by M. J. Trow
None of them reached Outremer, the Holy Land. They turned back, exhausted. Some fell ill on the way; others died. Others still were probably sold into slavery to the Saracens – the very Muslims who had taken Jerusalem in the first place.
We only know of three of them by name – Stephen, Nicholas and Otto. One of them was a shepherd, another a ploughboy, the third a scholar. The oldest was probably fourteen. Today, in a world where nobody believes in miracles, the Children of 1212 have almost been forgotten.
Almost... but not quite...
The poet Robert Browning caught the mood in his haunting poem, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, bringing to later readers the sad image of a lost generation, wandering a road to who knew where.
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