Writing The Holy Land: The Franciscans of Mount Zion and The Construction of A Cultural Memory, 1300-1550 1st Ed. Edition Michele Campopiano

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THE NEW MIDDLE AGES
Writing the
Holy Land
The Franciscans of
Mount Zion and
the Construction of a
Cultural Memory,
1300–1550
Michele Campopiano
The New Middle Ages
Series Editor
Bonnie Wheeler
English and Medieval Studies
Southern Methodist University
Dallas, TX, USA
The New Middle Ages is a series dedicated to pluridisciplinary studies of
medieval cultures, with particular emphasis on recuperating women’s
history and on feminist and gender analyses. This peer-reviewed series
includes both scholarly monographs and essay collections.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14239
Michele Campopiano
Writing the Holy

Land
The Franciscans of Mount Zion
and the Construction of a Cultural Memory,
1300–1550
Michele Campopiano
Centre for Medieval Studies and Department
of English and Related Literature
University of York
York, UK
The New Middle Ages

ISBN 978-3-030-52773-0 ISBN 978-3-030-52774-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52774-7
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: Church of the Holy Sepulchre: woodcut, from Breydenbach’s Sanctae
Peregrinationes (Mainz, 1846). Image from LACMA (lacma.org)
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To my mother, Rita Del Prete
To the memory of my father, Ettore Campopiano (1947–2020)
Sol chi non lascia eredità d’affetti
Poca gioia ha dell’urna
Preface
The volume you have in your hands is a study of the role of the Franciscans
in Jerusalem in building a shared representation of the past of the Holy
Land, a representation that is essential to understanding Latin Christianity’s
self-definition. The Franciscans played (and still play) a fundamental role
in facilitating pilgrimage to the Holy Land. What this book explores and
clarifies is how part of the Franciscans’ task was also accomplished by
collecting texts and elaborating a representation of the Holy Land by
means of the written word. This book stems from a singular coincidence
of interests and methodological approaches. My first book was dedicated
to the study and critical edition of the Liber Guidonis compositus de variis
historiis, a twelfth-century compilation of historical and geographical
texts. In carrying out this work, I focused on how the study of the sources
of a historical work and the analysis of its manuscript tradition could help
us to understand how certain historical representations were consolidated
over the centuries to build a vision of the past that would last over time.
The reception of certain texts or the diffusion of these manuscripts made
it possible to create a widespread and shared, but also lasting, vision of the
past. While studies on the use of the past often highlight the propensity of
different agents to adapt the past to the present circumstances, it seemed
necessary to analyse the possibility of continuity, of the construction of
lasting representations of the past. Each construction of the past offers the
possibility for a particular social group or institution to fashion an identity.
The convinction that identity and a particular vision of the past could not
be separated had been strengthened in me during my university years,
thanks to the study of various thinkers but in particular to my encounter
vii
viii PREFACE
with the philosophy of Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) and especially with

his book La Storia come pensiero e come azione (History as Thought and
Action, 1938). Croce also taught me that the study of the past could not
be separated from the interests of today and the interpretative categories
developed within our cultural context. This did not mean renouncing his-
torical research understood as the study of a past different from our con-
temporary reality, or understanding all historiographical work solely as the
expression of an ideology, but it did mean acknowledging that the concep-
tualization of the past is always linked to the categories of those who
observe it and try to understand it. Moreover, Croce’s ideas prevented me
from arbitrarily identifying a precise moment for the birth of “scientific”
historiography, of a historiography freed from the multiple processes of
collective memory construction.
Further readings had brought me to the knowledge of the most recent
studies on cultural memory, studies with which the present volume seeks
a dialogue. These studies have taught me that memory does not exist in a
vacuum, but must be constructed through certain cultural products, from
texts to monuments. Memory exists through different media. The
manuscript book was the medium par excellence for transmitting texts
created in the Middle Ages. The study of the transmission of texts and
how they were used as sources to create miscellaneous manuscripts and
compilations seemed to me essential to understanding how the construction
of a shared memory should be studied in relation to the diffusion and use
of these texts. So, the study of cultural memory had to be commingled
with methods from philology and manuscript studies.
In the course of my studies, I was also concerned with the problem of
the representation of space in the Middle Ages. But the representation of
space and that of the past did not represent two different cultural fields in
the Middle Ages. On the contrary, the description of places was the basis
for the construction of historical narrations, and the texts dedicated to the
description of space, of certain provinces and regions, were never clearly
separated from the narration of the historical events that took place there.
This was especially the case with the descriptions of the Holy Land, a cat-
egory to which many of the texts analysed in this book belong. But the
question seems to me to go beyond the chronological limits of the Middle
Ages. Even today we cannot think of a sovereign country, a region or a city
by artificially separating the geographical description from an understand-
ing of its past.
PREFACE ix
Obviously, I do not believe that this volume can provide an answer to

any of these important theoretical questions. However, it can perhaps
provide new food for thought, particularly among medievalists. This is
also because, more modestly, this volume presents a series of texts that are
little known not only to the general public but also to scholars of the
Middle Ages; nevertheless, these texts played a decisive role in the
development of the late medieval representation of the Holy Land. In
order to achieve this goal, this volume acts as a bridge between different
academic traditions, since I have tried to draw from studies written in
different countries. I therefore believe that I am rendering a small service
to all scholars—medievalists and otherwise—of the history of the
Mediterranean, the history of Christianity and the history of pilgrimage
and travel literature. If the broader issues that have stirred the mind of the
author of this work shine through and stimulate further questions in the
reader, it will only be an additional service.
York, UK Michele Campopiano

Acknowledgements
As often in these cases, this book owes much to the contribution and the
suggestions of many colleagues. In particular, I would like to thank Patrick
Gautier Dalché for his many comments. I would also like to express my
gratitude to Edoardo Barbieri, leader of the project “Libri Ponti di Pace,”
for his comments and his help in dealing with the patrimony of the library
of the Franciscan Custodia in Jerusalem. I wish to thank Luca Rivali,
Alessandro Tedesco, Emilia Bignami, Sarah Calabrese and Marcello
Mozzato for helping me while I was in Jerusalem, working in the library
and archive of the Custodia. I need to express my gratitude to the Custodia
itself and in particular to Father Lionel Goh, librarian, and Father Sergey
Loktionov, archivist. I am also grateful to the many other libraries and
archives listed in the bibliography that have granted me access to their
materials. I wish to extend my gratitude to Beatrice Saletti and Paolo
Trovato, not just because of their many useful comments, but also because
they often shared with me the results of their research before publication.
I would also like to thank Victoria Blud, Andrew Jotischky, Jonathan
Rubin and Claudia Wittig for their useful comments, as well as the
members of the research networks “Remembered Places and Invented
Traditions: Thinking about the Holy Land in the Late Medieval West”
and “Pilgrim Libraries: Books and Reading on the Medieval Routes to
Jerusalem & Rome” (led by Anthony Bale) and of the network “Imagining
Jerusalem: c. 1099 to the Present Day” (led by Anna Bernard, Helen
Smith, Jim Watt and myself). These comments are responsible for many of
the merits of this book and none of its demerits. The research for this
book was made possible also by the NWO (Netherlands Organisation for
xi
xii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Scientific Research. Project Cultural memory and identity in the Late

Middle Ages: the Franciscans of Mount Zion in Jerusalem and the
representation of the Holy Land [1333–1516], project number
360-50-070). I also want to thank the University of York for its support.
Thanks to Palgrave Macmillan and especially to Megan Laddusaw for
making this book possible.
Contents
1 Introduction: Writing the Holy Land 1
2 The Franciscan Holy Land 25
3 The Convent of Mount Zion and Book Production and

Circulation 55
4 Early Franciscan Descriptions and Maps of the Holy Land 89
5 Franciscan Compilations, Miscellaneous Manuscripts and

Composite Volumes on the Holy Land127
6 Franciscan Descriptions of the Holy Land in the Fifteenth

Century185
7 Between the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance225
8 The Lists of Holy Places and Indulgences (Indulgenziari)

and Their Diffusion281
9 Franciscan Texts and Late Medieval Pilgrimage Accounts305
10 Conclusions: Loss, Trauma, Recovery349
xiii
xiv Contents
Appendix: Summary Description of Analysed Manuscripts355
Bibliography381
Index423
Abbreviations
ASTC: Archivio storico della Custodia di Terra Santa

Briquet: http://www.ksbm.oeaw.ac.at/_scripts/php/BR.php
H: Den Haag, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 73 G 8
MGH: Monumenta Germaniae Historica
N: Naples, Biblioteca Nazionale, MS ex-Vind. lat. 49
P: Pisa, Archivio Storico Diocesano di Pisa, manoscritti, Miscellanea
Zucchelli, no. XXXIII, Appendice II, inserto III
Piccard: https://www.piccard-online.de/start.php
V: Vienna, Ӧsterreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS 3468
W: Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek Guelf. 391 Helmst
xv
List of Figures
Fig. 4.1 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Latin 4939, fol. 10v 99
Fig. 4.2 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Latin 4939, fol. 11r 100
Fig. 7.1 Staatliche Bibliothek Neuburg an der Donau, 04/Hs. INR 10,
p. 75245
p. 157247
p. 210249
xvii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Writing the Holy Land
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
1
Dominique Julia, Le voyage aux saints. Les pèlerinages dans l’Occident moderne (XVe–
XVIIIe siècle) (Paris: Gallimard, 2016), 13–17; F. Thomas Noonan, The Road to Jerusalem.
Pilgrimage and Travel in the Age of Discovery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2007), 49–83; Nicole Chareyron, Ethique et esthétique du récit de voyage à la fine du moyen
age (Paris: Champion, 2013), 3–6.
2
Andrew Jotischky, “The Franciscan return to the Holy Land (1333) and Mt Sion: pil-
grimage and the apostolic mission,” in The Crusader world, ed. Adrian Boas (Abingdon:
© The Author(s) 2020 1

