Bible and Sword: England and Palestine From the Bronze Age to Balfour

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Like the troubadour, the palmer earned alms for his tales, for he was a professional wanderer from shrine to shrine who depended for his livelihood on the free food and lodging that it was customary to offer these wayfarers. A pilgrim, on the other hand, was a settled person who undertook a specific journey for a specific reason at his own expense. Sometimes he went to fulfill a vow, expiate a sin, or perform a mission as did Sir James Douglas, who carried the heart of Robert Bruce in a golden casket to Jerusalem for burial there, since when the Douglases have borne a heart on their coat of arms. Sometimes he went to escape an uncomfortable situation as did a certain Abbot of Ramsay who in the year 1020 was expelled from his monastery when the monks mutinied over his too rigorous insistence on ascetic rules, and who took himself off to Jerusalem in a huff. But most often it was neither piety nor sin, but pure love of travel, that carried the generations of English pilgrims to Palestine. Indeed the English were considered great travelers and from their love of moving about were commonly believed to be under the moon’s influence. That lusty epitome of medieval womanhood, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, mentions in passing that she has been to Jerusalem three times, though one wonders when she found the time in between her five wedding trips to the church door.

  Sometimes a pilgrim could earn vicarious glory for those who stayed at home if they subscribed to the cost of his journey. It was a practice among the London guilds of the fourteenth century to release a member from his dues if he undertook a pilgrimage, so that his guild brothers, by taking up the cost of his dues, could share in the salvation he earned. In addition each colleague subscribed a penny to the pilgrim destined for Jerusalem (only a halfpenny if his goal was Rome or Compostella) and accompanied him in a body to the outskirts of the town as he set off on his voyage.

  From the fourteenth century dates the most popular of all medieval travelogues on Palestine, the Book of Sir John Mandeville, knight, who tells us he was “born in England in the town of St. Albans.” The unrelenting detection of modern scholars has shown that the author was neither English nor a knight, that his name was not Mandeville, and that his book is a package of borrowings from earlier travelers, geographers, and explorers from Herodotus down to Marco Polo. Yet no other book in that day was so widely read in England or on the Continent. Originally written in Latin and translated by the author himself (if one may believe him) into French and English, the book caught such interest that versions appeared in Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Walloon, Bohemian, German, Danish, and Irish, and some three hundred manuscripts have survived. As soon as printing was invented Mandeville was one of the earliest to be printed, a German edition appearing in 1475 and one in English in 1503. The long-lasting popularity of his book contributed much to the sense of familiarity with Palestine.

  Whatever his deficiencies in honesty, Mandeville makes up for them by his enthusiasm for his subject, his inexhaustible supply of information, whether fact or fable, and his exuberance in sharing all of it with his readers. Palestine he says flatly was chosen of God as “the best and most worthy land, and the most virtuous land of all the world, for it is the heart and middle of all the world.” He enters by way of Egypt, where he pauses to remark of the pyramids that they were the “granaries of Joseph” which he caused to be built to store grain against bad times. He adds without prejudice that “some men say that they are sepulchers of great lords that were formerly; but this is not true.” Twelve days’ journeying takes him to Mt. Sinai, and he retells all the adventures of Moses and the children of Israel in the wilderness, including the passage of the Red Sea, “which is not redder than other seas but in some places the gravel is red and therefore they call it the Red Sea.” The narrative is liberally laced with an immense variety of nonscriptural miracles and natural wonders such as the annual pilgrimage of “ravens, crows and other fowls of that country” to the monastery of St. Catherine’s at the foot of Mt. Sinai, “and each brings a branch of bays or olive in its beak and leaves it there.”

