The Christian idea of pilgrimage was a journey to a holy place undertaken out of motives of devotion or as an act of penance or thanksgiving. The long tradition of pilgrimages to the Holy Land was instrumental in highlighting the importance of Jerusalem as the main goal of crusades from 1095 onward.
The sources of Christian pilgrimage lay in both Jewish and pagan practices of pilgrimage. Another source was the idea that the follower of Christ is a wanderer in this world, for whom life on earth is an unavoidable but distasteful preparation for the real life in heaven. This idea, rooted in the teachings of Christ and St. Paul (Hebrews, 11:13-16, 13:14), was a part of the influential theme of “contempt for the world” (Lat. contemptus mundi) and accounted for the word pilgrim (from Lat. peregrinus, meaning “stranger” or “foreigner”). It was applied to believers who left all worldly affairs behind them to pursue their goal, ultimately the Kingdom of Heaven, thus becoming strangers to the material preoccupations of their environment.
Pilgrimage was undertaken as a pious deed, the pilgrim being a stranger to his family and social status for the duration of his journey. On his way he wore simple clothes, stayed at monasteries, and ate the food of the poor. This idea inspired many ascetics in the early Middle Ages to commit themselves to a life of aimless and painful wanderings in an attempt to come closer to Christ. This kind of life was particularly popular among the Irish saints, missionaries, and scholars of the sixth and seventh centuries, such as Colum-banus and Fursey. An additional contributing factor was the cult of relics. From the second century Christians venerated the physical remains of saints to show reverence for them, to gain their support, or out of the belief that the relics themselves retained healing powers.
Origins and Early History
It was only in the sixth century that pilgrimages were formally accepted as a form of penance and imposed on penitents. According to the penitential books, pilgrimage was favored as a spiritual exercise. From the eighth century it was considered especially appropriate as public penance for more serious transgressions; pilgrimages of varying duration were specified for murder (particularly by clerics), incest, bestiality, and sacrilege. In the framework of penitential pilgrimages in general, the pilgrimage to Jerusalem came to be considered as the most worthy and thus the most redeem-
Pilgrims arrive in the Holy Land. (Bettmann/Corbis)
Ing, as it was the most difficult and the most expensive. The worst crimes were punished with sentences of perpetual pilgrimage, such as was imposed in 850 on Frotmund, a nobleman who had killed his father. Like others who received a similar sentence, he traveled from shrine to shrine in chains, hoping that some saint might take pity and give some miraculous sign to demonstrate forgiveness. The exiled Frotmund journeyed to Rome, Jerusalem, and the shrine of St. Cyprian at Carthage, to Rome again, then to Mount Sinai and Jerusalem, once more to Rome, and finally to Redon in France, where his chains miraculously broke in the Church of St. Marcellinus.
From the twelfth century, penitential pilgrimage was imposed also for less grave sins of the laity. In the thirteenth century, pilgrimage began to be used as an afflictive penalty, imposed by certain courts. These were initially, in the early thirteenth century, the courts of the Inquisition in southern France, and later the urban courts of the Low
Countries and Germany. These expiatory pilgrimages punished religious crimes but also crimes against the person and against property. They continued to exist until the end of the Middle Ages.
Yet another type of pilgrimage was the vicarious one, namely, a pilgrimage on behalf of someone else. It first appeared in the tenth century in the form of the posthumous pilgrimage, undertaken in place of those who had not been able to perform their vows of pilgrimage in their own lifetimes. The custom then developed of sending a substitute to make the pilgrimage, the essential thing being the actual performance of the act of piety. As a result of this custom, a new type of pilgrim appeared, the professional paid pilgrim.
The conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine the Great, followed by the pilgrimage of his mother Helena to Jerusalem (326), marks the transformation of the small and somnolent Roman city, then known as Aelia Capitolina, into the holiest and most important center of Christian pilgrimage. It was during the Byzantine period that churches were built on the major holy sites and the first map of the Holy Places appeared. The most important was Constantine’s Church of the Resurrection (325-335). The resplendent basilica soon marked the new center of the city, and the writer Eusebius felt that the new buildings not only proclaimed the victory of Ecclesia (literally “the church” as personification of Christianity) over Synagoga (the synagogue as the personification of Judaism): not only were they monuments to the most memorable event in human history, they had also a place and meaning in the divine plan of salvation. Eusebius speaks of people coming from the ends of the earth to Bethlehem and to the Mount of Olives. Their number certainly grew, as is attested by pilgrims’ writings, known in Latin as descriptiones Terrae Sanctae (descriptions of the Holy Land) or itineraria (itineraries).
