The early church architecture of Syria remains comparatively little known in western academic circles, yet there is no area of the early Christian world where the remains of so many churches of different types have been preserved. The main purpose of this paper is to provide an introduction to this architecture; it also offers bibliography for those who may feel moved to find out more. Within Syria itself, there were marked regional variations which allow the area to be divided into three districts on the basis of geography, architectural style and building materials. The first of these to be treated here is northern Syria, essentially the late Roman provinces of Syria I and Syria II with their capitals at Apamea and Antioch. The paper then turns to southern Syria, that is most of the province of Arabia with its capital at Bostra, before moving to the final area, comprising Jordan, the southern part of Provincia Arabia and the eastern, transjordanian half of Palestine III.

In a letter of exhortation on the ascetic life addressed to monks of the Bierzo region in north-western Spain in the late seventh century, the local spiritual leader Valerius invoked the saintly example of a ‘fragile woman’. Her name was Egeria, who, at the time when ‘the luminous shining light of our holy religion was finally kindled after long delay in this region of the west’, had fearlessly embarked on a monumental journey encompassing the ‘whole world’. The object of Egeria’s God-inspired Wanderlust had been the biblical holy places of Old and New Testaments, as well as the monastic heartland of Egypt, through all of which Valerius found in her a model of tireless zeal and thanksgiving to parade before his correspondents. It was especially her intrepid ascent to the summits of holy mountains which characterized this exceptional woman as a paragon of spiritual endeavour, and Valerius’ monks were to be encouraged, if not to climb every mountain, at least to reach their own heights of discipline and self-denial, to ‘blush’ at the fortitude of one who ‘transformed the weakness of her sex into an iron strength’.

Egeria’s account of her journey to the holy places has been an invaluable source for study of many aspects of fourth-century Christianity, from liturgy and topography to clerical practice. Dr David Hunt, in his analysis elsewhere in this volume, discusses the part played by monks in Egeria’s ‘scriptural vision’. This paper looks at her account of worship in Jerusalem, and particularly at those worshippers who were neither ordained clergy nor committed to life as monks or nuns, whom we can call the ‘laity’ Egeria herself distinguishes between these groups, and is concerned to differentiate the parts played by each in worship. We shall consider here how much can be discovered about the composition, organization, and spirituality of these lay people, how Egeria herself contributed to the account, and how much is special to Jerusalem.

The period from the beginning of the seventh century to the middle of the ninth was decisive for the history of the Byzantine empire. At the beginning of the seventh century, the idea of the Roman, or Byzantine, empire as the political configuration of the Mediterranean world - something that the Emperor Justinian had done his best to restore - still seemed valid, though there were already significant cracks in the edifice. By the end of the seventh century - let alone the middle of the ninth - that was a dream, though a dream to which the Byzantines obstinately clung. For the early years of the seventh century had seen the temporary Persian conquest of the eastern provinces of the Byzantine empire, soon followed by the Arab conquest which the Byzantines were to prove unable to overturn. The impact on the Byzantine empire of these events and the infiltration into the Balkan peninsula by the Slavs, was profound - politically, economically, culturally, and theologically. But the story of this impact is generally presented, both in the sources and in scholarly accounts, from the point of view of the centre, the Queen City, Constantinople. Central to the Byzantine world view, as it emerged with renewed confidence in the middle of the ninth century, was the idea of the empire, and the Emperor, as the guardian of Christian Orthodoxy, which was symbolized in the proclamation of the ‘Triumph of Orthodoxy’ with the final overthrow of iconoclasm in 843, a proclamation that became part of the normal ecclesiastical calendar, celebrated thereafter each year on the first Sunday of Lent. But that Orthodoxy, in its final form, had not been nurtured in Constantinople, nor had the wealth of liturgical poetry that came to celebrate it. Constantinople had reacted to the catastrophe of the early seventh century by plunging into heresy: first, the Christological heresy of monenergism, with its refinement, monothelitism, and then the heresy of iconoclasm, also believed - by both iconoclasts and their opponents - to be ultimately a matter of Christology. The Orthodoxy whose triumph was celebrated from 843 onwards had been defined, and celebrated, in Palestine, the province that had been lost for good to the Byzantines in the 630s. Orthodoxy, in fact, achieved its final definition at the periphery - and defeated periphery at that - and from there took over the centre. In this paper, we are not concerned with Christians who visited the Holy Land as pilgrims, but rather with those who belonged there: mainly monks, both natives and those who came to the Holy Land to live in the complex of monasteries in and around Jerusalem. How and why did these Palestinian monks come to play this role in the wider history of the Christian œcumene?

