A History of the Crusades-Vol 1 by Steven Runciman

it by pilgrims from the West.
     
     
    CHAPTER III
    THE PILGRIMS OF
CHRIST
     
    ‘ Our feet
shall stand within thy gates, O Jerusalem.’ PSALMS CXXII, 2
     
    The desire to be a pilgrim is deeply rooted in
human nature. To stand where those that we reverence once stood, to see the
very sites where they were born and toiled and died, gives us a feeling of
mystical contact with them and is a practical expression of our homage. And if
the great men of the world have their shrines to which their admirers come from
afar, still more do men flock eagerly to those places where, they believe, the
Divine has sanctified the earth.
    In the earliest days of Christianity
pilgrimages were rare. Early Christian thought tended to emphasize the godhead
and the universality of Christ rather than the manhood; and the Roman
authorities did not encourage a voyage to Palestine. Jerusalem itself,
destroyed by Titus, lay in ruins till Hadrian rebuilt it as the Roman city of
Aelia. But the Christians remembered the setting of the drama of Christ’s life.
Their respect for the site of Calvary was such that Hadrian deliberately
erected there a temple to Venus Capitolina. By the third century the cave at
Bethlehem where Christ was born was well known to them; and Christians would
journey thither and to the Mount of Olives, to the Garden of Gethsemane and to
the place of the Ascension. A visit to such holy spots for the purpose of
prayer and of acquiring spiritual merit was already a part of Christian
practice.
     
    The First
Pilgrims
    With the triumph of the Cross the practice
grew. The Emperor Constantine was glad to give strength to the religion that he
had chosen. His mother, the Empress Helena, most exalted and most successful of
the world’s great archaeologists, set out to Palestine, to uncover Calvary and
to find all the relics of the Passion. The Emperor endorsed her discovery by
building there a church, which through all its vicissitudes has remained the
chief sanctuary of Christendom, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
    At once a stream of pilgrims began to flow to
the scene of Helena’s labours. We cannot tell their numbers; for most of them
left no record of their journey. But already in 333, before her excavations
were finished, a traveller who wrote of his voyage came all the way from
Bordeaux to Palestine. Soon afterwards we find the description of a tour made
by an indefatigable lady known sometimes as Aetheria and sometimes as Saint
Silvia of Aquitaine. Towards the close of the century one of the great Fathers
of Latin Christendom, Saint Jerome, settled in Palestine and drew after him the
circle of rich and fashionable women that had sat at his feet in Italy. In his
cell at Bethlehem he received a constant procession of travellers who came to
pay him their respects after viewing the holy places. Saint Augustine, most
spiritual of the western Fathers, considered pilgrimages to be irrelevant and
even dangerous and the Greek Fathers tended to agree with him; but Saint
Jerome, though he did not maintain that actual residence in Jerusalem was of
any spiritual value, asserted that it was an act of faith to pray where the feet
of Christ had stood. His view was more popular than Augustine’s. Pilgrimages
multiplied, encouraged by the authorities. By the beginning of the next century
there were said to be already two hundred monasteries and hospices in or around
Jerusalem, built to receive pilgrims, and almost all under the patronage of the
Emperor.
    The mid-fifth century saw the height of this
early taste for Jerusalem. The Empress Eudocia, born the daughter of a pagan
philosopher at Athens, settled there after an unhappy life at court; and many
pious members of the Byzantine aristocracy came in her train. In the intervals
of writing hymns she patronized the growing fashion for collecting relics; and
she laid the foundation of the great collection at Constantinople by sending there
the portrait of Our Lady painted by Saint Luke.
     
    The