signed the document under duress.
The Celts of Wales versus the Norman Kings
After John and the Magna Carta there was King Henry III who reigned from 1216 to 1272. It was in the year 1216 that the Celts of North Walespressed on with their centuries-old national identity, at least as far back as the Roman withdrawal in the 400s. These were Celtic Britons whom the Anglo-Saxons had driven westward from England's fertile midlands. Welsh territory had mountains, valleys, forests, rivers and marshes. The terrain made the Welsh pastoral rather than farmers, which made them mobile with seasonal migrations. And mobile people were more difficult to control.
The Welsh had resisted Norman occupation and control. Welsh leaders had learned to avoid ground that favored the Norman knights, and they had harassed the slower moving Normans. The Normans took control of lowlands and also emerged with control over the coastal plains along the southern portion of the Welsh territory. The Welsh learned from the Normans and began imitating them, using castles and armored cavalry and improving themselves militarily against the Norman – English – kings.
In the early 1200s, Welsh princes agreed to recognize and pay homage to one of their number, Llywelyn, as the paramount ruler among them. This gave birth to the Principality of Wales, with Welch as its language. England's Henry III recognized Llywelyn's kingship but not completely. He wanted LLywelyn and his successors to recognize that they were vassals of the King of England and to follow accepted rules of succession as laid down by the Pope, which excluded illegitimate sons. And Henry extended to LLywelyn the title "Prince of Wales."
Edward I, son of Henry III, became King of England in 1272, and he moved to establish control over the Welsh. The right of a people to govern themselves had no place in Edward's thinking – nor the thinking of the big landholders elsewhere – people who believed in domination and were lording it over their serfs.
In 1276 and '77 Edward fought the Welsh. In 1282 and '83 he accompanied his army in a war of conquest. He overwhelmed Welsh resistance, and to better secure his rule he built a series of castles and towns in the Welsh countryside and populated them with his fellow English.
Edward I, Wars for Wales and Scotland and Medieval Barbarity
William Wallace of "Braveheart" movie fame, at Edinburgh Castle in Scotland.
Royal families in Scotland and England had intermarried. With help from the Church, Scotland had become Anglicized. The death of Scotland's King Alexander II in 1286 was followed with the usual conflict over succession. England's Edward, following his success against the Welch, intervened. Rising to prominence at this time was William Wallace, from Renfrew, who led the resistance to the English. The Scots were to celebrate him as one of their great national heroes.
According to sources used by the English, Wallace had been wanted for killing an Englishman in response to an insult, and he had gathered around him some other desperate men who took to rebellion against the English. Soon Wallace was joined by various Scottish nobles who didn't like the idea of being subservient to an English king, and they provided Wallace with considerable manpower. The rebels burned down the quarters for English soldiers at Barns of Ayr and performed other exploits.
Edward sent an army against Wallace. Wallace was defeated. And, in mid-1297, Scottish nobles signed a submission to Edward. Wallace and his army fled north, and he gathered more men for his army. More battles followed. Wallace defeated the English army at Stirling in September, 1297, and was then able to drive Edward's army back to England.
The Scots by now were suffering from famine, and, to relieve the suffering, Wallace organized raids into England and devastated land to the gates of Newcastle. A hero among the Scots, Wallace was elected guardian of the kingdom. Then in 1298 Edward came with a great army. Wallace retreated. Because of the famine, the English started to pull back. Wallace pursued them to Falkirk, where Edward's army defeated him. Again Wallace retreated north, this time with only a remnant of his army. He was captured on August 5, 1305 and taken in chains to London.
Edward chose to charge Wallace with treason, although Wallace had never sworn allegiance to Edward. The charge of treason brought an execution worse than he would otherwise have suffered. Wallace was hanged, but cut down while still conscious. He was drawn, emasculated, his belly cut opened and his intestines, heart, liver and lungs were thrown upon a fire. He was decapitated for his outlawry. His head was placed on a pole on London Bridge. His body was hacked into four pieces, one quarter exhibited above a sewer at Newcastle for the enjoyment of the people there who recalled Wallace's invasion of their district. Another quarter was sent to the town of Berwick and a third to the Scottish town of Perth. What happened to the fourth quarter of Wallace's body is unknown or in dispute
Europe and the First Crusade
The Pope from 1088 to 1099, Urban II, was bothered by Muslim rule in the Holy Land. He wished to see the Holy Land under Christian rule. He and others were more confident about the power of Christendom than had been previous generations. To Christians, the Muslims appeared to be growing weaker. Christians had been expanding against Muslims since Charlemagne took Barcelona in 801. In Spain the Kingdom of Leon-Castile had expanded southward to Toledo in 1085. In 1091, Normans conquered Sicily, ending Muslim rule there, and in 1094 the Kingdom of Aragon expanded southward toValencia.
