The Crusades 1095-1197

by Jonathan Phillips

  10

  Religious life and pilgrimage in the Levant

  As a region of central importance to Christianity, Islam and Judaism there was an inherent richness and variety to religious life in the Levant. From the late eleventh century, the Frankish settlers, the hierarchy and institutions of the Catholic Church, and a huge seasonal influx of western pilgrims, imposed themselves on to this complex web. People of other denominations and faiths continued to live in, and to visit, the Holy Land, but obviously the number and influence of the westerners were far greater than before the First Crusade. This chapter will demonstrate how the Franks established and maintained the Latin Church in the Levant and, by highlighting the popularity of pilgrimage and the role of relics such as the True Cross, it will reveal some key aspects of religious life in the Frankish East.

  7. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre

  The establishment of the Frankish Church in the Levant

  Once the Franks had assumed political control of the Holy Land it was inevitable that they should direct religious life. In the immediate after-math of the capture of Jerusalem (1099) the conquerors purged non-Christians from the city, although this would be relaxed in later years to allow Muslim pilgrims to visit. Prior to the First Crusade the Holy Sepulchre had been under the custody of the Greek Orthodox community and although the Catholics assumed guardianship of the site, the Eastern Christians were permitted to remain and have freedom of worship. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre itself was a rather unimpressive collection of buildings that had grown up on the site since the time of Constantine in the fourth century. In the early 1130s the Franks decided to erect a new church complex that incorporated sites such as the Holy Sepulchre itself, Calvary and the Hill of Golgotha and they built the much larger and more splendid building that remains to this day. On 15 July 1149 the new church of the Holy Sepulchre was inaugurated. It brought many key locations under one roof to enable pilgrims to process around the site and in doing so it followed the trend found in the principal shrine churches of the West, such as St James of Compostela (north-western Spain) and Saint Denis at Paris. The main apse was decorated with a depiction of Christ’s descent into hell (the Anastasis) and, as Kuhnel has observed, quoting the Gesta Francorum, ‘The scene expressed the most ambitious of the crusaders who considered themselves “the followers of Christ by whom they had been redeemed from the power of hell”’ (Kuhnel, 1994: 50). Elsewhere in Jerusalem, Muslim religious buildings, such as the Dome of the Rock, were re-dedicated as the Templum Domini and many other churches and institutions were founded by the Franks, including religious houses (the Orthodox church of St Lazarus in Bethany became a convent for Benedictine nuns during Melisende’s reign), hospitals for pilgrims and, as we saw earlier, the military orders.

  The thirteenth-century writer Jacques de Vitry summarised the establishment of the Latin Church:

  From diverse parts of the world, from every race and language, and from every nation under heaven, pilgrims full of zeal for God and religious men flocked into the Holy Land, attracted by the sweet savour of the holy and venerable places. Old churches were repaired and new ones were built; by the generosity of the princes and the alms of the faithful monasteries of regular monks were built in fitting places; parish priests and all things appertaining to the service and worship of God were properly established everywhere. Holy men renounced the world and according to their religious fervour chose places to dwell in suitable to their object and their devotion. (Jacques de Vitry, tr. Stewart, 1896: 26-7)

  An issue that needed to be resolved quickly was the staffing and maintenance of the holy sites. Some clergy had taken part in the First Crusade — Godfrey of Bouillon is known to have brought monks from his own lands but others must have joined them. Western churchmen such as Peter the Venerable (abbot of Cluny, 1122-56) and Bernard of Clairvaux (abbot of Clairvaux and the leading Cistercian monk) strongly supported the worth of pilgrimage for the layman, but railed against monks leaving their orders in Europe and claimed that they were being distracted by their quest for the earthly Jerusalem at the expense of the real work of seeking the heavenly Jerusalem in the cloister. Nevertheless the immense spiritual charge of the holy places would have drawn people to the East and also persuaded some to take up the religious life once they had reached the Levant. In fact, it was not until after the deaths of Peter and Bernard that the Cluniacs and the Cistercians founded houses in the Levant, with the former at Palmarea, near Acre (1170) and the latter at Belmont, near Tripoli (1157).

