Jerusalem 1000-1400: every people under heaven

Dr Merav Mack

Blog-post author, Dr Merav Mack, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, IL.

Some reflections following a visit  in December 2016 to the exhibition “Jerusalem 1000-1400: Every People Under Heaven” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA (26 September 2016– 8 January 2017).

Exhibition poster

“What is Jerusalem? Or where is Jerusalem?” are the opening words of art critic Jason Farago when reviewing the exhibition: “The real city and its eternal image bleed into each other he explains. Suitably, he entitled his article Jerusalem Rebuilt in New York’s Green and Pleasant Land.

The exhibition is overwhelming in its scale and achievement, a project that takes place once in a life time. Over a period of several years the curators painstakingly selected and assembled in New York a great number of items, borrowed from all Jerusalem’s communities, and thus telling a story of cultural richness; a history of multiple narratives, told from as many angles as possible.

Gallery: Exhibition entrance
Gallery: Exhibition entrance

When I entered the exhibition hall I found the iconic images of Jerusalem displayed all around. Photographs of the Dome of the Rock projected on great screens. There were no modern maps to guide the visitors to the city or its various parts. I couldn’t help thinking that this was intentional as the subject of the exhibition was not just the physical city but its image.

The thousand-year-old question resurfaces; what matters more, Earthly Jerusalem or Heavenly Jerusalem. The eschatological city of the end of days and the temporal city are blurred in the Jerusalem Exhibition. While the city is represented with numerous archaeological artefacts, books, maps and images, many are fantastic and have little to do with the real city.

As I walked through the exhibition I wondered how many thousands of people made their pilgrimage to Jerusalem through the Met in New York City. Complementing our discussions in London I thought that a visit to the museum’s exhibition is a little bit like the medieval, arm-chair pilgrimage.

Gallery: The Pulse of Trade and Tourism
Gallery: The Pulse of Trade and Tourism

The first room of the exhibition was dedicated almost exactly to our subject, the travellers to Jerusalem: “The Pulse of Trade and Tourism”. The focus of the room instead of crusade, repentance, pilgrimage or devotion was merchants’ travels, their monies, commodities and souvenirs, as well as a few maps and charts. A recently discovered hoard of golden coins from Caesarea stood right the entrance.

Matthew Paris, Marino Sanudo and William of Tyre are the three wonderful manuscripts selected for this room, as well as a traveller map in Arabic, with no distinction between real travellers and armchair ones (e.g. Matthew Paris). In another room I found the beautiful bird’s eye-view of Jerusalem by Bernhard von Breydenbach (The Metropolitan Museum, 19.49.3), next to a Muslim pilgrimage certificate from the year 1433, combining Persian inscriptions and iconographical representation of the holy sites. A beautiful pictorial circular maps of Jerusalem was included – this copy from the Hague manuscript of the Gesta Francorum is probably the most famous among them.

Exhibition catalogue
Exhibition catalogue

In the catalogue (but sadly not at the exhibition) was the image from Liber peregrinationis by Riccoldo da Monte Croce (BNF MS Fr. 2810) of pilgrims at the (imagined) Holy Sepulchre.

The catalogue’s articles, like the exhibition, focused primarily on souvenirs and relics, tourist experience and the material aspect of their journey – specifically on items the travellers brought back home. The question of what knowledge pilgrims brought with them (in the form of books, drawings or maps), what libraries they encountered along the way and what they acquired in the East remain for us to explore.

Gallery: Diversity of the People
Gallery: Diversity of the People

The second hall focused on The Diversity of Peoples and included a large number of manuscripts, “a little unusual for a Met exhibition”, remarked one critic. Visitors queued to look and study the manuscripts carefully. I found this room particularly inspiring.

The emphasis of this hall (and the exhibition as a whole) is the richness of Jerusalem’s population, its languages and traditions. Here I found manuscripts that learned travellers could have found in medieval Jerusalem at one point or another (if allowed into the monasteries were they were kept, and if indeed they possessed knowledge of the locally spoken and written languages).

Karaites and Rabbinical Jewish manuscripts, Samaritan, Georgian, Syriac, Greek and Arabic, alongside manuscripts in Ge’ez and Armenian. Copies of the Gospels and the Qur’an were included as well as non-religious texts.

Let me conclude by listing these items, which may be of particular interest to visitors to this blog.

