Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion

by Jonathan Sumption

  7 Pilgrimages imposed by Inquisition: Gui, Practica, II. 3, p. 39. Dossat, pp. 210–11 (Gourdon and Montcuq). On Gui’s sentences, Molinier, pp. 400–1. In general, Lea (2), vol. i, pp. 466, 494–5.

  8 Liège legal codes: Cauwenbergh, pp. 23–4.

  Tradition of judicial exile in Flanders: R. C. van Caenegem, Geschiedenis van het Strafrecht in Vlanderen, Verhandelingen van de koninklijke Vlaamse Akademie, xix, Brussel, 1954, pp. 147–56.

  Douai commutations: Le Grand, p. 385n1.

  Robert de Roux: Chartes de Namur, no. 1303, p. 385.

  Devotions required at Liège: Cauwenberghe, p. 164.

  Breaches of public order: Aquinas, Summa Theologica, III (suppl.), q. xxviii, a. 3, vol. xii, p. 53. Coutumes de Liège, vol. i, p. 494.

  9 Arson: decree of 1186 in MGH. Constit. i. 450 (no. 318, cap. 8). Chartes de Namur, nos. 1000, 1026, pp. 298–9, 306.

  Nieuport lynchings: Cauwenberghe, p. 10.

  Affray and abusing councillor: Coutumes de Namur, Rep. 1440 (no. 77),

  Rep. 1483 (no. 118), vol. ii, pp. 91, 225–6.

  Henri le Kien: Rupin, p. 215.

  Pilgrimage for victim’s satisfaction: Poenit. Vinniani, XXIII, in Bieler (ed.), Irish penitentials, pp. 80–2. MGH. Constit. i. 450 (no. 318). Coutumes de Namur, Rep. 1483 (no. 87), vol. ii, p. 194 (Gerard de Rostimont). Pagart d’Hermansart (ed.), ‘Certificat d’accomplissement de pèlerinage pour homicide en 1333’, BHP, (1891), pp. 372–3 (Bondulf). Coutumes de Liège, vol. ii, p. 145.

  10 Pilgrimage imposed by arbitrators: On murderers of 1264, CRH., 1e serie, ix (1847), P. 49. Beaumanoir, Coutumes, nos. 1296–7, pp. 168–70.

  Rigaud, Reg. Visitationum, pp. 507–8. See also Cartulaire de la Commune de Fosses, no. 10, ed. J. Borgnet, Namur, 1867, pp. 32–3. In 1307 the count of Namur would only submit his quarrel with Charles de Valois to the arbitration of Philip IV of France on condition that no pilgrimage was imposed on the loser, Chartes de Namur, no. 334, p. 96.

  No commutation for Inquisition: Gui, Practica, II. 23, p. 55.

  Tariffs: Cauwenberghe, pp. 222–3 (Oudenarde), and other lists, pp. 223–36. Van den Bussche (ed.), ‘Rocamadour’, pp. 50–2.

  11 No commutation at Maestricht: Cauwenberghe, p. 148.

  Enforced if not commuted: Coutumes de Namur, Rep. 1440 (no. 18), vol. ii, p. 30. Ordonnances, vol. v, p. 460, vol. ix, pp. 586–7, 589.

  Pilgrimages imposed by corporations: Cauwenberghe, pp. 42–3, 161n.

  And by treaty: Archives de Bruges, vol. i, pp. 292–5, 357–8, 405, vol. ii, pp. 254–7 (Arques, 1326). On Bruges pilgrimages of 1309 and 1393, Van den Bussche (ed.), ‘Rocamadour’, pp. 38–40. Cartulaire de N–D de Boulogne, no. 156, pp. 239–40.

  12 Fettered pilgrims: Raynald, Annales, An. 1319 (no. 27), vol. v, p. 123 (murderer of bishop of Fricento). Thomas of Monmouth, Mirac. S. Willelmi, VI. 9–10, 11, pp. 231–41, 256–8 (Norwich). Reginald of Durham, De B. Cuthberti Virtut., LXXXIV, LXXIX, pp. 177–8, 164–5; cf. XCIII–XCV, pp. 205–12.

  Thomas of Monmouth on broken fetters: Op. cit., VI. 9, p. 235.

  13 Fetters worn voluntarily: Mirac. S. Benedicti, VIII. 19, pp. 303–4 (Fleury). Chron. Evesham, II, p. 34. William of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontificum, V. 268, pp. 425–6 (Cologne penitent). John of S. Bertin, Vita B. Bernardi, I. 5, Aa. Ss. April, vol. ii, p. 676.

  Crosses worn: Gui, Practica, II. 19, 34, pp. 53, 60. Lea (2), vol. i, pp. 466, 468–9.

  Pieterseune: Van den Bussche (ed.), ‘Rocamadour’, pp. 48–9.