  The great institutions of Frankish religious life included the Holy Sepulchre, the Templum Domini, the cathedral of Nazareth and the church of the Holy Nativity at Bethlehem. Religious houses needed income to survive and this came from gifts of land, privileges — in either the Levant or the West — and money from pilgrims and pious benefactors. Such important shrines naturally exerted a powerful pull on the imaginations of visiting pilgrims and crusaders. For example, in 1167 Count William IV of Nevers reached the Holy Land on crusade, but the following year he died of fever in Acre. During his visit he must have formed a strong attachment to the church of the Holy Nativity in Bethlehem because in his will he bequeathed a hospital at Clemency (near Auxerre in central France) to the house and by way of recognition for this gift he was buried in the church at Bethlehem. Such acts would have helped to strengthen the emotional bridge between the settlers in the East and their coreligionists in the West. To have local sites in Europe owned by such evocative institutions must have made the Holy Land more tangible to the people of the West and encouraged them to visit as pilgrims or to support its defence.

  In the contemporary West the Cistercians led a trend for the isolation of religious houses based in rural rather than urban settings, but for reasons of scriptural association most major shrines in the Holy Land were in cities. Security considerations also dictated that more isolated institutions were rare, although they did exist, such as the monastery at Mount Tabor in eastern Galilee (the site of the Transfiguration) and a great many hermits emulated the lives of early Christian ascetics from the fourth and fifth centuries by living in remote and inaccessible sites. We tend to think of hermits as solitary figures, but the reality was rather more flexible and they often formed loose communities coming together for prayers or to eat, and there are also examples of ascetics moving between an eremitical and a coenobitic (monastic) existence. An interesting feature of these hermit communities was that they were often as at Mount Carmel near Acre, or the Black Mountain near Antioch — places where Greek Orthodox and Latin religious men lived alongside one another. The issue of liturgical ‘contamination’ was one of which the church authorities were always wary. While we must always remember that it was the Catholic hierarchy that was in ultimate control, it must have been noticeable — and perhaps surprising — to western visitors that other Christians were present in large numbers. There were Coptic and Ethiopian Christians in the Holy Land, as well as Jacobites, Armenians, Maronites and Nestorians. The Greek Orthodox had the greatest profile, however, boasting at least seventeen monasteries in crusader Palestine and the great house of St Catherine on Mount Sinai. There was actually a revival in Orthodox monasticism during the twelfth century: at Mount Tabor, for example, in 1106 the pilgrim Daniel reported no Orthodox house, but by 1185 the site had both Latin and Orthodox communities. In part, this revival can be explained by the political situation. As Emperor Manuel Comnenus (1143-80) became more important as an ally for the Frankish settlers, it became politic to allow him to demonstrate imperial support for the Orthodox Church in the Levant. Various sites received his support, most notably the church of the Holy Nativity in Bethlehem which was redecorated in 1169 to include mosaics which depicted events such as the seven ecumenical councils of the Church but, intriguingly, omitted the filioque clause, which was a prime element in the split between the two Churches. The inscriptions on the walls (in Greek) inform us that Manuel and King Amalric of Jerusalem were responsible for the work, which shows how th
e close military and diplomatic co-operation between the two monarchs extended into the ecclesiastical sphere. Orthodox clergy were also present on the site. We can glimpse from such examples, therefore, the cultural and religious diversity that is one element to reconstructing life in the Levant during the twelfth century.

  Pilgrimage to the Holy Land

  The majority of pilgrimages at this time entailed visiting local shrines in the West, but it was logical that the Frankish hold on the Holy Land would mean more visitors to the Levant. The German pilgrim Theoderic (c. 1169-74) related why Christians would want to journey to the Holy Land: ‘It is holier because it is illuminated by the presence there of our God and Lord Jesus Christ and of his good Mother, and the fact that all the Patriarchs, Prophets and Apostles have lived and taught and preached and suffered martyrdom there’ (Jerusalem Pilgrimage, tr. Wilkinson, 1988: 276).

  It is not possible to give the numbers involved in pilgrimage from the West, but it must have been many thousand each year. The Order of St John’s Hospital in Jerusalem was reported as having beds for 2,000 sick or destitute pilgrims in 1185. Several more hospices existed, usually with regional affinities. As well as the Latin pilgrims we must note that there were houses for the Armenian, Greek, Russian and Jacobite pilgrims too.

