Editing Children's Crusade (section)

==Historiography==
{{Crusade}}

===Sources===
According to Peter Raedts, professor in Medieval History at the [[Radboud University Nijmegen]], there are about 50&nbsp;sources from the period that talk about the crusade, ranging from a few sentences to half a page.<ref name="Raedts"/> Raedts categorizes the sources into three types depending on when they were written:<ref name="Raedts"/>
#Contemporary sources written by 1220;
#Sources written between 1220 and 1250 (the authors could have been alive at the time of the crusade but wrote their memories down later);
#Sources written after 1250 by authors who received their information second or third hand.

Raedts does not consider the sources after 1250 to be authoritative, and of those before 1250, he considers only about 20 to be authoritative. It is only in the later non-authoritative narratives that a "children's crusade" is implied by such authors as [[Vincent of Beauvais]], [[Roger Bacon]], [[Thomas of Cantimpré]], [[Matthew Paris]] and many others. At least one source, that of a man simply known as Otto the last puer, was written by an individual who claimed to have participated in the Children's Crusade.<ref>Dickson, Gary (2008). Children's Crusade: Medieval History, Modern Mythistory</ref>

===Historical studies===
Prior to Raedts's study of 1977, there had only been a few historical publications researching the Children's Crusade. The earliest were by the Frenchman G. de Janssens (1891) and the German [[Reinhold Röhricht]] (1876). They analyzed the sources but did not analyze the story. American medievalist [[Dana Carleton Munro]] (1913–14), according to Raedts, provided the best analysis of the sources to date and was the first to significantly provide a convincingly sober account of the Crusade stripped of legends.<ref>{{cite journal |url=https://archive.org/details/jstor-1835076/mode/2up |title=The Children's Crusade |journal=[[American Historical Review]] |last=Munro |first=D. C. |date=1914 |volume=19 |issue=3 |pages=516–524|doi=10.1086/ahr/19.3.516 }}</ref> Later, J. E. Hansbery (1938–9) published a correction of Munro's work, but it has since been discredited as based on an unreliable source.<ref name="Raedts"/> German psychiatrist [[Justus Hecker]] (1865) did give an original interpretation of the crusade, but it was a polemic about "diseased religious emotionalism" that has since been discredited.<ref name="Raedts"/>

P. Alphandery (1916) first published his ideas about the crusade in 1916 in an article which was later published in book form in 1959. He considered the story of the crusade to be an expression of the medieval cult of the Innocents, as a sort of sacrificial rite in which the Innocents gave themselves up for the good of [[Christendom]]; however, he based his ideas on some of the most untrustworthy sources.<ref>Alphandery, P. (1954). ''La Chrétienté et l'idée de croisade''. 2 vols.</ref>

Adolf Waas (1956) saw the Children's Crusade as a manifestation of chivalric piety and as a protest against the glorification of the holy war.<ref>Waas, A. (1956). ''Geschichte der Kreuzzüge''</ref> H. E. Mayer (1960) further developed Alphandery's ideas of the Innocents, saying children were the chosen people of God because they were the poorest; recognizing the cult of poverty, he said that "the Children's Crusade marked both the triumph and the failure of the idea of poverty."<ref>Mayer, H.E. (1972). ''The Crusades''</ref> Giovanni Miccoli (1961) was the first to note that the contemporary sources did not portray the participants as children. It was this recognition that undermined all other interpretations,<ref>Miccoli, G. (1961). "La crociata dei fancifulli". ''Studi medievali''. Third Series, 2:407–43</ref> except perhaps that of [[Norman Cohn]] (1957) who saw it as a [[chiliastic]] movement in which the poor tried to escape the misery of their everyday lives.<ref>{{cite book |url=https://archive.org/details/pursuitofmillenn0000cohn |title=The Pursuit of the Millennium |publisher=Essential Books |author=Norman Cohen |year=1957 |location=New Jersey}}</ref> In his book ''Children's Crusade: Medieval History, Modern Mythistory'' (2008), Gary Dickson discusses the growing number of "impossibilist" movements across Western Europe at the time. Infamous for their shunning of any form of wealth and refusing to join a monastery, they would travel in groups and rely upon small donations or meals from those who listened to their sermons to survive. [[Excommunication|Excommunicated]] by the Pope, they were forced to wander and likely made up a large portion of what is called the "Children's Crusade". After the crusade failed, the Pope stated that the devotees of Nicholas and Stephen had shamed all of the Christian leaders.<ref name="Dickson">{{cite book |title=Children's Crusade: Medieval History, Modern Mythistory |first=Gary |last=Dickson |year=2008 }}</ref>

