Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion

by Jonathan Sumption

  The enthusiasm which the fate of the Holy Places aroused in these three provinces of France had much to do with the monastic revival. The interest of the monks in the Holy Land was reflected in their libraries. The library of St. Martial at Limoges was a mine of topographical information on the Holy Land. It included a manuscript of the pilgrimage of Etheria which, had it survived, might have contained the part missing in our text. The library of Moissac contained several itineraries, including a manuscript of the fourth-century ‘Bordeaux pilgrim’ and another written in the vernacular (‘simplice sermona scripta’). The books which they read, the hymns which they sang, the sculptures which they passed on their way through the cloister to the chapter house, all betray the same passionate interest in the Holy City. Several monasteries of southern France administered estates on behalf of the basilica of the Holy Sepulchre, which had by now acquired extensive endowments in the west.

  The abbey of Cluny is often credited with having organized the pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Certainly the abbots looked on it with favour, and had done much to produce the spiritual environment which nurtured it. But of active direction there is no evidence at all. Much more significant is their role in promoting the pilgrimage to Santiago. The Spanish crusades were followed with great interest at Cluny, and the Burgundian knights who took part spent much of their spoil on the enrichment of the abbey. In the reign of Alfonso VI of Léon and Castile (1065–1109), Cluny obtained a firm grip on the Church in north-western Spain. In 1094 a Clunaic monk became bishop of Santiago. By the close of the eleventh century many of the shrines and monasteries on the pilgrims’ roads to Santiago had become dependencies of Cluny, including Vézelay, St. Martial of Limoges, St.-Gilles, Moissac, and St. Eutrope at Saintes.

  Particularly interesting is the hand, of Cluny in composing the elaborate promotional literature put out by the church of Santiago. Most of it is contained in the Liber Sancti Jacobi, an exquisitely produced manuscript in the cathedral library. The Liber consists of five quite separate books bearing on the pilgrimage to St. James, proclaiming at the beginning and end that it was written for the benefit of the abbot of Cluny by pope Calixtus II. The attribution is fictitious, for there are parts which could not have been written by any Cluniac. But the second book, which consists of the Miracles of St. James, bears strongly the imprint of Cluny. Most of the miracles occurred to inhabitants of Burgundy, the Viennois, or the Lyonnais, and some happened within a few miles of the abbey. A few are attributed to a canon of Besançon, while another was related by an abbot of Vézelay. Three miraculous stories which St. Anselm told to abbot Hugh during a prolonged visit to Cluny in 1104 all appear with minor alterations in the Miracles of St. James. These miracles were Cluny’s greatest contribution to the pilgrimage of St. James. They were plagiarized by every collector of marvellous stories, copied out in a great number of manuscripts from the twelfth century to the sixteenth, set forth in sculpture and stained glass throughout Europe. Arnaldo de Monte, a monk of Ripoll who saw the Liber Sancti Jacobi at Santiago in 1173, justly remarked that it was these miracles which had made the apostle ‘shine forth as bright as the stars in every part of the world’.

  Cluny’s message faithfully reflected the spiritual values of the age. It insisted on the overriding importance of the remission of sins, and although men like St. Hugh had no doubt that the best possible chance of remission lay in taking the monastic habit, they appreciated the value of pilgrimage for those whose responsibilities prevented them from abandoning the worldly life. Abbot Mayeul, according to his twelfth-century biographer, ‘knew that life itself was but a pilgrimage and that man lived as a fleeting guest upon the earth. He would often undertake the hardships of a pilgrim’s life, expending all his bodily strength … on travelling across the Alps to Rome.’ One of Mayeul’s contemporaries, who knew him well, recorded that tears would come to his eyes as he approached the city ‘for he knew that he would shortly behold the glorious apostles as if he were standing face to face with them.’

