An Empire of Memory (21 page)

particular.

J E R U S A L E M A N D T H E W E S T B E F O R E

T H E E L E V EN T H C E N T U R Y

Generally dictated by an ever-changing combination of anti-Jewish sentiment and

political pragmatism, if any one word could characterize the early medieval Chris-

tian West’s relationship with the city of Jerusalem, that word would be ‘inconsis-

tent’. A large segment of early Christians went to some length to play down the

1 Sylvia Schein, Gateway to the Heavenly City: Crusader Jerusalem and the Catholic West (1099–

1187) (Burlington, Vt., 2005), 1–2; A. Frolow, La Relique de la Vraie Croix: Recherches sur le

développment d’un culte (Paris, 1961).

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importance of the terrestrial city in an attempt to distinguish their new cult from its

sibling, rabbinic Judaism. Paul himself had argued that the city was no longer

important to the practice of religion and many early Christians believed that Jesus’

death heralded the end of the old city and birth of a new, spiritual city.2 Jerusalem’s

destruction and the dispersal of the Jews in 70 CE only seemed to confirm the truth

of Christianity in the minds of many of these early thinkers and reinforced the

perceived transience of the earthly city.3

So, in their early centuries, Christians began to read Jerusalem as one would a

text. Historically, Jerusalem was the city of the Jews, allegorically it was the Church,

anagogically the heavenly city (paradise), and tropologically the soul of man.4 The

historical understanding of Jerusalem––the city of the patriarchs, prophets, kings,

and apostles––quickly came to occupy the third or fourth rank in this hermeneutic,

as the anagogical Jerusalem––the new, spiritual city founded by Jesus––triumphed.

Thus, the city as the site of Jesus’ suffering and sacrifice gave way to the transcen-

dental images that populate the book of Revelation.5 Jerome (d. 419/20), following

Eusebius (d. 339/40), etymologically defined Jerusalem as visio pacis and linked it

with the city of the elect and the world to come. Augustine (d. 430) concurred,

portraying Jerusalem as the ark, the allegorized Church, that carried the faithful on

their continuous pilgrimage towards salvation.6

Constantine (306–37) and his mother Helena (d. 329), as they are wont to do,

problematized all this. By transforming the physical landscape of the city, replacing

the small Roman town of Aelia Capitolina with the new Christian city of Jerusalem,

Constantine offered Christians an alternative to a simple narrative of Christianity’s

2 Joshua Prawer, ‘Jerusalem in the Christian and Jewish Perspectives of the Early Middle Ages’, in

Gli ebrei nell’alto medioevo: 30 marzo––5 aprile 1978, 2 vols. (Spoleto, 1980), ii. 741–52; and Schein, Gateway, 6. More generally, see also Bianca Kühnel, From the Earthly to the Heavenly Jerusalem:

Representations of the Holy City in Christian Art of the First Millennium (Rome, 1987); Robert

L. Wilken, The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought (New Haven, Conn.,

1992); and Andrew S. Jacobs, Remains of the Jews: The Holy Land and Christian Empire in Late

Antiquity (Stanford, Calif., 2003).

3 The impact of Josephus’ account of the destruction of Jerusalem on the medieval West remains

understudied. See Karen Kletter, ‘The Uses of Josephus: Jewish History in Medieval Christian

Tradition’ (Ph.D. Diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2005); and Amnon Linder,

‘Jews and Judaism in the Eyes of Christian Thinkers of the Middle Ages: The Destruction of

Jerusalem in Medieval Christian Liturgy’, in Jeremy Cohen (ed.), From Witness to Witchcraft: Jews

and Judaism in Medieval Christian Thought (Wiesbaden, 1996), 115–17.

4 This fourfold reading of Jerusalem was begun by John Cassian in the early 5th cent. See Bernard

McGinn, ‘Iter sancti Sepulchri: The Piety of the First Crusaders’, in Bede Karl Lackner and Kenneth

Ray Philip (eds.), The Walter Prescott Web Memorial Lectures (Austin, Tex., 1978), 40–1. I should note here that I follow Henri de Lubac in using ‘allegory’ instead of ‘typology’. See (on allegory) Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale: Les Quatre Sens de l’Écriture, 2 vols. (Paris, 1959); and (on typology) Jean Danielou, From Shadows to Reality, tr. Wulstan Hibberd (Westminster, Md., 1960).

