Gateway to the Heavenly City: Crusader Jerusalem and the Catholic West 1099-1187 (review)

The centrality of Jerusalem as an image within medieval Christianity seems, at first, self-evident. The capture of the city by crusaders in 1099 and its subsequent loss in 1187 stand as moments of triumph and despair in a western consciousness deeply influenced by the significance of the site of Christ's passion. These two events form the bookends of Sylvia Schein's discussion of changing attitudes towards the idea of Jerusalem among western Christians during the twelfth century. Schein, professor at the University of Haifa until her untimely death in 2004, presents a thorough and systematic analysis of primary sources referring to Jerusalem in an attempt to understand how and why views of the city shifted during the period.

It has to be said (a little churlishly, to be sure) that parts of the argument cover old ground. For example, the emphasis in chapter five on the importance to Western pilgrims of Jerusalem as the place where Christ himself lived and died, though supported by colourful evidence involving lepers, hair-shirts and self-flagellation, does not at first glance appear to add much to our knowledge of popular medieval religious practices. Equally, the argument in chapter one that Jerusalem was indeed the goal of the First Crusade sounds slightly strained, especially when Schein admits that those historians (such as Mayer) who had questioned this concept have already shifted their views. This debate has probably moved on, and there is the faint whiff of a straw man in the air here. But perhaps such criticisms are unfair. The stated aim of Schein's book (pp. 6-7), and its great virtue, is to identify the enormous jumble of attitudes towards Jerusalem that arose so frequently in contemporary commentaries (and which therefore have a ring of familiarity about them) and to impose some sort of analytical sense and order upon them. Did the victory of the First Crusade change Westerners' attitudes to Jerusalem? How did the image of Jerusalem sit within the wider context of twelfth-century spirituality? These are the central questions of the book. It succeeds in answering them.

Schein is careful to distinguish between images of the heavenly and the earthly Jerusalem. Before 1099 the relationship between the two had been one of opposition: the glorious heavenly city had contrasted sharply with its earthly counterpart, under Moslem rule and also home to the Jews who had killed Christ. Even the Church Fathers had generally seen the city in Judaea as a place 'to be despised or, at least, to be ignored' (p. 4). For Jerome, never one to mince his words, the Temple Mount had been the 'dungheap of the new Christian Jerusalem' (p. 93). After 1099 these views changed rapidly, partly through greater familiarity (while visiting Jerusalem on pilgrimage had been possible before the city came into Christian hands, it became easier and more popular to do so after its capture) and partly as the result of a shift in mentalities brought on by the success of the Crusade. Only after 1099 could the earthly Jerusalem be described as the 'gateway to the heavenly fatherland' or as the 'earthly paradise' (paradisus terrestris, p. 27) by eager observers. The shocked reaction to the fall of the city in 1187 captures the change in attitudes: by now the earthly Jerusalem was the 'Holy City' and 'the Glorious City of God' (p. 186), a status that demanded immediate attempts to reclaim it for Christendom.

References to Jerusalem as the centre of the world also proliferated in the twelfth century. This idea had a long history in biblical texts and exegesis but only now, according to Schein, did it become an 'almost universal' concept (p. 141). The physical placement of Jerusalem on medieval maps reflects the transformation of an anagogical truth (Jerusalem as the heavenly fatherland) into an accepted literal and physical truth (Jerusalem as...