  Most visitors from the West would have arrived by sea, but the timeframe to visit the Levant was restricted. To avoid the worst of the winter weather a ship would leave the West no earlier than late March or early April. The journey to the Levant took on average four to six weeks. Late October was the last safe time to set out for home, although this was a longer journey because it meant sailing into prevailing winds and took over two months. The flow of commercial shipping from southern France and Italy provided transport for the pilgrims. Many would have been familiar with water transport from the extensive network of river systems in medieval Europe, but to sail in the open seas was an entirely different matter and one that many people found utterly terrifying. The experience of William III of Nevers is not untypical and shows the reaction of a pious layman in such a situation: when faced with imminent shipwreck on his return voyage from Jerusalem in 1148 he acknowledged that his father had unfairly oppressed the church of St Mary Magdalene at Vezelay and swore on oath that he would give up these demands. Thus, as William’s charter recorded, by God’s virtue and the intervention of the saint, the ship passed out of the storm and into quiet seas.

  Most pilgrims arrived at Acre, either for Easter or, as William of Tyre noted, in the late summer or early autumn, which meant that they would stay over the Christmas season. There must have been a whole support industry geared towards providing for, and profiting from, these pilgrims. As well as medical care and a need for accommodation, there was money to be made from the sale of souvenirs, money-changing and the supply of food. Jerusalem’s notorious ‘Street of Bad Cooking’ is a reminder of the gastronomic hazards pilgrims might encounter and there must have been numerous beggars and guides who hoped to extract income from the visitors.

  The guardianship of pilgrim sites was of great concern to the secular authorities. The kings of Jerusalem were responsible for the defence of the holy places and they used this as an argument to justify appealing for support from the West. They also made a point of highlighting the needs of pilgrims. When Nur ad-Din captured Egypt in 1169 a crisis meeting in the kingdom of Jerusalem cited concern for pilgrims as a main reason to send for help. King Amalric wrote that the Muslims could now blockade the coastal cities which hindered the flow of pilgrim traffic and denied westerners the opportunity to visit the holy shrines. Pope Alexander Ill’s subsequent crusade appeal to the people of Christian Europe ascribed one reason for the fame of the Holy Sepulchre as the fact that it was ‘much visited’. Interestingly, in 1175, when Manuel Comnenus addressed a request for military help to the West, he chose to describe the aim of his project as being ‘to secure the road to the Holy Sepulchre’, and he depicted this as a task of importance for all Christians, both Catholic and Orthodox, because de facto it would facilitate pilgrimage.

  One of the most tangible reminders of pilgrimage is the number of accounts of such journeys that survive (Jerusalem Pilgrimage, tr. Wilkinson, 1988). They were written for a variety of reasons: sometimes as guides for other travellers, sometimes as advertisements for prospective pilgrims, or else as a way of allowing those who could not go to make a kind of spiritual pilgrimage. Much of the material in these works is repetitive and derived or copied from two or three core guides which themselves borrowed from previous authorities rather than relying exclusively on their own observations. The authorship of these guides reveals the geographical and denominational diversity of those visiting the holy sites and the Levant. They include the writings of Saewulf (1101-3) from Britain, Abbot Daniel (1106-8) from Russia, Nikulas of Pvera (c. 1140) from Iceland, an account of the life of St Theotinius from Portugal (who visited the Levant in c. 1100), and the Germans, John of Wurzburg (c. 1170) and Theoderic (c. 1169-74). From non-Latins we have the accounts of Benjamin of Tudela (c. 1166-71), a Spanish Jew, Ibn Jubayr (c. 1184), a Spanish Muslim, and John Phocas (1185), an Orthodox pilgrim from Crete. These works describe various pilgrimage routes. Many focused on Jerusalem, but others included a range of itineraries such as the journey from the East Gate of the holy city to the place of Christ’s baptism on the River Jordan. This passed through places such as Bethany (the site of the resurrection of Lazarus and where Christ’s feet were washed and his head anointed), the Red Cistern (a Templar fort to protect pilgrims and also associated with the site of the story of the Good Samaritan), on through the Judean desert to Mount Quarantana (the place of Christ’s Temptation and the site of a fortified monastery and a Templar arsenal), and thence on to the River Jordan itself.