  From Mt. Sinai another thirteen days takes the traveler across the desert to Gaza, city of Samson and Beersheba, which, says Mandeville, was founded by Bathsheba, “wife of Sir Uriah, the knight.” The Dead Sea of course provides him with unexampled profusion of wonders, as that a man can cast iron into it that will float, but a feather will sink. At Hebron, the oldest city of Palestine, the dwelling and burial place of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and of their wives and so as sacred to the Moslem sons of Ishmael as to the Jews, Mandeville reports a prophecy associated with a dead oak tree there: “A lord, a prince of the west side of the world, shall win the Land of Promise, that is the Holy Land, with the help of the Christians, and he shall cause mass to be performed under that dying tree and then the tree shall become green and bear both fruit and leaves. And through that miracle many Jews and Saracens shall be converted to the Christian faith.” This curious insistence on the convertibility of the Jews will reappear frequently in later chapters, especially in the earnest if misguided efforts of the Evangelical movement. But though the prophecy was forever to remain futile, the first half of it was eventually fulfilled if one can recognize “a prince of the west” in Field Marshal Allenby.

  Beginning in the fifteenth century there is a notable change in the tone of Palestine travel diaries, with less of the fabulous and more practical tourist information. By now pilgrimages had become an organized traffic, and a returned pilgrim who tried to awe his listeners with wondrous tales was likely to be tripped up, for too many had been there before him. A regular galley service operated out of Venice, making about five round trips to Jaffa a year, usually going in the spring and early summer. Each of these galleys, privately owned though under the supervision of the Venetian state, could carry as many as a hundred pilgrims, and trading vessels making the voyage to Eastern ports also carried pilgrims for extra profit. The ships, according to an anonymous account, were always “full stuffed with people,” so that “the air therein waxeth soon contrarious and groweth alway from evil to worse.” The discomforts of the crowded sea voyage, which took four to six weeks, must have been considerable, for the English traveler William Wey advises future pilgrims that a berth on the open upper deck, despite wind and spray, is preferable to the “right smolderynge hote and stynkynge” accommodations in the hold.

  The Venetian galleys usually stopped at Cyprus and Rhodes, where the pilgrims could take in the sights, and again at Beirut, the port for Damascus. From there they sailed down the coast to Jaffa, the port for Jerusalem, where the average pilgrim debarked, took a guided three weeks’ tour, and returned to Venice on the same ship. Transportation, for those who could afford it, on mules or camel-back with hired Arab guides was arranged for by the master of the pilgrim galley, who doubled as a tourist agent. Guides were Franciscan monks, sole custodians of the holy places after 1230, who recited the history and traditions associated with each town or monument or site of Biblical events to parties of visitors as they arrived.

  More ambitious travelers began their tour in Egypt, sailing from Venice to Alexandria, from where, following the route of the Exodus, they crossed the Sinai desert and entered Palestine from the south. Thomas Swinburne, English mayor of Bordeaux and personage of importance at the court of Richard II, led a party in 1392–93 by this route, covered the length of Palestine, and departed from Damascus and Beirut in the north. A daily itinerary kept by the squire of the party, Thomas Brigg, is stuffed with details of traveling expenses, transportation, guides, fees, imposts, tips, foods, and lodging. Apparently he was kept too busy adding up accounts to record much of what he saw. In the same year the ambitious young cousin of the King, Henry of Bolingbroke, then aged twenty-five, came to Jerusalem on a pilgrimage with one donkey carrying his provisions. Many years later, after he had deposed King Richard and reigned in his stead as Henry IV, the dying King, remembering a prophecy that his life would end in Jerusalem, had himself carried into the “Jerusalem Chamber” at Westminster, where he died.

  The fullest record of the average fifte
enth-century pilgrimage is the manuscript of William Wey, who went twice to Jerusalem, in 1458 and 1462, and set himself to write a handy travel guide that is touched with the genius of Baedeker. In prose and in rhymed couplets, in English and in Latin, Wey provides the prospective journeyer to Jerusalem with all the information he might need. He gives the rates of exchange in terms of a noble or a ducat along the route he took through Calais, Brabant, Cologne, Lombardy, Venice, Rhodes, and Cyprus to Jaffa, so that his readers may understand the “diversitie of moneys as from England unto Surrey in the holy lande.” He advises what kind of contract the traveler should make with the Venetian shipmaster to ensure that it covers food and drink, he suggests extra provisions that the traveler should carry for himself, including “laxitives and restoratives,” cooking and eating utensils, and bedding. He tells where a feather bed with a mattress, two pillows, a pair of sheets, and a quilt can be purchased in Venice and resold after use in Palestine for half the purchase price. He cautions the traveler to take only fresh food and drink, only good wine and fresh water, and to keep a careful eye on all his belongings, “for the Sarcenes will go talkyng wyth yow and make good chere, but they wyl stele from yow that ye have and they may.”

