Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion

by Jonathan Sumption

  The condition of the roads was the first obstacle. Europe relied, throughout the middle ages, on the network of roads bequeathed to it by the Roman empire. This network was far from comprehensive, but new roads did appear from time to time in response to changing needs. Thus the Roman road from Lyon to the south-west was diverted in the eleventh century through the hard granite mountains of the Ségalas to take it past the abbey of Conques; when the pilgrimage to Conques was forgotten, in the fourteenth century travellers returned to the old road. In France, the roads were never allowed to fall into complete disrepair, as they were in parts of England. Nevertheless travel was not easy and even an experienced rider could not expect to cover more than thirty miles in a day. The seigneur de Caumont, who rode from Caumont to Santiago in 1418, was reduced to six miles a day in the Pyrenees and the Asturias, but he was capable of doing twenty-seven miles when the terrain was good.

  The manor was responsible for the upkeep of the roads, but too often it had few resources and little enthusiasm for the work. Important roads, particularly if they were used by pilgrims, were frequently maintained by volunteers. For the maintenance of roads was regarded as a work of charity equivalent, for example, to almsgiving. Bridge-building was particularly meritorious, ‘a service to posterity and therefore pleasing to God’, declares a charter of 1031 concerning the construction of a bridge over the Loire at Tours. French hermits in northern Spain were active road-builders at the time when the great road to Santiago was being rebuilt by the Castilian kings. Their names are preserved in the Guide for Pilgrims to Santiago, ‘and may their souls and those of their companions rest in everlasting peace.’ The bridge over the river Miño at Puerto Marin was rebuilt after a civil war by Peter the Pilgrim. St. Domingo ‘de la Calzada’, another French immigrant, founded a celebrated hospice on the site of his hut by the river Oja, and spanned the stream with a wooden bridge; he built the first cobbled road across the marshy expanse between Nájera and Redecilla. Several mediaeval roads and bridges still survive in Spain and southern France, built under the impulsion of the pilgrimage to Santiago. At St.-Chély d’Aubrac and St.-Michel Pied-de-Port the old track, its stones worn or displaced, can still be followed for a few hundred yards. The fine stone bridges which span the river at Orthez and Oloron in Gascony date from the fourteenth century and replaced older, wooden ones. At Puente la Reina one can still see the great five-arched bridge where the two roads from southern France to Santiago came together.

  The Guide for Pilgrims to Santiago catalogues the full range of catastrophes which could overcome the traveller on the roads in the twelfth century. It is both a historical guide and a route-book, offering its readers information about towns and hospices, a few useful words of the Basque language, an architectural description of Santiago cathedral, and precise directions on how to get there. The pilgrim is warned that the eight-mile ascent of the Port de Cize, the principal pass over the Pyrenees, is a steep climb; that in Galicia there are thick forests and few towns; that mosquitoes infest the marshy plain south of Bordeaux where the traveller who strays from the road can sink up to his knees in mud. Some of the rivers are impassable. Several pilgrims had been drowned at Sorde, where travellers and their horses were ferried across the river on hollowed-out tree trunks. Other rivers were undrinkable, like the salt stream at Lorca, where the author of the Guide found two Basques earning their living by skinning the horses who had died after drinking from it. Pilgrims were in theory exempt from the payment of tolls, but nevertheless the Guide reports that the local lords exacted payment from every traveller in the Béam. At the foot of the Port de Cize, pilgrims were searched and beaten with sticks if they could not pay the toll. The author demanded immediate action by the bishop and the king of Aragon, but it was more than half a century before the extortionists suffered retribution at the hands of Richard Coeur-de-Lion.

  The supply of food and fodder is a constantly recurring theme in the Guide, and an important one at a time when it dictated the beginning and end of the travelling season much more effectively than the weather. There was no fodder to be had in the Landes south of Bordeaux, and the horseman was well-advised to bring three days’ supply with him. There were parts of the route where the pilgrim would find it hard to buy a good meal for himself, even in summer. The food and wine were excellent in Gascony but dreadful in the Basque country. Fish caught in the river Ebro were disgusting, even poisonous. In general, concludes the Guide, Spanish meat should be avoided by those who are unused to it, ‘and if any one can eat their fish without feeling sick, then he must have a stronger constitution than most of us.’