  14 Pleas of sickness: Coutumes de Namur, Rep. 1440 (no. 80), Rep. 1483 (no. 58), vol. ii, pp. 95–6, 175; cf. Rep. 1483 (nos. 52, 254), vol. ii, pp. 169–70, 325.

  Inquisitors’ warning (1251): Molinier, p. 404.

  Jan Vogel: Actes et procès-verbaux des séances de l’université de Louvain, ed. E. Reusens and A. van Hove, vol. ii, Brussels, 1919, pp. 126, 129–30, 143–9, 183–4, 201.

  Pilgrimage alternative to death: On Lambert de Soif, CRH., 2e serie, vii (1855), pp. 78–9. Coutumes de Namur, Rep. 1483 (no. 131), vol. ii, pp. 228–31 (Pierot the Porter). Guérin and Célier (eds.), Documents concernant le Poitou, vol. xxi, pp. 329–31 (no. 720) (cut-throats of 1393); cf. vol. xxiv, pp. 129–32, 284–7.

  15 Alternative to banishment: Coutumes de Liège, vol. i, pp. 496–7. Testimonials: Gui, Practica, II. 3, 10, III. 13, pp. 38, 47, 95; Van den Bussche (ed.), ‘Rocamadour’, p. 47. Coutumes de Namur, Rep. 1483 (no. 118). The fee required by the authorities at Bordeaux in 1495 was seven francs, six liards, see Reg. Fabrique de S. Michel, Archives Departmentales (Gironde), G. 2252.

  Judicial pilgrimage opposed: Capitularia Regum Francorum, vol. i, pp. 60–1 (Charlemagne). Rabanus Maurus, Poenit., VII, PL. ex. 473–4; cf. Cone. Mainz (847), in MC. xiv. 908–9; Cone. Seligenstadt (1022), PL. cxl. 1062. Jacques de Vitry, Hist. Hierosolymitana, LXXXII, pp. 1096–7. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, III (suppl.), q. xxviii, a. 3, vol. xii, p. 53. Durand de S. Pourçain, In Sententias, IV. xv. 4, Lyon, 1595, p. 745.

  16 Mansfeld’s surprise: Van den Bussche (ed.), ‘Rocamadour’, pp. 22–3, 26.

  CHAPTER VIII

  THE GREAT AGE OF PILGRIMAGE

  ‘Some three years after the year 1000’, wrote the Burgundian chronicler Radulph Glaber, ‘there was a sudden rush to rebuild churches all over the world, and above all in Italy and France. Although most of these churches were in perfectly sound condition, Christians everywhere vied with each other to improve them. It was as if the world itself had thrown aside its old rags and put on a shining white robe of churches.’ In southern France, broad strips of Glaber’s ‘white robe’ still stand as evidence of the extraordinary spiritual intensity of the eleventh century, of a mood which manifested itself in the climax of monastic history, in the crusades in Spain and the middle east, and in the transformation of Christianity by a world of emotion and sentiment. In an age of religious sensitivity, pilgrimage fulfilled a real spiritual need. By inflicting severe physical hardship on the pilgrim, it satisfied a desire for the remission of his sins and opened up to him the prospect of a ‘second baptism’. By showing him the places associated with Christ and the saints, it gave him a more personal, more literal understanding of his faith.

  Profound changes in the spiritual life of Europe coincided with political developments which made it possible, for the first time, for large numbers of people to travel long distances overland. The barbarian invasions of the ninth and tenth centuries had had a particularly destructive effect on the shrines of western Europe. These wealthy churches, protecting tombs of precious metal encrusted with jewels, proved an irresistible prey to raiding parties of Arabs, Vikings, and Magyars. Many of the more famous relics led a peripatetic existence as their owners carried them from church to church, fleeing before the invaders. When the Normans invaded the Loire valley in 853 the body of St. Martin was carried to Corméry and thence to Chablis, Orléans, and Auxerre. It was more than a hundred years before it returned to its home at Tours. After suffering a succession of Viking raids at the end of the ninth century, the monks of Lindisfarne took the body of St. Cuthbert and ‘wandered across the whole of Northumbria, having no settled home, like sheep fleeing before wolves’. The body was venerated at Chester-le-Street for more than a century before the monks fled once again from the Vikings and found a permanent home at Durham. In such conditions regular pilgrimages were impossible. The exact location of the relics might be changed or it might be forgotten altogether. Libraries were dispersed or burned, collections of saints’ lives lost. No one knew, in Orderic Vitalis’s time, the exact location of the fifteen hermitages founded by St. Evroul. Recurrent raids, and the political disintegration which accompanied them, made it unsafe to travel long distances on the roads. The monk Bernard, returning from the Holy Land in the 860s, observed that it was safer for a Christian to travel in the dominions of the Caliph than on the highways of southern Italy. In the tenth century, Arab raids in the Alps made a pilgrimage to Rome an extremely hazardous undertaking. Even if the pilgrim escaped ambush and death, he was
unlikely to find a monastery or hospice to receive him. Successive edicts emanating from the chancery of the Frankish Emperors failed to halt the decay of the Irish hospices, and a document of 841 shows that by then all the hostels maintained by the abbey of Monte Cassino were in ruins.

