The pilgrim movement began in earnest early in the fourth century after the Emperor Constantine declared Christianity the official, or at least the favored, religion of the Roman Empire. His mother, the Empress Helena, having likewise been converted, undertook to locate the exact site of the Gospel’s events. On a journey to Palestine in 326 she discovered, after convenient excavations, the True Cross and the Holy Sepulcher. Subsequently her own and her son’s activity in dotting Palestine with churches, monuments, and hostels to mark the holy places excited the Christian world and led to a wave of pilgrimages.
Celtic Britain’s history during this period lies in shadow. But in Palestine if not in Britain evidence exists of Britons making pilgrimages to the Holy Land, beginning in the fourth century. St. Jerome writing from Bethlehem in 386 remarks: “The Briton no sooner makes progress in religion than he quits his Western sun to go in search of a place of which he knows only through Scripture and common report.” This observation is confirmed independently by a contemporary, Palladius Galatea, Bishop of Heliopolis in Egypt, who lived much of his life in Palestine. In the course of a book of biographical sketches of monks, ascetics, hermits, and other local celebrities Palladius refers to the pilgrims who came from all corners of the world “even from Persia and Britain.” Another of Jerome’s letters implies that Britons must have been coming in some numbers, though apparently in an insufficiently pious frame of mind to satisfy the writer, for he admonishes prospective pilgrims “that it is as easy to find the way to Heaven in Britain as in Jerusalem.”
Who they were we do not know, but how they went we can be sure. They walked. From Edinburgh in the north, Roman roads stretched across Europe, the Balkans, and Asia Minor to Judaea. A pilgrim from Britain could follow them to Dover, cross the straits to Calais, and follow in the legions’ footsteps across Gaul, over the Alps, and down into Italy, where he might sail from Brundisium over the Adriatic to Macedonia, plod on across Thrace to Byzantium, and so down through Antioch and Damascus to Jerusalem. Or he might sail from Messina in Sicily across to Carthage and follow the Roman road along the Mediterranean coast to Alexandria, through Egypt and the Sinai desert to his destination.
Perhaps the earliest Britons to go may have been inspired by a sense of kinship with the popularizers of the Holy Land, Helena and Constantine, who had special associations for Britain. According to legend widely believed in the later Middle Ages Helena was of British birth, the daughter of a Welsh king, but whether this was believed by Britons in her lifetime it is impossible to say. Constantine’s father, for a fact, was killed at York while leading a Roman campaign against the dreaded Picts and Scots who periodically swooped down on Britain. There Constantine, acclaimed Caesar by his legions, embarked on the career that was to have such great consequences for the world of his time.
From the evidence of St. Jerome it is clear that within two generations after Constantine’s conversion the pilgrimage to Jerusalem had become an established custom; indeed, too much so to suit Jerome, who took a rather jaundiced view of overenthusiastic pilgrims. He complained that “Jerusalem is now made a place of resort from all parts of the world, and there is such a throng of pilgrims of both sexes that all temptation, which in some degree you might avoid elsewhere, is here collected together.” Jerome was disapproving by nature, a stern celibate who was forever urging the Roman ladies to abjure baths, second husbands, and other worldly pleasures. His letters, however, and those of his enthusiastic disciple, the Roman matron Paula, show the position Palestine held in the world of his time: “the first of all the nations,” as it is called. A man would not choose to learn Greek anywhere but in Athens or Latin anywhere but in Rome, Paula writes; likewise “can we suppose a Christian’s education complete who has not visited the Christian Athens?… Those who stand first throughout the world are here gathered side by side.”
But Jerusalem was gradually yielding to Rome, until, with the definitive establishment of a papal throne under Gregory the Great in 590, the seat of Christian authority was finally transferred to Europe. Jerusalem remained the spiritual home, “the Mother of us all,” as the Prior in Ivanhoe put it, and still a goal of pilgrimage. But its temporal history is severed from that of the Roman Empire by the Moslem conquest in 637 A.D. From then on, except for the unedifying episode of the Crusaders’ Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, Palestine remained under one form or another of Moslem rule, through a bewildering succession of Abbasid and Fatimite caliphates, Seljuk and Ottoman Turks, until 1918.