  Against wild animals, bad roads, and natural catastrophes, the traveller had no protection. But, in theory, he enjoyed a measure of protection against man-made hazards. Every criminal code imposed special penalties on those who molested travellers, and synods of bishops regularly threatened them with the severest ecclesiastical censures. In 1096 a steward of the king of France was excommunicated for seizing a vassal of his on the road to Vézelay during Lent. ‘But you should know’, the archbishop of Lyon pointed out, ‘that all those who travel to the shrines of the saints are protected against attack at all times, and not only in Lent. Those who disturb their journey will suffer the harshest penalties of the Church, so that the fear of God may remain for ever in their eyes.’ From 1303 onwards, molesters of pilgrims were included in the annual bull In Coena Domini, in which the pope solemnly anathematized an ever-lengthening list of obnoxious persons. But although it is true that pilgrims were marginally safer from attack than other travellers, they can never have felt secure. In the eleventh century the Tuscan nobleman Gerard of Galeria supported himself in part by attacking rich pilgrims on the roads north of Rome. King Harold’s brother Tostig was one of his victims. The French robber-baron Thomas de Marle owed much of his notoriety to his practice of holding pilgrims to ransom and mutilating them if the ransom was not paid. He terrorized the roads of northern France for many years before Louis VI mounted a military expedition against him in 1128. From the constant complaints of the ecclesiastical authorities, it is clear that Thomas had many imitators. We are better informed, however, of the bandits of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, most of whom were never brought to justice. The Roman Jubilee of 1350 brought considerable prosperity to one Berthold von Eberstein, who descended daily on the long processions of pilgrims winding through the Rhine valley. The German routier Werner von Urslinger was another bandit who enriched himself in 1350. His hunting-ground was Tuscany, where several of the main routes to Rome met. Jacopo Gabrielli, the papal rector of the Patrimony, was allowed 14,000 florins to raise mercenaries against him, the cost to be defrayed from the offerings at the Roman basilicas. The banditry of the later middle ages is remarkable for its international quality. The roads of northern Italy were infested with German robbers. On the roads which crossed northern Spain to Santiago, many of the bandits seem to have been Englishmen. In 1318 the provost of Estella spent several weeks in pursuit of one John of London, who had robbed pilgrims as they slept in a local hospice. In the following year a number of English bandits were captured at Pamplona. It was the same in the middle east. After the disappearance, in 1187, of the crusading kingdom of Jerusalem, the hills of Palestine were terrorized by brigands from every western nation, Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Germans, common criminals and former knights Templar, living side by side with Arabs for whom brigandage had been a way of life for centuries.

  To the depredations of professional robber bands were added those of innkeepers and villagers, who found the constant stream of pilgrims passing their doors a temptation too great to resist. The inhabitants of the coastal villages of southern Normandy repeatedly waylaid pilgrims bound for Mont-St.-Michel. Those of northern Italy were said, in 1049, to be murdering Norman pilgrims ‘daily’. Rather later, the villages of Navarre and the Basque country took to preying on pilgrims passing on the roads to Santiago; at the border towns of Sorde and Lespéron this was even described as ‘customa
ry’. Lawlessness on this scale was a familiar problem whenever the rise of a great sanctuary drew its seasonal flux of pilgrims onto the roads. The anarchic state of Italy in 1350 encouraged whole villages to seize and despoil pilgrims travelling to the Roman Jubilee. Peter, bishop of Rodez, and his companion were ambushed outside the village of Sant’ Adriano in Sabina and were saved only by the timely arrival of Napoleone Orsini. The Romans themselves were reported to be mounting expeditions to rob pilgrims on the roads north of the city. One observer believed that half the pilgrims who set out for Rome in 1350 were robbed or killed on the way.

