I finished Nancy Kress' Beggars Ride (Damn good book, despite a certain unconnectedness with the two before it... more on that later). What I noticed, though, is the notion of software agents, simple AIs, who can do information searches. This isn't such a new concept. What grabbed me was the fact that at one point, a character asked one of the AIs for three-sentence definitions of a two terms - and got back good, useful basic definitions, with some historical detail. I need that. In the last hour, about four different concepts have passed across my mind, none of which I know much about, three of which I have forgotten already, and none of which I had time to stop and google for a bit more information about. And all of them would have been useful, for work and for game materials. One of these items, however, is "Children's Crusade". You can guess which it applies to, work or game. Any historians out there able to give me a quick (three, or five, or seven) sentence summary of what that was all about?

From:

gallowglass.livejournal.com

no subject

from: INTERVIEW WTH C. D. BAKER, author of A Journey of Souls
(http://www.gospelcom.net/chi/BRICABRF/baker.shtml)

"Question: What exactly was the "Children's Crusade?"

Answer: In the spring and summer of 1212 two separate, yet related events occurred. In France a twelve-year-old shepherd boy named Stephan claimed he saw a vision of Jesus call him to lead an army of children to Palestine to liberate that Holy Land from Islam. In Germany, near Cologne, a ten-year-old boy named Nicholas claimed a similar vision.

In response to their calls, thousands of children began to gather in both regions to proclaim a crusade in which God would honor the innocence and purity of children. The Mediterranean Sea was expected to be opened like the Red Sea did for the Hebrews. The children of both lands were to win the hearts of their enemy by love and pure faith. The two simultaneous pilgrimages were together called the "Children's Crusade."

Through the summer, children began to migrate toward Marseilles, in France, and toward Genoa or Rome from Germany. Their columns were varied in size and there is much uncertainty as to their various routes. The chroniclers of the age refer to both the German and French contingents as having a main body as well as scattered groups of twenty to one hundred which followed. Estimates vary from 10,000 to 50,000 children in each of the two groups.

Despite their sincerity, both the French and German children suffered unspeakable hardship. Their misguided "faith" cost many French children their lives, and nearly all the Germans. Those who did not perish by the natural forces of starvation, disease or exposure were deceptively loaded into ships and sold in the slave markets of North Africa."