Jerusalem was now adopted as a Holy Place by the Mohammedans. So far it had figured in the new religion only for that fraction of a second between the fall of a cup from Mahomet’s bedside table and the catching of it before it reached the ground. It was during this interval that the Prophet had his famous dream of a miraculous midnight journey to Jerusalem astride the winged white steed Alborak and his ascent thence to heaven. Now, however, Mahomet’s followers, late comers to monotheism, were in physical possession of the city that was holy to the two older religions and were able to take advantage of its prestige. With the shrewd opportunism that characterized the founder, they were eager to adopt as much of Jewish and Christian beliefs and practices as could be fitted in between the pages of the Koran. Omar, the conqueror of Jerusalem, paid a visit of respect to the Holy Rock where Abraham had prepared to sacrifice Isaac and where the Temple of Solomon had once stood. Having cleaned it of the filth with which the Christians of that time had defiled it to show their resentment of the Jews, he adopted the site as a Mohammedan place of worship. There the Mosque of Omar was built, and thenceforward Mahomet was supreme where David had reigned and Jesus preached.
Yet the connection between Europe and Palestine was kept alive by the continued flow of pilgrims. Omar established the principle of tolerance for Christians and Jews, whom he respected as fellow monotheists, allowing them to remain as residents of Palestine subject to certain disabilities and permitting them to continue visits to their various shrines on payment of a levy from which he derived a comfortable income. But these privileges depended solely on the personal policy of the reigning sovereign. Pilgrims suffered little danger during the reign of friendly or tolerant caliphs such as Harun al-Rashid, who in 801 signalized his famous long-distance friendship with Charlemagne by sending the Emperor the keys to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and acknowledging him as Protector of the Christians in the East. But some were rabid anti-Christians like the mad Caliph El-Hakim, a sort of Arab Nero, who in 996 burned down the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and slaughtered thousands of unbelievers. Others, preferring the income to the glory, permitted the Christians’ residence and restored the pilgrims’ privileges.
From all parts of Europe they took the long road to the Holy Land, drawn partly by devotion, but also by curiosity to visit, to touch, to secure souvenirs of the places and the relics associated with the celebrities of the age. These were of course the saints and churchmen. Religion and its exponents ruled the life of the time. The hardest task today for a person who endeavors to understand the medieval world is to realize the extent to which the doctrines, dogmas, and controversies of the Christian Church enveloped and absorbed all mental activity. Although the Old Testament was known in the imperfect version of the Latin Vulgate, it was predominantly the Gospels and the writings of the early Christian Fathers that established the confines of medieval knowledge. As a result Palestine had almost exclusively Gentile connotations in men’s minds. No one thought of Jesus as one of a long line of Hebrew prophets, nor did the earlier prophets or the Mosaic law have the influence that they were to exert later, after the Reformation. To medieval Europeans Palestine meant the soil that their Saviour had trodden, not the land of the Chosen People. Jews of the Middle Ages were exclusively objects of hostility as Christ-killers and usurers. To the earliest Christians, when Christianity was still a sect struggling to establish itself as a Church, the Jews had been the Bourbons of an ancien régime. Caiaphas, high priest of the Temple, was to the disciples what Geor
ge III was to the American colonies. But by the time the Christian Church had become official under Constantine, the Temple had become a ruin and the Jews a homeless sect who, as aliens everywhere, were the more easily contemned. Their thousand years’ possession of Palestine hardly entered the mind of the pilgrim, certainly not the pilgrim of the early Middle Ages.
The earliest Briton known to us by name to have reached Palestine was not strictly a pilgrim. He was the British monk Pelagius, expounder of the celebrated heresy named after him, who came to the Holy Land about the year 413. He had been living in Rome until the sack of that city by Alaric the Goth forced him with many other residents to flee to Carthage. Here he came into conflict with St. Augustine, who dominated the Christian scene from his Carthaginian garden. Pelagius, a man of untroubled faith, did not share the awful soul struggles of the Saint of Hippo, nor could he accept Augustine’s insistence that salvation was not within man’s power to achieve, but was only within the Divine power to bestow. Hoping to find a more sympathetic religious climate, he moved on to Palestine, only to come up against the cantankerous Jerome, who promptly denounced him as an old fool dulled by Scotch porridge. For already his creed, contained in a series of commentaries on St. Paul, which incidentally form the oldest known book to have been written by a Briton, was making enemies for him among the entrenched episcopacy, in proportion as it gained headway in the Christian world.