M. Campopiano, Writing the Holy Land, The New Middle Ages,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52774-7_1
2 M. CAMPOPIANO
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 pilgrim-
ages 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: “Huius religionis sectandae caput est historia et prophe-
tia dispensationis temporalis divinae providentiae pro salute generis
humani in aeternam vitam reformandi atque reparandi.”4 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 “read” 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 sup-
plement to a text, due to its connection to the events of the Bible.5 The
Routledge, 2016), 241–255; Wolfgang Schneider, “Peregrinatio Hierosolymitana. Studien

zum spätmittelalterlichen Jerusalembrauchtum und zu den aus der Heiliglandfahrt her-
vorgegangenen nordwesteuropäischen Jerusalembruderschaften,” PhD diss., University of
Münster, 1982, 41–44; Leonard Lemmens, Die Franziskaner im Hl. Lande. 1 Teil. Die
Franziskaner auf dem Sion (1336–1551) (Münster: Aschendorff, 1925), 37–58.
3
Among the pilgrims it was quite easy to find large numbers of heretics, and for this reason
Pope Gregory XI gave to the province of the Franciscans in the Holy Land the title of
inquisitor haereticae pravitatis in Egypt, the Holy Land and Syria; see: Jean Richard, La
papauté et les missions d’Orient au Moyen Age (XIIIe-XVe siècles) (Rome: Ecole Française de
Rome, 1977), 133.
4
“The head of this religion which is to be followed is history and prophecy of temporal
dispensation of divine providence for the salvation of mankind to be reformed and recovered
in eternal life”; Aurelius Augustinus, De vera religione, VII, 13, in Augustinus, De doctrina
christiana. De vera religione, ed. Josef Martin and Klaus D. Daur (Turnhout: Brepols, 1962),
171–260 (Corpus Christianorum. Series Latina, 32).
5
Gerrit J. Schenk, “Dorthin und wieder zurück. Mittelalterliche Pilgerreisen ins Heilige
Land als ritualisierte Bewegung in Raum und Zeit,” in Prozessionen-Wallfahrten-Aufmärsche.
Bewegung zwischen Religion und Politik in Europa und Asien seit dem Mittelalter, ed. Jörg
Gengnagel and Monika Horstmann (Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau, 2008), 19–86, 19–33;
Glenn Bowman, “Christian ideology and the image of a holy land: the place of Jerusalem
pilgrimage in the various Christianities,” in Contesting the Sacred: the Anthropology of
1 INTRODUCTION: WRITING THE HOLY LAND 3
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 par-
ticular Deuteronomy: “The Lord your God will bring you into the land
that your ancestors possessed, and you will possess it” (Deut. 30: 3–5).
The term Holy Land first appears in Zechariah, but it is foreshadowed in
Ezekiel’s 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
Christian Pilgrimage, ed. Michael Sallnow and John Eade (London: Routledge, 1991),
98–121; Victor Turner, Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture:
Anthropological Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 172–202.
6
Colin Morris, The Sepulchre of Christ and the Medieval West (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005), 13–15.
7
Astrid Erll, “Literature, film, and the mediality of cultural memory,” in Cultural Memory
Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar
Nünning (Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 2008), 1–11; Martin Zierold, Gesellschaftliche
Erinnerung: eine medienkulturwissenschaftliche Perspektive (Berlin, New York: De
Gruyter, 2006).
8
Andreas Nehring, “Auf dem Weg zum ‘Heiligen’? Pilgern aus religionswissenschaftlicher
Perspektive,” in Unterwegs im Namen der Religion. Pilgern als Form der Kontingenzbewältigung
und Zukunftssicherung in den Weltreligionen, ed. Klaus Herbers and Hans Christian Lehner
(Stuttgart: Steiner, 2014), 13–24, 16–17.
4 M. CAMPOPIANO
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 them-
selves as the inhabitants of the Holy Land, and they were the first to use
the expression in a “distinctively Christian way.”10 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 Hadrian’s 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
mémoire (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
Morris, The Sepulchre, 1–2.

9
Robert L. Wilken, The Land Called Holy. Palestine in Christian History and Thought
10
(New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1992), XV.

11
Morris, The Sepulchre, 16–24.
12
Pierre Nora, “La fin de l’histoire-mémoire,” in Les Lieux de mémoire. I. La République,
ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), XVI–XXXIV.
13
Wilken, The Land Called Holy, 89; Eusebius, Vita Constantini, in Eusebius Werke, I, 1:
Über das Leben des Kaisers Konstantin, ed. Friedhelm Winkelmann (Berlin: Akademie Verlag,
1975), 3–30.
14
Wilken, The Land Called Holy, 90.
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 “from the beginning,”
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 for
the sanctification of the landscape of Palestine. The memory of the perse-
cuted church of the martyrs needed to be consciously kept alive after the
triumph of the Church in the Roman Empire. Intensifying veneration of
the localized holy tombs of the martyrs was the answer and in turn intro-
duced sacred space into Christianity.17 The grave of a martyr permitted
communication between heaven and earth because of their praesentia, a
presence on earth in the physical remains of the holy dead.18 If God him-
self had become flesh, the places in which he was born, lived and was
buried received the imprint of God’s presence: John of Damascus thus
writes that the Holy Land is a receptacle of divine energy.19
The Christian fathers also started to encourage believers to come to
Palestine.20 For example, Jerome writes to Marcella: “prima vox Dei ad
Abraham: exi, inquit, de terra tua et de cognatione tua et vade in terram,
quam monstrabo tibi.”21 He also defends the use of the attribute “holy”
for the city of Jerusalem.22 Jerome’s words allude to both a real and a
15
Origenes, Matthäuserklärung II: die lateinische Übersetzung der Commentariorum series,
ed. Erich Klostermann, Ernst Benz (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1933), chap. 27–32, par. 3.
16
Ambroise de Milan, Traité sur l’Evangile de saint Luc, vol. II (Paris: CERF, 1958), book
X, chap. 114.
17
Charles Freeman, Holy Bones, Holy Dust: How Relics Shaped the History of Medieval
Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 24–25; Peter Brown, The Cult of the
Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1981), 3. See also Marianne Ritsema van Eck, The Holy Land in Observant Franciscan Texts
(c. 1480–1650). Theology, Travel and Territoriality (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2019), 12–16.
18
Brown, The Cult of the Saints, 3.
19
Wilken, The Land Called Holy, 118–119.
20
21
“God’s first word to Abraham: ‘Go out,’ he says, ‘from your land and from your kindred,
and go to the Land I will show you,’” Isidorus Hilberg, ed., S. Eusebii Hieronymi opera.
Epistularum pars I (Vienna, Leipzig: Tempsky, 1910), chap. 46, par. 2.
22
Hilberg, ed., S. Eusebii Hieronymi opera. Epistularum pars I, chap. 46, par. 7.
6 M. CAMPOPIANO
metaphorical journey to Jerusalem. In another letter he writes that

Bethlehem is the homeland of the Lord and that he dwells there because
the Saviour chose this town.23 Jerome uses the expression “Holy Land” to
designate the land described in Ezekiel.24 He strengthens the link between
Christian piety and the places in which the patriarchs, Christ and the
Apostles lived their lives, but he also challenges the Jewish perspective in
which the visions of the prophets—the Promised Land—are translated
into a political and territorial hope.25 For the Latin fathers, the expression
“Holy Land” did not always designate a territory. In Augustine’s De civi-
tate Dei the expression “terra sancta” designates the soil from the Holy
Land, which was supposed to have curative powers.26 The monks of the
Judean Desert used it consciously to designate Jerusalem and the sur-
rounding area.27 It appears in a petition sent by the leaders of the monastic
communities of Palestine, Sabbas (439–532) and Theodosius († 529) to
the emperor Anastasius, where they talk of “the inhabitants of this Holy
Land” (referring to the monks).28 The Arabic conquest may have strength-
ened this territorial connotation: the Pseudo-Methodius talks of a recon-
quest of the Promised Land by the sons of the king of the Greeks.29
The establishment of the Crusader states promoted the use of the
expression “Holy Land” in a distinctive territorial sense, a land with fixed
boundaries that could be conquered and defended.30 The Latin occupa-
tion of the Levant enabled the “fixing” of many of the holy places in
23
Isidorus Hilberg, ed., S. Hieronymi, Epistularum pars II (Vienna, Leipzig: Tempsky,
1912), chap. 108, par. 10.
24
Hilberg, ed., S. Hieronymi, Epistularum pars II, chap. 109, par. 2; Wilken, The Land
Called Holy, 125.
25
Wilken, The Land Called Holy, 136–137.
26
Aurelius Augustinus, De civitate Dei, VII.7, in Aurelii Augustini Opera, vol. XIV, part
2, ed. Bernard Dombart and Alphonsus Kalb (Turnhout: Brepols, 1955), book XX, chap. 8.
27
28
29
Pseudo-Methodius, Apocalypse. An Alexandrian World Chronicle, ed. Benjamin Garstad
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 2012), chap. 13, par. 11, 56–58
(Greek text) and 126–128 (Latin translation of the Pseudo-Methodius); Wilken, The Land
Called Holy, 243–4.
30
Katell Berthelot, Vincent Lemire, Julian Loiseau and Yann Potin, Jérusalem. Histoire
d’une ville-monde (Paris: Flammarion, 2016), 201–239; Wilken, The Land Called Holy, XV.
Jerusalem and in the entire Palestine region. This territorial perspective

also influenced Jewish writers in the crusader and post-crusader period.31
Jerusalem was a central place in the religious identity of not only Jews
and Christians, but also Muslims. Jerusalem was lost to the Ayyubids in
1187. For the Muslims, the symbolic role of the city had increased signifi-
cantly since the Ayyubid period. The literature of the Faḍā’il al-Quds,
texts in praise of Jerusalem, emerged in the beginning of the eleventh
century, and originally, they were an essentially local phenomenon. The
sacred status of Jerusalem in Islam depended on the fact that the city was
alluded to as the goal of Muhammad’s night journey from Mecca (Qur’ān,
17.1) and that it was considered as the first direction of the qibla (Qur’ān,
2.136 and 138).32 With Nūr ad-Dı̄n and then Saladin, the reconquest of
Jerusalem became part of a more general project of political legitimation
and expansion.33 The Faḍā’il literature established that the sanctity of the
city rests on the Dome of the Rock and, more particularly, on the Al-Aqşā
mosque, seen as one of the most ancient mosques in the world and fur-
thermore built on the foundations of the Temple of Salomon.34 Jerusalem
is seen as one of the three holiest cities on earth, together with Mecca and
Medina, and one of the four cities of Paradise (the fourth being Damascus):
The Patriarchs and Jesus and Mary lived in Jerusalem, it was conquered by
Joshua. It was the place where Salomon built the temple, and the prophets
received the revelation there. Furthermore, some Islamic traditions
reported Jerusalem as the place of the Resurrection and the Last
Judgement.35 This literature started to encourage Muslim pilgrimage to
31
Elka Weber, “Sharing Sites: Medieval Jewish Travellers to the Land of Israel,” in
Eastward Bound: Travel and Travellers 1050–1550, ed. Rosamund Allen (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2004), 35–52. See also: Joshua Prawer, The History of the Jews
in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 128–141.
32
Oded Peri, “Islamic Law and the Christian Holy Sites: Jerusalem and Its Vicinity in Early
Ottoman Times,” Islamic Law and Society 6 (1999): 97–111, 98; Amikam Elad, Medieval
Jerusalem and Islamic Worship. Holy Places, Ceremonies, Pilgrimage (Leiden, Boston, Köln:
Brill, 1999), 1–22.
33
Berthelot, Lemire, Loiseau, Potin, Jérusalem, 243–295; Emmanuel Sivan, “Le caractère
sacré de Jérusalem dans l’Islam aux XIIe-XIIIe siècles,” Studia Islamica 27 (1967): 149–182,
157–164.
34
Gisèle Besson, “L ’eschatologie musulmane et l’Occident médiéval: l’exemple du Livre
de l’Échelle de Mahomet,” Vita Latina, 124 (1991): 41–48.
35
Sivan, “Le caractère sacré,” 164–165.
8 M. CAMPOPIANO
Jerusalem, and mystics and religious scholars began to establish them-