  The message was addressed with special urgency to the nobility, whose social responsibilities forced on them a worldly existence and exposed them to the temptations of power. The abbots of Cluny, like so many reforming churchmen of their day, believed in knighthood as an order of the Church, upholding the values of the Church not only in war but also in peace. So, in his treatise On the Christian Life, Bonizo of Sutri devoted a whole chapter to the duties of knights – the keeping of the peace, the protection of the poor, the defence of the Church, the persecution of heresy. The aristocratic poetry of the period shows that the nobility itself was acutely aware of its special spiritual needs. The troubadour William IX, duke of Aquitaine (d. 1127), sang of the dissipation of his youth and the imminence of death and judgement. A new age of religious sensitivity made William’s contemporaries deeply uncomfortable about the inevitable sinfulness of their way of life. A century later the seigneur de Berzé was induced to join the fourth crusade by his overpowering feelings of guilt for the sins which his social status had forced on him:

  Li un de nous sont usurier

  Li autre larron et murdrier

  Li autre son plain de luxure

  E li autre de desmesure;

  Li autre sont plain d’envie

  E d’orgueill e de tricherie,

  E tantes manières pechommes

  Nous qui en ce vill siècle sommes

  Que molt grant merveille sera

  Se ja Diex de nul en ara

  Misericorde ne merci.

  Some of us are usurers, others thieves and murderers. We sin by self-indulgence, by excess, pride, and deceit. We who live the worldly life are drawn so deeply into sin that it will be a miracle indeed if God has mercy on us.

  But by almsgiving, pilgrimage, or taking the Cross, such men were offered an immediate opportunity of bringing that miracle about. ‘Every day we see with our own eyes the death of men’, wrote Roger count of Foix when presenting a church to Cluny; ‘we know that we too must shortly die, and mindful of these things we have given much thought to the salvation of our souls and the remission of our most terrible sins.’ It was a pity, as the seigneur de Berzé naively remarked, that one could not be warned of one’s approaching death a year or two in advance, so as to prepare one’s soul for the great tribunal ‘where I shall have no essoins to delay the awful verdict.’

  In the early tenth century, abbot Odo of Cluny presented to his contemporaries an idealized portrait of the model knight in his Life of Gerald, count of Aurillac. Gerald, who died in 909, is shown as a man who renounced the brutal and worldly side of knightly life, its hunting, revelry, and violence. He did not, like many aristocratic hermits, renounce his knightly status, but used it to keep the peace and protect his vassals and tenants. He remained in the world and yet above it, and he chose devotional exercises which were in keeping with his noble status. Pilgrimage was the foremost of these. Gerald first visited Rome in the 880s, accompanied by several knights of his household, and on his return he founded a monastery at Aurillac dedicated to St. Peter. Thereafter he went every other year to Rome, and in the intervening years visited other shrines, including those of St. Hilary at Poitiers, St. Martial at Limoges, and St. Martin at Tours. Odo believed that these pilgrimages were the outcome of his feelings of guilt, born of the conflict between his semi-monastic way of life and his knightly status.

  ‘When he prayed to God from his innermost heart … he was afraid that God would not listen to him as long as evil thoughts remained in his mind…. For his sins, which might perhaps seem trivial to us, weighed heavily on his conscience and he was always thinking of ways to atone for them and secure the remission of them from a merciful God. And so God, in his mercy, showed him the way, that is, the way of prayer … and he developed the habit of going regularly to Rome.’

  Idealized as it was, Odo’s description did much to mould contemporary notions of lay piety. According to Adémar de Chabannes, William V, duke of Aquitaine, was ‘amiable to all, of good counsel, gen
erous with his wealth, a defender of the poor, the father of monks, and a builder and lover of churches, particularly the Church of Rome’. Like Gerald, he found pilgrimage a congenial method of expiating his sins, compatible with his almost royal status as the principal feudatory of the French Crown. From his earliest youth, ‘he was accustomed to go every year to the tombs of the apostles in Rome, and if he could not get there, to St. James of Compostella. … Such was the splendour of his retinue and the nobility of his bearing on these occasions, that onlookers took him for a king rather than a duke.’ The annual or biennial pilgrimage became a recognized mark of aristocratic piety. An Aquitainian knight whom St. Mary Magdalene raised from the dead in the mid-twelfth century used to go annually to Vézelay, as did Adalard, another knight who benefited from the Magdalene’s miraculous powers.

  No materials exist to make a statistical analysis of the clientele of a great mediaeval shrine, but the pilgrimage to Canterbury in the decade after Becket’s death is probably typical of other major sanctuaries of the twelfth century. The two massive collections of miracles identify a total of 665 pilgrims who visited Canterbury between 1171 and 1177. The authors describe the social status of nearly two-thirds of these pilgrims, from which it appears that more than eight per cent of them were of the higher nobility (i.e. earls, great magnates, potentes, etc.), and no less than twenty-six per cent were knights. Some allowance should be made for the fact that the arrival of a nobleman was more likely to be recorded than that of a peasant, but these figures are out of all proportion to the numerical importance of the nobility in the population at large. Moreover the scraps of evidence which survive from continental shrines suggest that they are no means untypical. It was very different in the fourteenth century, when the Florentine diplomat Paolo Vergerio was told by his guide in Rome that bishops and princes had long abandoned the Lenten ‘stations’, which were now given over to the scum of the earth. Very different too from the situation in England on the eve of the Reformation, when the commissioners for the dissolution of the monasteries could dismiss the pilgrims they found at Bury St. Edmunds as poor fools and old women.

