Pilgrimage and Crusade

III. Pilgrimage

A. Beginnings of a Tradition

By the end of the first millenium, the Christian practice of pilgrimage was well established. According to Steven Runciman, the tenth and eleventh centuries represent “the great age of pilgrimage,” (1951: 43) in which parties sometimes numbering in the thousands made their way to Jerusalem, spending more than a year on the voyage. The increasing popularity of pilgrimage at this time soon took another form involving even greater numbers: the crusades. Long before this pilgrimage “boom,” however, individuals began undergoing the journey in small numbers, intent on experiencing the place where God had chosen to become Man. Indeed, as the Eastern religion of Christianity expanded from Palestine, its believers found themselves increasingly removed from the physical location which served as the setting for Christ’s life and death. In effect, the universal vocation of the new religion demanded and created an entirely new paradigm for relating to place. When Christ told his apostles, “Euntes in mundum universum praedicate evangelium omni creaturae” (‘Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation’ [Mark 16: 15]), he was effectively unanchoring the gospel, and the faith which was based in it, from a specific spatial location. It would be some time before place would exert its pull and reclaim its place, in the new faith.

Several scholars have underlined a paradigm shift which took place in the new Christian religion around the fourth century, A.D. With the Roman Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity in 312 A.D., Christianity--originally a small, persecuted, and undeniably Eastern faith--grew into a religion of state and power. In a parallel development, the practice of pilgrimage, rare until then, began to thrive as Christianity pervaded the West. How can one account for this rise of pilgrimage?

In its early years, the new church derived its impetus from the universal import of Christ’s message. From a religious point of view, this early ecumenical focus seems a faithful reflection of the most revolutionary characteristic of Jesus of Nazareth’s preaching. Jesus was a Jew, and his moral teachings, while revolutionary in many respects, were steeped in Jewish tradition; what made his message so extraordinarily original was the fact that it was meant for everyone, regardless of nationality, status, religion, or profession. The first apostles clearly understood this to be their at the heart of their faith and their calling, judging from their immediate journeys to bring the Word to foreign lands.

Furthermore, this outward-looking perspective is also quite natural from a place-based point of view. In the years and decades following Christ’s life and death, his historicity--his authentic presence as a man whose life had been rooted in Palestine--were still very real. The importance of bolstering this historicity paled in comparison with that of spreading the universal message of Christ. With the passage of time, Christians began to feel the need to reaffirm what was for them a central truth: that God had become a real, human presence among them. While he was no longer physically present, the places where he had lived remained. When all those who had known Jesus of Nazareth were gone, these places represented the last enduring physical link to his humanity.

Scholars seem to agree that the infrequency of pilgrimage in early Christianity stems from this emphasis on universality, among other historical factors. Runciman offers a succinct explanation: “In the earliest days of Christianity pilgrimages were rare. Early Christian thought tended to emphasize the godhead and the universality of Christ rather than the manhood; and the Roman authorities did not encourage a voyage to Palestine” (38). For Runciman, it was the pilgrimage of Constantine’s mother, Saint Helena, whom he playfully calls “the most successful of the world’s great archaeologists” (39), which started the trend. Based on her “discovery” of the site of the Passion, Constantine built on Mount Calvary the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which was to remain for centuries a focal point of Christian pilgrimage and belief.

In a compelling study of Christian thought regarding Palestine over the centuries, Robert Wilken also notes the early church’s change in attitude towards holy places (1992). About early Christian sources, he remarks, “What they say about space appears to dethrone place as the locus of the divine presence” (91). He relates this to Jesus’s own words: “...venit hora quando neque in monte hoc neque in Hierosolymis adorabitis Patrem ... Spiritus est Deus, et eos, qui adorant eum, in Spiritu et veritate oportet adorare” (‘The hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father ... God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth’ [John 4: 21, 24]). In particular, he traces this dethroning of the idea of holy place to Origen, a Christian theologian of the third century. Origen sought to dispel the notion of chiliasm, the belief that God’s future kingdom would be established on earth, in Jerusalem. For him, the Old Testament prophecies regarding the coming of the Messiah had been fulfilled through Jesus, and would not be fulfilled again; besides, the belief that the divine can be found in particular places is reminiscent of paganism. At the same time, Wilken shows how Origen displaces the importance of Palestine from that of the site of God’s future kingdom on earth, to that which saw divinity made human. Origen writes movingly on this subject: “Human understanding is astonished and ... cannot grasp how one is to conceive and understand that awesome divine majesty, that Word of God itself ... could exist within the circumscribed limits of a man who appeared in Judea” (cited in Wilken, 78).[1]

This perceptible shift from the notion of a heavenly Jerusalem to that of Jerusalem as place of commemoration is rendered concrete by Constantine, and recorded in Vita Constantini by his biographer, Eusebius. Before Constantine, Wilken notes, “The tomb of Christ was buried beneath tons of dirt, and over it stood a pagan temple.” Wilken credits Constantine with the creation of a Christian Jerusalem, and Eusebius with the first Christian conceptualization of “the religious and theological significance of space.” For Eusebius, Jerusalem deserves the Christian’s utmost devotion because it is the place in which Jesus lived his life; in his writing, Wilken comments, “The term place (topos) has become incandescent, afire with energy and potency” (88).

Jonathan Smith also discusses this key moment in Western history when “Constantine created, for the first time, a Christian ‘Holy Land,’ laid palimpsest-like over the old, and interacting with it in complex ways, having for its central foci a series of imperial-dynastic churches” (1987: 79). Smith’s study, strongly inspired by humanistic geography, is premised on a reversal of Eliade’s concept of hierophany. Instead of accepting that certain places are sacred because the divine has manifested itself there, Smith contends that human beings make place sacred, through ritual for example. The meaningfulness of a place is brought into being by an act of human intellection. In this way, Constantine, Eusebius, and others made Jerusalem into a sacred place for Christians. For Smith, the impact of what he calls “the fourth-century creation of Christian Jerusalem” (88) on Christian ritual is enormous: “It was contact with the loca sancta of now-Christian Palestine in the fourth century that transformed Christian ritual into a celebration of the historical and syntagmatic as well as, in Palestine, the topographic” (114). The Christian myth (the life and deeds of Christ) projected itself retrospectively onto the land of Palestine to create the meaning of the place.