Pilgrimage to the Holy Land declined only with the Muslim conquest of Palestine (638). During that period, as Pauli-nus of Nola wrote, the principal motive that drew people to Jerusalem was the desire to see and touch the places where Christ had been present in bodily form. The Byzantine period was also a golden age of women’s pilgrimage: never again during the Middle Ages did so many women visit the Holy City as then. Many upper-class women are known by name, such as Helena, Egeria, Paula, Melania the Elder, Melania the Younger, and Eudocia, but there is also evidence that many women of other classes of society went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem as well. Some of them belonged to the category of transvestite saints of whom the more famous are Pelagia of Antioch and Mary of Egypt.
The second great pilgrim destination in the early Middle Ages was Rome. The city’s main attraction was the tombs of the apostles St. Peter and St. Paul. Another was its magnificent collections of relics, including the veil (Lat. sudarium) of St. Veronica in the Basilica of St. Peter and the heads of the apostles Peter and Paul in the Church of St. John Lateran. Pilgrimage to Rome received a new impetus following the Muslim conquest of Palestine, which for a time closed Jerusalem to pilgrims from the West. Rome also benefited from the growing devotion in the West to St. Peter, whose possession of the keys to paradise was believed to give his intercession added weight. The saint’s shrine was regarded as a particularly suitable destination for criminals, and Peter acquired a reputation as a breaker of chains.
It was especially at the end of the tenth century that people from all classes of society performed voluntary pilgrimages to expiate crimes that weighed on their conscience. This phenomenon can be explained by the compulsive search for a means of penance, brought on by the fear of the approaching millennium as well as radical changes in the role of the sacrament of penance, namely, the insistence upon the distinction between sin and punishment: the former was expunged by confession; the latter remained to be suffered in purgatory, unless adequate penance was carried out on earth. This obsession with the remission of sins can be discerned in the more notable pilgrimages of the tenth and eleventh centuries. Thus Fulk III Nerra, count of Anjou, went to Jerusalem four times on account of his slaughter of the Bretons at the battle of Conquereuil and the murder of his wife. This flowering of pilgrimage was undoubtedly helped by the economic recovery of the West and its release from barbarian attacks.
Another factor responsible for the growth of pilgrimages to Jerusalem was the improvement in the physical conditions of pilgrimage. The Byzantine navy regained control of the eastern Mediterranean, so that a sea voyage became feasible, either via Constantinople (mod. Istanbul, Turkey) or directly to a port in Egypt or Syria. The overland routes had become safer, maintained by friendly or well-disposed rulers, with ample provisions, accommodation, and guidance. As a consequence in the eleventh century there were, besides individual pilgrimages, semi-organized group pilgrimages, led by high-ranking prelates or magnates such as Count William of Angouleme (1026) or Count Guy of Limoges and his brother Bishop Hilduin a few years earlier. The biggest of these group pilgrimages were those of 1033 and 1064-1065, both of them partly motivated by eschatological fears.
Pilgrimage and Crusading
A new form of pilgrimage came into being through the preaching of the First Crusade (1096-1099). In 1095 the Council of Clermont decreed that whoever, for devotion alone, went to Jerusalem to liberate the church of God, could substitute this journey for all penance. Pilgrimage to Jerusalem, hitherto a devotional or penitential act, was thus linked by Pope Urban II to offensive warfare designed to free the holy places from Muslim rule. There was no specific terminology to describe crusading activity in 1095, and the participants in the First Crusade often referred to themselves as pilgrims (Lat. peregrini) and to their expedition as the Jerusalem journey.
During the twelfth century, the rituals for taking crusader vows were formalized, and crusaders were invested by a priest with a staff and scrip (satchel), the traditional emblems of pilgrimage. This aspect of crusading was more than a legal fiction, for crusaders were required to fulfill their vows by praying at the Holy Sepulchre before returning home. After 1187 when Jerusalem was in Muslim hands again (apart from the brief interlude of 1229-1244), this was not possible, but crusaders still needed to be dispensed from that obligation by the pope or his legate.
