Crusades Almanac | Pilgrimages to the Holy Land and Communities in the Holy Land

• Women, Pilgrimages, and the Crusades
• Penance
• Preparations
• Departure
• Dangers
• Arrival
• The sites
• Chapel of the Innocents
• Christian communities in the Holy Land
• For More Information

To a Christian, Jerusalem during the Middle Ages (500–1500) was both a place on a map and an idea. On the map, it was a far-off city that Christians, if they could read, knew of from the Bible, and if they could not, they learned about from their priests and bishops. As an idea, though, Jerusalem and other sites in the Holy Land fired the spiritual imagination of Christians, because...