Remember hearing the story when you were a kid? Hamelin, Germany was over-run by rats, and a stranger came along and piped till they.....well, you know the story.
But here's an interesting take on what may actually have happened to the "children" who followed the Piper:
especially the last paragraph of this article: Was the PIED PIPER of HAMELIN just recruiting settlers? The time period would have been right (1250s).
What else was happening at that time? Something else you've heard of: The Crusades.
"The origins of the Crusades lie in developments in Western Europe earlier in the Middle Ages, as well as the deteriorating situation of the Byzantine Empire in the east caused by a new wave of Turkish Muslim attacks [this would definitely have involved the area we know as Bohemia]. The breakdown of the Carolingian Empire in the late 9th century, combined with the relative stabilization of local European borders after the Christianization of the Vikings, Slavs, and Magyars, had produced a large class of armed warriors whose energies were misplaced fighting one another and terrorizing the local populace....trained warriors always sought an outlet for their skills, and opportunities for territorial expansion were becoming less attractive for large segments of the nobility".It was a period of "relative stabilization", with wave after wave of troops going off to adventure in the Holy Land. Normal people--farmers and tradespeople (i.e., OUR people)--couldn't participate, except for the oppressive taxes they were expected to pay to support those troops. Better to go east and colonize?