selves in the city.36
In 1291, Akko, the last important centre of the crusader Kingdom of
Jerusalem, fell to the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt, the new dominant power
in the Holy Land. The decades after 1291 were characterized by different
projects for the recovery of the Holy Land, which also produced descrip-
tions of it. These texts, together with the pilgrimage accounts and guide-
books, perpetuated the memory of this territory among Western readers.37
As we shall see, the impossibility of carrying out any real reconquest of the
Holy Land, together with the establishment of the Franciscan Custodia,
made pilgrimage the main link between the Holy Land and Western
Europe. This is not to say that hopes of reconquering the Holy Land were
lost, but they never regained the same intensity as in previous decades, in
which consistent intellectual efforts were put into designing plans for the
recovery of Palestine. Jerusalem grew considerably under the Mamluks,
conserving a Christian presence. It seems that the Mamluks did not try to
expand their presence in the Christian quarter of the city. The only
purpose-built Christian church that was converted to Islamic purposes was
the Crusader Church of Saint James Intercisus in the Armenian quarter.38
The strong religious value of Jerusalem is emphasized by the numerous
religious institutions founded in the Mamluk period.39 According to Sivan,
the city lost its ideological prestige under the Mamluks, due in part to the
fact that its status as a Muslim possession seemed to become less and less
endangered through the years.40 However, as Schaefer has stressed, the
religious importance of the city should by no means be underestimated.
During the Mamluk period, thirty texts of the Faḍa’̄ il al-Quds genre were
written.41
Many Jews and Christians continued to live in Jerusalem and to flock to
the Holy Land as pilgrims. The Florentine pilgrim Giorgio Gucci (who
36
Sivan, “Le caractère sacré,” 168.
37
Aryeh Graboïs, Le pèlerin occidental en Terre sainte au Moyen Age (Paris, Bruxelles: De
Boeck, 1998), 185–198; Sylvia Schein, Fideles Crucis: The Papacy, the West, and the Recovery
of the Holy Land, 1274–1314 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 269–270; Jean Richard, Les
récits de voyages et de pèlerinages (Turnhout: Brepols, 1981), 15–23.
38
Karl R. Schaefer, “Jerusalem in the Ayyubid and Mamluk Eras,” PhD diss., University of
New York, 1985, 282–283; Zayde Antrim, “Jerusalem in the Ayyubid and Mamluk Periods,”
in Routledge Handbook on Jerusalem, ed. Suleiman Mourad, Bedross Der Matossian and
Naomi Koltun-Fromm (New York: Routledge, 2018), 102–109.
39
Schaefer, Jerusalem, 271.
40
Sivan, “Le caractère sacré,” 179–180.
41
Schaefer, Jerusalem, 271.
travelled to the Holy Land in 1384–1385) also writes that many women
lived in Jerusalem as permanent poor pilgrims, without specifying their
religion.42 Rabbi Ben Menahem estimated that in 1481 there were 10,000
Muslim households and 250 Jewish households (Christians are not men-
tioned). This would suggest that there were at least 35,875 people living
in the city.43 The Jewish pilgrim Obadiah da Bertinoro, visiting the city in
1500, said that 4000 families lived in Jerusalem, 70 of them Jewish.44
Pilgrimage represented an important source of revenue for the Mamluks.
Christian pilgrims paid a tribute to the Nā’ib of al-Quds (three dirhams
per person) and five golden ducats to the nāȥir (supervisor of the Holy
Sepulchre); monks and merchants paid two ducats.45
The veneration of the holy places was central to the development of late
medieval spirituality.46 The number of pilgrims reaching the Holy Land
was relatively high. The Israeli historian Ashtor counts 110 documented
ship journeys to the Holy Land from Venice in the fifteenth century, esti-
mating a capacity of 50 or 60 pilgrims for each journey.47 The English
pilgrim Wey (who travelled to the Holy Land in 1458 and 1462) counts
197 pilgrims on his galley travelling from Venice.48 Some noble travellers
could bring their retainers: the marquis Niccolò d’Este and the count
Palatine Ludwig IV both travelled with about 50 retainers.49 Pilgrims
often belonged to the merchant or aristocratic elites of Europe, and the
practice of pilgrimage became an important sign of a common identity
within these circles.50 The influence of Jerusalem pilgrimage was far reach-
ing, even for people who never travelled to the Holy Land.
The city served as an exegetical representation of the human soul, for
just as Jerusalem had suffered at the hands of its many historical invaders,
42
Huda Lufti, Al-Quds al-mamlūkiyya. A history of Mamlūk Jerusalem based on the Haram
documents (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 1985), 222.
43
Lufti, Al-Quds, 220.
44
Lufti, Al-Quds, 220.
45
Lufti, Al-Quds, 135–136.
46
Bowman, “Christian Ideology”; Wilken, The Land Called Holy, 20–45.
47
Eliyahu Ashtor, “Venezia e il pellegrinaggio in Terrasanta nel basso medieovo,” Archivio
Storico Italiano, 143, no. 2 (1985): 214–215.
48
Beatrice Saletti, “La logistica dei pellegrinaggi in Terrasanta nei secoli XIV e XV,” Nuova
Rivista Storica, 100, no. 2 (2016): 421–481, 431.
49
Saletti, “La logistica,” p. 429.
50
Graboïs, Le pèlerin occidental, 45–51; Marie-Luise Favreau-Lilie, “The German Empire
and Palestine: German pilgrimages to Jerusalem between the 12th and 16th century,”
Journal of Medieval History 21, no. 4 (1995): 321–341.
10 M. CAMPOPIANO
the Christian soul was perceived as constantly threatened by the wiles of

the devil.51 Because of its associations with the life of Christ, Jerusalem
came to be used as a mnemonic device for recalling biblical events for
those reading or hearing its description or actually visiting the sites. Some
hoped to follow Christ’s footsteps, and so enact a form of compassion
with their God. For the devotional exercise of meditating on the life of
Christ, this land was ideal due to its identifiable landmarks that could, in
turn, facilitate memory and devotion.52 By the fourteenth century, the
practice of imagining the Holy City had been codified by the literature
that surrounded it.53 The last centuries of the Middle Ages were very fer-
tile for the production of literature related to the Holy Land. Pilgrims
wrote accounts of their travels and other descriptions of the holy places
were widely diffused in the West. Pilgrimage texts combine mnemoniza-
tion of the events of the Passion and meditation on the divine presence on
earth, rooted in the written texts of the gospels, with the invitation for
others to undertake a new pilgrimage.54 The impressive quantitative pro-
duction of pilgrimage texts and their manuscript circulation make it diffi-
cult to track the construction of a collective memory mediated through
the written word. However, what many scholars overlook is the presence
of a central focus for the pilgrimage experience, as well as for the search of
written sources on the Holy Land, in the Western relationship to the Holy
Land: the Franciscan convent in Jerusalem.
51
Annette Hoffmann and Gerhard Wolf, “Preface,” in Jerusalem as Narrative Space/
Erzählraum Jerusalem, ed. Annette Hoffmann and Gerhard Wolf (Leiden: Brill, 2012), viii–
xix; Suzanne M. Yeager, Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2008), p. 3.
52
Yeager, Jerusalem, 4; Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory. A Study of Memory in
Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 34; Mitzi Kirkland-Ives,
In the Footsteps of Christ. Hans Memling’s Passion Narratives and the Devotional Imagination
in the Early Modern Netherlands (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 4.
53
Pietro Porcasi, “La letteratura di pellegrinaggio in Terrasanta nel Medioevo,” in Studi in
onore di Guglielmo de’ Giovanni-Centelles, ed. Errico Cuozzo (Salerno: SISAUS, 2010),
187–210; Yeager, Jerusalem, 3–5; Heike Schwab, Toleranz und Vorurteil. Reiserlebnisse spät-
mittelalterliche Jerusalempilger (Berlin: Spektrum, 2002), 65–66; Ursula Ganz-Blätter,
Andacht und Abenteuer. Berichte westeuropaeische Jerusalem und Santiago Pilger (1320–1520)
(Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1991), 40; Richard, Les récits; Titus Tobler, Bibliographica geo-
graphica Palaestinae (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1867).
54
Julia, Le Voyage, 40.
The idea of memory as an essentially “collective” phenomenon, as a

