For anyone coming to Jerusalem, the sight of Franciscan habits might not seem surprising in a city that so many people of different religions consider holy. What the modern pilgrims or tourists may not know is that the Franciscan presence in Jerusalem has a long history. The friars shaped the way Western travellers and pilgrims have seen, imagined and written about the Holy Land for centuries. This book explores the writings on the Holy Land from the Franciscan convent in Jerusalem and investigates their role in the construction of the memory of holy places, in the period from around 1333, when the Franciscans started to settle in the Holy Land, to the 1530s (after the Ottoman conquest of the Holy Land in 1517). Pilgrimage to the Holy Land declined shortly thereafter also owing to the pressures of the Ottoman expansion.1 During this period, the Franciscans of Mount Zion played a crucial role in mediating the relationship between Western Europe and the Holy Land. Settled on the Cenacle in Jerusalem, the friars played a part in welcoming and guiding pilgrims, orchestrating their devotional practices and acting as intermediaries between the local population and the Muslim authorities.2 The Friars also played a major role in diplomatic relations between the Holy See and the Eastern Churches, and acted as inquisitors into heresy in the East, especially among pilgrims.3 Pilgrimage to the Holy Land offered a model for other pilgrimages in which collective devotion was framed by a religious order (in this case the Franciscan order).
At the root of the Franciscan endeavour there was the role the Land of Promise played in Christian thought and piety. The Holy Land, as the site of the life of Jesus Christ and the Apostolic Community, played a major role in the construction of a Christian identity. Christianity as a religion is grounded on the historical accounts of the Bible. In De vera religione , Augustine writes: âHuius religionis sectandae caput est historia et prophetia dispensationis temporalis divinae providentiae pro salute generis humani in aeternam vitam reformandi atque reparandi.â4 Writing on the Holy Land was an integral part of the process by which Christianity was transformed from a dissident sect within Palestinian Judaism to a universal religion, which could be âreadâ and understood everywhere in the world. The text of the Bible referred by name to the places, people and events of the history of this region, which were invoked in liturgy, preaching and visual arts. The representation of the Holy Land was developed as a supplement to a text, due to its connection to the events of the Bible.5 The Old and New Testaments mention events that take place in a real, worldly space. However, this link between Christianity and geographical space was not contemporary with the beginning of Christianity as a religion, which instead emphasized the possibility of achieving salvation everywhere. Early Christians did not link divine presence to a specific territory; pilgrimage was not part of early Christian practices.6 Instead, this link was forged by a historical process that exalted the role of certain places in Christian piety, defined the Holy Land as a sacred space crucial to Christian identity and identified the places mentioned in the Holy Scripture with existing places. The representation of the Holy Land and of its history was not set once and for all. It was subject to re-mediation: re-presented again and again, over decades and centuries and in different media.7 It is therefore more accurate to talk about a process of sacralization of holy places, rather than as places being declared sacred once and for all. The construction and identification of these places was always underway, and written texts played a major role in establishing their sacrality.8
This process of construction has its roots in the Hebrew Bible, in particular Deuteronomy : âThe Lord your God will bring you into the land that your ancestors possessed, and you will possess itâ (Deut. 30: 3â5). The term Holy Land first appears in Zechariah , but it is foreshadowed in Ezekielâs vision of Mount Zion and Jerusalem. According to Ezekiel, God will return on Mount Zion. The expression, Holy Land, is found again in the second book of the Maccabees.
After the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, the Christian and Jewish communities were dispersed, and the memory of their holy places largely lost.9 After the Bar Kochba Rebellion in 135, the city of Jerusalem was replaced by Colonia Aelia Capitolina, founded on its site by Hadrian. During the fourth to seventh centuries, different Christian groups began to think of Jerusalem as their city, as the Christian city, and Palestine as a place set apart. Monks began to settle in this area. They spoke of themselves as the inhabitants of the Holy Land, and they were the first to use the expression in a âdistinctively Christian way.â10 The fourth century saw the intensive work of the valorization of the Holy Land by Constantine and Helena. In 324, Constantine defeated the Eastern emperor Licinius at Chrysopolis, thus reunifying the Empire: within a few months, he ordered extensive works on the Eastern side of Hadrianâs buildings in Aelia. This led to the discovery of the Holy Sepulchre and of the Wood of the Cross, and to the identification of a column of rock as the hill of Calvary, in the place where the chapel of Calvary still stands.11 The extensive construction works memorialized these places. The efforts of Constantine and Helen strengthened the relationship between the events narrated in the Holy Writings and Jerusalem, creating in the Holy Land a veritable lieu de mĂ©moire (site of memory)12 for the now-Christian empire. Eusebius, in his Life of Constantine, reports on the discovery of the sepulchre and the building of the Anastasis, directing attention to the religious significance of space: for him this place was holy from the beginning, and it is now holier because it has brought to light proof of the suffering of the Saviour.13 He explained that the tomb was a sign of the veracity of the Gospels.14 Before the discovery of the tomb, Eusebius had already written the Onomasticon on the location and names of places among the Hebrews. He identified obscure biblical sites, apparently without distinction between the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. Significantly, Eusebius began to envision Palestine not as a Roman province but as a land whose character and identity were formed by biblical and Christian history. As early as the third century, Origen mentions the tradition that the body of Adam, the first human being, was buried where Christ had been crucified.15 Perhaps this is why Eusebius says that the place was holy âfrom the beginning,â since Jerusalem would have hosted the remains of the first man. Among the Latin fathers, Ambrose, too, connects the place of the Cross with the burial place of Adam beneath it.16
The Constantinian basilicas in Palestine could only be intelligible to Christians at the time due to the more or less contemporary rise of the cult of the saints. The prominence of the cult of the martyrs paved the way...