THE DAWN OF
MODERN- GEOGRAPHY.
a
THE DAWN OF
MODERN QEOG-RAPHY.
EXPLORATION AND GEOGRAPHICAL SCIENCE
FROM THE CONVERSION OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE TO A.D. 900, WITH AN ACCOUNT OF THE ACHIEVEMENTS AND WRITINGS OF THE EARLY CHRISTIAN, ARAB,
AND CHINESE TRAVELLERS AND STUDENTS.
BY C. RAYMOND BEAZLEY, M.A., F.R.G.S.,
LATE FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE, OXFORD; CORRESPONDING MEMBER OF THE LISBON GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY.
WITH REPRODUCTIONS OF THE PRINCIPAL MAPS OF THE TIME.
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET.
1897.
A HISTORY OF
8?
Big
v.l
o
LONDON :
PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.
PREFACE.
This volume aims at presenting an account of geographical movements in Christendom, and especially in Latin or Western Christendom, during the early Middle Ages (from about a.d. 300 to about a.d. 900) ; — to which has been added a summary account of non-Christian movements, especially in the Arab and Chinese dominions and races, during the same period. Every geographical enterprise or speculation of importance in these centuries should thus come within the scope of this attempt. But, here, I wish to make two disclaimers.
First, narrow and poor (comparatively) as is the geo- graphical literature of Christendom in these ages, I cannot hope, even with the aid of the collections furnished by the Societe de V Orient Latin, to have noted every passage of importance, or in fact to have done so vast a. subject more than imperfect justice. In non-Christian geography again, this survey is professedly selective; and the Arab and Chinese movements are treated as an appendix to those of the Christian West.1
Secondly, I must plead for a liberal interpretation of the words used above, “ every passage of importance.” Any one who is at all acquainted with the literature in question, must surely admit that the true method of dealing with the same is hard to find and harder to follow. For while it is
1 See pp. 46, 392, 393.
VI
PREFACE.
best to aim at what may be called a typical or representa- tive account, which seeks to avoid an intolerable repetition of petty detail, it must not be forgotten that in that very dull and servile repetition of the same axioms, the same fancies, the same astonishing blunders, is seen a true re- flection of the European decadence in science throughout this time. And, above all, it is important to remember, for such a subject as this, that a true view of history will not ignore the weakness, or the degradation, or even the lifeless- ness of the past ; for almost as much light may sometimes be thrown on the progress of mankind by the attentive examination of those centuries when the tide of life seemed ebbing, as by the prospect of those other and brighter times, which, taken at the flood, led on to fortune.
In the Introductory Chapter more has been said about these and other general aspects of the question, and, at the beginning of each section of the detailed narrative that follows, some attempt has been made to connect this geo- graphical thread of mediaeval history with others of more general interest.
After the introduction, the next five chapters (ii.-vi.) are concerned (1) with the practical exploration and (2) with the geographical study, of Christendom, down to the time when the Norsemen began to change the face of Europe, circa a.d. 300-900. Of these five chapters, the first four (pp. 53-242) are taken up with the travels of pilgrims, merchants, and missionaries ; while chapter vi. (pp. 243-391) describes the geographical science or pseudo-science of the “ Lower Empire ” and the “ Dark Ages.” Chapter vii. is occupied with the Moslem and Chinese geography of this time, which forms (down to about a.d. 950) so surprising a contrast to the contemporary ruins of classical enterprise and culture in the West.
PREFACE.
Yll
In all this, we shall have especially to notice many ideas and circumstances somewhat strange to us of the present day. On the one hand there is the overwhelm- ing importance of religious conceptions both in prac- tical and theoretical geography ; the wonderful diffusion of Christianity through missionary travel (especially of the Nestorians) ; the part taken by pilgrimage in exploration ; the curious survival of so much of the ancient cosmical myth, along with the comparative and temporary dis- appearance of the real classical science ; and the ambitious attempt of Cosmas and others to construct a theological Universe from texts of Scripture. On the other hand, we have the rapid, perhaps too rapid, development of the Arab mind; the activity of the Buddhist propaganda, and the remarkable inter-connection (at least of commerce) between all parts of Asia at such an era as the eighth and ninth centuries a.d. All these features, in their different ways, are full of suggestion, when viewed by the light of the past and future position of Europe.
In these pages we have to do with the time when the Oriental reaction, which was in various ways evidenced by the triumphs both of Christianity and of Islam, by the revived Persian Empire of the Sassanidse, and by the decay of Greek and Latin science, was at its height, naturally affecting human history along the path of geography as along every other road. The subject as a whole, of course, points on to the crusading time, the later Middle Ages, and the Renaissance period (marked by the great maritime discoveries), when Europe gradually retrieved the position it had lost, and entered upon its modern life by the commercial and colonial expansion of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. But that brilliant epoch is parted from the subject of this
Vlll
PREFACE.
volume by a gulf whose depth and width grow steadily upon any student of mediaeval life and thought ; and over some parts of our present period there hangs an intellectual gloom like that which enveloped Caprera and its hermits in the eyes of the fierce old pagan poet — “ Squalet lucifugis insula plena viris.” 1
The illustrations we have to offer are principally of the maps of this time. Crude and curious as they may he, they are not the less instructive. For they are the only examples of map-science that have survived to us from their age. To these a few more or less plausible attempts at the recon- struction of lost map-schemes have been added; as well as a few illustrations of places or objects which have some connection with the more extensive or remarkable travels of the time.
Two notes have also been added, (1) on the Manu- scripts, and (2) on the Editions, of the principal texts for the literature of the subject ; but it has not been possible to give (as was hoped) a more detailed account of either in this volume. Here it may be said that, with certain exceptions, few texts of Western literature can have been less thoroughly examined. The manuscripts of several, e.g. of the pilgrim, narratives have been very inadequately collated. Cosmas has not been edited (independently) since 1765, or Raban Maur since 1626-7; till 1885 the Acta Sanctorum, like Gregory of Tours or Vincent of Beauvais, had never been thoroughly sifted for their geographical material, and even now this has only been done for the earlier Christian centuries by Molinier and Kohler; and the allusions, not infrequently found in works of professed scholarship, to authors so important as Arculf, Dicuil, Massoudy, or Hiouen-Thsang, to say nothing of Cosmas,
Rutilius Namatianus.
PREFACE.
IX
often betray the extreme dimness of the general conceptions of mediaeval geography. This is well borne out by the fact that no attempt whatever has yet been made to deal with this subject as a whole, except in such brief summaries and allusions as may be found in Peschel’s Erdkunde or Vivien de St. Martin’s Histoire de la Geographie. Works such as Santarem’s great Essai sur la Cosmographie or Lelewel’s Geographie du Moyen Age (like Konrad Miller’s new Map- psemundi) are almost exclusively concerned with mediaeval maps.
I have to acknowledge with many thanks the kindness of Mr. J. W. McCrindle, of Edinburgh, who has courteously allowed me to see his forthcoming edition of Cosmas in manuscript, after this volume first went to press. Wherever I have made use of this I have noted the source by the initial [McC.].
I have also to thank Lord Ashburnham for permission to photograph the Beatus map, once in the possession of Libri, from MS. No. 15 at Ashburnham Place ; and the authorities at the University Library in Leipsic, at the Laurentian Library in Florence, and at the Coin Department in the British Museum, for the same privilege in respect of the Sallust map, the Cosmas sketches, and the Merovingian coins herein reproduced.
As to the spelling of Arabic and Chinese names, it may be well to mention that, for the former, M. Reinaud has been usually followed (and especially the orthography of his Abulfeda), and, for the latter, M. Stanislas Julien.
C. R. B.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
INTKODUCTORY.
PAGE
Outline of tlie subject — Chief eras of mediaeval geography — Christian and non-Christian geography in the earlier Middle Ages — New era in Western history with Constantine — Theological atmosphere of early Christian geography — Slow progress of mediaeval science —Practical travel and theoretical study in our period, a.d. 300-900 — Remarks on Byzantine geography — Early pilgrim travel from Latin Christendom to the Levant — Remarks on the principal pilgrims — Missionary and commercial travel of this time — Geo- graphical science of the Patristic Age — Early Christian maps — Outline of early Arabic geography — Outline of Chinese geography in this period ... ... ... ... ... ... 1
CHAPTER II.
THE PRIMITIVE PILGRIMS OP LATIN CHRISTENDOM DOWN TO JUSTINIAN (CIRC. A.D. 300-530) IN DETAIL.
Part I. Before Jerome : — Alexander, Antoninus and other pre-Nicene devotees — St. Helena, mother of Constantine — The Bordeaux pilgrim of a.d. 333 — Minor pilgrims, a.d. 340-370. Part II. From Jerome to Justinian: — St. Jerome as a centre of pilgrim movement — Silvia of Aquitaine, importance of her journey — Paula and Eustochium — The pilgrimage of Paula — Minor pilgrim notices, a.d. 391-417— Melania the younger — Pilgrim records after Jerome’s death — Eucherius of Lyons, c. a.d. 440 — Minor notices to a.d. 523 53
CHAPTER III.
THE PILGRIMS IN DETAIL, CONTINUED, PROM JUSTINIAN TO MOHAMMED.
The Roman revival of this age — Growth of pilgrim legends — Important pilgrim journeys — The Breviary of Jerusalem, c. a.d. 530 — Theodosius, c. a.d. 530 — Difficulties of his record — The tract “ On the Route of the Children of Israel ” — Minor pilgrim notices, a.d. 530-570 — Allusions in Gregory of Tours — Antoninus of Placentia, c. a.d. 570 — Wild legends in Antoninus — His extensive travels —
Xll
CONTENTS.
PAGE
Pope Gregory the Great and pilgrimage — The “ Notitia . . . Patriar- chatuum ” — Lesser pilgrim records, a.d. 570-000 — Storm of Jerusa- lem by the Persians in 615 a.d. — The Holy City surrendered to the Arabs in 637 a.d. — The triumph of Islam an era in the history of geography, as well as in politics, etc. ... ... ... ... 95
CHAPTER IV.
THE PILGRIMS IN DETAIL, CONTINUED, DURING THE LATTER CENTURIES OF OUR PERIOD, CIRC. A.D. 680-870 (900).
All belong to Anglo-Frankish Age and movement — (1) Arculf and his time, c. a.d. 680 — The Western World in Arculf’s day — Arculf, Adamnan, and Bede — Arculf’s record illustrated by plans — Stages of the pilgrimage of Arculf — (2) Willibald and his time, c. a.d. 721- 728 — The Western World of this time — Stages in the pilgrimage of Willibald — His connection with the conversion of Germany— (3)
Latin pilgrims under the Karlings, c. a.d. 750-870 — The Western World in the Karling Age — Pilgrimage of Fidelis, as recorded by Dicuil, before a.d. 767 — Charles the Great and the holy places —
The tract “On the Houses of God in Jerusalem,” c. a.d. 808 — Pil- grimage of Bernard the Wise, a.d. 868, etc. — The Western World in • Bernard’s day — Features of Bernard’s narrative — His mention of the holy fire — The pilgrimage of Frotmund, c. a.d. 870 — The tract “On the Situation of Jerusalem,” of c. a.d. 975 (?), the only impor- tant record of tenth-century pilgrimage from the West— A natural stopping place in geographical history, and especially in pilgrim- travel, about a.d. 900 ... ... ... ... ... 125
CHAPTER V.
COMMERCIAL AND MISSIONARY TRAVEL.
Part I. Commercial Travel , a.d. 300-900 : —The great trade-routes of the Old Empire and the early Middle Ages — Limits of ancient enterprise — Decline of Roman trade — Revived enterprise under Justinian — Attempts at new trade-developments in South and North — Alliances with Abyssinians and Turks — Journeys of Sopater, Cosmas, and Zemarchus — The silk trade and its influence on travel — Importation of silk manufacture into the Roman Empire — Sopater in Ceylou — Cosmas as a merchant traveller in Africa and India — Trade of Latin Christendom, a.d. 300-600 — Byzantine com- merce, a.d. 600-900 — Latin trade enterprise, in France, Germany, Britain, Italy, etc., a.d. 600-900. Part. II. Missionary Travel : — In Abyssinian channel — Conquests of Abyssinian Christianity before Mohammed — Nestorian mission travel, in Central Asia, India, China, etc. — The inscription of Singanfu — Decline of Nestorian enterprise — Distribution of Nestorian Mission Sees — Mission travels of Ulphilas — Irish mission travel — Patrick,
CONTENTS.
Xlll
PAGE
Columba, Columban, Gall, Virgil, etc. — Discovery of Iceland, the Faroes, etc., by Irish hermits, as related by Dicuil — The legendary Irish voyages of St. Brandan and others — Mission travel in Northern Europe — The great Roman missionaries of the ninth century ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 176
CHAPTER VI.
GEOGRAPHICAL THEORY.
The cosmographical science of the Patristic Age — Three chief schools in early Christian geography, their characteristics — I. Solinus the Fabulist, his date, sources, and peculiarities — His special depend- ence on Pliny and Mela — Main divisions of his work: (1) the history of Rome and the wonders of Italy; (2) the marvels of South-Eastern Europe ; (3) the wonders of Scythia ; (4) remarkable things in Northern and Western Europe ; (5) the wonders of Africa ;
(6) the mysteries and miracles of Asia — Notable things about certain Islands— II. Cosmas the Scientist —Patristic parallels to Cosmas — His system of the universe — Date, sources, and special features of his book, the “Christian Topography” — Map sketches of Cosmas — Place of Cosmas in history — His debt to his friends —
His possible Nestorianism — Contents of his work — III. The Raven- nese Geographer and the statistical school — Sources, date, and special features of his catalogues — His relation to the older itine- raries, and especially to the Peutinger Table — Authorities quoted by him — Specimens of his method — Contents of his work — Other Geographers not belonging exclusively to any one of the three schools above noticed — IV. Dicuil and his book, “ On the Measure- ment of the Earth” — Date, sources, and special features of this work— Original narratives of travel embedded in Dicuil — His account of intercourse between Charlemagne and Haroun-al- Rashid— The body of Dicuil’s work statistical — V. The Minor Geographers of the Patristic Age— Patristic views in general of the universe, the world, sun, stars, etc. — Three special illustrations of the geographical views of this period: (1) as to the earthly paradise; (2) as to monstrous races; (3) as to an earth-centre at ^ Jerusalem or elsewhere — The minor geographers in detail — Marti- anus Capella, c. a.d. 300 (?) — Macrobius, c. a.d. 400 — St. Basil of Csesarea in his “ Hexaemeron,” c. a.d. 370 — Severian of Gabala and Diodorus of Tarsus, a.d. 370-400 — Their probable connection with Theodore of Mopsuestia, the possible source of most of Cosmas’ theories— Orosius, c. a.d. 425 — iEthicus of Istria (seventh century?)
— Controversies connected with this work — Julius iEthicus the Cosmographer, c. a.d. 530 — Julius iEthicus, Julius Honorius, and Orosius — Vibius Sequester (fourth century?) — Priscian, Ausonius, Ammianus Marcellinus, Cassiodorus, Procopius, Jornandes, etc. —
St. Isidore of Seville, c. a.d. 600 — Armenian geography — Bede the
XIV
CONTENTS.
Venerable, c. a.d. 700 — Virgil of Salzburg, his peculiar theories — Raban Maur of Mainz (ninth century) — Guido of Ravenna (or of Pisa?) c. a.d. 850 — VI. Map-science of this time — Classical traditions in map-making — References to lost maps of Old Empire — Maps of the early Christian period, their extreme rarity and sketchy character — The Peutinger Table, compared and contrasted with the systems of Eratosthenes and of Ptolemy — Christian insertions in the Table — Possible dates of its various recensions — The map sketches of Cosmas — The map of Albi — Map sketches of minor importance — The lost maps of this period, of Beatus and others
PAGE
243
CHAPTER VII.
NON-CHRISTIAN GEOGRAPHY OF THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES.
Part I. The Earlier Arabic Geography — Its merits, defects, and special achievements — Trade-routes of the Caliphate — Influence of Arab thought on Christian science — Instances — The geography of the Koran — Influence of Nestorian teachers on Arabs — Beginnings of Arabic science, c. a.d. 770 — Beginnings of descriptive geography, c. a.d. 800 — Legendary character of much of this — Geography of the age of Almamoun, from Aljahedh to Soleyman the merchant — Journey of Sallam the Interpreter — Ibn Vahab’s visit to China —
Abou Zeyd Hassan, his supplement to Soleyman — Chinese Revolu- tion of a.d. 878 indecisive as a check to Arab enterprise — lbn Khordadbeh— His important notes on trade-routes— Albateny — Aldjayhany — Ibn Fozlan— Russian travels of the last named — Sindbad the Sailor — Basis of fact in the Sindbad Saga— The Sindbad voyages considered in detail— Alestakhry and Ibn Haukal — Ibn Haukal on particular countries and especially Samarcand — Alfaraby— Massoudy — Encyclopaedic character of his work, “ The Meadows of Gold ” — Instances of his geographical doctrines and knowledge — Part II. Chinese Geography — Buddhist and Chinese pilgrimage compared — Early intercourse of China with Mediter- ranean world, with' India, and with the Caliphate — Chinese travellers of our period : (1) Fa-Hien, a.d. 399-414 — His wander- ings in Central Asia and India, etc. — (2) I-TsiDg, etc., a.d. G50-700 — (3) Hoei-Sing and Sung-Yun to India in a.d. 518 — (4) Hoei-Sin and others to Eastern countries (North America ?), a.d. 499, etc. —
(5) Hiouen-Thsang to Central Asia, India, etc., a.d. G29-646 — Early experiments by Chinese in map-making and the use of the magnet — The outlook at the end of our period ... ... 392
Additional Notes: —
(1) On Manuscripts
(2) On Editions ...
(3) On certain minor points
Index of Names
517
525
531
533
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
TO FACE PAGE
Bishop Arculf’s Drawing of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre
AS IT WAS ABOUT A.D. 680 ... ... ... ... ... 133
The Church of the Last Supper, etc. 7 on Mount Sion, as Arculf
drew it, cir. a.d. 680 ... ... ... ... ... 136
The Round Church of the Ascension on Olivet, as Arculf drew " it, cir. a.d. 680 ... ... ... ... ... ... 136
The Church over Jacob’s Well as in about a.d. 680, according
to Arculf ... ... ... ... ... ... 136
The Round World as represented in Merovingian Coins ( heading
to page) ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 176
* Old “Syrian” Church at Caranyachirra (after Bishop D. Wilson) 213
* The Old Church of Parur on the Coast of Malabar (after
Claudius Buchanan) ... ... ... ... ... 213
* Exterior of old “ Syrian ” Church at Cotteiyam in Travancore
(after Bishop D. Wilson) ... ... ... ... ... 214
Interior of Church at Cotteiyam (after Wilson) ... ... 214
The Christian [Nestorian] Inscription at Sin-gan-fu, from a
RUBBING BY BARON RICHTHOFEN ... ... ... ... 218
The Plans of Cosmas (now first photographed from original MS.)
i. The World and the Firmament ... ... ... ... 282
ii. The Waters above and below the Firmament ... ... 284
iii. The World and the Pillars of Heaven ... ... ... 286
iv. The Present and Antediluvian Worlds, with Ocean between ... 288
v. The Universe according to Cosmas ... ... ... 290
* Old Syrian [Nestorian] Churches in South India, commemorating Nestorian missions in Far South of Asia, and all probably containing work of eighth and ninth centuries.
XVI
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
TO FACE PAQR
The Plans of Cosmas — continued.
vi. The Great Mountain in the North, with the rising and setting
sun [(N.B. — Mountain has three zones, denoting (1) the Winter Sun, (2) the Sun at Equinoxes, (3) the Summer Sun] 292
vii. The Antipodes in Derision ... ... ... ... 291
The World of Ordinary Classical Geography (after Reinaud) 376 The World according to the Ninth [or Tenth?] Century Map-
Sketch in Sallust MS. at Leipsic ... ... ... 380
The Western, Byzantine, and Eastern Sections of the Peutinger
Table ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 381
The World-Map of Cosmas (now first photographed from
original MS.) ... ... ... ... ... ... 384
The World according to the Mappe Monde of Albi ... ... 385
Mappe Monde from a MS. of the Ninth Century, in the Library
at Strassburg ... ... ... ... ... ... 386
The Ashburnham Map of the Tenth Century. Oldest Derivative
SURVIVING OF THE ORIGINAL PLAN OF BEATUS ... ... 388
The World-System of the Ravennese Geographer ... ... 390
The World according to Ibn Haukal (after Reinaud) ... 451
The World according to Massoudy (after Reinaud) ... ... 460
A Chinese Magnet-Figure, as used in Ships of Eighth and
Ninth Centuries, a.d. ... ... ... ... ... 489
GEOGRAPHY OF THE MIDDLE AGES.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.
The expansion of Europe in the way of geographical progress is commonly spoken of as if it affected only that modern world which the fifteenth century saw gradually evolved out of the mediaeval, and which received so immense an enlargement from the discovery of America, of the Cape route to India, and of the ocean way round the glohe. 1 Classical geography has also received a good share of attention, hut few have troubled to inquire how those forces that displayed themselves with such effect in the lifetime of Columbus were stored and matured in the long “ Middle Age ” of preparation, or how the great successes were led up to by the futile ventures or partial triumphs of the thirty generations that lay between the two periods of European ^ ascendency.
The geographical progress of the Middle Ages and of modern times is, from our point of view, essentially con- nected with the extension of Europe and Christendom into its present dominion over the best and largest part of the earth ; and the history of this progress falls naturally into two parts — the mediaeval time of dejection and recovery,
1 In 1492, 1486-98, and 1520.
B
2
INTRODUCTORY.