  Pilgrims gathered in Jerusalem in huge numbers over Easter week. Many of the visitors had come to witness the miracle of the Easter fire, the climax of Holy Week and a series of processions, blessings and absolutions around the holy sites. On Saturday worshippers of all denominations filled the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and after a lengthy service the Holy Cross was placed on the shrine of the Holy Sepulchre. Then, following an Orthodox tradition that was taken on by the Latins, all the lights in the building were extinguished and the faithful waited expectantly for one of the lamps in front of the Holy Sepulchre to re-ignite spontaneously, in other words, a miracle that symbolised the resurrection. The fire did not always reappear at first and sometimes repeated processions were needed to induce the flame to spark — a process that could take many hours. The fire would then be taken to the patriarch who lit his candle from the fire and the flame was passed from person to person. Slowly the light would spread through the choir, up to the gallery and around the whole building in an extraordinarily moving ceremony at the heart of a Christian festival in the centre of the Christian faith.

  The True Cross

  Relics were an integral part of medieval religious life. Most were associated with the person or possessions of a holy figure and were believed to offer an undiminished part of that saint’s power which, if venerated, would enable him or her to intercede with God on the petitioner’s behalf. Saints were commonly asked to assist in cases of healing, protection and good fortune. Because Christ was assumed into Heaven his relics were limited to sheddings such as blood (rather than say the preserved limbs of other saints) and objects associated with his time on Earth. Among the most venerated of all these objects was the True Cross, the wood on which Christ was crucified. Originally discovered in the fourth century by St Helena, the mother of Constantine, the first Christian emperor, the relic was split into two pieces: one part was sent to Constantinople, the other remained in Jerusalem. The piece at Jerusalem was taken by the Persians, but rediscovered by the Patriarch Heraclius in the seventh century. After the Arab invasions later that century it was divided again and one of these fragments was found by the crusaders soon after the capture of Jerusalem in 1099. Notwithstanding its complicated history, the authe
nticity of the relic is, in a sense, irrelevant, because contemporaries believed in its veracity and it therefore carried an important spiritual charge. It was known that numerous other pieces of the True Cross existed in both Europe and the Levant, but the piece in Jerusalem was certainly the most important of these and it was placed in a large metal cross and decorated with gold and silver. Usually the Cross was kept in its own chapel in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where pilgrims offered donations, and while it played an important part in the liturgical life of the church, it had other uses too. As an item of such centrality to the Christian faith it is not surprising that the settlers in the kingdom of Jerusalem used it as an object of protection and good fortune in battle. The True Cross became regarded as an essential element in the defence of the holy places and it was taken into battle on no fewer than thirty-one occasions between its discovery in 1099 and its loss at Hattin in 1187. Fulcher of Chartres noted that it was the relic itself that was responsible for a Christian victory at the Battle of Jaffa in 1102: ‘Truly it was right and just that they who were protected by the wood of the Lord’s Cross should emerge as victors over the enemies of that Cross. If indeed this benevolent Cross had been carried with the king in the previous battle [Ramla], it cannot be doubted that the Lord would have favoured his people’ (Fulcher of Chartres, tr. Ryan, 1969: 173). Most of these engagements took place when the Franks were defending their own lands (i.e. the function of protection noted for relics above), but the Cross might also be used in offensive engagements as well. Obviously the presence of the True Cross boosted Frankish morale and helped to convince the troops that God was on their side. In consequence, its loss at Hattin was regarded as a major disaster (note Pope Gregory VIII’s comments in the papal bull Audita tremendi, see Document 19). The settlers’ attachment to the relic, or indeed the attachment of the wider Latin world to it, can be demonstrated by the fact that its recovery was a prominent aim of all subsequent crusading expeditions to the Levant, and by reason that its return loomed large in any negotiations with Muslim powers seeking to neutralise such campaigns. It is known that other fragments of the True Cross existed in the Latin East. The rulers of Antioch, for example, carried a similar object on campaign, but this was lost at the Battle of the Field of Blood in 1119.