An Empire of Memory (24 page)

11th cent., the Charroux legend eliminated the middle man and had Charlemagne acquire the

christological relics in Jerusalem himself. See Ch. 2 above.

43 Callahan, ‘The Cross, the Jews’, 17–19.

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worthy piety to the fruit of penance’.44 Yet, all this devotion to new Jerusalems in

the West simultaneously (and perhaps paradoxically) reinforced the necessity of the

real Jerusalem. No matter how sacred the loci sancti in the West, no matter how

vivid an image of Jerusalem that shrine or cloister became, it could never be

anything more than an image. And an image requires something tangible and

real from which it can reflect––the true Jerusalems, heavenly and terrestrial. While

the heavenly Jerusalem was not attainable in this life, Christ’s own city was.

The roots of Christian pilgrimage lay deep in late antiquity.45 Despite the fact that

virtually every monastery or church throughout Europe was a pilgrimage destina-

tion during the Middle Ages, the perceived efficacy of their relics distinguished

certain cult centers from the rest. In other words, the difference was mostly a matter

of scale, with Jerusalem sitting at the apex.46 Bede’s De locis sanctis, an early eighth-

century reworking of Adomnan of Iona’s (and the Pseudo-Eucherius’) description

of the holy places, may best represent how the West thought about the Holy Land

in the early Middle Ages. This extremely popular text, which served as a model for

later writers and was particularly important during the Carolingian centuries,

continued to be the dominant descriptive source of the Holy Land until well into

the twelfth century.47 Bede’s account begins with a short biblical history of the city

and its geographical situation, then briefly narrates Jerusalem’s destruction by Titus

in 70 CE and explains why the Holy Sepulcher is now located within the city walls.

44 ‘Tribuas gestimus quatinus nostrates, qui ad urbem Iherosolimam causa abholendi sua peccata

venire nequeunt, quiddam in partibus nostris visibile habeant, quod ad passionis dominice mentionem

corda eorum fideliter molliat et ad fructum penitencie digna revocet pietate.’ Descriptio qualiter Karolus Magnus clavum et coronam Domini a Constantinopoli Aquisgrani detulerit qualiterque Karolus Calvus hec

ad Sanctum Dyonisium retulerit, in Die Legende, 112.

45 See the fundamental Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin

Christianity (Chicago, 1981). On the transformation of Jerusalem into a Christian space and its

appeal as a pilgrimage destination, see Wilken, Land Called Holy, 82–125; and Annabel Wharton,

Refiguring the Post-Classical City: Dura Europe, Jerash, Jerusalem and Ravenna (Cambridge, 1995),

64–104. We should here too note that the word ‘pilgrimage’ reflects our modern understanding of this

particular phenomenon. Into at least the early 12th cent., peregrinus seems to have commonly meant

‘traveler’ or ‘wanderer’ and is used in just this manner e.g. in the Vulgate. ‘peregrino molestus non eris scitis enim advenarum animas quia et ipsi peregrini fuistis in terra Aegypti’, Exod. 23: 9. See also Janus Mller Jensen, ‘War, Penance and the First Crusade: Dealing with a “Tyrannical Construct”’, in

Tuomas M. S. Lehtonen, Kurt Villads Jensen, Janne Malkki, and Katja Ritari (eds.), Medieval History

Writing and Crusading Ideology (Helsinki, 2005), 55–6.

46 Bernhard Töpfer, ‘The Cult of Relics and Pilgrimage in Burgundy and Aquitaine at the Time of

the Monastic Reform’, in Thomas Head and Richard Landes (eds.), The Peace of God: Social Violence

and Religious Response in France around the Year 1000 (Ithaca, NY, 1992), 46–50.

47 For instance, Bernard the Monk’s late 9th-cent. account does not describe the Holy Sepulcher in

his pilgrimage account, simply referring the reader back to Bede. Bernard the Monk, A Journey to the

Holy Places and Babylon, in Jerusalem Pilgrims Before the Crusades, tr. John Wilkinson (Warminster,

2002), 266. On the afterlife of Bede’s account, see Graboïs, Le Pèlerin occidental, 79, 184, 192. On

Bede and the Carolingians generally, see Joyce Hill, ‘Carolingian Perspectives on the Authority of

Bede’, in Scott DeGregorio (ed.), Innovation and Tradition in the Writings of the Venerable Bede

(Morgantown, WV, 2006), 227–49; and Mark Stansbury, ‘Early-Medieval Biblical Commentaries and

their Readers’, Frühmittelalterliche Studien, 33 (1999), 75–6. Bede’s was a very conscious reworking of Adomnan’s text. See Arthur G. Holder, ‘Allegory and History in Bede’s Interpretation of Sacred

Architecture’, American Benedictine Review, 40 (1989), 127, for examples of some of the choices Bede

made.

