Children's Crusade

American  

noun

1. a crusade to recover Jerusalem from the Saracens, undertaken in 1212 by thousands of French and German children who perished, were sold into slavery, or were turned back.

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Example Sentences

Her Camp Hope effort fails, in a climax that reels from slapstick to horror, but the vision of a sustainable world may be redeemed by a fortitude not unlike Willa’s, a kind of Children’s Crusade.

From Los Angeles Times • Mar. 8, 2022

Or the famed Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, where singing children poured out of churches in peaceful, exuberant marches to occupy the segregated business district downtown.

From Slate • Jan. 28, 2022

“What about the way the early settlers treated the Indians? Was that moral? How about the Children’s Crusade? Was that moral?”

From The New Yorker • Aug. 6, 2019

Several thousand students participated in the famed Children’s Crusade, which began on May 2, 1963 and lasted almost a week.

From Seattle Times • May 4, 2018

We became curious about the real Children’s Crusade, so O’Hare looked it up in a book he had, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, by Charles Mackay, LL.

From "Slaughterhouse-Five" by Kurt Vonnegut