Pilgrims to Jerusalem in the Middle Ages

Pilgrims to Jerusalem in the Middle Ages

Pilgrims to Jerusalem in the Middle Ages

Nicole Chareyron

TRANSLATED BY W. DONALD WILSON

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS    NEW YORK

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2000 Éditions Imago

English-language translation

     copyright © 2005 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-52961-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Chareyron, Nicole.

[Pélerins de Jérusalem au Moyen âge. English]

Pilgrims to Jerusalem in the Middle Ages /

Nicole Chareyron; translated by W. Donald Wilson.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0–231–13230–1 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 0–231–13231–X (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Christian pilgrims and pilgrimages—History

2. Christian pilgrims and pilgrimages—Jerusalem.

I. Title.

BX2323.C3913 2005

263‘.04256942—dc22      2004056043

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

Ouvrage publié avec le concours du Ministère français chargé de la culture—Centre nationale du livre.

This work was published with the cooperation of the French ministry of culture National Book Center.

CONTENTS

Foreword by Pierre-André Sigal

Preface

Chronology and Maps

1. Evagari et Discurrere per Mundum . . .

2. All Roads Lead to Venice

3. Venice in Splendid Dress

4. Five Weeks in a Galley

5. The Holy Lond of Promyssion

6. Jerusalem and the Holy Places

7. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher: The Christian World in Miniature

8. Pilgrimages and Excursions Round and About Jerusalem

9. Saracens in the Towns, Arabs in the Desert, and Jews Here and There

10. Desert Time, Desert Space

11. Sinai and Its Speaking Stones

12. Cairo, City of Lights

13. Diamonds of the Sands, or Pharaoh’s Granaries

14. The Virgin’s Garden, the Hermits’ Desert, and Egyptian Dreams

15. Alexandria, Sentry of the East

16. Happy He Who, Like Ulysses . . .

17. By Way of an Ending: The Smell of Thyme and the Taste of Honey

Appendix: Pilgrims’ Profiles

Notes

Bibliography

Index

FOREWORD

Pierre-André Sigal

Jerusalem—the place where Christ lived, was crucified, and entombed—has exerted extraordinary magnetic power over Christians from the fourth century to the present day. Over the centuries, thousands of pilgrims have been eager to confront the difficulties and dangers of the journey in order to pray and meditate in the Holy Land. Many of them remain anonymous, but some—beginning with the Spanish nun Egeria, who made her pilgrimage between 381 and 384—set down the story of their journey for posterity, wishing to transmit an account of their experiences to future pilgrims in order to guide and counsel them in undertaking their expedition. Whether in the form of notes recorded daily and reworked when the journey was completed or written entirely after returning from the pilgrimage, these narratives, which were especially numerous in the final centuries of the Middle Ages, represent a documentary source of the first order for learning about the pilgrimages to the Holy Land.

Nicole Chareyron therefore made a wise choice when she turned to them to evoke the different aspects of the holy journey. Her considerable accomplishment consists, in the first place, in having scoured libraries all over Europe, seeking out, collecting, and translating more than a hundred accounts written by Frenchmen, Englishmen, Italians, and Germans of varying social status—many of them churchmen, but also nobles, bourgeois, and merchants. These texts cover the period from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, but the great majority were written in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, lending a certain temporal homogeneity to the whole. This was a time when the Holy Land and Christ’s burial place, earlier conquered by the crusaders, had been lost to Westerners. The last Christian fortified town, Acre, fell in 1291, with the result that the pilgrims had to cope with harassment by the Muslim administration and the hostility of the local population in addition to the material difficulties inherent in a long journey to a distant land.