It was a characteristically British heresy even then; for Pelagius rediscovered Free Will. Repudiating the doctrine of original sin, he suggested instead that sin was a matter of choice rather than an unavoidable inheritance from Adam. This appalling theory filled church officials with horror. For if it were admitted that men were not totally depraved from birth but could achieve righteousness and grace through their own ability, then of what avail was Jesus’ atonement on the Cross? If the Redeemer was not a necessity for mankind, no more was the Church. Such subversive ideas could not be allowed by the doctrinaires of the day. Led by Augustine and Jerome, they kept the controversy raging until they had secured the condemnation of Pelagianism as heresy.
Within the lifetime of Pelagius the Roman Empire, pulling in its legions from the provinces in an effort to defend its core against the barbarians, had withdrawn from Britain. The country was left to its own devices against the ever-ready Picts and Scots, soon followed by the Anglo-Saxons. Under the new Invaders the heathen pall redescended on the former Romanized settlements, though not on the more remote regions of the North and West. Pushed back by the new barbarians, the Celts retreated to the fringes of the British Isles, and here Celtic Christianity survived. From one of the remarkable Scotch monasteries in the North another figure, the Abbot Andamnan of Iona, emerges to penetrate the cloudy history of that dim era. His connection with Palestine was fortuitous; Andamnan happened to fall host to a French bishop, Arculf, who, sailing home from a nine months’ pilgrimage to the Holy Land, was shipwrecked on the stony Scottish coast about the year 690. A storm at sea gave Britain its first in the endless count of English travel books on Palestine.
Warming his guest, no doubt, with the steaming Scotch porridge so despised by Jerome, Andamnan, a man “most learned in the Scriptures,” must have listened fascinated to Arculf’s first-hand description of the Holy Places. One can imagine the two cowled figures in the bare hall of the monastery, swept by sea wind and Caledonian fog; the traveler telling his tale of far-off places, of sacred shrines and relics, the listener urging him on with eager questions. Andamnan took it down in Latin, the language common to both, and presented the finished work, entitled De Locis Sanctis, to the King of Northumbria. From here it came into the hands of a great contemporary and fellow Northumbrian, the Venerable Bede, through whose efforts the book was destined to have a much wider circulation than its remote origin might have warranted. Bede abridged and rewrote De Locis Sanctis, including it, though with full credit to Arculf and Andamnan, among his own historical and ecclesiastical works and thus assuring its survival. During the course of the Middle Ages more than one hundred transcripts were made of Bede’s condensed version and a score of Andamnan’s original. These figures, in the days of painstaking longhand reproduction and scarce parchment, represent a best seller. Setting the pattern from which his innumerable followers never far depart, Arculf visits and describes each place of importance in Jesus’ life: Bethlehem, Nazareth, Capernaum, Galilee, the Jordan, and each street, shrine, and stone in Jerusalem, each church, monastery, and hostel sprung up since the Christian era. He records the belief that Jerusalem is the center of the earth, proved, he says, by a “lofty column in the middle of the city which at midday at the summer solstice casts no shadow.” He drinks water from the well of Jacob and eats wild locusts, which, boiled in oil, “make a poor sort of food.” He sees the last footprints of the Saviour, preserved under a temple on Mt. Olivet, which miraculously remained as before “although the earth is daily carried away by believers.” He calculates the exact measurements of the Holy Sepulcher in terms of the width of his palm. The color of the marble, the twelve lamps of the twelve apostles, the niche enshrining the cup, the sponge and the lance used in the crucifixion, every last detail of architecture and furnishings of every edifice, all are remembered by the traveler and written down by the eager reporter.
He notices the natural features of the country, too, remarking on the rich and fruitful plains inland from the coast at Caesarea or noting that at Jericho the Jordan was “about as broad as a man could throw a stone with a sling.”
