Prayer, Pilgrimage and Worship on Crusade: Religious Practice in the Holy Land

For Western Christians who joined expeditions to the eastern Mediterranean from the First Crusade of 1096–1099 onward, the journey to the Holy Land was both a military undertaking and a religious pilgrimage. Prayer, fasting and visits to holy places gave the campaigns a devotional purpose as well as helping participants face hardship and danger. These practices were not identical from one expedition to another: the best-documented examples include crisis rituals at Antioch and Jerusalem during the First Crusade, worship at Jerusalem’s churches, and later agreements over Christian pilgrimage and Muslim holy places.

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Taking a penitential pilgrimage

In Latin Christian life, sin was addressed through confession to a priest and penance prescribed by the clergy. A pilgrimage to Jerusalem could itself be undertaken as a penitential journey. When people answered the call for the First Crusade, they commonly vowed to complete a pilgrimage to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the church built over the place Christians associated with Jesus’s burial and resurrection. Taking the cross, usually sewn onto clothing, marked their commitment. The vow connected the long journey with a religious obligation, though the people who joined included more than trained knights: the crusading forces also contained poorer participants and non-combatants.

Accounts describe crusaders adopting the outward behaviour of pilgrims as they approached their destination. After the army left Ma’arrat al-Numan in 1099, Raymond of Saint-Gilles travelled barefoot and dressed as a pilgrim. When the crusaders first saw Jerusalem in June, many wept. Reaching the city fulfilled the purpose of the pilgrimage for many participants, and most of the First Crusaders eventually returned home.

Prayer and fasting during the campaigns

Collective religious observances could respond to immediate military crises. During the First Crusade’s siege of Antioch, which began in October 1097, hunger and disease weakened the besieging army. The papal legate Adhemar of Le Puy interpreted the suffering as a consequence of sin. The crusaders undertook fasting, prayer and almsgiving, practices that joined acts of devotion with an effort to restore discipline and confidence in the camp. Adhemar, recognised as the expedition’s spiritual leader, died during an epidemic in 1098.

At Jerusalem in July 1099, the crusaders again fasted and prayed before attempting to take the city. The priest Peter Desiderius said that he had received a vision of Adhemar instructing the army to fast and then process barefoot around Jerusalem’s walls. After a three-day fast, the crusaders made the procession on 8 July, ending at the Mount of Olives, where Peter the Hermit preached. The ritual gave a divided army a shared religious act at a moment of danger. It preceded the assault that captured Jerusalem on 15 July, after the army had also assembled the timber, towers and manpower needed for the assault.

Worship at Jerusalem’s holy places

After the crusaders established Latin Christian rule in Jerusalem, the city’s churches linked worship to places associated with Jesus’s life. The Latin patriarch, the senior leader of the Latin Church in Jerusalem, celebrated Mass at different churches according to the part of the Christian calendar being observed. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was central to this pattern. Its chapels included Calvary, identified by Christians as the site of the crucifixion, and the tomb associated with Jesus’s burial.

Holy Week brought worshippers into close contact with these places and their relics. On Good Friday, the Latin patriarch carried the True Cross relic from its chapel to Calvary, where the patriarch, clergy attached to the church and assembled pilgrims venerated it. On Holy Saturday, four pilgrims chosen by the patriarch carried it to the shrine of the Holy Sepulchre, accompanied by an incense-bearer and two liturgical assistants. The congregation waited with unlit candles. A flame known as the New Fire was understood by worshippers as appearing at the tomb; the cross-bearer lit a candle from it, and the light was passed through the church to the patriarch, clergy and congregation.

Relics carried into worship and war

A relic is an object believed to be connected with a holy person or event; a reliquary is a container made to hold such an object. The True Cross, revered by Christians as the wood on which Jesus was crucified, held a particular place in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. After the city’s capture in 1099, the first Latin patriarch, Arnulf of Chocques, recovered a fragment said to have been hidden by local Greek Orthodox clergy. The account reports that they were tortured to reveal its location. The fragment was placed in a richly decorated reliquary, kept at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and protected by knights. Latin Christians also carried it into battle.

The relic’s importance made its loss a major blow. The True Cross was captured by Saladin after the crusader defeat at Hattin in 1187 and was not returned. Its role in worship and warfare shows how a physical object could connect devotion to the campaign: it represented the events central to Christian belief while also serving as a sacred presence carried by the army.

Pilgrimage access and religious boundaries

Negotiations in later campaigns also dealt with access to holy places. Under the Treaty of Jaffa in 1192, Christians were allowed to make pilgrimages to the holy sites of Palestine. In the agreement reached by Frederick II in 1229, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and other places passed to Christian control, while the Temple Mount, the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque remained Muslim places of worship. Frederick visited Jerusalem and crowned himself king in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The settlement therefore provided for Christian access and rule in parts of the city without transferring its Muslim sanctuaries to Christian worship.

Pilgrimage remained part of the experience of later crusaders. During the Barons’ Crusade, Theobald of Champagne and Peter of Dreux made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem before leaving the expedition. Such visits were not simply pauses in a military journey: reaching and worshipping at a holy place could fulfil a personal religious purpose, even when a campaign’s political or military aims remained unsettled.