Bible and Sword (6 page)

He notices the natural features of the country, too, remarking on the rich and fruitful plains inland from the coast at Caesarea or noting that at Jericho the Jordan was “about as broad as a man could throw a stone with a sling.”

The sites of Old Testament history, chiefly those most easily accessible in and around Jerusalem, which are included in every later tourist itinerary, are also visited: the Patriarchs’ tomb at Hebron, the walls of Jericho, the stones of the twelve tribes at Gilgal. Even the task of recounting weird legends about the Dead Sea and swimming in its metallic waters to ascertain if, in truth, one would not sink, is included. It is not clear from the narrative whether Arculf himself visited the Dead Sea, but Andamnan contributes an abundant variety of Dead Sea fantasies. For example, near the awful site where Sodom and Gomorrah
were engulfed grow beautiful apples that “excite among spectators a desire to eat them but when plucked they burst and are reduced to ashes and give rise to smoke as if they were still burning.”

The narrative describes, for the benefit of future pilgrims, both land approaches to the Holy Land: the southern route by Egypt and Sinai generally used by pilgrims before the Moslem conquest, and the northern one down through Constantinople and Damascus, as well as the direct sea route by Sicily and Cyprus to Jaffa, which became the most popular approach at the height of the pilgrim traffic in the later Middle Ages. Arculf seems to have entered and departed by way of Constantinople, still then, of course, a Christian capital, but he made a side trip by sea to Egypt involving a forty days’ sail from Jaffa to Alexandria. Although Arculf does not mention it, there existed at this time a Suez Canal, as we know from a contemporary Latin treatise on geography by an English scholar named Dicuil. This treatise reports a conversation with an English monk, Fidelis, who had actually sailed through the canal from the Nile into the Red Sea while on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land during the first half of the eighth century. In 767 the canal was blocked up by the Caliph Al-Mansur.

Other firsthand reports by Continental pilgrims have survived, but through the accident of his shipwreck and the devoted work of the Scotch abbot Arculf’s story belongs to Britain. Launched by the respected Bede, this book contributed to the passion for pilgrimage that soon afterwards seized the Anglo-Saxons. The first of the pilgrims who left an account was St. Willibald of Wessex, the son of a certain Richard who bore the title King, but of what, historians have never been able to decide for certain. Whether Willibald had read
De Locis Sanctis
is not known, but it seems probable that he would have, for he was an intensely pious young man dedicated to the service of the church as a child. In the years after his prolonged pilgrimage Willibald became a renowned bishop carrying on the proselytizing
work of his uncle, St. Boniface, among the Teutons.

Two accounts of his life and journeys survive, one anonymous, and one by a nun related to him who took down his reminiscences in after years.

He was described in his old age as “perfect in charity and gentleness”; yet “his look was majestic and terrible to gainsayers.” As a youth he must have been equally terrible to less high-minded souls, for at the age of eighteen he managed to persuade his father, brother, and sister, much against their inclination, to undertake the long journey to Jerusalem with him (one wonders how his mother resisted, but the chronicle is silent). When first he urged his father to become a pilgrim and “despise the world” the King refused on the not unnatural ground that it would be “contrary to all humanity” to leave his wife a widow, his children orphans, and his house desolate. But the persistent Willibald maintained that love of Christ prevailed over all natural affections, and the father, “overcome at last by the conversation of his truth-telling son,” agreed to go. The decision proved to his sorrow, for the King died on the way, even before the party reached Rome, and was buried at Lucca in Tuscany. In Rome the brother fell ill, but Willibald, leaving him in the care of his sister, pressed on to Palestine in the year 721.

At any given time it is possible to gauge the degree of religious feeling in England by the reaction of the traveler to his first sight of Jerusalem. In the fervent Middle Ages some wept, some prayed, some fell on their knees and kissed the soil. Margery Kempe, a fifteenth-century fanatic, was so overcome at the sight that “she was in point to a fallen offe her asse,” but her companions put spices in her mouth to revive her. Indeed, at every place memorable for some incident in the life of Jesus this pilgrim was so much given to “wepyng and sobbyng in lowde voys” that “hir felows wold not latyn hir etyn in their cumpany.” Later, after the Reformation, adventurous Elizabethans, seventeenth-century merchants and scholars, cool eighteenth-century
skeptics could make the ascent and never notice the bend in the road where Jerusalem first comes into view. Victorians revert to medieval fervor and tend to tears, awe, and solemn thoughts.