The fact that pilgrimage was an integral part of crusading had certain disadvantages. First, it was never possible to prevent noncombatants from taking crusade vows in order to perform the pilgrimage and to obtain the indulgence offered, even though Pope Innocent III and his successors encouraged such people to commute their vows by making a contribution to crusading funds. Second, the diversification of crusading activity, which was present almost from the start, was not always compatible with pilgrimage. The rulers of Christian Spain, from Alfonso I of Aragon (d. 1134) to Isabella I “the Catholic” of Castile (d. 1504), saw the crusades in Iberia as part of the same war as crusades to the Holy Land: a war against Muslims throughout the Mediterranean world that, in the case of Spain, would open up the prospect of reaching the Holy Land through Morocco. In the later Middle Ages, crusades launched to defend Byzantium against the Ottoman Turks were understood in the same way: theoretically such campaigns, if successful, would culminate in the liberation of Jerusalem. All crusades against the Islamic world were therefore in some sense understood as pilgrimages to Jerusalem.
There was no way in which the Baltic Crusades of the thirteenth century could be seen as stages on the pilgrim road to Jerusalem, though Albert of Buxhovden, bishop of Riga (1198-1229), ingeniously designated Livonia as the dowry of the Blessed Virgin Mary, so that it might become a place of pilgrimage in its own right. Participants in the Albigen-sian Crusade (1209-1229) were not required to visit any particular shrine, but only to give their services to the church for a period of forty days. Some of them did call themselves pilgrims, but that was simply a formality. Thus although pilgrimage remained a theoretical part of crusading throughout the Middle Ages, its practical application diminished; for participants in crusades directed against Islam could seldom reach Jerusalem, while those who took part in crusades on other fronts did not normally have a pilgrimage goal.
An individual might take a crusade vow as an act of private devotion, and a steady stream of such people came to the Latin East after 1099 to help to defend or to recover the Holy Places. Yet although all who came to the Holy Land as crusaders were, by definition, pilgrims, not all pilgrims who came there were crusaders. The foundation of the Latin kingdom led to a huge increase in the number of Western pilgrims to the Holy Land. The great majority came by sea, particularly from the Italian ports, although some pilgrims, especially those from central and eastern Europe, took ship at Constantinople. The land routes through Anatolia were considered unsafe and were normally only used by crusading armies.
Because many pilgrims were noncombatants and were preyed upon by Muslim brigands in the early years of Frankish settlement, the French knight Hugh of Payns founded the Knights Templar in 1119 to patrol and garrison the main pilgrim routes, and their work proved very effective. To meet the needs of the many destitute and sick pilgrims, the Latin hospital of Jerusalem, which dated from before the First Crusade, grew into the independent Order of Knights Hospitallers, whose primary duty, even after they had become partially militarized, remained the care of the poor and infirm. Their hospital in Jerusalem was by the 1160s one of the largest in the Christian world, and they also founded smaller hospitals along the chief pilgrim routes of western Europe and in other parts of the Latin kingdom.
The Latin clergy, with the full support of the Crown and baronage, undertook an impressive building program. They carried out extensive new work at the Holy Sepulchre, where they incorporated the Byzantine rotunda into a new church, and, where necessary, they rebuilt the other Greek Orthodox shrine churches, many of which had fallen into ruins. They also identified many new holy sites, both in the environs of Jerusalem and elsewhere in Outremer, and endowed churches, and sometimes also monasteries, to serve them. These shrines were often embellished with sculptures, frescoes, and, more rarely, mosaics.
The years 1099-1187 were a golden age for pilgrims visiting the Holy Land. They could travel freely to the holy places under Frankish control, which comprised the majority of sites mentioned in the Gospels, and on occasion they were able to venture farther afield. For example, in the 1160s they could visit the monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai, which was then under Frankish protection, and in times of truce they were allowed to make a pilgrimage to the Greek Orthodox convent of Our Lady of Saydnaya near Damascus, which possessed a miracle-working icon.
Pilgrims from the Eastern churches also came to the Holy Land in large numbers while it was under Latin rule. Among them were Orthodox Christians from the Byzantine world and Russia, and there was a revival of Greek Orthodox monastic life in the Judaean desert in the 1160s under the patronage of the Byzantine emperor Manuel I Kom-nenos. The Armenians and the Syrian Orthodox (Jacobites) both built large new cathedrals in twelfth-century Jerusalem to accommodate the huge numbers of pilgrims who came there.
A strong Christocentric piety had inspired some of the participants in the First Crusade, and it was shared by many of the Western pilgrims who visited Palestine. The shrines there were administered by Latin clergy, who celebrated the liturgy in a rite with which the pilgrims were familiar, and they could thus fully experience the reenactment of the events of Christ’s life, particularly those of Holy Week and Eastertide, in the places where tradition asserted that they had taken place. This arguably prepared the way for a growth in the Western Church during the thirteenth century of an affective devotion to the humanity of Christ, of a kind made popular by the Franciscans.
