The pilgrimage trails
"The Road Goes Ever On..."
Well, I’ve been missing in action for awhile on this blog. Sorry! November was NanoWriMo month, and I wrote about 150 pages in my novel-in-progress, and didn’t do much of anything else. December was holidays and travel and a new grandchild (yay!), and since then I’ve been doing some long-delayed maintenance on my social reading app, Bookship. Enough excuses; let’s get back to the medieval era, the Crusades, and Richard and Saladin.
As it happens, in my book, the protagonist (Rob) has escaped the disaster of a shipwreck and Richard’s resulting capture near Vienna, by Leopold of Austria. In one of those weird twists of history, Richard had humiliated Leopold after the Siege of Acre, only to fall into his hands, and spend Christmas with him in 1192. Rob is trying to make his way back to England from the wilds of Austria.
Sometime ago I wrote about travel in the medieval era, with a particular focus on England. I explored things like how far people could expect to travel in given time, riding, walking, or rolling.
Pilgrimages
Today I want to discuss a particular form of travel, travel on pilgrimage routes.
Pilgrimage was common in the medieval era. People traveled in religious devotion, to perform penance for misdeeds, or simply to explore the world and their faith. They often traveled for extremely long distances. Usually they would visit sacred sites, associated with martyrs, saints, or relics.
Like other aspects of life, pilgrimages made their way into literature. Perhaps the most famous is The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s masterpiece, containing 24 stories by pilgrims as they traveled from London to, well, Canterbury, to visit the shrine of St. Thomas Becket. (For more about Becket, see our post about the cast of characters that featured large in Richard’s life (and more precisely here, the life of his father, Henry II).
The pilgrimage experience could be quite arduous. The routes might be short, or they might be thousands of miles. Pilgrims would often walk; in the medieval era, horses were expensive and most common people would not have access to them. Pilgrims often traveled in groups, both for the cameraderie, as well as the safety from bandits. They might stay in humble inns, or a monastery, or perhaps even with local villagers. Hostels for pilgrims were often run by religious orders. A pilgrimage could turn into quite an expensive experience! Maps were a rarity - people traveled from waypoint to waypoint, guided by what they’d been told, by the locals, and by the collective knowledge of the way and what people had done before them.
While most pilgrims likely had no map, in the mid 13th century, Matthew Paris made some incredible medieval pilgrimage maps. Lovely photos here:
The longest of the pilgrimages went all the way to the Holy Land. This would have been a forbidding, expensive proposition, unless one were on Crusade with someone else paying for it.
The Knights Templar
The pilgrims and the pilgrimage roads are where we see the rise of the Knights Templar. Their formal name was The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, but they became known as the Templars. The order was founded ca. 1119, and they were created primarily to secure the pilgrimage routes, and to provide safety and security to travelers. The Templars rose to become one of the most powerful forces in the medieval era—they were warriors, they were monks, they were bankers, and they controlled enormous amounts of money, power and military force. But they started by protecting the roads.
As an aside, there's a great book I just finished re-reading, The Iron King by Maurice Druon, which begins with Philip the Fair’s campaign to end the Templars, whom he viewed as both a threat and a source of funds he could appropriate. Philip would eventually arrest all the Templars, and burn Grand Master Jacques de Molay at the stake. Good times, right? According to George R. R. Martin, “This is the original Game of Thrones”. But The Iron King is a hundred years in the future from Richard. Back on task, shall we?
Our hero Rob is trying to make his way from Vienna to England—how might he have gone about that? Here's a map of many of the main pilgrimage routes that people would take:
Rob is a commoner from the north of England, so getting home from Austria after a shipwreck would have been no small feat. He would have tried to get on a major road as quickly as possible and follow the road to the coast to catch a ship to get home, most likely. Roads were often pilgrim routes and protected by the Templars and so he might've appealed for their help in getting home to England, especially as he’d have known some of them from the Crusade. I think it most likely Rob would have taken the so-called Templar Trail, discussed below.
Medieval pilgrimages had three main destinations: Rome, Jerusalem, or Santiago de Compostelana (the Way of St. James). There were many secondary pilgrimage destinations which we’ll ignore for today. There were well-known routes for each of these destinations. Of particular note were/are El Camino de Santiago, often known as the Way of St. James, the Jerusalem Way, and the Via Francegina (to Rome).
The Way of St. James
The Way of Saint James led to the burial site of St. James in Santiago de Compostela, at the Cathedral there. Pilgrims could start from many different areas, the routes converging on the burial site.
Is it really St. James buried there? Opinions vary. The truth, as with most relics, is difficult to determine.
The Via Francegina
The Via Francigena originated as the Lombards, a germanic tribe, competed for dominance in Italy during the 7th century. They created a secure road to the south of Italy, traveling through the Apennines Mountains near the present Cisa Pass.1
Later, European pilgrims would use the road to get to Rome, which was the center of the Christian universe during the medieval era, and the path is almost 2000 miles long depending on where you start. One could start all the way in Canterbury, England, go through France and Switzerland, and ending in Rome. The road continued briefly to Apulia where one could get a ship to the Holy Land.
The Templar Trail
The Templar Trail is another historic pilgrimage trail that leads to Jerusalem. From Dijon, France, it makes its way through Serbia, down to Instanbul, and from there into the Levant, ending in Jerusalem. This is the route taken during the First Crusade by Godfrey of Bouillion, a French Duke and one of the Crusade leaders. The First Crusade ended with the Crusaders taking Jerusalem from Muslim control, after which there was a rather nasty massacre of Muslims (and Jews) by the Christian forces.
In 2006, Brandon Wilson and his companion Émile retraced the steps of Godfrey, but without the military intent. Wilson wrote a book, Along the Templar Trail, which won Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Awards for best travel book in 2009.
The Jerusalem Way
The Jerusalem Way is an ancient route, or more precisely a set of routes, leading to Jerusalem. It shares paths with the previously mentioned trails.
So far we’ve been discussing pilgrimage in the Christian world, but it was no less important in the Muslim world. Whereas in the Christian world, pilgrimages were multi-faceted and went to many different places, in the Muslim world, focus was on one place: Mecca.
In the Muslim world, pilgrimage was the Hajj. Travel to Mecca. Every devout Muslim was expected to perform Hajj at least once in their life. Depending on where one lived, it could be equally as arduous as the trip to Jerusalem from Europe. Pilgrims would walk to Mecca, and participate in various prescribed activities.
In contrast to Christian pilgrimage, which could occur at most any time of year (subject to weather), Islamic pilgrimage was limited to the single week of Hajj, occuring once per year in the Islamic Calendar. While it was expected of any Muslim to perform the Hajj, it was by no means universal. For example, Saladin was an extremely devout Muslim, but his biographers report that at multiple times throughout his life, he intended to go on Hajj, but events prevented him from doing so.
In medieval era, Islamic pilgrims would gather in the major cities, and then join enormous caravans of tens of thousands of people to make the journey, making it a much more singular and focused experience than the more ad hoc Christian pilgrimages which might take place whenever the pilgrim had the opportunity.
One of the triggering events for the Third Crusade was in fact an attack on a caravan of pilgrims on Hajj, by Renald of Chatillon. This eventually led to the Battle of Hattin, where Saladin destroyed the Crusader army and eventually re-took Jerusalem, legendarily slaying Renald personally after the battle.
https://www.viefrancigene.org/en/introduction/