Bible and Sword by Barbara W. Tuchman Read Free Book Online Page A

pattern from which his innumerable followers never far depart, Arculf visits and describes each place of importance in Jesus’ life: Bethlehem, Nazareth, Capernaum, Galilee, the Jordan, and each street, shrine, and stone in Jerusalem, each church, monastery, and hostel sprung up since the Christian era. He records the belief that Jerusalem is the center of the earth, proved, he says, by a “lofty column in the middle of the city which at midday at the summer solstice casts no shadow.” He drinks water from the well of Jacob and eats wild locusts, which, boiled in oil, “make a poor sort of food.” He sees the last footprints of the Saviour, preserved under a temple on Mt. Olivet, which miraculously remained as before “although the earth is daily carried away by believers.” He calculates the exact measurements of the Holy Sepulcher in terms of the width of his palm. The color of the marble, the twelve lamps of the twelve apostles, the niche enshrining the cup, the sponge and the lance used in the crucifixion, every last detail of architecture and furnishings of every edifice, all are remembered by the traveler and written down by the eager reporter.
    He notices the natural features of the country, too, remarking on the rich and fruitful plains inland from the coast at Caesarea or noting that at Jericho the Jordan was “about as broad as a man could throw a stone with a sling.”
    The sites of Old Testament history, chiefly those most easily accessible in and around Jerusalem, which are included in every later tourist itinerary, are also visited: the Patriarchs’ tomb at Hebron, the walls of Jericho, the stones of the twelve tribes at Gilgal. Even the task of recounting weird legends about the Dead Sea and swimming in its metallic waters to ascertain if, in truth, one would not sink, is included. It is not clear from the narrative whether Arculf himself visited the Dead Sea, but Andamnan contributes an abundant variety of Dead Sea fantasies. For example, near the awful site where Sodom and Gomorrahwere engulfed grow beautiful apples that “excite among spectators a desire to eat them but when plucked they burst and are reduced to ashes and give rise to smoke as if they were still burning.”
    The narrative describes, for the benefit of future pilgrims, both land approaches to the Holy Land: the southern route by Egypt and Sinai generally used by pilgrims before the Moslem conquest, and the northern one down through Constantinople and Damascus, as well as the direct sea route by Sicily and Cyprus to Jaffa, which became the most popular approach at the height of the pilgrim traffic in the later Middle Ages. Arculf seems to have entered and departed by way of Constantinople, still then, of course, a Christian capital, but he made a side trip by sea to Egypt involving a forty days’ sail from Jaffa to Alexandria. Although Arculf does not mention it, there existed at this time a Suez Canal, as we know from a contemporary Latin treatise on geography by an English scholar named Dicuil. This treatise reports a conversation with an English monk, Fidelis, who had actually sailed through the canal from the Nile into the Red Sea while on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land during the first half of the eighth century. In 767 the canal was blocked up by the Caliph Al-Mansur.
    Other firsthand reports by Continental pilgrims have survived, but through the accident of his shipwreck and the devoted work of the Scotch abbot Arculf’s story belongs to Britain. Launched by the respected Bede, this book contributed to the passion for pilgrimage that soon afterwards seized the Anglo-Saxons. The first of the pilgrims who left an account was St. Willibald of Wessex, the son of a certain Richard who bore the title King, but of what, historians have never been able to decide for certain. Whether Willibald had read
De Locis Sanctis
is not known, but it seems probable that he would have, for he was an intensely pious young man dedicated to the