The Latin population of the Frankish East was recruited in part from pilgrims, some of whom stayed there permanently. The majority, of course, returned to the West, taking with them a variety of relics and souvenirs. The most prized of these were relics of the True Cross, but among other relics taken back from Jerusalem were pieces of stone from the Holy Sepulchre and Calvary, from the manger of the Nativity at Bethlehem, and from the rock on which Christ had stood at his Ascension into Heaven, as well as pieces of the Virgin’s dress and strands of her hair. Those who could not obtain relics took back souvenirs with sacred associations, such as water from the river Jordan and palm fronds commemorating Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem (John 12:12-15). As in the Byzantine period, small containers made of clay, glass, and lead or tin alloy were made in Jerusalem for relics of this kind. These relics helped to diffuse a knowledge of the holy places and devotion to them more widely throughout the Christian West.
After 1187 some of the shrines, such as that of St. John the Baptist at Sebastea, passed out of Latin control for ever, while others, including those in Jerusalem, were only restored to Latin rule for brief periods. More crusades than ever before were launched to recover the holy places between 1187 and 1274, and a great number of people took crusade vows, but few of them were able to visit the Holy City. Similarly, large numbers of noncombatant pilgrims continued to come to the Holy Land throughout the thirteenth century because the ports of Syria and Palestine remained in Frankish hands, yet few of them visited Jerusalem, even though the Muslim authorities were often willing that they should do so. The papacy discouraged Christians from visiting the Holy Places while they were in Muslim hands in order to prevent the Islamic authorities from making an economic profit out of Christian piety, although it does not seem to have been essential for Western pilgrims to obtain a papal dispensation in order to visit Jerusalem until the fourteenth century. The majority of thirteenth-century pilgrims contented themselves with visiting holy places that were still in Latin possession, such as Mount Carmel. Because most of the religious communities that had served the holy places in the twelfth century had retreated to Acre (mod. ‘Akko, Israel) after 1192 and set up chapels there, that city became the focus of pilgrim devotion, and indulgences were granted to those who visited those shrines, which conferred spiritual privileges equal to those previously granted at the original holy places. This attractive pilgrimage option came to an end when Acre and the other remaining Frankish strongholds fell to the Mamluks in 1291. Western pilgrimage to the Holy Land continued thereafter, albeit on a reduced scale, but it was directed once again to the city of Jerusalem and the other authentic holy places.
Pilgrimage in the Later Middle Ages
Another popular pilgrimage center by the twelfth century was Santiago de Compostela in Galicia (northwestern Spain). Santiago de Compostela was brought into the front rank of medieval shrines by a combination of factors. Shortly before 1095, the ancient see of Iria was transferred to Compostela, and that city became the center of the Christian activities against the Muslim rulers of Iberia. In the twelfth century the shrine of St. James at Compostela began attracting large numbers of pilgrims. Its popularity was stimulated in part by a romantic association with the Reconquista (the reconquest of Spain from the Moors) and St. James’s role as a patron of this crusading movement. Compostela, however, was also considered a worthy alternative by those who were unable to reach Rome or who were disillusioned with it. At Compostela as at Rome, the pilgrim could find a body of an apostle, in this case St. James, who was portrayed as a protector of pilgrims and as a healer. On becoming bishop (1100), Diego Gelnirez set aside half the alms received in the basilica for the support of a hospice for pilgrims he had established previously. On his instructions, an aqueduct was built to supplement the city’s inadequate water supply. A massive rebuilding program was undertaken, including the construction of a new cathedral of St. James.
