Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion

by Jonathan Sumption

  For pilgrims and crusaders alike the normal method of renouncing the world was to enter a monastery on their return. Peter the Venerable heartily approved of those knights whose pilgrimages were merely the prelude to taking the monastic habit. Cluny received many of them. Peter tells us of a knight who gave his horses, fine clothes, and money to Cluny and proceeded ‘as a pauper’ to Jerusalem before ending his days in the abbey. Another spent forty days in Rome and then took the habit at Cluny.

  Even those who made no attempt to live up to this ideal, usually made some conventional gestures towards the mortification of the flesh. Pilgrimages on foot were very common, and among sincere penitents almost obligatory. A long tradition of the Church held that walking was the most virtuous method of travelling. According to Sulpicius Severus, St. Martin had expressed his contempt for priests who went mounted about their duties. St. Hilary of Aries (d. 449) is stated to have walked to Rome at the end of his life ‘because he so much admired the ideal of poverty that he insisted on doing without horse or mule.’ As so often happened, the hagiographic tradition of the early Church moulded the behaviour of later generations. Thus the idealized ‘holy man’ of the eleventh century, in this case St. Albert, travelled on foot:

  ‘Walking completely barefoot, clothed in a simple tunic, and with scarcely a penny on them, he and his companions set out for Rome rich in the abundance of their poverty. They rode on horseback rarely or never, and used their mule only to help weak and infirm pilgrims whom they met on the road.’

  Matilda of Thornbury walked to Canterbury on her crutches at the end of the twelfth century, and even so august a pilgrim as the countess of Clare threw away her shoes as she began her pilgrimage. Barefoot pilgrims were particularly esteemed, and at Limoges in the fourteenth century there is even a reference to pilgrims arriving completely naked. The author of the Life of St. Godric of Finchale gloried in the austerities of the saint during his journeys to Jerusalem. Not only did he go barefoot till his feet were covered in hideous sores, but he ate nothing but dry barley bread; if only fresh bread could be obtained he would keep it in his bag until it was hard and almost unbreakable. Pilgrims rode on horseback at their peril, risking not only the imprecations of idealistic churchmen, but also the possibility of divine chastisement. A canon of Dol, riding to Chartres at the close of the eleventh century, began to feel ill as he approached Orléans, and so thought it prudent to do the rest of the journey on foot. John King found his horse unusually restless on the road to Canterbury and took it as a divine warning to dismount. A woman who suffered from deformed feet was obliged to go to Reading abbey in a carriage and pair, but she was healed during the journey, and thereupon dismounted and proceeded on foot. Thus, although the austere warnings of the Santiago preacher fell on deaf ears, a distant echo of his voice was sometimes heard on the pilgrimage roads.

  Renewal and Death

  One of the stories which Jacques de Vitry collected for use in his sermons told of two brothers, the one an assiduous visitor of shrines, the other not. When they died, the pilgrim was escorted to heaven by flights of angels, while the other made his way alone. At the tribunal of St. Peter both brothers were found wanting, but only the pilgrim was admitted: ‘open to him’, the Lord commanded, ‘for he was a pilgrim.’ The story, like so many of Jacques de Vitry’s, expresses in the simplest pictorial fashion the aspirations of his audiences. The overwhelming majority of mediaeval pilgrims expected to have their sins expunged from their souls as if by a magic wand, and the austere warnings of the preacher of Veneranda Dies fell on deaf ears. The moral theology of the Church laid an overpowering emphasis on the sinfulness of men. The material world they lived in, everything they touched and saw, all that they enjoyed, drew them towards sin, and the few introspective writings which survive are all characterized by a morbid obsession with the accumulated burden of guilt. The penitential system of the eleventh and twelfth centuries offered only a partial solution, for by preserving an elaborate distinction between guilt and punishment, it left the sinner with most of his burden. The prospect of a second baptism, of starting his spiritual life anew, stood before him like a mirage, irresistibly attractive.

  This was what the great shrines offered, with increasing openness, to the sinner. Baptismal imagery constantly recurs in the devotional literature which they put out. At the shrine of Thomas Becket criminals were reformed, sinners amended, debauchers returned to the path of holiness: ‘the moment they approach the shrine … they promise to mend their ways as if rebaptized in the font of their own tears.’ Sentiments of this sort became a commonplace of the later middle ages. Christ informed the Swedish mystic St. Bridget in a vision that she was cleansed of her sins at the moment of entering the basilica of the Holy Sepulchre ‘as if she had just arisen from the baptismal font’. When a noble woman of Bologna entered the Franciscan church of the Portiuncula in 1336, a voice declared to her: ‘just as you were freed of all sin in the baptismal font, so you are now, by the act of entering this church, relieved of the entire burden of your sins.’