Eastern Christian communities
  • Armenian Gospel copied by Nerses the abbot in 1321 in Jerusalem (Library of Congress).
  • Georgian Menologion – written by the founder of the Holy Cross George Prokhorus 1038-1040 at the monastery of the Holy Cross. Before founding the monastery he was a monk at the Great Laura of Mar Saba. (Bodleian Library).
  • Four Gospels from Mar Saba (Princeton).
  • Syriac Breviary from St Mary Magdalene & St Simon the Pharisee, 1138 Jerusalem.
  • Armenian canon tables written after 1187 with a scribe’s note of his sadness of the fall of J-m to Saladin and prayer for its recovery. (Walters Art Museum).
Latin and mixed communities
  • Missal of the Holy Sepulchre ca. 1135-1140 (BNF, Paris), with a mixture of Latin and Armenian pagination, demonstrating cooperation between a Frankish calligrapher and an Armenian-speaking illuminator.
  • Melisende’s Psalter (BL Egerton MS 1139).
Karaite and Rabbinical manuscripts in Jerusalem before the crusades

After the bloody conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 Jewish survivors were ransomed and exiled to Ascalon then Cairo (Fustat). Manuscripts were ransomed too, including the famous Aleppo Codex.

  • A page from the Aleppo Codex.
  • Daniel al-Qumisi, Commentary on Psalms (late 9th, early 10th century). JTS New York. Cat. 36a, p. 94. Hebrew.
  • Abraham al-Basir – Responsa, 11th century. Arabic. JTS (MS 3448).
  • Yefet ben ‘Ali translation and commentary (10th century). A prolific writer, translator (Hebrew to Arabic) and biblical commentator, his manuscripts were copied numerous times.
Jewish travelers in the Middle Ages
  • Maimonides Plan of the Temple (Bodleian, MS Poc. 295).
  • Letter requesting funds to ransom captives (JTS MS 8254).
  • Yehuda Halevi (JTS).
Muslim manuscripts
  • Al-Ghazali’s Ihya (Revival of the Islamic Sciences) from the museum of Islamic art in Doha (this copy was not copied in Jm). Cat. No. 43, p. 100.
  • Al-Busiri’s Qasidat al-Burda (Ode to the Mantle) copied in Jerusalem by a Persian calligrapher Muhammad al-Fruzabadi al-Shirazi in 1361. He lived and taught in Jeruusalem between 1358 and 1368. (NLI Yah. Ar. 784).
  • A few copies of the Qur’an were included in the exhibition. One by Muhammad ibn al-Bulaybil al-Hijazi was copied in Jerusalem in 1390 (British Library).
  • Nur al-Din’s qur’an: a beautiful copy whose pages can found in various museums. The Met had 2 pages from Dallas (Dallas Museum of Art – ex. Keir collection VII 3 and 4).
Exhibition video introduction

Pilgrims as readers & writers: some reflections

Professor George Greenia
Professor George Greenia

Blog-post author, Professor George Greenia, College of Wiliam & Mary, Virginia, USA.

Professor Anthony Bale shared a strong vision for our joint project on Medieval Pilgrims Libraries when we met in London December 9-10, 2016. We’re all grateful for his leadership and helpful push in new directions and especially for bringing together researchers from such diverse fields. Here are some reflections based on our initial conversations.

Professor Anthony Bale
Professor Anthony Bale

Many medieval pilgrims belonged to lively lectoral communities. They carried their libra­ries with them on their way to Jeru­sa­lem, Rome or Santiago even when there were no books at hand. Memories of books read before leaving home were fond­ly rehearsed aloud among bands of sacred sojourn­ers, texts that scripted the ex­per­i­ence even while walking and sailing to distant shores. Some deliberately bade farewell to their books for a while as a personal discipline or as part of the acetic rigor of the trip, somewhat like foregoing bathing or haircuts. At op­portune stops along the way they may have read or listened to the recitations of unfamiliar writings, pur­chased souvenir texts, or either made or commissioned copies of admired works to take home. Not a few pilgrims eventually com­posed their own travelogues as itiner­aries, diaries and guidebooks for subse­quent travelers.

English: A Naval Battle; Antwerp, after 1464, from the Roman de Gillion de Trazegnies, fol. 21. Lieven van Lathem (1430–1493), Getty Center
English: A Naval Battle; Antwerp, after 1464, from the Roman de Gillion de Trazegnies, fol. 21. Lieven van Lathem (1430–1493), Getty Center

Complementing those who enjoyed full agency as readers – the ones who were personally literate – almost all pilgrims participated in ever rotating com­mun­ities of secondary literacy. Many who could not read for themselves because of lack of education or failing eyesight listened to texts being read aloud and partici­pat­ed in their interpretation.[1] Throughout Antiquity and the Middle Ages almost all reading was done aloud and routinely by young adults whose eyes were better suited for the task. Pilgrims probably carried few books with them and in any case one literate reader among any given travelers’ band would be enough.

