Going down to the Jordan, "four leagues east of Jericho," Arabia was seen beyond "hateful to all who worship God, but having the Mount whence Elias was carried into Heaven in a chariot of fire."
Eighteen days journey from the Jordan is Mount Sinai, by way of Hebron, where "Abraham's Holm Oak" was still standing, and where, as pilgrims said, he "sat and ate with God," but Sæwulf himself did not go outside Palestine, on this side. After travelling through Galilee and noting the House of Saint Archi-Triclin (Saint "Ruler-of-the-Feast"), at Cana, he made his way to Byzantium by sea, escaping the Saracen cruisers and weathering the storms that wrecked in the roads of Jaffa before his eyes some twenty of the pilgrim and merchant fleet then lying at anchor. But not only can we see from this how the religious and commercial traffic of the Mediterranean had been increased by the Crusades; the main lines of that traffic had been changed. Since the Moslem conquest, visitors had mostly come to Palestine through Egypt; the Christian conquest of Syria re-opened the direct sea route as the conversion of Hungary and north-east Europe had re-opened the direct land route one hundred years before (c. 1000-1100). The lines of the Danube valley and of the "Roman Sea" were both cleared, and the West again poured itself into the East as it had not done since Alexander's conquest, since the Oriental reaction had set in about the time of the Christian era, rising higher and higher into the full tide of the Persian and Arabian revivals of Asiatic Empire.
Among the varied classes of pilgrim-crusaders in Sæwulf's day were student-devotees like Adelard and Daniel from the two extremes of Christendom, England and Russia, Bath and Kiev; northern sea-kings like Sigurd, or Robert of Normandy; even Jewish travellers, rabbis, or merchants like Benjamin of Tudela. All these, as following in the wake of the First Crusade, and for the most part stopping at the high-water mark of its advance, belong to the same group and time and impulse as Sæwulf himself, and are clearly marked off from the great thirteenth century travellers, who acted as pioneers of the Western Faith and Empire rather than as camp-followers of its armies.
But except Abbot Daniel (c. 1106) and Rabbi Benjamin (c. 1160-73) who stand apart, none of our other pilgrim examples of twelfth century exploration have anything original or remarkable about them.
Adelard or Athelard, the countryman of Sæwulf and Willibald, is still more the herald of Roger Bacon and of Neckam. He is a theorist far more than a traveller, and his journey through Egypt and Arabia (c. 1110-14) appears mainly as one of scientific interest. "He sought the causes of all things and the mysteries of Nature," and it was with "a rich spoil of letters," especially of Greek and Arab manuscripts, that he returned to England to translate into Latin one of the chief works of Saracen astronomy, the Kharizmian tables. We have already met with him in trying to follow the transmission of Greek and Indian geography or world-science through the Arabs to Europe and to Christendom.
THE SPANISH-ARABIC MAP OF 1109.
[(see list of maps)]
Abbot Daniel of Kiev in himself is a very ordinary and rather mendacious traveller, a harmless, devout pilgrim, as careless in all matters of fact as Antonine the Martyr. But, as representing the beginnings of Russian expansion, he is of almost unique interest and value. His tract upon the Holy Road is one of the first proofs of his people's interest in the world beyond their steppes, and of that nation's readiness and purpose to expand Christian civilisation in the East as the Franks, after breaking through the Western Moslems, were now doing. Mediæval Russia, Russia before the Tartars, after the Northmen, was now a very different thing from the "people fouler than dogs" of the Arab explorers. The House of Ruric had guided and organised a nation second to none in Europe, till it had fallen into the general lines of Christian development. Jury trial and justices in assize it had taken from the West; its church and faith and architecture, its manners and morals came to it from the court of the Roman Empire on the Bosphorus. Daniel and the other Russians, who passed through that Empire in the age of Nestor for trade or for religion, were the vanguard of a great national and race expansion that is now just beginning to "bestride the world."
In 1022 and 1062 two monks of Kiev are recorded, out of a crowd of the unknown, as visitors to Syria, and about 1106, probably through the news of the Frankish conquest, Daniel left his native river, the Snow, in Little Russia, and passed through Byzantium and by way of the Archipelago and Cyprus to Jaffa and Jerusalem, describing roughly in versts or half-miles the whole distance and that of every stage.