[Ch.
and the modem age of consequent success. These periods obviously pass into one another in the great forty years of discovery between the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope by Bartholomew Diaz in 1486, and Magellan’s circum- navigation of the globe (1520-22). In the mediaeval period, which we may consider as lasting down to the aforesaid voyage of Diaz, we have again (from the European outlook) two main divisions — divisions which may be conveniently termed the Dark Ages, and the Crusading Time, to which last the movement of Norse or Yiking enterprise forms an introduction. The former of these we have tried to deal with in the present volume, and its sub-divisions are indicated in their place ; but, after all, these are unimportant, and, speaking roughly, we may assume that the whole of this earlier period of the Christian Middle Ages is marked by the same leading features; and among these, religious conceptions, both in travel and in science, are the most prominent.
There is in general during this time a lack of geo- graphical enterprise or study for the sake of knowledge, of political dominion, or even of commercial gain. The chief journeys of these centuries (c. a.d. 300-900) are undertaken,, and the chief cosmographies or geographies are written for religious interests, and in a religious spirit ; but the result of this, as will be seen, is not altogether to the advance- ment of man’s “ earth-knowledge.”
The first of our mediaeval periods, it is true, offers com- paratively little variety, but the second has at least three clearly marked and distinctive epochs. First there is that of the Northmen ; who begin their career as discoverers on the fringe of the known world, and as the awakeners of Europe to a new and more vigorous life in the latter years of the ninth century, but whose more decisive achievements are reserved for the tenth and eleventh.
I.]
OUTLINE OF THE SUBJECT.
3
Secondly, there is the age of the Crusades proper, from 1096 to 1270, or, in a juster view, from the accession of Hildebrand as pope in 1073, to the close of the thirteenth century. This period thus includes the travels of Marco Polo, and is especially marked by overland journeys.
Thirdly, we have the time of transition (from about 1300 to 1486), in which Prince Henry the Navigator, of Portugal, is the principal figure, and maritime exploration the main interest.
In each of these developments, something is accomplished towards the enlargement and the quickening of European life. Pilgrimage and missionary travel, trading enterprise and political conquest, — above all, the fierce, restless, and inquisitive love of wandering and of adventure, were re- sponsible for the successive steps of advance. In the Dark Age time, religious and proselytising fervour is the cause of many remarkable and extensive journeys, but the religious spirit did not chronicle these in a scientific manner, and religious divisions were a great obstacle to the transmission of new knowledge. How little did Catholic Christendom know or value the discoveries of Nestorian missions or Arab travellers in the Far East, till its own interest had long been awakened and its emissaries had laboured for generations in the same parts of the world. How little effect did Moslem science produce in Christian geography till the latter had undergone an intellectual revival from within.
A more permanent gain for our European world was realised by the emigration and expansion of the Scandinavian peoples. This was not merely because their pioneers penetrated to Greenland and North America; nor because, on the other side of Christendom (towards Asia), they rounded the North Cape, explored the recesses of the White Sea, and opened up many districts of North-Eastern Europe ;
4
INTRODUCTORY.
[Ck
nor even because they were the true founders of the Russian Kingdom as an organized State, — but because they spread their arms, their settlements, and their race into every Christian country. By so doing they effected an essential revival of the European blood and spirit ; they imparted to well-nigh every one of the peoples of Christendom something of their own fire; and thus began that forward movement which the West seemed to have abandoned in the decline of the Boman Empire, but which was now again as it were caught up by mediaeval Europe, persisted in against all discouragements, and carried through to complete success in the fifteenth century and in modern times.
Such we may conceive to have been the mission of the Vikings. The two later stages of European advance, up to the era of the Great Discoveries, had the task of carrying out into action some part of what the Norse energy had done so much to render possible, and of preparing for the accom- plishment of the rest. In the crusading age, the barriers which Islam had erected against the political, and so against the geographical, the commercial, and the scientific expan- sion of Europe, were pierced through on the eastern side ; and a fuller revelation was gained of the treasures of India and of Cathay than the Christian federation had ever possessed before. And as this knowledge was bound up with material wealth ; as the Polos and their companions had discovered afresh those great prizes of Further Asia, which old Rome had coveted so ardently, but had never been able to seize ; it was a knowledge not easily forgotten.
From the end of the thirteenth century to the success of the Portuguese on another road, at the end of the fifteenth, Europeans were steadily engaged in pressing forward upon the old land routes, and getting an ever larger share of their profits.
IJ
THE GREAT DISCOVERIES.
5
And however great the political exhaustion left by the crusading wars, this could not turn aside the stubborn per- severance of the new commercial, military, and colonizing ambitions of Europe, or put out the light of its reawakened science. And so came the final touch. One thing was lacking for the commercial victory of the West over its Eastern rivals ; for an effective military diversion against the heavy odds of Asiatic numbers ; for a healthy extension of the European race and its political organizations.
A flank movement round Africa, if successful, might bring all this to pass. By such a new sea route, Europe would gain a private way, as it were, to the very source of Eastern wealth, a way on which no competition was to be feared; it would also take its old enemies on their most vulnerable side ; and it would throw open new lands, possibly of enormous extent, for Western settlement or colonization.
It was precisely this attempt, gradually carried through, which was the special and decisive achievement of the later Middle Ages. Even before the Portuguese mariners had arrived at the solution of their task, their progress and prospects on the Southern Ocean track inspired the thought of a similar attempt upon the most hidden riches of Asia by the West. The old and true doctrine of the roundness of the earth, — known as a respectable tradition to learned men, and recognised as certain by keen students of nature in the fifteenth as in the first century after Christ, — combined with the success of African coasting to bring about the venture of Columbus. This was of course intended, not as a quest after an unknown continent, but as an attempt to reach Cathay and India by the most direct sea route ; and it largely resulted from the discoveries of Henry of Portugal and his lieutenants and successors between the Canaries and the Cape of Good Hope.
6
INTRODUCTORY.
[Ch.
In 1486 Diaz reached the Cape of Tempests ; in 1492 Columbus sailed for “ the Indies.” He never got there, for he found America lying across his path. The New World thus disclosed left no interest at the time for the further prosecution of his original idea; and it was not till 1520-22 that Magellan, in proving the round world that Columbus had assumed, appeared (as his great predecessor had always meant to do) upon the shores of the Furthest East from the extremity of the West. Meantime Da Gama’s voyage from Lisbon to Malabar (1497-99) realised the hopes and the prophecies of the Portuguese, Southern, or African school of maritime explorers ; and it was from the victory of the new European enterprise in these various directions that the Christian nations were at last raised into a position of pre- dominance throughout the world. Like men besieging a stubbornly-defended citadel, they had out-manoeuvred their antagonists by hidden, winding, and far-fetched mines, and breached the defences with sudden and terrible effect. Like men, again, attacking one point of vantage, they had, while making their approaches, found others not less worth hold- ing ; for in pursuing their trade rivalry with Asia, they had lighted upon a new continent, and discovered unexpected recesses of an old one, in which they might develop their energies without a competitor, and thus call in the unknown countries to “ redress the balance ” of the known.
These were perhaps the chief stages, objects, and results of the geographical movements of the Middle Ages in Europe and Christendom. By the side of these we attempt to give a sketch of the non-Christian movements of the same time, and especially of those which sprang from the Arab or Moslem civilisation. The history of this Eastern part of our subject is in sharp contrast with the Western. While the thirteenth century saw, in the land of the Franks, an
I.] MOSLEM GEOGRAPHY IN MIDDLE AGES. 7
exploring energy develop itself beyond that of earlier times, and apply itself to new discoveries and to safer, if longer^ ways to the goal of its ambition, — in Asia it witnessed con- vulsions from which the science, trade, and expansive activity of the Levant have never recovered. All the best work of Mohammedan travellers and students was done before the days of Marco Polo ; and even in survivors like Aboul- feda and Ibn Batouta we cannot prolong the life of the higher Mussulman geography beyond the middle of the fourteenth century. In this volume we have briefly described the history of that geography down to about 950, when the Caliphate had fairly lost its political power ; and it will be easily seen that these ages (630-950), of peculiar darkness for us, were light indeed to our chief rivals. The succession of Moslem explorers and inquirers does not cease with the weakness and division of their Empire ; in some ways their work shows an advance : but on the whole it may be called stationary, from the beginning of the Second Christian Millennium. As it was in the political struggle with Crusading Europe, so it was in exploration, and, with some exceptions, in science also. It held its own, but it had lost its aggressive mood ; and as man cannot stand still (at least outside China), but must fall back if he does not advance, so the Mohammedan peoples waited on events and subsisted on their traditions until they had allowed their Christian foes to get the start of them, to circumvent them, and at last to win from them many of their choice possessions ; thus forcing them into a secondary place, and completing the ruin of their higher life or civilisation.
The historical changes which affect other races and countries produce in China a more and more perfect indif- ference to the movements, the discoveries, and the interests of the rest of the world. In the period covered by this
\
8
INTRODUCTORY.
[Ch.
volume, the Land of Silk tries the experiment of compara- tively free intercourse with “ remote barbarians ; ” but it gives up the uncongenial part as far as possible, after the civil troubles of 878 and following years ; and, until the Mongol Conquest of the thirteenth century, it does not repeat, as a nation, the hazardous venture.
The great rulers of the House of Ghenghiz and of Kublai do indeed bring China for a time into the main stream of the world’s history ; but even they fail to break up perma- nently the proud exclusiveness which had only deepened since the time of Pliny ; 1 which, gradually severing itself from the Tartar over-lordship, held Europeans stubbornly at bay when at last they reached its ports by the Cape route from the West ; and which still offers a singular contrast with that earlier time in which the Celestials had not yet outlived their interest in so many of the activities of human life.
When any one tries to gain a hearing for a subject which is obscure, apparently uninteresting, and possibly despised, he is bound to show cause for his intrusion. And the reason why the travels and geographical science of the later Empire and the darker Middle Ages are important to history cannot easily be found in the evidence we actually possess of those travels and that science. Practical and theoretical geography were at a low ebb between the conversion of Pagan Rome and the Crusades ; but they had in themselves great possibilities. The time of sowing must not disappoint us if it fail to give a crop : in the age of the making of the modern nations we cannot expect the discovering instinct to show much activity. But to gain anything like a complete view of the development of European Christendom upon the surface of the earth, it is necessary 1 Cf. Pliny’s description (H. N. vi. 20).
I.] NEW ERA WITH CONVERSION OF EMPIRE. 9*
to begin with the origins. And these we find, as far as are required for onr purpose, in the pilgrim-travellers and convent maps and religions science of the centuries between Constantine and our own English Alfred.
Eor the sake of clearness, it is perhaps well not to go further back. From the conversion of the Empire to the sixteenth century the story of Christendom is unbroken ; the later Roman Dominion is the Church-state of a Christian Prince, as much as the France of St. Louis, the England of Henry VII., the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella. Mediaeval Europe delighted to think of itself as the old world-state under religion ; the two main elements in our civili- sation were the same in the days of Constantine and of Columbus — the classical tradition and the Christian Church. And so, throughout this time, the expansion of European life, in discovery, exploration, and geographical knowledge, has a continuous history. But before the time of Constan- tine one of the main conditions of mediaeval and modern life is unfulfilled, and it is open to question whether this alone does not constitute a real difference between ancient and modern history. In exploration the mediaeval Christian world certainly did not carry on the work of the ancient without a break ; much of that work had been partially forgotten or obscured in the century of pagan decline before Diocletian ; and in the break-up of the fifth and seventh centuries the whole matter was altered, the problem was recast, and the greater part of what was known to Augustus or to Trajan had to be learnt over again. The ancient and often mistaken theories of premature science, of reflection which had outrun observation, were lost sight of in the general confusion, along with much of the ground really won. We do not find Europeans of the earlier Middle Ages following in the steps of Ptolemy — correcting-
10
INTRODUCTORY.
[Ch.
his miscalculations, or dominated by his theories. Their geography is turned off upon a different path, and occupied with very different problems ; and it is not the lineal descendant of Greek thought in the same way as Arabic metaphysic is the lineal descendant of Aristotle. The great names of ancient science have a vague, but not a very exact or penetrating, influence upon Christian geography and exploration before the fourteenth century.
In any account, therefore, of mediaeval travel, at least before the Crusades, it may be safe to treat the higher classical geography as a deposit rarely used, a legacy generally forgotten, though realised by some. From the modern point of view, it belongs rather to the literature than to the life of exploration in its slow development between the collapse of the old pagan society and the emergence of the Christendom which replaced that society into a universal energy.
It was with the conversion of Constantine that Christian travel, in pilgrimage, really began. And this activity was largely unlike anything to be found in the pagan world of Greece and Rome, and different in many important respects from all similar movements in the pre-Christian Oriental religions, and in all those other forms of faith which have moved in a different orbit from the Roman Empire. Only in the greatest of the imitations or adap- tations of Christianity, in Mohammedanism, does Christian pilgrimage find a real parallel. The journeys of pious Greeks to their oracles are on quite a different platform — they went to get advice, rather than to worship relics of a divine visit to their world or to awaken a fuller appreciation of their faith, a fuller insight into the meaning of their sacred writings. The Jewish habit of going up to Jerusalem was undoubtedly one of the precursors of the Christian
I.] PLACE OF PILGRIMAGE IN GEOGRAPHY. 11
sentiment, and is in some ways a parallel to the Christian -custom as settled in the fourth century. For the Hebrew idea of visiting the capital of a religious empire is also clearly seen in the travels of Western Catholics to Rome, in which relic worship was combined with more practical reasons. But the Palestine and other Levantine pilgrimages (like the Gallician to Compostella) were mainly sentimental, and accordingly more liable to decay. As the practical interests encroached upon the ideal, the Eastern pilgrimages became of less and less importance; they were performed by a humbler and more ignorant and superstitious class : in the fifteenth century the “ Information for Pilgrims ” and similar works cater for the lowest of the people; and in the sixteenth century the habit was comparatively rare. Columbus is rather a late case of a great man who makes the thought of pilgrimage practically important in his life. Yet the pilgrimages of pure sentiment lasted in consider- able vigour for nearly twelve hundred years. They served as a powerful motive force, a very persuasive surface reason for the Crusades, whose real causes lay deep down in the life of the nations of the West. And during six centuries, as we have always to remember, these religious travels represented the most active enterprise of Latin Christendom ; they were performed, sometimes at least, by men with comparatively enlarged experience and knowledge ; they were evidences of energy rather than of superstition or folly ; and their literature forms an eminently suggestive chapter in that great mass of writing which is, after all, the expression in speech, however incoherent, of the coming races of the world, during a long period of their development.
Christian pilgrimage, like Christian preaching, was to a great extent a new thing ; and in it we must recognize, as we so often have to do in other developments, both earlier
12
INTRODUCTORY.
[Ch.
and later, that the secret of its strength was also the secret of its weakness. It was, above all things, due to a devo- tional impulse ; but the religious feeling, which drove men from such great distances, closed their senses to much of human life, to most things that lay not exactly in the path of their devotion, when they got so far. Thus what they tell us, of interest to our subject, is incidental and, so to say, unintentional. The first pilgrims serve us as a sufficient type of all, and in their ranks are to be found the most enterprising of their class. The amount of secular information contained in their records is usually small : they had great opportunities for observation and material discovery, but they let them slip by mostly unheeded ; they were interested in a different kind of learn- ing, and they did not relate what did not offer food for their theological meditation. For the same reason, pilgrim- travel is not progressive ; the ninth century finds us and leaves us worse off for extensive and systematic religious journey ings than we were in the sixth or in the fourth ; and the value of these enterprises is really comparative, and rests upon their being the principal geographical records of their time. Once, therefore, that the old aggressive in- stincts, of commerce, of conquest, or of colonisation, are awakened afresh, and begin to send out their shoots,' the religious travels lose all except a theological interest.
So confined, indeed, is the outlook of many of our pilgrims, and of nearly all our professed geographers of the pilgrim- age, that some may find an interest even in the extent, the variety, and the daring of their absurdities. For these have a special place as illustrating the mental habits of the time. They help to show us how difficult material progress must have been when such were the thoughts and words of the travelled and learned Christian; they throw a good deal
I.] THEOLOGICAL CONCEPTIONS— MATERIAL PROGRESS. 13
of light on the growth of that geographical mythology which offered so obstinate and tangled a hindrance to scientific discovery ; and they point to the underlying truth in the story of the world’s exploration. And that seems to be, that for material progress — of this kind, as of others — material and not sentimental ambitions are needed. It is the love and the hope of material gain, partly political or imperial, partly scientific, but above all commercial, which has been the motive power of our geographical, as of our industrial, revolution. The secrets of the present world have been disclosed to those who lived in the present ; they have naturally been hidden from those who did not value the actual world around them. For the religious emotions, in their essence, however valuable to civilisation in certain other fields, such as art, were not of a kind to promote the exploration of the physical universe, either upon the surface of our earth, or beneath it, or in the world of space outside its atmosphere. And so the religious age of Christian travel was of neces- sity unprogressive and unproductive. Devotional travel was as little in sympathy with exploration for the sake of knowledge, as the theological doctrines of a scriptural geography (as we have them in Cosmas or in some of the more elaborate mediaeval maps) were in sympathy with the formation of a scientific theory of the world’s shape, as expressed in modern atlases and treatises.
At the end of this long and difficult chapter of history — the early Middle Ages — we come face to face with a new people and a new energy. The Northmen supply the spirit to the body, the fire to the powder. It is the impulse given by them, as we have already suggested, which is seen in the upheaval of the Crusades, when all Christendom rises to that new and ever-increasing activity which has continued to produce fresh results till now. From the crusading
14
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[Ch.
movement (we may repeat) spring the overland and commercial explorations, the maritime ventures, and the scientific discoveries of the later Middle Age, of the now re-civilised West; from these, again, result the plans, the theories, the attempts which, in their success, reveal the prime secrets of the unknown. The age of our victory over nature, or rather of our initiation into nature, beginning with the unveiling of the earth-surface, is thus connected with the first groping of our Western world after a wider room and a broader life. Dim at first is the light, staggering and uncertain are the steps ; false and deceitful ambitions, disappointing hopes, superstitious fears are ever checking the onward course : but from the time that pilgrimage first led to conquest (in the eleventh century), that course has been steadily onward and outward. Yet not always as it had been planned. The Franks came to smite the Moslem unbelievers, but they stayed to trade with them and to learn of them. The incidental gain proved to be even greater than the first object.1 The Mohammedan world had more to give to Christendom by commerce and friendship than was to be won by stamping out the worshippers of the God of the Koran. By the religious wars was gradually recovered that secret which the pre-Christian world had found out and abused, which for centuries remained inarticulate, felt but unexpressed — the secret that the religious feeling by itself was inadequate for material prosperity, that the present was an unmistakable and fundamental fact, and that pro- gress could not be made in this life by renouncing it.
But this revelation was not yet. In the time with which we have here to deal, religion, sometimes fanatical and
1 So in Columbus’s discovery, the incidental success — the finding of America en route — proved to be
even more important than his origi- nal aim, the reaching of India from the West, by the West.
L] THEOLOGICAL ATMOSPHERE OF PILGRIM AGE. 15
ignorant religion, governs tlie men who are representative of literature and of science. So exclusively theological is their outlook, that we are often in danger of forgetting that the modern world, with all its splendour and its variety, can be traced back on one side to their work. Christianity, of a type very unlike the present, has indeed been one of the factors of our civilisation. And in our particular subject we have especially to take this into account. In ages when the only kind of exploring and geographical interest was theological, we must beware of ignoring this phase, or of treating it as a symptom of decay or weakness. We cannot pass by the fact that the theological interest, in the hands of the Church organisation, mastered that Empire, or Political Society, which possessed the intellectual heritage of Aristotle and Plato, of Ptolemy and Strabo, of Lucretius and Tacitus, of Cicero and the Roman jurists. Neither can we deny that the barbarians from beyond the Rhine and Danube gradually subdued and settled themselves upon that same empire, which seemed so final. Least of all can it be disputed that those conquering barbarians, without doubt the strongest physical force in the Western world, bowed to the faith and the religious system of the Empire, and moulded their states, and directed their progress from barbarism to civilisa- tion, by its teaching. The Church, therefore, in its various expressions, must be treated with respect by any one who respects the facts of life. It had triumphed over civilised refinement and uncivilised, or semi-civilised, strength. It had taken possession of the best minds of the European races.
So much may be allowed, and yet it may be said that a certain element of weakness and lowered strength was responsible for its victory. The Roman Empire, in which the Church saw all things put under its feet, certainly had not the strength of the first Caesars. They could have
16
INTRODUCTORY.
[Ch.
repelled the Teutonic invasions, just as they came near to the conquest of all Germany, and left that conquest un- finished rather from choice than from necessity. Almost as certainly, they could have stood the shock of the Saracen invasions, which, indeed, were rendered possible by the theological phase that had passed over the Roman world. Christianity and Judaism inspired Islam to be their own rival, and its place in men’s hearts was prepared for by their work. The whole appeal of Mohammed would have fallen flat upon the Agnostic world of Augustus.
Yet, if the new era of world-religions, controlling the political and social life of nations, was associated with a certain decline of intellectual and physical vigour among the more advanced peoples, it certainly went along with a great increase of mental activity and social progress among the more rude and brutal nations. For both Christendom and Islam raised the average of the society they respectively conquered, taken as a whole. The check inflicted on the seventh-century prosperity of Syria and Egypt by the Arab invaders, or the repression exercised by Catholicism on the philosophy of Porphyry or the poetry of Claudian, was not to be weighed against the impulse towards . better things which the one communicated to the Berbers and the Arabs themselves, or which the other inspired in Germans, English, and Russians.
Up to a certain point. For here comes the difficulty. In the face of the natural philosophy, or the classical revival, of the twelfth century, and still more of the four- teenth,1 fifteenth, and sixteenth, the religious spirit in
1 In the thirteenth century the Catholic theologians attempted, -with some success, to absorb as much of the new and revived learning as ap- peared in any way compatible with
their inherited dogmas. When this broke down, the Church had only the choice of war with science, or an alliance with it.