Smith’s thesis, while convincing on many counts, fails to take into consideration the fact which so astonished Origen: that an almighty God chose to become a man in the particular place of Judea. If one places oneself within the Christian perspective, this represents indeed a manifestation of the divine in space which cannot be denied. It is not only the retrospective projection of a myth which sanctifies space, but the simple fact that God showed up there, and not anywhere else. I would argue that what Smith describes as a unidirectional movement from ritual man to place, could be better understood as an ebb and flow, from transcendence, through place, to man, and back again. My argument, of course, presupposes a belief in transcendence; but surely, this was the case of the medieval pilgrims of which Smith speaks. If we want to understand them, we cannot simply subtract all factors of transcendence, incarnation, and revelation from the significance of place.

As we have seen, many factors contributed to the emergence of the Christian pilgrimage to Palestine; among them, the Christianization of the Roman Empire, theological doctrine, and the need to reaffirm Christ’s existence as a real, historical figure. However diverse the reasons may be for the gradual reanchoring of the new Christian faith in the holy places of Palestine, the phenomenon is incontestable. In retrospective accounts, Saint Helena is seen as having inaugurated the trend. Dorothea French (1992) describes sixth-century legends, according to which St. Helena discovered the True Cross on Mount Calvary as well as many other sacred places, noting, “The developing pilgrimage sites gained authenticity and prestige when their foundations were grafted onto older roots and consecrated by the association with a holy woman” (54).

From the fourth century on, the Jerusalem pilgrimage became increasingly common. As this and other pilgrimages grew in importance, they gradually became associated with the notion of canonical penances. As Runciman puts it, “The belief was growing that certain holy places possessed a definite spiritual value which affected those that visited them and could even grant indulgences from sin” (44). This efficacy, according to Runciman, was associated with four places: Saint James at Compostella, Saint Michael at Monte Gargano, Rome, and Palestine. The belief in the power of certain places to absolve one’s sins reached its culminating point in the crusades. How could the pilgrimage journey have such a powerful influence in affairs of the soul? Part of the answer lies in the allegorical and symbolic resonances of pilgrimage, a subject which I will examine in the next section.

B. Pilgrimage as Allegory

Earlier in this chapter, I discussed the two different ways in which exile has been regarded over the centuries. From one perspective, exile is an unholy banishment; from the other, exile offers an outward reflection of an inner truth, namely, that man’s higher nature is not of this world. In many ways, the practice of pilgrimage mirrors this second, “existential” exile. For many Christian thinkers, pilgrimage serves as a profound allegory of human life, which is considered as a mere journey to the final destination of heaven, humanity’s only true home. Within this allegorical perspective, concrete aspects of pilgrimage, i.e. the specific destination, the rites and liturgies accomplished there, or the results obtained, are of little importance. In this lack of concern for the realities of pilgrimage, we can perceive the limits of the allegorical view in explaining the immense popularity of the phenomenon. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to understand the allegorical resonances of pilgrimage, not only because they heavily influenced prominent medieval proponents of pilgrimage and crusade, such as the Cluniacs, but also because they represent, as Ladner notes, “essential ingredients of early Christian and mediaeval thought and life” (233).

1. The Jewish Tradition of Diaspora

The development by Christian theologians of pilgrimage as an allegory of the human condition has as its source the long tradition of Jewish thought concerning the diaspora. This remains true despite the fact that many of them were unattentive to, if not ignorant of, any such shared heritage.[2] Yet the Hebraic roots of the notion that man is a stranger in the world are undeniable. The earliest source of this notion, as I have pointed out, is the Genesis story of Adam and Eve, in which the rupture of man’s happy union with God and with the earth is posed as the ineluctable condition of all humanity. This world, in a fundamental sense, is not where man belongs.

When God chooses Abraham to be the father of his chosen people, he promises him many descendents and a land for his people, but imposes one condition on the fulfillment of this promise: Abraham must leave his country, and become a stranger in exile. In this way, the Jewish people is in exile from the very beginning. During the time of the Patriarchs, they live a nomadic existence. In the time of Moses, they are exiled in Egypt and then in the desert. They begin to settle in Palestine during the period of the Judges, and finally create a homeland during the reign of David, with Jerusalem as their capital. This prosperity doesn’t last long; wars, conquests, and foreign domination follow one upon the other, and the Jewish people is dispersed, deported, and persecuted through the centuries and throughout the world. Not until 1948 is a modern state of Israel created in Palestine. And still, many Jews remain in foreign lands. This manifest preference for the life of a foreigner, or stranger, raises an important question. Could it be that Jewish diaspora is not only the result of an external and imposed will, but also the expression of a preference inspired by faith? If so, what is the signficance of such an diaspora, or exile?

The question of Jewish exile is intimately linked to the notion of the Promised Land. From the beginnings of their faith, the bestowal of the Promised Land was conditional. Alliance with God and respect for his moral law preceded and supported man’s relationship to a land which would become his. This implies that the Jewish people must achieve a just relationship with God and with others before possessing a homeland. From this perspective, Jewish wandering and exile take on the meaning of a moral apprenticeship: “Peregrinum non opprimes; scitis enim advenarum animas, quia et ipsi peregrini fuistis in terra Aegypti” (‘You shall not oppress a stranger; you know the heart of a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt’ [Exodus 23: 9]).

This idea of a moral apprenticeship represents only one aspect of the significance of Jewish exile. On a metaphysical and existential level, diaspora reflects the inner progression of the Jew, who strives to give life to the Law within himself. This project is full of difficulty and paradox, because the Law calls man to accomplish what is moral in the midst of the natural world. The Law, divine and perfect, is incompatible with the imperfection of the natural world. Therefore, its accomplishment on earth and in man requires a perpetual striving, a lifelong quest, for something which will always remain out of reach. As Abécassis explains, Jewish diaspora and exile reflect this internal quest: “On comprend que l’histoire du peuple de YHWH soit un arrachement, un déracinement et un exil perpétuels, même sur sa propre terre. Il ne peut, en tant que tel, être pleinement de ce monde, même à Jérusalem, sa capitale. Il vit l’existence humaine universelle et il doit rester fidèle à ce qui dans l’homme est le plus humain: ce qu’il cherche à être plus que ce qu’il est” (1: 276).

