Pilgrimage in the Middle Ages
Happy are the people whose strength is in you,
Whose hearts are set on the pilgrim’s way.
—Psalms 84:4
The Christian practice of pilgrimage has its roots both in first-century Judaism, where travel to Jerusalem for holy festivals was semi-mandatory, and in the various paganisms of the Roman Empire, where it was a common practice to visit the shrines of gods in different cities and offer sacrifice to them. Even by the early Middle Ages, the shrines of the numerous saints and their relics scattered throughout Latin Christendom provided ample opportunities for those seeking spiritual sustenance, forgiveness of sins, or intercessions for themselves or ailing loved ones. The Holy Land (and Jerusalem and Bethlehem in particular), where Jesus and his earliest followers were born, lived, and died, was undoubtedly the grandest destination for medieval pilgrims, but getting there was beset by all manner of difficulties. Besides the sheer physical distance and the high costs of travel by land and sea, the perils of banditry and piracy, the lost opportunities for work and trade, and the fact that the Holy Land was mainly held by Muslim overlords, made such a pilgrimage prohibitively costly and dangerous for most people throughout most of the Middle Ages. Infamously, the so-called “Great German Pilgrimage” in which a group of German bishops led a crowd of many thousands to the Holy Land in 1065 nearly proved disastrous: the German pilgrims received a chilly welcome from hostile (though Christian) Hungarians, Bulgars, and Byzantines along their overland route, before being attacked by Bedouins in the Holy Land itself, reaching Jerusalem too late for Easter and then being quickly dispatched on ships by the local Muslim governor, who was not unreasonably suspicious of the influx of large crowds of European Christians into his territory.
And so most potential pilgrims were content with traveling less ambitiously, often to a cathedral in a large nearby city, or to a church in the market-town, or to an abbey in the next county, or sometimes even just to a humble shrine a few villages over that might house the relics of a local saint. Just as the cults of the various saints waxed and waned over time, so did the popularity of certain pilgrimage sites. Rome, however, remained a popular destination, because of its high concentration of ancient churches, its associations with the Apostles Peter and Paul (who were both martyred in Rome) and other early saints (especially St Lawrence), and its housing of important relics, including the fragments of the True Cross allegedly discovered by the Emperor Constantine’s mother, and the “Veronica,” the cloth believed to have been used to wipe the sweat and blood from the face of
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Christ during his Passion. Rome, of course, was also the main residence of the papacy, and many a canny pope encouraged pilgrimages there, knowing that the pilgrims swelled both the prestige of the papacy and were also a very significant source of revenue for the Eternal City. From at least the twelfth century, and probably earlier, the shrine of St James (Santiago) in Compostela in Galicia (now northern Spain) was perhaps second to Rome in its attraction of large masses of pilgrims. The shrine of St Thomas Becket in Canterbury, England, was established as a leading international pilgrimage destination not long after Becket’s death in 1170, fueled by the drama of his martyrdom. Within the Holy Roman Empire, Cologne Cathedral, with its relics of the Three Magi, and Aachen Cathedral, with its associations with Charlemagne, emerged as major pilgrimage centers at about this same time. But smaller sites for pilgrimages also flourished throughout the Middle Ages, especially along the established routes to more popular sites. Hence Venice, where the fifteenth-century pilgrim Margery Kempe sojourned for thirteen days, received an influx of travelers making
their way by sea to the Holy Land, and elaborate itineraria (or “pilgrims’ guides”) existed that catalogued the more significant sites of relics along the Camino de Santiago (the “Way of St James”) or the Via Francigena, which ran from France and through Rome to Apulia in Southern Italy, from where pilgrims could embark for the Holy Land. But even less high-profile and more remote places attracted pilgrims in significant numbers: in the twelfth century, Pope Callixtus II declared that two pilgrimages to St David’s Cathedral in southwest Wales was worth one pilgrimage to Rome, and that three trips to St David’s would confer the same spiritual benefits as a pilgrimage to Jerusalem!
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Like almost all travelers in the Middle Ages, pilgrims traveled in groups. Chaucer’s pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales number about thirty, and that might be considered rather typical; bands of less than ten or fifteen might be especially susceptible to roadside bandits. On the other hand, some accounts of specific pilgrimages set the numbers in the thousands. The movement of such sizable groups through the European countryside posed obvious logistical challenges in terms of food supply and shelter, yet they also provided rich opportunities for entrepreneurship, both for the major destinations and for the smaller towns and roadside inns along the way. Pilgrims paid for food and lodging, but also would buy trinkets, souvenirs, and, sometimes, purported relics. Pilgrim badges, usually cast of metal, were a commonly purchased item,
and they offered proof that one had actually reached one’s destination (a rough equivalent to the concert t-shirt today!). Pilgrims to Compostela obtained badges in the shape of scallops, while pilgrims to the Holy Land would carry back palm leaves from that country, folded into the shape of a cross: such people were thus called palmers (Latin palmarii).
