Fontes et pontes fluviorum, et strata viarum.
More than all these, in sixteenth-century eyes, was the fact that they possessed Constantinople, recognised as the city whose possession necessarily carried with it the political headship of the world by reason of its situation taken in conjunction with its imperial associations. They dominated Greece, also, the source of intellectual light, and Egypt, the home of science. More than all these, they ruled at Jerusalem.
PART II
JERUSALEM AND THE WAY THITHER
PILGRIM-SONG IN 16th-CENTURY SETTING[86]
From all points of view except that of geography Jerusalem was forming part of Europe; the spot where was localised what was recognised as the prime factor in their mental and spiritual ancestry, life, and future. What it is now to a convinced Zionist, it was then to the average Christian. But the idea of securing Jerusalem as an axiom, almost an incidental axiom, of practical politics requires, perhaps, a word or two of explanation, considering how far the modern habit of weeding out theology from all politics but party-politics has gone; and this the more so since little help is to be had from histories, written, as they naturally are, to defend, attack, or explain the present rather than the past, and dealing, consequently, with the past, only in so far as it throws light, not on itself, but on things current.
History having become specialised into accounts of the political events of the past in relation to to-day and to-morrow, the interest of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has come to be concentrated on the development of national and centralised governments. It is therefore left out of account that the ideas at the back of the average sixteenth century man's mind were such as assumed that the world, and Europe in particular, was under theocratic government; and consequently that what seem to us independent sovereigns developing national monarchies seemed to him so many deputies of the Almighty—"many," because of the sins of the world—ruling by permission until the appointed time should come for the unification of Europe under the one true head, the completion of whose work would be a final gigantic Crusade which would pulverise the Turk and secure Jerusalem for Christianity, world without end. In fact, the conquest of Jerusalem held much the same place in international politics as "disarmament" with us; just so far ideal as to make discussion of it interesting, and sufficiently impracticable to be common ground. If these ideas seem too mediæval to be attributed to the sixteenth century, it is because their more "modern" ideas have been disproportionately insisted on since; seven-eighths of their life was mediæval—and a large part of the remaining eighth the majority would have wished to disown.
Where the leaven of new ideas was showing itself was not in a cessation, but in a decrease, of pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The state of transition is definitely marked by the diversity of the preoccupations which men carried thither; the change itself by the discontinuance of the pilgrim galleys. This took place between 1581 and 1586. It had been usual for two galleys to sail to Jaffa and back each year specially for pilgrims, from Venice, starting on different dates between Ascension Day and early in July; the latter date being dictated by the weather, the former doubtless by everybody's desire to wait to witness the Espousal of the Sea. In 1581 a boat[87] started on May 7 or 8 with fifty-six on board, all told; this was wrecked in the Adriatic, thirty persons only being saved. On July 14, another left, but the pilgrims by this had to change into a smaller vessel at Cyprus. In 1587, however, a guide-book writer,[88] advising on the basis of his experiences the previous year, tells the pilgrim to take the first boat to Tripoli in the spring, before Easter if possible, otherwise there may be none towards Palestine till August, since the pilgrim-galleys have ceased sailing, although the procession is still kept up at Venice in which every intending pilgrim had the honour of walking on the right hand of a noble, bearing a lighted wax candle. That this discontinuance was sudden and recent may be assumed from the fact that a priest who was visiting the shrines of Christendom as the deputy of Philip II, who had vowed such a pilgrimage when his son was ill, hurried[89] on his way to Italy in 1587, expecting to find a pilgrim-galley ready to start. But that this discontinuance was not merely temporary is clear enough from all subsequent writers.