In addition to bringing to life the moral and metaphysical resonances of exile, Jewish tradition also hands down to Christianity its concept of Jerusalem as a holy place. To be sure, for Christians, Jerusalem and the lands surrounding it derive much of their sacrality from the fact that they were the place of the Incarnation. However, because Jesus was himself a Jew, and clearly perceived his message as a fulfillment, and not a negation, of Jewish faith, Christianity shares with Judaism “les mêmes patriarches, la même révélation, les mêmes textes à l’origine, les mêmes principes et le même Père” (Abécassis 3: 45). The Old Testament elaboration of Jerusalem’s significance provides a foundation for Christianity’s understanding of place. Without the Jewish tradition of reverance for Jerusalem, the significance of the Incarnation would lose much of its substance.

According to Wilken, Jerusalem was initially a Canaanite town of little importance. It becomes significant for the Jews, and in retrospect for all of Western civilization, when it is captured by David, thereby becoming an Israelite city. Wilken thus notes, “The majestic and sacred city of the Bible was a creation of the Israelites.” The second book of Samuel tells how David, very soon after capturing Jerusalem, brings the ark of the Covenant to the city. “The ark was the symbol of God’s presence in the midst of Israel, and with its removal to Jerusalem God’s presence was no longer portable; holiness was now bound to place” (9, my emphasis). This centrality of Jerusalem in Jewish identity would last until the present day. Although, as Wilken points out, many peoples have been attached to particular lands, and many have been exiled from them, the Jewish people is unique in having maintained such strong ties to their homeland over so many centuries: “Jewish tradition made the loss of the land and the exile a central fact of Jewish self-understanding even after the return of exiles from Babylonia” (21).

2. Augustine’s Peregrinatio and the Christian Allegory of Pilgrimage

In an article on the terms peregrinatio and peregrini in Saint Augustine’s City of God, M.A. Claussen (1991) contextualizes this work by elaborating upon the various legal, philosophical, and theological ramifications of such pilgrimage-related terms. As Ladner has also pointed out, the Augustinian notion of Civitas dei peregrinans--or the pilgrim City of God-- strongly influenced Christian thinking about the place of faith and God’s church in the world (236). Central to this concept is the idea that God’s people must pass through this world as though they were on a pilgrimage. Later, Gregory the Great, who was pope from 590-604, developed a very similar doctrine of the appropriate Christian attitude toward earthly life. Just what is meant by this concept of godly life as a pilgrimage?

To summarize Claussen’s study, the verb peregrinor, when used by the classical authors, generally meant ‘to live abroad,’ and connotes the condition of being abroad or a stranger (37). Plotinus, in his work On Beauty, declares that the wise person knows that he is separated from his true patria, and spends his life seeking it. Augustine takes up this notion of alienation from the world, and transforms this Plotinian search for patria into a peregrinatio, a pilgrimage (38). Early Christian Latin thinkers such as Tertullian also emphasized the Christian’s status as a peregrinus. He gives the term a spiritual meaning, related to the quest for truth, thereby casting truth as a wanderer on the earth (39). Tertullian’s use of peregrinatio both derives from, and transforms, its use in Roman law, as does Augustine’s. In the Roman legal system, a peregrinus does not have the same rights as a citizen. He cannot exercise dominium--ownership by full legal title--but instead has only, at best, ususfructus (the right to use and enjoy something without owning it), or usus (the right to use something, without enjoying its fruits). Transformed into a spiritual doctrine by Augustine, this means that the peregrinus can use the goods of the earth, but they can never belong to him. He is not a full-fledged citizen of the earth, but only a visitor, rather like a guest to whom hospitality is offered (50-51).

Scripture also contains many echoes of this notion of strangeness. In his first epistle, Peter writes, “Carissimi, obsecro tamquam advenas et peregrinos abstinere vos a carnalibus desideriis...” (‘Beloved, I beseech you as aliens and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh ...’ [1 Peter 2: 11]). Paul employs this image as well: “Iuxta fidem defuncti sunt omnes isti, non acceptis promissionibus, sed a longe eas aspicientes et salutantes, et confitentes quia peregrini et hospites sunt supra terram...” (‘These all died in faith, not having received what was promised, but having seen it and greeted it from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth’ [Hebrews 11: 13]); or “Audentes igitur semper et scientes quoniam, dum praesentes sumus in corpore, peregrinamur a Domino” (‘We know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight’ [2 Corinthians 5: 6]). In each case, being a person of faith implies a sense of alienation or strangeness in the world. The second- (or early third-) century anonymous “Letter to Diognetus” emphasizes this same notion: “[Christians] live in their own countries, but only as aliens. They have a share in everything as citizens, and endure everything as foreigners. Every foreign land is their fatherland, and yet for them every fatherland is a foreign land ... They busy themselves on earth, but their citizenship is in heaven” (217). Claussen expresses it thus: “The church as peregrina remains, by her very nature, a foreigner and a stranger, a wayfarer and an alien, in the world” (45).

Ladner also credits Gregory the Great and his Moralia in developing the allegorical view of Christian pilgrimage (234-36). In his discussion, Gregory relies on the binary opposition which, as we now realize, serves as the underlying paradigm for all thinking about exile, diaspora, and alienation. From one perspective, Lucifer is the archetypal alienus, who has fallen away from God and his divine order: this kind of alienation connotes evil. (To this sort of alienation corresponds banishment, considered as a horrible fate.) On the other hand, however, the just Christian knows that he is a pilgrim in this world, and cannot be happy in it because he belongs in heaven, his true patria: “... mala hominum in terra aliena portatis. Peregrinatio quippe est vita praesens: et qui suspirat ad patriam, ei tormentum est peregrinationis locus...” (Registrum IX, 218 [782]; quoted in Ladner [236]).