process built in social and cultural exchange has deep roots. For example,
the Italian philosopher Carlo Cattaneo (1801–1869) writes already in
1855 about collective memory (memoria collettiva), formed by all indi-
vidual memories.55 He argues that we can only remember what we can
think and that the possibilities of thinking are embedded in one’s society:
a human being living in solitude would just recollect single sensations.
Social life offers the reference point to organize and structure experiences
and recollect them. It also allows to connect ideas among members of the
same cultural group and across different cultural groups which come in
communication with one another, also from generation to generation,
through the subsidy of different media.56 The concept of collective mem-
ory has, however, found its way in contemporary historical studies and
social sciences especially through the work of the French philosopher and
sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945). For Halbwachs, memories
cannot be separated from the social frameworks in which they were
formed, and by the systems of signs and conventions shared by social
groups defined in specific conditions of time and space.57
Halbwachs based his cultural study of the legendary topography of the
Holy Land on pilgrimage accounts,58 on the assumption that:
Leur témoignage n’en est que le plus précieux: ce ne sont les opinions
d’individus, mais les croyances de groupes de fidèles, naïves et vivantes.
Nulle réflexion sur ce qu’on a pu croire avant eux, et qu’ils ignorent ou
qu’ils ont oublié. On peut suivre ainsi l’évolution spontanée des traditions,
et dans certains cas leur persistance naturelle à travers le temps, sans autre
motif qu’un instinct religieux, certains besoins de l’imagination religieuse,
dans des groupes affranchis de toute discipline rationnelle ou scientifique.59
55
Carlo Cattaneo, Psicologia delle menti associate, ed. Barbara Boneschi (Milan: Istituto
Lombardo di Scienze e Lettere, 2016), 276. I am preparing a study of the concept of collec-
tive memory in Cattaneo.
56
Cattaneo, Psicologia, 273–276.
57
Maurice Halbwachs, La mémoire collective (Paris: Albin Michel, 1997; first edition Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1950), in particular 135–142; Maurice Halbwachs, Les cad-
res sociaux de la mémoire (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1925). Important developments of the concept
in: James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).
58
Maurice Halbwachs, La topographie légendaire des évangiles en Terre sainte (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 2008). Initially published in 1941 by the Presses Universitaires
de France.
59
Halbwachs, La topographie légendaire, 3.
12 M. CAMPOPIANO
Their testimony is only the most precious: they are not the opinions of indi-
viduals, but the beliefs of groups of faithful, naive and living. There is no
reflection on what may have been believed before them, and which they
ignore or have forgotten. In this way it is possible to follow the spontaneous
evolution of traditions, and in some cases their natural persistence through
time, without any other reason than a religious instinct, certain needs of the
religious imagination, in groups free from any rational or scientific discipline.
I believe we cannot assume a spontaneous evolution for such traditions,

as Halbwachs supposed. Memory is mediated by texts, monuments and
practices. We cannot approach operations of memory directly, but we are
dependent on intermediary levels of reflection, constructed in different
media.60 This is evident, too, in the analysis of pilgrimage accounts: these
were also dependent on each other and on other written sources. As Aleida
Assmann has written, cultural memory cannot be stored in places of mem-
ory like pilgrimage sites; these sites can sustain the processes of memory
only with the help of other media.61 In the case of pilgrimage experience,
it was in particular the large body of literature on the Holy Land that
guaranteed the stability of the memory attached to this region and its dif-
fusion across the Western world. Even in the earliest accounts, the pilgrims
mixed personal experiences and descriptions from earlier sources.62 It is
therefore necessary to reconstruct the complex dynamics that informed
these narratives. The memory of the Holy Land often crystallized around
fixed points, fateful events of the past, the memory of which was main-
tained through cultural formations (texts, rites, monuments) and institu-
tional communication (reading and copying, recitation, practice,
observance). Assmann calls these points “figures of memory.” He believes
that cultural memory is characterized by (1) the potential to lay the foun-
dations for an identity: cultural memory preserves the store of knowledge
from which a group derives an awareness of its unity and peculiarity; (2)
the capacity to reconstruct: cultural memory exists in two modes, first in
the mode of potentiality of the archive whose accumulated texts, images
and rules of conduct act as total horizon, and second in the mode of actu-
ality, whereby each contemporary context puts the objectivized meaning
60
Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen
Gedächtnisses (Munich: Beck. 2010), 149–339.
61
Assmann, Erinnerungsäume. 21.
62
John Kenneth Hyde, “Italian Pilgrim Literature in the Late Middle Ages,” Bulletin of
John Rylands Library, 72, no. 3 (1990): 13–33, 14.
into its own perspective, giving its own relevance; (3) organization: the
presence of bearers of memory, the institutional buttressing of this process
of preservation and reconstruction.63 Memory can be conceptualized as
the result of the interaction between three types of historical factors: the
intellectual and cultural traditions that frame all our representations of the
past, the memory makers who selectively adopt and manipulate these tra-
ditions, and the memory consumers who use, ignore or transform the
media through which cultural memory is constructed.64
Some approaches in cognitive science underline that memory works
through a complex system of cooperation and coordination of different
internal and external sources: neural, affective, bodily, social, technologi-
cal and institutional.65 The present book, however, does not pretend to
proceed into a study of neural, bodily and affective aspects: I doubt that
with the sources available we would be able to penetrate these aspects of
medieval life. We can look, however, at the institutional, social and techni-
cal aspects of the construction of memory: studying texts in their manu-
script context and analysing the dynamics of their transmission. This
means that we need to connect this research to traditional methodologies
concerning the identification of the sources, the origin of the manuscripts
and the information on the codicological structure of the manuscripts.
These methods can lead to important insights into how different texts
were brought together. Therefore, we need to base a study of the develop-
ment of a shared memory on philological, palaeographical analysis. We
need to do more research into the traditions that were built around the
Holy Land, the archives of texts that crystallized these traditions and the
institutions that preserved and diffused these texts.
By the fourteenth century, the practice of imagining the Holy City had
been codified by the literature that surrounded it.66 Pilgrimage narratives
could take a multiplicity of forms: letters, reports or autoptic information
63
Jan Assmann, “Collective Memory and Culture Identity,” New German Critique 65
(1995): 125–133; Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische
Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: Beck, 1992).
64
Wulf Kansteiner, “Finding meaning in memory: a methodological critique of collective
memory studies,” History and Theory 41, no. 2 (2002): 179–197.
65
John Sutton, Celia B. Harris, Paul G. Keil, Amanda J. Barnier, “The psychology of
memory, extended cognition, and socially distributed remembering,” Phenomenology and the
Cognitive Sciences 9 (2010): 521–560; David Kirsh, “Distributed cognition: a methodologi-
cal note,” Pragmatics & Cognition 14 (2006): 249–262.
66
Yeager, Jerusalem, 3–5.
14 M. CAMPOPIANO
could be inserted within “learned” descriptions, and this fluidity contin-

