Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg One of the strangest and least well-known events in European history happened 807 years ago this summer, in the year 1212. This was an era of fierce religious fervour and piety across Europe. The third crusade, which had ended 20 years earlier in 1192, had seen King Richard the Lionheart of England and King Philip II of France stop fighting with each other, and, at the command of the Pope, march their armies to the Holy Land. After three years of fighting, they were forced to retreat in failure, without capturing Jerusalem.
Their failed crusade was followed by a fourth, this time led by the Pope himself. Again, the crusaders failed to take Jerusalem, and the Pope’s armies were so ineffectual that he excommunicated every last one of them.
The failure of the Fourth Crusade was compounded by the fact that the excommunicated Crusader armies turned their weapons on Constantinople in vengeance against a perceived betrayal by the Byzantine authorities, an act which made permanent the schism between the eastern Churches and Rome that persists to this day.
Liberation
By 1212, European Catholics who had been promised for over a century that Jerusalem would be taken back, were beginning to lose faith. Each army had been turned back, and the city, it seemed, could not be held.
In Germany, in April of that year, a young shepherd of about 16 years of age, known to history as Nicholas of Cologne, claimed that God had sent him to liberate the Holy Land. He said that when those who followed him reached the sea, God would part the waves and allow his followers to walk across the Mediterranean Sea to Jerusalem. He amassed, in a matter of weeks, thousands of followers, and led them through the alps to the Port City of Genoa.
At the same time in France, a 12-year-old boy, Stephen of Cloyes, arrived in Paris with a letter for the King of France that, he said, had been given to him by God himself. Large crowds immediately began to follow him, and it was said that he could perform miracles. The King, facing down the crowd, declared the boy a fraud and turned him away.
Undeterred, Stephen of Cloyes gathered his 30,000 followers, and marched them to Marseilles, telling them that God would provide for them, and lead them to Jerusalem to reclaim the City of God for Christendom.
The story, sadly, does not have a happy ending.
When Nicholas reached Genoa, the seas did not part. Many of his followers died of hunger, and others were seized by criminals and sold, it is said, into slavery in the Holy Land itself. Stephen of Cloyes reached Marseilles at the end of June of 1212, and after a few months of waiting for God to provide, his followers had turned to begging, or returned home.
Beware, the Bible says, of false prophets.
I kept thinking of the Children’s Crusade, as these events are known, this week, as I watched the young Swedish climate activist, Greta Thunberg, sail across the Atlantic to reclaim the United Nations for Mother Earth.
She sails, she says, because flying would do too much harm to the globe. Her consistency, at least, should be praised. Indeed, Ms Thunberg is a very impressive young woman for a 16-year-old, and I have no desire to criticise her personally. The following she has attracted, after all, is not her fault.
The parallels, nonetheless, are striking. As with European Christianity in 1212, the Green movement has suffered 50 years of miserable failure. Every prediction of disaster has, thus far at least, failed to come to pass. The polar ice caps, which at one point we were told would disappear by 2012, remain stubbornly cold.
The Kyoto agreement failed to deliver. The Paris accords no longer have the co-operation of the US. Bangladesh, which my teachers used to tell me would be underwater by the time I was 30, remains happily hot and uncomfortably dry.
Every great achievement for the Greens has been a false dawn, and every announcement of doomsday has been postponed, in the manner of those American evangelicals who predict, every few years, that the world will end on Monday, and then suffer the humiliation of television cameras observing their confusion at the continued existence of the world.
Now then, they turn to a child with an inspiring message. They follow her, not through the Alps, but in spirit as she sails across the ocean to the promised land. Some of them seem to think her almost divinely sent. In Ireland, as elsewhere, young people are encouraged to emulate her example, and to take days off school to aid her in her holy mission.
Credit
To her very great credit, Ms Thunberg herself says that she offers no solutions. Only, she says, a demand – that the world listens to her message and do something. What the something is remains unspecified, but then again, she is only a 16-year-old child, not yet old enough to vote, let alone save the world single handed. She is not the interesting story here.
No, what’s interesting are the people following her, who are convinced once again that in the voice of a child lies the solution to a battle that generations of adults have failed to win.
The first historian to write in depth about the Children’s Crusade, the German Psychologist Justus Hecker, described the events of 1212 as the symptoms of a “diseased religious emotionalism” that had swept the continent.
I wonder how many of Ms Thunberg’s followers would agree with him.