"Did you ever hear about the Children's Crusade of 1212? Or basically that time that thousands of children marched to the Holy Land? Hi, I'm Teresa of the Unhinged History Podcast, where we cover the stories that you just didn't cover in school. Today we're tackling episode 83, titled Misery is My Paintbrush, and that makes sense in context. Journey with me. It is 1212. We are in medieval Europe. When we have two children, Stephen and Nicholas, they are thousands of miles apart. They both separately convince thousands of children to follow them to the Holy Land. Why? They've got a mission sent from God. Stephen claims that Jesus personally handed him a letter and said that it is his mission to go. Meanwhile, Nicholas, well, he insists that it was an angel who told him to. The brilliant plan that they both have is to walk to the Mediterranean and basically pray, part the seas like Moses, and walk across the dry land to the Crusades, to the Holy Land. Then they're going to defeat the warriors with song, a couple of, you know, prayers, maybe a sermon or two. But for one group, they get to the Mediterranean, and strangely, the seas do not respond to prayer or supplication. And so this is where a couple of ship captains, they step in and they decide to offer some divine providence. That group, they end up not faring so well because apparently those generous ship captains just take them all the way right into slavery. The second group, well, they make it all the way to the pope, and they tell the pope, hey, look, bro, we got an idea. We have a plan. There's a ton of us. We've got places to go and people to meet. And the pope says, ah, you guys are a little too short for this, right? Why don't you walk on home? But since it is a long walk home, most of the kids don't make it. And Nicholas's father, well, he ends up getting taken, taken, uh, he ends up buying a farm just because he enabled this disaster. And this just goes to show you that sometimes child prodigies are really smart with just a couple of bad ideas. It's great marketing. And if you want to hear the full deep dive, jump and go listen to the full thing where the links go and send this to somebody else who was precocious enough to start something this unhinged."