Palestine passed from the caliphate of Bagdad to a newer branch of Islam, the Seljuk Turks. The Seljuk conquest provoked the First Crusade; the Norman conquest caused England’s participation in what was chiefly a Continental project. During the ensuing two hundred years of intermittent crusades there was of course a constant flow of travelers between England and Palestine, but few English diaries of individual pilgrimages from this period survive. One thathas survived is the diary of Saewulf, a prosperous merchant given to fits of piety between periods of indulgence in earthly pleasures. In one of the former he embarked on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1102. Only three years had passed since the taking of Jerusalem by the warriors of the First Crusade, and the Latin kingdom they had established there was in the springtime of its power. For the first time in five hundred years the holy places were in Christian hands. New trade opportunities were opened. Ambitious nobles dreamed of new fiefs that could be carved from the infidel’s lands with a battle-ax and a few men-at-arms. Saewulf notes the crowds of travelers going to Palestine, both noble and poor, clergy and lay, true pilgrims and piratical adventurers “embarking with crews of desperate marauders … plundering and devastating on their way.”
On his arrival Saewulf narrowly escaped death in a terrible storm that wrecked his ship a few hours after he debarked at Jaffa. He has left a harrowing description of the crashing and splintering ships in the harbor, the shrieks of the drowning, the roaring of the wind, the awful sight of a falling mast knocking off a man’s head, and in the morning the derelict fragments of twenty-three vessels and the beach strewn with a thousand bodies.
Then comes the hazardous climb up to Jerusalem through the hills where Saracens lie in wait in caves to pounce on unwary travelers and where many unburied corpses lie scattered on the way, “for there is not much earth on the hard rock to dig a grave.” This suggests that Palestine already had begun to suffer the soil erosion that during the centuries of Arab cultivation reduced it from the one-time land of milk and honey to a stony goat pasture.
Saewulf spent eight months visiting Jerusalem and the Biblical towns around from Hebron in the south, where Abraham settled and was buried, up through Jericho to Nazareth, Tiberias, and Capernaum in the north. Typical of many medieval travel diaries, Saewulf’s narrativepasses without a comma from things he actually saw to gossip and popular lore gathered from local guides at each stopping place. To separate out the nuggets of fact is not easy, but his account is valuable less for what it tells of Palestine than for what it tells of the furnishings of the mind of the average twelfth-century tourist. Knowledge of geography and history was not a strong point. When he visited the Mosque of Omar, then in the hands of the Latin monks, Saewulf refers to it as the Temple of Solomon, endows it with an entirely fictitious history according to which it was rebuilt somewhere along the line by Hadrian or Heraclius or “some say it was by Justinian” (Saewulf is not particular), and indicates only the vaguest notion of how and when the Mohammedans entered the picture.
Likewise his description of an enemy fleet encountered on the way home shows how history happening under his eyes was interpreted in terms of ancient history learned from the Bible. “Twenty-six ships of the Saracens suddenly came into sight,” he writes. “[They were] the forces of the Admiral of Tyre and Sidon which were carrying an army to Babylonia to assist the Chaldeans in making war on the King of Jerusalem.” One would think Saewulf was somehow transported back to the sixth century B.C. when the Chaldean kings of ancient Babylon made war on Jerusalem and took the Israelites into captivity. But of course the king of Jerusalem whom Saewulf is talking about is the crusader king,
On his arrival Saewulf narrowly escaped death in a terrible storm that wrecked his ship a few hours after he debarked at Jaffa. He has left a harrowing description of the crashing and splintering ships in the harbor, the shrieks of the drowning, the roaring of the wind, the awful sight of a falling mast knocking off a man’s head, and in the morning the derelict fragments of twenty-three vessels and the beach strewn with a thousand bodies.
Then comes the hazardous climb up to Jerusalem through the hills where Saracens lie in wait in caves to pounce on unwary travelers and where many unburied corpses lie scattered on the way, “for there is not much earth on the hard rock to dig a grave.” This suggests that Palestine already had begun to suffer the soil erosion that during the centuries of Arab cultivation reduced it from the one-time land of milk and honey to a stony goat pasture.
Saewulf spent eight months visiting Jerusalem and the Biblical towns around from Hebron in the south, where Abraham settled and was buried, up through Jericho to Nazareth, Tiberias, and Capernaum in the north. Typical of many medieval travel diaries, Saewulf’s narrativepasses without a comma from things he actually saw to gossip and popular lore gathered from local guides at each stopping place. To separate out the nuggets of fact is not easy, but his account is valuable less for what it tells of Palestine than for what it tells of the furnishings of the mind of the average twelfth-century tourist. Knowledge of geography and history was not a strong point. When he visited the Mosque of Omar, then in the hands of the Latin monks, Saewulf refers to it as the Temple of Solomon, endows it with an entirely fictitious history according to which it was rebuilt somewhere along the line by Hadrian or Heraclius or “some say it was by Justinian” (Saewulf is not particular), and indicates only the vaguest notion of how and when the Mohammedans entered the picture.
Likewise his description of an enemy fleet encountered on the way home shows how history happening under his eyes was interpreted in terms of ancient history learned from the Bible. “Twenty-six ships of the Saracens suddenly came into sight,” he writes. “[They were] the forces of the Admiral of Tyre and Sidon which were carrying an army to Babylonia to assist the Chaldeans in making war on the King of Jerusalem.” One would think Saewulf was somehow transported back to the sixth century B.C. when the Chaldean kings of ancient Babylon made war on Jerusalem and took the Israelites into captivity. But of course the king of Jerusalem whom Saewulf is talking about is the crusader king,
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