Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [101]
By the mid–eleventh century Palestine had been laid waste by war, and was full of robbers and brigands. Providing protection and supplies for the bands of pilgrims was beyond the capacity of the Muslim rulers, in a land that was short of food and water. These groups several thousand strong, with their armed protection of armored knights and retainers, and their fortified marching camps, must have seemed more like invading armies than parties of the pious. Increasingly, large groups of pilgrims seeking food and water met with a hostile response. There were skirmishes at ports such as Tripoli and later in roadside towns such as Ramleh, where the townspeople refused to admit the travelers within their gates. Pilgrims saw only that the Holy Land, which should belong to Christendom, was suffering at the hands of the “Saracens.” It had become a wilderness. In the pilgrims’ eyes there was little outwardly to distinguish those Muslims who like the amir of Ramleh behaved well toward them, from others who did not. The endless frustrations of the journey, the ceaseless demands for fees and bribes to pass through both Byzantine and Muslim territories, the requests for payments to ease entry into the holy sites fueled their undifferentiated sense of rage and resentment. So the thousands of pilgrims carried home tales of their difficult and dangerous journey, stories that were no doubt exaggerated with each retelling, to enhance their heroism.
IT IS ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE, AT THE START OF THE THIRD MILLENNIUM, to reconstruct the popular understanding of the Holy Land during the eleventh century. But it is safe to say that few believers can have been ignorant of it. For most lay Christians at the time, their faith was determined by the ceremonies of the church, and God’s truth, but not directly through the texts in which it was inscribed.21 The word of God came to them via a series of verbal dramas enacted by their priests. The pioneer philologist Walter Ong called this an “oral literacy.” And he also noted the essentially dramatic quality of the Christian message. It was designed to be spoken, especially since it was structured around a set of narratives or parables. These possessed all three vital characteristics for a good story: location, character, and incident. The Qur’an, by contrast, despite its great poetic power, is essentially abstract and rarely topographical. The Christian narratives all have a precise topos: as with the stable in Bethlehem, or the feeding of the five thousand beside the Sea of Galilee. The entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, his trial and crucifixion in the city are all closely bound to a place.22 The imagined topography of the Holy Land became the staple of medieval art and illustration. Jerusalem in particular must have been a place more real to many Christians than Rome, Paris, Edinburgh, or London. Bethlehem, Nazareth, Galilee, and above all, Jerusalem were part of every Christian’s inheritance. The immediacy of the region was heightened by the sense that many of the holy relics enshrined in Western churches had their origins in the East.23
The holy city, for Western even more than for Eastern Christians, was “the navel of the world, a land fruitful above all others, like a Paradise of delights.”24 It was the central point on the globe, where Dante entered hell at the beginning of his Divine Comedy. Jerusalem was not so much a place-name as an individual. Pope Urban II echoed this popular feeling, personifying the struggle, when he summoned Christendom to Jerusalem’s aid: “This royal city, therefore, situated at the centre of the world, is now held captive by His enemies … She seeks therefore and desires to be liberated, and does not cease to implore you to come to her aid. From you especially she asks succour.” The pains and torments suffered in the East were human and not abstract. Evil men had ravished a land that belonged to Christ:
An accursed race, a race utterly alienated from God, a generation forsooth which has not directed its heart and has not entrusted its spirit