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Spain was the first. Another was that broad wedge-shaped peninsula with the Adriatic to its west and the Black Sea to the east, stretching up to the great Hungarian plain. The Turks called it balkan, “the mountain,” and that name—the Balkans—has stuck. Here, like the holy sites of Spain, buried saints suffused the land with a kind of holiness.2 A third lay to the east, at the opposite end of the Mediterranean. It extended from the desert edge of Sinai to the foothills of the Anatolian plateau. It had various names, but in many European languages it was (and is) the Levant, from the Italian and Spanish term for the point where the sun rises in the east (levante). In Arabic it was called Al-Mashreq, also meaning the land where the sun rises. But the archetype for this idea of holy ground was that part of the Levant where Jesus Christ had been born, lived, and died.3

Muslims were enjoined to make the journey to Mecca at least once in their lives. But pilgrimage to Palestine, the Holy Land, was not mandatory for Christians. Nonetheless a pilgrimage still conferred a great spiritual benefit. The pilgrim’s journey involved physical sacrifice and hardship, which was meritorious in its own right. Furthermore, to pray with a pure heart where Christ himself had once stood was an act of great symbolic significance. One knight, leaving his goods to the Abbey of Cluny as he left for the Holy Land, wrote: “I have decided to go to Jerusalem, where God became man, where He spoke with men, and to adore Him where He walked.”4 Pilgrimage could also be imposed as penance for a serious crime such as murder, and these pilgrims sometimes carried a heavy iron chain about their waists to signify the reason for their journey. It was widely believed that when the sinner prayed in Jerusalem, God himself would shatter the iron links to make clear his absolution.

Jerusalem was a magnet for Muslims as well as Christians and Jews. It was the third holiest site of Islam, after Mecca and Medina; for Muslims it was Al-Quds, the holy place.5 Devout Jews often came to the city in the month of Tishri, and stayed to celebrate the feast of the Tabernacles.6 Christian pilgrimage had begun under the emperor Constantine and continued under his successors. Great efforts had been made to recover the Christian past of the Holy Land. Lost or half-forgotten biblical sites were located and restored, and lavish churches were erected to enshrine the key places in the life of Jesus Christ. The vast Holy Sepulchre complex was first built between 326 and 336, over the tomb in which Christ had briefly lain. Constantine’s redoubtable mother, Helena, commissioned the building of churches in Bethlehem and on the Mount of Olives. She was also responsible for rediscovering the three long-lost crosses upon which Jesus of Nazareth and the two thieves had been crucified, relics that had disappeared centuries before. The cross on which Christ had died was identified by the simple expedient of lowering a mortally ill woman onto each of the three wooden shafts in turn, and witnessing her miraculous recovery the instant she was placed upon the true cross.

Not only Jerusalem, but Bethlehem, Nazareth, and many other places named in the Old and New Testaments received a steady stream of pilgrims from the fourth century onward. St. Jerome (342–420), living in the Holy Land, observed that the places where a diligent Christian should pray in Jerusalem had become so numerous that it was impossible to visit them all in a single day.7 Ardent pilgrims soon discovered a multitude of additional holy sites, some of dubious authenticity. One of Jerome’s community told him how she had visited the houses where Cornelius and Philip had once lived in Caesarea, as well as the grave of four unspecified holy virgins. In Bethlehem, she had visited not just the Church of the Nativity, but also what was by tradition the tomb of Rachel. At Hebron she was taken to see some remarkable relics: she entered the authentic hut of Sarah, wife of Abraham,