Success by Christians against the Muslims was not universal. In 1071 Constantinople had lost against the Seljuk Turks at Manzikert, between the Black and Caspian Seas. And following this defeat the Turks took much of Constantinople's territory in Asia Minor. Alexius, the emperor at Constantinople, wanted to win back former empire, including Palestine – which had been lost to Islam in the 600s. Alexius appealed to the West for help. Then there was a disappointment for Alexius: the Turks overranJerusalem. There was talk in Christendom about relics in the Holy Land having been profaned and of Christian pilgrims in Jerusalem having been mistreated or sold into slavery. Pope Urban spoke "of 'the base and bastard Turks ... an accursed race.'" note8
Emperor Alexius was interested in promoting Christian unity, and he recognized the growth of power in western Europe. Pope Urban II responded to the call for help from the emperor at Constantinople and organized what was to become known as the First Crusade. Urban II said Christ would lead any army that went to rescue the Holy Land. He promised a cancellation of debts, exemption from taxes and eternal life to all participants. Those who died in the Crusade, he announced, would go to heaven. He described going on the Crusade as a religious duty, and in preparing for the Crusade he ordered all feuding among Christians to stop and threatened to excommunicate those who did not. He hoped that warring for the cause of Christianity in the Holy Land would be a substitute for warring in Europe.
Enthusiasm for the Crusade spread to Scotland, England, Castile and Scandinavia, and among the enthused were common people. Before Urban II could organize his crusade, peasant mobs, hoping perhaps for eternal life and heaven, began to march in the direction of the Holy Land. Many had sold their land to pay their way. Mostly the peasants bought their food, but some pillaging took place. Many did not reach Constantinople – the major city on route to the Holy Land. To prevent looting, officials at Constantinople rushed the Crusaders out of town on their way to the Holy Land through Asia Minor, and there the Crusaders were exposed to attack by the Turks.
From five to ten thousand knights, mostly from France, volunteered for the First Crusade, along with twenty-five to fifty thousand additional soldiers. French and German nobility were in a mood for conquests and loot. For the knights the Crusade was an opportunity to emulate the great deeds of Charlemagne. Western Christendom was looking upon the Eastern Christian Church as not much better than paganism, and members of the Roman Church believed that conquering the Holy Land would elevate their church and end the schism between the Western and Eastern churches, with the Western Church absorbing the Eastern Church.
Crusaders passing through some European towns sought contributions from Jews. Jews were attacked and murdered. At Metz (in France) in early May, 1096, some Jews who refused to be baptized were murdered. At Speyer (along the Rhine River) thirteen Jews were killed. There a Catholic bishop, John, gathered the Jews under his protection, and it is said that anyone he could catch who had killed Jews would be punished by having their hands cut off. note9 Later that month at Worms (also on the Rhine) perhaps 500 or more Jews were killed after Crusaders broke into the Episcopal palace where the Jews had taken refuge. Another massacre occurred along the Rhine at Mainz. And more were killed at Cologne.
The cry of the Crusaders on their way to combat Islam and liberate the Holy Land was "God wills it!" The knights were more successful than the peasant armies at arriving in the Holy Land, and there the knights conquered. They seized gold, silver, horses and mules and invaded houses in search of loot. Convinced that they were fighting the devil they cut down all before them. Any Muslim who did not flee Jerusalem was among those who might be cut down. In the Holy Land were many Jews. The knights, exuberant in victory and believing that the Jews had killed Christ, exercised a collective punishment and massacred Jews where they found them. Jews who took refuge in Jerusalem's main synagogue were burned to death. And some Crusaders were sickened and shamed by the brutality.
Knights, Chivalry, Sadism and Impulsiveness
Entering the 1100s, a rising economy was changing the lives of many. Most Europeans were using money at least in some transactions, while most people were still farming (and would remain so until the 20th century). But in western Europe most of those working the soil were serfs. Average life expectancy going into the 1200s has been described as something like thirty-five years. Disease and sudden death were common and servility a way of life.
he successes of heavily armored knights on horseback fed their sense of superiority. They viewed themselves as protectors and as deserving privileges. Despite everyone's dependence on those who labored at farming, the aristocrats treated the common peasant with little respect. The heroes of the aristocrats continued to be the knights in shining armor.