With considerable verve and a sense of concrete reality Nicole Chareyron enables us to relive the eventful moments of this journey and permits us to become intimately familiar with this company of a hundred or so medieval pilgrims. Her plan is very logically inspired by the route followed by the pilgrim, from his departure in the West (usually through the great port of Venice) to his return from a visit to a Holy Land that might reach as far as Mount Sinai and Egypt. Through the diversity of these accounts and experiences, the author, in her excellent synthesis, traces a truly living portrait of the pilgrim to the East in the late Middle Ages. Indeed, there is no shortage of picturesque details, for the pilgrims give naïve expression to their astonishment as they marvel at the churches of Venice, the gardens of Alexandria, the plans of Egyptian cities, or the majesty of the pyramids (which many of them took to be granaries). They were overcome by emotion in those places where the life and passion of Christ took place, attempting at every step to rediscover some trace of the events described in the New Testament. Many of these travelers—and this is one characteristic of pilgrimage at the end of the Middle Ages—also took an interest in the people and, like ethnologists, took note of the local customs. Chareyron excels at rendering the image of the other as it emerges from pilgrims’ accounts, whether it is a simplistic perception of the Muslim religion or the primitive condition of the Bedouin population. However, undertaking a pilgrimage to the East also meant confronting many problems of a material nature, and the author humorously describes how the pilgrims coped with these: life on board ship and the difficulties of life at close quarters; the cost and quality of the requisite supplies; relations with guides and the local population. Other observations strike a more serious note. There were illnesses and violence of all kinds—hence the joy of a safe homecoming at the completion of the pilgrimage.

Always referring to original documents, from which she cites numerous extracts, Nicole Chareyron makes this company of pilgrims our intimates. When we finally close her book, the German Dominican Felix Fabri, the English churchman William Wey, the French knight Bertrandon de la Brocquière, the Italian Pietro Casola, and many others have become our familiar traveling companions.

PREFACE

Before I entered the field of pilgrimage studies I must admit that I had only a rather stereotypical perception of it and, worse still, the rather critical attitude of a child of the Reformation, the ironic Rabelais and the stern Calvin having proclaimed that pilgrimage served no purpose for the salvation of the soul. The journals of pilgrims who made the holy voyage to Jerusalem helped me understand to what extent we unconsciously mold human history around our personal beliefs.

I only had to put myself in the shoes of travelers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, explore the world through their eyes, and survey the desert through their spectacles to see things differently. This came about when I encountered a type of literature that is not held in high esteem, no doubt because its subject matter is too personal or anecdotal to deserve the attention of anyone but a historian or the curious. It may seem paradoxical that stories of such an engaging nature should not have met with much success with publishers over the centuries, but it is only natural, after all, that readers should have preferred the archetype of the fearless knight—along with the justificatory discourse in praise of the hero’s valor¹—to the obscure figure of the pilgrim and his long and arduous journey. These men revealed heroism of a different kind to me, one that is rarely represented in fiction but perhaps deserved one additional tribute. I say additional since some fine books have already been written to honor the memory of God’s wayfarers (an eloquent definition that situates the individual halfway between heaven and earth),² and some impressive syntheses encouraged me to undertake my own study.

This literature of testimony reveals insights that fiction does not always provide. This is so because these travelers, writing first and foremost for themselves, confess their astonishment, pity, admiration, and dread with touching sincerity and lack of self-consciousness. When they speak of other men, they draw their own portraits through their words. In turning the pages of the world they also turn the pages of history. At Rhodes in 1480 they encountered the Turks, who were besieging the town. At Candia in 1494 they experienced a cataclysmic earthquake. In 1394 one of them took the wrong way home and found himself in the midst of a war in the Peloponnese. What adventures awaited another who decided to transform his pilgrimage into an exploration of unknown lands!How could one not wish to set out in their company?