While it is easy to perceive the real life equivalent of the concept of exile as evil (banishment from human society, especially for medieval men and women, held connotations of a frightful, bestial existence), it is more difficult to understand exactly what theologians such as Augustine or Gregory meant life as a Christian pilgrim to be, in practical terms. There is, indeed, a considerable distance separating pilgrimage-as-allegory and the real life practice of pilgrimage. A sophisticated thinker such as Augustine could develop an entire doctrine of the city of God as a pilgrim,[3] and still hold that the actual practice of pilgrimage was “irrelevant and even dangerous” (Runciman, 40). This disapproval finds its origins in the fact that pilgrimage, despite all the allegorical or metaphysical interpretations it may engender, is intimately enmeshed in the places of this world. The great majority of medieval men and women who made pilgrimages did not do so with the primary intention of expressing their detachment from earthly values. On the contrary, they journeyed to Rome, or Compostella, or Rocamadour, or Jerusalem because they believed that those places had power, and that physical contact with them would improve their lives. Augustine suspected that actual pilgrimage fostered an attachment to the world, and so disfavored it; for such a learned man, there was no contradiction between encouraging Christians to think of themselves as pilgrims in the world and urging them not to become real pilgrims.

For people less intellectually subtle than Augustine, the distinction was not so easily perceptible. The Augustinian concept of pilgrimage seemed to blend perfectly with the increasingly popular pilgrim journeys. Ladner describes how, from the sixth to eighth centuries, Irish and Anglo-Saxon monks chose peregrinatio (interpreted as homelessness) as one of their main penitential and ascetic practices; and how, from the eleventh through the thirteenth, this concept increasingly took on wayfaring and missionary connotations (245). The holy hermit living in the desert or the woods becomes a familiar image, as does the hermit-preacher. For most people, pilgrimage seemed unequivocally a most holy thing to do. Along these same lines, there was in early Christianity much debate over chiliasm: whether Jerusalem was to be the actual location of God’s future kingdom on earth (in which case pilgrimage in hopes of being there for the Second Coming made perfect sense), or whether biblical imagery of Jerusalem was simply an allegory of the celestial Jerusalem (in which case there is no point in going there). While scholars debated, most Christians made little distinction between familiar biblical images of the city, the notion of a celestial Jerusalem, widespread anticipation of the Second Coming, and the desire to see and touch the places where Jesus had lived and died. Rather than contradicting one another, all these associations and imagined visions of the great city coalesced into one terribly compelling reason to make the journey.

C. Pilgrimage and Place

While the allegorical view undoubtedly provides insight into the nature of pilgrimage, it is, as we have seen, hardly sufficient to account for the phenomenon. It tells us much about how a religious person struggles to understand his or her place in the world and in life: How can I balance my belonging to the earth with my belonging to God? How does the Incarnation change the nature of this place? It reveals little, however, about why thousands of people left their homes and travelled for years at a time, sometimes under conditions of great hardship and physical danger, in order to visit certain places. I cannot claim to offer any complete answer to this question; I don’t know if such an answer is possible. In seeking an answer, we may begin with an observation so obvious it has rarely been voiced: a pilgrim desires, more than anything else, to be in a particular place. In this place, through this place, he hopes, he will experience and receive something he cannot get otherwise.

1. Pilgrimage as Practice

According to Wilken, the first known Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem made their journey in the third century. One declared he was going there “for prayer and investigation of the places,” the other “for the sake of the holy places” (84). From the beginning, pilgrims travelled to Palestine with the simple goal of experiencing firsthand the places in which different biblical events occurred, not only the events of Christ’s life, but also those recounted in the Old Testament (108-14). Saint Helena, a sort of legendary “first pilgrim,” mirrored the desires of most pilgrims when she sought to discover Christ’s burial place, or touch for herself the wood of the True Cross. As D. French notes, “Christians gradually created a new sacred topography for Jerusalem and Palestine. They did this first by discovering the exact location of caves associated with Christ’s birth, passion, and ascension; second, by erecting basilicas over the newly defined Christian sites; and finally by encrusting these new shrines with layer upon layer of legitimizing ancient associations or legends” (52-53). Because of the events which had occurred there, Palestine was a unique place, and the monuments erected by the Christians would have lost their significance had they been built anywhere else.

Gradually, distinct ritual celebrations developed to complement the pilgrims’ visit to each specific place. For example, Egeria, a fourth century Spanish woman and pilgrim to the holy lands, describes how, on Good Friday, the faithful went to a chapel on Golgotha, where they read accounts of the Passion.[4] Stational liturgies, the ancestor of modern day Catholicism’s Stations of the Cross, became an increasingly important part of the pilgrim’s experience. The faithful would move from the site of one biblical event to another, sometimes coordinating real place with “real” time (as during Holy Week), accomplishing in each place certain rites commemorating the event. The development of stational liturgies had two principal results. First, as believers made these spaces a central part of the expression of their devotion to God, place became invested with profound meaning and sanctity. Somehow, place held an element of the divine power which had seen fit to manifest itself there. Secondly, as Jonathan Smith points out, worship shifts from “an essentially private mode of worship to an overwhelmingly public and civic one of parade and procession” (92). It has not escaped Smith’s attention that the rise of pilgrimage and consequent transformation of Christianity from a private to a public religion coincides with the conversion to Christianity of the Roman Empire. The interpretation of Christ’s admonition to worship “in spirit and in truth” has undergone siginificant changes, in large part due to the powerful associations of place.

Another important motivation for many pilgrims was the belief that the place they were visiting had the power to heal infirmity, solve problems, grant wishes, or accomplish miracles. Because modern man has largely ceased to believe in such miracles, modern scholars have neglected to give due consideration to this notion of efficacious place, but it held great potency for medieval men and women. In an article based on the twelfth century Rocamadour narratives, Robert W. Frank explores the notion of “sacral power” associated with shrines (1992). He describes many accounts of miracles attributed to a visit to Rocamadour, some of which even occurred along the route to or from the shrine or, in cases where the person was too sick to travel, when they prayed in the direction of the shrine. Whether or not one believes in such miracles, there is no question that medieval pilgrims had utmost faith in the power of certain places to intervene effectively in their lives and bodies. This truth is also reflected in the belief that, through pilgrimage, one’s sins will be forgiven. For many, the journey of pilgrimage was not just symbolic, or even commemorative; it was truly efficacious. In the minds of medieval men and women, place had a very real power, the magnitude of which we can only imagine today.

