Konrad von Grünenberg - View of Jerusalem, 1487
There are many routes by which travellers go from England or France on their pilgrimages to Jerusalem. For many, John Mandevillle tells us, the choice was to attempt the journey first to Egypt, and from there proceed to the holy city, to make the long pilgrimage and then the short.
They might cross France and Burgundy, passing cities and towns too familiar for Mandeville to think worth mentioning. From there though, there were options. Some chose to depart from Genoa, as far north as you can be on Italy’s western side, some passing through Sardinia and Corsica. Others opted for Genoa’s longtime rival on the opposite coast, leaving from Venice and sailing the Adriatic. Others went to whatever port they might find an available boat, some to Naples and some to Brindisi near the heel of the Italian boot, some via Sicily, where Mandeville mentions a test of fidelity conducted with a poisonous adder that would encircle the trustworthy spouse and bite the adulterous, and where the earth beneath Mount Etna constantly burns, where flames issue forth of many colours. From those colours the locals were said to prophesize on the quality of the corn harvest, the market, and the weather.
Sometimes, pilgrims’ journeys took them to the port of Pisa, from which they would sail to the Genoese owned island of Corfu, and on to Greek ports at Myroch, Vlore, or Durres, on to Constantinople, Rhodes, and Cyprus, to Jaffa and then Alexandria, the city where St. Catherine’s head was slashed off, where the churches’ walls were washed white to obscure their Christian images, where St. Mark was martyred and his bones laid to rest before being snatched up and smuggled to Venice, or so that city’s stories went.
From Alexandria, the route went from sea to sand, and these were sands that would have spoken to the pilgrims of biblical doings, of the deserts through which Moses and Aaron led the people from Egypt. The pilgrims could follow in their footsteps, finding the well where Moses provided water when they muttered against him, finding the bitter well at Mara where Moses had removed the foul taste by placing a piece of wood in the water, finding the Elim Valley, where, quote, “there are twelve wells and sixty-two date-bearing palm trees, where Moses and the Children of Israel camped.” “From this valley to Mount Sinai [it was] only one day’s travel,” to the place where Moses saw God speak to him in the burning bush, where an abbey of devout Greeks and Arabs live on dates, roots, and herbs behind good walls and iron gates that keep back the wild animals of the desert. Where at the church of St. Catherine, birds flock bearing olive branches and the oil that produced from this miraculous harvest is used both for food and to light their lamps.
Across the desert Mandeville’s pilgrims went, making sure to bring all necessary provisions on their camels, the text being clear that horses would never manage it. Thirteen days it took, bringing them to Beer Sheva, to the Vale of Hebron, to Bethlehem, and at last to Jerusalem, the city to which Mandeville describes many ways, even an especially short one for those with no funding or companions.
That’s the city we’ll be visiting today.
Hello and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the history podcast that follows medieval history through the travellers that crossed it, sometimes on very verifiably real journeys, sometimes somewhat less so.
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And now, the story.
Today, it’s back to the stories of John Mandeville, tales tall, taken, and otherwise, and as I’m making such heavy use of his translation and footnotes, I’d like to again point out that the text I’m working from here is by Anthony Bale who has also in recent years translated the Book of Margery Kempe, something I’ll also be getting to at some point.
Last episode, we walked with our infamously unreliable guide right up to the gates of Jerusalem, but we did not enter the city. Today, we go in, and we go on to see the surrounding sites. I mentioned last episode that we’d be following Mandeville further in his armchair travels to Egypt and elsewhere, but we’re actually really going to linger here, around the city of Jerusalem. Egypt will have to wait for next episode. We’ll not be getting into those taller tales with this episode. Today, we are 14th-century pilgrims.
We go, just as pilgrims had gone for a thousand years, holding sacred the holy sites of Jerusalem even as a competing intellectual strain within Christianity - from Gregory of Nyssa to Bernard of Clairvaux - had warned against placing too much value upon them, against fixating on terrestrial Jerusalem when celestial Jerusalem was ever within reach, not that this prevented Bernard from preaching crusade.
Pilgrims sought mystical experiences, blessings, and cures. They asked after saintly or godly intervention or fulfilled their vows for that which had already been given. They looked to be pardoned for their sins and by the time of the 12th-century could be called upon to complete a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem to atone for mortal sin.
