Christian Pilgrimage: Jerusalem, Rome, Santiago and Beyond

Christian pilgrimage is the practice of travelling to a holy place, such as the sites of Christ's life in Jerusalem, the tombs of the apostles in Rome or the shrine of Saint James at Santiago de Compostela, as an act of devotion, penance or thanksgiving. It began in earnest in the fourth century, became one of the defining institutions of medieval Christendom, was attacked by the Protestant reformers, and has revived strongly in modern times, with the Camino de Santiago now walked by hundreds of thousands of people each year.

The Holy Land and the Birth of Christian Pilgrimage§

The earliest Christians had no single sacred centre; the gospel taught that God would be worshipped "in spirit and in truth" rather than on any particular mountain (John 4). A few scholars, such as Melito of Sardis in the second century and Origen in the third, travelled to see biblical places, but mass pilgrimage began only after Emperor Constantine turned to Christianity. His mother Helena toured Palestine around 326–328, and churches were built over the sites associated with the birth of Christ at Bethlehem, his death and burial in Jerusalem, and his ascension on the Mount of Olives. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was dedicated in 335.

The oldest surviving pilgrim itinerary, by an anonymous traveller from Bordeaux, dates from 333. Far richer is the account of Egeria, a woman probably from Gaul or Spain, who travelled through Egypt, Sinai, Palestine and Mesopotamia around 381–384 and wrote to her "sisters" at home. Rediscovered in a manuscript at Arezzo in 1884, her text describes the monks and holy places she visited and the liturgy of Jerusalem, including the Holy Week processions that later shaped worship everywhere. Jerome settled in Bethlehem in 386 with the Roman noblewoman Paula. Not all churchmen approved: Gregory of Nyssa warned that travel to Jerusalem exposed pilgrims to moral dangers and did not bring them closer to God.

Pilgrims brought home tokens of the holy places: small flasks (ampullae) of oil from the lamps at the holy sites, of which sixth-century examples survive at Monza and Bobbio in Italy, and earth or stones from the sites. The belief that holiness could be carried in material objects links pilgrimage to the cult of relics described in Saints, Relics and the Virgin Mary.

Rome and the Jubilee Years§

Rome claimed the tombs of the apostles Peter and Paul, the catacombs of the martyrs and, from the fourth century, great basilicas built over them. Pilgrims from Britain, Ireland and the Frankish lands travelled to Rome ad limina apostolorum, "to the thresholds of the apostles," and the English and other peoples maintained hostels near Saint Peter's. Guidebooks such as the twelfth-century Mirabilia urbis Romae led visitors through the city's churches and ancient wonders.

In 1300 Pope Boniface VIII proclaimed the first Holy Year or Jubilee, offering a plenary indulgence to those who visited the basilicas of Peter and Paul in a state of repentance. The chronicler Giovanni Villani, who was there, described enormous crowds. Jubilees were later held every fifty, then thirty-three, and from 1475 every twenty-five years, with extraordinary jubilees in between. The ceremony of opening a Holy Door in Saint Peter's and the other major basilicas developed in the fifteenth century. In the 1550s Philip Neri organised the walking pilgrimage to Rome's Seven Churches, still followed today. The most recent ordinary Jubilee was held in 2025.

Santiago de Compostela and the Camino§

According to tradition, the body of the apostle James, son of Zebedee, was brought by his disciples from Jerusalem to Galicia in north-western Spain. The tomb was "discovered" in the early ninth century, in the time of King Alfonso II of Asturias and Bishop Theodemir of Iria Flavia, and a church built there grew into the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. James, as Santiago Matamoros, also became a patron of the Christian kingdoms in their wars against Muslim al-Andalus.

By the eleventh and twelfth centuries Santiago ranked with Jerusalem and Rome as one of the three great goals of pilgrimage. The Codex Calixtinus or Liber Sancti Jacobi, compiled in the mid-twelfth century, contains sermons, miracle stories, liturgy and, in its fifth book, a guide for pilgrims describing four routes through France, the towns, rivers and shrines along them, and the character of the peoples the traveller would meet. The scallop shell, gathered on the Galician coast, became the badge of the Santiago pilgrim and later of pilgrims in general.

The pilgrimage declined after the Reformation and almost disappeared in the nineteenth century. Its revival began in the mid-twentieth century and accelerated after 1987, when the Council of Europe declared the routes its first European Cultural Route; the Camino was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993. Pilgrims carry a credential stamped along the way and receive a certificate, the Compostela, if they walk at least the last hundred kilometres. Today many walkers describe their motives as spiritual or cultural rather than strictly religious.

