Bernard, "the French Monk" of Mont St. Michel, took the straight route overland by Rome to Bari, then a Saracen city, whose Emir forwarded the pilgrims in a fleet of transports carrying some nine thousand Christian slaves to Alexandria. Here, like Willibald, Bernard found himself "suspect"—thrown into prison till Backsheesh had been paid, then only allowed to move stage by stage as fees were prompt and sufficient, for a traveller must pay, as an infidel, not only the ordinary tribute of the subject Christians of Egypt, but the "money of the road" as well. Islam has always made of strangers a fair mark for extortion.
Safe at last in Jerusalem, the party (Bernard himself and two friends, one a Spaniard, the other a monk of Beneventum) were lodged "in the Hostel of the glorious Emperor Charles, founded for all the pilgrims who speak the Roman tongue," and after making the ordinary visits of devotion, and giving us their account of the Easter Miracle of the Holy Fire at the Church of the Sepulchre, they took ship for Italy, and landed at Rome after sixty days of misery at sea.
Bernard's account closes with the Roman churches—the Lateran, where the "keys of the whole city are given every night into the hands of the Apostolic Pope," and St. Peter's on the "West side of Rome, that for size has no rival in the world."
At the same time, or a little earlier than the Breton traveller (c. 808-850), another Latin had written a short tract On the Houses of God in Jerusalem, which, with Bernard's note-book, is our last geographical record before the age of the Northmen.
A new time was coming—a time not of timid creeping pilgrims only, but of sea-kings and seamen, who made the ocean their home, and, for the North of Europe at least, broke the tradition of land journeys and coasting voyages.
But the early pilgrims after all have their place. It is of no use insisting that the mental outlook of these men is infantile;—that is best proved by their own words, their own scale of things; but it is necessary to insist that in these travellers we have comparatively enlarged experience and knowledge; and as comparison is the only test of any age, or of any man therein, the very blunders and limitations of the past, as we see them to be, have a constant, as well as an historical, value to us. That is, we are always being reminded, first, how we have come to the present mastery over nature, over ourselves, over all being; and, secondly, how imperfect, how futile, our work is still, and seems always doomed to be, if judged from a really final standpoint, or rather from our own dreams of the ultimately possible.
So if in the case of our mediæval travellers their interests are the very reverse of ours; if they take delight in brooding over thoughts which to us do not seem worth the thinking; if their minds seem to rest as much on fable implicitly accepted as on the little amount of experienced fact necessary for a working life, it will not be for us to judge, or to pity, or to despise the men who were making our world for us, and through whose work we live.
THE MAPPE-MONDE OF ST. SEVER.
[(see list of maps)]