And now, let’s go see the holy city situated there among the hills. It was, Mandeville tells us, first called Jebus and then, until David was king, Salem. It’s David who’s credited with combining the two in Jebusalem and Solomon with the more familiar Jerusalem. The etymology is not an invention of the text. It can be found in a number of its known sources.
Our guide first locates the city geographically, with Egypt, Arabia, Syria, and the Mediterranean at its compass points, and near to the cities of Hebron, Jericho, Beer Sheva, Ashkelon, Jaffa,, Bethlehem, and the biblical Ramatha-in-Ephraim. He locates it within its recent Christian past, saying simply that “there used to be a patriarch in Jerusalem and there were archbishops and bishops throughout the country.” He extends this thought, saying that the province had been held by many nations, “such as Jews, Canaanites, Assyrians, Persians, Medes, and Macedonians, Greeks, Romans, Christians, Saracens, Barbarians, Turks, Tartars, and many other peoples; for [quote] Christ does not desire that it should be in the hands of traitors and sinners, whether they are Christians or not.”
So Christians sometimes explained to themselves and others the failure to hold the holy land. “Yet,” the text continues, “the sinful ones have held that land in their hands for more than a hundred and fifty years,” ever since Salah ad-Din had taken it in other words. “Just as these regions were lost …, so shall they be won again,” Mandeville says, with perhaps undue optimism.
Our guide then goes on to speak of what lies within the city’s walls, of its sites and buildings. And this is not a run-down of palaces and military might. This is a pilgrim’s account of the holy places of which there were, of course, no shortage.
We can begin, Mandeville tells us, as people did, with their first pilgrimage to the church of the Holy Sepulchre, once north of the city walls but now solidly within them. It is a, quote, “handsome circular church, finely roofed with lead and with an open ceiling. On the west side is an attractive and sturdy bell-tower; and in the middle of the church is a tabernacle like a little house, beautifully crafted in the manner of a semicircle and richly decorated with gold, azure, and other colours; and to the right is the sepulchre of Our Lord; and the tabernacle is eight feet long and five feet wide and eleven feet high.”
The church so described sits on the site of a Roman temple where the one ordered built by Constantine was consecrated in 335, but it had, to say the least, been through a bit since then. There’d been burning in early 7th-century Sassanid Jerusalem, total destruction in early 11th-century Fatimid, and repeated rounds of earthquakes and fires in between. The structure we’re encountering in Mandeville was roughly that which would last for centuries after, the result of a 12th-century rebuild that would then be periodically renovated or updated as required.
To jump forward a little bit, this is where a mid-18th-century agreement between the different Christian communities making use of the church would seek to prevent inter-order disputes. The resulting Status Quo barred any of the orders from making alterations without the permission of the others, but it would also result in the delightfully absurd “immovable ladder,” an item which, because it could not be moved, sits there beneath a window both in recent colour photos and also in a 1728 engraving. And in our text, there is some acknowledgement of Christian diversity at the church at this time, a reference to “a chapel where priests sing,” not, quote, “according to our rite but according to their own.”
Mandeville writes of a place where the sepulchre itself had needed to be walled away because visitors had been prone to break off stone in pieces or dust to be taken home, where there were no windows, only oil lamps, and where the one in front of the sepulchre was known to extinguish itself on Good Friday and then light itself again on Easter Sunday. And the empty tomb with its miraculous lamp was not alone in affecting the church’s visitors.
There in its walls, pilgrims could contemplate the final Stations of the Cross made powerfully real before their eyes. They could see the pillar where Christ was stripped and scourged. They could see Calvary where he was set upon the cross and the white rock where the cross was then set, the white contrasting with the red of Christ’s blood. They could see the place on the ground where Joseph of Arimathea laid his body. There was the cleft in the rock where Adam’s head was said to have been unearthed after Noah’s flood. There was the site of Abraham’s sacrifice. There were the four stone columns, ever dripping with water and said to weep for Christ’s death. For those pilgrims willing and able to pay for the privilege, there was the possibility of being locked inside until morning to contemplate the sepulchre in seclusion. The lord Nompar de Caumont, visiting in the early 15th-century, would leave a record of just such a night, and of being made, after mass the next morning, knight of the chivalric order of the Holy Sepulcher.
Strengthening the site’s connection with biblical history, a cross, recognized as the true one, had been found, and the four nails, one of which Emperor Constantine was said to have had made into a bridle for his horse, “for [quote] by the power of this bridle he overcame his enemies and won all these lands.”