New Jerusalems and Pilgrimage to the East before 1100

85

After mentioning Constantine and Helena’s impact on the city, the account moves

on to descriptions of the holy sites, beginning with the Holy Sepulcher and ending

with the resting place of the True Cross in Constantinople.48 But these discussions

of the holy sites do not note contemporary architectural or geographical markers.

Instead they are couched exclusively in terms of Old or New Testament events.

Jerusalem continued to be ‘read’ and the terrestrial Jerusalem’s only importance

sat squarely in the past. The land around Jerusalem was the dwelling place of the

(long-dead) saints. Monasteries and churches were empty vessels, devoid of current

inhabitants and contemporary significance, serving only as memorializations of

decisive moments of sacred history. Mount Zion commemorated the descent of the

Holy Spirit to the apostles and the death of the Virgin. Raab’s house in Jericho was

all that was left of the city of Joshua and its tumbling walls. According to Bede, all

there was in the city now called Neapolis was ‘a church split into four parts, that is

in the way of a cross, in the middle of which is Jacob’s well, forty cubits deep . . . , at

which Christ thought a Samaritan woman worthy to ask water from her’.49 Bede

narrates a place where time seems to have stopped, allowing the pilgrim (or reader)

to walk through the pages of the Old and New Testaments.

In Palestine, the pilgrim followed his or her own mental map, created by their

particular understanding of scriptures. Sacred history led the early medieval pilgrim

through the Holy Land, even if that history seemed to have stopped just after the

crucifixion. The Holy Land became, in a way, ‘atemporal’. It existed almost outside

of time, a museum where one could look directly at the past, which lived on into

the present. The pilgrim ‘relived’ both Testaments as he or she visited each site,

contemplating the crucifixion on Golgotha, the entry into Jerusalem via the Mount

of Olives, etc. If one so chose, the pilgrim could quite literally walk in Jesus’

footsteps, especially along the route of the crucifixion. As Blake Leyerle has written,

‘Unlike other historical events which unscroll in time, the sights of the biblical land

are repeatable.’50 One could experience them anew by visiting their place. The

stational liturgy that the pilgrim would encounter at Jerusalem would only heighten

this association, with specially chosen readings recreating the past for their

48 Bede, De locis sanctis, ed. I. Fraipont, CCSL (Turnhout, 1965), 175: 251–80.

49 ‘Ecclesia quadrifida est, hoc est in crucis modum facta, in cuius medio fons Iacob XL cubitis

altus . . . , de quo Dominus aquas a Samaritana muliere petere dignatus est.’ Bede, De locis sanctis, ed.

Fraipont, 258–9, 267, and quotation at 275.

50 Leyerle, ‘Landscape as Cartography’, 128–31, quotation at 131; Graboïs, Le Pèlerin occidental,

33, 109–16; Ora Limor, ‘“Holy Journey”: Pilgrimage and Christian Sacred Landscape’, in Ora Limor

and Guy G. Strousma (eds.), Christians and Christianity in the Holy Land: From the Origins to the Latin Kingdoms (Turnhout, 2006), 347–51; and Mary B. Campbell, ‘“The Object of One’s Gaze”:

Landscape, Writing, and Early Medieval Pilgrimage’, in Scott D. Westrem (ed.), Discovering New

Worlds: Essays on Medieval Exploration and Imagination (New York, 1991), 6, 11–12. On the imitatio

Christi, see Graboïs, Le Pèlerin occidental, 84–5; Sumption, Pilgrimage, 92–3; and now Purkis,

Crusading Spirituality, who argues convincingly for the prevalence of the idea (if not the explicit use of the phrase) in the 11th cent. It is interesting to note, however, that pilgrim narratives almost never dwell on Jerusalem’s place in the events of the Last Days. For example, of all the pre-1100 narratives translated in John Wilkinson’s Jerusalem Pilgrims Before the Crusades, Bernard the Monk is the only

writer to mention the site of the Last Judgment. See Bernard the Monk, Journey to the Holy Places, tr.

Wilkinson, 267.

