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If we are working with older sources, the problem gains a new dimension: other eras (and other cultures, too) have a different notion of the child and childhood (although there are always certain conformities). We can try to circumvent this problem by defining a certain age group (people from birth to age 14, for example) to whom we dedicate our inquiry.
But this doesn't help us much face to face with the sources because they do not always give the age of the persons they speak about. I want to illustrate this problem with the discussion about the Children's Crusade of 1212: until recently, most historians believed that two big groups of children from the German Rhine valley and from North France started in 1212 to liberate the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.
The image of innocent children trying to redeem the corrupted idea of the crusade was so attrac-tive [or a long time that only recent articles evaluated the sources critically. They pointed out that the term ''Children's Crusade'' became common in the sources not before the last third of the 13th century and that it was not mentioned in the most reliable contemporary sources.
These sources described the participants of the migration as people of all ages (from sucklings to aged persons), not only as 'pueri" and ''puellae.'' Some historians even deny that children (under age 14) made up a prevalent part of these migrations. The doubts were intensified by a terminological problem: the Latin word "puer'' which means in most medieval age classifications a boy between 7 and 14 years old,[10] apparently also had a social shading of meaning.
Georges Duby suggests that ''puer" often meant poor farm-laborers, people who could not inherit land during the economical crisis of the 12th arid 13th centurics and became dependent wage workers who usually could not marry. [11] Peter Raedis therefore classcs the ''Children's Crusade'' with the widespread movement of the People's Crusades-migrations of very poor, landless men and women whose last hope was to reach Jerusalem which was for them rather the celestial Jerusalem of the Apocalypse than the earthly city in Palestine.[12]
ACK!
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