Perhaps Willibald set the style for medieval English travelers, for certainly no pilgrim was ever more deeply affected than he. “What spot was there which had witnessed the Lord’s miracles,” says his chronicle, “on which Willibald, the man of God did not imprint his kisses? What altar was there that he did not bedew with his tears and sighs?”

So ardent were his feelings that he made four sojourns in Jerusalem during his extended stay of several years in the Holy Land. In between he visited all the usual places of religious interest throughout the country and one unusual one, a church on Mt. Tabor consecrated jointly to Jesus, Moses, and Elijah. He drank sour ewe’s milk without approval, remarked on the extraordinary native sheep “all one color” (were eighth-century English sheep parti-colored?), and once on a plain thick with olive trees he encountered a lion that roared dreadfully but when approached “hurried off in another direction.”

Sometimes he traveled alone, at another time in company with seven unnamed countrymen. On one occasion all eight were arrested on suspicion and imprisoned by the Saracens. “The townsmen used then to come to look at them because they were young and handsome and clad in good garments.” When they were brought before the King of the Saracens he asked whence they came and was told: “These men come from the west country where the sun never sets and we know of no land beyond them, but water only.” Apparently not regarding such origin as a crime, the King replied: “Why ought we to punish them? They have not sinned against us. Give them leave and let them go.”

Each side trip Willibald made required a letter of safe-conduct from the Caliph, a matter of some difficulty, for on one occasion he and his companions could not find the
sovereign “because he had fled out of his kingdom.” This was the same Emir-al-Mumenin who had earlier released the English party from prison. Perhaps he was too tolerant toward unbelievers to please his subjects.

Tyre and Sidon, Antioch and Damascus, Constantinople and Nicaea were visited before Willibald finally sailed for Sicily and Italy, where he settled for a time at Monte Cassino just ten years after leaving home.

After Willibald there is a long silence, for the times were not friendly to the survival of manuscripts. During the ninth and tenth centuries, while Moslem civilization was at its height both in the arts of peace and in temporal power, Europe was sunk in the darkest period of the Dark Ages. Barbarism, cruelty, moral decrepitude, and cultural lethargy held sway. No light or inspiration came from Rome, where the Church was in the hands of persons described by the great papal historian, Caesar Baronius, as “monstrous men, depraved in life, abandoned in morals, utterly corrupt.” Men of the sword, unbridled by established law or strong rulers, left no man’s life safe. In England the ravaging Danes burned, destroyed, and slaughtered wherever they passed, with only King Alfred in the southwest offering a valiant resistance. Meeting destruction on every hand, men became disgusted with the world on earth and in a desperate search for security entered monasteries in droves or set off to seek the threshold of heaven in the Holy Land. A period of religious hysteria, in which the year 1000 was expected to bring the end of the world, afflicted all of Western Europe like an epidemic. Hastening to the scene of man’s Redemption before the final awful moment of reckoning, “hordes,” according to some chroniclers, poured into the Holy Land, of whom a large proportion never returned. Some died of want, some of plague, some were killed by marauding Arabs, some were lost at sea by storms or shipwreck or pirates. Only the lucky or the well provided came back alive.

A highly imaginative account of a mass pilgrimage supposed
to have taken place in 1064 is incorporated by the otherwise circumstantial historian, Florence of Worcester, whose chronicle was written in the last quarter of the eleventh century, shortly after the event was supposed to have taken place. He tells of a multitude of 7,000 who accompanied the Archbishop of Mentz (Mainz) and the Bishops of Utrecht, Bamberg, and Ratisbon on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. They were attacked by the Saracens, who, in search of the gold the Christians were supposed to have swallowed when in fear of capture, pinned as many as they could catch to the earth in the shape of a cross and slit them open from throat to belly. Of the 7,000 a remnant of 2,000 escaped and survived. Although this adventure apparently does not involve people from England, it was included in a chronicle of English history and was probably typical of the atrocity stories circulating at the time, which helped to arouse the fervor for the First Crusade.

Beginning in the eleventh century crowned heads and mitred bishops, fat abbots and helmeted barons joined the simpler people on the road to Jerusalem. Olaf Tryggvason, first Christian king of Norway, made the pilgrimage in 1003, Duke Robert of Normandy, father of William the Conqueror, followed in 1035, and Ealdred, Archbishop of York, who was later to perform the coronation of William the Conqueror, went in 1058 with “such splendour as none other had displayed before him.”