Representing more recent history were the bodies of the Kings of the Kingdom of Jerusalem which lay there before the altar. You would recognized some of them from the Salah ad-Din series.
Out on the street outside the church, a Mandeville-guided visitor might walk the two hundred paces to the Hospital of St John, the home of the Knights Hospitaller where both pilgrims and the sick were received and cared for, and at which Benjamin of Tudela estimated that around 400 brother knights lived in 1170, the place John of Wurzburg described in 1165, like this:
“... a beautiful church built in honour of St. John the Baptist, to which is annexed a hospital, in which are gathered in various rooms a huge number of sick people, both men and women, who are cared for and refreshed daily at very great expense. I learnt from the servants themselves speaking on the subject that their number during that time … amounted to two thousand, of whom more than fifty are sometimes carried out dead during the course of a day and a night, while more are newly arriving all the time.”
The hospital distributed bread beyond knowing to those who came door to door, and it maintained “distributed throughout its castles many persons instructed in every kind of soldiery.”
You might instead leave the Holy Sepulchre and walk one hundred and sixty paces to the temple, to the Temple, “... a very beautiful building … completely circular and exceptionally tall and roofed with lead and handsomely paved with white marble.” it was barred in Mandeville’s time to Jews and Christians, but he claims to have gone where he wished, courtesy of a letter of introduction bearing the sultan’s seal.
So it was that you, like he, could enter one of its four entrances, “finely turned in cypress wood,” see its marble pillars, its Holy of Holies. You were standing, Mandeville wished to make clear, not in the Temple that Solomon built, not in the one that was ordered destroyed by Roman Emperor Vespasian’s son, Titus, not the one which Emperor Julian, the Apostate, ordered constructed and which soon fell in an earthquake, but rather that ordered rebuilt by Hadrian.
It was on this site that Jacob slept upon a rock and saw the angels passing up and down the ladder, where David prayed for mercy after murdering Uriah, where Christ himself sat. It was from this site that the Ark of God was taken to Rome by Titus.
A little way off was another temple, the temple of the Knights Templar. There was a church dedicated to Mary’s mother, before which a great tree had begun to grow on the night she had been conceived. There was the house of King Herod the Great, Jewish client-king of the Roman provinces and doer, in these and other accounts, of wicked deeds both great and small. There, outside the city and beyond Mount Zion, was the Field of Blood, said to have been bought with Judas’ 30 pieces of silver. There were so many sites, saints, and holy spots to confront the pilgrim with the place’s past, in both biblical and slightly more recent history.
And some two miles to the north, Mandeville tells us, was Mount Joy, from which many of those pilgrims would first catch sight of the destination they had laboured so hard to attain. The journey was not easy on the body, and for those who reached Mount Joy and looked upon their desired destination, that place earned its name. For those who could not undertake it themselves, they might instead contemplate the holy places through a text such as Mandeville’s.
After this short break, we’ll look beyond this sight and city, and we’ll expand our little regional tour, in just a moment.
…
Let’s move out now from the holy city. We’re zooming out until we see Gethsemane, where Christ was kissed by Judas, parted with his disciples, and then was arrested.
Mandeville shows us the tomb of King Jehoshaphat and Mount Olivet, with its many olives, its view over the valley of that king and down into the streets of Jerusalem itself, and on the slope down towards the city, the footprint of Christ, his last before ascending into the sky. That print in its church had been the subject of veneration since the 7th-century but had been abandoned in 1187, and by 1212 the church was a mosque and the footprint taken to al-Aqsa. However, by the time Mandeville was supposed to have made his excursion, there were two such footprints being visited by pilgrims, and a church again too.
The Mandeville text continues its remembrances. Here, there once was an abbey but now a church. There, is a chapel where once Christ sat and spoke, saying, as in Matthew, “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.” And near that, the church and burial place of Mary the Egyptian, the 4th-century figure who had, after a pretty eventful early life, crossed the Jordan and retired to the desert with only three loaves of bread, there to live an ascetic life and die a miracle-laden death.
Further east from that church was the chapel of Bethany. That was where Simon the Leper had lived and leant aid to Christ before being baptized as Julian, before becoming a bishop and then a patron saint of hospitality. That was also where Lazarus was from, with his sisters Mary and Martha, and where he was raised from the dead in the Gospel of John, where Mary Magdalene was forgiven, where Doubting Thomas had his Marion vision, and where Christ sat upon a stone and preached, where he’s said to sit again on the Day of Judgement.