Most importantly there was the internal library shared equally among the literate and illiterate, the vast oral stream they all grew up with. Medieval sojourners carried a rich imaginary of their journey spun out of their memory hoard[2] stocked by prior reading plus all their accustomed folk genres as they moved through their newly fluid discursive landscape. Some of their more pious texts they accessed “from within”: a common stock of Latin prayers and rituals, hym­no­dy in Latin reliably re-encountered at hosting institutions, and verna­cular devotional songs learned by heart back home and happily belted out along the trail or on arrival.[3] To lift their spirits and antici­pate possible spiritual adven­tures there was the reverent recounting of hagiography and miracle stories associated with the shrine sites they visited.

'The Author Hears the Story of Gillion de Trazegnies' by Lieven van Lathem and David Aubert, after 1464. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
‘The Author Hears the Story of Gillion de Trazegnies’ by Lieven van Lathem and David Aubert, after 1464. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

On the secular side were ballads and ordinary walking songs, and epic stories in prose or verse.[4] Some medieval travelers had their recollections of itineraries or topo­graphical plans, but even without them all had mental maps that constituted a “consensus cartography” that fused sites and anticipated encounters. When their accounts of physical geography seem defective, they are probably reporting a traveler’s topography of significance and holiness.

Much of their remaining common oral culture was plainly utilitarian: medical knowledge and techniques (as distinct from miraculous cures), guessti­mates of diverse monetary ex­change, knowledge of equivalents for local weights and measures, calcula­tion of dis­tan­ces, seasons, climate, and folk tales and games to pass the time.[5] Any of these could end up in written records but the bulk of it churned through the living oral stream, the cultural “soup” everyone swims in without recog­nizing one’s conceptual environment always known from within.

The accounts that most attract our attention now – what pilgrims who made it home again wrote down and left unsystematically among family papers and local archives – are their own compositions in the form of itineraries and daybooks. Most are middle brow, repetitive in their sequence of places and sights, and doggedly anonymous.[6] This is probably not because generally poor writers took up the task. It would have been hard to actually compose anything serious while traveling in the Middle Ages. Toting reliable supplies of ink, quills and parchment or paper – much less wax tablets – is pretty much ruled out by the tiny satchels shown in most con­tem­porary painting and sculpture.

Medieval travel accounts were likely put together after a return to a writerly environment and perhaps before the pilgrim company disbanded. For pilgrims returning from Jerusalem, the logic site would be on disembarking at Venice. A troop which had shared the journey could share the reminiscing and the most able scribe among them could stitch together what each individual agreed was true. That would help explain the depersonalized and often pedestrian accounts that come down to us. The stationers’ shops in Venice could also supply enough raw mater­ials to make multiple copies for as many of the companions who wanted a set of reliable notes to embellish orally for family, friends and fellow parishioners. Pro­ducing a “corporate report” from a whole group of travelers usually makes for dull reading but would lend a certain weight and credence to the nar­ra­tive.

Bands returning from Jerusalem en­joyed the advan­tage of a fairly stable party from start to finish, or at least from depar­ture from Venice until their return there. Venice would have also marked a psychological “homecoming” even if individuals had started out from more distant parts of Christen­dom, and no other pilgrim node along the thousands of sacred routes in medi­eval Europe provided the same urban nexus of launch point, site of return and time to linger. There are points of convergence along the trails to Santiago (Ostabat and St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port on the eastern slopes of French Pyrenees) and to Rome (certain Alpine passes on the descent into Italy) but none in an urban center that invited poten­tial writers to linger and compose. Of course, Rome was the most heavenly and best provisioned writers’ environment of all, but writers in residence on the Tiber did not routinely overlap with visiting pilgrims and they produce different sorts of works.

All these factors would have favored greater numbers of travelogues about the Holy Land, somewhat less so for Rome and relatively few for Santiago and other pilgrim shrines, and extant archival witnesses seem to corroborate this scenario.


