The Pied Piper of Hamelin
The story most people know involves rats, a jilted piper and children led into a hill. The historical record is more unsettling. The oldest known source, a stained glass window in a Hamelin church from around 1300, shows only the children and the piper. No rats. A town chronicle from 1384 records simply: it is 100 years since our children left. The departure of 130 children from Hamelin on 26 June 1284 appears in documents that predate the fairy tale by centuries.
The record
Certainty
/
Century
"It is one hundred years since our children left.
"Hamelin town chronicle · 1384
Historians have proposed the children were recruited for the Ostsiedlung, the eastern colonisation of Slavic territories, and never returned. Several villages in Poland share surnames with Hamelin.
Other theories suggest plague, a children's crusade or a dancing mania. None accounts for the precision of the 1284 date in the earliest sources.