You might travel from five Bethany to Jericho with its ancient wall, “once a decent city,” he says, but now desolate and all but deserted. Or you might travel to the River Jordan, blind men on the way “sat in the road, crying … ‘Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!’” To the east you’d see the great mountain, where Abraham spent a time, where Christ spent his 40 days, and where live, quote, “a kind of Christian men … called Georgians,” at what must have been the hermitage of Quarantine, the word I - being a great fool of Took - only now realize refers to the aforementioned 40 days. Might be all alone in my sense of discovery there.
When you reach the Jordan, which the people of Israel passed through without getting wet, where Christ was baptized, and where the Holy Ghost came down as dove, you find it neither great nor broad but abundant in fish, flowing from Mount Lebanon and known by Mandeville and his medieval sources to take its name from the two springs, Jor and Dan, which were its source. On one side is Mount Gilboa and a pleasant plain, on the other, the mountains of Lebanon that run in full to the desert of the pharaoh and split Syria from Pheonicia. There are cedar trees bearing fruit the size of a human head. There is the plain on which Job’s Temple sits. And there is the Dead Sea, into which the Jordan flows.
If you’ve been in the Dead Sea, you’ll have noticed first the simple impossibility of sinking. You’d heard that would be the case, but to experience it is somehow still a thing of childlike wonderment. You might have noticed the way that something in the water adheres to your skin, forming a kind of jelly that must be rinsed off immediately when you get out. You’ll definitely notice the burning, every scrape and abrasion you didn’t know you’d picked up, suddenly aching in the salts. This was not water you wanted near your eyes.
Mandeville puts it slightly differently.
“It’s called the Dead Sea,” he says, “because it doesn’t flow.” And contrary to the name, “neither man nor living beast is able to die in it, and that has often been tested: they throw men in who have been condemned to death, and it spits them out again.” A piece of iron thrown in floats back up, but a feather sinks down. It is, he says, against nature, and then compares this, somewhat oddly, to those cities punished for being likewise against nature: Sodom, Gomorrah, Adama, Seboim, and Zoar. Some called this sea Devil’s River, some Stinking River, because, he helpfully clarifies, the water stank, and some Lake Alsiled, an interesting name that places the Arabic “Al” before a Middle English word for mire.
Overall, he makes it all sound pretty unpleasant. There is a brief reprieve when some attractively coloured fruits are mentioned, but then we read that though they seem ripe, “when one splits them or cuts them open one finds nothing but cinders and ashes,” and also that this is a token of God’s vengeance through which these cities [against nature] were burned with hell-fire.”
Everything here is put in terms of its distance from Jerusalem, that city at the centre like in the T and O maps of earlier centuries. “The gracious city of Damascus, that is full of excellent goods and wares,” was, for example, five days from Jerusalem. Near Damascus was Mount Seir, city of many physicians, and what Mandeville calls Nostre Dame de Gardemarche, the Our Lady of Saidnaya Monastery, which you can still visit today, and where our guide describes a painted panel that is known to miraculously become flesh and blood; it does not now do so very often, but it does produce oil like that of an olive, and this oil has many healing properties.
Sometimes, the distance is in terms of time. There is a strong sense that things here are not as they once were. So much of it is like Nazareth, which, quote, “used to be a huge city but is now just a little town and it has no walls.” “There used to be a grand church there, but now there is just a little booth to receive the pilgrims’ offerings.” In Schechem’s fertile valley, where Christ spoke to the Samaritan, there used to be a church but it was knocked down.” And Sebastiya, where the twelve tribes of Israel had come from, was “not as big as it once was.” So much had fallen away.
Sebastiya had been where St John the Baptist had been buried, his remains having been translated there and entombed, but the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate had had his bones removed and burnt, only the one finger, the one with which John had gestured, “Behold the Lamb of God” had failed to burn, taken, according to Mandeville, to the mountains to be revered, and soon multiplying, found as relics across the medieval world.
Of course, his head had also survived. That, Mandeville says, had been taken by Emperor Theodosius, he of the Theodosian Walls, to Constantinople, “wrapped in bloodied cloth.” Now it was split in half - it’s not clear whether vertically or horizontally - the one part still in that city and the other in Rome at St Sylvester. Another head of the Baptist was said to be in Amiens, though which was the true one Mandeville admits he knows not. “But God knows.”