In the same decade Earl Sweyn, rascally elder brother of Harold, who was to be King of England, went to Jerusalem in expiation of his many sins and died at Constantinople on his way home about the year 1055. His career seems to have been unusually conscienceless even for the eleventh century. He began by seducing Edviga, the Abbess of Leominster, who he ordered “should be fetched unto him and he had her as long as he listed and afterwards let her fare home.” Not so much the act of seduction as its choice of a bride of Christ as victim shocked his countrymen, who thereupon pronounced him an outlaw. He took refuge in
Denmark, but was apparently not a bit chastened, for by some further crime he “ruined himself with the Danes.” Allowed to return home to plead for remission of the sentence of outlawry, he promptly murdered his cousin Earl Beorn, who had received part of Sweyn’s lands and whom Sweyn had induced to meet him under a truce. Again it was not the murder so much as the violation of the truce that prompted his next punishment. Though he was the eldest son of Earl Godwin, regent of the kingdom, he was pronounced a
nithing
, or man without honor, the lowest form of manhood known to Saxon society. He again took refuge on the Continent, but in the following year, 1050, he was brought home, pardoned, and restored to his earldom—a rash act, granted his reputation, though it may have been motivated by some phase in the bewildering rivalries of the Saxon nobles, whose disunity was soon to open the way to William the Conqueror.

The pattern is repeated with monotonous regularity. Sweyn is again outlawed in 1051 for some offense that no chronicler mentions. This time apparently his family has had enough of him, and either to get him out of the country for a long time or to earn him a last chance of forgiveness he is somehow induced to set off for Jerusalem in 1053.

Earl Sweyn as an individual would not warrant much attention were it not that he is the first recorded instance of the type of pilgrim that is to become all too frequent during the Crusades. This is the criminal who joined the pilgrims’ ranks to escape imprisonment or execution, as later criminals joined the Foreign Legion. Once having received the blessing of the Church on his journey and the Cross to sew on his cloak, the pilgrim traveled under ecclesiastical protection that put him beyond the reach of the secular arm, just as a fugitive claiming sanctuary inside a church was safe from all pursuers. Moreover the church had a regular table of indulgences that could be won by pilgrimages to holy places. According to one count there
were ninety-six holy places in Jerusalem alone, and thirty-three more in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, not to mention many hundreds in Bethlehem, Nazareth, Galilee, and elsewhere. Neither Rome nor St. James of Compostella, the other two most favored pilgrimages, had anything like this to offer. By adding up partial indulgences granted at each of a number of holy places, five days from one, forty from another, a pilgrim could reduce his expected stay in purgatory to very little, perhaps to nothing. Or if he were a highly placed person or came with an important letter of introduction or made rich gifts to the monastic orders that administered the holy places, he might even secure a plenary indulgence remitting all punishment. Certificates were given to pilgrims testifying to the places they had visited and the devotions performed. On payment of a fee they might even be made Knights of the Sepulcher. Clearly the journey to Palestine provided a convenient out for the man who had made his home too hot to hold him. He could not only place himself beyond the reach of the law and his enemies for a long time, but he could at the same time commute the penalty he might otherwise expect to pay either on earth or in the after life. This system proved so attractive to transgressors that cutthroats and misfits aplenty mingled with the pious, the adventurous, and the purely curious amid the pilgrim multitudes.

Shortly after the pilgrimage of the Saxon Sweyn the sovereignty of England passed to the Norman conquerors, and five years later, in 1071, the sovereignty of Palestine passed from the caliphate of Bagdad to a newer branch of Islam, the Seljuk Turks. The Seljuk conquest provoked the First Crusade; the Norman conquest caused England’s participation in what was chiefly a Continental project. During the ensuing two hundred years of intermittent crusades there was of course a constant flow of travelers between England and Palestine, but few English diaries of individual pilgrimages from this period survive. One that
has survived is the diary of Saewulf, a prosperous merchant given to fits of piety between periods of indulgence in earthly pleasures. In one of the former he embarked on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1102. Only three years had passed since the taking of Jerusalem by the warriors of the First Crusade, and the Latin kingdom they had established there was in the springtime of its power. For the first time in five hundred years the holy places were in Christian hands. New trade opportunities were opened. Ambitious nobles dreamed of new fiefs that could be carved from the infidel’s lands with a battle-ax and a few men-at-arms. Saewulf notes the crowds of travelers going to Palestine, both noble and poor, clergy and lay, true pilgrims and piratical adventurers “embarking with crews of desperate marauders … plundering and devastating on their way.”