I.]
STRUGGLE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
17
Christendom, as in Islam, declared itself, to a large extent, obscurantist. And when this attitude seemed to be passing away in the papacy and the curia, the cause of non- reasoning faith was revived in the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic reaction ; the science which this double movement could not suppress was forced back into its old attitude of hostility ; and religion became terrible to many as the principal opponent of advancement and knowledge.
In the case of Islam, on the other hand, the great “Unitarian” religion, as a less dogmatic, intricate, and systematised faith, without priesthood, or sacraments, or mystic ritual, except of a simple kind, seemed for a time more fortunate. It found the conflict with science much less searching, and more easily evaded or postponed; but in the end the same struggle loomed before the future of the civilised Caliphate, when further danger was averted by the ruin of theologians and scientists alike in a common doom. On the one side, in the Levant, the utter and irre- deemable barbarism of the Turks covered all. Incapable of any form of science or of art, except the war-like,1 they spread like a blight over the fairest portions of that field where the first intellectual harvest of the Middle Ages had been reaped. On the other side, in the West, the Moslems of Spain fell a prey to anarchy within, and as the crusad- ing spirit rose higher and higher in Christendom, the Emirate of Cordova perished altogether. But at first, after the old culture and the old government of Rome had been submerged, there was no question whether the science of the time was to be friend or foe of religion. The theological forces were then wholly on the side of order, of peace, and
1 And except to a certain extent in architecture, as may be seen from the Mameluke buildings in Cairo.
But it is only in a very qualified sense that the Mameluke rulers of Egypt can be called “ Turkish.”
C
18
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[Ch.
of learning ; they were among the most powerful allies of the good, and among the most influential enemies of the bad, tendencies in society. So it was largely due to Church- men that certain parts of ancient civilisation were preserved, and that the old political unity was replaced by the spiritual community of a religious federation which was constantly struggling to express itself in political forms.1
And in our particular inquiry, it was through the writings and the travels of Churchmen that geographical conceptions were kept before the world of Bede, of Charles the Great, or of Gerbert. Even Cosmas, though sinning against light and apparently taking a more superstitious and unnatural view of the world than the “ sceptical ” Christians whom he denounces, still preserved a good number of scientific needles in the midst of the intolerable deal of hay which he called his “ Topography.” In other and more barbarous places and times, writings such as those of Dicuil, of the Kavennese geographer, or of Guido — maps such as those of Beatus or of Albi, — are valuable for their monopoly of the subject, if for nothing else. They are the only teachers of geography in their age and among their people. And in the light of what their countrymen after- wards became — masters of the world — these teachings, however grotesque, are suggestive. The absurdities of Dark Age map-making are the precursors of the first accurate charts and of modern atlases ; the creeping ventures of the pilgrims are the first movements of an ultimately invincible race-expansion.
Now, many of the monuments of early Christian travel have scarcely been treated yet in their proper relation to progress in general, or to the special kind of progress they
1 E.g. the Empire of Charles the I or the temporal suzerainty of the Great, or of the Ottos, the Crusades, | popes oyer Christian kingdoms.
I.] SLOW PROGRESS OF MEDIAEVAL SCIENCE. 19
illustrate, which is geographical. They have had, perhaps, a fair amount of attention from the theologians and the philologists ; they have certainly been neglected by the historians. They have shared in the effects of the vicious tendency which puts religion and all its works on one side, and tries to isolate them from ordinary life ; they have been relegated to the theological shelves of the library. But just as the main importance of the writings of the Christian apostles and fathers is in relation to the general life of their time, and the general progress, or retrogression, of the race, so the essential value of these Christian travel-documents is in their bearing upon the history of civilisation, then and afterwards. There are certain ages of the world which are quite unintelligible except through the proper understand- ing of their theological literature. Even so late as the Tudor period in England, not a little of our political philo- sophy has its origin in works of divinity ; in the age of Justinian the chief geographers and travellers seem to have been priests and monks of the Church. An endeavour to connect and interrelate the sacred and the secular in the story of exploration could hardly fail to throw an additional, even if sometimes a flickering, light on certain parts of history.
It has often been pointed out that human progress is far from being always continuous, and that its course is more like the confused movements of a crowd, whose advance is only to be clearly seen after many swayings and stoppages, than the orderly forward motion of an army along a military road. Early Christian geography is a good illustration of this. For centuries the new religious interest seems to exercise little or no effect in the advancement of science — rather the reverse — yet, under the Christian civilisation, was at last awakened an interest both in practical and theoretical
20
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[Ch.
geography greatly transcending that of the pagan world. We must therefore look behind the literature for the vitalis- ing facts, for the progress which certainly was now being made possible. The early Christian period was, after all, a time, not of harvest, but of planting. European life and manhood were regenerated, but the European mind seemed almost to lie fallow for a time.
The growth of the geographical myth during this period points to the same conclusion as the poverty of results from religious travel. In the course of these centuries were elaborated or popularised most of those travellers’ tales which we think so pleasant in Solinus or in Mandeville, and wonder at on the maps of St. Sever or of Hereford, but which were a real and formidable hindrance to enterprise. The terror and ignorance of nature that they reflected was the prime cause of the isolation, poverty, and barbarism of the earlier Middle Ages. The imagination of folly and of pseudo-science peopled the world with monsters, curtained the seas with impenetrable darkness, and travestied every known fact of geography by an attendant fiction which tended to supplant the original.
Again, in examining the reasons for the prolonged back- wardness and even occasional retrogression of Christendom, our attention is recalled to some particular influences of a general anti-Christian and anti-European movement, to which we have already alluded. First, the Spanish Caliphate cut off all access to the Western sea beyond the Bay of Biscay, from the eighth to the twelfth centuries ; similarly the communication of Christendom with the far East and South — with Abyssinia, or India, or China — was fatally interrupted by the intrusion of the new rulers of the Levant and of North Africa. The geographical outlook of Christian Europe was thus materially contracted. And as Moslem
I.] CHIEF DIVISIONS OF DARK-AGE GEOGRAPHY. 21
traders and pirates shut up or abstracted Western commerce, so Moslem schools stole away some of the ablest of Western thinkers, till in the ninth and tenth centuries the triumph of the Prophet’s followers in every art of life, in every comfort, in every science, over their older rivals seemed complete.
The materials for the subject in hand may be divided under three heads : first, the writings of travellers, almost without exception pilgrim-travellers ; secondly, the scattered notices of missionary or commercial enterprise ; lastly, the writings of geographical theorists, of untravelled students, who are equally, as a rule, theologians ; with these may also be reckoned the maps of draughtsmen who tried to illustrate Scripture or Divinity of some kind by a picture of the w7orld, and a few compilations of marvels from the late pagan period which were fortunate enough to gain an enthusiastic acceptance from the Christian world. The pilgrim-travellers last for our purpose up to the time of the extinction of the Frankish Empire on the continent, and the reign of Alfred in Wessex. In other words, it is only during the first nine centuries of the Christian era, or, more exactly, from the opening of the fourth to the close of the ninth, that the work of exploration, such as it is, falls to their share. And in this time, we may find, if we look a little more closely, that the more important of our pilgrim-records fall into certain groups, and are associated with certain prominent persons and events. Thus we have the travellers of the first period grouped, as it w7ere, round the work of the Emperor Constantine and his mother Helena in Palestine ; those of the second age, around Jerome in Bethlehem or in Home ; those of the third, round the Imperial and Catholic Majesty of Justinian, whose build- ings in Jerusalem, like those of Constantine, mark an epoch
22
INTRODUCTORY.
[Ch.
iii the topography of the Holy City. Lastly, the leading pilgrims of the fourth age, as we may call it, though more scattered, are nearly all associated with the conversion of the Franks or the English, and with the joint movement of the two great races for the further conversion of heathen Germany.
Again, in the history of pilgrim-travel, we have to deal with two main classes of records, those made by the travellers themselves, and those contained in the writings of others, such as Gregory of Tours, who allude to or describe in some detail the journeys of pilgrims who have or have not left any account of themselves. With a very few exceptions, the former class holds all that is important for ns. As to the merely allusive notices, even the more valuable of these are generally so vague, as in Gregory’s accounts of travellers to India from the West, that little can be gathered from them.
The case of Cosmas, " the man who sailed to India,” presents an especial difficulty. He is more known as a theorist who set himself to disprove the roundness of the earth, but he is also a practical explorer, of an unusually ambitious type. He journeyed to Malabar and Ceylon, it would appear, from the head of the Eed Sea, and returned to Egypt, probably visiting Palestine as well, before he left his old profession of a trader, settled down in his monastery, and wrote his “ Topography.” Preposterous as a philosopher, he was no contemptible observer ; and his book has a place of its own, standing as it does by the side of contemporary works such as those of Procopius and Gregory of Tours, and partaking both of the reason of the one and of the credulity of the other. And the case of Cosmas is an exception which justifies a rule. It may be said, speaking broadly, that the only travel which need be attended to, in
I.] BYZANTINE GEOGRAPHY AND CIVILISATION. 23
those centuries which coincide with the first six hundred years of the Byzantine Empire, is Latin, is from the lands west of the Adriatic, from the Christendom which is conveniently called Roman. The Byzantine provinces, it is true, carry on a not inconsiderable trade with the further East, though this is of ever-decreasing importance and extent from the time of Justinian ; but they show no discovering spirit, except what we may find better represented in Britain, Gaul, Italy or Spain. The Byzantine influence on Western or Latin Europe was surprisingly slight, from the days of Heraclius to the Crusades, and as its power waned within its more immediate surroundings it was not natural that it should exercise a very stimulating effect in distant lands that had practically renounced its authority long before they formally did so. The importance of the Eastern Empire, in checking the progress of the Saracens1 at their most dangerous period, cannot easily be overrated. It saved Europe from the Asiatic deluge at a time when resistance to such a double attack as was then in progress (through the Taurus as well as through the Pyrenees) could hardly have been successful ; but, after all, the place of the Byzantine civilisation in history was rather passive than active, and its travel enterprise has but little to do with the rest of Christendom.
What slight proof do our Latin travellers give us of any overshadowing influence of the Byzantine world on the West they came from. Though Arculf and Willibald, for example, both have a good deal to tell us about the Constantinople of their day, and allude to it as the greatest city, and the “ metropolis ” of the whole Roman Empire, they seem little touched by its spirit. The whole literature of our Latin geography in the Dark Ages is inconsistent with any deep knowledge of the Greek Christendom whose very language
1 As well as of barbarians, like the Avars.
24
INTRODUCTORY.
[Ch.
was becoming forgotten in the West. When the Roman Church carries out the religious exploration of central Europe in the eighth and ninth centuries, it is allowed to push its conquests within the limits of the original Eastern Empire and even to dispute with St. Sophia for the allegiance of Bulgaria, which, if once given, in spirituals, to the Lateran, would not be easily rendered, in temporals, to the palace on the Bosphorus. The Greek missionaries,1 whose travels into Moravia are of some interest to our subject, went in the service of the Old Rome and not of the New ; in the same way Hungary and all the North Danube tracts became adherents to the faith of the more distant power, which by the winning of Scandinavia completed its religious explora- tion of unknown Europe. Only in the case of Russia did Byzantine orthodoxy show any expansive force, and this, a success of the eleventh century, was rather due to dynastic ambitions and Norse adaptability than to Greek missionary zeal.2 As time went on, the superior energy of Latin Catholicism was seen in its conquests, though temporary, of Syria and of Constantinople itself, as well as of so many islands and outlying points of the Levant. East and West were really severed long before the dogmatic schism of the Churches, and it is not, after all, of great moment whether or no Byzantine merchants at certain times travelled to India or to the Wall of China or penetrated into Abyssinia, unless they handed on their work to successors or influenced a more persistent and virile race than their own. As a rule — Cosmas is a partial exception — they did not do this ; their labours were so far from permanent that they were on the contrary continually receding, and we must not overrate the import- ance of such an unfruitful and disappointing “ expansion.”
1 Especially Cyril and Methodius. I next period — the Viking Age.
2 This happens well within our I
IJ SKETCH OF EARLY PILGRIM-TRAVEL. 25
I. Before the conversion of Constantine, Christian pil- grimage is just existent, and that is all ; before the close of the Diocletian persecution, the number of credible journeys of this sort, from the West to the Levant, may be counted on the fingers of one hand — the two Placentian travellers of a.d. 303-4 — John and Antonine the Elder — are perhaps the chief of these ; and their travels include Sinai as well as Jerusalem.
But the example set by the empress-mother, Helena, and the buildings erected by the bounty of Constantine and her own piety, in the holiest sites of Palestine, coupled A with her discovery of the true cross, was the beginning of a new age. Her pilgrimage seems to have been inde- pendent of any expectation of such discovery. She sought out Jerusalem, Rufinus tells us, and inquired the spot — not where the cross was to be found, — but only “ where the body of Christ was fixed to the tree.” The search, it is admitted, was difficult ; and this proves that to earlier pil- grims there could not have been available that exact cult of particular sites which became established from the time of Helena’s “inventions.” From a.d. 136, when the last revolt of the Jews under Bar-Cochab was suppressed, Jeru- salem had been forbidden ground to the Hebrew race, and the city of the famous Semitic priests and kings had become the Roman garrison town of iElia Capitolina. A statue of Yenus, too, in one tradition, had been erected over the site of the Crucifixion by the persecutors of the Church.
What Helena really discovered it is impossible now to determine ; all that concerns us here is that with her visit Christian pilgrim-travel really begins. Yet we may /notice how greatly the original story is amplified by later writers. To the simple statement that she discovered the sign of the cross at Jerusalem, Rufinus adds the healing of the sick
26
INTRODUCTORY.
[Ch.
by tbe new-found relics; in Gregory of Tours, the nails have the power of quieting storms ; fragments of the wood could save a city besieged. And so on, and better still, in infinite progression ; for there is scarcely a book, a tract, or a sermon of the mediaeval time, in any way referring to the treasures of the Holy Land, which does not mention Helena’s pilgrimage and its results.
. The effect of this journey on the Latin West is seen at once 1 in the “ Itinerary from Bordeaux to Jerusalem,” the earliest work of Christian travel, — a witness alike of the ^recent triumph of the Church, the restored peace and order of the Empire, and the resettlement of politics and society with fresh religious interests.
Our itinerary follows the main roads of Southern Gaul and North Italy, to Aquileia; thence it goes through Sirmium and Belgrade to Constantinople, and across Asia Minor by the military highway to Antioch and Palestine, returning along a more southerly route from the Bosphorus to Albania and Otranto. Composed in the year 333, or at any rate giving the journal of certain pilgrims in that summer, this tract, which roughly and inaccurately adapted for the use of Christian travellers a portion of the old imperial surveys, remained for a long time the principal handbook of the class whose needs it met. Its course is usually followed; and its relics form the staple of every account. Yet it has little claim to originality. It simply reproduces — in all except its more detailed notes on the sacred sites themselves — the road-books of the Caesars : to its tables of pagan place-names it adds a Christian tour in Judaea and the Syrian coast; but it has been doubted by some, from the state of the St. Gall and Paris manuscripts, whether this last is not a later insertion. While this
Within ten years (325-333).
I.]
EARLY PILGRIM-TRAVEL.
27
difficulty may be dismissed, on tbe strength of the oldest text at Verona, we still have to consider the curious fact that the objects of devotion herein mentioned, as ini the case of the crypt of Solomon for the torture of the devils, are in most cases of a rather extravagant kind, and argue a high development of superstition and credulity at an age fondly supposed by many to be too early for such corruptions. Those who imagine an ideal Church, before its establishment by the State, and derive all its abuses from this source, would perhaps find it hard to explain how it is that in a tract dated within ten years after the “ establishment ” of Constantine, so large a number of highly apocryphal relics occur among the few which are mentioned at all.
The Bordeaux itinerary throws an interesting side-light upon the question whether the primitive Christian intelli- gence was or was not more enlightened than that of later ages ; but here we cannot notice this point, except as illus- trated by our subject. And as a record of travel or explora- tion, this pilgrimage certainly holds an obscure place. It never leaves the well-known roads, except for a few detours in Palestine. It tells us of only one site beyond Jordan, and of none of the famous spots in Galilee ; the more distant fields of Egypt, Sinai, and Mesopotamia are entirely beyond its ken. In all these respects, it contrasts curiously with the journey of Silvia, our next important record. After the Bordeaux pilgrim, we get no other memorial of Christian travel so nearly related to, and so suggestive of, the classical and official geography ; but we get many more important and extensive journeys from Western Christendom. In the next generation, the fashion of pilgrimage spread apace ; it was recognised by the Church of Borne as an act of advanced piety, meriting considerable indulgence or a heavy cheque upon the treasury of merits ; and the leading men
28
INTRODUCTORY.
[Ch.
of the Catholic world found their way to Palestine in ever-increasing numbers. Julian’s attempt to re-establish paganism and restore the Jews to their old home (361-363) seems to have checked the new movement for a time — as a certain peace and prosperity was necessary for the develop- ment of such an external activity ; but after the reaction had collapsed, it is seen again in full swing.
Constantine and Helena closed one age of this movement and began another. They ended the period of a simply historical pilgrimage, unaided or nearly unaided by relics, shrines, privileges, and visible memorials of the Bible story. The Bordeaux guide-book, again, ends the unrecorded and begins the self-recording age of the same. Jerome’s visit to Palestine in 372, still more his second coming for a residence of five and thirty years in 385, is a third landmark, com- mencing the most fashionable age of pilgrim-travel. In the interval, seemingly, between his two journeys (and without any immediate summons from him, or influence exerted by him), occurred the visit of the traveller whose narrative, recently discovered,1 goes by the name of Silvia of Aquitaine. The questions of authorship, and of the writer’s country, date, sex, and station, will be discussed elsewhere; but it will be safe to assume here that this work was written by a Roman lady of rank, a Christian of Southern Gaul, belonging to some sisterhood, to whom the narrative is addressed, and that she journeyed in the Levant between 378-9 and 384-5. What is of more importance to us is the extent of her wanderings, and the interest of her occasional remarks. She not only travels through Syria : she visits Lower Egypt, and Stony or Sinai tic Arabia, and even Edessa in Northern Mesopotamia and on the very borders of hostile and heathen Persia. The torrent of the Euphrates she compares to the
1 In 1883.
I.]
EARLY PILGRIM-TRAVEL.
29
Rhone, the greater to the less, a foreign to a native example ; and, on the way home by the military high-road between Tarsus and the Bosphorus, likens, with unconscious historical irony, the brigand habits of the Isaurian mountaineers, who endangered this part of her route, with the similar failings of the Arabian Saracens, who were one day to be driven back by those very Isaurians from the city of Constantine. The future subverters and saviours of Christendom were then alike outcasts from civilisation.
In this letter we have described for us the most far- reaching and enlightened pilgrimage of the first five centuries. Its entire omission of Jerome’s name, and various incidental notices in the course of its story, can leave but little doubt that it is of a date earlier than 385. It also gives us evidence, parallel to that supplied by Jerome, of the growing importance and fashionableness of pilgrimage; for the author, whoever it be, is clearly a person of importance, and it is difficult to picture such a one undertaking the toil and danger of so distant a journey in earlier times. Lastly, while from this example it is clear that the monastic organization of Syria and Egypt was now a powerful attraction to Western devotees, and allowing for a natural preference for objects of religious interest, Silvia’s casual remarks, historical, geographical, or social, are of quite unusual breadth and value, and suggest by contrast the pro- bability that most of our pilgrim records have been com- posed by persons of no very high education or employment.
After St. Silvia, our memoirs for some time are of a strictly devotional character, such as the notices of Paula or Eustochium, or the two Melanias; and though Jerome boasts that men came to see him from India and Ethiopia, our Latin travel -documents of this age have scarcely any bearing on geography.
30
INTRODUCTORY.
[Ch.
Between the death of Jerome and the accession of Justinian we have, indeed, occasional notices of the journeys of Westerns to the holy places, not only of Syria and Egypt, hut of Malabar; but it is nearly im- possible to make much out of them, as will be seen from the details to be given in the next few chapters. They serve, however, to emphasise the fact, confirmed by so many different witnesses, that Christianity reached its most com- plete and deep-rooted extension in the Old World before the rise of Islam. It is true that the Churches of the far East have little or no connection with Europe; and that their prosperity is now only to be seen, by us who look back over so many centuries, through a haze as tantalising as the mist that conceals their decline and fall ; — but the vision, though dim, is not a mirage.
Between Constantine and Heraclius, between the fourth and the seventh centuries, the gospel, though for the most part in heretical forms, came to dominate not only the world of the Roman Empire, but vast districts of Africa and of Asia, beyond the limits of the Cmsars’ power. Even in Europe it won Ireland and the Caledonia of Northern Britain, which the legions had never quite subdued ; south of Egypt it conquered Nubia and Abyssinia; across the Red Sea it won Yemen to itself ; in the Erythrean Ocean it made the Island of Socotra a centre of its activity ; as early as the Bordeaux pilgrim its missionaries planted a bishopric at Merv in Khorasan; in the time of Justinian, Nestorians preached the faith among the mountains of Herat and in the Garden of Samarcand ; in the lifetime of Mohammed the name of Jesus was first proclaimed in China; and at the same time Ceylon, Persia, and the Deccan contained an “ infinite number of Christians, both priests, monks, soli- taries, women vowed to the religious life, and laymen.” Yet
EARLY PILGRIM-TRAVEL.
31
I.T
almost none of these offshoots were Catholic. With strange perversity, the sun appeared to shine upon the followers of Patrick, who used the tonsure of Simon Magus, and upon the communion of the “ Wolfish ” Nestorius, who denied the claims of the Mother of God, even more than upon those who preferred soundness of belief to that heretical restless- ness which travelled so far and compassed sea and land to make one proselyte.1
The most important of our travel-documents in this intermediate time — the tract of Bishop Eucherius of Lyons (c. 440), “ On Certain of the Holy Places,” and the “ De- scriptio Parrochise Hierusalem ” (c. 460) — are, as Ptolemy would have said, topographical 2 rather than geographical ; and the notices of such adventurers as David of Wales are clouded with miracle, and only the bare fact of a journey to Syria can be recovered from the ideal world which has coloured all the details.
