Jerusalem is at once a place in the world, a historic city in the Holy Land, and an image, an idea, a symbol. Jerusalem’s multiple facets are present in the biblical accounts of the city. Perhaps more than any other place or space on the planet, Jerusalem has been represented in writing and culture, at least since the biblical period. Encounters with the earthly Jerusalem and attempts to apprehend the heavenly Jerusalem are a mainstay of the western Christian tradition of travel writing, as well as of Jewish and Muslim literary and devotional traditions. In this essay I alight on some of key representations of Jerusalem but make no claim to completeness. Rather, in this essay I focus on Jerusalem’s status within the medieval Christian tradition of place pilgrimage, especially with regard to the dominant role Jerusalem has played in global geography, popular pilgrimage, and mnemonic retention.

Any modern survey of medieval travel literature whose destination was Compostela, or which mentioned it as a significant waystation, had little to discuss about this small town except as a goal of sacred travel. With the twelfth-century Liber Sancti Jacobi the one stunning exception, pre-Reformation primary sources are essentially preserved in archives outside the Iberian Peninsula. Of the forty-some narratives that report visits to Santiago, nearly all were written by foreigners in foreign vernaculars in manuscripts shelved and nearly forgotten near travelers’ homes. It seems that the consolidation of the Spanish state under Ferdinand and Isabel in the late fifteen century, the stiffening of that nation’s intellectual frontiers, and Spain’s adversarial incursions into European affairs in the sixteenth century coincide with a slow rise in pilgrimage narratives written by native Spaniards. Jacobean pilgrimage contracted. Many foreigners came to despise pilgrimage and largely stopped coming.