For the Darkness in Your Eyes

Probably the most unusual of all the Crusades during the Middle Ages to the Holy Land was the Children’s Crusade (1212).

However, according to the Italian historian Giovanni Miccoli, the word used in the sources to refer to the participants translates more as “boys” rather than “children.” And 13–14-year-old teenagers were considered young men—warriors—in those times.

But the French medieval scholar Paul Alphandéry, in his book “Christianity and the Idea of the Crusades,” suggests that the Children’s Crusade was an expression of the medieval cult of the Innocent—kind of a sacrificial ritual, when the Innocent give themselves for the good of the Christian world.

The Children’s Crusade did not reach its goal: no one managed to get to the walls of Jerusalem. And many of the young participants suffered the most tragic fate.