2. Jerusalem, Center of the World

Theoreticians of place such as Eliade, Tuan and Relph have each called attention to the notion of a sacred center of the world. According to Eliade, religious man needs to found his world by finding in it a fixed center (22). This center is revealed by hierophany, an opening among the planes of the divine world, earth, and the underworld, and is often expressed through the image of an axis mundi, or cosmic pillar, which connects all three planes. This axis mundi, of which Jacob’s ladder and the Jerusalem Temple are images, provides the sacred center around which the world can be constituted in an orderly fashion. It is the Center of the World, the navel of the earth (36-37). Relph reiterates Eliade’s notion of sacred center, emphasizing that such centers are not to be understood in a geometric sense: there can be as many sacred centers as there are sacred places. These centers perform an essential existential function by providing orientation in an otherwise disoriented world (15-16). If, as Clarence Glacken suggests, the earth was considered by medieval man as “a vital link in his partnership with God” (294), then it makes sense that the notion of a sacred center held particular sway in the Middle Ages. Tuan perceives the image of a sacred center in medieval T-O, or wheel maps: “The wheel maps of the Middle Ages expressed the beliefs and experiences of a theological culture that placed Christianity--and its topographic symbol, Jerusalem--at the center” (1974: 41).

Dorothea French expands upon the medieval notion of sacred center, as well as its reflections in cartography and pilgrimage, in her “Journeys to the Center of the Earth” (1992). She accentuates the complementary relationship that exists between the sensus literalis of Jerusalem’s holy places (e.g. Mount Calvary as the place where Jesus was crucified), and their sensus allegoricus (e.g. the place of the salvation of the world). For Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem, she claims, these two levels, or meanings, of a place existed simultaneously. As French felicitously notes, this Christian propensity to think allegorically about place developed “within a society that had a long-standing and carefully articulated set of ideas regarding the allegorical meaning of place” (51)--namely, the pagan and, especially, Jewish traditions. In this way, a very elaborate, multi-layered structure of meanings was gradually associated with Mount Calvary.

From Eliade’s perspective, Mount Calvary exemplifies the idea of a break-through among the three cosmic planes of heaven, earth, and underworld. French points out that already in apocalyptic Judaism and the Midrash (a work of Jewish commentary), “Adam was made in Jerusalem and therefore at the Center of the World” (52).[5] In Jewish thought, it was of course the Temple which represented the Center. J. Smith describes the complex mythology associated with the place of the Temple: it is the source of the first light of creation, the place from which dust was gathered to form Adam, the site of his grave, the site of Noah’s first sacrifice after the flood, etc. (Smith, 84). Christianity transferred these traditions from the Temple to Mount Calvary. It especially elaborated upon the link between Adam and Jesus, through the site of Calvary. Christian iconography reflected and reinforced the idea that the Crucifixion took place at the exact spot of Adam’s burial by showing Adam’s skull at the foot of the cross in depictions of Golgotha (French, 57-59).

Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem visited many different shrines, but the focal point of all pilgrimages was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Within the the Church was the Sepulchre, and also the Church of Calvary, itself containing Mount Calvary, which in turn contained Golgotha, the place of Adam’s skull. “The levels of shrines in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre were like a three-dimensional labyrinth with ever-smaller concentric circles leading the devout down to the sacred center, or the navel of the earth” (French, 66). Pilgrims were particularly drawn to a crevice in Mount Calvary, which was thought to have opened after the Crucifixion. It was, for them, the precise omphalos, or umbilicus, of the world. In an example of what Wilken calls “tactile piety,” believers would attempt to place their hands and faces into the crevice, or to leave something there.

Another example of how medieval men and women perceived space can be seen in the art of sacred cartography. French traces the development of map-making from the “practical” second century maps of Ptolemy, which emaphsized accuracy, to the mappae mundi of the High and Late Middle Ages. Early medieval T-O maps showed the world encircled by an ocean, and divided into 3 continents (Asia, Europe, and Africa), separated by a T-shaped body of water. Gradually, Jerusalem replaced the body of water in the exact center of the world (the upper bar of the T). There were also thematic maps, which illustrated the world through actual drawings of buildings and other real sites. In these too, Jerusalem was located at the center of the world. In one particular map, the Ebstorf World Map (ca. 1235), the world is drawn on top of an image of the crucified Christ, which his head, feet and hands represented the four cardinal points. As French points out, Christ’s body is integrated into, indeed becomes, the very substance of the world (64).

Medieval map-making, as well as the Christian amplification of the significance of Mount Calvary, shed much light upon the medieval perception of place. We must not think that medieval Christians, overwhelmingly concerned with religious significance, simply did not care to represent the world realistically. At stake in these matters is not a debate over the relative importance of the allegorical or the real, but the very definition of what constitutes the real. French makes this point by referring to Eliade, who held that “profane” geography is abstract and non-essential: “Sacred cartography delineates the only real space, for it is concerned with the only indubitable reality--the sacred” (French, 60). Within the medieval world-view, the allegorical meanings of space are so deeply intertwined with the literal that the two become inseparable. Real space inherently contains many layers of symbolic meaning. It is this mode of perception, so radically different from our own, which leads Carolly Erickson to refer to the “enchanted world” of medieval vision (1976).[6] It is difficult for us to appreciate how deeply meaningful places were to men and women in the Middle Ages. Examining the phenomenon of pilgrimage, in particular to Jerusalem, represents perhaps our best means for attaining such an appreciation.

