urban legends ✓

the childeren crusade ☹

The Children's Crusade is the name given to a variety of fictional and factual events which happened in 1212 that combine some or all of these elements: visions by a French or German boy; an intention to peacefully convert Muslims in the Holy Land to Christianity; bands of children marching to Italy; and children being sold into slavery.

A study published in 1977 cast doubt on the existence of these events and many historians now believe that they were not (or not primarily) children but multiple bands of "wandering poor" in Germany and France, some of whom tried to reach the Holy Land and others who never intended to do so.

Early versions of events, of which there are many variations told over the centuries, are largely apocryphal. Recent research suggests the participants were not children, at least not the very young.

The confusion started because later chroniclers, who were not witness to the events of 1212 and who were writing 30 years or more later, began to translate the original accounts and misunderstood the Latin word pueri, meaning "boys", to mean literally "children".

The original accounts did use the term pueri but it had a slang meaning, similar to how the term "country bumpkins" is used as a derogatory term in the rural United States.