  Wey, who had been appointed one of the original fellows of Eton college on its foundation in 1440, required special permission from the King, Henry VI, to make the journey in order that he might resume his fellowship when he returned. “Wee, having tendre consideration unto his blessed purpose,” wrote the King, do license “our well-beloved clerc, Maister William Wey … to passe over the see on peregrimage as to Rome, to Jerusalem and to other Holy Places.” Possibly Wey was commissioned to undertake the pilgrimage for the very purpose of writing a guidebook, for he certainly took great pains. He provides a table of distances, a glossary of useful words and phrases in transliterated Greek, the spoken language of the Levant, a list of indulgences to be attained at various shrines, an enumeration of all the holy places that can be visited in a thirteen days’ tour in and around Jerusalem (ten between Jaffa and Jerusalem, twenty-two in Jerusalem, thirteen in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, seven in Bethlehem, eight on the Jordan, and so on to a total of one hundred and ten), and a few remarks on the rulers of the country and the laws and regulations affecting Christian travelers. He even supplies ten reasons for undertaking the pilgrimage to begin with, which include the exhortations of St. Jerome, the remission of sins, and the opportunity to acquire relics. Wey’s care with dates of arrival and departure gives us an accurate picture of the time required for such a journey in the later Middle Ages. He spent less than three weeks in Palestine on his first trip and less than two on the second, but was away from England altogether nine months each time. The journey from England to Venice took nearly two months the second time because of a detour necessitated by a local war in Germany; otherwise it required a month to six weeks. A month was spent in Venice waiting for a ship, and the sea voyage itself took him one month the first time and nearly seven weeks the second. Comparing this with an itinerary of a pilgrimage made in the last decade of the tenth century by Archbishop Sigeric of Canterbury, we can see that there was little change over a period of five hundred years. It took the Archbishop nearly three months from Rome back to England, the part of the journey covered by the itinerary, but he was slowed by rainy weather. His record shows that a day’s march on foot or horseback varied from five to twenty-five miles according to weather, food, and available hostels. A good day’s average was fifteen or twenty miles in four or five hours.

  By the year in which Wey compiled his careful guidebook the time of the pilgrim was already running out; the end of the Middle Ages was close at hand. Palestine, dominated since the death of Saladin in 1193 by the Mamelukes of Egypt, whose wars with the Crusaders, the Tartars, the Mongols, and various other barbarian hordes had kept the land bloodsoaked for three centuries, now faced a new conqueror. The Ottoman Turks in 1453 had captured Constantinople, with echoes that were heard around the world. Now they were advancing down upon Syria, and by 1517 they had conquered the Mamelukes, absorbed the Egyptian Caliphate into the Turkish Empire, and were masters in Jerusalem and Palestine. Within a few years England underwent an equally momentous change with the secession from Roman Catholicism.

  Two voyagers of the early sixteenth century have left us a picture of conditions at the end of the pilgrim era. Sir Richard Guildford, privy councilor to the first Tudor king, Henry VII, with his companion John Whitby, Prior of Guisborough, left England in April 1506 and arrived at Jaffa in August. According to an account of Guildford’s ill-fated pilgrimage written by the chaplain who accompanied him, the party was first detained in the ship for seven days off Jaffa. Then they were “received by ye Mamelukes and Saracyns and put into an old cave by name and tale, and there scryven ever wrytyng oure names man by man as we entered in the presence of the sayd Lordes and there we lay in the same grotto or cave Fridaye all day upon bare stynkynge stable grounde, as well nyght as day, right evyll intreated by ye Maures.” After this ordeal “bothe my mayster and mayster Pryor of Gysborne were sore seke” and being unable to go on foot to Jerusalem were forced to procure “Camellys with grete dyffyculte and outragyous coste.” The party managed to reach Jerusalem, but there both Sir Richard and the Prior died of their illness.