5 Primarily Revelation 21–2. All citations from the Bible are, unless otherwise noted, taken from

The Oxford Study Bible (New York, 1992). See also the discussion in Wilken, Land Called Holy, 46–81.

Sylvia Schein recently suggested that there were three distinct Jerusalems: the earthly, heavenly, and future (this last Jerusalem being a rough conflation of the other two). See Schein, Gateway, 4–5.

6 Stemming from the Greek ieros (holy) solyma (peace). This idea was also picked up by Isidore of

Seville in his Etymologies. McGinn, ‘Iter sancti Sepulchri’, 40–1, 60 n. 44, respectively; also Wilken, Land Called Holy, 230. On Augustine specifically, see Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, tr.

R. W. Dyson (Cambridge, 1998), 768–70.

New Jerusalems and Pilgrimage to the East before 1100

75

movement away from the terrestrial Jerusalem and towards a more spiritual and

figurative understanding of the holy city.7 But even this building program shared

something with earlier Christian conceptions of the city. Eusebius of Caesarea

compared God’s command to build the original Temple with Constantine’s

construction of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Constantine was the new

David, coaxing a new (Christian) Jerusalem out from the ruins of the old. Con-

stantine’s actions, Eusebius continued, were physical manifestations––literal pre-

figurations––of the descent of the new Jerusalem from heaven (as spoken of in

Revelation).8 This was ideological supersession in action. Although the importance

of the terrestrial city to Christianity would continue to be debated in the succeeding

decades and centuries, a strong current of thought flowed from the imperial circle.

Jas Elsner has illuminated the Christian imperial ideology that underlay the fourth-

century Bordeaux pilgrim’s experience and how that ideology meshed nicely with

Constantine’s own vision.9 The fifth-century apse mosaic of Santa Pudenziana

in Rome elided the earthly and heavenly Jerusalems by placing the skyline of

Constantine’s rebuilt Jerusalem behind an image of Christ in majesty, who was

supposed to be seated in the heavenly Jerusalem. Cassiodorus’ mid-sixth-century

Expositio psalmorum offered a ringing paean to this new Christian Jerusalem, while

early medieval hagiographies often emphasized instances of pilgrimage to the East

in order to bolster their subjects’ reputation of sanctity.10

Although the late Roman building and renovation program reintroduced the

terrestrial Jerusalem into the minds of Christians and likely inspired the birth of

Western Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land, it by no means simplified the

discourse surrounding the city. Jerome’s thought is representative, as he unsuccess-

fully struggled to reconcile the anagogical and historical readings of the city, torn

(metaphorically) between Augustine and Constantine. Like Augustine, Jerome

persistently attacked physical pilgrimage as a waste of time and championed the

idea that Jerusalem’s terrestrial or physical importance lay only in the past. He

argued that Christianity had taken over the meanings of the sites without having to

physically take over the sites themselves. But at the same time, Jerome himself spent

much of his life in the Holy Land. In his writings, he defended the importance of

the holy places, wrote that one could not truly understand scripture unless living in

7 Colin Morris, The Sepulchre of Christ and the Medieval West: From the Beginning to 1600

(Oxford, 2005), 16–40; Kühnel, From the Earthly, 79; and especially Jacobs, Remains of the Jews,

143–58.

8 The details of the building program in Jerusalem can be found in Eusebius, The Life of

Constantine, tr. Averil Cameron and Stuart G. Hall (Oxford, 1999), 132–7. This building program

continued for several centuries, finally being completed during the reign of the Emperor Justinian

(527–65) when almost all of the holy sites had been located and honored. See Aryeh Graboïs, Le Pèlerin occidental en Terre Sainte au Moyen Âge (Paris, 1998), 166; Prawer, ‘Jerusalem’, 754–6; and Kühnel,

From the Earthly, 83.

9 Jas Elsner, ‘The Itinerarium Burdigalense: Politics and Salvation in the Geography of

Constantine’s Empire’, Journal of Roman Studies, 90 (2000), 181–95.

10 Frederic W. Schlattter, ‘Interpreting the Mosaic of Santa Pudenziana’, Vigiliae Christianae, 46

(1992), 282–5; Thomas Renna, Jerusalem in Medieval Thought, 400–1300 (Lewiston, NY, 2002), 47;

and Adriaan H. Bredero, ‘Jérusalem dans l’Occident médiéval’, in Pierre Gallais and Yves-Jean Riou

(eds.), Mélanges offerts à René Crozet, 2 vols. (Poitiers, 1966), i. 265, respectively.

