Fig. 283.—The Virgin of St. Luke (so called).—An image painted on wood, placed in the Church of Sta. Maria Maggiore, now San Paolo-fuor-gli-Muri, at Rome, in the Fourth or Fifth Century.
Fig. 284.—Greek Panagia, or Image of the Holy Virgin, with a Portrait of Jesus Christ upon her bosom.—From the “Antiquities of Russia,” by Sevastianof (Thirteenth Century).
The worship of relics, as well as that of miraculous images, had, beyond question, sometimes degenerated into superstition; but it is impossible to deny the services which it rendered to Christianity in these ages of barbarism. The people, without anything to restrain or to guide them, were in a state of perpetual commotion, easily tempted to evil, a prey to the first adventurer who could show them some ready road to plunder, impatient of all social restraint, moving about from place to place, and dead to all family ties and love of country. Amidst all this disorder, preaching unaccompanied by grand religious spectacles would have been fruitless, and thus the Church revived the worship of relics. Search was made in every direction for the bodies of saints; the bishops themselves journeyed to Italy, to Africa, and to the East to collect the precious remains of those who had sealed their testimony with their blood. When these relics arrived at the place for which they were destined, the people went out to meet them and escort them back. Their transfer to the sanctuary, in which they were solemnly laid, was made the occasion for ornate ceremonies and for numerous pilgrimages (Figs. 286 and 287); and so devotion brought together hostile races which had long been separated by bitter warfare. The deeds done by the saint, who seemed as if present and visible to the eyes of the faithful, were read from the pulpit; the miracles which he had wrought might always be renewed under the influence of fervent prayer; a few cures were soon worked in proximity to his shrine, or upon his tomb. The pilgrims continually increased in number, and the priests gradually regained the moral authority which they had allowed to slip away from them.
Fig. 285.—Miraculous Image of Our Lady of Vladimir, the goal of one of the most famous pilgrimages in Russia.—From the “Antiquities of Russia,” by Sevastianof. (Twelfth Century.)
Fig. 286.—Coffer containing the Hair-cloths of St. Louis, presented by Philippe le Bel, his grandson, to the Abbey of Notre-Dame-du-Lis, near Melun.—The chest is in beech-wood, covered with metal, and with painted designs of the royal insignia of France and Castille, and various allegorical subjects.—Work of the Thirteenth Century, in the Louvre, Paris.
The Crusades were in reality but the general application, upon a larger scale, of those pilgrimages to the Holy Land which the inhabitants of Christian Europe had so long been performing. In the rear of the armed hosts marched with unfurled banners a tribe of infirm pilgrims, women, children, and old men (Fig. 288), led by priests in their sacerdotal vestments—undisciplined multitudes, into whose ranks inevitably crept a number of those miscreants who were the real authors of all the misdeeds with which history has reproached the Crusaders. As to the pilgrimages, the immediate result of this great movement of the European population towards Palestine was the creation, along the road which they had to travel, of a number of receiving-houses, supported and managed by certain religious and military orders, who entertained the wearied and sick pilgrims, and helped them on their journey.