  One of the most popular legends of the middle ages was the story of St. Mary the Egyptian, a prostitute who was purified by a visit to the Holy Land. On the feast of the Invention of the Cross she attempted to enter the basilica of the Holy Sepulchre together with the crowds of other pilgrims, but a miraculous force prevented her from passing through the door. Then Mary realized that she alone was unworthy to enter that place. Guided by the Blessed Virgin she walked to the point in the Jordan where Christ had been baptized, and swam across, to live a hermit’s life on the other side. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the story enjoyed an undying popularity. Honorius of Autun preached on St. Mary the Egyptian, and Hildebert of Tours wrote her life in verse. Her story was sculpted on the capitals of the church of St. Etienne in Toulouse. Within a decade of the Christian conquest of Jerusalem, the door which she had been unable to enter and the place where she had immersed herself in the Jordan were marked out for the benefit of pilgrims.

  St. Mary the Egyptian had purified herself by reliving the baptism of Christ. The sins of her past had been obliterated and her spiritual life begun afresh. It was this process of regeneration which mediaeval pilgrims to the Holy Land tried to repeat by bathing in huge numbers in the Jordan. The biographer of St. Silvin, writing at the beginning of the ninth century, recorded that the saint walked to the Jordan ‘to the very place where Christ, the son of God, was baptized … and immersed himself totally in the holy waters. Overcome with elation, he emerged from the river as if reborn, his spiritual ills cured, and his life’s desire fulfilled.’ This symbolic act eloquently explains what it was that brought pilgrims to the Holy Land in such numbers. It became, in the eleventh century, an almost obligatory part of any pilgrimage to Jerusalem to trek the twenty miles to the Jordan and baptize oneself in its waters. After the capture of Jerusalem by the crusaders a large detachment of the victorious army, led by Raymond of St. Gilles and the visionary Peter Bartholomew, marched to the Jordan and swam, fully clothed, across the river. On emerging from the water Raymond was presented by the hermit with a palm of Jericho and, having fulfilled thus the object of his pilgrimage, he began his homeward journey. The ritual was not peculiar to western Europeans. The Danish hero Thorstein Ricard-son baptized himself in the Jordan in about 1025. The Russian princess Euphrosine, as she lay dying in Jerusalem, was unable to go to the Jordan, but one of her companions brought her some of the precious water in a bottle, ‘which she received with joy and gratitude, drinking it and spreading it over her body to wash away the sins of the past’. When Dietrich of Wurzburg visited the Holy Land in c. 1172, he counted 60,000 pilgrims (an exaggeration, no doubt) standing with candles in their hands on the banks of the Jordan. So popular had the ritual become that it was adopted at Santiago. Two miles before the city there was a stream where French pilgrims were in the habit of totally immersing themselves ‘for love of the apostle’.

  According to Jacques de Vitry there were three reasons for
the pilgrim to immerse himself in the Jordan. First, the waters of the Jordan were a relic which Christ had sanctified by the touch of His flesh. Secondly, every pilgrim should seek to imitate, however inadequately, the perfection of Christ; by bathing in the Jordan, Christ had bestowed upon it regenerative powers through which the pilgrim could enjoy a second baptism. Finally, Naaman the Syrian had been cleansed of his leprosy in the Jordan ‘which was the model of purification for future generations’.

  The tendency of the later middle ages was to venerate the Jordan exclusively as a relic. In a guide-book written at the end of the thirteenth century, the three reasons given by Jacques de Vitry are reduced to one, namely that ‘these are the very waters which came into contact with the body of Christ, our Redeemer.’ In 1483 Felix Faber reported that several knights of his party dived into the Jordan fully clothed, in the belief that their clothes would become impenetrable to the weapons of their enemies. Others brought small bells with them which they dipped in the water in the hope that, if they were rung thereafter, no thunder or lightning would threaten any area within earshot. ‘However whether these vulgar opinions are true or false’, the Dominican discreetly added, ‘I leave for the sensible reader to decide for himself.’ Certainly it was by now common for pilgrims to bring bottles of Jordan water home with them, for in 1480, as a pilgrim, ship lay becalmed in the bay of Jaffa, its passengers vigorously debated the question whether the boat was capable of movement so long as part of the Jordan remained on board. One of them stood on the rail and announced that he had himself seen a papal bull at St. Peter’s in Rome excommunicating those who removed water from the Jordan. This statement was evidently found convincing, for most of the pilgrims hastily threw their phials of water overboard, and the wind rose immediately.

  When princess Euphrosine came to Jerusalem in 1173, it was with the fixed intention of dying there. A desire to die in Jerusalem was in fact expressed by several of those pilgrims of the eleventh century who believed that the end of the world was imminent. It is closely allied with the notion that the Holy Places offered to the sinner the means of wiping clean the slate of his past sins. Pilgrims who felt that they had just experienced a process of spiritual renewal hoped to die while they were still in their perfect state. The notorious sinner Eskill Sveinsson prayed: ‘I am afraid, O Lord, that when I return to my native country, I shall be seduced by Fortune and tempted into sin, and then I shall return to my old ways. I pray you therefore that for the good of my soul, you will deliver me now from the bonds of this earthly life and from the weight of my sins, and lead me to everlasting rest.’ ‘Lord Jesus Christ, who knowest all things’, another begged, ‘if I cannot purge myself of my former vices, then permit me not to return to my country but grant that I may die here … and be saved.’ According to Caesarius of Heisterbach his prayer was answered, ‘and thus, a few days later, he was united with the citizens of the heavenly Jerusalem.’ The field of Aceldama, where pilgrims who died in Jerusalem were buried, bore eloquent witness to the vast number of pilgrims who died far from their homes, happy in the conviction that the stains of sin had been washed away.