  Innkeepers, never the most popular of men, were blamed for many thefts and murders. The most celebrated of all the miracles of St. James told of a man wrongly hanged for stealing money from the pockets of some wealthy German pilgrims as they slept in an inn at Toulouse. The true culprit, it transpired, was the innkeeper, ‘wherefore it is clear that pilgrims should take great care before staying at an inn lest a similar fraud be perpetrated on them.’ German pilgrims were notoriously the victims of these frauds, probably because they travelled in a somewhat more showy style than others. Tales of gruesome murders of pilgrims in lonely inns were commonplace. In the forest of Châtenay, near Mâcon, there lived, at the beginning of the eleventh century, an innkeeper who used to accommodate travellers at night and murder them as they slept. According to Radulph Glaber, an investigation by the authorities revealed eighty-eight bodies hidden in his hut.

  No one doubted that the journey to Jerusalem was by far the most dangerous that a pilgrim could undertake. Every hazard which a mediaeval traveller could encounter is exemplified in the experiences of those who walked three thousand miles or endured six weeks in a tiny, unstable boat, in order to visit the Holy Places.

  At the beginning of the eleventh century the conversion of Hungary and the revival of Byzantium had brought most of the overland route to Jerusalem under nominal Christian rule. Latin pilgrims learned how nominal that rule was in 1053, when the Irish pilgrim, Colman, was battered to death at Stockerau outside Vienna, after an angry mob had. taken him for a government spy. Although travellers now passed the frontier of the Byzantine empire at Belgrade, behind that frontier lay tracts of untamed territory which never recognized Byzantine rule. Lietbert, bishop of Cambrai, found Christian slaves being sold here in the summer of 1054. The valley of the Danube was so insecure in 1053 that travellers were being turned back by border guards at Belgrade. Pilgrims passed the southern extremity of the Byzantine empire at the coastal town of Lattakieh in northern Syria. Here again, they encountered a deeply hostile and suspicious population. Gerald of Saumur was battered to death by Syrian peasants in 1021, while others, like Anselm of Ardres, fell into the hands of Moslem fanatics and were lucky to escape by renouncing their faith.

  Conditions were probably at their worst in 1064–5, when seven thousand unarmed German pilgrims made their way overland to Jerusalem under the leadership of Gunther, bishop of Bamberg. ‘Truly we have been through fire and water’, Gunther wrote to the canons of his cathedral from Lattakieh; ‘… we have been harassed by the Hungarians, attacked by the Bulgars, and driven to flight by the Turks, we have endured the insults of the arrogant Greeks of Constantinople and the rabid fury of the Cilicians. But we are afraid that even worse disasters lie ahead of us.’ And so it was. On Good Friday 1065, as the long column of pilgrims was passing through an abandoned village near Caesarea, a terrifying scream of triumph was heard as hordes of mounted Arabs descended on them ‘as famished wolves leap upon their prey’. The pilgrims in the front of the procession were cut down in hundreds and their leader, the bishop of Utrecht, left half dead in the sand. Those at the rear fled to a nearby farmhouse where they held out for three days until the arrival of the Arab governor of Ramleh.

  The Arab authorities in Palestine were weak rather than malevolent, and they were well aware of the economic benefits which Christian pilgrimages brought to them. The only point of conflict was at the gates of Jerusalem, where pilgrims were required to pay a toll of one gold piece each. This was a large sum of money, which many pilgrims did not have by the time they reached Jerusalem. When Robert, duke of Normandy, arrived there in 1036 he found several hundred pilgrims lying starving beneath the walls, begging for alms with which to pay the keepers of the toll-gate. The Greeks also levied tolls on pilgrims. Basil II demanded payment from all western travellers arriving in Constantinople by sea, and his successors set up toll-gates at two points on the overland route. Pilgrims were charged half a gold piece each, three gold pieces if they were mounted. These exactions were the source of some bitterness in the west. In 1056 pope Victor I addressed a long complaint to the empress Theodora, pointing out that her officials were taking advantage of the neutrality of the Arabs to levy taxes within the precinct of the Holy Sepulchre itself.