If it is true, as I have claimed in regards to the medieval poems of Roland and Alexis, that place provides a link between God and humankind, then Jerusalem is the archetypal place for the Christian believer. The holy places of Palestine supported, literally underlay, the real, historical existence of Jesus of Nazareth. As this existence faded with time, it became increasingly vital for Christians to reaffirm that he was a real person who had lived in our world. Like all of us, he had had a place in the world, and this place, unlike him, was still there for people to see and touch. For place not only contains a link to God; it endures and remembers beyond the scope of our finite lives. Place is the constant presence that keeps memory alive, through the vicissitudes of human generations. In all the liturgies and devotions of pilgrims, in their need to touch the places touched by God, in their desire to leave something of themselves behind or to take a relic with them, in the stories of miraculous healing, there is one guiding purpose: to remember that God was a real person, and that he was here, in our place. A Buddhist monk once said, with regards to the Catholic belief that God is present in the Eucharist, that if he were Catholic, he could never bring himself to leave the church and its exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. This anecdote offers a window onto the yearning of early Christians to see, and indeed have as their place, the land filled with Christ’s presence.

IV. Crusade

From the fourth century onwards, European Christians made the Jerusalem pilgrimage in considerable numbers. Their desire to experience the biblical holy lands derived in large part from their sense of the value of this particular place: God had made himself manifest there throughout the centuries, in the history of Israel, and especially, in the life of Jesus. But Jerusalem was not the only place treasured by medieval pilgrims. There was Rome, site of numerous relics. Two other immensely popular pilgrimages, which Runciman associates with the idea of a penitentiary indulgence, are Saint Michael at Monte Gargano in Italy, and Saint James at Compostella in Spain. Both St. Michael and St. James are warrior-saints. As Carl Erdmann (1935) notes, St. Michael was originally identified primarily as an archangel, but then increasingly as a warrior. According to legend, he appeared at Mt. Gargano as a leader in battle, slaying the enemy with lightening from heaven (20-21). Likewise, St. James, patron of the knighthood of Christian Spain, was known for having appeared on horseback, carrying a white flag to lead the Christians to victory in the legendary battle with the Moors at Clavijo (274). The fact that places associated with two warrior-saints attracted such devotion is significant. It reveals that, for medieval men and women, God often manifested himself through battles and warfare. As The Song of Roland reveals, battles are intimately related to the value of place. In this sense, the Mt. Gargano and Compostella pilgrimages illustrate another facet of the medieval view of place; namely, that to wage battle for the restoration of a place represented a holy deed, one that merited the intervention of God’s greatest saints.[7]

Until the time of the reform popes, the church did not necessarily uphold this correlation of holiness and warfare, as Erdmann so well explains in his decisive study of the development of the church’s doctrine of holy war. At the level of the populace, however, there was nothing strange about the idea: place often needed to be defended, and nothing is more natural than to believe that God is on one’s side when one is defending one’s own home, much less one’s faith. In these matters, it is often difficult to judge whether warlike notions led to the idea of crusade, or crusade contributed to warlike notions, and I will not attempt to answer such a question here. In this brief discussion of the crusades, I will examine only the time leading up to the first crusade to the Holy Land (1098), for I believe that this time is our best witness to the initial motivations and forces behind such an enterprise. A great deal has been written about the first crusade, and the following section cannot begin to do justice to the subject. Taking a very broad perspective, I intend to evoke the basic undercurrents which led to the phenomenon of crusade, in hopes that they might reveal an additional facet of the medieval European sense of place.

In order to understand the nature of the forces which led to the immense success of Pope Urban II’s call to crusade in 1095, it is imperative to realize that crusade has its roots in the phenomenon of pilgrimage. In Histoire de Saint Louis, Joinville describes how he donned a pilgrim’s garb upon departing for the Crusades: the abbot of Cheminon gave him “m’escharpe et mon bourdon,” and Joinville left his castle “à pié, deschaus et en langes” (1868: 44). Many scholars have underlined the extent to which crusaders and pilgrims shared common motivations, practices and liturgies. The historian J.G. Davies (1992) wrote, “The Crusades can of course be considered from the perspective of political history or military history, as well as that of social and/or economic history; but if their true nature is not to be obscured they also have to be studied in relation to the medieval understanding of pilgrimage” (13). Like pilgrims, the first crusaders were inspired by a desire to see the holy lands, and thereby to obtain the remission of their sins: it is generally thought that Urban II promised a plenary indulgence at the Council of Clermont, or soon thereafter. Nevertheless, however similar their motives, many aspects of the Crusades were of course radically different from those of pilgrimage. Crusaders carried arms, and travelled with the objective not only of seeing the holy places, but of using force to obtain temporal power over them. The mere experience of the holy places, it would seem, had become insufficient. Suddenly, large numbers of European Christians deemed the establishment of a Christian kingdom in Jerusalem an objective worth killing and dying for. To what can we attribute this radical change in the pilgrim’s project?

By all accounts, the outpouring of support for Urban II’s call, the ostensible goal of which was to succor Eastern Christians, far surpassed anyone’s expectations. Many different factors converged to create this surprising reaction: socio-economic, eschatological, historical and political.[8] But I would like to begin by examining the phenomenon from the perspective of place as I have defined it thus far. When we do so, two factors, or to be more exact, two constellations of factors, stand out. First, the Crusades have as their focal point the city of Jerusalem. The tremendous appeal of this sacred center for medieval men and women cannot be overstated. Secondly, beginning in the seventh century, a new kind of world begins to emerge in Europe with the rise of Islam. The presence of so different a faith and its rapid advance through southern Europe cause a radical change in world-view, one which has everything to do with place. In the eighth century, the Moors reach central France before they are repelled by Charles the Hammer; they continue to thrive in Spain into the eleventh century and beyond, up to the Reconquest of Grenada in 1492.

It is difficult to imagine how the nearby presence of the Moors must have felt to a Europe more or less secure in its identification with Christianity. Even when, as was often the case, the Muslim rulers tolerated the Christian faith, this could not erase the fact that they had won dominion over a place which had been Christian. No matter how tolerant the rulers, a people’s sense of its belonging to place was being threatened. Runciman describes the situation thus: “The western Christian ... was proud to be a Christian, and, as he thought, the heir of Rome; yet he was uneasily aware that in most respects Moslem civilization was higher than his own. Moslem power dominated the Western Mediterranean from Catalonia to Tunis. Moslem pirates preyed upon his shipping. Rome had been sacked by the Moslems. They had built robber castles in Italy and in Provence. From their strongholds in Spain it seemed that they might again emerge to cross the frontiers and pour over the Pyrenees into France. Western Christendom had no organization that could have met such an attack” (88).

