THE ROLE OF PILGRIMAGES 101

In taking up arms under the impulse of this homesickness for their
pristine holy land, the Crusaders not only made for Christendom's
oldest and most sacred pilgrimage-resort as their ultimate objective; they
also set themselves intermediate goals to draw their flagging feet forward
along the intervening stages of their long war-path by throwing out, en
route, new pilgrimage-resorts in advanced posts just beyond an expand-
ing Western Christendom's previous borders. Norman pilgrimages to
the shrine of Saint Michael the Archangel on Monte Gargano, in the
Apulian dominions of the East Roman Empire, were reconnaissances
that became preludes to a Norman conquest of the bridgeheads of
Orthodox Christendom and Dar-al-Islam in Southern Italy and Sicily,1
and French pilgrimages to the shrine of Saint James the Apostle at
Compostela, in a Galician no-man's-land between a Western Christian
fastness in Asturia2 and the former domain of a dissolving Andalusian
Umayyad Caliphate, provided successive new drafts of military man-
power for the progressive conquest of the Iberian Peninsula by the joint
efforts of Cispyrenean and Transpyrenean Frankish aggressors.3

The perilous exposure of the shrine at Compostela on the fringe of a
Medieval Western Christendom's ddr-al-harb had the same effect in
spurring the Crusaders into making superhuman exertions as the des-
perate deed of a Scottish knight who, on an Andalusian battlefield where
he had broken his pilgrimage in order to fight under a Castilian banner,
turned the fortunes of a day which had been going against the Franks by
flinging into the midst of the all-but-victorious Muslims a silver casket
containing Robert the Bruce's heart, and rushing forward after it to
conquer or die for the sake of rescuing a treasure, entrusted to his safe-
keeping, which he had thus deliberately thrown into jeopardy as a last
resort for calling out his own supreme reserves of vigour and valour.4
This incident was an omen; for the mission which the Bruce on his
death-bed had charged his companion in arms, James Douglas, to fulfil
had been to carry his heart to Jerusalem in order to bury it there in the
Church of the Holy Sepulchre; the attainment of this Palestinian objective
was sacrificed for the sake of a Frankish victory on Andalusian ground
which was won by Douglas at the cost of the martial pilgrim's own life;
and this personal story repeated itself on an oecumenical scale. While the
last of the Crusaders' bridgeheads on the coast of Syria was lost within
less than two hundred years of the Frankish invaders' first descent upon
Palestine, their conquests in the Iberian Peninsula, Southern Italy, and
Sicily under the auspices of the far-flung shrines at Compostela and
Gargano were the two abiding gains of territory that were made by
Western Christendom in the Crusades at Dar-al-Islam's and Orthodox
Christendom's expense.

Elsewhere, and above all in Palestine, the Crusades were the failure
that is the usual nemesis of attempts to reach religious goals by military
short-cuts; but the Western Christians' yearning for the holy land of
Christendom, which had found its earliest expression in these misguided

* See IV. iv. 401-3. * See II. ii. 446. * See V. v. 259-60.

* The tale is told by the writer's mother, Edith Toynbee, in True Stories from Scottish
History (London 1896, Griffith Farran Browne), pp. 90-91.