The Children's Crusade. An Episode of the Thirteenth Century
The Children’s Crusade. An Episode of the Thirteenth Century. By . New York : Hurd and Houghton.
THE fact that in the thirteenth century fifty thousand French and German children, in separate crusades, left their homes and set out, under the leadership of two of their number, to achieve the liberation of the Holy Sepulchre, after so many armies had failed, is as little known as it is picturesque and surprising. It was in the time of Innocent the Great, and the children caught from him the fervor for crusading before which their elders and rulersremained cold. Two shepherd lads, who had been inflamed with so much zeal by the priests as to believe themselves divinely appointed to preach and lead the children’s crusade, gradually drew a vast following after them, the enthusiasm of which the little ones could nowhere resist. Boys and girls alike left their homes, in hut and hall, against the entreaties and commands of their parents and the decrees of their princes. A rabble of fanatical priests accompanied them, and the vile and lewd of either sex and all ages joined their march, and preyed upon them. The Rhenish barons supplied themselves abundantly with serfs from the helpless hosts of the German children, who, with immense losses by pestilence and violence and famine, crossed the Alps into Italy, where their blamelessness was made to feel the hatred for the German race enkindled by the imperial invasions. The sea was to open before them and to give them a path to Asia, and they wandered from port to port for this miracle in vain. At last they appeared before Innocent in Rome, and he sent the miserable remnant back to their homes. The French children reached Marseilles in full force, and found the Mediterranean as insensible to prophecy there as it had shown itself in Italy. But two merchants, Hugo Ferreus and William Porcus, offered the little ones passage in their ships to the Holy Land. Part of them perished by shipwreck, and the rest were carried, as the merchants had plotted, to the Moslem coasts, and sold into slavery, from which they were never redeemed.
This is that most tragical story which Mr. Gray has with great patience drawn from the chronicles of the period, and given for the first time completeness and coherence. He has written with the interest which such an uncommon theme must inspire, and has not been betrayed into greater fancifulness and conjecture, perhaps, than could well be avoided, considering the strangeness of the material and the obscurity of the time. We cannot help feeling, however, that he has just failed to make one of the most beautiful children’s books that could have been written, while his narration lacks a satisfactory historical strength and philosophy. A few touches, bestowed here and there, would still put the children in possession of a work which might profitably supplant nine tenths of the books lately written for them, while their elders would be no less charmed with it, and would not then be troubled by a sense of the defects we have hinted at. But as it stands we accept it very gratefully, and own to a sad pleasure in its perusal. Certainly, in the history of the world, there never were events more wonderful and touching, and we heartily commend the book, which fathers and mothers may read aloud to their little ones, and may easily make intelligible to them, while they themselves will not fail to enjoy it.