ued through most of the early modern period.67 The pilgrimage of St
Willibald († 787/788) is narrated within a comprehensive account of his
life.68 The account of John of Würzburg is written in the form of a letter.69
Pilgrimage, and in particular pilgrimage to Jerusalem, was present in other
forms of writing, particularly travel writing (e.g. Mandeville’s Travels—
mid-fourteenth century—deals largely with pilgrimage to Jerusalem), and
it was discussed, and even criticized, by religious authors in the late Middle
Ages, like Thomas à Kempis.70 Pilgrims openly refer to previous accounts.
We read, for example, in the Itinerarium written by the Frankish Monk
Bernard, who travelled to the Holy Land around 870:71 “De hoc sepul-
chro non est necesse plura scribere, cum dicat Beda in historia anglorum
sua sufficentia, quae et nos possumus referre.”72
Pilgrims like the Franciscan Symon Semeonis (who left Ireland for the
Holy Land in 1323) often travelled with books.73 Scholars have also
pointed out the reciprocal influence of world maps, maps of the Holy
Land and pilgrimage accounts.74 Maps and guides helped the pilgrim to
67
Palmira Brummett, “Introduction: Genre, Witness, and Time in the ‘Book’ of Travels,”
in The ‘Book’ of Travels: Genre, Ethnology, and Pilgrimage, 1250–1700, ed. Palmira Brummet
(Leiden: Brill, 2009), 1–35.
68
Titus Tobler, ed., Vita seu potius hodoeporicon sancti Willibaldi, Descriptiones Terrae
Sanctae ex saeculo VIII.IX.XII et XV (Leipzig: Hinrich, 1874), 1–84.
69
John of Würzburg, Peregrinationes, in Peregrinationes tres. Saewulf. John of Würzburg.
Theodericus, ed. Robert B. C. Huygens (Turnhout: Brepols, 1994), 79–141.
70
De imitatione Christi libri quatuor, ed. Tiburzio Lupo (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice
Vaticana, 1982), book I, chap. 23.
71
Celestina Milani, “Nomi e testo nell’Itinerarium Bernardi monachi Franci,” Il nome nel
testo 9 (2007): 211–219.
72
“About this sepulchre it is not necessary to write more, since Beda says enough in his
History of the English people, which we also can report”; Bernardus Monachus, Itinerarium
Bernardi, monachi Franci, in Descriptiones Terrae Sanctae ex saeculo VIII.IX.XII et XV., ed.
Titus Tobler (Leipzig: Hinrich, 1874), 85–107, 92.
73
Malgorzata Krasnoebska D’Aughton, “Inflamed with Seraphic Ardor: Franciscan
Learning and Spirituality in the Fourteenth-Century Irish Pilgrimage Account,” Franciscan
Studies 70 (2012): 283–312, 293. The text of Symon Semeonis had been edited by Mario
Esposito: Mario Esposito, ed., Itinerarium Symonis Semeonis ab Hybernia ad Terram
Sanctam (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1960).
74
Ingrid Baumgartner, “Reiseberichte und Karten. Wechselseitig Einflūsse im
Spätmittelalter,” in Spuren reisen. Vor-Bilder und Vor-Schriften in der Reiseliteratur, ed.
Gisela Ecker and Susanne Röhl (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2006), 89–124; Ingrid Baumgärtner,
“Erzählungen kartieren. Jerusalem in mittelalterlichen Kartenräumen,” in Projektion –
Reflexion – Ferne: Räumliche Vorstellungen und Denkfiguren im Mittelalter, ed. Uta Störmer-
find the traces of sacred history in the topographical reality: their role was
essentially to recall the past of the Holy Land, permit a glimpse of a past
reality, and in this way the written text on the holy places in some ways
replaced the direct experience.75 Guides to “spiritual pilgrimages”
appeared, leading to the development of devotional practices in which the
places and the events of the life of Christ were experienced from within the
cloister, which interacted in complex ways with the tradition of writing
pilgrimage accounts.76 Although guides specific to spiritual pilgrimages
existed, pilgrimage accounts and descriptions of the Holy Land could also
be adapted for this goal. Ricoeur affirmed that memory consigned to the
written word has to be re-actualized and contextualized in the process of
reading, given the fact that the written text is separated from its connec-
tion to the person with whom the message originated.77 In the specific
case of late medieval and early modern history writing, it is in the process
of compilation that we see the capacity for both fixing and re-contextualizing
texts. Compilations re-use passages and insert them (usually without any
form of re-working) into the architecture of new texts. The medievalist
can therefore point to writing practices that denote a connection with the
establishment and transmission of memory very different from that which
emerged in modern forms of publishing (within which theorists such as
Ricoeur are “trapped” without being able to recognize it). More work is
needed on the sources of pilgrimage accounts, since it is essential to
Caysa, Sonja Glauch and Susanne Köbele (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), 193–223; Pnina Arad,
“Mapping Divinity: Holy Landscape in Maps of the Holy Land,” in Jerusalem as Narrative
Space/Erzählraum Jerusalem, ed. Annette Hoffmann and Gerhard Wolf (Leiden: Brill,
2012), 263–276; Patrick Gautier Dalché, “Cartes de Terre sainte, cartes de pèlerins,” in Tra
Roma e Gerusalemme nel Medio Evo. Paesaggi umani ed ambientali del pellegrinaggio meridi-
onale, ed. Massimo Oldoni (Salerno: Lavegna, 2005), 573–612.
75
Catherine Delano-Smith, “The Exegetical Jerusalem: Maps and Plans for Ezekiel
Chapters 40–48,” in Imagining Jerusalem in the Medieval West, ed. Lucy Donkin and Hanna
Vorholt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 41–75; Emmanuelle Vagnon, “Mesurer la
Terre Sainte. Mesures de l’espace et cartographie de l’Orient latin, du IXe au XVe siècle,” in
Mesure et histoire médiévale (Paris: Editions de la Sorbonne, 2013), 293–309, 294.
76
Kathryn M. Rudy, Virtual Pilgrimages in the Convent Imagining Jerusalem in the Late
Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001). See also: Kathryn Hurlock, Medieval Welsh
Pilgrimage, c.1100–1500 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 145–174; Kathryne Beebe,
Pilgrim and Preacher. The Audiences and Observant Spirituality of Friar Felix Fabri
(1437/8–1502) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 129–177; Kathryne Beebe,
“Reading mental pilgrimage in context: The imaginary pilgrims and real travels of Felix
Fabri’s Die Sionpilger,” Essays in Medieval Studies 25, no. 1 (2008): 39–70.
77
Paul Ricoeur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (Paris: Seuil, 2000), 177.
16 M. CAMPOPIANO
understand how representations of the Holy Land were created and dif-
fused. The striking homogeneity of many late medieval pilgrimage
accounts has led to hypotheses that these texts were influenced by some
form of guidebook, which listed the holy places and the indulgences.
Some accounts, such as the one by Felix Fabri (who travelled to the Holy
Land in 1483), refer openly to this kind of booklet.78 There has been sub-
stantial disagreement about the precise nature of these works, sometimes
described as a form of medieval “Baedeker,” referring to the famous
nineteenth-century travel guides.79 Röhricht and Sommerfeld argue that
these handwritten and printed pilgrimage guides (listing holy places, the
prayers to be performed there and indulgences) heavily influenced pil-
grims in the redaction of their works.80 These texts could be acquired in
Venice or in Jerusalem from the Franciscans of Mount Zion.81 Ganz-
Blättler points to the necessity to not simply suggest this, but to further
investigate the issue of the circulation and use of such hypothetical texts.
Röhricht’s and Sommerfeld’s hypothesis was re-formulated by Brefeld,
who has tried to adopt statistical methods to reconstruct this “Baedeker,”
and to establish an Urtext of the guidebook. According to the Dutch
scholar, texts derived from this Urtext should have been available from the
Friars of the Franciscan convent of San Francesco della Vigna in Venice or
from the Franciscans of Mount Zion in Jerusalem.82 Ganz-Blättler has
expressed her scepticism as to the possibility of identifying a single text
that would have acted as a principal source throughout the centuries. She
points out that different texts may have circulated, in different periods,
though this would still indicate the central role of the Franciscans in dif-
fusing similar texts.83 The present book shows that the reality was much
78
Felicis Fabri, Evagatorium in Terrae Sanctae, Arabiae et Egypti peregrinationem, ed.
Konrad Dietrich Hassler, vol. III (Stuttgart: sumtibus Societatis literariæ stuttgardiensis,
1849), 244.
79
Franco Cardini, In Terrasanta. Pellegrini italiani tra medioevo e prima età moderna
(Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002), 184–186; Ganz-Blättler, Andacht und Abenteuer, 103–106.
80
Martin Sommerfeld, “Die Reisebeschreibungen der deutschen Jerusalempilger im aus-
gehenden Mittelalter,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und
Geistesgeschichte 2 (1924): 816–851; Reinhold Röricht, Deutsche Pilgerreisen nach dem heili-
gen Lande (Innsbruck: Wagner, 1900), 8 and 43.
81
Nicole Chareyron, Pilgrims to Jerusalem in the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2005), 85; Richard, Les récits, 18–19.
82
Josephie Brefeld, A guidebook for the Jerusalem pilgrimage. A case for computer aided
textual criticism (Hilversum: Verloren, 1994), 58–61.
83
Ganz-Blättler, Andacht und Abenteuer, 03–106.
more complex: the Franciscans developed different, more elaborate texts

in their convent of Mount Zion, and they influenced pilgrims’ writing in
many different ways. These guidebooks had a doctrinal function: they
taught what pilgrims should see and what they should not.84 We also need
to understand how these texts were structured and how they connected
the representation of space with the memory of the events that took place
in the Holy Land.85 In this way, we will be able to understand how the
history and geography of the Holy Land are connected in these texts and
how this connection is represented to the reader. These texts often describe
the history of the Holy Land before and after the life of Christ, narrating
political and religious events and also describing the peoples and beliefs of
this land. Such narratives must be analysed in the context of the medium
(manuscript or printed book) in which they are transmitted.86 Therefore,
the current book will be based on a direct analysis of the manuscripts and
early prints that transmitted these texts. This is relevant because descrip-
tions and pilgrimage accounts with different origins were often combined
in the same texts. Genre boundaries in this mass of writings are not easily
drawn. In the past, scholars have often insisted on the difference between
descriptiones or itineraria and pilgrimage accounts. Descriptiones con-
tained information on the itineraries to be made by the pilgrims, distances
between the different holy places, and were typical in particular in the
early and high Middle Ages. We need to remind ourselves that there was
no clear difference between pilgrimage accounts and descriptions of the
Holy Land, no clear division of genre. The Dominican pilgrim Burchard
of Mount Zion writes a description of the Holy Land relying on several
occasions on autoptic observations.87 Bernhard von Breydenbach (fifteenth
84
Bert Roest, Reading the Book of History: Intellectual Contexts and Educational Functions
of Franciscan Historiography, 1226—c. 1350 (Groningen: Rijksuniversiteit Groningen,
1996), 104–106.
85
See, for example: Robert G. Ousterhout, “The memory of Jerusalem: text, architecture,
and the craft of thought,” in Jerusalem as Narrative Space/Erzählraum Jerusalem, ed.
Annette Hoffmann and Gerhard Wolf (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 139–154.
86
Annete Hoffmann and Gerhard Wolf, “Preface,” in Jerusalem as Narrative Space/
Erzählraum Jerusalem, ed. Annette Hoffmann and Gerhard Wolf (Leiden: Brill, 2012),
IX–XIX, XI–XIII.
87
Burchard of Mount Sion, O. P, Descriptio Terrae Sanctae, ed. John. R. Bartlett (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2019), Burchardi de Monte Sion, Descriptio terrae Sanctae, in
Peregrinatores Medii Aevii Quatuor, ed. Jacques C. M. Laurent (Leipzig: Hinrich,
1864), 19–94.
18 M. CAMPOPIANO
century) inserts sections of descriptions of other treatises in his account.88

As we will see in Breydenbach’s Peregrinatio in Terram Sanctam, descrip-
tions, maps or lists of holy places can actually provide a structure to the
experience of travel.89 Pilgrimage accounts, which related the journeys of
single pilgrims, were more common in the last centuries of the Middle
Ages and influenced by other genres such as the family memoir.90 These
texts cannot, however, be read as pure expressions of personal experi-
ence.91 Pilgrimage accounts are at the centre of complex intertextual webs,
and they repeat tópoi and narrative structures of other genres, such as
chivalric romances, in which travel also plays a major role.92 This does not
mean that any discussion on genre is void, but it reminds us that con-
fronted with this fluidity we must not impose modern categories on medi-
eval and early modern writing.
This book is also intended to contribute to more nuanced categoriza-
tions between descriptions and pilgrimage accounts, since the boundaries
were very fluid: not only because in the latter the Franciscans’ experience
of life in the Holy Land is an important source of information for their
learned descriptiones, but also because in compilations and deliberate
assemblages, accounts based on personal information tended to blend in
various forms with other learned texts on the holy land. The accounts of
the past became the descriptions of the present. This book studies these
writing practices within their manuscript contexts, but it also explains how
Franciscan descriptions influenced pilgrims’ writing practices. This allowed
the Friars to establish an “official” version of the memory of the Holy
Land, which through these texts influenced the vision of the past of the
88
See this volume, Chap. 9.
89
Brummett, “Introduction,” 1–2.
90
Gabriella Bartolini and Franco Cardini, Nel nome di Dio facemmo vela. Viaggio in Oriente
di un pelelgrino medievale (Roma, Bari: Laterza, 2002), 75–76; Aryeh Graboïs, “Christian
Pilgrims in the Thirteenth Century and the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem: Burchard of Mount
Sion,” in Outremer. Studies in the History of the Crusading Kingdom of Jerusalem Presented to
Joshua Prawer, ed. Joshua Prawer, Benjamin Z. Ḳedar, Hans Eberhard Mayer and Raimund
C. Smail (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi Institute, 1982), 285–296; Donald Howard, Writers
and Pilgrims: Medieval Pilgrimage and Their Posterity (Berkeley, London: University of
California Press, 1980).
91
Nathalie Bouloux, Culture et savoirs géographiques en Italie au XIVe siècle (Turnhout:
Brepols, 2002), 70–71.
92
Bouloux, Culture, 75; Bartolini, Cardini, Nel Nome di Dio, 75.
Holy Land in the whole of Western Christianity. The Franciscan memory