I therefore invite the reader to travel with them on a journey I have pieced together using elements garnered from their notebooks and accounts, to set out on a dangerous journey with them between the falsehoods of the real world and the true fiction of writing. Let him or her relive the emotions of a sea or desert crossing in the company of Ogier d’Anglure from Champagne, the German Felix Fabri, the Florentine Frescobaldi, the Irishman Symon Semeonis, and so many others, including Italians, Frenchmen, Flemings, and English. Let him be dazzled or disappointed by the medieval city of Jerusalem as it rises up before him, disproving the abstract, ideal, hallowed image of the urbs beata, represented in books and stained-glass windows as a perfect circle or square divided into four parts, with its twelve gates—Jerusalem the heavenly city, evoking all the ages, and the absolute centrality of its location.³ Let the lover of cruises rediscover the perils of the Nile, and for a brief moment see the pyramids as stinking stone quarries and the haunt of wild beasts once again, their inner depths scarcely to be penetrated by the flickering light of a candle! Perhaps this literary journey of the pilgrim of former times may show the tourist of today all that his culture and worldview owe to those who went before. Perhaps, thanks to the magic of these testimonies, the modern individual, who is always in such a hurry, may take a few steps in a different time, a hallowed time, a time of self-denial and of effort—the age of the pilgrim.⁴

Preface to the English-Language Edition

I would like to say how pleased I am to see Pilgrims to Jerusalem in the Middle Ages cross the Atlantic thanks to Columbia University Press. I am grateful, first of all, to the press for judging it worthy and doing me the honor of this edition. I also want to thank the translator, Don Wilson, for his contribution to this American edition, for without him nothing would have been possible. The quotations from Old French—often in dialect—made his task none the easier, and I have to admire his mastery of the medieval language in its many forms. An Internet dialogue carried on over several weeks allowed us to collaborate and supplement the original with some new material, including additional notes, capsule biographies of the pilgrim authors, and a revised bibliography (which, however, makes no claim to be exhaustive). I am also very grateful to Henry Krawitz for his scrupulous attention to detail in editing the English-language text. Finally, I hope that the reader will enjoy journeying briefly in the footsteps of these great wayfarers of long ago and, thanks to their testimonies, reliving a fascinating page of human history.

N. C.

Evagari et Discurrere per Mundum . . .

Some are foolish enough to think there is no country but their own.

—ANSELMO ADORNO

Is it the explorer’s instinct that compels men to travel far from their homeland or is it a nomadic urge they allow to triumph within them?¹ Whatever the nature of the inner compulsion that makes them leave their native soil, it is reinforced by a cultural imperative that endows it with meaning, whether it be the call of spirituality or a thirst for knowledge. This is what makes man human. Unlike the salmon, man chooses to follow the river back to its source. Man desires exile or consents to it.

The Call of the Open Road

In leaving his castle, village, or province to venture over land and sea, each pilgrim who wends his way to Jerusalem reconquers the world in his own way. Might he not be concealing a feeling of elation under his long cloak as, staff in hand, he receives the parting blessing as a promise of renewal and a portent of singular things to come? Little has been said about this feeling other than to condemn it as lacking in piety. It was the Church’s duty to ensure that the would-be pilgrim was not the kind of person to harbor some questionable desire to set off a-roving, leaving his conjugal duties and familial responsibilities far behind. Such vigilance was commendable. Yet Chaucer makes no attempt to conceal this elation. His Prologue to the Canterbury Tales sounds like a hymn in praise of a joyful departure under the young April sun. The pilgrimage coincides with the rebirth of spring. The sap rising in the flowers, the gentle breeze, and the song of the birds seem to beckon to distant shores.²

How could anyone remain deaf to such signs of Nature, with which the crusaders had already been familiar? The expedition against the infernal hosts recounted in Le Bâtard de Bouillon set out to the call of fine weather, meadows in flower, and fledgling birds³. These literary openings in the form of commonplaces are also the expression of an existential reality.

