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One of the most extraordinary and memorable episodes of the crusading era, the Children's Crusade (1212) was medieval Europe's first youth movement. Young people (pueri), shepherds and peasants primarily, took part in a futile venture to regain the Holy Land and the True Cross. Contrary to the views of a revisionist historian, youths did indeed compose the core group of this popular crusade revival, although at a later stage adults-men, women, young mothers, the elderly-joined it as well. This paper argues that one possible way of interpreting the Children's Crusade is according to the schema laid down in the anthropological classic Les rites de passage (1908) by the French ethnographer and folklorist Arnold van Gennep. The Children's Crusade exemplifies the problem of coming of age in the Middle Ages, especially for peasant youths, who lacked access to the rituals of knighthood available to the chivalric aristocracy.
The Children's Crusade of 1212 began as a popular crusade revival.1 Muslim invaders from North Africa threatened to overwhelm the Spanish church. A decisive battle was expected by Pentecost, 1212. Pope Innocent III set out to mobilize the prayers of Christians in Rome and elsewhere on behalf of the Spanish Crusaders. Aroused by sermons and liturgical processions, the Children's Crusade sprang to life on 20 May in Chartres. The Chartrain was a region saturated with crusade ideology and continuous recruitment from the First Crusade of 1095 onwards. The shepherd boy Stephen of Cloyes, accompanied most likely by some of his workmates, listened to sermons and joined the church processions at Chartres. Somehow, these processions left Chartres, seemingly unaccompanied by churchmen, and assumed an ecstatic, vociferous momentum of their own.
Later, Stephen attracted a large following and led them to the vicinity of the shrine of Capetian monarchy, the royal abbey of Saint-Denis. This was in June at the time of the Lendit fair. After their dispersal, we hear no more of Stephen. But many of his followers formed troops of unarmed pueri (boys, children, youngsters), as the chroniclers called them, whose goal, articulated in their processional acclamations, was to regain the Holy Land and the True Cross from the Saracens.
Then the self-proclaimed crusaders made their way to the Rhineland, where, from Cologne, they followed...