Now that Palestine was no longer under Moslem rule, pilgrims thronged from every Christian country to visit the holy places, and Bethlehem was crowded with even greater multitudes than during the days of St. Helena or St. Jerome. At Christmas time the vast concourse of clergy and nobles and pilgrims celebrated the festival with gorgeous pomp in the restored and now magnificent church. There were peals of ringing bells, and triumphant choruses of praise, and swinging of priceless censers, and above the great throng of worshippers a golden star was pulled across the church, while young men on the roof chanted the song of the angels.
“In those days,” Brother Felix tells us, “Bethlehem was full of people, famous and rich. Christians of every country on earth brought presents thither, and exceeding rich merchants dwelt there.”
But with peace and wealth, the Christian population of Bethlehem became more and more enervated and corrupt, until it is said that at last one of the leading men of the town planned to commit a deadly sin within the very precincts of the sacred Cave of the Nativity. When this was reported to the Moslems, they saw that virtue had departed from their Christian rulers, so they were not afraid to rise up against them, and soon they drove them out of all Palestine.
This is only a tradition; but it sounds almost like an allegory of the actual issue of the Crusades and the lamentable fate of the short-lived Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem.
SOME BETHLEHEM LEGENDS
XII
SOME BETHLEHEM LEGENDS
Numberless traditions have sprung up concerning the sacred places in and about Bethlehem and the holy persons who dwelt there. Many of these tales are really beautiful, and even when they will not bear a too critical inspection, there is often a moral overlaid by the extravagant details of the narrative.
The story of the First Roses is told in the words of Sir John Mandeville, who heard it in Bethlehem in the year 1322, except that the spelling of the old knight has necessarily been modernized.