  The Mortification of the Flesh

  One of the less admirable characteristics of aristocratic pilgrimages was the comfortable, sometimes luxurious manner in which they were often performed. William V of Aquitaine was not the only nobleman whose manner of travelling led onlookers to believe that he was a king. The official historian of the dukes of Normandy recorded that such was the magnificence of duke Robert when passing through Constantinople in 1035, and such the largesse which he dispensed to the inhabitants, that they concluded that he was the king of France. Ealdred, bishop of Worcester, travelled through eastern Europe in 1059 ‘in such state as none had displayed before him’. Gunther, bishop of Bamberg, who led several thousand Germans on a mass pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1064, informed the canons of his cathedral that the citizens of Constantinople, seeing his splendid array, had assumed him to be a king disguised as a bishop in order to avoid capture by the Arabs. Gunther had every reason to fear capture by the Arabs, for he and the other leaders of the host of pilgrims travelled in litters carried by livened retainers; their tents were hung with silk and they ate splendid repasts nightly off gold and silver plate which was carried behind them on long trains of packhorses. As a result they found themselves attacked at every stage by the covetous inhabitants of eastern Europe and Palestine, losing much of their treasure and suffering heavy casualties. At least one contemporary, the annalist Lambert of Hersfeld, regarded this as a proper punishment for their sinful pride.

  Others were inclined to agree with him, and for this reason there is a certain ambivalence amongst churchmen of the twelfth century towards the pilgrimage to the Holy Land. When a knight called Hugh Catula decided to go to Jerusalem instead of entering the monastery of Cluny, Peter the Venerable wrote to him protesting that although pilgrimage might be a valuable spiritual exercise if properly performed, it could not offer the same prospect of salvation as the monastic habit: ‘it is better to serve God in humility and poverty for ever than to set out in grandeur and luxury for Jerusalem. Whence it follows that if it is good to visit the Holy Land and survey the places where Our Lord trod, then it is even better to enter Heaven where you will see Our Lord face to face.’ Salvation, he remarked on another occasion, was ‘achieved by holy lives, not holy places’. Yet Peter’s attitude is not as straightforward as it appears. Writing to an abbot of his acquaintance, Peter commended his decision to go to Palestine, observing that a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre over such a distance would be as pleasing to God as that first pilgrimage of the holy women to the tomb on Easter Sunday. In Peter’s opinion, the ideal pilgrim was one whose pilgrimage was a monastic exercise as exacting as that which St. Jerome had required of his followers in the fourth century. Jerome’s ideal was thus reasserted in all its rigour at a time when the coming of the penitential pilgrimage had made it very largely meaningless.

  In the first book of the Liber Sancti Jacobi there is a remarkable sermon, known from its opening words as the sermon Veneranda Dies. It was attributed (wrongly) to pope Calixtus II, and intended to be read to pilgrims on the vigil of 30th December, one of the two feasts of St. James. ‘The way of St. James’, it begins, ‘is fine but narrow, as narrow as the path of salvation itself. That path is the shunning of vice, the mortification of the flesh, and the increasing of virtue.’ The preacher’s purpose was to deny that pilgrims to St. James would automatically be saved as if the apostle had waved a magic wand over them, ‘for a wand’, he told them, ‘is an external, material thing, whereas sin is an internal, spiritual evil.’ Having thus dismissed the spiritual ideas of most of his audience, the preacher urged them to make their pilgrimage a monastic exercise of the most austere sort:

  ‘The pilgrim may bring with him no money at all, except perhaps to distribute it to the poor on the road. Those who sell their property before leaving must give every penny of it to the poor, for if they spend it on their own journey they are departing from the path of the Lord. In times past the faithful had but one heart and one soul, and they held all property in common, owning nothing of their own; just so, the pilgrims of today must hold everything in common and travel together with one heart and one soul. To do otherwise would be disgraceful and outrageous…. Goods shared in common are worth much more than goods owned by individuals. Thus it is that the pilgrim who dies on the road with money in his pocket is permanently excluded from the kingdom of heaven. For what benefit can a man possibly derive from a pilgrimage undertaken in a spirit of sin?’