Medieval Pilgrimage: Shrines, Badges and Indulgences§

Medieval Christians went on pilgrimage for many reasons: to seek healing, to fulfil a vow, to give thanks, to do penance imposed by a confessor or a court, or to gain indulgences. A pilgrim received a blessing, a staff and a scrip (bag) before setting out, and enjoyed legal protection on the road. Major shrines included Canterbury, where Archbishop Thomas Becket was murdered in 1170 and quickly canonised; Walsingham in Norfolk, with its replica of the Holy House of Nazareth; Cologne, with the relics of the Magi; and countless regional and local saints' shrines described in Folk Christianity.

Cheap lead and tin badges, cast in moulds at the shrines, were sewn onto hats and cloaks as proof of the journey and as protective tokens; thousands have been recovered from riverbanks in London and the Low Countries. Pilgrimage to Jerusalem continued under Muslim rule, and Pope Urban II's call of 1095 framed the First Crusade as an armed pilgrimage, its participants taking a pilgrim's vow. The English mystic Margery Kempe's account of her journeys to Jerusalem, Rome and Santiago in the early fifteenth century shows both the devotion and the hardships of the road, and Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales uses a pilgrimage as the frame for a portrait of English society.

Reformation Critiques and Eastern Christian Pilgrimage§

Critics had long complained that pilgrims sought adventure more than holiness. Erasmus satirised the relic cults of Walsingham and Canterbury in his colloquy A Pilgrimage for Religion's Sake (1526), and Martin Luther, in his 1520 address To the Christian Nobility, urged the abolition of pilgrimages, which he thought distracted people from their duties and promoted a false trust in works. In England the shrines of Becket and Walsingham were destroyed in 1538. Protestant devotion turned inward, and John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) made pilgrimage an allegory of the soul's journey rather than a physical journey.

In the Orthodox world pilgrimage never ceased. Russian peasants walked to the Holy Land, Kyiv and the great monasteries; Mount Athos, the monastic republic in northern Greece, still receives male pilgrims; and the Holy Fire ceremony at the Holy Sepulchre on Orthodox Holy Saturday draws crowds from across the Orthodox world. The anonymous nineteenth-century Way of a Pilgrim, discussed in Hesychasm and the Jesus Prayer, joined wandering with unceasing prayer. Ethiopian Christians gather in great numbers at the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela, especially for the Nativity feast described in Christmas: History of the Nativity Feast.

Modern Pilgrimage and Its Interpreters§

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought a new wave of Catholic pilgrimage to sites of Marian apparitions, such as Lourdes, Fátima and Guadalupe, the most visited Catholic shrine in the world; see Marian Apparitions. Railways and later air travel made mass pilgrimage possible. Irish pilgrims climb Croagh Patrick on the last Sunday of July and keep a three-day fast on the island of Lough Derg; Anglicans and Catholics have restored Walsingham; and ecumenical communities such as Iona and Taizé attract young people from many churches.

Scholars have studied pilgrimage across religions. The anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner described it as a "liminal" journey in which ordinary social distinctions dissolve into a sense of shared humanity, which they called communitas; later researchers argued that shrines are often places of contest between different groups and meanings. Comparisons with the Islamic hajj, one of the Five Pillars of Islam, and with Buddhist pilgrimage show pilgrimage to be one of the most widespread forms of religious practice in the world.

Frequently asked questions§

What are the three great pilgrimages of medieval Christianity?§

Medieval writers ranked Jerusalem, Rome and Santiago de Compostela as the three principal goals of pilgrimage. Jerusalem held the places of Christ's death and resurrection, Rome the tombs of Peter and Paul, and Santiago the tomb believed to be that of the apostle James.

Why is the scallop shell a symbol of pilgrimage?§

Scallops are found on the Galician coast near Santiago, and medieval pilgrims brought them home as proof of their journey. The shell became the badge of Saint James and is still used to mark the routes of the Camino.

Do Protestants go on pilgrimage?§

The Reformers rejected pilgrimage as a means of earning grace, and for centuries most Protestants avoided it. Many now visit the Holy Land, Iona, Walsingham or the Camino as journeys of prayer and study rather than for indulgences.

Sources and further reading§

• Egeria's Travels — John Wilkinson, 1971
• Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion — Jonathan Sumption, 1975
• Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture — Victor Turner and Edith Turner, 1978
• Pilgrimage in Medieval England — Diana Webb, 2000
• The Pilgrimage to Santiago — Edwin Mullins, 1974
• Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage — John Eade and Michael J. Sallnow, 1991
• Pilgrimage: A Very Short Introduction — Ian Reader, 2015