ioo RENAISSANCES

to break his journey, and lighten his purse, at Rome;1 but Rome, in her
turn, had to part with some of the custom thus captured by her from
Jerusalem to younger holy places more conveniently placed than Rome
herself. A pilgrim heading towards Rome from Lombardy might earn
his merit and spend his money nearer home at Loreto; and a devout
native of England might make his pilgrimage to Canterbury or Wal-
singham without having to leave the shores of his insular alter or bis.2 It
was left for France to emulate in a nineteenth-century Western Christen-
dom the feat achieved by Khurasan in a sixteenth-century Shi' he
fraction of Dar-al- Islam. At Mashhad, Khurasan had given birth to a
shrine that would draw Shx'I Muslim pilgrims in the opposite direction
from Qarbala and Mecca. At Lourdes and at Lisicux, France similarly
gave birth to shrines that could draw Roman Catholic Christian pilgrims
in the opposite direction from Rome and Jerusalem.

The foregoing examples illustrate the tendency of a pilgrimage-hori-
zon to contract from the oecumenical range set for it by the world-wide
expansion of a universal church to the parochial limits of sects, civiliza-
tions, and states. This tendency towards a narrowing of the horizon on the
religious plane had, however, sometimes been checked or reversed by a
counter-tendency on the military, political, and economic planes. This
counter-movement would be set in motion by an impulse to recapture
by main force a lost hold upon some site that was still holy ground in the
now militant pilgrims' eyes in virtue of its having been the birthplace of
their society's chrysalis-church; and such impulses were the offspring
of renaissances, since they were responses to the appeal of a ghost who
had risen from the dead to exercise his powers of fascination upon the
living.

A classic example of a renaissance thus expressing itself geographically
in a militant movement of expansion is the explosion of a Medieval
Western Christendom in the Mediterranean in the Crusades,3 In effect
the Crusades were assaults made by Medieval Western Christian ngres-
sors on the contemporary domains of their living Muslim and Orthodox
Christian neighbours ; but the conscious motive of these Western Chris-
tian invasions of Dar-al-Islam and Orthodox Christendom was a yearning
to incorporate in the Western Christian body social the birthplace of
another society that was not a rival civilization but was the Western
Civilization's own mother church. The Crusaders were seeking to gain
possession of a Palestine that was prized by them not so much on account
of its present strategic and economic value as for the sake of those histori-
cal associations with the origins and antecedents of Christianity that hnd
long since made Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Jerusalem the goals of pacific
Christian pilgrims. 'It was the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and not the
Levant trade of Pisa and Genoa, that inspired the Crusading Move-
ment',4

* Rome had become a goal of Western Christian pilgrims before the end of the fourth
<^' G': 'Pannages & Rome vers la Fin du iv* Siecle', in Analteta

See Bar<^'

» ' '

Bottancbana, vol. i, pp. 224-35.

2 See I. i. X7-X8. 3 See I. f. 38 and IX, viil 146-63.

Gi.4 ?af "£?' Christopher: Religion and the Rise of Western Culturt (London 1950,
Sheed & Ward), p. 203. N v* *