The pilgrimage can hardly dispense with the figure of the peregrinus himself. In his costume acting like a safe conduct, he proclaimed his mission as he set out to travel far and wide on his quest for eternal life. He displayed as many as five insignia: the red cross on his mantle; the gray hat marked with a cross; the beard; the scrip with the flask; and the donkey and its driver. He assumed the grave expression appropriate to the occasion:

From that day forth I allowed my beard to grow and adorned both my cloak and scapular with a red cross, a cross sewn into my clothing by the virgins dedicated to God, the brides of Christ, and I took the other badges of the pilgrim as befitted me. Indeed, pilgrims to the Holy Land have five badges: a red cross on a long gray coat, and the hood stitched to the monk’s tunic—but if the pilgrim does not belong to the predicant order the gray habit is not befitting. The second badge is a black and gray cap, also decorated with a red cross on the front. The third is a long beard on a visage rendered grave and pale by suffering and danger, for everywhere pilgrims, even pagan ones, allow their beard and hair to grow until their homecoming. . . . The fourth is a shoulder bag containing a little food and a flask, not for his enjoyment but just enough to sustain him. The fifth emblem, a useful one in the Holy Land, is an ass with a Saracen donkey driver in place of a stick. And then, turning inward, I impatiently awaited the designated day, and prepared myself in silence to undertake the holy journey.⁴

If not all leave-takings had the same gravity, all entailed a ceremony of blessing and farewell.

In the tireless repetition of the trudge to Jerusalem the actors change, as does the style of the accounts that tell and retell their story, for human diversity arises within a context of conformity. Thus, if the pilgrimage remains the same, improvisations on the theme are as many and varied as the pilgrims who relate it. The accounts of travels to the East produced in the two centuries before the Renaissance are in the image of those who wrote them. They reveal authors who were increasingly unable to resist the temptation to depict themselves in a heroic light, even if that heroism was wrapped in the mantle of the Cross. Behind the traditional image of the pilgrim to the Holy Land, to which they intended to remain faithful, these occasional writers—in most cases they would write only this one book of memoirs—display a literary originality and perceptiveness that allows us to recognize the pleasure they took in visiting strange lands, the interest mixed with fear they took in the inhabitants, and the attention they paid to such representatives of primitive humanity as the Bedouins they encountered in the desert. Thanks to the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the silk merchant from Bruges, the nobleman from Champagne, and the chaplain he brought with him—men from town, country, and convent—could all enjoy the illusion of being seasoned seafarers or explorers of new lands—a natural enough illusion, after all, for someone journeying to the land of mirages.

The profile of the pilgrim has doubtless evolved since the earliest centuries of the Christian era, but the attraction of the place where God chose to reveal his salvation has not changed down through the ages. It has been possible to establish a typology of pilgrims to the Holy Land reflecting a representation that was historically defined. Toward the end of the Roman period and during the Byzantine era (fourth to sixth centuries), it was an aristocracy of classical culture tempted by the asceticism of desert life. Then the pilgrim began to take an interest in stories of miracles. In the eleventh century there emerged the figure of the millenarian penitent awaiting the imminent Last Judgment in the Valley of Jehoshaphat. As the pilgrimage increasingly became a collective phenomenon, groups that included laymen and ecclesiastics as well as knights bearing arms for their defense would assemble under a leader. This is how the Crusade developed, for its initial vocation was as a pilgrimage. In the early years of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem it was difficult to distinguish between the crusader and the pilgrim, but in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a widening gap developed between those whose purpose in the world was to defend it by force of arms and those who rejected it in the name of an ideal of contemptus mundi. The twelfth-century pilgrim was more of an intellectual, as open to the knowledge of things spiritual as of secular realities. He complemented the traditional descriptions of sites and sanctuaries with his own spontaneous observations and also contributed to the dissemination of legends.

The homo itinerans of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in quest of indulgences, no longer really corresponded to any particular type but embodied several figures, so that a diversity of social strata and individual temperaments are reflected in their travel memoirs. Beginning in 1332, the pilgrim came under the aegis of the Franciscans of the Holy Land, who organized processions, sermons, and spiritual exercises appropriate to particular holy sites. The practice of pilgrimage was carried out according to the principles of the Imitation of Christ as preached by the Poverello. It had essentially New Testament and evangelical themes. The pilgrim submitted to this, but to the round of collective devotions the learned individual would sometimes add a dimension of personal exploration of the country.⁵ In refining somewhat the perhaps overly systematic nature of these categories, let me first point out that my sources are primarily the individual experiences of men who could read and write and are thus not necessarily reflective of the whole community of travelers; and that, furthermore, the more numerous the accounts from a given period the more they permit the very ingredient of human diversity to be introduced.