During the reign of Justinian, Cosmas Indicopleustes journeyed and wrote. In the same reign the first Christian description of the Holy City, in any detail, was composed under the name of “ The Breviary of Jerusalem ; ” and the two curious pilgrims, Theodosius and Antoninus of Placentia, recorded their impressions concerning the situation of the Holy Land.” These remarkably credulous, careless, and imaginative writers add a good deal of myth to the already unreal pilgrim-geography, and present the Palestine legends in a thoroughly formed and hardened state. They preserve, however, some notices of a more extended kind. Theodosius, indeed, only indulges in a few flights of fancy beyond his
1 Before Gregory the Great, indeed, the Catholic Church seemed content
with dominion for the most part inside the Empire, and left outside enter- prise to the heretics.
2 The same is true of the entries in the “Notitia Antiochim ac Iero- solymas Patriarchatuum ” of the sixth century.
32
INTRODUCTORY.
[Ch.
proper ground of Palestine, as when he refers to countries- “where no one can live for the serpents and hippo-centaurs;” but for the rest his knowledge is not extensive or peculiar, and his narrative, unlike the Bordeaux pilgrim’s, has neither the appearance of a journal or time-table nor of a guide-book. Antoninus, on the other hand, is an even more travelled pilgrim than Silvia ; he goes beyond her into Upper Egypt, and traverses all the usual ground of Sinai and Palestine, penetrating into Mesopotamia and visiting Edessa. In his narrative he appears as a sort of older Mandeville, who mixes truth and fiction in pretty equal proportions, but with a resolute partiality to favourite legends. Along with his marvels, such as the yearly stoppage of the Jordan at the Epiphany, the devils to be seen by night on Mount Gilboa, or the salt pillar of Lot’s wife, lessened, as had been falsely reported, by the licking of animals — with all this he gives us every now and then glimpses of a larger world, rarely noticed at all by our pilgrim-travellers. He tells us of the effects of the recent earthquakes (of 526 and 551) along the coast of Phoenicia ; he notices the splendour and civilisation of Tyre, Gaza, and Alexandria ; he describes the hospice of Justinian in Jerusalem, and the Ethiopians whom he met in the Holy City. In the Sinai desert he speaks of Saracen beggars and idolaters ; in the Ked Sea ports he thrice records the appearance of ships from India laden with aromatics. He travels up the Nile to the cataracts, and describes the Kilometer of Assouan and the crocodiles in the river ; lower down, the Pyramids become for him the twelve barns of Joseph — a number which later pilgrims altered to fit the text of the seven years of plenty.
But far more wonderful than the practical jumble of Antoninus is the systematic nonsense of Cosmas, whose “ Christian Topography ” we must not enter upon here, for
I] EARLY CHRISTIAN TRAVEL; COSMAS. 33
its place is among the works of early Christian theory or science — with Dicuil and others of that class. Yet, as a traveller, his journey is deserving of especial attention. Unfortunately the references to it in his writings are only incidental, as his main purpose was to set forth a system of the universe. But his travels to Western India, to Abys- sinia, to the coasts of the Bed Sea, to the Ajan shore-lands beyond Guardafui, and probably to Ceylon and Palestine compose a very exceptional record ; and, naturally enough, it is as a trader that he makes these extensive wanderings.
And whatever the absurdities of Cosmas and his dogmas “ evolved out of holy Scripture,” he is of interest to us as the last of the old Christian geographers, and in a sense, too, the first of the mediaeval. He closes one age of civili- sation which had slowly declined from the self-satisfied completeness of the classical world, and he prepares us to enter another that, in comparison, is literally dark. From the rise of Islam the geographical knowledge of Christendom is on a par with its practical contraction and apparent decline. Even more than actual exploration, theoretical knowledge seemed on its death-bed for the next five hundred years.
From the time, indeed, that Islam began to form itself into an organized civilization till the twelfth century, Christendom seemed content to accept it as the principal heir of the older Eastern culture, and took its geography, its ideas of the world in general, mainly from the Arabs, who in their turn depended upon the pre-Christian Greeks.
Yet our last group of pilgrim-travellers between Cosmas and the Yiking Age, between the creation of the Empire of Mohammed and the fall of the Empire of Charles the Great, however limited and unprogressive, has a special interest to us through its association with the conversion of England
D
34
INTRODUCTORY.
[Ch.
and the beginnings of English science and letters in the age of Bede.
Arculf, Willibald, and Fidelis — the first a Frank, the second an Englishman, the third probably Irish — all fall within the century (660-770) in which England definitely joined the communion of Rome, and allied itself with the Frankish kings and the Italian popes in the work of Christianising Central Europe. Arculf, the first of Latin travellers in the Levant since the Mohammedan conquest, on his return from Syria (c. 680) was hospitably entertained by Adamnan, abbot of Iona and successor of St. Columba, to whom he told his story. Bede abstracted and paraphrased this account, and in his version it became perhaps more widely known than any other of these older pilgrim-records.
Like Willibald, who made his journey in the next generation, and who is especially noticeable as the earliest English pilgrim (721-731), Arculf is full of confusions, omissions, and repetitions. The narratives of both belong to the infancy of thought and of expression ; but they are at least records of a devout persistence and of a physical endurance, whose simple pathos and dignity never quite allow us to forget that we are now dealing with the actions of the men of a great race, though still only half developed.
Again, the impression given by our two principal guide- books of this “ Frankish ” Age is confirmed by the monk Fidelis, whose journey (of about 750) is narrated by the Irish philosopher, Dicuil,1 and by Bernard the Wise of Mont St. Michel, who went over all the pilgrim-ground a century later (c. 870). Fidelis, indeed, who describes for us the Pyramids in a curious passage, and who sailed from the Nile into the Red Sea by the fresh-water canal of Necho and
1 In his tract on the “Measurement of the Earth.”
I.] THE ANGLO-FRANKISH PILGRIMS. 35
Hadrian, is probably one of a separate group of travellers, the Irish devotees, who, between the sixth and the ninth centuries, w7ent out into all lands ; but Bernard is a genuine Frankish pilgrim, and the last of any importance. His account shows us the Moslem oppression of Christian visitors at a more acute stage than any earlier narrative, although he bears witness to the good government and order of the Caliphate. He went on his travels at one of the worst and weakest times in the history of Christendom. He pictures the people of South Italy being swept off as slaves to Moslem countries; the Campagna of Borne overrun with brigands ; Christian travellers fearing to move within their own lands, save in strong armed companies. The new rulers of the Levant have now changed the main lines of traffic between the east and west of the Mediterranean world, and forced the Syrian route from “ Frankland ” to go, as Bernard has to travel, through Egypt ; for the Arab dominion is now in the height of its power, controlling all the lands between the Pyrenees and the Sahara, between the Sea of Aral and the Indian Ocean, between the Atlantic and the Indus. More than that — while Christian commerce, like Christian travel, barely arrests the attention of the casual observer by any sign of life, Moslem enterprise is opening up a vigorous trade with China, with Further India, with Malabar, and with Ceylon, exploring and colonising the eastern coast of Africa to the equator, and even approaching the harbours of Korea and Japan, where in the tenth century they began a certain trade. Never before or after did Islam appear more nearly in the light of a universal system ; never before or after did it work more nobly for enlightenment and for progress. Arabic science was in its earlier prime ; Arabic astronomy and geography were shaping themselves after Greek models ; the sword of
36
INTRODUCTORY.
[Ch.
Aristotle had passed into the keeping of the schools of Cordova, of Cairoan, and of Bagdad, — for a time.
It is difficult to imagine that the Europe of Bernard’s day was destined ever to witness such a turn of the tide as that Christian armies would carry war into the heart of the Caliphate ; still more difficult to conceive of the same Europe as once again controlling, as in the days of the Caesars, the best parts of the world; most difficult of all to think of the fellow-countrymen of our pilgrims as the dis- coverers, settlers, and conquerors of the then unknown three- quarters of the earth which lay shrouded in mist beyond the limits of the known or half-known world. The new time needed new forces, a fresh inspiration of virility and daring. But here, with the Empire of Charles and his Franks all in ruins, and but little promise of revival, with heathen Northmen and Moslem Saracens seemingly allied for the destruction of Christendom, this section of our story must be left, — where the secret of the future seems most impenetrable, and the dark hours have deepened into that intenser blackness that comes before the dawn.
At the same time, or a little earlier than the Breton traveller, another Latin had written a short tract (c. 808 ?), “ On the Houses of God in Jerusalem,” which, with Bernard’s note-book and the Story of the Penitential Pilgrimage of Frotmund (c. 870), is our last record of religious journeyings before the “ coming of the Northmen.” The new time, indeed, had come already, and men knew it not ; in the Yiking pirates — pagan, cruel, fearless, the destroyers of monasteries and fortresses, of books and men, of art and armies alike — it was not easy to recognise the future strength of Christendom, the men who were to call Europe out of sleep, and to awaken the new nations to the fact of their growth into life.
I.]
MISSIONARY AND COMMERCIAL TRAVEL.
37
II. The Levantine pilgrimages are the principal, but not the only examples of early Christian travel. There was a good deal of Roman missionary exploration in Northern and Central Europe, as in the journeys of Augustine of Canter- bury, of Cyril, of Methodius, and of Ansgar, from the sixth century. In the same time, and to a large extent in the same countries, the Irish monks, such as Call or Columban, were busy with their work, pursuing it even to such out- lying parts of the world as Iceland,1 whose first discovery is due to them. The Byzantine conversion of Russia after- wards (in the eleventh century) extended this work of religious enterprise to a field but slightly known to the older Empire; and Byzantine trade in distant quarters of Asia and Africa, though declining, continued to struggle along the old caravan routes.
But here, in the further East and South, the Moslem ousted the Christian merchant more and more till the Crusades ; while in the North-east, as late as the close of the ninth century, and long after the appearance of the North- men upon the theatre of the world, the limits of Christen- dom and of civilisation might be said to follow the courses of the Elbe and the Danube. In some places Slav and Teutonic heathendom had crossed these boundaries ; but in other districts, as in Moravia and Bohemia, it had been driven back far beyond them. Charles the Great’s scheme for a separate Church province beyond the Elbe, under a metropolitan of its own, was not realised in his own lifetime : but his son Lewis the Pious made a good beginning when he sent Ansgar to be bishop in Hamburg (a.d. 831) ; for this resolute and saintly missionary, who had already travelled to Sweden to preach the gospel, journeyed, during an epis- copate of four and thirty years, in all the South Baltic lands,
1 E.g. in 795.
38
INTRODUCTORY.
[Ch.
and introduced the first, though temporary, Christianity into Denmark, Sweden, and Nordalbingia. Similarly, the Frankish conversion — in somewhat forcible manner — of the Saxons, of the King of the Moravians, of some of the Bohemians, and of scattered tribes beyond the Elbe, opened the way for the extension of Christendom by the missionary travels of Cyril and Methodius, who, between 863 and 885, added Moravia to the Western world and the Western faith ; the conversion and consequent exploration of the Frisian country between the Bhine, the Ems, and the Weser had been already accomplished by English and other preachers during the seventh and eighth centuries. Bavarians and Thuringians were first touched by the new religion in the time of the Meowings, but with widely different results. Under the succeeding dynasty of the Karlings, Thuringia is a definite part of the Latin Church and the Frankish State : Bavaria, on the contrary, was just as definitely outside the political federation, and only to a very limited extent incor- porated in the religious communion, of the West. In all these directions there was some advance of geographical knowledge through religious effort, beyond the limits of the old Empire, — before the conversion of the Northmen, or the age of their exploring and conquering activity.
The Irish missions, meantime, recovered Northern and Central England for Christendom, $dded Ireland itself to the Catholic world, and combated barbarism with no small courage and success in France, in Switzerland, in North Italy, and in still more distant fields. With their religious work they helped forward the progress of social order, know- ledge, and art. In other words, they did real and manful service to civilisation, in arresting a further decline, and in commencing a revival of culture ; parallel with their crusade against heathendom went their struggle with anarchy.
I.] GEOGRAPHICAL SCIENCE IN EARLY CHRISTENDOM. 39
Their geography, or study of the world, will be seen most completely in the tract of Dicuil, who is, for his age, a scientist of unusual merit ; and their exploration, though as narrowly devotional as that of the Latin pilgrims, is worthy of a certain place in the story of Western expansion. We shall have to notice more fully in another place their most important journeys, already mentioned, such as that of Fidelis and his companions to the East, or of the eighth- century hermits to the Northern islands.
Byzantine trade and travel in Central and Southern Asia and “ Erythrea ” will also claim a more detailed study in the body of this volume — so far, at least, as it relates to extension of geographical knowledge, or a maintenance of anything like a far-reaching geographical outlook. Here it will be enough to repeat that the record is a poor one for our purposes, and that its main interest is connected with those Nestorian missions which fought their way so stubbornly in China during the seventh and eighth centuries, and founded Churches in Hyrcania, Bactria, and various regions of Tartary down to the middle of the eleventh.
III. Geographical theory or science in Christendom, between the age of Mohammed and that of the Yikings, is in a state scarcely less rudimentary than travel.
Much of the advance made by the pagan world is now abandoned ; part of the knowledge once gained has been forgotten, part seems to lie in a sort of limbo on this side of Lethe, not altogether out of sight, but, as it were, out of touch of the new time, uncared for, unattended to. The word seems reversed — “ Let us not now remember our fathers, and the actions of famous men.” As Bacon said in another connection, everything of value seemed to sink, and only the light and worthless rubbish came floating on down the stream of time. Ptolemy and Strabo, Herodotus and
40
INTRODUCTORY.
[Ch.
Hipparchus, passed almost wholly away from Christian memory, and the only works of the pagan period which held much attention were compilations of marvels such as those of Solinus, or the lists of place-names which Orosius, Guido, or the anonymous geographer of Ravenna put under contribution.
The compilation of Solinus, probably made in the third century, by a pagan analyst of the classic Mirabilia, and especially of Pliny, became so fashionable in the Christian Middle Ages, and exercised so powerful an influence on their geographical imagination, that it cannot be passed over. It is simply a collection of marvels, chiefly of natural history — beasts, birds, fishes, reptiles, minerals and precious stones — brought together apparently on the principle “ Credo,” or at least, “Lego, quia impossible.” Never perhaps do we pene- trate more deeply into the enchanted world of “ geosophists ” than when we turn over the pages and study the conceptions of Solinus or of Cosmas. In the former, geography is only taken into account as a framework on which the web of the story-teller is woven into the garments of romance in which the naked repulsiveness of fact is becomingly draped. In the latter, geography in its abstract and general relations is restated in terms of theology.
Cosmas, as the first scientific geographer of Christendom, if not popular or influential, is at least remarkable, and holds a distinct place. His Topography, which alone has survived to us, is, above all, a work of theological interest. It is both destructive and constructive. It denies the roundness of the earth, as asserted by the leading Greek geographers and astronomers ; it denies especially the existence of antipodes, or land inhabited by human beings beneath our feet ; and it attacks the belief that the world can be suspended in mid- air, or in any sort of motion. On the other hand, it alleges and tries to prove a positive system of its own, which has
X]
GEOGRAPHICAL SCIENCE.
41
become proverbial among the curiosities of literature and of thoughts According to this, theuni-verse~ was- a fiatparal- lelogram, its length exactly double of its breadth. In the centre of the unrvefsB~iBy_our^dHd7_surrounded by the ocean. Beyond the ocean was another earth, where men lived before the flood, and from which Noah came in the Ark. To the north of our world was a great hill (an Indian conception) round which sun and moon revolved, thus causing day and night. The sky consisted of four walls, meeting in the dome of heaven, on the floor of which we live ; and these walls were glued to the edges of the outer world of the patriarchs. Heaven, moreover, was cut in two by the Armament, lying between our atmosphere and the Paradise of God ; below this firmament lived the angels, and above it were waters — the waters that be above the firmament.
But besides these and other cosmological points, a great deal of attention is devoted to purely theological questions, such as the precise state, history, and future prospects of the angels ; and to questions where theology and science “ falsely so-called” mingle in a daring confusion, as in the hand- ling of those two fundamental truths, “ Of the independent being ofjieaven and earth,” and “ Of Moses’ tabernacle^The true modeLoi-thajini verse.’ ’
The reasoning throughout is like that to be found in St. Isidore and St. Augustine, on the effects of man’s fall upon the stars and the vegetable world, or the atmospheric changes due to angels. But far more valuable than Cosmas’ arguments, are his digressions into matters of fact.1 Of these we have to make mention elsewhere, and it will be seen that their importance is considerable; but to the author they were merely incidental, and occupy scarce a tenth of the
1 As in the case of the Adule inscription or the Roman intercourse with Ceylon.
42
INTRODUCTORY.
[Ch.
space given to Scriptural quotations alone in this enormous treatise.1
Passing by the geographical summaries of encyclopaedists such as Isidore, the next among our men of science are the tabulists Guido of Bavenna2 (c. 800-850) and the Anonymous Geographer of the same city (c. 650). They are fairly called Tabulists because, though professing to give us a general account of the world, or a summary of geography, they are really occupied in drawing up a list of place-names, derived,, by their own confession, from the works of previous “ philoso- phers.” Thus their writings, like most of early Christian cosmographies, are connected with the pre-Christian civili- sation. As the Bordeaux itinerary points back to the Antonine survey, as Solinus refers us back to Pliny, so these Kavennese catalogues are almost certainly based upon the Peutinger table, that great ribbon-map of the Boman roads, which in all likelihood reaches back, ultimately, to the Augustan Age. Thus, like the still more wretched compila- tions of Julius Honorius and Julius iEthicus, both the “ Anonymous ” and his disciple Guido belong rather to the expiring age of classical geography than to the mediaeval spirit. A few incidental expressions are the only hints we get of the Christian period in which these catalogues were put together.
Dicuil’s treatise on the measurement of the earth (a.d. 825), like that of the Anonymous Bavennese, gives us a kind of view or description of the world mainly taken from older compilations. But in this are embedded two valuable accounts of original travel, the voyage of Fidelis to the
1 The “ Christian Topography ” is
further illustrated by a map of the world, with the rivers of Paradise, the ocean, and the outer or patri- archal earth, which, if original, is
perhaps the earliest of Christian mappe-mondes.
2 Or of Pisa, according to some recent conjectures.
I.]
GEOGRAPHICAL SCIENCE.
43
Levant, and the journeys of Irish monks in the Northern islands, both of the eighth century. Compared with most of his sources and co-workers— in the systematic expo- sition of geography— Dicuil is not at all contemptible ; and his work is perhaps the chief memorial of the distinctive Irish tradition, as it is the latest. In his own lifetime began the Viking attacks upon the British Isles — a few years after he wrote upon the measurement of the earth, the Ostman kingdoms were founded in Leinster. Barbarism, though the barbarism of a supremely creative and pro- gressive race, overwhelmed in the ninth century that civilisation of Christian Ireland which is so interesting in itself, and so irritating in its poetic obscurity and uncertainty to us of the modern world. The art, the literature, and the missions of Patrick’s Church perished under the first heathen onslaught, and its scientific, in particular its geographical, study naturally sank with other treasures in the storm.
In addition to our four chief examples of geographical theory in this time — Solinus, Cosmas, the Ravennese geographer, and Dicuil — we have also tried to select from every side of the Christian literature of the earlier Middle Age, examples of geographical theory, so far as these had anything distinctive or remarkable about them, either for wisdom or for folly ; and we have attempted to touch upon every one of the minor geographical writings of this time, in Latin Christendom, that seemed for any reason worthy of notice. The result of this is such as we might expect, from the fierce opposition between the extremist element in the early Church and the spirit of pagan science, — an opposition which the later Middle Ages grew less and less disposed to accentuate, till, in the time of the Renaissance, churchmen seemed ready to do what St. Jerome so feared 4for himself,, and to become half Ciceronian and half Christian. But
44
INTRODUCTORY.
[Ch.
before the tenth century there was little danger of that. The wisdom of this world was reckoned by most of the Patristics as mere folly in the sight of God, and both the physical and metaphysical study of the Greeks was freely dismissed as “ windy babble ” by the more fanatical school of Christian writers. On the other hand, an extraordinary proportion of ancient myth was eagerly adopted into the service of the new system ; questions of pure science were settled by Biblical texts after the manner of a remote and oracle-guided antiquity ; and fresh questions of almost incredible pettiness or absurdity were mooted and discussed. What must have been the state of physical science in general, and of geography in particular, when one of the most learned and least superstitious of the Fathers, St. Isidore of Seville, could spend his time in debating whether the stars had souls, and, if so, what they would do at the day of Besurrection ; when so great a scholar as Theodore of Mopsuestia could substitute the personal agency of angels for the natural laws of celestial movements, thus employing them, as J ohn Philoponus complains, like porters to hold up and push about the heavenly bodies ; or when Alcuin, in trying to give some true ideas of nature to the court of Charles the Great, was obliged, in language suitable for little children, to speak of the year as a waggon with four horses, Night and Day, Warmth and Cold; driven by two coachmen, Sun and Moon ; passing by the twelve stations of the months ; and escorted by the twelve watchmen of the Signs of the Zodiac ? 1
The belief in a round or spherical world professed by the Venerable Bede with tolerable clearness,2 and by some others
1 See Alcuin’s “ Disputatio Re- Mundi,” throughout, galis Isidore, “De Natura Rerum, ” 2 As in “ De Natura Rerum.
27; John Philoponus, “ De Creatione
I.]
EARLY CHRISTIAN MAPS.