of the Holy Land was rooted in the identity of the Order, whose piety was
Christocentric and emphasized the importance of the Passion as founding
act of Christianity, and the role of Francis as alter Christus, second Christ,
showed by his stigmata (as I will discuss in the next chapter). On the other
hand, the compilations, descriptions and treatises elaborated in Mount
Zion innovated the identity of the Order and its role in Christianity by
showing how the history of the Holy Land was characterized by a series of
losses and trauma, the Holy Land being continuously “subtracted” to the
true Christians. It was the presence of the Friars in the Holy Land (also
legitimized by the piety of the Order and their Christian love for the pil-
grim) that now guaranteed the relationship of Western Christianity with
the Land of Promise.
The Franciscans prepared texts on the holy places and maintained a
library where pilgrims could consult various texts on Palestine. The pres-
ence of the Franciscan order has indeed been studied,93 but the texts pro-
duced by the Franciscans have never been analysed in detail. No research
exists on the corpus of texts that are linked to the Franciscan presence in
the Holy Land. The heritage of manuscripts and printed books in the
library of the Custody has been investigated.94 However, this important
research focuses on producing an up-to-date catalogue of the patrimony
of the library, not investigating the production of texts on the Holy Land
as the present book does. Therefore, the status of the texts from Mount
Zion within the wider body of pilgrimage literature has been essentially
ignored. Some of the texts I uncovered during my research and which I
study below have not previously been worked on. Several important stud-
ies on pilgrimage literature have focused on the writing practices and liter-
ary traditions within which authors of pilgrimage accounts can be placed,95
but little has been done to evaluate the impact of these institutionalized
93
For recent work in this area, see: Beatrice Saletti, I francescani in Terrasanta (1291–1517)
(Padova: libreriauniversitaria.it, 2017); see also: Lemmens, Die Franziskaner im
Heiligen Land.
94
See: Alessandro Tedesco, Itinera ad loca sancta. I libri di viaggio delle Biblioteche
Francescane di Gerusalemme (Milan: Edizioni Terra Santa, 2017).
95
See, for example: Elka Weber, Traveling Through Text: Message and Method in Late
Medieval Pilgrimage Accounts (New York, London: Routledge, 2005); Wes Williams,
Pilgrimage and Narrative in the French Renaissance: ‘The Undiscovered Country’ (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1998).
20 M. CAMPOPIANO
guardians of memory, the Franciscans of Mount Zion, on the establish-

ment of a written memory of the Holy Land. Some recent works have
tried to focus on how the pilgrims themselves are to be positioned between
the literature and the reader, or to understand the relationship between
pilgrimage accounts and the manuscript medium, or the relationship
between early print and previous manuscript works.96 However, these
works do not consider the position of these texts within such an influential
tradition as that of the Franciscans, nor their material transmission as man-
uscripts and early prints. The construction of a shared memory of the holy
places as mediated through these texts has never been investigated.
The Franciscan texts created a “textual community”97 shared by friars,
pilgrims, clerics and scholars in Europe. They elaborated on descriptions
of the Holy Land, which contained much more than practical information
on the itinerary, distances, shrines and relics.98 Yet absence of practical
information does not exclude their use from preparation for pilgrimage.99
Pilgrimage was travel in time as much as it was travel in space: knowledge
of the history of the Holy Land was part of this preparation. Franciscan
compilations and treatises on the Holy Land included extensive historical
information on Palestine and details on the different religious groups
residing there. Chronica sive descriptio: this inscriptio introduces the most
ancient of the descriptions of the Holy Land produced by the convent of
Mount Zion.
Some scholars, such as Gautier Dalché, have already identified the
Mount Zion as the point of diffusion of the grid maps of Palestine: this
volume will expand on this research and discuss the role of this form of
representation of space in the Franciscan representation of the Holy Land.
It will also analyse how maps and pilgrimage accounts interacted and how
Franciscan descriptions cannot be understood in some cases without
96
See, for example: Anne-Sophie Germain-De Franceschi, D’Encre et de poussière. L’écriture
du pèlerinage à l’épreuve de l’intimité du manuscript (Paris: Champion, 2009); Noonan, The
Road to Jerusalem.
97
For the concept of textual community, see Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy:
Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 88–91.
98
Identified by Bartolini and Cardini as the core of the high medieval descriptions of the
Holy Land: Bartolini, Cardini, Nel Nome di Dio facemmo vela, 75.
99
Kathryn M. Rudy, “An Illuminated English Guide to Pilgrimage in the Holy Land:
Oxford, Queen’s College, MS 357,” in Imagining Jerusalem in the Medieval West, ed. Lucy
Donkin and Hanna Vorholt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 219–242.
reference to the images that accompany them.100 The maps that we know
originated from Mount Zion are closely connected to the texts by the
same friars and therefore help us to interpret these texts, visualizing the
very descriptions the Franciscan wrote.
The evolution of the representation of the Holy Land among the friars
of Mount Zion should be understood through interactions with the tradi-
tions of Latin culture in the holy places, and with the way the Franciscans’
activity was perceived and received by Western Christianity. However, the
Franciscans also had to interact with the local population of Palestine.
Contact between Eastern Christian churches, Muslims and Jews was con-
tinuous in the Holy Land. Jerusalem, and Palestine in general, played a
crucial role in the religious identity of these people. The Franciscans often
developed their memory of the Holy Land in contradistinction to these
groups: Roman liturgy was introduced to avoid “contamination” from
Eastern Christian practices, while their definition of the memory of the
holy places often had the effect of displacing Jewish memory attached to
these places in order to focus on the events of the Passion.101 The Franciscan
construction of the memory of the Holy Land cannot be understood
without recalling that it was developed in this context of contact and com-
petition with other religious groups. The descriptions of the holy places
produced by the Franciscans of Mount Zion often included texts on what
the Friars considered theological errors of the Eastern Churches, of the
Muslims and of the Jews.102 The construction of a lieu de mémoire for
Western Christianity went hand in hand with the definition of its alterity
vis-à-vis other religious groups. Memory and identity have an indissoluble
bilateral relationship.103 What a social group remembers as its own past
defines what the group is. People construct identities (however multiple
and changing) by locating themselves or being located within a repertoire
100
Lucy Donkin and Hanna Vorholt, “Introduction,” in Imagining Jerusalem in the
Medieval West, ed. Lucy Donkin and Hanna Vorholt (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2012), 1–13, 7–8; Catherin Delano-Smith, “The Exegetical Jerusalem”; Patrick Gautier
Dalché, “Cartes de Terre Sainte, cartes de pèlerins.”
101
Sylvia Schein, “La Custodia Terrae Sanctae franciscaine et les juifs de Jérusalem à la fin
du Moyen Age,” Revue des Études Juives 141 (1982): 369–377.
102
Michele Campopiano, “Tradizione e edizione di una compilazione di testi sulla Terra
Santa proveniente dal convento francescano del Monte Sion (fine del XIV secolo),” Revue
d’Histoire des Textes 6 (2011): 329–359; Régine Pernoud, Un guide de pèlerin de Terre Sainte
au XVe siècle (Mantes: impr. du Petit Maniais, 1940).
103
Ricoeur, La mémoire, 98.
22 M. CAMPOPIANO
of emplotted stories; this “experience” is constituted through narratives.104

The notions of same and self (and therefore of what is “other” or differ-
ent) are thus connected to memory. Medievalists tend to discuss the issue
of the “other,” and the relationship with the “other.” The problem with
this approach is that it does not explain who the “us” is. It assumes an
“us” based on a Western experience from a contemporary point of view.105
For example, present (and still ill-defined) concepts of “Europe” cannot
be easily transferred to late medieval and early modern culture.106 Identity
is a continuous process of renegotiation and transformation. The
Franciscan approach is interesting, because their descriptions also define
who the Latin Catholics are and establish their identity on the basis of a
shared memory of this lieu de mémoire. The Catholics themselves are
divided by the Franciscans into different groups. Muslims and Jews are
placed in different categories, and different Eastern Christian groups are
also treated separately. There are many ways of understanding “us”
and “them.”
Understanding the content of the descriptions of the Holy Land that
circulated among or were written by the Franciscans of Mount Zion will
also allow us to understand more clearly the kind of representation of the
Holy Land the friars offered to pilgrims in other forms, for example, in
preaching or simply through the prolonged contact and discussion they
had with them in Jerusalem. Another issue that this work tackles is the
continuity of Franciscan representations of the Holy Land after their dif-
fusion in print. The endurance of this continuity of medieval representa-
tions of the Holy Land and the early modern period is understudied. The
popularity of Jerusalem pilgrimage between the second half of the fifteenth
century and the first half of the sixteenth century helped to bring numer-
ous pilgrimage accounts into print.107 According to Noonan, on the eve of
Europe’s print revolution, European travel had been essentially peregrina-
tio causa religionis.108 Pilgrimage may have not been as central to medieval
travel writing as Noonan says. Trade was an important part of medieval life
and generated different forms of writing: from portulans to pratiche di
104
Margaret Somers, “The Narrative Construction of Identity: A Relational and Network
Approach,” Theory and Society 23, no. 5 (1994): 605–649.
105
Camille Rouxpetel, L’Occident au miroir de l’Orient chrétien: Cilicie, Syrie, Palestine et
Égypte (XIIe -XIVe siècle) (Rome: Ecole Française de Rome, 2015), 2–7.
106
Brummet, “Introduction,” 3.
107
Noonan, The Road to Jerusalem, 17–28.
108
Noonan, The Road to Jerusalem, 8.
mercatura, and also narratives concerning merchant travel such as many of

the tales of the Decameron.109 However, pilgrimage literature was indeed
one of the main corpora of texts through which medieval Western readers
came in contact with travel experience and description of other religious
groups. The extensive literature on the holy places in Palestine also offered
a model for writing itineraries and descriptions for other pilgrimage
shrines. Greater awareness of the continuity between medieval and early
modern representations is of as much benefit to early modernists as to
medievalists. Zur Shalev, for example, in his crucial work on geographia
sacra, acknowledges that the geographical elaboration of the biblical text
was not a new exercise in Jewish and Christian traditions. Yet he links it
directly to late antiquity (Eusebius, Jerome) without really addressing the
relationship between medieval tradition and its early modern elabora-
tion.110 This is particularly relevant for Franciscan traditions, the impor-
tance of which Shalev acknowledges.111
This work will be organized in eight chapters. Chapter 2 discusses the
presence of the holy places in the spiritual life of the Order, in particular of
those connected with the events of the life and Passion of Christ, and gives
an outline of the main aspects of the Franciscan presence in the Holy
Land. Chapter 3 will lead us in the library of the Franciscan convent of
Mount Zion as a centre of book production, where we shall study the
friars’ manuscript culture on the basis of the manuscripts still kept in the
library of the Custodia in Jerusalem today. Chapter 4 will discuss forms of
representation of space in Franciscan descriptions and maps elaborated
around the years of the establishment of their presence on Mount Zion,
and the preservation of these forms in the Jerusalem convent. Chapter 5
will analyse compilations of texts on the Holy Land produced in Jerusalem
in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—which played a pivotal role in
establishing the Franciscan archive of texts on the history of the Holy
Land—and their sources. Chapters 6 and 7 will study Franciscan treatises
on the Holy Land between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and their
attempts to establish the centrality of the Holy Land in Western piety and
109
Richard, Les récits de voyages, 8.
110
Zur Shalev, Sacred Words and Worlds Geography, Religion, and Scholarship, 1550–1700
(Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2012), pp. 3–4.
111
Shalev, Sacred Words, 18–19. On the continuity of Franciscan representations of the
Holy Land into the early modern period, see also Michele Piccirillo, “La Gerusalemme
Francescana,” in Una ‘Gerusalemme’ Toscana sullo sfondo di due giubilei 1500–1525, ed.
Sergio Gensini (Florence: SISMEL, 2004), 93–108.
24 M. CAMPOPIANO
religious identity. In Chap. 8 we will enquire into the transmission of