In 1009, Muslims attacked and pillaged Jerusalem, and destroyed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Christians were persecuted and many pilgrims martyred (Alphandéry, 19). According to Erdmann, Pope Sergius IV envisioned at this time a serious plan for crusade (114). As Runciman describes, the Caliph al-Mansur, or Almanzor, repeatedly attacked the kingdom of Leon, the leading Christian power in Spain. In 981, he took Zamora, in 996, Leon, and in 997, twice burned the city of St. James at Compostella. The Great Sancho III, king of Navarre, launched the counter-attack. With the support of the Cluniacs, ever-diligent defenders of pilgrims and pilgrimage, Sancho and his successors attracted the support of the Normans and the Papacy. In 1063, the Spanish counter-attack against the Moslems acquired the status of a holy war as Pope Alexander II promised an indulgence for all who took up arms to defend Christendom in Spain (Runciman, 89-91).

While the western empire fought the Moslems in Spain, Byzantium was attempting to repel the Moslems, as well as other groups, from its own frontiers. In 1071, just twenty-five years before the Council of Clermont, it lost the decisive battle of Manzikert to the Turks. The Emperor Alexis successfully defended the Danube Valley against the Turks, but had more difficulty with the Seldjuks in Asia Minor. As Alexis tried to rebuild his army from the disaster at Manzikert, he looked to the West for mercenaries. At the same time, both he and Pope Urban II were striving to ease the tense relations between the eastern and western branches of the church. In 1095, Byzantine envoys attended Urban II’s council at Piacenza. H.E. Mayer asserts that the Emperor Alexis, guided by a desire to obtain western military help for Byzantium, made the situation in the East look more dire than it in fact was. Moreover, Mayer claims, Alexis “deliberately emphasized the idea of help for Jerusalem because he anticipated that this would prove an effective propaganda slogan in Europe” (8). Neither Alexis at Piacenza, nor Urban II six months later at Clermont, realized how forceful this “propaganda slogan” would prove to be.

Such were the events which led to the Crusades. As this cursory summary of events reveals, Christendom, both in the East and the West, was facing a real threat to its hegemony in the late eleventh century, and had lived with this threat for some time. In Spain, in the south of Italy, in the Middle East, and in Eastern Europe, it was confronted with the intruding presence of Islam--in modern parlance, we might say the Other. This threatening intrusion is expressed through place--who can defend it, who can dominate it. As we have seen, place plays an instrumental role in a people’s perception of its relation to transcendence.[9] Where a people’s ties to place are threatened, their link to God is endangered. That such an onslaught of threats to Christendom’s place should coincide with the unexpectedly powerful yearning, on behalf of Europeans both great and small, to affirm Christianity’s roots in Jerusalem is perhaps just that: a coincidence. Or perhaps, more significantly, it reflects humanity’s deep need for both the secure roots, and the transcendent meanings, of place.

Scholars have also indicated other factors which led to the crusading idea and its success. According to Mayer, the knightly class was affected by the difficult social and economic conditions of the time, and came to see crusade as a beneficial solution. Citing an article by Herlihy (1958), Mayer describes the agrarian crisis and wave of famines which swept through France and Italy in the tenth and eleventh centuries. In response to the needs of a rising population, the Carolingian custom of splitting lands equally among heirs was gradually eliminated, in favor of the system of primogeniture. According to this system, the eldest son received the entire inheritance, and younger sons were forced to find another means of subsistance, often entering the Church or the knighthood. Moreover, many younger sons were not allowed to marry. Because Urban II had promised to the crusaders the ownership of any lands conquered, crusade offered to many men a chance to improve considerably their material situation (Mayer, 22-25).[10] Along the same lines, Alphandéry cites the prevalence of epidemics and natural disasters during the eleventh century. These incited the population to seek out a better place in Jerusalem, believed by many to be the land of milk and honey described in the Bible (46-47).

This last point is related to another motivation which many scholars consider important in the development of the Crusades: the eschatological connotations of Jerusalem. Because of the epidemics, floods and droughts plaguing the West, many people, especially the poor who were most affected by the dire conditions, believed that the end of the world was approaching. Alphandéry underlines the instrumental role played by the preaching of hermits such as Robert d’Arbrissel and Peter the Hermit in inciting an unparalleled religious fervor in the poor, and also the commonly held notion that the final battle waged by the Antichrist would take place in Jerusalem. As I have pointed out, the line was quite blurred between the earthly city of Jerusalem and biblical images of a celestial Jerusalem. To be ensured a place among the chosen of the triumphant Christ at the end of time, it was best to be in Jerusalem when He came (50-56). Runciman also expresses this idea: “Medieval man was convinced that the Second Coming was at hand ... The Church taught that sin could be expiated by pilgrimage and prophecies declared that the Holy Land must be recovered for the faith before Christ could come again. Further, to ignorant minds the distinction between Jerusalem and the New Jerusalem was not very clearly defined” (115).

If large numbers of people, encouraged by the pope as well as influential preachers such as Peter the Hermit, believed that the end was at hand, it is not surprising that the pilgrimage indulgence held widespread appeal. Already in 1089, Urban II had offered an indulgence to Christians who would help restore the church at Tarragona, in Spain, and the idea of an indulgence associated with the Jerusalem pilgrimage was already familiar to believers. Combined with the ambiant eschatological fervor, the indulgence gained particular power; as Mayer states, it “put all the others [motives] in the shade” (25).

In summary, many unusual and compelling factors came together at the end of the eleventh century, creating an environment which was extremely receptive to Urban II’s pronouncement at the Council of Clermont. Historical, political, social, economic, religious, and eschatological undercurrents combined with a fervent belief in the efficaciousness of place, in its power to purify the sinner, to engender what Alphandéry calls “le jaillissement quasi spontané” (9) of crusade. More than anything else, it was the extreme potency of the name and place Jerusalem which turned a call meant to appeal mainly to knights into one which moved thousands of people, from many different backgrounds. By most accounts, Jerusalem was an afterthought for both the Emperor Alexis and Urban II: their primary goal was to assist the Eastern church, and thereby solidify the ties between East and West. And perhaps, buoyed by increasing prosperity, the success of the Spanish Reconquest, and a mounting ideal of restoration, Urban II came to believe that Western Christendom, truncated without Jerusalem, was ready to go on the offensive. One thing is certain: once the word “Jerusalem” was spoken, it took on its own life in the imaginations of thousands. Mayer writes, “Even the mere sound of the name Jerusalem must have had a glittering and magical splendour for the men of the eleventh century which we are no longer capable of feeling” (11). The allure of the Crusades, I believe, finds its primary explanation in the almost inexpressible value of a place such as Jerusalem.