It nevertheless remains true that our average pilgrim from the late Middle Ages cannot be considered apart from the abundant literature that emerged from the Crusades and that helped form his mentality and culture. In it the Holy City was inseparable from the notion of conquest. The name of Jerusalem imposed an awed silence. When the minstrel addresses those listening to La Chanson d’Antioche (late eleventh century), calling on them to be silent, the solemn tone has universal relevance: Be silent, Lords, you will hear of Jerusalem; you will learn how the armies were gathered up!⁶ Among the chansons de geste, La Conquête de Jérusalem took on the stylistic characteristics of an epic—a convincing theatricality that gave an imaginary glimpse of the painful adventures experienced by the warriors of the Cross, and of the emotions that beat in their breasts: They arrive on a hilltop, and, seeing Jerusalem, fall most reverently to their knees!⁷ The fourteenth- or fifteenth-century pilgrim was perfectly familiar with all these words and actions, the fundamental rituals of epic discourse on the Holy City. Perhaps he was also familiar with the History of Jerusalem by Foucher de Chartres, a major accredited reference source about the Latin Kingdom. The first book of Jacques de Vitry’s Historia Hierosolomitana (an abridged guide to the Crusades) was widely available, having been translated into French in the thirteenth century. The history of Jerusalem was a standard of the time.⁸

As for works in a more literary vein, they turn out to incorporate as many fanciful expeditions as real divergences, such as the dream of a hypothetical conquest of Mecca that is flaunted in Le Bâtard de Bouillon (fourteenth century) and the reality of an expedition that petered out in Constantinople (reported by Robert de Clari and Villehardouin). It can be seen how the concept of the Holy Land was gradually extended, and how only Jerusalem, even when it was out of reach, was still a magnet powerful enough to set armies on the move. According to Villehardouin, the messengers who announced their masters’ arrival to the doge of Venice did indeed speak of barons who have put on the emblem of the Cross in order to reconquer Jerusalem, God willing. But God was not willing, and Constantinople, that other Holy Land where Russian pilgrims liked to sojourn, was where the expedition ended. Relics from the Holy Chapel of the Byzantines (a piece of the Holy Cross, the Tunic, and the Soldier’s Lance) would be the only rewards of Robert de Clari’s unrealized dream expedition.⁹ Jerusalem emitted its waves in concentric circles across the entire world. The city was established as the Center of the World thanks to Ps. 74:12 (For God is my King of old, working salvation in the midst of the earth.) and Ezek. 5:5 (Thus saith the Lord God: This is Jerusalem, I have set her in the midst of the nations). Maps of the time reflected this spiritual geography.

These books, which helped shape our pilgrims’ imaginations, also transmitted nostalgia for a glorious age as well as the pain of living in an age of disappointment. Everyone knew that in a temporal sense Jerusalem, which was in the hands of the sultan of Egypt at the time, was lost. This was why theoreticians and backroom strategists set forth their dreams in plans for its recapture.¹⁰ The inexorable Ottoman expansion merely made the sense of urgency more acute. Hayton, nephew to the king of Armenia, proposed itineraries and alliances. Pierre Dubois (1306) dreamed of the Mediterranean becoming a Christian lake once again. Marino Sanudo unveiled his secrets. Bishop Jean Germain (1451) exhorted the French king to undertake an overseas expedition. But the Holy Land would see nothing of all this. One can almost say that the Crusade became intellectualized, an object of speculation and a mental exercise. At the same time, the pilgrimage was increasingly becoming a middle-class phenomenon, so that the texts no longer reflected just the image of a knight in armor. The pilgrim of the post-Crusades period was formed spiritually just as much by what he inherited from the collective memory. He set forth armed with his historical learning and the fictions of his imagination. His head was filled with the Jerusalem of heroic deeds, books, stained glass, and paintings. He knew he was setting out like his epic heroes, royal or anonymous—for the pilgrim was also a ubiquitous literary figure of rich typological diversity, a character who shared in the action of numerous epic poems.¹¹ Perhaps our very real traveler secretly felt he was living in the pages of a novel as he set forth on a road that parchment figures had trodden before him.

