Pilgrimage to Jerusalem

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The term pilgrimage to Jerusalem refers to pilgrimage in the ancient Church and in the Middle Ages to the Holy Land . By the 4th century at the latest, Christian pilgrims made their way to the Holy Sepulcher and other central biblical sites.

history

The first pilgrimages to Jerusalem, the spiritual background of which can be traced back to the teachings of St. Jerome , are primarily attributed to women. The pilgrimage of Empress Helena , mother of Emperor Constantine in the first third of the 4th century, is significant . According to legend, during excavations in Jerusalem she found the remains of the True Cross and the Holy Sepulcher. In its place, they ordered the construction of a church , as she initiated the construction of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem as well as the construction of Eleona Basilica on the Mount of Olives , which is subsequently to major pilgrimage destinations developed.

From other Christian women on the way to the Holy Land like St. Paula with her daughter, St. Eustochium (partly together with the church father Jerome), the Virgin Egeria and St. Melania the Younger with her grandmother. Melania the Elder have received pilgrimage reports that she wrote herself . The itinerary written by Egeria was less of a travelogue in today's sense, but rather a description of the cult activities of the Christian community in Jerusalem and the holy places in the vicinity of the city.

The earliest records of a Christian pilgrim on the way to Jerusalem come from the year 333: in the Itinerarium Burdigalense a pilgrim from Burdigala , today's Bordeaux, described his way to the Holy Sepulcher. In addition to the pilgrimages to Rome and Santiago de Compostela , the pilgrimage to Jerusalem developed into one of the three central Christian pilgrimage routes in the early Middle Ages and was at times the most important Christian pilgrimage route.

Similar to the pilgrimage to Santiago, the pilgrimage to Jerusalem was closely connected with the fight against the advance of Islam in Europe, or with the attempt to suppress it . In contrast to the pilgrimage routes to Santiago and Rome, the power political interests of the European states and the Vatican were in the foreground very early on, with the aim of conquering or defending the holy places for Christian rule, which is why European armies of knights arise again and again during the Crusades made the path of pilgrimage with shield and sword.

After the final defeat of the crusader armies and the long-term loss of the holy places in Jerusalem to the Saracens in 1244 , the peaceful pilgrimage to Jerusalem in favor of the two other great Christian pilgrimage destinations, Rome and Santiago, also decreased noticeably.

Pilgrimage routes

A given pilgrimage route from Central Europe to Jerusalem is not recognizable, rather the choice of the route will have been based on the respective political situation as well as security and financial considerations. Wealthy pilgrims usually preferred the route over the Alps to Venice in order to travel by ship to the Holy Land. Poorer pilgrims or those with a special interest in the holy places along the way preferred the land route via the Balkans and Constantinople through the area of ​​today's Turkey . The overwhelming majority of the pilgrimage reports, which were mainly written by rich and educated pilgrims, describe the route via Venice.

The overland route through the Balkans also does not follow a single route. While some reports describe the route via Győr and Niš to Philipopolis and Adrianople , others touch today's Belgrade or travel along today's Croatian and Albanian coast, all of which meet in Adrianople at the latest.

For crossing the area of ​​today's Turkey, two routes seem to have been known as possible routes for the medieval pilgrims. On the one hand, pilgrims describe the way from Constantinople to the south via southern Asia Minor to Antioch . An alternative was the way from Constantinople to the east via Cappadocia to Antioch and then on to Jerusalem via Tripoli and Acre.

The third route described is the pilgrimage route from Central Europe over the Alps to Apulia , where they translated into what is now Albania , and then continued along the Via Egnatia via Thessaloniki to Constantinople.

literature

Remarks

  1. ↑ Konstantin Klein: Familiar foreignness - exquisite landscape. Work on presence in the travelogue of Egeria. In: Helge Baumann, Michael Weise et al. (Eds.): Have you already flown tired? Travel and homecoming as cultural anthropological phenomena. Tectum, Marburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-8288-2184-2 , pp. 159-174.
  2. ↑ Otto Cuntz (Ed.): Itineraria Romana. Volume 1: Itineraria Antonini Augusti et Burdigalense. Accedit Tabula Geographica, Leipzig 1929
  3. ↑ Reinhold Röhricht: The pilgrimages to the Holy Land before the Crusades . Gütersloh 1875.
  4. ^ Röhricht, Reinhold: German pilgrimages to the Holy Land, Innsbruck, 1900 (online: http://www.archive.org/details/deutschepilgerr00rhgoog )
  5. ↑ a b Herbert Donner : Pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The oldest accounts of Christian pilgrims to Palestine (4th – 7th centuries) . Catholic Biblical Works, Stuttgart 1979, ISBN 3-460-31841-4 .