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Jerusalem

listeners.51 In this way the pilgrim could feel the continuation of the covenant

between God and his people––the ‘new’ Israel––without being troubled by the

city’s ‘profane’ present (Jerusalem being controlled by Muslims continuously

between 638 and 1099).

None of these ideas, however, could overcome inherent difficulties in travel from

the West and pilgrimage to Palestine remained sporadic before the eleventh

century. In the ninth century, the Franks tried to re-establish contacts with

Jerusalem by exchanging emissaries with the Islamic Caliph, the patriarch of

Jerusalem, and religious houses around the city (especially the Benedictine monas-

tery on the Mount of Olives and the church of St Mary Latin in Jerusalem itself ).52

This all seems to have had an effect, for while the eighth century was dominated by

diplomatic envoys to Constantinople, the ninth century witnessed an upsurge in

the number of pilgrims setting off for the Holy Land.53 But the waxing of

pilgrimage to the East in the ninth century was followed by its waning in the

tenth, which in turn was followed by renewed interest in pilgrimage to the Holy

Land before the turn of the first millennium. At that time, the Holy Sepulcher

became a ‘magnetic pole’, likely attracting many more pilgrims than are even

attested in the surviving sources. By c.1030, pilgrimage to the Holy Land had

become more popular than it ever had been before, more popular even than the

route to Rome.54 One of the factors contributing to this resurgence in pilgrimage to

the Holy Land in the eleventh century was the reopening of the land route to

Constantinople.

In the ninth century, the Western traveler could sail the short distance across the

Adriatic Sea from Bari or Brindisi to Durazzo and follow the old Roman Via

Egnatia through the Byzantine-held Balkans to Constantinople. The Bulgars,

however, took control of at least part of the route by the middle of the century

and this change, coupled with the poor physical condition of the road at the time,

led to the collapse of the route by the beginning of the tenth century. But the route

reopened as the Byzantines expanded once again into the Balkans and northern

Syria, with their navy simultaneously starting to reassert itself in the eastern

51 e.g. see the late 4th-cent. description by Egeria. Egeria’s Travels, tr. John Wilkinson, 3rd edn.

(Warminster, 1999), 142–64.

52 See the fuller discussion in Ch. 1, above.

53 Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: Communication and Commerce, A.D.

300–900 (Cambridge, 2001), 435, 171, respectively; also Yitzhak Hen, ‘Holy Land Pilgrims from

Frankish Gaul’, Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire, 76 (1998), 295.

54 The characterization of the Holy Sepulcher is from Françoise Micheau, ‘Les Itinéraires maritimes

et continentaux des pèlerinages vers Jérusalem’, in Occident et Orient au Xe siècle: Actes du IXe congrès de la Société des historiens médiévistes de l’enseignement supérieur public (Dijon, 2–4 Juin 1978) (Paris, 1979), 75. On the number of pilgrims, see Colin Morris, ‘Memories of the Holy Places and Blessings

from the East: Devotion to Jerusalem before the Crusades’, in R. N. Swanson (ed.), The Holy Land,

Holy Lands and Christian History (Woodbridge, 2000), 90–1; Phyllis G. Jestice, ‘A New Fashion in

Imitating Christ: Changing Spiritual Perspectives around the Year 1000’, in Year 1000, 178; and

France, ‘Le Rôle de Jérusalem’, 154–5. See also the lists of travelers compiled in Runciman,

‘Pilgrimages to Palestine’, 68–78; Micheau, ‘Itinéraires’, 79–104; and Jean Ebersolt, Orient et

Occident: Recherches sur les influences byzantines et orientales en France pendant les Croisades, 2 vols.

(Paris, 1929), i. 72–81.

New Jerusalems and Pilgrimage to the East before 1100

87

Mediterranean.55 Thus, the oft-cited conversion of the Hungarians to Latin

Christianity, coupled with this re-emergence of Byzantium as a power in the

Balkans, allowed a Western pilgrim to travel virtually the whole overland route to

the Holy Land through Christian lands by the early eleventh century. The ‘new’

land route to the East was immediately popular. As late as the First Crusade, every

army followed the land route in one form or another. The armies of the northern

Franks and Southern Italian Normans did journey part of the way to Constanti-

nople by ship, but they both followed ninth-century precedent, traveling only the

short distance from Southern Italy to the Albanian coast by sea and continuing

overland to Constantinople from there. The northern Franks picked up the Via

Egnatia at Durazzo and followed it through the Balkans to Constantinople, while