45
with varying degrees of confidence, was robbed of all practical value, in the few cases where it gained a hearing, by the dogma that only one race of human beings could be supposed — all derived from Adam, and included in the nations to whom the gospel had been already preached. In the almost universal belief moreover, the torrid zone could not be crossed for the heat ; and so the notion of the “ lower parts” of the globe (apart from the difficulties of a topsy- turvy world) was generally condemned, as both unscriptural and ridiculous.
Lastly, the maps of this time, as far as they have sur- vived to us, barely show even the commencement of mediseval cartography. True, we have the scheme, if genuine, of Cosmas himself ; the mappe-monde of Albi seems to have been executed about 730 ; and the original plan of the Spanish theologian Beatus was probably com- posed in 776; but of the last named we only possess the later derivatives of “ St. Sever ” (c. 1028-1072), “ Turin ” (c. 1080), “ London ” (1109), and “ Ashburnham ” (tenth cen- tury), with six others of the eleventh, the twelfth, and the thirteenth centuries.
The position and work of Beatus will be examined in another place ; but it may be well to note here, how his map, like the tenth-century almanack of Bishop Harib of Cordova, was drawn in the time of complete Moslem domination over the peninsula. Beatus himself, seemingly a priest and monk of the Asturias, was possibly deprived by this very fact of many opportunities of wider knowledge ; and so, although his map is free from the elaborate absurdities and deceptions of some later examples, it is, as a world- sketch, among the crudest, — for in it the rudimentary truths of the earth’s surface, and of the distribution of its seas and lands, are nearly lost. Its interest, of course, is mainly
46
INTRODUCTORY.
[Ch.
theological : it is an attempt to illustrate the Bible world, in a commentary on the Apocalypse ; and it is the work of the chief orthodox opponent of the Adoptionist heretics, Felix of Urgel and Claudius of Turin, whose contempt for pilgrimage is also noticeable.
The xYlbi map, though only a little sketch by comparison, has a rather closer relation to facts : its place-names are apparently derived from the geographical section of Orosius’ “Universal History” and from Julius Honorius, whose text it is especially drawn to illustrate. Some have con- jectured that the draughtsman had seen Cosmas’ map of the Mediterranean world and its outliers ; but this does not seem to be proved by a close comparison of the two plans.
By the side of Christian enterprise it may be useful to place a brief summary of non-Christian parallels in the same period. Without attempting to treat these in anything like an exhaustive manner, we shall find material enough to show how inadequate the knowledge of Christendom then was, if judged only by contrast. The subject of this inquiry, as we have already pointed out, is mainly the geographical movements of Western or Latin Christendom ; but both in this and subsequent parts some attention will be given both to exploration and geographical literature among Greek or Eastern Christians and among non-Christian races, such as the Arabs, the Chinese, or the early Norsemen. Our inner circle will be therefore strictly a part of European history ; but outside this we shall try to deal with the progress of discovery and “earth-knowledge” in non-European lands, though only in the way of selection.
Now, many of the more important monuments of Arab and Chinese travel and science belong to a time earlier than the epoch when, at the close of the ninth and beginning of the tenth century, both Islam and China underwent their
t] THE NON-CHRISTIAN WORLD OF THIS TIME. 47
most important mediseval revolution ; and it is not a little singular that at the very same period when the expansive energy of Western Europe, even in pilgrimage, seemed to have become practically exhausted, or at least unfruitful, both the Caliphate and the Celestial Empire should have suffered so severely from social and governmental disorder The whole world seemed to receive about this epoch a certain lowering of its tide of life.
On the one hand, the Bagdad Caliphate lost all its political force— the last caliph who could be termed both pope and emperor of the Saracens died in 940 ; and with this political degradation ended the first great school of Moslem geographers and travellers, in the person of Massoudy — a school which had had a continuous and active existence for a century and a half, or even more.1
On the other hand, the domestic revolution of 878, and the consequent depression of foreign trade, inaugurated a new era in China. In the course of the next two generations the whole spirit of the government and of the people seemed to have altered ; the age of comparative enterprise and open- ness was definitely closed; and the age of comparative exclusiveness as definitely begun.
Modern China, the most suspicious, self-contained, and anti-foreign of countries, now had its starting-point. The stream of Buddhist pilgrims from the Celestial Land to India and the “ countries of the West ” markedly decreased in the ninth and tenth centuries ; in the same age the Christianity which Nestorian missionaries had imported into the Silk Land became practically extinct ; at the same time Chinese merchants ceased to frequent the ports of Southern and South-Western Asia, and nearly all Chinese harbours were closed against import traffic.
1 Circ. 780-950.
48
INTRODUCTORY.
[Ch.
Spain was almost the only country of the civilised or semi-civilised world where, during the tenth century, a high standard of political efficiency, of mental culture, and of social progress was kept up : and even this was a deceptive splendour ; for the next forty years (a.d. 1000-1040) wit- nessed an utter collapse of the Kingdom of Cordova ; and a great weakening of its intellectual energy accompanied the political and social breakdown. Just as the Persian and Arabian Empires normally stopped short, in their Indian dominion, at the great Rajpoot deserts beyond the Indus, so the history of most mediaeval kingdoms, from the Atlantic to the Yellow Sea, seems to pause, as it were, on the edge of an unproductive, unprogressive, and often reactionary or half-anarchic interval, as it nears the end of the first Christian millennium.
1. Beginning in the age of the Caliph A1 Mansor, the immediate predecessor of Haroun A1 Raschid, the early Arabic geography was brought to maturity under Haroun’s successor, A1 Mamoun (813-833), in the age of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious. In his reign many of the chief works of Greek geography were translated ; observatories were built; the positions of places were ascertained by astrono- mical calculation; original or quasi-original works were composed on the basis of the Hellenic models now so eagerly studied ; and Arab explorers traversed nearly every country of Southern and Central Asia, of Northern Africa, and of Mediterranean Europe.
Rising out of a host of lesser figures, we have in this age, the early ninth century, three pre-eminent Moslem geographers — Mohammed Alkharizmy, Alfergany, and Soleyman the Merchant. The first two occupied them- selves with theory and science, the last with practical travel ; the one wrote upon the astrolabe, upon the climates, upon
I.]
EARLY MOSLEM GEOGRAPHY.
49
Greek and Indian observations ; the other gave the first Arab account of China and of many of the coast-lands of the Indian Ocean. His voyages seem to have been made about A.D. 850 ; but at least ten years earlier the Caliphs had begun the systematic exploration of the countries of Turkestan and of what is now called European Russia, lying beyond the northern frontiers of Islam. Sallam the Interpreter, sent from Bagdad on this mission (in 840), traversed the regions to west, north, and east of the Caspian ; and his discoveries, disfigured as they were by the legendary and superstitious spirit of their narrator, were carried forward with far sounder results by Ibn Fozlan in his Russian travels of a.d. 921.
From voyages such as Soley man’s gradually arose the series of narratives which we know by the name of Sindbad the Sailor — a real account, with a little more of mystery and exaggeration than usual, of the experiences of early Arabic mariners in the Southern Ocean, “ selected and arranged for popular use.” A very different class of geographical work is represented by Ibn Khordadbeh’s description of trade routes, lands, and taxes (a.d. 890), where statistical tables are oddly interspersed with legendary narratives, and where there is a marked absence of first-hand experience ; but where we find a digest of many facts as to places, distances, and commercial highways useful for the Caliph’s government. Lastly, sur- prising precision was given to Moslem science at the close of our period by men like Albateny; extensive overland travels were accomplished, and interesting observations were made by Ibn Haukal; the borders of the civilised world were pushed southwards along the East African coast by Arab traders and warriors, such as those of the Emosaid family ; and encyclopaedic work began, both in practical travel and literary geography, with Massoudy. To the
E
50
INTRODUCTORY.
[Ch.
last named certainly belongs the leading place among all those men who, in the interests of Geography, either journeyed or wrote within the limits of the early Middle Ages. As an explorer, he touched the Atlantic on one side, and the China Sea on the other ; towards the South, he seems to have crossed the equator and reached the Zanzibar Islands, if he did not visit Madagascar ; only on the northern side was he content with the limits of Islam and the excur- sions of the less ambitious of his predecessors. As a writer, Massoudy has almost the quiet confidence of Lord Bacon, that he has taken all knowledge for his province ; and few indeed are those in ancient or modern times who have collected a geographical anthology of equal variety and bulk.
2. Never did China display a less exclusive spirit than during this same period. In trade, it kept up a pretty constant intercourse, from the fifth century, with the southern coast of Asia as far as Ceylon ; and at times this intercourse was extended to the Persian Gulf, and even to the mouth of the Euphrates. Foreign merchants crowded its ports in the time of the earlier caliphs and under the emperors of the Thang dynasty ; foreign embassies and visitors were received at court ; and diplomatic missions were despatched, though more rarely, to outside lands. In religious travel, a series of pilgrims journeyed to India between the beginning of the fourth and the end of the seventh centuries ; the names of more than sixty are preserved ; and among them at least two enjoyed great renown.1 Fa-Hien and Hiouen-Thsang may rank among the foremost of the purely religious travellers. The latter especially was a man of profound learning and trained intelligence, and had no small share of scientific interest, as any one may see by the descriptions of foreign countries in his “Life” and “Records.”
1 The first journeying from 399 to 414 ; the second from 618 to 636.
I.] DISCOVEKIES OF THE CHINESE. 51
It is strange enough to find two other achievements of great moment claimed by the Chinese of this age — the dis- covery of America, and the invention of the compass. We shall see, later on, what is the chief evidence under each of these counts ; here we may perhaps express a belief in the possibility of Buddhist missionaries and others creeping, as alleged, or rather suggested, round the northern angle of the Pacific from Corea to Alaska and the fiords of British Columbia, in the fifth and sixth centuries. On the other question, it seems clear that the Celestials were acquainted with the indicating power of magnetised iron before the Christian era, and that various improvements in the use of the same were made by the Emperors of the Thang in the seventh and eighth centuries. But the water or pivot compass, as we know it, was not employed till about A.D. 1110.
As we look back upon the course of a movement which through so many centuries of European life appears often stationary or even retrograde, in the midst of our disappoint- ment and weariness we may find some comfort in the comparative value even of such devotional enterprise. And as comparison is the only test of any age or of any man therein, the very blunders and limitations of the past have a constant as well as an historical value to us. Eor they remind us not only how we have come to our present mastery over the world, but also how imperfect the work even of our time must be in the light of the ultimately possible.
So, if our pilgrim-travellers and Bible scientists have interests the very reverse of ours, thoughts which to us seem unthinkable, or fancies that repel us as rather absurd than poetic, it will not be for us to utterly despise men who, in a true sense, were making their times ready for better things.
52
INTRODUCTORY.
[Ch. I.
And especially we must remember this 1 in our mournful and threatening close. A half-barbarised world had entered upon the inheritance of a splendid past, but it took cen- turies before that inheritance was realised by the so altered present. In this time of change, we have men writing in the language of Csesar and Yirgil, of Alexander and Sophocles, who had been themselves, or whose fathers had been, mere “ whelps from the kennel of barbarism ” to Greeks and Romans of the Old Empire.
We have been passing through the time of the recon- struction of society, the only apparent reaction which our Western world has known, and that only apparent, when savage and strong men who had conquered were set down beside the overworked and outworn masters of France, and Italy, and Spain, and Britain to learn from them, and to make of them a more enduring race.
Particularly, of course, in relation to Christendom.
( 53 )
CHAPTER II.
THE PRIMITIVE PILGRIMS OF LATIN CHRISTENDOM.1
I. Before Jerome — a.d. 370.
The earliest traditions of Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land from Western Europe are those of the very doubtful Gallic matron who was said to have returned to her own country with a shell full of the blood of John the Baptist, then newly murdered by Herod Antipas (a.d. 31) ; 2 and of Quilius, King of the Brito-Saxons, as he is absurdly called, who, in or about the year 40, was supposed to have visited Jerusalem and brought back relics. But all the stories of this kind, from the first, second, and third centuries, are vague and shadowy, as far as they relate to Latin or Western enterprise. It is in Greek pilgrimage that the oldest authentic memorials are to be found ; 3 and the mass of these memorials is rather Asiatic than European. In any case they do not concern us here, in an attempt to trace the earlier story of Christian explorers. To all men
1 The Primary authority for almost all the texts in clis. ii., Hi., and iv., is
Tobler and Molinier1 s Collection, vols. i., i. 2, and ii.: “Itinera Hierosolymitana et Descri | itiones Terras Sanctae Beilis Sacris Anteriora et Latina Lingua exarata Sumptibus Societatis illus- trandis Orientis Latini Monumentis
ediderunt Titus Tobler et Augustus
Molinier.” Genevae, Typis J. G. Fick, 1877 and 1885. [Vol. ii., ed. by Molinier and Kohler.]
2 Greg, of Tours, De Gloria Mar- ty rum, c. 12.
3 Guibertus de Novigento, De Vita Sua, ii. 1. Cf. also Paul us Orosius, Hist. vii. 6 ; Josephus, Antiq. Jud. xx . chs. 2-4, etc. ; Euseb. ii. 12.
54 PRIMITIVE PILGRIMS OF LATIN CHRISTENDOM. [Oh.
of the Greek-speaking provinces the way to Syria presented no more difficulty than the antiquarian researches of such a student as Pausanias encountered in Greece itself.
But of more distant journeys, and more real exploration, from the West, we have a great increase from the fourth century. And the pioneers of this new fashion seem to have been obscure men, such as Antoninus the Martyr, John the Presbyter, and Alexander the Bishop, who went to the Holy Land “for prayer and to obtain knowledge of the sacred places by inquiry.” Both Antonine and John came from Placentia, or Piacenza, in North Italy, and they made the Syrian pilgrimage about a.d. 303, some twenty years before Helena, the empress-mother, discovered the relics in Jerusalem which gave new life to an old custom and made a ruling fashion out of the habit of a few devotees. Antoninus visited Jerusalem and Sinai, where he saw a statue of pure white marble defiled and blackened by idolatrous sacrifices,1 but which became as white as ever when these abominations had ceased. John the Presbyter died in Capernaum, and was buried there, without any special or exciting experience to record.2
Next comes the journey of St. Helena, mother of
1 “ Tetra ut pix efficiebatur.” Cf. John, Archd. of Placentia, .Tract on finding of S. Antonine’s body, lects. vii. and viii. ; AA. SS., July ii. p. 18 ; and the (MS.) Passionarium at Milan (Ambros E. 22). Cf. It. Hi. (303-304 a.d.), ii. 33, 34.
2 The Alexander who is sometimes alluded to as the earliest Christian pilgrim is probably Alexander Flavianus (c. 212, a.d.), “Bishop of Cappadocia,” whose pilgrimage Jerome records in De Viris Illus- tribus, c. 62 (Migne, P. L. xxiii. 674).
Though a bishop in Greek-speaking lands, he must have been of Western or Latin family : cf. Gesta Epp. Hieros. ; Delpit, Essai sur les Pelerinages a Jerusalem, p. 19 ; Eusebius, H. E. vi. 11, 20. The pilgrimage of the great Origen of Alexandria was shortly after Alexander’s. We may notice that the latter became Bishop of Jerusalem on accomplishing his journey. See the references in the collection of the Societe de l’Orient Latin, Serie Geographique (Itinera Hierosolymitana, ii. 21, 22).
II.]
PILGRIMAGE OF HELENA.
55
Constantine the Great, and the “ Invention ” of those relics of the Passion which made Jerusalem the great pilgrim- museum of later time. The references to her visit are, of course, innumerable, but they are all repetitions or ampli- fications of St. Jerome’s statement in his Chronicle,1 under the year 321, that the “ mother of Constantine, warned by heavenly visions, found the most blessed sign of the cross at Jerusalem” — an event which is now fixed by the chronologists to the date 326.
^ Before her visit, we are expressly assured by Bufinus, the exact spot of the Crucifixion had been “ almost entirely con- signed to oblivion.” But now the site was discovered, and, finding Pilate’s title “ in Hebrew and Greek and Latin on one cross ” (out of the three that had been dug up), Helena was disposed to think this was the Redeemer’s, when the actual proof was given by a miracle — the “ saving wood ” restored a dying woman to life and strength. On this, the Empress at once built a splendid church over the spot ; and carried the nails and a part of the cross itself to the Emperor : the rest was kept in silver chests in the Memorial she had erected. ^
From another source2 we hear how the discovery was first made. The three original pilgrim-churches of the Passion (or Holy Sepulchre), Resurrection, and Ascension of Christ, were only built by Helena, after she had found the
1 Chronicon, a.d. 321 ; cf. Migne, P. L. xxvii. 671. Ruf. Hist. Ecc. i. 7-8.
2 Bede, Horn. Subdit. xciii. ; Sul- picius Severus, Hist. Sacra, ii. 33, 34 : and cf. also S. Paulinus of Nola, Epist. xxxi. cc. 4, 5 (Migne, lxi. c. 327); Cassiodorus, Tripartite Hist. ii. 18; Ambrose, He Obitu Tbeodosii Oratio ; Greg. Tours, Hist. Franc, i. 34 ; De Glor. MM. i. 5-6 ;
Altmannus Altivillarensis, Vita S. Hel. ii. 26-28 ; Ansellus, Epistola ad Eccl. Paris., a. 1108 (Migne, P. L. clxii. c. 731); Berengosus (De Laude et Inv. S. 0. ii. 5-7 (Migne, P. L. clx. 956-958); Alcuin, Carmina, c. 147, ii. 219 (Froben); Eusebius, De V. Const, iii. 42-44, and other refs, as in Soc. de L’O. L., S. G. (It. Hi. ii. pp. 51, 52, ed. Molinier and Kohler).
56 PRIMITIVE PILGRIMS OF LATIN CHRISTENDOM. [Ch.
true position of the Gospel sites by threatening the Jews with death for their conspiracy of silence. “ By the God who made me,” the Empress was made to say, in Christian homilies, “ unless you tell me, I will kill you every one.” 1 A later story confidently declared that Helena would have burnt alive those enemies of the Cross, if they had not confessed.2 A man named Judas, renamed as Quiracus on his baptism, was specified as the actual discoverer of the site, by the help of an old story in his family that had been handed down from his great-grandfather. The woman whose miraculous recovery showed which of the three trees was the Saviour’s cross, was named Libania, and in the tradition she appears as the widow of Issachar the Jew. The reliance of the story upon Jewish aid is remarkable, and surely goes to discredit the whole. For what Jewish family would preserve a local tradition about a victim of Jewish persecution between Hadrian, who expelled all Hebrews from iElia, and Constantine, nearly two centuries later ?
One Eustathius,3 a priest of Constantinople, is named as the builder of the new church of the Holy Sepulchre, the capital, for the future, of the whole pilgrim-world of Christendom ; and from this time the number of notable pilgrims whose names are preserved increases rapidly.
1 Cf. Bede, Horn, xciii.
2 The difficulty of the preservation of the wood for three centuries was surmounted by Paulinus of Nola,
with the argument that it had been anointed with the blood of Christ, and was therefore indestructible. Gregory of Tours (De Gloria Mar- tyrum, i. cc. 5-6) adds the story we have noticed in the introductory chap- ter, of one of the nails of the cross quieting a terrible storm in the Adriatic merely by being dropped into the water; and both he and
Cassiodorus agree that another was fixed in the imperial statue which crowned the Porphyry Column at Constantinople. Several early ac- counts, and especially Altmann’s “ Life of St. Helena,” speak, as we have noticed before (introd. ch.), of a temple of Venus erected over the spot by Hadrian when he de- stroyed Jerusalem, at the instigation of the high-priest of the Jews.
8 Jerome’s Chron. It. Hi. ii. p. 52 (Migne, P. L. xxvii. c. 679).
y
II.]
THE BORDEAUX PILGRIM OF 333.
57
For instance, nnder the year 330, 1 Potentinus, Felicius, and Simplicius, “Eremites from the diocese of Cologne” and a group of devotees from Western Europe — not to mention Eutropia, the Emperor’s mother-in-law, who must be reckoned rather with Creek than with Latin pilgrims, — made the journey to Jerusalem “for the sake of the holy relics.”
Again, in 333, the Bordeaux pilgrim compiled the first of Christian guide-books, the “Itinerary from Bordeaux to Jerusalem,” which symbolises the beginning of a new and extraordinary kind of literary activity. Like Origen, he came “ to search after the footsteps of Jesus and His disciples and the prophets ; ” like Queen Helena, “ to seek know- ledge of a land so worthy of veneration,” and to “ render thanksgivings with prayers,” — to put, as the letter of Paula to Marcella urges, “ the finishing stroke on virtue by adoring Christ in the very places where the gospel first shone forth from the Cross.” But he did more than any devotee before him — he recorded what he saw, for the help of others. And of this, the earliest of our travel-documents,2 some detailed notice should be taken. It coincides pretty closely with the start of the Christian Empire of Rome, under Constantine, and with the impulse given by the pilgrimage of his mother, and is one of the many wit- nesses to the reconstruction of society, and to the new movements which stirred it at that time. It immediately follows the proclamation of the new faith of the Court, the foundation of the new capital of Constantine’s creation, and the gathering of the first general assembly3 of the new
1 Acta SS. (Boll.), Iune iii. p. 576 ; Act. SS. 7 Sept. iii. p. 56.
2 “ Itinerarium a Bui digala Hieru-
salem usque : ” best text in S. de
L’O. L. S. G. It. Hi. i. 1. 1-25 (Tobler).