The earliest organized trips offered a round-trip ticket between Venice and Jaffa for about fifty ducats, including a visit to the holy sites and an optional crossing of the desert to St. Catherine of Sinai, with the possibility of returning through Egypt after a visit to Pharaoh’s granaries, and a tour of Cairo—the Egyptian Babylon, an overpopulated megalopolis where hundreds of camels wandered, distributing drinking water. The return trip might include Alexandria (on the spring journey), unless the traveler chose to travel in the opposite direction, in which case he arrived at Alexandria and sailed home from Jaffa (the autumn journey). But the itinerary left little room for choice. The Venetian ship’s captain would decide on the route and follow it based on his commercial advantage.

Once the traveler had escaped the perils of the sea journey—whether storms or flat calms, Barbary pirates or Turkish forces—once he had survived the verbal or physical assaults of the local population—which did not always show these peaceable intruders any respect—and once he had managed to return home safe and sound within a year of his departure—having avoided enslavement, imprisonment, dehydration and fever, and without his ship taking him too far out of his way—he could consider himself lucky. For any complainers not completely satisfied with the service provided an office had been established in Venice to keep a record of grievances and settle disputes between the shipowners and their clients. But often the pilgrims had only one concern: to cover, without any further delay, the leagues that still lay between them and their roof of slate, tile, or thatch, and the chimney whose smoke they had more than once thought they would never see rising heavenward again.

The Genesis of a Literary Genre

What tales they would tell of nighttime vigils at the Holy Sepulcher, of the customs of the nomadic Arabs, of the monsters and dangers encountered on sea and land, of the ritual dip in the Jordan, and of the Dead Sea, that oily Devil’s Sea!¹² Then would come the time to remember. They would impose some kind of shape on the notes they had taken day by day in the course of their wanderings in order to preserve for a time this singular, fleeting experience, which threatened to evaporate like a misty dream, so that it could be of service to those who might also set out one day, or to help them relive their adventure among friends in the warmth of the family circle. To the epic poems and existing chronicles the pilgrim would modestly add these few pages from the novel of his life in order to become a paper hero in turn.

The accounts left by these travelers of diverse social origins are as precious as they are fascinating. No longer was it only the literate clerk who had a voice. Now the bourgeois merchant could also tell his tale, and the nobleman could invite others to share his discovery of the world. Their piety was undeniably the thing they had in common and the primary motivation they invoked for what they called their holy journey—the only journey, the great one, whose destination was that special place that maps placed at the center of the world. In the minds of these humble adventurers there also dwelt an interest in new things, an appetite for marvels, and the joy of meeting a challenge. These merchants, heads of families, noblemen, or plebeians—genuinely religious or spies in friar’s dress, all endowed with the optimism required to challenge mountains and cross the seas, and now suddenly brought together and labeled pilgrims—would forget some of their differences as they flocked on board the departing ship. What tremulous elation they must have felt!

These travelers of former days, like the traveler of today, brought with them a mental baggage that they projected onto the world. They were sensitive to different things, depending on their personality and their aptitude for appreciating people and places. On these journeys those who had a connoisseur’s appreciation of the gems of Frankish architecture rubbed shoulders with others who constantly complained about the lack of comfort in the inns. Some accepted their misadventures with good humor, while others exhibited bad humor. Some were homesick and some indifferent to the expense—though many were those who made impressive tabulations of their expenses, large and small, down to the nearest ducat. There were those who remained indifferent to the present around them yet attributed to stones the power to resurrect the past, and those able to decipher the present state of a civilization as they described its mysterious signs, learning the difficult art of seeing through the eyes of a different culture.