Franciscan lists of indulgences and holy places, and how they were included
in other bodies of pilgrimage writings. Chapter 9 deals with the dynamics
by which this galaxy of texts influenced the formation of pilgrimage
accounts. This chapter will be followed by an Appendix, including a sum-
mary description of the manuscripts investigated more in depth in
the book.
CHAPTER 2
The Franciscan Holy Land
The life and passion of Christ were crucial to Franciscan religiosity: God
had marked Francis with Christ’s wounds, and representing Francis as
alter Christus emphasized the corporeal presence of Christ, his deeds and
the reality of his Passion. Images commissioned by Franciscans in the thir-
teenth and fourteenth centuries stressed Francis’ devotion to the Passion.1
The Holy Land thus gained a central role in Franciscan thought, and this
led to a strong interest in establishing a Franciscan presence there. In this
chapter, we shall investigate first the place of the Holy Land in Franciscan
thought and spirituality and subsequently how the Franciscans strove to
establish a presence in the Holy Land and to maintain and strengthen their
role in the Levant.
The Franciscans and the Holy Land

Franciscan writers often emphasized the corporeality of Christ, the reality
of his death and his materiality, and therefore the importance of the places
touched by Him. Saint Francis writes in the Epistola toti Ordini missa
(probably after 1223) that the community of the faithful is made sacred by
its contact with the body of Christ in the Host, just as the Virgin was by
1
Nancy M. Thompson, “The Franciscans and the True Cross: the Decoration of the
Cappella Maggiore of Santa Croce in Florence,” Gesta 43, no. 1 (2004): 61–79; Anne
Derbes, Picturing the Passion in Late Medieval Italy: Narrative Painting, Franciscan
Ideologies and the Levant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 16–24.
© The Author(s) 2020 25

M. Campopiano, Writing the Holy Land, The New Middle Ages,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52774-7_2
26 M. CAMPOPIANO
bearing him and the Sepulchre was by enclosing him after death.2 In the
Epistola encyclica de transitu sancti Francisci, attributed to Elias of Cortona
(ca. 1180–1253, among the first to join Francis and then Vicar general of
the Friars), we read:
Non diu ante mortem frater et pater noster apparuit crucifixus, quinque
plagas, quae vere sunt stigmata Christi, portans in corpore suo. Nam manus
eius et pedes quasi puncturas clavorum habuerunt, ex utraque parte con-
fixas, reservantes cicatrices suas et clavorum nigredinem ostendentes. Latus
vere eius lanceatum apparuit et saepe sanguinem evaporavit.3
Not long before the death our brother and father [Francis] appeared cruci-
fied, bearing on his body the five wounds, which are the real stigmata of
Christ. For his hands and feet had piercings almost as those of the nails,
pierced through both parts, retaining his scars and showing the blackness of
the nails. His side truly appeared speared and often spilled blood.
Other foundational texts for Franciscan identity—such as the Legenda

Maior by Saint Bonaventure (1221–1274), an account of the life of Saint
Francis—also make frequent use of Passion imagery and of the connection
of Francis with Jesus and his Passion.4 The Legenda Maior received the
approbation of the general chapter of the order in 1263, and as a result
each of the thirty-four provinces of the order received a copy.5 Francis was
an example for his fellow Christians; this is shown also by the “signaculum
2
Claudio Leonardi, ed., La letteratura francescana, I, Francesco e Chiara d’Assisi (Milano:
Mondadori, 2004), 198–215, 204. See also Lydia Schumacher, Early Franciscan Theology.
Between Authority and Innovation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 30–54.
3
Leonardi, ed., La letteratura francescana, I, 248–255, 250–252.
4
Also, in the precedent lives of Saint Francis, the comparison between the stigmata of
Francis and the wounds of Christ is clearly expressed. We read in the Vita brevior by Thomas
of Celano, written between 1232 and 1239, edited by Jacques Dalarun: “Cernebant corpus
beati patris Christi stigmatibus decoratum, in medio videlicet manuum et pedum ipsius non
clavorum quidem puncturas, sed ipsos clavos ex eius carne compositos, immo carni eidem
innatos, ferri retenta nigredine, ac dextrum latus sanguine rubricatum (They saw the body of
the blessed Father [Francis] decorated with the stigmata of Christ, that is to say in the middle
of his hands and feet in fact not the puncture of the nails, rather the very nails composite of
flesh, born to the same flesh, having retained the blackness of iron, and the right side red-
dened by the blood),” Jacques Dalarun, “Thomae Celanensis Vita Veati Patris nostri Francisci
(Vita brevior). Présentation et édition critique.” Analecta Bollandiana 133, no. 1 (2015):
23–86, 65.
5
Bonaventure, La leggenda di Francesco, ed. Claudio Leonardi (Milan: Mondadori,
2013), 9.
2 THE FRANCISCAN HOLY LAND 27
similitudinis Dei viventis, Christi videlicet crucefixi, quod in corpore ipsius

fuit impressum.”6 The stigmata were impressed on him a few days after he
had written the rule of the Order, as a sign of approbation.7 Francis there-
fore bears on his body the marks of the Crucifix. After his conversion:
Dum enim una dierum sic sequestratus oraret et prae nimietate fervoris
totus esset absorptus in Deum, apparuit ei Christus Iesus veluti cruci fixus.
Ad cuius conspectum liquefacta est anima eius, et memoria Passionis Christi
visceribus cordis ipsius adeo impressa medullitus, ut ab illa hora, cum Christi
crucifixio veniret in mentem, vix posset a lacrymis et gemitibus exterius con-
tinere, sicut ipse postmodum familiariter retulit cum appropinquaret
ad finem.8
For while one day he prayed in solitude and because of the excess of ardour
was completely absorbed in God, Jesus Christ appeared to him as crucified.
At the sight of this his soul is liquefied, and the memory of the Passion of
Christ is impressed into the depths of his heart in his inmost soul in such a
way, that from then, when the crucifixion of Christ came in his mind, he
could barely restrain himself from tears and sorrows, like he familiarly
referred when he approached the end.
Christ crucified rested in his mind: “Christus Iesus crucifixus intra suae
mentis ubera ut myrrhae fasciculus iugiter morabatur, in quem optabat per
excessivi amoris incendium totaliter transformari.”9 Francis wished to
emulate the martyrs, to die for the faithful as Christ did.10 This is why he
left towards the infideles: “pro fide Trinitatis effusione sui sanguinis
dilatanda.”11 For the excessive love of Jesus, Francis wanted to be cruci-
fied, receiving the stigmata:
quodam mane circa festum Exaltationis sanctae Crucis, dum oraret in latere
montis, vidit seraph unum sex alas habentem, tam ignitas quam splendidas,
de caelorum sublimitate descendere. Cumque volatu celerrimo pervenisset
6
“Sign of the similarity of the living God, namely of the crucified Christ, which was
impressed in his body”; Bonaventure, La leggenda, Prologus, chap. 2, 34.
7
Bonaventure, La leggenda, book IV, chap. 7, 91.
8
Bonaventure, La leggenda, book I, chap. 5, 46.
9
“Jesus Christ crucified dwelled uninterruptedly in the breasts of his mind like a bundle of
myrrh, in whom he wanted to be transformed totally through the fire of excessive love,”
Bonaventure, La leggenda, book IX, chap. 2, 162.
10
Bonaventure, La leggenda book IX, chap. 2, 162.
11
“To spread the faith of Trinity through the effusion of his blood,” Bonaventure, La
leggenda, book IX, chap. 7, 168.
28 M. CAMPOPIANO
ad aeris locum viro Dei propinquum, apparuit inter alas effigies hominis
crucifixi, in modum crucis manus et pedes extensos habentis et cruci
affixos.12
One morning close to the feast of the exaltation of the Holy Cross, while he
prayed on the side of the mountain, he saw a seraph having six wings, so set
on fire as splendid, descending from the height of the sky. And when with
a very fast flight it came to a place in the air close to the man of God,
appeared between the wings the image of a crucified man, having the hands
and feet extended in the form of the Cross and affixed to the Cross.
Francis rejoices at this sight, but he is also afflicted by the sorrows of see-
ing Him on the Cross:
Intellexit tandem ex hoc, Domino revelante, quod ideo huius modi visio sic
divina providentia suis fuerat praesentata conspectibus, ut amicus Christi
praenosset, se non per martyrium carnis, sed per incendium mentis totum in
Christi crucifixi similitudinem transformandum.13
He finally understood from this, by the revelation of God, that a vision of
this form had been presented to his sight by the divine providence, so that
the friend of Christ could know, that he was to be transformed into the simi-
larity of Christ crucified, if not by the martyrdom of the flesh, by the total
burning of the soul.
Francis received the stigmata: he could also see a wound on his side, as if
he had been stabbed by a spear. In this way, the image of the Crucifix
(Crucifixi effigies) is “non in tabulis lapideis vel ligneis manu figuratam
artificis, vel in carneis membris descriptam digito Dei vivi.”14 Francis also
exalted the Virgin Mary, thanks to whom mankind received mercy.15
Bonaventure also emphasizes the special connection between Francis and
the Cross in many of his sermons.16 The sign of the Cross must appear to
all believers, but God showed it in particular in two human beings, the
emperor Constantine and Francis: “Placuit ergo Domino, sicut ipse voluit
12
Bonaventure, La leggenda book XIII, chap. 3, 222–224.
13
Bonaventure, La leggenda book XIII, chap. 3, 224.
14
“Not represented in stone or wood tables by the hand of an artist, but written in the
limbs of flesh by the finger of the living God”; Bonaventure, La leggenda, book XIII,
chap. 4, 226.
15
Bonaventure, La leggenda, book IX, chap. 3, 162.
16
Eric Doyle, ed., The Disciple and the Master: St. Bonaventure’s Sermons on St. Francis of
Assisi (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1983).
2 THE FRANCISCAN HOLY LAND 29
tempore illius Constantini finem imponere tribulationibus et bellis quae

