Abstract

In the history of Acre, located on the Syrian coast, the 12th and 13th centu­ries were of particular importance. Under the rule of the Crusaders, the city experienced a period of rapid demographic, economic, cultural, and religious growth. As the main port of the Kingdom of Jerusalem—and in the 13th cen­tury its capital as well—it was an important stop on the route of Latin pil­grims. Nevertheless, it was mentioned extremely rarely in the pilgrimage writ­ings of that period, where information about the sites of worship in the city is scarce. This problem was noticed by Aryeh Graboïs and David Jacoby, but their attempts to explain this state of affairs need to be partly reexamined. The most important reason for the “silence of pilgrimage sources” about the city and its religious life seems to be the marginal presence of Acre in the pages of the Bible and its negligible place in the history of salvation.

Highlights

  • In the history of Acre, located on the Syrian coast, the 12th and 13th centuries were of particular importance

  • Even if we assumed that the authors of narratives describing peregrinations commonly recognized Acre as a city outside the Holy Land, paying little attention to it, it is impossible not to notice that we can find numerous examples of medieval texts talking about cult centers located far beyond the territory delineated by the Nile and the Euphrates

  • The idea of the poor and modest Church, which appeared in the 12th and 13th centuries, was not widely accepted enough to allow the hypothesis that most of the authors of these pilgrimage texts omitted the description of religious life in Acre on account of their reluctance towards stately sacred buildings and the wealth of the local clergy

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Summary

Introduction

In the history of Acre, located on the Syrian coast, the 12th and 13th centuries were of particular importance. For some medieval authors, Acre was a city situated outside the Holy Land, though directly at its border (Jacoby, 2001, 2004; Mylod, 2013).

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