  By mediaeval standards the period which followed the millennium was a peaceful one. All over Europe the barriers to travel were lifted. Most dramatic of all was the opening of the overland route to Jerusalem at the end of the tenth century. The victories of the Byzantine emperor Nicephorus Phocas placed Antioch once more in Christian hands and secured the route through Asia Minor. Basil II (976–1025) overthrew the Bulgarian empire and extended his dominions to the Danube. When duke Geysa of Hungary announced his conversion to Christianity in 985 the whole land route from western Europe to northern Syria was brought under nominal Christian rule. Geysa’s son Stephen accommodated pilgrims at court and founded hospices for their use. The great monastery of Melk on the Danube was founded at this time by ‘wealthy Christians from neighbouring provinces for the accommodation of pilgrims and the poor’. The overland route to Palestine was cheaper and safer than the sea voyage. The chance of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land was now embraced by an ‘enormous multitude, both noble and common’ whose grandfathers could never have afforded it.

  At the opposite end of Europe developments of the same kind marked the rise of the great sanctuary of Santiago de Compostella. The decline of the Ummayad caliphate of Cordova left northern Spain in peace and freed the route from France to Santiago. The reign of Sancho the Great of Navarre (970–1035) marks an epoch as significant for the Spanish pilgrimage as the reign of Stephen of Hungary was for the Palestinian one. Hospices were constructed along the camino de Santiago by kings, bishops, and noblemen, and by a horde of immigrants from France. In the middle years of the century, Alfonso VI rebuilt every bridge between Logroño and Santiago. Diego Gelmirez, the great archbishop of Santiago, who completed the existing cathedral, made it his chief concern to keep open the ‘Frenchmen’s road’. To this end he rebuilt one ruinous town on the route, bought up another, and sprinkled northern Spain with churches and mansiones for the use of pilgrims. In his time the camino was probably the busiest trunk road in Christendom. When, in 1121, the ambassadors of the Almoravid Caliph of Cordova traversed the route on their way to León, they were taken aback by the crowds of travellers using it, and confessed that ‘they had not thought so many people could be found in all Spain.’

  Yet Santiago is scarcely heard of before the end of the ninth century, and no pilgrim is known by name until Gottschalk bishop of Le Puy visited it in 950. It was lifted to the front rank of mediaeval shrines by a combination of shrewd promotion and excellent communications. Other towns attempted, though less successfully, to do the same, and the eleventh century was probably the last in which totally specious ‘discoveries’ of relics could command universal acceptance. In France, England, and Italy, new shrines sprung up like mushrooms after rain, sometimes taking firm root, sometimes provoking a brief spurt of enthusiasm before falling back into oblivion. At Sens, archbishop Leoteric ‘discovered’ part of Moses’ rod in the foundations of his cathedral, ‘at the news of which the faithful converged on Sens not only from every province of France but even from Italy and overseas.’ This, according to Radulph Glaber, was the first of an unprecedented spate of discoveries. In Italy the citizens of Salerno rediscovered their lost relics of St. Matthew the apostle in 1080, while the monks of Monte Cassino rediscovered in the rubble beneath their church the body of St. Benedict. Reading abbey was not founded until 1121, yet by the 1190s its list of relics contained 242 items, including twenty-nine relics of Our Lord, six of the Virgin, nineteen of the patriarchs and prophets, fourteen of apostles, seventy-three of martyrs, fifty-one of confessors, and forty-nine of virgins.

  Several saints were more or less invented under the stimulus of the pilgrimage to Santiago. St. Leonard, who was venerated in a small town near Limoges on one of the busiest roads to Spain, was completely unknown to any writer before the eleventh century. He began to corruscate in miracles around 1017, and the first biography of the saint (a tissue of falsehoods) was written in about 1030. Almost as fraudulent as the cult of St. Leonard were those of St. Eutrope at Saintes and St. Gilles near Aries, both of which owed their considerable prosperity to the fact that they lay on one or other of the roads to the great Galician sanctuary.

  Lay Piety and the Monasteries

  The strongly local character of eleventh-century piety is one of its most remarkable features. Glaber’s boast that ‘men of every nation’ filled the roads to Jerusalem was the truth, but it was far from being the whole truth, for a very high proportion of them came from a few provinces of France and the Rhineland. Burgundy and Lorraine, Gascony, and above all Normandy and Aquitaine, were the homes of these long-distance pilgrims.