At the same time, there was a decline in pilgrimage to Rome. In the twelfth century the apostolic city was rent by schism in the papacy and by rival warring factions. The city had to contend with bitter criticism of its corruption on the one hand and the increasing popularity of other holy places, notably Jerusalem and Compostela, on the other. It was during the pontificate of Innocent III (1198-1216) that major steps were taken to put Rome back on the spiritual map. Innocent III undertook a large-scale building campaign in the most important of the city’s churches, including St. Peter’s. The participants of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), regarded by some as the greatest pilgrimage of the entire Middle Ages, were most impressed with the splendor and spirituality of the Holy City. Another factor that contributed to Rome’s preeminence among Western shrines from the thirteenth century was the introduction of indulgences for pilgrimage, from which the Roman shrines profited greatly because the popes were generous to individual churches and because the concentration of shrines in a small area enabled energetic pilgrims to perform the devotions needed to collect the indulgences offered in a number of churches. By 1300, the time of the first Roman Jubilee proclaimed by Pope Boniface VIII, indulgences were being granted to individual altars in St. Peter’s, and a pilgrim could collect several hundred years’ worth of indulgences if he or she was in the city at the right time. Consequently, pilgrims to Rome could state that the way from the Lateran to St. Peter’s was the “sacred way” (Lat. via sacra), as it offered the same indulgences as the pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
Pilgrimage to Jerusalem continued to thrive in the later Middle Ages, due mainly to two factors. The first was the enterprise of the Venetians: shipowners of Venice provided the earliest all-inclusive package tours, which greatly simplified the organizational and logistical difficulties to be overcome by pilgrims. These tours were abandoned in the late 1480s, and as a result the pilgrimage to the Holy Land suffered a prolonged decline. The second factor was the foundation in 1333 of a Franciscan settlement in Jerusalem, known as the Custodia Terrae Sanctae (guardianship of the Holy Land); it had a tremendous impact, both on the image of the sanctity of the Holy City in the West and on the pilgrimage movement. It also meant the reestablishment of Roman Catholic rites there for the first time since 1244. The convent of the Franciscan friars on Mount Zion served as a lodging for the more important pilgrims, as well as for members of the Catholic monastic orders who visited Jerusalem. The Franciscans of Jerusalem, who enjoyed considerable influence with the Muslim authorities, did all they could to ease the pilgrims’ lot. At the beginning of the fifteenth century they even succeeded in taking over the administration of tolls and the issuing of visas. However, the importance of the Custodia surpassed aid to pilgrims. The friars were the sole representatives of the Latin West in Jerusalem and exercised considerable influence over the pilgrims and their impressions. As guides to the holy places, the friars reinvented the geography of the Holy City. Under their influence, the geography centered upon the Passion and Crucifixion and the life of the Virgin Mary, and also found expression in the localization by the friars of the stations of the cross, which has in general terms been preserved up to the present. As a result of this focus, the traditions of the Old Testament, which had been prominent under Frankish rule, largely disappeared.
Under the guidance of the Franciscan friars in the last two centuries of the Middle Ages, Jerusalem pilgrimage became a kind of guided tour of the Holy Land lasting from ten to thirteen days. The pilgrims, upon arrival, spent one day each in Jaffa (mod. Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel), Ramla, and
Lydda (mod. Lod, Israel), and one day traveling to Jerusalem; the fifth day was spent at the stations of the cross, the sixth in Bethlehem, the seventh in the mountains of Judaea, while the eighth day was devoted to visiting various holy places in Jerusalem. On the ninth day the pilgrim visited the place of the baptism of Christ at the Jordan; on the tenth day he visited Bethany; the eleventh day was once again devoted to Jerusalem. On the twelfth day the pilgrim returned to Ramla and on the thirteenth day to Jaffa. During this guided tour the pilgrim spent at least two nights in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Conclusions
While pilgrimage put thousands of Christians on the roads to holy sites, it also brought forth criticism. As early as the fourth century, St. Jerome voiced the classic criticism that seeing Jerusalem was not enough; interior, spiritual conversion was what God required. Throughout the following millennium, churchmen reiterated Jerome’s point. Monastic writers such as Bernard of Clairvaux and Peter the Venerable claimed that the spiritual benefits of pilgrimage were fleeting and that the repentant sinner would do better to enter a monastery. Pilgrimages by women particularly attracted criticism. The Church Fathers argued vehemently that women should be cloistered in order to remain spiritual and, from the fifth century onward, strict enclosure was gradually enforced in women’s monasteries. It was not always observed, however, and the pilgrimages of nuns from the British Isles to Rome in the eighth century aroused the anger of St. Boniface, who in 747 wrote that many of them perished and few kept their virtue, so that most of the towns in Lombardy had courtesans and harlots of English stock. The Council of Friuli in 796 decreed that permission should never be given to an abbess or a nun to visit Rome or other venerable places and attributed the desire to go on pilgrimages to the inspiration of Satan in the form of an angel. Similarly, the twelfth-century abbess Hildegard of Bingen argued that the desire of another abbess to undertake a pilgrimage was nothing but the devil’s deceit. While in the early and high Middle Ages criticism was mainly directed at the conduct of pilgrims, in the late Middle Ages the very principle of pilgrimage was questioned. Pilgrims were now accused of being motivated more by curiosity and the quest for distraction than by the desire to purify their souls. Clerics and the intellectual elite now preferred “interior pilgrimage,” consisting of prayers and devotional practices at home. Yet despite these developments pil-
Grimage remained popular until the attacks of the Reformation in the sixteenth century.
-Sylvia Schein
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World History