Pilgrimages also offered an otherwise mostly stationary population a chance to see the world and to mix and mingle with people from a variety of backgrounds. The group in The Canterbury Tales consists of rich and poor, rural folk and Londoners, merchants and craftsmen and clergy, men and women, a few virtuous folk and, more predictably, some rather dodgy folk. (Similarly, a group of pilgrimaging animals in the twelfth-century beast-epic Ysengrimus included a fox, a donkey, a goose, a deer, a sheep, a goat, a rooster, and, to everyone’s chagrin, a wolf.) The sacrifices involved in terms of time invested and money spent would obviously vary according to class and situation: a wealthy burgher from Flanders traveling to Rome or Santiago de Compostela would feel the pinch less than, say, a peasant from Yorkshire. |
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Certainly pilgrims anticipated special blessings, or the forgiveness of sins, or some other divine intercession for having successfully completed their journey, but it was also widely recognized that the journey—with its perils and costs and more mundane hardships—was itself part of the spiritual benefit conferred. This understanding rests upon an old and deep Christian trope: that mortal life itself was a kind of pilgrimage, a sojourn in what both Psalm 84 and the popular Salve Regina prayer refer to as the lacrimarum valle (“the vale of tears”), and what Augustine calls the regio dissimilitudinis (“country of unlikeness”), a state of separation from the divine presence of God, where humans are subject to sickness, toil, misfortune, and all the other consequences of sin and the mutable world. The human being was thus indeed Homo Viator — "Man on the road [of life]." In this same vein, the Epistle to the Hebrews speaks of the descendants of Abraham as being “pilgrims and strangers upon the earth” (11:13).
Medieval poets and writers recognized the symbolic and narrative value of this idea. Dante’s entire Commedia—which literally describes a journey to God—is presented as a sort of pilgrimage, and its central character as a pilgrim; William Langland’s central Everyman character, Piers Plowman, first appears dressed in pilgrimes wyse, his very clothing affirming that mortal life is a pilgrimage; Bonaventure writes of the practice of contemplative prayer as an itinerarium, or pilgrim route, to God. There is also a sense in which some of the quest narratives of the medieval chivalric romance, particularly the Grail quests of the Arthurian cycle, can be read as pilgrimages, journeys that involve leaving sin behind and drawing closer to the divine. But perhaps Geoffrey Chaucer more than anyone else explores the imaginative potential of the pilgrimage as a figure for mortal life. His motley congregation of twenty-nine pilgrims reveals a full spectrum of human emotion, pretense, self-interest, and folly, and yet, whatever their other motivations for travel, they wend their blithe and awkward way from Southwark to Canterbury Cathedral, the hooly blisful martyr for to seke. Although these pilgrims never reach their destination (within Chaucer's incomplete text), they also never completely lose sight of the fact that at some level theirs is potentially a journey out of the vale of tears and towards God. |
Further Reading
- Sarah Blick and Rita Tekippe, Art and Architecture of Late Medieval Pilgrimage in Northern Europe and the British Isles (Brill, 2005)
- The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Lynn Staley (W. W. Norton, 2000)
- Guillaume de Deguileville, Le pélerinage d l'âme: The Pilgrimage of the Soul, trans. Eugene Clasby (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2017)
- Eamon Duffy, "Cathedral Pilgrimage: The Late Middle Ages," in A People's Tragedy: Studies in Reformation (Bloomsbury Continuum, 2020)
- Kathryn Hurlock, Medieval Welsh Pilgrimage: c. 1100-1500 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)
- Michael Lewis, Saints and Their Badges: Saints' Lives ad Medieval Pilgrim Badges (Greenlight Publishing, 2014)
- Denys Pringle, Pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the Holy Land: 1187-1291 (Ashgate Press, 2012)
- Alison Stones, Pilgrim's Guide to Santiago de Compostela: A Critical Edition. (Harvey Miller, 1998)
- Diana Webb, Medieval European Pilgrimage, c. 700 - c.1500 (Palgrave, 2002)
- Brett Edward Whalen, ed., Pilgrimage in the Middle Ages: A Reader (Broadview Press, 2011)