Recommended Bibliography

  • Herbers, Klaus. “Peregrinaciones a Roma, Santiago y Jerusalén.” El mundo de las peregrinaciones. Roma, Santiago, Jerusalén. Ed. Paolo Caucci von Sauken. Barcelona/Madrid, 1999. 103-34. Subsec­tion on “Relatos de los peregrinos en el medievo tardío,” 128-34]
  • Herbers, Klaus, y Robert Plötz. Caminaron a Santiago. Relatos de peregrinaciones al »fin del mundo«. Santiago de Compostela: Xunta de Galicia, 1998.
  • Howard, Donald R. Writers and Pilgrims. Medieval Pilgrimage Narratives and Their Posterity. Ber­keley: U of California Press, 1980.
  • Plötz, Robert. “Santiago de Compostela en la literatura odepórica.” Santiago de Compos­tela: ciudad y peregrino. Actas del V Congreso Internacional de Estudios Xacobeos. Eds. María A, Antón Vilasánchez; José Luis Tato Castiñeira. Santiago de Compostela: Xunta de Galicia, 2000. 33-99. [on mapmaking and the concept of space]
  • Reynolds, Roger E. “A Precious Ancient Souvenir Given to the First Pilgrim to Santiago de Compostela.” Peregrinations: Journal of Medieval Art & Architecture 4.3 (Spring, 2014): 1-30.
  • Stones, Alison. “Medieval Pilgrimage Writing and its Manuscript Sources.” Encyclopedia of Medieval Pil­grim­age, ed. L.J. Taylor, et al. Leiden: Brill, 395-413. [see bibliography 411-12 for list of travel nar­ra­tives]
  • Stones, Alison, & Jeanne Krochalis. “Qui a lu le Guide du pèlerin ?” Pèlerinages et croisades. Ed. L. Pressouyre. Paris: CTHS, 1995. 11-36.

Notes

  1. Linguistic anthropologists working in Chiapas, Mexico have observed how leaders of base Christian communities (comunidades de base) could be illiterate yet function as the most insightful and trusted commentators of scriptural and inspirational texts. (As reported by Vincent Barletta, now at Stanford, from field work in the 1990s during doctoral studies at UCLA. Personal communication.)
  2.  The phrase was coined by Mary Carruthers in her classic The Book of Memory. A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990).
  3. The “Pilgrims Guide” in the Codex Calixtinus describes how various nationalities, clustered together in their respective corners of the tribune level of the cathedral in Santiago, would loudly compete as they sang hymns in their native tongues.
  4. The earliest and one of the most intriguing prose epics about the adventures of Charlemagne and Roland in Spain is consecrated in the “Historia Turpini” of the Codex Calixtinus, the twelfth-century master com­pi­la­tion on the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. The connection to Charlemagne’s supposed devotion to St. James and the saint’s instructions to have the French secure the pilgrimage route against the Muslim foe is tenuous in the narrative, entirely fictional in terms of history.
  5. Folk tales contain many stories about the intervention of saints on behalf of their devotees. A version of hopscotch became the pilgrim game of Juego de la Oca or Goose’s Game, a modern version of which has been laid in the paving outside the church of Santiago the Elder in Logroño along the main route to Compostela.
  6. Anxiously sincere personal narratives of travel along the Camino de Santiago have repopulated this genre in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, most of them just as artless as their medieval forerunners if more heartfelt.

In our time

A recent edition of BBC Radio 4’s ‘In Our Time’ featured, as an expert guest, Professor Anthony Bale from Birkbeck, University of London (English & Humanities).

The discussion centred on England’s medieval mystic Margery Kemp. The figure of Kemp has been a lynchpin of Anthony Bale’s recent research, resulting in the publication of his lively translation of Kemp’s writing: The Book of Margery Kemp’ (OUP 2015).

In the book’s accompanying editorial commentary Bale brings fresh insights into the extraordinary life of this proto-eminist pilgrim and pioneering travel writer. Critically acclaimed internationally, the book is record of popular religion, women’s spirituality and pilgrimage practices. It vividly conveys the vitality and vivacity of late medieval European and Middle Eastern cultures captured in a female gaze.

• BBC Radio 4 ‘In Our Time’. Margery Kempe and English Mysticism.
• First broadcast: 2 Jun 2016. Listen again at www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07cyfkg.

Anthony Bale is currently leading a network of international scholars as part of a Leverhulme-funded research project (2016-18) called Pilgrim libraries: books and reading on the medieval routes to Jerusalem & Rome.

Professor Anthony Bale

52nd International Congress on Medieval Studies

Professor Anthony Bale – director of the Pilgrim Libraries Project – will be chairing a panel at the 52nd International Congress on Medieval Studies (11–14 May 2017) at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo. USA.

The Pilgrim’s Library: Books and Reading on the Medieval Routes to Jerusalem and Rome

For more about the Congress see: https://www.wmich.edu/medievalcongress.