It has been pointed out how difficult it is to reduce the travel account to generic traits because of its evolving nature and its ambiguous relationship to the novel and to scientific writing.¹³ At the confluence of several types of discourse, its form is extremely open—too open, no doubt, to permit a definition based on normative presuppositions.¹⁴ F. Wolfzettel has noted the "lack of epistemological status of a type of discourse that is a practice rather than a genre (since classifications ultimately consist in nothing more than pragmatic distinctions)."¹⁵

A practice rather than a literary genre. Therein, no doubt, resides the secret of these unclassifiable texts that cannot be fitted into any schema, so broad is the spectrum of the authors and intended readers of such narratives. J. Richard has observed that their compositional characteristics vary according to expectations, with those of merchants differing from those of pilgrims.¹⁶ However, the specific nature of the pilgrimage (a linear trajectory), as distinct from the secular journey (a circular one), has been demonstrated. A priori the pilgrim is not a globe-trotter¹⁷: his is a spiritual objective toward which he is supposed to hasten with no loitering along the way.

In French, for instance, the semantic content of the word voyage (journey, travel), derived from the Latin viaticum, lacked precision, whether applied to the action or to a type of writing. Its meaning could only be contextual, with the precise significance being determined by the reader’s interpretation. It could incorporate either a military or a religion connotation depending on the context. In one case it might mean Crusade, while elsewhere it was used as a synonym for pilgrimage. Pilgrims fleshed out the concept by adding the adjective saint (holy) in order to dispel any ambiguity, but the word could also, by extension, simply designate a visit to a place of worship.¹⁸ The texts illustrate all these facets of such a protean term, even down to nuances peculiar to the author’s subjective interpretation.¹⁹ Where the military connotation is concerned, for instance, the voyage to Nicopolis (1396), characterized by Froissart as a regrettable military expedition, was more secular in nature than the same voyage viewed by Philippe de Mézières, which was prompted by the dream of a successful Crusade carried out by a holy knighthood capable of erasing the outrage suffered.²⁰ In the same way, the pacific meaning had ambiguities of its own: the saint voyage (holy journey) could gradually evolve into a journey full of enjoyment—or vexation.

Ultimately each user merely discovered a content adapted to his perception. The word took a long time to acquire the accepted meanings that assign no specific purpose to travel and to take on the neutral meaning we give to the notion of a journey, namely, the distance covered in traveling from one place to another.²¹ On the fringes of the concept there existed a plethora of related words referring to the details of the activity. In Latin navigatio and iter emphasized the type of locomotion, peregrinatio its objective, and evagatio the wandering aspect. The French word journée (the day as a duration, with the activity it contains, as opposed to jour, the unit of time), an indeterminate spatiotemporal concept that has survived in the English word journey, conveyed a division into stages, while verbs such as aller, chevaucher, nager, and ramer (walk, ride, sail, row, resp.) referred to the means of locomotion.

All these subtle distinctions do little to encourage research into the rules of a literary genre through a study of the narratives themselves. This is all the more so since the difficulty of giving a precise definition of the pilgrimage account did not escape certain of the authors. Felix Fabri raises the difficulty of choosing an appropriate title and provides an exemplary illustration of the transformation of the pilgrim into a secular traveler—or, rather, into an ambiguous mixture of the two. In the Epistola that serves as a preface to his book he expresses his hesitation about what to call his account, being aware that his too diverse material breached the limits of the traditional concept of the peregrinatio, and that in his case the journey took on more of the appearance of a evagatio (wandering) of body and of mind. He initially viewed the work in terms of what it was not. It could not be called a pilgrimage, or journey, or passage, so it had to be named Wanderings. Thus, the author deliberately recognized his eclecticism and boldly emphasized the disorder and lack of composition resulting from his effort. It was a singular title for a singular work by a singular author. The essence of the book became an object for reflection, with the evagatio being juxtaposed to the peregrinatio.²²