errant in mondo, per signum victoriae, hoc est per signum crucis osten-
sum Constantino, et sic voluit signum victoriae ponere in beato
Francisco.”17
The Memoriale of Saint Angela da Foligno, Franciscan tertiary (ca.
1248–1309),18 whose spiritual experience was written by a Franciscan friar
(the non-identified “friar A”), includes several meditations on the crucifix,
the body of Christ and the Passion.19 These include meditations on the
sorrows of the Virgin Mary, which became crucial to Franciscan
spirituality:
Et figebam me in sancto Ioanne et in Matre Dei cogitando dolorem eorum,

rogando ipsos quod ipsi acquirerent michi istam gratiam, scilicet quod sen-
tirem semper de dolore passionis Christi vel saltem de dolore eorum. Et ipsi
inveniebant michi, sed et adhuc ipsi inveniunt michi. Unde et tantum dedit
michi semel sanctus Ioannes, quod fuit de maximis quod unquam senserim.
Et dabatur michi intelligere quod sanctus Ioannes tantum dolorem sustinu-
erat de passione et de morte Christi et de dolore matris Christi, quod exsti-
mabam et existimo eum fuisse plus quam martyr.20
And I imagined myself as Saint John and the Mother of God meditating
their sorrows, asking them that they obtained for me this grace, that it is to
say that I felt always the sorrow of the Passion of Christ or sometimes their
sorrow. And they implored it but they also implore it for me till now.
And from this Saint John gave me one so much, that it was among the great-
est things I ever sensed. And it was given to me to understand that Saint
17
“It pleased the Lord, like He wanted in the time of that Constantine to put an end to
the tribulations and wars which run across the work, by the sign of the victory, this is the sign
of the Cross showed to Constantine, and so he wanted to put the sign of victory in the
Blessed Francis”; S. Bonaventurae Opera Omnia, vol. IX, ed. David Fleming (Quaracchi:
Collegio S. Bonaventura, 1902), 587.
18
Angela da Foligno, Memoriale, ed. Enrico Menestó (Florence: SISMEL, 2013), XXVI–
XXIX; see also on the redaction of the Memoriale: Alessandra Bartolomei Romagnoli, “Sulla
edizione Menestò del Memoriale di Angela da Foligno.” Frate Francesco 80, no. 2 (2014):
475–486; Alessandra Bartolomei Romagnoli, “Angela da Foligno dottore della Trinità.”
Frate Francesco 80, no. 2 (2014): 205–220; Attilio Bartoli Langeli, “Il Codice di Assisi.
Ovvero il Liber Sororis Lelle” and Emilio Paoli, “Le due redazioni del Liber: il perché di una
riscrittura,” in Angèle de Foligno: Le dossier, ed. Giulia Barone, Jacques Dalarun (Rome:
Ecole Française de Rome: 1999), 7–27 and 29–70.
19
See, for example: Angela da Foligno, Memoriale, 6, 11, 30, 40, 93.
20
Angela da Foligno, Memoriale, 9.
30 M. CAMPOPIANO
John sustained so much sorrow about the Passion and Death of Christ and
of the sorrow of the Mother of Christ, that I believed and believe he was
more than a martyr.
The controversial and influential Franciscan author Peter John Olivi

(1248–1298) writes in a letter to the sons of Charles II of Anjou that they
should continuously admire the greatness of the Cross of Christ and his
Passion.21 In a letter to the friar Corrado da Offida, he writes that the dig-
nity and authority of the Pope derives from the Passion and Cross of
Christ.22 As these citations show, the exaltation of the Cross and the neces-
sity of continuously representing the Passion, the foundation of
Christianity, were essential to the formation and development of the
Franciscan order.
It is among the Friars—the so-called spiritual Franciscans—that we find
some of the clearest expressions of devotion for the places of the Passion
and for the Holy Cross. Ubertino da Casale (ca. 1259–1329), in his Arbor
Vitae crucifixae Iesu (The tree of the crucified life of Jesus), writes that he
wanted to turn over in his mind the life of Christ and of His Mother: “non
tam preterita recolere quam presentia iugiter mihi videret inspicere.”23
Ubertino also explains that to meditate on the birth of Christ the believer
must consider time (tempus), place (locus), the visible nature (natura visi-
bilis) and the witness of the entire creation (universe creature testimonium),24
stimulating the believer to understand the geography of the Land of
Promise. The Umbrian Franciscan Jacopone da Todi (ca. 1230–1306)
writes in one of his Laude that Christ is the book of life, and the five
21
Pietro di Giovanni Olivi, Scritti Scelti, ed. Paolo Vian (Rome: Città Nuova, 1989), 210;
see also 152; Franz Ehrle, “Petrus Iohannis Olivi, sein Leben und seine Schriften.” Archiv
für Litteratur- und Kirchengeschichte des Mittelalters 3 (1887): 409–552, 534–540.
22
Livarius Oliger, “Petri Iohannis Olivi de renuntiatione pape Coelestini V Quaestio et
Epistola,” Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 11 (1918): 366–373; Pietro di Giovanni
Olivi, Scritti Scelti, 219.
23
“It appeared immediately to me not to recall them as past but observe them as present”;
Ubertinus de Casali, Liber qui intitulatur Arbor Vitae crucifixae (Venice: Andrea de Bonettis:
1485), prologus, fol. a IIr (on Ubertino see: David Burr, The Spiritual Franciscans. From
Protest to Persecution in the Century After Francis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2001), 261–278; Raoul Manselli, “Pietro di Giovanni Olivi ed. Ubertino da Casale,”
“Studi Medievali” 6 (1965): 94–121).
24
Ubertinus de Casali, Liber qui intitulatur Arbor Vitae crucifixae, book I, chap. xi, fol. d IIIr.
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Writing The Holy Land: The Franciscans of Mount Zion and The Construction of A Cultural Memory, 1300-1550 1st Ed. Edition Michele Campopiano

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Writing The Holy Land: The Franciscans of Mount Zion and The Construction of A Cultural Memory, 1300-1550 1st Ed. Edition Michele Campopiano

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Writing the Holy Land: The Franciscans

of Mount Zion and the Construction of a

Three Pilgrimages to the Holy Land: Saewulf: A True

The Oxford History of the Holy Land 1st Edition Robert

Memory and Enlightenment: Cultural Afterlives of the

The Oxford Illustrated History of the Holy Land H.G.M.

Walter Benjamin and the Idea of Natural History

The BBC, The 'War on Terror' and the Discursive

The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New

The Power of Memory and Violence in Central America 1st

More information about this series at

Writing the Holy

The New Middle Ages

with the philosophy of Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) and especially with

Obviously, I do not believe that this volume can provide an answer to

York, UK Michele Campopiano

Scientific Research. Project Cultural memory and identity in the Late

1 Introduction: Writing the Holy Land 1

2 The Franciscan Holy Land 25

3 The Convent of Mount Zion and Book Production and

4 Early Franciscan Descriptions and Maps of the Holy Land 89

5 Franciscan Compilations, Miscellaneous Manuscripts and

6 Franciscan Descriptions of the Holy Land in the Fifteenth

7 Between the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance225

8 The Lists of Holy Places and Indulgences (Indulgenziari)

9 Franciscan Texts and Late Medieval Pilgrimage Accounts305

10 Conclusions: Loss, Trauma, Recovery349

Appendix: Summary Description of Analysed Manuscripts355

ASTC: Archivio storico della Custodia di Terra Santa

Introduction: Writing the Holy Land

© The Author(s) 2020 1

Routledge, 2016), 241–255; Wolfgang Schneider, “Peregrinatio Hierosolymitana. Studien

Morris, The Sepulchre, 1–2.

(New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1992), XV.

metaphorical journey to Jerusalem. In another letter he writes that

Jerusalem and in the entire Palestine region. This territorial perspective

Jerusalem, and mystics and religious scholars began to establish them-

the Christian soul was perceived as constantly threatened by the wiles of

The idea of memory as an essentially “collective” phenomenon, as a

I believe we cannot assume a spontaneous evolution for such traditions,

could be inserted within “learned” descriptions, and this fluidity contin-

more complex: the Franciscans developed different, more elaborate texts

century) inserts sections of descriptions of other treatises in his account.88

Holy Land in the whole of Western Christianity. The Franciscan memory

guardians of memory, the Franciscans of Mount Zion, on the establish-

of emplotted stories; this “experience” is constituted through narratives.104

mercatura, and also narratives concerning merchant travel such as many of

religious identity. In Chap. 8 we will enquire into the transmission of

The Franciscan Holy Land

The Franciscans and the Holy Land

© The Author(s) 2020 25

Other foundational texts for Franciscan identity—such as the Legenda

similitudinis Dei viventis, Christi videlicet crucefixi, quod in corpore ipsius

tempore illius Constantini finem imponere tribulationibus et bellis quae

Et figebam me in sancto Ioanne et in Matre Dei cogitando dolorem eorum,

The controversial and influential Franciscan author Peter John Olivi

Zara, 261 sq.

Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions

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York, UK Michele Campopiano

1 Introduction: Writing the Holy Land 1

2 The Franciscan Holy Land 25

3 The Convent of Mount Zion and Book Production and

4 Early Franciscan Descriptions and Maps of the Holy Land 89

5 Franciscan Compilations, Miscellaneous Manuscripts and

6 Franciscan Descriptions of the Holy Land in the Fifteenth

7 Between the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance225

8 The Lists of Holy Places and Indulgences (Indulgenziari)

9 Franciscan Texts and Late Medieval Pilgrimage Accounts305

10 Conclusions: Loss, Trauma, Recovery349

Appendix: Summary Description of Analysed Manuscripts355