So. We have saints, miracles, history both biblical and otherwise, and we have the odd other intriguing anecdote. We have, for example, the sands near Acre that people come for from far and wide in order to make fine glassworks, that never empty out no matter how much has been taken, and that swirl from strong winds; that turn metal that touches them into glass, and glass objects that had been made of them back into sand.
And of course we have people, not just the biblical figures scattered through this section of the text, not just the historical ones, from Roman through Mamluk, that had impacted the region, but also the people who still lived there.
I briefly mentioned last episode the part in which Mandeville covers Greek Christianity, noting the differences from and for his Latinate audience. As with that, throughout, there seems here to be an openness to “other” Christianities, for “devout men [who] lead a chaste life and live in great abstinence and great penance” even if their practices or beliefs do differ from Mandeville’s own.
We read about the Samaritans in their red linen headwraps who, quote, “believe in the Bible by the letter,” but whose “law is different from Christian law, Saracen law, Jewish law, and pagan law.” We read that, quote:
“You should also be aware that in many places Christians live amongst the Saracens, paying tribute to them. They have various customs, and there are many different kinds of monks, and though they are all Christians and have a range of laws yet they all really believe in God the Father and in the Son and in the Holy Ghost.”
These people, Mandeville tells us, are the Jacobites. “They know the Bible and the psalter well, but they cite it in their own language and not in Latin.” And they confess not to man, but only to God, for only one who knows the nature of the sickness may give good medicine to the ill. They don’t consider it worthwhile to confess their sin to one who doesn’t understand its nature.
Now, the information on these people is not always correct. We read here that they are called Jacobites because the were converted by St James when actually they take their name from the 6th-century Bishop of Edessa, Jacob Baradaeus, but the depiction seems fairly sympathetic. And the Greeks, Samaritans, and Jacobites are not alone.
Quote:
“There is another people and they are called Syrians. They keep the Greek faith, and they have long beards. There are other people, who are called Georgians, who were converted by St George. They worship the saints in Heaven more than others do, and they have shaved tonsures: the clerics have round tonsures and the laymen have square tonsures. They keep the Greek faith. There are other men, called Girdling Christians, because they wear girdles down below. There are also some others called Nestorians, some called Arians, some called Nubians, some called Gregorians, some called Indians, who come from the land of Prester John. Each of these has some of the articles of our faith, but each one varies somewhat from the others. It would be too much to describe the differences between them.”
It’s really a paragraph that goes places, stretching its legs from Syria all the way to the lands of Prester John, somewhere we’ll be going in a few episodes. Lest I give the impression that the Mandeville author fully endorses Christianity in all its forms with equality, I should note that he rounds out his description of the Jacobites with the words “However, they still want for the articles of our faith,” but it is, perhaps surprisingly, open, accepting, tolerant even, it has sometimes been said. But why?
Why, when compared with his sources, was this writer’s treatment of others so generous, so keen to avoid demonization? And was this generosity universal? It’s a topic we’re going to return to.
I’ll finish here for today. Next episode, we’ll get to Egypt, and we’ll see what else.
Sources:
Sir John Mandeville: The Book of Marvels and Travels, translated by Anthony Bale. Oxford University Press, 2012.
The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, translated by Charles Moseley. Penguin, 2005.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Higgins, Iain Macleod. Writing East: The "Travels" of Sir John Mandeville. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.
Janin, Hunt. Four Paths to Jerusalem: Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Secular Pilgrimages, 1000 BCE to 2001 CE. McFarland, 2006
Moore, Kathryn Blair. The Architecture of the Christian Holy Land: Reception from Late Antiquity through the Renaissance. Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Pringle, Denys. The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem: Volume 3, The City of Jerusalem: A Corpus. Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Routledge Handbook on Jerusalem. Edited by Suleiman A. Mourad, Naomi Koltun-Fromm, and Bedross Der Matossian. Routledge, 2018.
Routledge Revivals: Trade, Travel and Exploration in the Middle Ages (2000): An Encyclopedia. Edited by John Block Friedman & Kristen Mossler Figg. Taylor & Francis, 2017.
Tzanaki, Rosemary. Mandeville's Medieval Audiences: A Study on the Reception of the Book of Sir John Mandeville (1371-1550). Taylor & Francis, 2017.