Pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the Holy Land, 1187–1291, by Denys Pringle

Abstract

The Holy Land provided the most strenuous and meritorious Christian pilgrimage destination in the middle ages. From the fourth century AD onwards, the attraction of visiting the sites of the Bible, and in particular of the Incarnation, and thus in some way witnessing, even spiritually re-enacting, scriptural events, provoked a constant flow of pilgrims to the carefully constructed Christian holy landscape and shrines of Jerusalem and Palestine. Yet even in periods of greatest ease of access and popularity, for western Christians during the twelfth-century Frankish occupation, the Jerusalem pilgrimage remained a minority activity, difficult and expensive. So, parallel to the actual journeys, literary accounts of them were composed, often claiming the authenticity of personal experience even though many (by the thirteenth century, perhaps most) were products of inter-textual borrowing, plagiarism from earlier narratives and fictive invention. Studied artifice frequently lay behind the desiccated facts and lush piety. More than travellers’ tales or tourist gazetteers, the accounts implicitly or explicitly associated the liturgical and pedagogical centrality of the Bible stories with literally treading in the footsteps of Christ, the Apostles, the heroes and villains of the Old and New Testaments. Thus a description of the journey to Jerusalem could supply a mnemonic for the journey of the soul to Heaven as well as providing apparently validating objective evidence of the physical reality of the scriptures and therefore of the truth of Christian faith itself.