  The preacher then turned his attention to those comfortable persons who ate and drank their way across the roads of Europe in the hope of salvation.

  ‘Truly, these are not real pilgrims at all, but thieves and robbers who have abandoned the way of apostolic poverty and chosen instead the path of damnation…. If the Lord chose to enter Jerusalem on a mule rather than a horse, then what are we to think of those who parade up and down before us on horseback? … If St. Peter entered Rome with nothing but a crucifix, why do so many pilgrims come here with bulging purses and trunks of spare clothes, eating succulent food and drinking heady wine? … St. James was a wanderer without money or shoes and yet ascended to heaven as soon as he died; what, then, will happen to those who make opulent progresses to his shrine surrounded by all the evidence of their wealth?’

  Turning from the general to the particular, the preacher directed his invective against those who entered Santiago fattened on the profits of usury, lying and swearing, joking, and singing bawdy, drunken songs. In fact, a pilgrimage was worthless unless it was accompanied by a total moral reformation in the pilgrim. Not only must he go to Santiago in the right spirit, but he must persevere in that spirit for the rest of his days. ‘If he was previously a spoliator, he must become an almsgiver; if he was boastful he must be forever modest; if greedy, generous; if a fornicator or adulterer, chaste; if drunk, sober. That is to say that from every sin whi
ch he committed before his pilgrimage, he must afterwards abstain completely.’

  These opinions were not simply mouthed in vain by a few idealistic churchmen. A small minority of pilgrims attempted to put them into practice, not, perhaps, on the roads to Santiago, but certainly in Palestine during the century of Christian rule. Some of them, like St. Godric, the hermit of Finchale who visited Jerusalem in the early twelfth century, tended the sick in the Hospital of St. John. Others chose the traditional eremetical life and retired to an isolated cabin in the desert wastes of Palestine. The Greek monk John Phocas, who visited the Holy Land in about 1175, met several of these lonely ‘men of God’. In a hut by the Jordan, he encountered an aged Spaniard, ‘a very pleasing and admirable person from whose conversation we derived great benefit.’ Another hermit, this time an Italian from Calabria, was found with twelve brethren inhabiting a shed by the ruins of Mount Carmel. Even after the disaster which engulfed the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem in 1187, communities of Christian hermits survived in Syria, at the Quarantana, in the valley of the Jordan and the district of Galilee. Jacques de Vitry, writing in the 1220s, regarded the preservation of their way of life as a legitimate reason for launching another crusade. Those pilgrims who became hermits and recluses were drawn chiefly from the noble and well-to-do. Rayner Pisani, who suddenly went to live alone on Mount Tabor in the middle of the twelfth century, was a wealthy merchant of Pisa whose ‘conversion’ occurred when he listened to a sermon on the humanity of Christ, during a business visit to Tyre. ‘Because the life of the world was onerous’, wrote his biographer and disciple, ‘he prayed to God day and night to help him put aside all his wealth, to put on the pilgrim’s habit and be worthy of it.’ Many of these hermits came from northern Italy, the birthplace of the eremitical movement of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. William of Mallavalle, who ended his days as a recluse in the wilderness north of Pisa, was a knight who had marked his ‘conversion’ to the spiritual life by ‘throwing aside his breastplate’ and making a pilgrimage to the Holy Places. Such figures were the spiritual heroes of the twelfth century, and their example was frequently highly infectious. In June 1200, when Berthold von Neuen-burg sold all his belongings and retired to a hermitage in Palestine, he found many followers in the Breisgau region; ‘a large number of noblemen, together with their wives and children, sold all their goods and vowed to become serfs of the Holy Sepulchre.’ The ideal of renouncing the world was adopted by some crusaders. Jacques de Vitry knew a crusader who had his family brought before him as he left in order to make his departure the more bitter and meritorious. Indeed, the preacher complained that some crusaders were worthless as fighting men on account of the austerities which they inflicted on themselves. Nevertheless it was generally agreed that a crusading army was bound by spiritual conventions which would not have applied to any other army. Hence when Saladin offered to accommodate Hubert Walter at his expense in Jerusalem, the archbishop refused on the ground that ‘we are pilgrims and can never accept such comforts.’