  South-western France in particular was struck with great force by the spiritual movements of the eleventh century. The delicate civilization of Languedoc and Aquitaine thrived in an atmosphere of harsh religious extremes. In Limoges, Périgueux, and Angoulême, the proclamation of the millennium and the forcible baptism of the Jews were greeted with enthusiasm several decades before the same distressing symptoms appeared in the Rhineland. It was here that the movement for the moral reform of the Church took its most violent form. In 1031 the councils of Limoges and Bourges published canons of draconian severity against clerical immorality, pronouncing the bastards of priests to be slaves of the Church on whom no one could confer property and whom no judge could set at liberty.

  Shortly after the millennium, Guy count of Limoges and his brother bishop Hilduin led a large party of pilgrims to the Holy Land ranging from the great seigneurs of his court to the most obscure citizens of Limoges. Another unwieldy band departed in 1010 under the leadership of the bishop of Périgueux and the count of Malemart. The army of pilgrims who accompanied William, count of Angoulême, to Jerusalem in 1026 was believed to be the largest mass pilgrimage which had left France since the opening of the overland route. Nor was it only to Jerusalem that these Aquitainian pilgrims went. Among local shrines, St.-Jean d’Angély, St. Eutrope at Saintes, and St.-Léonard de Noblat all leapt to prosperity in the wake of the pilgrimage to St. James. William V, duke of Aquitaine, apparently visited Santiago or Rome every year. Gerald of Corbie, founder and first abbot of La Sauve-Majeure had been to both Rome and Jerusalem in his time.

  The Christian faith of the dukes of Normandy dated only from the middle of the tenth century, but few princes were more assiduous in sending alms to the Holy Places. Their subjects were notoriously the most energetic pilgrims of the eleventh century and became the leaders of the early crusades. The considerable cost of the pilgrimage of the abbot of St.-Vannes to Jerusalem was met by duke Richard, and the army of hangers-on who accompanied the abbot across central Europe included a substantial Norman contingent. Robert, duke of Normandy, went to Jerusalem in person in 1034. His grandson, Robert Curthose, was a prominent figure in the first crusade. In spiritual matters, as Orderic Vitalis remarked, the Normans tended to follow the example of their rulers. Normans were among the leaders of the Spanish crusades, and many of them visited Santiago. In Rome there were hostels which specialized in the business of accommodating them, and the horde of coins discovered beneath the walls of the basilica of St. Paul in 1843 includes a large number of eleventh-century coins minted in Rouen.

  The aggressive habits of Norman travellers, pilgrims, and soldiers of fortune alike, earned them an unsavoury reputation which made it wise for them to make their pilgrimages in large, well-armed bands. In Italy, Norman pilgrims met with intense local hostility after a group of their compatriots, gathered at the shrine of Monte Gargano, had embarked with astonishing success on the conquest of Apulia. John, abbot of Fécamp, complained to pope Leo IX that Norman pilgrims were being robbed, imprisoned, or murdered ‘every day’ by enraged Italian peasants. The Norman conquest of southern Italy also earned them the u
ndying hatred of the Greeks. For three years in the 1020s, every Norman who passed through Constantinople on his way to Jerusalem was cast into prison. Few Normans needed to travel far to find an enemy. Roger I de Tosny had made so many in his violent lifetime that he was afraid to make a pilgrimage to Conques lest he should meet one of them on the road. Instead he founded a church at Conches in Normandy and dedicated it to St. Foy.

  In both Normandy and Aquitaine there were powerful movements of monastic revival. From the abbey of St. Martial at Limoges the influence of Cluny radiated through south-western France, while in the Bordelais a succession of monastic foundations enjoyed the patronage of the counts of Aquitaine. At La Sauve-Majeure Gerald of Corbie created a strange mixture of the monastic and eremitical lives which, by the time of his death in 1095, had been implanted in twenty priories throughout Gascony and Aquitaine. The same pattern can be discerned in Normandy, where the ancient foundations of Mont-St.-Michel and Jumièges combined with the new ones at Bee and Caen to produce a spiritual revival with a strong local character. The third area which sent pilgrims and crusaders in large numbers to Spain and Palestine was Burgundy, and here the influence of Cluny was overpowering. The Clunaic monk Radulph Glaber recorded a steady stream of departures for the Holy Land including several of those strange mass-pilgrimages which are so characteristic of the eleventh century. The enthusiasm for these distant shrines seems to have been strongest at Autun whence, in 1024–5, an immense leaderless mob of pilgrims left for the Holy Places. The news of their doings created a considerable stir in the surrounding provinces. Radulph Glaber’s friends came to tell him in his priory at Bèze. Two years afterwards Richard of St.-Vannes confessed that their example had prompted him to make his own pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Aganon, bishop of Autun, visited the Holy Places at an advanced age in 1083, and lived to see the synod, held at Autun in 1094, which first proposed the launching of the crusade.