The rise in prosperity was accompanied by aristocrats buying smoother clothing such as quality woolens from Flanders, and for grand occasions they might wear silk from the East. Aristocrats had moved from wooden homes to houses of stone, usually with a great fireplace and tapestries for decoration. And with the money economy having come into existence, if they needed money they might seek out a moneylender.
Common people were, of course, without political power. In feudal Europe nobles or knights were asserting their will uncontolled by kings. They exacted crops and military service from the peasants living on their lands (fiefs).
The knights had been a rowdy bunch, fighting each other with gusto for territory or revenge, destroying crops and killing peasants in the process. But they were beginning to be influenced by a refinement that accompanyied the rise in prosperity. At royal courts a greater interest was taken in music, poetry and manners.
Chivalry was a part of the culture, and chivalry for the knights meant not attacking another knight who had not yet prepared himself with his armor and weapons. And the knights preferred to believe that their little wars were for honor rather than for profit such as stealing horses or taking prisoners for ransom.
The Church was discouraging warfare among the knights, and it denounced fighting for booty as a sin. The knights obliged, and, in the place of reduced warfare, tournaments were created. The Church objected to the tournaments also, but this the knights largely ignored. The tournaments became the favorite entertainment of the aristocracy. Occasionally tempers were lost and a participant was killed. Winners won horses and armor and losers were ransomed and allowed to go free when the ransom was paid.
Aristocratic women attended the tournaments, and the knights performed especially for them. During the 1100s courtly love had developed. Adventurous men, some of whom were married, carried on romantically with women other than their wives. Troubadours sang of love, and aristocrats ignored Church strictures on sexuality, believing that they were, after all, sinners. In these times prostitutes from the lower classes swarmed the castles. Nobles were little ashamed of their bastards, and occasionally a noble abandoned his wife for someone new.
The Church fought back, and at the end of the century the Church demanded that a man have its approval to divorce or to remarry. Rather than divorce, some men tried annulments, and if the wife protested the Church defended her. The increase in attention to women, meanwhile, had been accompanied by the Church increasing its veneration of the Virgin Mary and Saint Mary Magdalene, and in the 1100s many nunneries were founded.
There was a lot of ugliness and sadism to escape from. Steven Pinker writes of religious values "imparted with bloody crucifixes, threats of eternal torture, and prurient depictions of mutilated saints." He goes on:
Craftsmen applied their ingenuity to sadistic machines of punishment and execution. Brigands made travel a threat to life and limb, and ransoming captives was big business. note26
He quotes historian Barbara Tuchman describing two popular sports of the time:
Players with hands tied behind them competed to kill a cat nailed to a post by battering it to death with their heads, at the risk of cheeks ripped open or eyes scratched out by the frantic animals' claws ... Or a pig enclosed in a wide pen was chased by men with clubs to the laughter of spectators as he ran squealing from the blows until beaten lifeless.
The culture of sadism extended to cutting off noses as punishment for heresy, treason, prostitution, sodomy and as an act of vengeance.
Pinker quotes historians who describe the temperament of people in medieval times as impetuous and uninhibited, including Barbara Tuchman describing "childishness noticeable in medieval behavior, with its marked inability to restrain any kind of impulse.
More Crusades and Heretics, 1144 to 1212
In 1144, Muslims captured the city of Edessa in northern Mesopotamia (now southern Turkey), and a crusade from 1147 to 1149, led by the German emperor, Conrad III, and the French monarch, Louis VII, failed to retake the city for Christendom. In 1187 the Muslims, led by the great Saladin, reconquered Jerusalem. And from 1189 to 1191 a third crusade, led by Richard the Lionhearted of England along with the French and German monarchs, failed to retake the city. Then in 1193 the death of Saladin inspired hope among the Christians, and Pope Innocent III decided on a new crusade, the Fourth, to retake Jerusalem.
Venetian merchants, in competition with Constantinople for trade with the Muslims, offered transportation for the Crusaders in exchange for the Crusaders capturing the port town of Zara (Zadar) on the Adriatic coast in what today is Croatia. The city, in 1202, was besieged, ransacked, demolished and robbed, and its population escaped into the surrounding countryside. Pope Innocent III responded by excommunicating the Venetians and the crusaders involved.