  The place of a man’s burial was a matter of some importance to him, for the mediaeval Church firmly believed in the bodily resurrection of the dead. Those who were buried near the shrine of a great saint would rise in that very place on the Last Day, in the company of the saint. He would throw a mantle of protection over them at the tribunal of Christ, and they would ascend to Heaven in his wake. In Rogier van der Weyden’s great altarpiece of the Last Judgement, in the hospital at Beaune, the blessed and the damned can be seen emerging from the ground and reaching out to grasp the robes of the saints above them. In the early Church this was a very powerful idea which shaped the attitudes of churchmen to the burial of the dead. Paulinus of Nola had his son buried near the martyrs’ tombs at Alcala, in Spain, ‘so that the proximity of their blood might purify his’. When the early Christian cemetery at Aries was excavated, it was found that all the sarcophagi were piled, one on top of the other, over the tomb of a local martyr. In the middle ages this notion was held with the same immovable conviction. When abbot Suger closed his biography of Louis VI with an account of the obsequies of the dead king at St.-Denis, he concluded with these words: ‘in that place he awaits the resurrection of the dead at the last day. At St.-Denis he is closer in spirit to the army of the saints because his body is buried close to the holy martyrs Denis, Eleutheria, and Rusticus. And so at the Last Day he will benefit by their advocacy.’

  At the Last Day Christ too would be found in the place where he had been buried, and would dispense judgement to men from his sepulchre. The author of a guide to the Holy Land, written at the beginning of the twelfth century, states as a fact that the Last Judgement would be held in the valley of Jehosaphet on the eastern side of Jerusalem, not far, in fact, from the pilgrims’ cemetery of Aceldama. Some seventy years later a German pilgrim reported that the tribunal would be set up in a field in the valley of Ennon and that simple-minded pilgrims were in the habit of reserving stones for themselves to sit on and enjoy a good view. This belief still prevailed at the end of the fifteenth century, when several of Felix Faber’s companions set about claiming seats not only for themselves but also for their friends at home. The pilgrim who was buried within yards of the site of the Last Judgement would be resurrected in the holiest place on the earth. Just as Louis VI would enjoy the patronage of St. Denis at the awful tribunal, so the pilgrim who died in Jerusalem would have the favour of the divine judge himself. This is what the Autun pilgrim Lethbald meant when, in 1025, he entered the basilica of the Anastasis in Jerusalem, and prayed to be allowed to die there, ‘for I believe that thus … my soul shall follow in the track of yours and enter Paradise.’

  In the eleventh century, millenarian fears, always a strong undercurrent of mediaeval thought, gave a peculiar urgency to the quest for the remission of sins. No period had such a strong belief in the imminence of divine judgement. To mediaeval men history was not an ever-continuing process. It had a formal, dramatic unity, for the events of which the chroniclers wrote were the direct consequences of the fall of Man and they led directly to the end of the world. The chronicle of Otto of Friesing, who died in 1158, begins at the Creation and ends with the Last Judgement. ‘Manifest signs portend the destruction of the world, and ruin builds up around us’, began a charter of the seventh century. These fears were strangely linked with political events, for chaos and disorder in the affairs of men were certain portents of the Last Day. In the middle of the tenth century the notion was embodied in a little book, the Libellus de Antichristo of Adso of Montiérender, which held the field amongst millenarian writings until it was replaced in the later middle ages by the even stranger works of Joachim of Fiore. Adso borrowed from the Book of Daniel the prophecy that there would be four empires in the history of the world, asserting that the fourth and last of these empires was the Roman empire. Like all his contemporaries, Adso recognized in the Christian German empire of his own day a continuation of the Roman empire, and it followed that when the Christian German empire ended, so too would the history of the world.

  Adso himself had every confidence in the resilience of the empire. But he wrote at the end of a century of political chaos during which western Europe had been continuously raided and pillaged by Arabs, Norsemen, and Magyars, and its political fabric had come close to total dissolution. His contemporaries had no reason to be confident of the future, and the imminence of divine retribution was their constant preoccupation. They not only knew that the world was drawing near to its end, but they had clear ideas as to how and where the Last Judgement would occur, and what signs would precede it. There would be famine, earthquakes, and other natural disasters, followed by the dissolution of all political power, as the Apocalypse had foretold. Then Antichrist would be born in Babylon of the tribe of Dan and would rule the world until the descent of Christ and his saints. When the time came for the dissolution of all political power
the emperor would march to Jerusalem and surrender the insignia of office in the church of the Holy Sepulchre. There he would witness with his own eyes the Last Judgement. The polemicist Benzo of Alba saw his contemporary, the emperor Henry IV, in this role. He would be the last emperor, and would lead his army to Jerusalem ‘where he will visit the Holy Sepulchre and be crowned by He who lives for ever and ever, and whose tomb shall shine forth in glory.’ At that moment the earthly and the celestial Jerusalem would be one.