THE Crusading Kingdom of Jerusalem was a brief interval in the history of the Holy Land, during which pilgrimage to the greatest shrine of mediæval Christianity was comparatively easy. Before and after that period the difficulties of the way, the tediousness of the journey, and the hostility to be met with, were the causes which led to a very general desire in Christendom to transport all movable relics as far as possible away from the power of the infidels, and to represent by copies the immovable, but most precious of all—the Holy Sepulchre. Even the removal of this most valued record of the great Christian epic seems to have been seriously contemplated in the seventeenth century (vide p. 35).

At the time of the loss of Acre and the termination of the Latin Kingdom, the “Holy House” of Loretto is supposed to have been transported bodily across the sea to the shores of the Adriatic—a comparatively simple thing for the Venetian traders to undertake with their experience in transporting the immense quantities of building materials from ruined temples and sites in the Ægean which have gone towards the building of mediæval Venice.

Many of the relics preserved in St Peter's and elsewhere in Rome are supposed to have come from the Holy Sites around the Holy Sepulchre, the dates of their “invention” are perhaps uncertain, but as a rule they were probably added to the collection in Europe at different periods of religious enthusiasm connected with the barbarian inroads of the “Dark Ages.”