3 In the Council of Nicsea, a.d. 325.
58 PRIMITIVE PILGRIMS OF LATIN CHRISTENDOM. [Ch.
spiritual state, of that Catholic Church which now claimed a partnership with the Empire. Thus it is an evidence of a new kind of activity created by the new and victorious religion, or, rather, a fresh variety of an ever-active interest — the interest of travel and of sentiment, the wish to see new things, and the wish to see memorable places. “ Adora- birnus in loco ubi steterunt pedes ejus.” 1
But the record of the Bordeaux pilgrim is not only the earliest narrative of a Christian pilgrimage, it is also the most detailed and exact among the fragments of the Boman itineraries that have come down to us, of which the Peu- tinger table gives us the expression in map form, and which were made by imperial warrant. Its exact measure- ments point to a direct copyist of the old surveys as the author — a copyist whose name is unrecorded, but who was certainly a Christian, and probably a native of Guienne. But, apart from the knowledge it shows of the great high- ways (derived from works like the Antonine itinerary), its notes are of too short and business-like a nature for us to infer much about Christian knowledge of the world in the fourth century. Its geography, unlike its superstition, is of the slightest. Yet, after all, only a few of the later host of apocryphal relics are noticed,2 such as the house of Hezekiah, or the “ true monolith ” which was the tomb of Isaiah. On the other hand, scarcely anything is said about the places through which the pilgrim-route on the way to, and from, Palestine itself must pass. The names of town after town,
1 Cf. remarks of A. Stewart in his preface and notes to the translation of the Bordeaux pilgrim, in the Palestine Pilgrims’ Text Soc. (1887).
2 For instance, there is no mention of the “ holy lance,” or the crown of thorns, the reed, the sponge, the cup of the Last Supper, the stone rolled away
from the sepulchre, or the “ charger ” in which John Baptist’s head was carried. Most of the legendary sites in our pilgrim are connected with Jewish history and the Temple, rather than with the life of Christ and the Holy Sepulchre. Cf. Walckenaer’s essay on the B. P. ; Delpit, pp. 54-G2.
II.] ROUTE OF THE BORDEAUX PILGRIM. 59
mountain after mountain, sea after sea, are just recorded, with the distances between the places named, and with summaries, every now and again, of the total mileage along some great section of the road.1
But, besides these figures and names, there are a few things in the itinerary of more general interest. Thus, for example, the date is fixed by the statement of the original traveller or travellers who went over the route, and laid down the plan, — “And so we journeyed from Chalcedon on the 30th of May, in the yeai; of the consulship of Dalmatius and Zenophilus,2 and returned to Constantinople on the 25th of December in the same year ” (a.d. 333). Again, at a certain number of places, especially in the Holy Land itself, something is said about the surroundings, the history, or the objects of interest. Thus, at Bordeaux, the starting- point “ is the river Garonne, through which the Ocean Sea ebbs and flows for one hundred leagues, more or less,” — a reckoning which is only kept up as far as the city of Toulouse (Tolosa), when all distances begin to be stated in miles. From Bordeaux to Arles, by way of Car- cassonne, Narbonne, and Nimes, — this is the first main
1 E.g. from Bordeaux to Arles, “ 372 miles, 30 changes, 11 stations” — “rnillia ccclxxii., nmtationes xxx., mansiones xi.” The numbers, how- over, as Tobler remarks (pref. xiii.), are in hopeless confusion: thus the manuscripts have muddled up leagues and miles in reckoning the total dis- tance from Bordeaux to Arles “ 372 miles,” composed of 106-108 leagues, and 21 1-214 miles, and really making, even in jumble, only 317-322. As the Gallic league, however, equalled 1| miles (Roman), the difference is much
less than at first appears. Of. A. Stewart inP.P.T. ed., p. 1. But it is
quite outside our task to discuss the intricate and lengthy topographical questions which rise out of the itine- rary, and which belong, on one side, to Roman historians, and, on another, to Palestine antiquaries. We have more excuse for noticing the glowing language of Ausonius on the Bor- deaux of this day ; our pilgrim came from one of the most rising cities of the West, already famous for its scholars — men such as the later Paulinus(afterwards Bishop of Nola).
2 Flavius Valerius Dalmatius, brother of Constantine, and M. Aure- lius Zenophilus (Xenophilus).
60 PRIMITIVE PILGRIMS OF LATIN CHRISTENDOM. [Ch.
section of the journey ; from Arles the pilgrim goes on to Milan,1 through Orange (Arausio), where Rome had once received so shrewd a knock from the Gauls, over Mount Gaurus and the Cottian Alps. Continuing across North Italy to Aquileia, we are taken through Bergamo and Verona. From Aquileia to Sirmium (Mitrowitza), the next stage crosses the Julian Alps, passes the boundary between the Diocletian division of Eastern and Western Empires, and traverses Pannonia.2 From Sirmium to Singidunum (Belgrade), from Singidunum to Serdica (Sophia), from Serdica to Constantinople, the traveller moves on through the European provinces of what was even then in process of becoming the Byzantine Empire.
Leaving the new Christian Rome on the Bosphorus, “ you cross the Pontus, come to Chalcedon, walk through Bithynia.” At Libyssa (Gezybeh), two stations before Nico- media, the pilgrim (who has already been reminded of recent history at Viminacium in Europe, “ where Diocletian killed Carinus,”) is told of something more ancient — “Annibalianus is laid there,3 who was once king of the Africans.” Still pressing on and crossing Asia Minor by the great military road from Constantinople to Syria, we pass through “ Ancyra (Angora) of Galatia ; ” through Andavilis (Andaval), “ where is the villa of Pampatus,4 whence came the curule horses ; ” through “ Tyana,5 the home of Apollonius the Mage ; ”
1 From Milan to Constantinople | the itinerary agrees with the route laid down in the Antonine survey, except for the section between Bur- dista and Virgoli. The importance of Milan at this time (as of Aquileia) was at its height — “ Mediolani mira omnia,” as Ausonius said.
2 From Petovio (Pettau), where
the pilgrim enters Pannonia, he l
| follows the northern banks of the Drave, along the southern boundary of modern Hungary. Cf. Zozimus, ii. 18.
3 I.e. on his suicide at the Court of Prusias, king of Bithynia, b.c. 183.
4 Probably a famous stable of that ' day, conjectures Walckenaer, 17.
5 Kiz Hissar.
II.]
THE BORDEAUX PILGRIM IN PALESTINE.
61
through the Cilician gates,1 “where are the borders of Cappadocia and Cilicia,” and through “ Tarsus, where Paul the Apostle was.” From Tarsus the pilgrim proceeds to Antioch and the “ palace of Daphne,” then in process of rebuilding at the hands of Constantine, crossing the frontier of Syria on the way ; and entering Phoenicia, our route now ceases to copy the imperial itineraries, or to follow the beaten paths, after taking the ordinary course along the coast to “ Caesarea Palestina,” by way of Antaradus,2 — “ a city in the sea, two miles from the shore,” — Tripolis (Tarabulus), Beyrout (Berytus), Sidon (Saide), Tyre (Sur), and Sarepta, “ where Elias went up to the widow and asked food for himself.”
Finally, passing beneath Mount Carmel, “where Elias made his sacrifice,” the pilgrim comes to the borders of “ Syria, Phoenicia, and Palestine,” and finds himself at Caesarea in Judaea (Kaisarieh).
“ Here is the bath of Cornelius the Centurion,” proceeds our guide-book, now beginning to be more detailed, and enlarging itself, so to say, from a Bradshaw into a Baedeker.3 The last piece of the journey to Jerusalem is not made along the direct route, but by a circuitous way, through Jezreel, Bethshan (Scythopolis), and Shechem (Nablous), possibly to complete the list of places connected with the history of Elijah. In this detour we pass very close to Nazareth and the Sea of Galilee, but without finding any mention of either in our itinerary.
1 Ghulek Boghaz.
2 In Ruad island, where still exist walls of huge stones, near to the
Tortosa of the Crusades. Similarly the pilgrim’s (1) Pagrius, on the Borders of Syria and Cilicia, is the crusading Bagras , a fort proverbial for strength ; and so (2) his Ladica is Laodicea (of Phoenicia); (3) his
Alexandroschene is William of Tyre’s Scandaleon , “ Champs de Lion ” ; (4) his Porphyrion is Haifa.
3 This part is wanting in the St. Gall and Paris manuscripts, which present the itinerary simply as what Tobler calls “ arida qusedam viarum descriptio ” (pref. xii.).
62 PRIMITIVE PILGRIMS OF LATIN CHRISTENDOM. LCh.
First of all, on leaving Caesarea, the pilgrim reaches Mount Syna, “ where is a spring, in which, if a woman wash, she becomes pregnant.” 1 Next he comes to the town of Stradela, or J ezreel, “ where King Ahab sat and Elias pro- phesied,” and near it “ the field where David slew Goliath.” 2 3 Then through Bethshan, or Scythopolis, by way of Aser, “where was Job’s country-house,” to Neapolis, or Nablous, “ where is Mount Gerizim,” and where the Samaritans declared Abraham used to sacrifice, “ ascending to the top of the mountain by three hundred steps.” 8 Following Eusebius in the distinction he makes between Neapolis, Sichem, and Sichar, our guide points out in Sichem, “ at the foot of the mount (Gerizim), a tomb where J oseph lies, in the parcel of ground4 that Jacob gave him.” Going on towards Jerusa- lem, we come to the “ village ” 4 of Bethar, or Bethel, where “Jacob slept, when he was going into Mesopotamia, and the angel wrestled with him.” And here, too, was “ King Jeroboam, when the prophet came to him,” who was “ slain by a lion on the way as he returned.” From this point it is only twelve miles to Jerusalem ; and here the pilgrim is to notice the “ two great pools ” that Solomon made on the right and left sides of the temple, “ with five porches, which are called ‘ Bethsaida ’ ” (Bethesda) : also the crypt where the aforesaid Solomon tortured the demons ; 5 the lofty tower, where the Lord was tempted — “ If thou be the Son of God, cast Thyself down ” — the corner stone of which it was said,.
1 Cf. the crusading historian, Albert of Aix, vi. 41.
2 Probably from a confused remem- brance of the mention of a battle fought here between Israelites and Philistines.
3 They must have been patri-
archal steps, or only up a part of the
mount, for it is 1174 feet high.
4 Villa.
5 Only in the Bordeaux Itinerary, which is also alone in its mention of, e.g., (1) Mt. Syna and its procreative fountain ; (2) the field, near Jezreel (Stradela), where David slew Goliath ; (3) the chamber where Solomon de- scribed Wisdom; (4) the perforated stone at the Jew’s wailing-place.
11.]
THE BORDEAUX PILGRIM IN JERUSALEM.
63
“ The stone which the builders rejected is become the head of the corner ; ” the palace of Solomon, “ where he sat and described Wisdom ; ” the great vaults and pools underneath the temple area. More than all this, the very hob-nails of the soldiers’ boots left their marks “ throughout the whole enclosure of the temple,” so plain “ that you would think them impressed on wax ; ” and the men who left these marks were the very same who slew Zacharias between the temple and the altar. Needless to say, the traces of his blood were also clear enough upon the stone. Two statues of Hadrian must also be seen, commemorating the final expulsion of the Jews; “and not far from the statues, a perforated stone, to which the Jews come every year, and anoint it, bewail themselves with groaning, and rend their garments, and so depart.”1 Both Hadrian and Antoninus Pius, we may remember, placed their “images” in the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, which Hadrian built on the site of the Holy of Holies ; and St. Jerome speaks of these as still existing in his day, at the end of the fourth century. In the time of the Bordeaux Pilgrim, the profanation of
1 This must have been very recent, as Hadrian’s prohibition of Jews set- ting foot in the city (a.d. 136) remained in force till the days of Constantine — at least, till his acces- sion as sole emperor, in 324. During his refoundation of the non-pagan city, from the year of Helena’s pil- grimage (326) down to the dedication of his Martyrion, or Church of the Passion, in 336, the Jews seem slowly and gradually to have begun their return. But perhaps the law had long been evaded, as in the similar exclusion of Jews from England between Edward I. and Cromwell. A relic of Roman iElia, such as is here referred to by the Bordeaux
Pilgrim, was used in the substructures of the Mosque El Aksa, on the site of Justinian’s Church; it bears the inscription: TITO ML. H ADRI- ANO. ANTONINO. AUG. PIO. P.P. PONTIF. AUG. D.D. See Vogue, “ Eglises de la Terre Sainte,” p. 267 ; and Jerome, “Commentary on Wis- dom,” iii. On the Zacharias story see Jerome’s “ Commentary on Matthew,” which welcomes even an erroneous tradition springing from a righteous hatred of the Jews. The “ perforated stone ” of the text was probably the Sacred Rock of the Temple Area, the Es-Sakhrah of the Moslems, the Altar-stone of the old Hebrew temple. See Delpit, pp. 59, 60.
64 PRIMITIVE PILGRIMS OF LATIN CHRISTENDOM. [Ch.
Mount Moriah, as of a place sacred only to the unbelieving Jews, was complete. Not until the reign of Justinian did any church arise upon the spot ; and even then no attempt was made to hallow the spot on which the Temple had once stood.
In describing Jerusalem, our guide, in thoroughly methodical manner, commences with the north end of the Eastern Hill, and then proceeds southwards ; crosses the valley above Siloam to the Western Hill ; returns towards the north, and leaves the city by the east, on the way to the Mount of Olives and Bethany. He almost certainly saw Constantine’s buildings, on the site now occupied by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre ; and the Jerusalem of his day must have preserved all the main lines of Hadrian’s HSlia.
In the neighbourhood of Jerusalem, as one goes round the city, the pilgrim first notices the pool of Siloam, which stops dead on the Sabbath, “ running neither by day nor night for that space ; ” the house of Caiaphas, where is the pillar of Christ’s scourging ; the place of the palace of David ; the walls of the house of Pilate ; the “ little hill of Golgotha ; ” and the crypt where the Lord’s body was laid, a stone’s- throw only from the hill of suffering. “ And there, by order of the Emperor Constantine, a church of wondrous beauty has been built.” 1 But of the seven synagogues that once were to be found in Sion, “ one alone remains ; the rest are ploughed over and sown upon, as said Isaiah the prophet ” (a confusion of Micah iii. 12 with Isaiah i. 8).
On the eastern side of the city, going out towards the Mount of Olives, the pilgrim crosses the valley of Jehosha- phat, and sees the “stone at the place where Judas Iscariot betrayed Christ ; ” the “ tree from which they took branches and strewed them in the way;” and the two “ notable tombs ” of Isaiah and Hezekiah, king of the Jews. Upon Olivet is 1 Of. Euseb. Life of Const, iii. 31.
II.] THE PILGRIM IN THE JORDAN VALLEY. 65
to be found another of Constantine’s basilicas, apparently built to commemorate the Ascension, “ over the cave where Christ is said to have taught his disciples ; ” close by is the “ little hill ” of the Transfiguration, conveniently brought from the north of Palestine to the south ; a mile and a half to the east is Bethany, with the crypt of Lazarus.
Next, taking the way to Jericho, we see the sycamore of ZacchaBus ; the fountain of Elisha, which once made women barren, but now fruitful ; and the house of Bahab the harlot. Here once stood the city of the Canaanites ; but nothing was now to be seen of it, except the place where rested the Ark of the Covenant and the twelve stones which the children of Israel brought out of Jordan,1 together with the spot at which “ Jesus, the son of Nave (Joshua, the son of Nun), circumcised the children of Israel, and buried their foreskins ” — a first outline of the later pilgrim legend of the “ hill of the prepuces.” 2
Nine miles from Jericho, continues our guide, is the Dead Sea, of a water most bitter, without ship, without fish, which turns over any man who tries to swim in it. Thence to the Jordan, “where the Lord was baptized by John,” is a distance of five miles ; and a rock upon the left or further bank of the same marks the spot “ whence Elias was taken up to heaven.”
On the south, going from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, a journey of six miles, we pass the tomb of Bachel ; and in Bethlehem visit the new church, “built by the orders of Constantine,” and enjoy a perfect round of sacred sights, with the tombs of Ezekiel, Asaph, Job, Jesse, David, and Solomon ; while only fourteen miles further on is the ■“ fountain where Philip baptized the Eunuch,” at Bethasora
1 But which were really set up, I pare Josh. iv. 20). mot at Jericho, but at Gilgal (com- J 2 “ Acervus preputiorum.”
F
66 PRIMITIVE PILGRIMS OF LATIN CHRISTENDOM. [Ch.
(Bethzur, Beit Sur). Thence to Terebinthus, or Mamre, two miles from Hebron, where the pilgrim can sit under the shadow of the same oak that sheltered Abraham, when he “ spoke with angels, and ate food with them,” a spot now marked by a “ wondrously fair church ” of Constantine’s. Lastly, in Hebron itself is the great monument 1 in which lie the three first Hebrew patriarchs and their wives — Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebekah, and Leah.
Here ends abruptly, without any notice of the sites of Galilee, and with but few allusions, comparatively speaking, to Hew Testament history, our guide’s account of the Holy Land, and what the religious traveller is to visit in the same. The Bordeaux pilgrim now begins again to copy the Antonine itinerary, and giving us a summary of the whole distance from Constantinople to Jerusalem (1164 miles), relapses into his first condition, that of a mere time-table, or mile-record, briefly noting the chief stages of the return journey, which, unlike the way out, is not all by land. And of these notes, the only ones of general interest are the mention of Heraclea in Thrace, where the traveller diverges from his former route to follow the Via Egnatia due west through Macedonia to the Adriatic near Durazzo ; of Philippi, or Filibeh, “ where Paul and Silas were thrown into prison;” of Euripidis (Yrasta), ‘‘where lies Euripides the poet ; ” of Pella (Yenikeui), “ whence came Alexander the Great of Macedon ; ” and of Aulon in Epirus (Aulona), at the end of the Egnatian Way, where we are to take ship for Italy. A voyage of one hundred miles will land the returning traveller at Hydruntum or Otranto, and from this point his course is easy, by way of Brindisi, Bene- vento, Capua, and Appii Forum, to Rome. The rest of the way home is only described as far as Milan, and this in the
1 Memoria.
II.] THE BORDEAUX PILGRIM TYPICAL. 67
briefest and most cursory manner, without a note of interest upon any place. For the guide-book is business-like to the last. Its object was to indicate the way to and from Jeru- salem for Western, and especially for Aquitanian, pilgrims, and to give a short account of the great things that the pilgrim was to see when he had gone so far.
And the notes of the Bordeaux guide-book, as we have pointed out, are not only the first faint signs of Christian interest in geographical movement; they are also the groundwork of most of the narratives of religious travel from Latin Christendom to Palestine during the next three cen- turies. Nearly all the men who followed upon the path of our Gallic traveller between Constantine and Heraclius must have found his record useful ; and very few added much to its solid information. Its mistakes and confusions belong to its character ; we can only be thankful there are so few, by comparison with those of later devotees : for the aims of the mediaeval pilgrim were simply devotional, and the form or size of the buildings, the exact appearance of the country, which enshrined the objects of his faith, mattered little. He lived in two worlds — the religious and the real, — and the transition was easy from one to the other ; sometimes the result was a curious blending of the two.
The fresh impulse given to pilgrimage by Helena and the Bordeaux traveller is seen in the traditional decree of Pope Sylvester I. (335), which announced indulgences for all pilgrims to the sanctuaries of Constantine in the Holy Land, and, above all, to the Martyrium, or Church of the Passion, in Jerusalem,1 just visited by another person of importance — Athanasius of Alexandria.2
1 Cf. Bulla Pii IV., 9 April, 1561. Cf. Lavigerie, Ste. Anne de Jer. p.
10 ; Algiers, 1879. (But as yet the original is indiscoverable, as Molinier
notes, ii. p. 55.)
2 Cf. Theophanes, Chron. 5827 (ann. mund.) ; Eutychius, Annals (Pococke, i. 165).
68 PRIMITIVE PILGRIMS OF LATIN CHRISTENDOM. [Ch.
The Roman legates, Elpidius, Philoxenus, and Gabianus, who in 342 carried the letters of Pope Julius to Palestine;1 the poor who flocked to Jerusalem from all parts, as Eusebius declares ; the other Eusebius of Vercelli, who journeyed to the Holy Land, though under the gentle pressure of an Arian persecution, between 355 and 358 ; 2 Gaudentius the priest, Syrus the deacon, and Victorianus the exorcist, who accompanied him: and Ursicinus, another Gallic bishop, who followed in 360 3 — all witness to the great advance of intercourse between various parts of the Catholic world, and particularly between the Levant and Western Europe, at this time.
Unfortunately this intercourse, with rare exceptions, did not point to anything beyond itself; knowledge of the world was a very different thing from knowledge of the holy sites : and the close of the seventh century found a greater ignorance of the surface, shape, and divisions of the globe in such great centres of our Western civilisation as Rome, Milan, Ravenna, Narbonne, Bordeaux, or Toledo than had prevailed at any time since the old pagan Empire of the Eternal City took shape in the first century before Christ.
The outlook of the early Church upon geography is more or less clearly indicated by a certain constant and very suggestive habit of the Bordeaux pilgrim. Almost -every site of the Holy Land suggests to him some verse of the Scriptures, and often he dwells upon the thought of prophecy fulfilled. Isaiah’s word is realised in the syna- gogues of Sion ploughed over and sown upon; the great stone (seemingly of the south-east angle) of the temple wall
1 Julius, Ep. 342 ; Mansi, Conc.ii. 1211.
2 Cf. St. Ambrose, Serm. lvi., Ep.
c. ; Jerome, De Viris Illustrib. c. 96 ; and tbe Anonymous Life of St.
Eusebius.
3 Gallia Christiana, xii. 5; and Eusebius, Ep. ad Presbyteros et plebem ltaliae (Migne, P. L. xii. 947).
II.]
PILGRIMAGES OF JEROME’S AGE.