The sites of Old Testament history, chiefly those most easily accessible in and around Jerusalem, which are included in every later tourist itinerary, are also visited: the Patriarchs’ tomb at Hebron, the walls of Jericho, the stones of the twelve tribes at Gilgal. Even the task of recounting weird legends about the Dead Sea and swimming in its metallic waters to ascertain if, in truth, one would not sink, is included. It is not clear from the narrative whether Arculf himself visited the Dead Sea, but Andamnan contributes an abundant variety of Dead Sea fantasies. For example, near the awful site where Sodom and Gomorrah were engulfed grow beautiful apples that “excite among spectators a desire to eat them but when plucked they burst and are reduced to ashes and give rise to smoke as if they were still burning.”
The narrative describes, for the benefit of future pilgrims, both land approaches to the Holy Land: the southern route by Egypt and Sinai generally used by pilgrims before the Moslem conquest, and the northern one down through Constantinople and Damascus, as well as the direct sea route by Sicily and Cyprus to Jaffa, which became the most popular approach at the height of the pilgrim traffic in the later Middle Ages. Arculf seems to have entered and departed by way of Constantinople, still then, of course, a Christian capital, but he made a side trip by sea to Egypt involving a forty days’ sail from Jaffa to Alexandria. Although Arculf does not mention it, there existed at this time a Suez Canal, as we know from a contemporary Latin treatise on geography by an English scholar named Dicuil. This treatise reports a conversation with an English monk, Fidelis, who had actually sailed through the canal from the Nile into the Red Sea while on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land during the first half of the eighth century. In 767 the canal was blocked up by the Caliph Al-Mansur.
Other firsthand reports by Continental pilgrims have survived, but through the accident of his shipwreck and the devoted work of the Scotch abbot Arculf’s story belongs to Britain. Launched by the respected Bede, this book contributed to the passion for pilgrimage that soon afterwards seized the Anglo-Saxons. The first of the pilgrims who left an account was St. Willibald of Wessex, the son of a certain Richard who bore the title King, but of what, historians have never been able to decide for certain. Whether Willibald had read De Locis Sanctis is not known, but it seems probable that he would have, for he was an intensely pious young man dedicated to the service of the church as a child. In the years after his prolonged pilgrimage Willibald became a renowned bishop carrying on the proselytizing work of his uncle, St.
Boniface, among the Teutons.
Two accounts of his life and journeys survive, one anonymous, and one by a nun related to him who took down his reminiscences in after years.
He was described in his old age as “perfect in charity and gentleness”; yet “his look was majestic and terrible to gainsayers.” As a youth he must have been equally terrible to less high-minded souls, for at the age of eighteen he managed to persuade his father, brother, and sister, much against their inclination, to undertake the long journey to Jerusalem with him (one wonders how his mother resisted, but the chronicle is silent). When first he urged his father to become a pilgrim and “despise the world” the King refused on the not unnatural ground that it would be “contrary to all humanity” to leave his wife a widow, his children orphans, and his house desolate. But the persistent Willibald maintained that love of Christ prevailed over all natural affections, and the father, “overcome at last by the conversation of his truth-telling son,” agreed to go. The decision proved to his sorrow, for the King died on the way, even before the party reached Rome, and was buried at Lucca in Tuscany. In Rome the brother fell ill, but Willibald, leaving him in the care of his sister, pressed on to Palestine in the year 721.
At any given time it is possible to gauge the degree of religious feeling in England by the reaction of the traveler to his first sight of Jerusalem. In the fervent Middle Ages some wept, some prayed, some fell on their knees and kissed the soil. Margery Kempe, a fifteenth-century fanatic, was so overcome at the sight that “she was in point to a fallen offe her asse,” but her companions put spices in her mouth to revive her. Indeed, at every place memorable for some incident in the life of Jesus this pilgrim was so much given to “wepyng and sobbyng in lowde voys” that “hir felows wold not latyn hir etyn in their cumpany.” Later, after the Reformation, adventurous Elizabethans, seventeenth-century merchants and scholars, cool eighteenth-century skeptics could make the ascent and never notice the bend in the road where Jerusalem first comes into view. Victorians revert to medieval fervor and tend to tears, awe, and solemn thoughts.
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