This reminds me of when I learned there was no such thing as "The Children's Crusade".
As my history professor put it, "going to the Holy Land was an incredibly expensive endeavour reserved for a very few. There's no way anyone was going to waste it on young, inexperienced children".
Nearly every source we had saying that the crusade involved children came much later, after a few writers referred to the same source with a mistranslation (think reading "me and the boys" as referring to actual children).
But people spent 500 years discussing the horrors of the children's crusade without ever really questioning if it happened.
As my history professor put it, "going to the Holy Land was an incredibly expensive endeavour reserved for a very few. There's no way anyone was going to waste it on young, inexperienced children".
Nearly every source we had saying that the crusade involved children came much later, after a few writers referred to the same source with a mistranslation (think reading "me and the boys" as referring to actual children).
But people spent 500 years discussing the horrors of the children's crusade without ever really questioning if it happened.