69
lias now, indeed, become tbe bead of tbe corner, be notices with triumph ; tbe fountain at Jericbo now performs wbat Elisba bad commanded, and aids conception. Everywhere the traveller is haunted by bis prejudices. Before be reaches Syria be knows wbat be wishes to see, and be sees it without fail. In this there is no true exploring spirit : tbe senti- mental interest of tbe past has quite overlaid tbe practical interest of tbe present. To this habit of mind certain parts of tbe world assume an altogether fictitious importance, and dwarf everything else. Directly such a view, implicit in tbe pilgrim-journals, finds expression in maps or formal treatises, we naturally have such distortions as we find in tbe “ Psalter,” “ Hereford,” and other wheel maps, where tbe world centres round Palestine ; where Jerusalem — as large as Sicily — forms tbe bub, and tbe ocean tbe hoop, of tbe earth ; and where tbe places and countries of tbe globe are not delineated according to actual relations, but according to ideal importance.
II. From Jerome to Justinian — a.d. 370-527.
Tbe pilgrim-travellers of our next group belong to wbat may be called tbe Age of Jerome — to tbe time when this great Father exercised so powerful an influence in drawing devotees to tbe Holy Land, and especially to bis own cell at Bethlehem. He is tbe centre of all tbe religious exploration of Western Christians in tbe Bible-coun tries during tbe last years of tbe fourth, and tbe early years of tbe fifth, century. But he was not only tbe leader, be was also tbe candid friend of tbe pilgrimage now so fashionable. His vehement exhortations to friends to retire from tbe world, in Bethlehem or some other secluded and peaceful hermitage, are a commonplace ; and we shall have to notice some of
70 PRIMITIVE PILGRIMS OF LATIN CHRISTENDOM. [Ch.
them presently ; but it is often forgotten how vehemently, too, he insisted on the danger of sacred sight-seeing. “ There is no matter of praise,” he writes Paulinus, “ in having been at Jerusalem, but only in having lived religiously at Jerusalem.1 But as for those who say, ‘ The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord,’ let them hear the apostle’s words, 4 * * * Ye are the temple of the Lord, and the Holy Spirit dwelleth in you.’ For the kingdom of heaven may be reached from Britain even as from Jerusalem.” Gregory of * Nyssa2went beyond Jerome — he wrote a tract against indiscriminate pilgrimage ; and St. Hilarion, during fifty years’ life in Palestine, boasted of having only once visited the sacred places. But these examples of moderation were rare. Pilgrims flocked to Syria from every country of the West ; and, not content with water from the Jordan, earth from the Sepulchre, or splinters from the Cross, some were said to have gone on into Arabia to see the dunghill 8 on which Job endured his sufferings and disputed with his friends.
Nearly all these travellers go on their journey by the same road, and stop at very much the same point. Only a
1 Jerome, Ep. lviii. 2, 3 ; imitated from Cicero, Pro Mursena, 12. “ Non Asiam nunquam vidisse, sed in Asia continenter vixisse laudandum est.”
2 “ De iis qui adeunt Hierosolyma,”
Works, ii. 1084-1087 ; cf. Fabric, ix.
120 ; and Robertson, Ch. Hist. ii. 64,
65. Gregory declared the sight of
the holy places added nothing to his faith, while the desperate wickedness of their inhabitants showed him there
was no peculiar grace given to those who dwelt there (contrast Jer. Epp. xlvi., xlvii.).
In the same way Claudius of Turin, the famous “ protestant ” bishop of the ninth century, wrote against the
| pilgrimages of his time (Migne, P. L. civ.); not, however, absolutely con- demning them, as their effects were different with different persons. To the same effect speaks St. Augustine. Do not meditate lengthy journeys; it is in loving, not in journeying that one travels to Him who is every- where : [for the Lord has not said, Go to the East for justice, or fly to the West for pity]. See Augustine, Epp. civ., lxxviii. ; Serm. I. De Verb. Apost. Petri ; and Serm. III. De martyr, verb [disputed].
3 Chrysostom, Ad. pop. Antioch. Horn. v. 1 (t. ii.).
II.]
PROMINENCE OF WOMEN.
71
few have left us any record of their own journey ; but a large number of names are quoted— for instance, in Jerome’s letters — to prove the now triumphant attractions of religious devotion. And among these pilgrims of the “ second age,” the first of any importance is Jerome himself (372), quickly followed by Melania the elder,1 who went to Jerusalem in 373, and, as Jerome asserts, gained the surname of Thecla “from her virtues and miraculous humility.” A later tradition adds the story of her founding, with the help of her friend Rufinus of Aquileia, a monastery near Jerusalem, in which she lived herself, with fifty others, for seven and twenty years.2
One noticeable feature in the pilgrim movement of Jerome’s age is the prominence of women in the same. The fiery controversialist, whose friendships with his fellow- men were so strictly dependent on the agreement of their opinions with his own, was perhaps never more at ease than with the submissive admiration of that innermost group of his Roman friends, which largely consisted of certain noble ladies. Submissive we may fairly call it, for Marcella’s playful trick of disputing with the Father about the mean- ing of various texts was hardly more serious than the theological dissent of Catherine Parr from the infallibility of Henry VIII. As time went on, several members of this circle (which included Paula and her daughter Eustochium, the two Melanias, Rufinus the Church historian, and Fabiola a descendant of Quintus Maximus, all Pilgrims in their time) left Rome, and, not content with visiting the Holy Sites of Palestine, stayed there for good, in cells and convents, often constructed by their own labour and at their own expense.
1 Jerome, Epp. iv., xxxix., xlv. ; 2 Vincent of Beauvais, Spec. Hist.
Cbron. a.d. 377 ; Paul. Nola. Epp. lib. xvii. c. 89 ; xviii. 99 ; xix. 35.
xxxi., xxxii., xxviii., xxix., xlv.
72 PRIMITIVE PILGRIMS OF LATIN CHRISTENDOM. [Ch.
Thus Taula undertook the erection of the great monastery at Bethlehem for Jerome himself; Melania the elder devoted herself to the service of some exiled 1 monks at Sepphoris ; Melania the younger lived for fourteen years in a cell on the Mount of Olives : all died in Syria. And some of these devotees were disposed to regard the fate of Marcella as almost a retribution. Devout Christian as she was, she had hung back [from the pilgrimage which would have perfected her virtues ; the time went by, and she perished in the sack of Rome by Alaric. Nor is it wonderful that women such as Paula, even apart from her imitation of Jerome, should have found a home, for a season at least, in the Levant. At one time or another she had helped to entertain many of the most prominent men of the Eastern Churches. Epiphanius of Cyprus, Paulinus of Antioch, Isidore of Pelusium, Theophilus of Alexandria, were all guest-friends of hers, and all seem to have been visited by her in the course of her pilgrim journey. Family affliction was often an important, sometimes a determining element in the pilgrimages of these Roman ladies. Just as Constantine’s execution of his son Crispus, and his wife Fausta, was probably an immediate cause of the journey of St. Helena, so friends urged upon Paula the deaths of hus- band and daughter, and upon Marcella the loss of her mother, as decisive reasons for seeking the consolation of pilgrimage.
The journey of Silvia of Aquitaine was in all likelihood connected with something of the same kind ; and the enthusiastic devotion of these women in the century that elapsed between Helena and Eudoxia did much to spread the custom of pilgrimage,2 and to combat the old prejudice
1 Exiled from Nitria in Egypt during the persecution of Valens.
2 This prejudice, however, con- tinued to be felt against the specially Jewish site of Mount Moriah till
Justinian’s day, and even he did not venture to build on the site of the Temple ; but raised his church at the south-east angle of the Noble Sanctuary.
II.]
SILVIA OF AQUITAINE.
73
against Deicidal Palestine, against the country that had rejected and killed the Divine Saviour of mankind.
But we must now look at the memoirs of Jerome’s friends and disciples in more detail.
Another pilgrim of the same time is Philastrius, bishop of Brescia,1 whose visit is usually put under the year 37 5 ; but Julius Honorius, writing in 376 a description of Palestine, is not to be counted, any more than Julius iEthicus or the other and probably later iEthicus Istricus, in the roll of Christian travellers, and what he says is only,, and very slightly, interesting to geographical science.
In 380, 2 Caprasius of Lerins, Honoratus, afterwards Archbishop of Arles, and his brother, Yenantius, who died on the way, may be added to the list of Gallic pilgrims ; and about the same time occurred the important journey of Silvia of Aquitaine, or whoever else is the author of the “ Peregrination ” that bears her name.3 Among all the devotees whose memoirs form our best commentary on the Bordeaux guide-book, this one is the most enterprising and instructive. Nearly half a century after the first Christian traveller from Southern Gaul had described the
overland route to Syria and the wonders of the Holy Land for his fellow-pilgrims, another, starting from the same part 4
1 Acta SS., July iv. p. 387.
2 Acta SS., 1 June, i. p. 78; 16 Jan., ii. p. 18 ; May, vii. p. 241.
3 Text first given by Gamurrini, 1883-7 ; first, in English, by Bernard, in ed. of Pal. Pilg. Text Soc., 1891.
4 For though the name is con- jectural, we may be sure that the author of the “ Peregrination ” was a “ Roman ” from Southern Gaul. Of. (1) the compaiison of the Euphrates with the Rhone (p. 48) ; (2) the words of the Bishop of Edt ssa — “ Be extremis terris venires ad hsec loca ”
(pp. 48, 49) ; (3) the explanations of Greek phrases in Latin, e.g. pp. 45, 46, 56 ; (4) the use of peculiar words and constructions of South-west Gal- lic dialect of Latin, agreeing, e.g.y with Prosper of Aquitaine, as quod in sense of quando ; eo quod for acc. with injin. after verbs of narration, and expressions perdicere,perciccedere , consuetudinarius. Cf. Wolfflin and Geyer, Archiv fur Lateinische Lexi- kographie,pp. 259, 611 ; andMommsen in Sitzungsberichte der Berliner Akademie der Wissensch., 1887.
74 PRIMITIVE PILGRIMS OF LATIN CHRISTENDOM. [Ch.
of the world, reaches Palestine by way of Egypt and Arabia, after a series of journeys now lost to us. It seems probable that Silvia went by sea from Gaul to Egypt, and in the same way from Alexandria to Constantinople ; and that she then made her way by land from the Bosphorus through Asia Minor. What we have left of her journey discovers her at “ Sinai, the mount of God,” from whose summit the pilgrim saw “ Egypt and Palestine, and the Bed Sea and the Parthenian Sea, which leads to Alexandria, and the boundless territories of the Saracens ; ” from this point she journeyed slowly through the deserts of Stony Arabia to Suez and the land of Goshen, to Rameses and the “ city of Arabia,” 1 on the Red Sea. So far she had been escorted by a guard of Roman soldiers ; but now, dismissing these as needless on the great military road from Pelusium to Syria, she pressed on to J erusalem “ through the several stations in Egypt, by which we had formerly taken our course, . . . and which I had seen when I was before at Alexandria and in the Thebaid.” 2 ?
Having spent some time in the Holy City, Silvia set out for Mount Nebo, in Moab, to the east of the Dead Sea.
1 Page 39 of original manuscript. “ Arabia ” is the Thuku of the Hiero- glyphics, Thou of the Romans ; where the road to Clysma (Suez), in the Antonine itinerary, left the main track from Memphis to Pelusium; cf. Herod, ii. 158 (. . . t^v Apafttriu
In Rameses, Silvia sees two colossi, which she thinks are statues of Moses and Aaron, and a sycamore tree, planted by the patriarchs, and called the “Tree of Truth,” which cured any one who plucked off a twig of it.
2 The places in Arabia and Egypt mentioned by Silvia are (pp. 31-40)
Sinai and Horeb, The Bush , Taber ah, “ where the children of Israel lusted for food,” Faran, Clesma or Suez ( Goshen Land), Epauleum or Pi- hahiroth , Migdol, Belesfon or Baal- Zephon, Oton or Etham, Succoth , Pithom, Heroopolis, “ where Joseph met Jacob, his father,” the city of Arabia, Rameses , Taphnis ( Tanis or Zoan , or possibly Tahpanhes (?)), and Pelusium. It may be noticed that the pilgrim’s references to the Old Testament all follow the Septuagint pretty closely, and that she shows no knowledge of the Vulgate.
II.]
SILVIA ON MOUNT NEBO.
75
Starting from Jerusalem, “ and journeying with holy men,” she “ arrived at that place of the Jordan where the children of Israel had crossed.” A little higher up the river was the spot “ where the children of Reuben and Gad and the half- tribe of Manasseh had made an altar, where Jericho is,” and crossing the stream, the pilgrim came to the “ city called Livias,” 1 in the “ plain where the children of Israel encamped, under the mountains of Arabia above Jordan.” The “ foun- dations of that camp and of the dwellings of the people ” were duly seen, and then the travellers went aside about six miles to see the water flowing out of the rock “ which Moses gave to the children of Israel,” before they made the ascent of Nebo. The greater part of the mountain could be accom- plished, they found, “ sitting on an ass,” but there was one piece that had to be performed “laboriously on foot.” At the summit they were, of course, shown the tomb of Moses, — a comfort to weak brethren who might have fancied, as Scripture said, that “ no one knew where he lay ;” and in the prospect from the topmost peak, Silvia saw the “ most part of the Land of Promise,” and the “whole Jordan territory and all the land of the Sodomites and Segor (Zoar).” Also “ the place where was the inscription about Lot’s wife was shown to us : but believe me,” continues the pilgrim with an outburst of candour, “ the pillar itself was not visible, only the place is shown. The pillar itself is said to be covered in the Dead Sea. We saw the place, but no pillar ; I cannot deceive you about this matter.” The bishop of the place, however, said that it was only a few years since the pillar was visible, and later pilgrims did not agree to this quiet renunciation of a venerable site; two hundred years after Silvia, travellers not only saw and touched the pillar, but knew all about its past.2
1 The Liviada or Salamaida of I 2 Heshbon(Esebon)of the Amorites Antoninus Martyr, ch. x. | and Sasdra (Edrei) the city of Og,
76 PRIMITIVE PILGRIMS OF LATIN CHRISTENDOM. [Ch.
After the grave of Moses, Silvia naturally wished to see the grave of Job, in the region of Ausitis (Uz). So she took her way from Jerusalem to Carneas,1 the city of the patriarch, on the borders of “Idumaea and Arabia.” On the outward journey she passed the “ city of Melchisedek ” at Salem, above the bank of Jordan. Here were to be seen “ ancient and vast foundations ; ” hard by was the “ Garden of John ” (Baptist), and the valley of the Cherith, where the ravens fed Elijah ; while just beyond, the “ parts of Phoe- nicia” suddenly came into view, with a “lofty mountain? (Hermon ? ) which extended a great distance.” In Carneas itself, all doubt about the grave of Job had been lately put to silence by the discovery of a stone, found after a little digging, with the name of the patriarch neatly carved upon it.V Ke turning again to Jerusalem, and having now seen all the holy places, Silvia had a mind to visit her own country once more. But first of all she wished, God willing, to go to Mesopotamia, for the holy monks were said to be numerous there, and of such blameless life as baffled description. Besides this, she longed to pray at the tomb of St. Thomas at Edessa. There is no Christian, proceeds Silvia — whose religion at least gave her the resolution to travel where few women, at any time, would have cared to venture — there is no pilgrim who has journeyed as far as Jerusalem, and does not also wend his way thither (to Edessa).3 “ And since from
king of Bashan, were also pointed out from the Mount of Promise, as well as the Hill of Balak and Balaam, and the delighted but unsatisfied wanderers now returned for a short breathing space, to Jerusalem (pp. 41-43).
1 “ Formerly called Dennaba,” the Dinhabah of Gen. xxxvi. 32, and really in Bashan; apparently Ash- taroth-Carnaim, near the “home of Job” at Sheikh Saad. It was the
traditional belief of the early Chris- tians that Uz lay at this site, where Job’s stone is still shown, and not in Edom or in Arabia proper where the O.T. “ Land of Uz ” must be looked for. (Of. Wilson, appendix to edition of Silvia in P.P.T.S., p. 146.)
8 Cp. pp. 44-47.
3 Cf. Cureton, “ Early Syriac Docu- ments relating to Christianity in Edessa.”
II.]
SILYIA IN MESOPOTAMIA.
77
Antioch it is nearer to Mesopotamia, it was convenient for me, as I was returning to Constantinople, and my way was through Antioch, that I should go from thence.” 1
So she set out, and travelled through the stations of Ccelesyria and Augusta Eufratensis, to Hierapolis. Fifteen miles further she reached the “ great river Euphrates, rushing down in a torrent like the Ehone, but greater ; ” and passing this, and entering Mesopotamia, came to Bathanis, or Bathnse in Osrhoene, a “ place swarming with inhabitants ; ” and finally to Edessa, the city of Thomas the Apostle, and of Abgarus, the correspondent of Jesus Christ.
The “memorial” of Thomas, Silvia found, had been lately rebuilt (viz. under Valens, in a.d. 372); and in the palace of King Abgar she saw a statue of the prince in marble, “ which shone as it were of pearl,” and the letters that had been sent “ by the Lord to him, and by him to our Lord.” Already the story was full grown, of the immunity of the city from all hostile attack by the virtue of these relics : the letter of Christ had cast darkness upon the eyes of the Persians when they came to besiege it ; and the same power had caused fountains of water to burst forth in the town and supply the besieged in their need. All this was explained by the bishop to Silvia, who had known some- thing of it before, “ but indeed the account I received here is more full.” Copies of the sacred letters she already had in her country, but now she had gained a whole commentary upon their meaning. For “ blessed is the stronghold wherein thou abidest, Edessa, mother of wise men, which by the living mouth of the Son was blessed ; this blessing shall abide in her till the holy one be revealed.” 2
After three days in Edessa, Silvia, “ still advancing,”
1 Cp. pp. 47, 48. I (Assemani’s ed. ii. 399). Cureton
2 Ephraem Syrus, Testament | Syriac Docs. 152.
78 PRIMITIVE PILGRIMS OF LATIN CHRISTENDOM. [Ch.
went on to Abraham’s Charrte, or Haran, a city where, except clergy and monks, “ all were heathen.” 1 Still it was not deficient in relics — the “ house of Abram ; ” the wells of Rebekah and Eliezer, of Rachel and Jacob ; and the “ farm ” of Laban the Syrian. These only whetted the pilgrim’s appe- tite for more : and she asked for “ that part of the Chaldees where Terah dwelt first with his family.” But here, at last, her energy was checked ; the place was only ten stations off, by way of Nisibis, but there was “ no access for Romans,” for “ Persians held all the country ” since Julian’s fatal attack in the summer of 363.2 To atone for this dis- appointment, Silvia feasted her eyes on the great stone that Jacob rolled away from Rachel’s well, on the home of Laban in Fadana (Padan-Aram), on the place where Rachel stole her father’s idols, and, above all, on the “ unheard of piety ” of the monks and solitaries, living all around.
Here Silvia had gone more than 2000 miles from her home, reaching the extreme limits of the Roman Empire, and in one or two places actually passing them, both in Arabia and Mesopotamia. She had now spent quite four years in travel, and yet had no intention of giving up her quest. Her religious enthusiasm is unbounded : everywhere she seeks out clergy and monks, whose condescension amazes her — they deign with willing mind to receive her insignificant self, to guide her from one point to another, to admit her to salutation, all undeserved, to show her the holy relics and the famous sites. Yet she must have been a
1 Page 51. A very -unusual notice
with Silvia, who always consorts with the Christian clergy, and has no deal- ings with the natives, never alluding, for instance, to the lay population of Syria, Egypt, Palestine, and Asia Minor, except in the case of a few
garrison towns and forts and some titles of provincial governors.
2 The words of her guide, “Modo ibi accessus Romanorum non est,” by themselves imply that this part of the country had only been lost very recently, pp. 52, 53.
II.]
SILYIA’S MERITS.
79
person of consideration 1 — her Roman escort in Arabia, the frequent kindnesses of governors, the attentions of bishops, all seem to prove this : as she herself confesses, the way was made smooth to her ; “ everywhere she saw what she purposed.” In rank she is probably a parallel case to the noble Roman matron, Paula, the friend of Jerome : but in
travel for religion’s sake, as we have said before, she scarcely has an equal among these early Christian pilgrims.2 Scarcely any other takes us to so many different parts of the East “ for love of the Faith and of the monks ; ” scarcely any other conforms so little to the accepted types, which most pilgrims reproduced with only an addition of legendary wonders.
Through the mist of marvel and miracle in which Silvia, like other devotees, continually moved we are generally able to perceive some solid ground of fact, some actual piece of travel accomplished. Even her credulity is more restrained than the ordinary traveller’s. Her distortions of fact are less violent : the wilder legends, as in the case of the pillar of Lc\*s wife, she either omits or expressly denies. Had all our records of religious travel been written by persons of her own class, who had enjoyed some of the profane learning and worldly enlightenment lacking in many of the pilgrims, we should have a very different light upon the path we are following.
1 On these grounds, Gamurrini has suggested that our author was
St. Silvia, of Aquitaine, a sister of Rufinus, Prefect of the East under Theodosius I., whose journey from Jerusalem to Egypt is recorded in the “ Historia Lausiaca” of Palladius. But that ascetic, who boasts (Hist. Laus. p. 143) of not having washed for sixty years, except the finger tips for communion, and never travelled in a litter, presents some inconsis- tencies with the writer of this pere- grination, who would have gone up
Mount Sinai in a chair if she could (p. 32), and rode up the last part of Mount Nebo on an ass (p. 42).
2 “ From the portion which alone is left to us, it seems probable that the peregrination as a whole furnished a more clear, intelligent, exten- sive, and independent account of the Christian holy lands than any other writing of this class and time.” See Geyer, Kritische Bemer- kungen, 1890 ; Comptes rendues Ac. Inscr. et B. L., 1885.
SO PRIMITIVE PILGRIMS OF LATIN CHRISTENDOM. [Ch.