  The conquest of parts of Palestine and Syria by the crusaders served to increase the number of pilgrimages to the Holy Land without making their journey any safer. Guerrilla raids constantly cut the roads leading to Jerusalem. In 1172 a traveller reported that churches lying within a mile of the city were fortified against the infidel. Ascalon, which remained in Arab hands until 1153, was the base from which raids were launched against the roads west to Joppa and south to Hebron. The Joppa road was the lifeline between Jerusalem and the sea, along which travelled almost every pilgrim who visited the Holy Land in the twelfth century. An English pilgrim who followed the road in October 1102 described how the Arabs ‘lay hidden in caves and crevices, waiting day and night for people travelling in small parties or straggling behind their groups. At one moment they are everywhere, the next they are gone. Their presence is felt by every one who passes on that fatal road.’ The road to Jericho and the Jordan, where most pilgrims went to baptize themselves and collect their palms, was no safer than it had been in the time of the good Samaritan, although the Templars regularly patrolled it. At Easter 1120, thirty pilgrims were killed and sixty captured out of a party of some seven hundred. As for the road north to Nazareth and Acre, it was scarcely attempted except during the periodic wars between the kings of Jerusalem and the emirs of Damascus, when enterprising pilgrims would attach themselves to the Frankish army. In 1106, the Russian pilgrim abbot Daniel managed to penetrate as far north as Lake Tiberias in the entourage of king Baldwin. But travelling with the army was not as safe as it appeared, for many pilgrims are reported to have died on this particular expedition.

  The eleventh century had been the heyday of the overland route to the Holy Land, but the growing instability of eastern Europe sharply reduced its popularity in the twelfth. Wealthy pilgrims with large escorts might fight their way through the Balkans as Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony, did ‘cum magna gloria’ in 1172. But for most men, a pilgrimage to the Holy Land involved a long and expensive journey by sea. After the final disappearance of the crusading states at the end of the thirteenth century, there is scarcely a single case on record of an overland pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

  Travel by Sea

  A voyage by sea in the middle ages was an uncomfortable experience. Pilgrims were crowded like grains of corn into small, unstable boats where, for six weeks or more, they endured stale food and water, boredom, disease, and intense discomfort.

  Men may leve alle games

  That saylen to seynt James,

  sang an Englishman of the fifteenth century with bitter memories of a voyage to Santiago. The seamen shouted at him and rushed to and fro, continually ordering him out of their way. The bark swayed and tossed so violently that he did not feel like eating and could not hold a tankard to his lips. The poorest pilgrims, stowed in the most uncomfortable part of the ship, slept next to the bilge-pump, and had to make do with bread and salt and water.

  The well-to-do pilgrim could mitigate the discomfort of the journey by paying a little more for his passage. Two types of ship were available at Venice. There were large, oared galleys which were safe, comfortable, and expensive; and small ships for the use of the poo
r, which were crammed to overflowing. Sebald Rieter, the opulent merchant of Nurnberg, paid sixty-seven ducats for his fare to the Holy Land in 1479 and shared the ship with only sixty-three other passengers. On the other hand an anonymous German pilgrim who travelled in the cheap ship paid only thirty ducats. The Florentine, Lionardo Frescobaldi, took the expensive ship to Alexandria in 1384 and watched the cheap one foundering in the first storm with two hundred pilgrims on board. When the demand for places fell, both rich and poor would share the same ship but occupied different parts of it. ‘Chose yow a place in the sayd gallery in the overest stage’, advised William Wey, ‘for in the lowst under hyt is ryght smoulderyng hote and stynkyng.’ When Hans von Mergenthal sailed to the Holy Places in 1476, the place allotted to poor pilgrims was so narrow that it was impossible to turn over in one’s sleep. Sleepers were bitten by insects and trampled over by large rats. The animals penned up on the deck to be slaughtered for food broke out from time to time and trod on the sleeping bodies. When the sea was rough, passengers could not stand upright for fear of being struck by swinging booms and ropes.