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Jerusalem

the Holy Land, and supported his disciples Paula and Eustochium in their visits to

the holy city and Palestine. His description of Paula’s journey in particular suggests

that simple proximity to sacred sites could increase one’s devotion.11

Jerome, however, was Jerome. Christians of the succeeding couple of centuries

tended not to be so conflicted. The empress Eudocia, wife of Theodosius II (401–

50), made her home in Jerusalem. Emperor Justinian (527–65) rebuilt several

churches in Palestine and completed Jerusalem’s Nea (‘New’) church, dedicated to

Mary. Around 570, one of many pilgrims made the long trek eastwards from

Piacenza, offering a richly textured account, devoted to the physical remains of the

Holy Land and their spiritual significance. Throughout this period, the liturgy of

Jerusalem spread into the West and to the rest of Byzantium. And as it did so, it

continued to highlight the importance of place in its listeners’ ears, evoking the sites

of biblical history as tangible locations here on this earth.12

But things changed radically in the seventh century. Jerusalem fell to the Persians

in 614 and its restoration by the emperor Heraclius (610–41) was short-lived, with

the city reconquered in 638 by the Muslims, who would hold it for more than 460

years, until it was retaken by the Franks in 1099. For the West, Jerusalem remained

the land of the prophets, kings, and Messiah but the terrestrial city effectively

became an artifact––an object of interest for the importance it held during a

particular historical moment but with little immediate, functional value to the

West. Augustine’s reading of the city provided a built-in rationalization for the

Muslim possession of the city. Jerusalem possessed a past, acknowledged as sacred

and indeed significant, but it had no sacred present, partly because it was controlled

by the Muslims and the overland route to the East (especially through the Balkans)

became so problematic, but also partly because the peculiarities of Frankish

spirituality, beginning around the time of Gregory of Tours (538–94) and

continuing into the tenth century.

Charlemagne exhibited some interest in the contemporary Holy Land, most

directly in that he exchanged numerous emissaries with the patriarch of Jerusalem

and Islamic Caliph.13 Yet, during the later ninth and tenth centuries, the West

tended to intellectually focus on Paul and Augustine’s anagogical (contemplative

11 Steven Runciman, ‘The Pilgrimages to Palestine before 1095’, in Kenneth M. Setton and

Marshall W. Baldwin (eds.), A History of the Crusades, 6 vols. (Philadelphia, 1955), i. 69; Jonathan

Sumption, Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion (Totowa, NJ, 1975), 90; Graboïs, Le Pèlerin

occidental, 120; Prawer, ‘Jerusalem’, 757–65. Jerome arrived in Bethlehem c.385 and remained there

until his death. Bredero, ‘Jérusalem’, 262. His letter to Eustochium is partially translated in Jerome, To Eustochium, in Jerusalem Pilgrims Before the Crusades, tr. John Wilkinson (Warminster, 2002), 79–91.

12 On Eudocia, Elizabeth A. Clark, ‘Claims on the Bones of Saint Stephen: The Partisans of

Melania and Eudocia’, Church History, 51 (1982), 141–56. The rebuilding program of Justinian is

described in Procopius, On Buildings, 5. 6, tr. H. B. Dewing and Glanville Downey (Cambridge,

Mass., 1940), 342–9. On the Piacenza Pilgrim, see Piacenza Pilgrim, Travels from Piacenza, in

Jerusalem Pilgrimages Before the Crusades, tr. John Wilkinson (Warminster, 2002), 79–84; and the

analysis in Blake Leyerle, ‘Landscape as Cartography in Early Christian Pilgrimage Narratives’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 64 (1996), 132–7. On the Jerusalem liturgy, see Morris, Sepulchre of Christ, 85–9; Allan Doig, Liturgy and Architecture: From the Early Church to the Middle Ages

(Burlington, Vt., 2008), 30–9; and the discussion below.

13 See Ch. 1, above.

New Jerusalems and Pilgrimage to the East before 1100

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and figurative) Jerusalem. One prominent vein in Carolingian exegesis, culminat-

ing in the work of Haimo of Auxerre (d. 855), drew from Augustine to assert that

Jerusalem could be found in his city of God. In turn, these exegetes defined

Jerusalem as both the heavenly and earthly churches. For example, Frankish royal

ideology, enmeshed with ideals of Davidic kingship, conceived of the Frankish

realm as based upon an Old Testament model. The empire under the Carolingians