But to return. Haran was Silvia’s furthest: from this point she made her way hack to Antioch, and so by the great military road 1 through Tarsus, Isauria, Cappadocia, Galatia, and Bithynia — “provinces I had passed through on my outward journey.” At times she was in some danger from the brigand Isaurians, as she had been before from the Bedouin Saracens, both being “ very mischievous and given to robbery ; ” but she escaped with persistent good fortune, although, to visit a famous shrine, she was always ready to run risks that most pilgrims would have shunned. Finally, when safely housed in Constantinople, she registers a vow, after worshipping in the churches of the imperial city, to “ go to Asia ” (and especially to Ephesus), for a further pilgrimage ; and if, after this, she were still in the body and able to acquaint herself “ with any more of the (holy) places,” she promises to keep a full record of the same for the benefit of the sisterhood in Gaul, whom she had left to come to the BJ^st, and for whose benefit she writes.
The rest of her home letter is entirely taken up with an account of the services and ritual of the Church of Jerusalem, especially during holy week, and in the course of this we find one of the earliest references to the festival of “ Palm ” Sunday and to the Christian use of incense. In all this we cannot follow St. Silvia — although this latter part of her book is of as much value to students of liturgies and ceremonial as the earlier part is to students of geogra- phy,— except to notice that the pillar of scourging, the holy wood of the Cross, Solomon’s ring, the horn of anointing, and the various churches of Constantine’s building are mentioned among the sights of most importance to the worshipper in the Holy City.2
1 The route of the Bordeaux pil- I 2 The “ great accuracy ” of Silvia’s grim. Cf. Silvia, 54, 55. | account of Sinai has led Sir C. W.
II.]
JEROME’S FINAL VISIT TO PALESTINE.
81
Silvia’s journey may be fixed, as we have said, to the years between 379 and 385.1 At this latter date, Jerome was in Palestine for the second time, and settled at Bethle- hem,2 where he became the leader, guide, and friend of all Western pilgrims, their chief correspondent, their principal attraction. His fiery appeals gave a new impulse to religious travel, and the presence of such a figure, “ glorious through- out the world,” 3 and directing, to a great extent, the fortunes of the whole Church from a cell in Judsea, could not possibly have been ignored by any visitor to the Holy Land in the next thirty years (385-415).
Sabinian the Deacon, from Italy (about 390), though an unsatisfactory sort of Christian, according to Jerome ; Paula and Eustochium from Rome (386), invited by the saint of
Wilson, perhaps, to attach overmuch topographical importance to her tra- vels in Egypt (on the other side is Naville; cf. his Goshen, pp. 19, 20), but all her descriptions unques- tionably bear the mark of personal experience. She saw all the places she writes about, and very probably “compiled her account from notes written on the ground.”
1 Several reasons for this may be pointed out ; as, e.g. —
1. The allusion to Persians hold- ing all the country about Nisibis (pp. 52, 53) seems to point, as already noticed, to a date later than 363, when this territory was ceded to the Persians by Jovian ; and the wording of the passage, “ Modo ibi accessus Romanorum non est,” makes, as we have seen, for a recent transfer of possession.
2. The church of St. Thomas of Edessa, described as “ newly rebuilt ” (nova dispositione), was finished under Valens, a.d. 372.
3. Edessa and all the rest of the East was quiet when she visited it. This would make it probable she was there after Valens’s persecution of the Catholics, ended by his death in 378.
4. The Bishop of Edessa, men- tioned as a confessor (p. 48), was probably Eulogius, who died in 387-8, and had been put out of his see by Valens. Cyrus, his successor, suffered no persecution whereby he could gain this title. He translated the tomb of St. Thomas to the great church in 394 ; whereas Silvia seems to make the “ martyrium ” quite dis- tinct, as would be the case of a visitor arriving before 394.
5. There is no mention of Jerome, who settled permanently in Palestine in 385, and was the m an object of interest to all pilgrims from that time.
2 Cf. Jerome’s Epp. xiv., Ixxiv., cxvii., lxvi., lxxxi., lxxxii.
3 Prosper of Aquitaine, Chron. pt. ii. ; cf. Migne, P. L. li. c. 586.
G
82 THE PRIMITIVE PILGRIMS OF LATIN CHRISTENDOM.
Bethlehem in his usual fervent style — for whether in love or hate, Jerome left nothing to be desired in the cordial vehemence of his language ; — and Gaudentius, bishop of Brescia, who visited Jerusalem about 390, were all repre- sentative of this new “ Hieronymic ” class of pilgrims.1
And of these journeys, that of Paula and Eustochium (386) is especially commemorated in the “ Letter to Mar- cella about the holy places.” The chief point of this is a rhetorical justification of pilgrimage. What man could learn Greek or Latin properly without a stay in Athens or in Borne ? What Christian could be reckoned a master in religion without a visit to the Holy Land? This was felt by every one. “ Whoever may be a leading man in Gaul, hastens thither [to Palestine]. Even the Briton, separated as he is from our world, seeks the place known to him by general report as well as by the word of the Scriptures. And why should we speak of Armenians, of Persians, of the peoples of India and Ethiopia, of Egypt, fertile in monks, of Pontus and Cappadocia, of Syria and Mesopotamia, who come by one accord to these sacred places, according to the Saviour’s word, ‘ Wheresoever the body is, there shall the eagles be gathered together.’ ” 2
The language, indeed, of this pilgrim host is different, but the religion is one. Holier, indeed, is this place, continues the letter, speaking more narrowly of Bethlehem, than the Tarpeian Bock at Borne, so often struck by lightning — an evidence of the wrath of God. The virtue of Palestine must atone for the wickedness of Italy. Pagan Borne was the Babylon of the Apocalypse ; and though the Church of the Eternal City had the trophies of apostles and
J uly iv. 383.
2 cc. 1, 2. (Jer., Ep. xcvi.)
1 Cf. Jer., Epp. xlv., lxxxvi., cxlvii., etc. ; Gaudentius, Sermon xvii., in Migne, P.L. xx. 964; Acta Sanctorum,
II.]
PAULA’S INVITATION TO MARCELLA.
83
martyrs, the true confession of Christ, and the faith preached by his messenger, yet the size, and stir, and distractions of so great a place were enemies to the life and peace of a monk. But here, in Bethlehem, in Christ’s village, was “ nothing but quiet country life, a quiet unbroken except by psalms.” A Puritan might have envied the picture that is drawn to attract Marcella. It is like a realised kingdom of the saints. “ Wheresoever you turn, the ploughman, holding his plough, sings loudly his ‘Alleluia.’ The sweating reaper diverts himself with psalms, and the vine-dresser, as he lops the vine with his sickle, chants something of King David’s.1 These are our love-songs here, these are our pastorals,; our weapons in our war of husbandry.” Cannot such a prospect draw Marcella from the throng of Borne ? Would it not be glorious to visit the Lord’s tomb together, to weep with sister and mother, to ascend with the risen Christ from Mount Olivet, to pray in the tomb of David and of Abraham, to set eyes upon the Jordan, to adore the ashes of John Baptist and of Elisha, to kiss the wood of the Cross ? 2
What the Bordeaux pilgrim had left unnoticed, Paula invites Marcella to do — to go to Nazareth and “see the flower of Galilee,” to Tabor and “visit the tabernacles not3 of Peter,” to set eyes upon the Sea of Gennesareth and the town of Nam, the hill of Hermonim and the torrent of Kishon; above all, upon Capernaum, the favoured spot of the Lord’s miracles.4
Paula and Eustochium have seen all this, and their tract on the holy places is simply an “open letter” to Latin Christendom, addressed to one intimate friend by name,
1 Elsewhere Jerome gives an ac-
count of a storm at Bethlehem, which
draws a different picture of the
;State of the city.
2 cc. 3-7.
3 A “ non ” expunged by later pil- grims.
4 0, 8. See Delpit, pp. 116-129.
84 PRIMITIVE PILGRIMS OF LATIN CHRISTENDOM. [Ch.
but looking beyond this to a general migration of Catholic Christians to the old home of their religion.
Nearly twenty years after the writing of this appeal, Paula’s own journey to the holy places, upon which the same appeal was based, is separately and lengthily described by Jerome himself.1 The saint’s friendship with this enthusiastic and high-born lady, like Hildebrands with Countess Matilda, was famous throughout the Christian world of that day, and seemed to satisfy the monastic ideal of a spiritual marriage, a higher state than the physical union of the sinful children of this world.
Paula had given up “houses, lands, and children,” for “ the gospel’s sake,” and in spite of the appeals of “ brother, friends, and son,” embarked at Rome for Palestine, with a “piety not to be conquered by entreaties.” With Eustochium, her only companion, she passed the island of Pontia, celebrated as the prison of “ that noblest of women, Flavia Domitilla,” under the Domitian persecution, and sailing by Rhodes and Cyprus, touched the Syrian coast at Seleucia, the port of Antioch. From this point she followed the route of the Bordeaux guide-book along the coast, “ admiring the ruins of Dor, a city once most powerful,” and visiting Joppa, famous, “ from the fables of the poets,” for the rock of Andromeda. Thence, going up the country to Jerusalem, the Roman pilgrim passed Bethoron, Ajalon, and Gibeon, “ where Joshua fought with five kings, and gave orders to the sun and moon ; ” and was welcomed in the Holy City, as a lady of noble rank, by the governor, “ who knew her family right well.” She visited the Sepulchre, the relics of the Cross, the column of scourging ; 2 and, going
1 Ep. lxxxvi. [= 108 in Migne], written in 404 ; referring apparently to journeys of 385-6.
2 At this very time Prudentius
was celebrating in his verses (Dit- tocheum, 121-124) the “corner-stone of the first temple, which survived the ruin of the second.”
II.]
PAULA’S PEREGRINATION.
85
on to Bethlehem, declared, in Jerome’s hearing, that she “saw with the eyes of faith” the Divine child in the manger, the magi, the shepherds, the star, and all the wonders of the gospel of the childhood, as if actually before her sight. From Bethlehem, Paula moved on to Hebron, and stood by Abraham’s oak, “beneath which he saw the day of Christ and was glad ; ” then, by Engedi and Mount Olivet, to Jericho and the “ hill of circumcision.” After this, in Central Palestine, the “peregrination” began to take something of a more marvellous character. While in Samaria, Jerome’s friend, in her own words, saw “devils writhing and yelling in different kinds of torture ; and men, before the tombs of the saints, howling like wolves, barking like dogs, roaring like lions, hissing like serpents, bellowing like bulls. Here women also had hung themselves up by the feet.” 1 She prayed for these unfortunates, and went on into Galilee, where, says Jerome, “ daylight would fail me sooner than words, if I were to go over all the sites that venerable Paula now came to with a devotion beyond belief.” So he brings her, with a stroke of the pen, to Egypt, Alexandria, and Nitria, the “home of monks,” on which last name the saint puns a little : “ Nitria, in whose pure nitre of heavenly virtues the stains of many are daily washed away.”
Here Paula was in her element, and she revelled in monastic humilities. “ Whose cell did she not enter ? At whose feet did she not cast herself? ” Here, “ forgetful of her sex and weakness,” she would have stayed, had not the long- ing for the soil of Palestine drawn her back to Bethlehem,
Yet we may remember that while so large a proportion of the Christian world was devoting itself to religious ecstacies,
1 Cf. cc. 15, 16 ; Delpit, “ Essai sur les Anciens Pelerinages,” pp. 96-116.
86 PRIMITIVE PILGRIMS OF LATIN CHRISTENDOM. [Ch.
the Empire was breaking up. Six years after Jerome’s first visit to Palestine, the Goths overthrew Valens at Adrianople (378) ; less than ten years before Jerome’s death, Alaric sacked Rome (411). The saint of Bethlehem himself admits that the inroads of the Barbarians had largely increased the number of the religious travellers, and especially of those ladies from Rome, who now “filled all the cities” of the Levant. The pilgrim movement that he championed may have been towards a heavenly country ; but it hardly strengthened the defence of his earthly fatherland. To his pagan enemies, it seemed as if the “ worship of the cross had eaten out patriotism.” 1
After Paula’s journey, news from the far West came to Palestine again with Eusebius of Cremona, who seems to have visited Jerome about the year 394, and with the letters he brought from Amandus, presbyter of Bordeaux ; 2 while, in his next budget of letters (under the year 395-6), the hermit of Bethlehem notices 3 the arrival of Eabiola and Oceanus from Rome, of Vigilantius from Gaul, and of Paulus and Sysinnius from North Africa (397 ?). In 398 Zenon the shipmaster brought Jerome letters from Italy, but hardly seems to have made a pilgrimage. As a letter- carrier, the saint complains, he had been grossly remiss.
Next year some copyists 4 came over from Spain (399) to help Jerome in his work : in 400 Theodorus, returning from Alexandria to Rome, visits the great doctor of the Roman
1 Nor was Jerome the only famous
counsellor of pilgrims and pilgrimages
in this age. In the same spirit, and
about the same time, St. John Chry- sostom, while at Antioch, indulged in vigorous pulpit exhortation to in- tending or reluctant visitants, and in warm commendation of those who
had performed the duty. Cf. Migne, P. G., lvii. 74 ; lv. 221, 242, 274'; and xlix. 191.
2 Jer. Epp. lvii., liv., lv.
3 Epp. lxxvii., lviii., lxi., cii., cv., lxxii.
4 Jer. Ep. lxxv. (Migne, P. L. xxii. c. 688).
II.]
ALEXIUS AND OTHER PILGRIMS, 380-400.
87
Church at Bethlehem, and Yincentius, the priest of that same Church, who had accompanied J erome 1 on his second pilgrimage in 385, is again heard of in Palestine. About the same time, Alexius of Rome,2 according to a doubtful story, travels to Edessa, adores the miraculous napkin, and is found by his own children sitting among the beggars of the town — found, but not recognised. An extraordinary amount of interest was roused by the journey of Alexius : later authorities brought him to J erusalem ; poems in Latin German, and French, of various metres, celebrated his humility ; and a whole group of English “ Alexius legends ” took shape in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in material interesting to philologists.
The journey of Postumianus,3 in or about the same year 400, which saw so great a concourse of pilgrims wending their way to Syria — from Harbonne to Carthage, from Carthage to Alexandria, from Alexandria to Bethlehem and Jerusalem, — is one more witness to the importance of Jerome’s stay in the Holy Land as a point d’appui for pilgrims ; and the same is proved by his complaints of the constant flow of letters to him from the West, and the demands for his full and immediate answer to one and all.4
The early years of the fifth century, like the closing years of the fourth, show St. Jerome’s influence at its height.5 Frequent notices are preserved of the intercourse between Rome, Hippo Regius, Alexandria and Bethlehem
1 Jer. Ep. lxxxviii.
2 Acta SS., Jul. iv. pp. 238-270, esp. p. 252; and Vita S. Alex. (Anony- mous), It. Hi. ii. 97-106.
3 Migne, P. L. xx. 183, etc.
4 “Uno ad Oecidentem navigandi tempore tantse a me simul epistolse
flagilantur, ut si cuncta ad singulos velim rescribe re, occurrere nequeam ”
(Jer. Epp lxxxv.).
5 Avienus’ (c. 401-450) description of the Holy Land, in the course of his Descriptio Orbis terrse, has no con- cern with pilgrim-travel. But see the note of Marcus Diaconus, in his Vita S. Porphyrii, on “ iEgyptii Mer- catores ” (c. viii. § 58; Acta SS. Feb. iii. 655).
88 PRIMITIVE PILGRIMS OF LATIN CHRISTENDOM. [Ch.
during these years,1 and in one letter 2 3 the saint alludes to monks from India, Persia, and Ethiopia arriving daily in the Holy City and its neighbourhood in such numbers as to cause some confusion. Thus, in 403, one Firmus,8 a priest, brings a letter from the women of the nation of the Getae, outside or barely on the borders of the Roman world.4
About this time (405) occurs, moreover, an apparently independent pilgrimage from the extreme north-west of Spain. Turribius, a bishop of Astures in Galicia,5 near Cape Finisterre, went to Jerusalem, was entrusted by the patriarch with the charge of some relics, and, learning in a dream that the Holy City would fall into the hands of unbelievers, carried them off — with or without the consent of the patriarch, does not appear — and housed them in a shrine at the Monte Sacro of his own native district (S. Maria de Monte Sacro).6
In 406 three visitors from distant parts are noticed in Jerome’s letters : Sisinnius, a Spaniard, sent by Exuperius, bishop of Toledo ; 7 Ausonius a Dalmatian ; and Apodemius a Gaul, “from the furthest parts thereof,” who came to Bethlehem by way of Rome. In 409 a second visit of Melania is recorded,8 and another attempt, not fully accom- plished, of Rufinus of Aquileia ; an impassioned exhortation to pilgrimage, dating from the same year, is to be found in the letters of Paulinus of Nola.9
Next comes a journey of Avitus 10 the Spaniard (of Braga),
1 E.g. Jer., Epp. xcix., cxiv., cxii., cvii.
2 Ep. cvii
3 Jer. Ep. cvi.
4 The same Firmus seems to have been employed later (in 405) in the correspondence between Jerome and Augustin^ ; Jer. Epp. cxv\, cxxxiv. ; Aug. Ep. lxxxii.
5 Brev. Abt. Vetus (Acta SS. 16
Apr. ii. 422).
6 The fame of this exploit was especially preserved at Palentia ; L. M. Siculus, Jib. v. De rebus Hispanicis.
7 Prsefatio in Zach. ; Jer. Epp. cxix., cxviii., cxx.
8 Paul. Nol. Epp. xxix., xxxi.
9 P. N. Ep. xlix.
10 Migne, P. L. xxxi. 1214, li. 913, lviii. 1085.
II.]
PELAGIUS, OROSIUS, MELANIA.
89
reported by Orosius in 409 or 410 ; in 411 occurred an attack of the Saracens1 upon Palestine, which now seems ominous in the light of later history ; in 412 came the famous visit of Pelagius, the British heresiarch, famous, however, mainly in the story of theological controversy.2
In 414 a company of noble women from Gaul was compelled by “ fierce storms of enemies ” to go “ through Africa ” to the Holy Land ; 3 and, in 415, Paulus Orosius, the historian, the friend of Augustine, the “ religiosus Juvenis ” of his Epistles, who had been in Palestine already during the time of Pelagius’ visit, passed to and fro with letters between Jerome aud Augustine.4 He was a Spaniard, and was credited with a great service to the Latin Church. For he was the first who transported the relics of St. Stephen to the West, after their rediscovery about this time in Palestine; and he brought the account of this new “in- vention,” as translated by Avitus from the original Greek of Lucian the discoverer, to Home, and Carthage, and Hippo.5
The year 417 was marked by some important pilgrimages, about which a good deal has been written, especially those of Paula and Melania the younger. The latter of these, in the anonymous life of St. Melania, recently printed 6 from a manuscript in the Paris library, is the most considerable and detailed of all the minor pilgrim-notices of the first six centuries.
Starting from Rome, and sailing by Sicily, the travellers were caught by storms and driven on to a hostile coast, made prisoners and in danger of worse, when they were
1 Jer. Ep. cxxvi.
2 But interesting as a very early
journey from so distant a corner of the
Roman world as Britain; Migne,
P. L. xxxiii. 762, xxxii. 649, xliy.
-359, etc., li. 271, etc., xxii. 1165.
3 Jer. Ep. cxxx.
4 Aug. Ep. clxvi. ; Jer. Ep. cxxxiv.
5 Bede De VI. iEtatibus Mundi. (And see Migne, P. L. cvi. c. 1243.)
6 Anonym us Cosevus, Vita S. Me- lanise ; Bib. Nat. n. acq. lat. 2178.
90 PRIMITIVE PILGRIMS OF LATIN CHRISTENDOM. [Ch.
rescued by the local bishop, who had heard of the fame of their journey. Thence they escaped to the shore of Africa, near Carthage, and coasted along to Alexandria, where they were received by St. Cyril. From Egypt they went on to Jerusalem, being encouraged to persevere by the words of Nestor of Alexandria, “ a man full of the spirit of prophecy.” “ The end of toil,” he told them, “ completes your joy. The sufferings of this time are not worthy to be compared to the glory that shall be revealed in us.”
In Jerusalem they were alarmed at hearing that the barbarians had broken into Spain, where Melania’s brother seems to have had possessions; and she proposed to him that they should return to Egypt, and pray for God’s mercy from the monks — “My lord, let us go and see our lords,, the holy servants of God, that they may succour us by vision and prayer.” After this visit of devotion they are again found in Jerusalem,1 where Melania’s mother died, and then in Northern Syria, at Tripolis, seemingly on the way to Constantinople, — where the narrative breaks off abruptly, giving no account of the rest of the journey, or of the death of Melania, both which are believed to have been in the original record.2
Jerome died in 420, and in the same year, St. Petroniusr bishop of Bologna, erected in his own city, on his return, an imitation of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, after measurements and notes which he had made on the spot. While in Jerusalem he had erected a sumptuous monastery on the top of Olivet; he travelled over Egypt, and won the favour of the Emperor Theodosius II.; his Italian
1 For a stay of fourteen years.
2 Her story of a pious but un- successful fraud, by which she tried to bestow a few coins upon one of the solitaries who prayed for her
family, leaving them in a corner of his cell while his attention was dis- tracted, reminds one in different ways both of Silvia and Willibald.
II]
PETRONIUS, EUDOXIA, EUCHERIUS.
91
buildings stood till they were burnt in an invasion of the Hungarians.1
About the same time (420-430), the relics of St. Jerome themselves became an object of veneration;2 in 431 a certain Germanus, a presbyter from Arabia, is heard of at Jerusalem in the course of a very long journey to Gallicia in Spain; and a little later, another imperial pilgrimage attracted some attention. This was undertaken by Eudoxia,3 the wife of Theodosius the younger, the spiritual daughter of Melania, in 438 (or ’9) : and the complete story of this, as we have it in Vincent of Beauvais, finds here the origin of the festival of St. Peter ad Vincula, in Kome.4 For Eudoxia, it was said, had the good fortune to unearth the relics of the apostle’s chains, of which the filings became in time so favourite a papal present to devout monarchs.
An extraordinary story of an attempted pilgrimage,5 at this epoch, comes from Isidore of Seville.