CONCLUSIONS

The medieval practice of pilgrimage offers us an excellent standpoint from which to study what place may have meant for medieval men and women. Pilgrimage implies the convergence of many people in special places, which are believed to enjoy a favored link to transcendence and its power. These places serve as sacred centers, and their power is not just symbolic but real and efficacious: they can cure blindness, or forgive sins, or bring rain to a dry region. In every case, a place becomes sacred because it has been somehow touched by God in a knowable way. Of all the places in the world, Jerusalem and the Holy Lands are most sacred for the Judeo-Christian tradition, for they have not only been touched by God, but have provided the grounding soil for almost all of His interactions with His people. The layers of meaning which live in this place descend to the beginning of time; to experience them physically is to be as close to God as is possible on this earth.

All of these compelling associations of place are present in the phenomenon of the First Crusade, and added to them is a palpable feeling of danger. Faced with the constant threat of Muslim invasion, Christendom felt unsure of its future, and sought fiercely to reaffirm itself. Its search for reaffirmation took the form of a quest for place motivated by the idea of restitution. This should no longer surprise us: place’s very function, in the Middle Ages, is to provide the strength of roots as it links a people to God. The crusaders believed firmly that the best thing they could do, for their souls and for God, was win Jerusalem for Christ. This belief, which the immense response to the Clermont call shows to have been shared by many, reveals how innate and how strong was the medieval attachment to place.

It is in this context, then, that the first known written versions of the legend of Tristan and Yseut make their appearance, toward the middle of the twelfth century. At this time, the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem is still intact (it will fall in 1187). If we consider the medieval “world-view” of place which I have sketched in this chapter, it seems that both the Song of Roland and Life of Saint Alexis fit very well into this view. In these poems, while the protagonists may demonstrate detachment from place in their actions, this detachment is unquestionably subsumed into an overarching feeling of intense devotion to place. Through their lives, Roland and Alexis uphold the value of dulce France and Rome, thus sustaining the place which ensures their people’s bond to God.

Within this context of harmony among man, God and place which we see both in literature and in the historical realities of pilgrimage and crusade, the Tristan legend appears as a sort of aberration. In Tristan, the ties uniting man to place are extremely problematic, and correspondingly, so are those between man and God. The radical difference, from the perspective of place, which separates Tristan from the dominant instincts of its time hints at the transgressive, subversive nature of this legend. Indeed, many contemporary authors were troubled by Tristan, and opposed it as best they could. They were were right to worry. After Tristan, place would never be the same again.

[1] For another perspective on this subject, see Stock (1993: 322-23).

[2] Contemporary Jewish thinkers such as Armand Abécassis (1987) have pointed out Christianity’s failure to appreciate the Jewish roots of their faith.

[3] Augustine’s use of the city image confirms, if need be, that his concept of pilgrimage is firmly anchored in the idea of community, and has nothing to do with the concept of exile as alienation. Tuan speaks eloquently of the city-ideal in the Antiquity and Middle Ages (1974, chapter 11). According to him, the city was then considered an image of the cosmos, a perfect community in which humanity could flourish.

[5] The idea that Adam was made in Jerusalem is particularly arresting in the light of the exegetical comments I made earlier concerning the creation story. If Adam was made in Jerusalem, placed in Eden, and then sent back to the place whence he was taken, then Jerusalem as place is even more compelling: it makes up the very substance of the first man’s being.

[6] “The multiform reality ... may be likened to an enchanted world in which the boundaries of imagination and factuality are constantly shifting. At one time the observed physical limits of time and space may be acknowledged; at another they may be ignored, or, from another point of view, transcended. Yet so constant and so automatic is this expansion and contraction of the field of perceived reality that it goes on unnoted and unreconciled by medieval writers. It belongs to those tacit norms in all cultures which ... are rarely explicitly acknowledged.

Of course, the fact that medieval men and women shared this flexibility of perception does not mean that they were unable to distinguish between the imagined and the tangible. Nor does it imply that they were puzzled or deluded about the difference between material and immaterial existence ... [they] used other means than sense perception to authenticate reality” (Erickson, 5-6).

[7] Likewise, in Plato’s Timaeus, the godliness of the first Athenians is manifest in their excellence as warriors. Dante’s Paradiso portrays warrior-saints in paradise, while Charlemagne was canonized in the late twelfth-century.

[8] Among the best-known studies of these factors are Delaruelle (1941-1954), Erdmann (1935), Runciman (1951), Alphandéry (1954), and Mayer (1965).

[9] In Space and Place, Tuan ties this linking function of place to the tradition of razing a city once it is conquered: “Conquerors did not raze a city to the ground simply out of wanton fury; in such destruction they appropriated a people’s gods by rendering them homeless, and in appropriating the gods the conquerors acquired a civilization” (150-51). In other words, an intact place leaves an intact link to God; in order to take God away from a people, one must take from them their place.

[10] Ladner, in a thought-provoking insight, suggests a strong connection between pilgrimage and the development of chivalry: “It is very interesting to see how feudalism, which originally was rather localized and static, fell under the dynamic spell of the peregrinatio idea, without which the chivalric ideals of the High Middle Ages could hardly have developed. This happened in two stages ... First and most obviously, chivalry coalesced with the mediaeval pilgrimage movement in the great pilgrimage in arms aimed at recapturing Jerusalem ... Second, in conjunction with the rapid slackening of the crusading spirit, there arose in the literature of the second half of the twelfth century that fateful image of the knight-errant who must seek out the hostile forces of the world and find his own self in a ceaseless course of aventure” (246).