Written, probably, in the early 680s on lona, Adomnán’s De locis sanctis has excited interest, and been used as a quarry for facts about the Holy Land, ever since. It purports to report the pilgrim experiences of a ‘bishop of the Gaulish race’ (prooemium, I), Arculf, who, when later on Iona, told of what he had seen in Palestine, Alexandria, and Constantinople. Realising his ‘scoop’, Adomnán set the details down in a permanent record. Within twenty years this formed the basis of a more concise account by Bede, who added a few details of his own about Arculf which have become standard elements of the latter’s biography: the pilgrim, returning home, was blown by a gale on to the western shores of Britain, and thence he travelled to Iona where he told his story. However, while Arculf - through either Adomnán’s or Bede’s account - is the focus of attention in scholarship using these works as evidence, Bede recognized the expertise of Adomnán in the work, and did not reduce him to the status of an amanuensis.

Jerusalem, the Holy Sepulchre and the liturgy of the Resurrection appear to be the origin of everything.’ Carol Heitz was emphatic about the significance of the Jerusalem ideal in shaping the liturgy and architecture of the Carolingian period. The question of how far this interest in Jerusalem lies behind the origin of the crusades has for a long time been the subject of discussion among historians. Their productivity on the subject has inevitably been increased by the occurrence of the ninth centenary of the preaching of the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont in 1095. It is agreed by almost all that there was a devotion to Jerusalem in Western Europe in the preceding centuries, but there are profoundly different views about its effect on the decision of Urban II to proclaim the crusade and on the response to his preaching. This paper does not attempt to add to this voluminous debate. It is concerned rather to explore the reasons for the reverence for the Holy Land, the forms which it took, and the changes which took place from the Carolingian period to the beginning of the crusade movement.

Western pilgrimage to the Holy Land can be explained through patterns of evolving spirituality. The development in the eleventh century of a penitential theology in which pilgrimage played a crucial role, coupled with the practical opportunities for travel occasioned by the success of the First Crusade, brought the Holy Land closer than ever. The survival of a strong textual tradition manifested in pilgrimage itineraries, many of which are autobiographical in tone, further contributes to our perception of pilgrimage as an example of medieval religion in practice.

The Second Crusade (1145-9) was, for the most part, a failure. One of its few successes was the capture of the Muslim-held city of Lisbon by contingents of Anglo-Normans, Flemings, and northern Rhinelanders travelling via the Iberian peninsula en route to the Holy Land. At its full extent the Second Crusade consisted of campaigns in the Levant, the Baltic, and the east coast of Spain, as well as the Lisbon expedition. By far the largest forces went to the Holy Land but, following a calamitous crossing of Asia Minor, the combined armies of the kings of France and Germany, along with the troops of the Latin settlers, retreated from the walls of Damascus after only five days. Because the crusade to the Levant had been preached so successfully by Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux, this dismal outcome attracted bitter criticism from contemporaries. The defeat was ascribed to the treachery of (variously) the Greeks, the Templars, the count of Flanders, and the Latin settlers, or the incompetence of King Louis VII of France and the papal legates. Some commentators believed the crusade to have been the work of the devil. Bernard himself argued that it was the judgement of God that had caused the expedition to fail. Other writers blamed the participants’ motives, most relevantly here the contemporary historian, Henry, Archdeacon of Huntingdon. He wrote:

The opening laisse of the Old French Chanson d’Antioche, which focuses on the Holy Land as the scene of Christ’s Passion, promises to address the theme of this volume very directly. How far is that promise fulfilled? The purpose of the examination which follows is to look at the image of Jerusalem in the Chanson and the attraction of the Holy Land to the poem’s audience: this will entail a consideration of the ideas of pilgrimage and crusade. Aspects of popular religion – visions and miracles, for example – will be identified. It will be seen that the role played by the clergy in promoting, explaining, and especially participating in the expedition is crucial to the text.

Shortly after his election on 8 January 1198, one of the earliest duties of the youthful and energetic new pope, Innocent III (1198-1216), was to inform the ecclesiastical and lay rulers of Christendom of his succession following the death of his predecessor, the nonagenarian Celestine III (1191-98). His immediate task, therefore, was to undertake a ‘mail-shot’ of a series of personal letters announcing that he had been so chosen. One recipient of such a missive was Aimery the Monk, Patriarch of Jerusalem (1194/97-1202), who was suffering, together with others, the dire consequences of recent events in the Holy Land. Given these circumstances, Innocent’s letter to Aimery was couched in somewhat mild and unexpectedly innocuous language. All he did was to assure the Patriarch of his papal solicitude and to promise that one of his many future duties as pope would be to attempt a resolution of the Holy Land problem. It would be through God’s help and with fasting, tears, and prayers, that the people of the Holy Land might expect to be freed. Eighteen years later they were still waiting.