Historians have put the crusade in the context of the role of teenage boys in medieval warfare.<ref>Kelly DeVries, "Teenagers at War During the Middle Ages" in ''The Premodern Teenager: Youth in Society, 1150–1650'' (2002) ed by Konrad Eisenbichler pp 207–223.</ref> Literary scholars have explored its role in the evolution of the tale of the [[Pied Piper of Hamelin|Pied Piper]].<ref>Bernard Queenan, "The Evolution of the Pied Piper," ''Children's Literature'' (1978) 7#1 pp: 104–114.</ref>

===Popular accounts===
Beyond the scientific studies there are many popular versions and theories about the Children's Crusades. Norman Zacour in the survey ''A History of the Crusades'' (1962) generally follows Munro's conclusions, and adds that there was a psychological instability of the age, concluding the Children's Crusade "remains one of a series of social explosions, through which medieval men and women—and children too—found release".

[[Steven Runciman]] gives an account of the Children's Crusade in his ''A History of the Crusades''.<ref>Runciman, Steven (1951). [http://www.historyguide.org/ancient/children.html "The Children's Crusade"], from ''A History of the Crusades''.</ref> Raedts notes that "Although he cites Munro's article in his notes, his narrative is so wild that even the unsophisticated reader might wonder if he had really understood it." [[Donald Spoto]], in a 2002 book about Saint [[Francis of Assisi]], said monks were motivated to call them children, and not wandering poor, because being poor was considered pious and the Church was embarrassed by its wealth in contrast to the poor. This, according to Spoto, began a literary tradition from which the popular legend of children originated. This idea closely follows H. E. Mayer.

===Revisionism===
The Dutch historian Peter Raedts, in a study published in 1977, was the first to cast doubt on the traditional narrative of these events. Many historians came to believe that they were not (or not primarily) children, but multiple bands of "wandering poor" in Germany and France. This comes in large part from the words "parvuli" or "infantes" found in two accounts of the event from [[William of Andres]] and [[Alberic of Troisfontaines]]. No other accounts from the time period suggest an age at all, but the connotation with the two words give an entirely separate meaning. Medieval writers often split up a life into four major parts with a variety of age ranges associated to them. The Church then co-opted this classification to a societal coding, with the expression referring to wage workers or labourers who were young and had no inheritance. The ''[[Chronica regia Coloniensis]]'', written in 1213 (a year after the crusade was said to have taken place), refers to crusaders having "left the plows or carts which they were driving, [and] the flocks which they were pasturing", adding to the idea of it being not "puerti" the age, but "puerti" the societal moniker. Another spelling, ''pueri'', translates precisely into children, but indirectly means "the powerless". A number of them tried to reach the Holy Land but others never intended to do so. Early accounts of events, of which there are many variations told over the centuries, are, according to this theory, largely [[apocryphal]].{{clarify|date=October 2012|reason=See talk page}}<ref name="Raedts">{{cite journal | last = Raedts | first = Peter | title = The Children's Crusade of 1213 | journal = Journal of Medieval History | volume = 3 | issue = 4 | year = 1977 |doi=10.1016/0304-4181(77)90026-4 | pages=279–323}}</ref><ref name="Russell">{{cite book |title=[[Dictionary of the Middle Ages]] |volume=4 |chapter=Children's Crusade |publisher=Charles Scribner's Sons |location=New York |last=Russell |first=Frederick H. |year=1989 |chapter-url=https://archive.org/details/dictionaryofmidd0000unse/page/14 |pages=14–15 |editor-first=Joseph R. |editor-last=Strayer }}</ref>

Raedts "wandering poor" without children account was revised in 2008 by Gary Dickson who maintained that while it was not made up entirely of actual children, they did exist and played a key role.<ref name="Dickson"/><ref>{{cite book |page=[https://books.google.com/books?id=O8ubDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA149 149] |title=The World of the Crusades: A Daily Life Encyclopedia |volume=1 |publisher=ABC-CLIO |author=Andrew Holt |year=2019 }}</ref>

Further theories by other historians suggest that the fixations on children within the traditional narrative of these events are to corroborate with perceptions of the Crusades during certain periods of time. First by sources in the Medieval era to portray such religious movements with the innocent and pure nature often affiliated with children in. Then by sources in more contemporary times to either slander or propel established beliefs of the Crusades and Christianity.<ref>{{cite journal |url=https://www.medievalists.net/2024/06/childrens-crusade-interpretation/ |title=The Children's Crusade: A Change of Interpretation Over Time |journal=[[Medievalists.net]] |last=Athas |first=Liam |date=2024 }}</ref>