From Zara, a fleet with Crusaders arrived at Constantinople in the spring of 1203. The people of Constantinople revolted against the presence of the Crusaders, and the Crusaders retaliated, seizing the city for themselves in a three-day orgy of rape and the plundering of palaces and Eastern Orthodox convents and churches. Fire destroyed much of the city, and the Crusaders set up their own king in the city, after executing Emperor Alexius V by throwing him from the Column of Theodosius. In accordance with an agreement made before the sacking of Constantinople, half the booty taken there went to the Venetians.
Pope Innocent III was delighted by the news of the fall of Constantinople to Roman Christianity. When he heard of the atrocities that had attended the victory he was shocked, but he continued to approve of the conquest. And soon in Constantinople, Latin (Roman) prelates would replace Greek (Eastern Orthodox) prelates.
Eastern Orthodox Christians clung to their ideological brand of Christianity despite rule by Latin Christians. The dream in Rome of uniting Christendom would remain just a dream. Roman Catholic rule in Constantinople, called the Latin Empire, would last only to 1261. The Latin Empire included some of Thrace and Greece and weakened itself with constant wars against the Bulgars. It was defeated by Michael VIII, a co-emperor of a neighboring fragment of Byzantium's empire to its east called the Empire of Nicaea.
A Crusade Against the Cathars
Innocent III had become pope when a number of dissident movements were spreading among the Christians. This was mainly in economically advanced areas, where people were more inclined to question and to exercise independent thinking – areas such as the Rhineland, Italy and southern France. These movements came with many names, among them were the Waldenses, Beguines, the Humiliati and the Albigenses (Albigensia) or Cathars. All of them were concerned with what they saw as the growing greed and corruption of public life, and they tended to be interested in a literal interpretation of scripture and a return to "true" Christianity.
n 1207, Pope Innocent III launched a crusade against the Cathars, believing they were in error concerning the nature of Jesus Christ. He associated heretics with treason, disease and filth. He rallied to his cause the French monarch, Philip Augustus. France was still under a variety of local rulers, and Philip Augustus was eager to extend his authority into southern France against nobles who had adopted the Cathar heresy.
People devoted to the Church joined the crusade – to be known as the Cathar Crusade. Innocent III had already declared heresy as a capital offense, and some of the Crusaders took it upon themselves to be executioners. The leader of the crusade at Beziers is said to have responded to the question of how they should know who was a heretic and who was not with the call of "Kill them all, God will know His own." But a Catholic encyclopedia denies that such words were uttered.
According to reports, 20,000 men, women and children were massacred at Beziers. At Minerve, hundreds received more lenient treatment: they had their ears and noses cut off. After all the killing and looting the Cathars remained, clinging to their beliefs as had other persecuted believers. It would take persistent effort by the Church to wipe them out as a recognizable group – which would not be accomplished until the late 1300s.
The Children's Crusade
During the crusade against heretics in southern France and northern Italy, children whose emotions were fired by the cause of Christianity and the preaching against heretics decided to be Christian heroes by trying to retake the Holy Land. In 1212, thousands of children, with a sprinkling of adults and a few clerics, started for Jerusalem. They were deficient in money and organization but they believed that as children they were favored by God and could work miracles that adults could not.
The Children's Crusade did not have the blessing of the Church and technically was not a Church crusade. But neither ecclesiastical nor secular authorities bothered to disperse the children, except for the king of France, Philip Augustus, who, persuaded a large group of them to return home.
The children left the Rhineland in early July, 1212, and crossed the Alps. About 7,000 of them arrived at the port city of Genoa in late August – thousands having died along the way. And at Genoa the miracle they expected failed to happen: God did not part the sea for them or allow them to walk on water as they had expected. In November, exhausted and disappointed, many went back home. Two merchants from Marseilles provided seven ships for the remaining children. Two of these ships were wrecked off the coast of Sardinia, and the children aboard the other five ships were sold on slave markets in North Africa and Egypt.
In the wake of the failures of the Children's Crusade, people came to decide that the whole enterprise was the work of the devil. Success was still the work of God and the devil was still responsible for failures.
But Pope Innocent III would summon Europe to another crusade, saying of the children, "They put us to shame. While they rush to recover the Holy Land, we sleep.
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