That Jerusalem, especially the heavenly Jerusalem of Revelation, plays an important role in the writings of the famous apocalyptical thinker Joachim of Fiore is to be expected. What has not been looked at before is the elaborate role ascribed to the Holy Land and Jerusalem by Joachim’s immediate followers. The thesis of this paper is that the early followers of Joachim justified their very existence in terms of a distinctive apocalyptical role for the Holy Land.

Gregory IX is rarely associated with the affairs of the Holy Land. In fact, he is most widely known for initiating the conflict between imperial and papal authority which was to occupy European society for most of the thirteenth century. After all, the conflict with Emperor Frederick II had been among the defining features of Gregory’s pontificate. In September 1227, barely six months into office, he excommunicated Frederick, and in 1241 he died after a failed attempt to try Frederick before a general council. Consequently, the period of concord between 1230, when peace was made with Frederick in the Treaty of San Germano, and March 1239, when the Emperor was excommunicated for a second time, has been described as an interlude, a breathing space, allowing both Frederick and Gregory to muster the means and arguments for their final show-down.

The fortified convent of Saidnaiya (often called Sardeney by medieval Western writers) is situated on a rocky outcrop some twelve miles to the north of Damascus. It claims to have been founded by Justinian, but it is not mentioned in the De aedificiis of Procopius, and its origins are uncertain. The earliest surviving description of it may be that given by Burchard of Strasbourg, the ambassador of Frederick Barbarossa to the court of Saladin, who visited Saidnaiya in c. 1175:

One of the striking features of crusading in the aftermath of the fall of Acre (1291) was the sudden profusion of treatises written to offer advice on how the Holy Land could be recovered. In the years between 1290 and 1335, around thirty such proposals were written containing often detailed information about the Mamluks and practical recommendations on how they could be defeated and expelled from the holy places. This practicality distinguishes the ‘recovery treatises’ from other crusading literature. Prior to this period, non-descriptive writing on the crusades tended to be theological, dealing with the justification of crusading or the morals of participants. After the brief flurry of proposals written in the decades prior to 1335, similar works were rare until the treatises outlining plans for crusades against the Ottomans written in the mid-fifteenth century by such authors as John Torzelo and James Tedaldi. However, a few new proposals dealing with the crusade to the Holy Land were written during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. This is striking, given the great obstacles posed to such a crusade by the twin scourges of war and plague in Europe, and the greater immediacy of the Ottoman threat. It is possible that these later works were influenced by recovery treatises written between 1290 and 1335, since some of the latter survive in copies made during the later fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries which were held in European libraries, notably that of the dukes of Burgundy. These copies, and the new treatises on the subject, illustrate that the idea of a crusade to recover Jerusalem continued to exert an appeal on later generations at certain times during the period.

In one passage in his famous account, Friar Felix Faber described how ‘some dull and unprofitable pilgrims’ to Jerusalem in 1480 mocked the excited behaviour of the devout in the courtyard in front of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, ‘calling them fools, hypocrites and Beghards’. The incident is revealing of the spectrum of reactions provoked by the experience of the Holy Land in late medieval and Renaissance Europe. Here more than anywhere else, tension was generated by the inescapable paradox of Christology, God become man, and the conflicts which it set up between the immanent and the representational, the universal and the elect, the eschatological and the timeless. This occurred, moreover, within a physical setting which constantly reminded the sensitive pilgrim of the difficulty of reconciling the Old and New Dispensations. But the same electrical charge which caused the Holy Land as sacred space to provoke diverse and at times contradictory responses, endowed the Holy Land as idea with a remarkable attraction. There took place a number of different ‘migrations of the holy’, to use John Bossy’s phrase. To a large extent the status of the geographical Holy Land was weakened by these developments, but in at least one respect it was strengthened.

After the Muslim conquest of Palestine there was a comparative lull in Holy Land pilgrimage until a revival in the more settled conditions of the tenth century. The first half of the eleventh century saw a marked increase in the number of pilgrims, most notably but not exclusively from the West, as well as the restoration of the Church of the Anastasis by the Byzantine Emperor Constantine IX. This context explains the enthusiasm with which in the same century the Christians of Russia, within decades of their adoption of the faith, took up Holy Land pilgrimage with all the enthusiasm of recent converts.