Military and religious life in the Middle Ages and at the period of the Renaissance

by P. L. Jacob

In the third century, but even more so in the fourth, Christian men and women of all nations visited the places mentioned in the Gospel as having been the scenes of some episode in the life of Jesus Christ, from the stable at Bethlehem to the Calvary of Golgotha. Amongst this host of pilgrims, history has handed down to us the names of St. Hilarius, St. Basilius the Great, and his brother St. Gregory of Nyssa, who wrote a discourse concerning the visitors to Jerusalem; St. Jerome also, with the Scriptures in his hand, made the solemn pilgrimage, accompanied by learned theologians such as the Bishop of Gaza, Porphyrius, and Rufinus of Aquileia, and by several saintly women, Melanie, Paula, Fabiola, Eustochia, who were scarcely less erudite than the doctors.

We find the proofs of these early pilgrimages in the inscriptions traced with the point of the stylus, or merely with charcoal, upon the plaster of the walls of the Catacombs at Rome. There are many in the cemetery of St. Calixtus which give expression to pious thoughts, touching prayers, and some interesting events. In the crypt of the old church at Montmartre, where, as there is reason to believe, the martyrdom of St. Denis (Fig. 279) and his companions took place, there were found many similar inscriptions, which would seem to indicate that there, as at Rome, the pilgrims have left traces of their visits.

The Catacombs at Rome are full of images of saints, painted in fresco on a groundwork of glass or mosaics in coloured stones; and many of them, some dating from the second and even from the first century of the Church, seem to mark the stations at which the primitive pilgrims halted or knelt or prayed.

The memory of any act which has excited admiration, or has impressed itself vividly, long remains indelible in the heart of the people, to which fact must be attributed the origin and long duration of a number of pilgrimages which date from the early ages of Christianity. The commemorative marks of these pilgrimages remained unknown to posterity, until recourse was had to consecrated standards (signa), to images, and to amulets which generally bore the monogram of Christ or the sign of the redemption. The cross was never of the shape which it assumed in the fourth century, being rather the cross termed commissa or patibulata—in the form of the Greek letter tau (T), which, as tradition tells us, corresponded exactly to the shape of the cross upon which our Lord suffered death. This kind of cross is, in fact, to be seen on amulets or reliquaries of the third century; it was embroidered on garments and engraved upon tombs. The cross was thus the symbol of pilgrimage, as it was afterwards the emblem of the Crusades.

Fig. 280.—St. Barbara, a Maiden of Nicomedia, who suffered Martyrdom in the Third Century.—Drawn with the pen and pencil by John Van Eyck, called John of Bruges, in honour of the building of a church dedicated to her.—In the Museum at Antwerp (Fifteenth Century).

The worship of relics, whatever be its origin, was a natural adjunct to the worship of the tombs in which Christ’s confessors were laid, and of the soil where their martyrdom had taken place; thus the smallest fragment of a saint’s body, the most trifling piece of raiment, or most insignificant object (tantillæ reliquiæ) that had belonged to a blessed martyr, and more especially anything which represented a material reminder of the glorious death which a Christian had won in confessing the Gospel, was carefully preserved as a relic. Thus the periods of persecution were the most favourable for the multiplication of these relics. Almost before the martyr’s sufferings were over, a crowd of believers invaded the amphitheatres and arenas, carried off and concealed the mortal remains of the victim, collected his precious blood in sponges, and almost fought for the very sand upon which it was shed; and when the new saint had been laid in some sure resting-place, they vied with each other in sprinkling sweet perfumes over the body, in wrapping it up in white linen, and even in purple and gold. His solemn interment afterwards took place in some sanctuary (loculum) of the Catacombs, which was afterwards visited by numerous and devout pilgrims who came to pay their pious homage to his memory.

One of the earliest instances of this worship of the martyrs is furnished us in the hagiography of St. Ignatius, who suffered martyrdom at Rome in the reign of Trajan. We see therein how, in spite of the armed attendants and heathen crowds which filled the amphitheatre where the execution had taken place, some courageous Christians, at the risk of their own lives, secured the remains of the prelate in order to convey them to his own church at Antioch. In a letter concerning the martyrdom of St. Polycarp, quoted by Eusebius, it is stated that the faithful carried away his bones, more precious in their eyes than gold and precious stones, and concealed them in a fitting-place (ubi decebat).

The unanimous testimony of St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, St. Leo, St. Cyprian, St. Chrysostom, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, and of all the most illustrious Fathers of the Greek, African, Eastern, Roman, and Gallican Churches, proves that the worship of martyrs, of the places of their nativity (natalia), of their burial-places, and of their relics, was established in the Christian world before the close of the fourth century (Fig. 280). The various liturgies, sacramentaries, missals, and rituals confirm this testimony. Moreover, the primitive Church had, in a measure, joined the worship of relics to the sacrifice of the eucharist by celebrating the latter upon the tombs of the martyrs. This ancient usage was raised into a liturgical law under the pontificate of St. Felix (269), as St. Athanasius affirms in his biography of that saint. When the persecutions had ceased, basilicas sub dio, or under the open sky, were raised over the crypts which held the bodies of the martyr-saints.

The enormous sum of five hundred golden sous, representing seven pounds of gold, the price for the body of an obscure martyr in the third century, fails to give an idea of the fabulous sums which were expended at that period to obtain possession of the bodies of the saints. Men hoped, to use an expression borrowed from the Acts of St. Firmus and St. Rusticus, that by so doing they were laying up treasures for the life to come; and this explains why Luitprand, King of the Lombards, purchased the relics of St. Augustine for their weight in gold.