  A few years later Sir Richard Torkyngton, Rector of Mulberton in Norfolk, made a pilgrimage. He also complains of maltreatment by the Mamelukes, who put his party “in great fear which were too long to write.” At Jaffa he found that “now there standeth never an house but only two towers and certain caves under the ground,” but Jerusalem was still “a fair eminent place for it standeth upon such a grounde that from whence so ever a man cometh, there he must needs ascend,” and from there one can see “all Arabie.” He describes how the city gets its water by conduits in great plenty from Hebron and Bethlehem, so that the cisterns are all filled “and much water runneth now to waste.”

  On his return journey down from Jerusalem Torkyngton, joined for greater safety with two other English pilgrims, Robert Crosse, a pewterer of London, and Sir Thomas Toppe, “a priest of the west country.” These are among the last names we can group with the devotional pilgrims of the Middle Ages, for within a few years England embraced the Reformation, and the practice of pilgrimage, because of its association with the buying of indulgences and the worship of saints and relics, was sternly disapproved by the reformers. The new tone is typified by Erasmus, who in his satirical dialogues mocks the vanities of pilgrims, “all covered with cockle shells, laden on every side with images of lead and tynne.” Wyclif, early herald of the Reformation, had long ago voiced a pronounced distaste for pilgrimages and with some effect for when one of his followers was forced to abjure Lollardy he had to take an oath promising that “I shal neuermore despyse pylgrim-age.” The road to Jerusalem lies in the heart, the reformers taught. There it was to remain for some time, while the physical Palestine was left to the merchants and diplomats of competing powers.

  CHAPTER IV

  THE CRUSADES

  To be “the sewer of Christendom and drain all the discords out of it” was the primary function of the Crusades, the Reverend Tom Fuller said in his History of the Holy Warre, written in 1639. Admittedly a partisan Protestant view, Fuller’s dictum can still stand without serious challenge. At the outset the Crusades were set in motion by a thirst for gain, for glory, and for revenge upon the infidel in the name of religion. Exulting in bloodshed, ruthless in cruelty, innocent of geography, strategy, or supply, the first Crusaders plunged headlong eastward with no other plan of campaign than to fall upon Jerusalem and wrest it from the Turks. This in some mad fashion they accomplished only because the enemy was divided against himself. Thereafter mutual dissension defeated them too; even the most elementary loyalty among allies that ought to have been dictated by a sense of self-preservation was lacking. For the next two hundred years the trail of their forked pennons across the heart of the Middle Ages was but a series of vain e
ndeavors to recapture the victories of the first expedition.

  Failure seems to have taught them nothing. Like human lemmings each generation of Crusaders flung themselves into the fatal footsteps of their fathers. Palestine itself, the battleground and the prize, became a second country if not a graveyard for half the families of Europe. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who preached the Second Crusade, boasted that he left but one man in Europe to console every seven widows. But what made the distant land so familiar was not the numbers who went at any one time so much as the fact that they kept on going over and over again to the same place for nearly two centuries, so that often two, three, or four generations in the same family had fought or settled or died in Palestine.

  In England the carved stone effigies of four earls of Oxford, each with the crossed legs signifying a participant in the Crusades, lie in the parish church at Hereford. Albericus de Vere, the first Earl, surnamed “the Grim,” in full battle dress of chain mail from head to toe, covered by a cloth surplice, sword at his side, spurred feet resting on a lion, lies in stony immortality on a tomb bearing the date 1194. Near him are the second Earl, died 1215, the third Earl, died 1221, and the fifth Earl, died 1295, each with the crossed legs of the Crusader. Similarly in Aldworth church in Berkshire are five cross-legged effigies of the de la Beche family. Such effigies can be found in every country in England, some with feet resting on a boar or stag, some with hand on sword half pulled from its scabbard, some with hands in prayer, some with shields bearing the Templar’s cross, some with their ladies also cross-legged lying beside them, their robes fixed forever in straight, stiff folds. The numerous families whose coats of arms bear the scallop shells or George’s Cross bespeak the Crusades, and even today inns exist at the sign of the “Saracen’s Head.”