In 1483 this Dominican, who had returned from Jerusalem in 1480, embarked on a second pilgrimage, wishing to remedy the frustrations of a first visit, full of incident but poorly fixed in his memory, and to bring back for his brethren a faithful description of the Holy Land so that they, too, might renew their faith at the holy sites in spirit, if not in person. He integrated the account of his own story into his notes—events both happy and unhappy, vexations and satisfactions, as well as certain insignificant facts and other extraordinary ones.²³ Here encyclopedic discourse is combined with practical experience. The traveler splits in two, simultaneously becoming an author and an actor, with the former depicting the deeds of the latter. This dichotomy would give birth to a range of pilgrim characters, heroes of their own tales. Such is the nature of the Dominican’s story: novelistic, with its living subject as a witness, and encyclopedic in its effort to describe.

Thus, the pilgrimage account underwent a transformation. Initially written for oneself, it mutated into a book written for others in which the quest for an esthetic gradually emerged. Fabri’s account of his first journey (1480), which serves as a prelude to the second, resembles a memorandum of events and impressions. The second (1483), while adhering to a (more or less fictional) calendar, begins to look like a gigantic summa of investigations, inclining to the thematic. Far from undergoing the peregrinatio as a penance, the experienced traveler—becoming an intermediary between the world (of which he himself is a representative) and the other, whose signs he decodes for others—comes to desire it. Even if the descriptio calls for the formal rigor of a treatise, there is nothing to prevent the pilgrim from becoming the hero of an odyssey filled with the unexpected. The involvement of a biographical first person as an intermediary between reality and the reader would be the great contribution of this work. In addition to his desire to respond to curiosity and satisfy the knowledge and piety of his potential readership, the traveler increasingly introduced the personal touch of his own involvement in the adventure.

Although it is scarcely possible to discern any uniform approach to a literary genre, it is nevertheless possible to say that these accounts paved the way for new forms of writing. The way the world, space, and people can be put into words evolves, and its transformations points to a changing way of being in the world. In addition to the unimpeachable model of an evocation of the holy sites following the ordo peregriniationis of his guide (their descriptions and the biblical memories associated with them), the Christian freely set down his remarks in response to what he observed, for he was becoming less and less exclusively a pilgrim. Jean de Mandeville set out to be both a geographer and a witness. It is possible to identify his sources, even if he prefers eyewitness accounts to references to authorities. This kind of combination inevitably created confusion and made experts wonder whether his journey was real or imaginary.²⁴

If one observes trends according to the period or the intent of the text (i.e., whether the main interest was religious, strategic, or ethnological), one should not overlook the charming eclecticism, or those traits that allow us to us glimpse the people of flesh and blood behind the text! It should be added that the more new things our authors found to describe, the more they were obliged to confront the aporia of writing about the real world—for ultimately the art of description makes greater demands than that of fiction. Then there would emerge in their writing all the contortions, circumlocutions, and innovations capable of evoking objects through a process of approximation. The later books would provide models and, if need be, a linguistic apparatus permitting real things to be written about.²⁵

There were, of course, pilgrims who claimed that their only ambition was to keep a private diary of their holy journey for personal use, intended for no eyes but their own. But is it possible to take up the pen without secretly wishing to cross the frontiers of one’s inner landscape? To what extent is the pilgrim’s narrative really condemned never to escape the ambit of the self? The more we approach the age of the printing press, the less we encounter this pious self-effacement. On the contrary, the pilgrimage account increasingly served as an excuse to communicate the traveler’s personal experience. Bernhard von Breydenbach can be considered a typical example of this phenomenon. He pays considerable attention to his reader, speaking of his concern to shun all verbosity, obscurity, or rhetorical artifice.²⁶ Such an overt preference for a natural style is symptomatic of the way the pilgrimage account gradually asserted itself as travel writing, aiming at simplicity, communicativeness, and conviviality. Breydenbach would succeed beyond his wildest dreams. Living in an