Tomb and Temple: Re-imagining the Sacred Buildings of Jerusalem 1783272805, 9781783272808

Table of contents :
Illustrations xi
Preface xxv
Contributors xxvi
Abbreviations xxvii
Editors’ Note xxx
Introduction 1
Part I: Re-presenting Jerusalem
1. Public, Private and Political Devotion: Re-presenting the Sepulchre / Robin Griffith-Jones 17
Part II: The Church of the Holy Sepulchre
Introduction 51
2. The Building of the Holy Sepulchre / Robin Griffith-Jones 53
3. The Crusader Church of the Holy Sepulchre / Denys Pringle 76
4. The Crusader Church of the Holy Sepulchre: Design, Depiction and the Pilgrim Church of Compostela / Jaroslav Folda 95
Part III: The Noble Sanctuary / The Temple Mount
Introduction 123
5. Medieval Muslim Veneration of the Dome of the Rock / Robert Hillenbrand 125
6. The Temple as Symbol, the Temple as Metaphor: Contrasting Eastern and Western Reimaginings / Robert Ousterhout 146
7. Spiral Columns and the Temple of Solomon / Eric Fernie 159
8. Raphael’s ‘Marriage of the Virgin’ and the Temple at Jerusalem in the Italian Renaissance Imagination / David Ekserdjian 164
Part IV: The Orthodox Churches
Introduction 183
9. ‘I have defeated you, Solomon’ / Robin Griffith-Jones 187
10. Saint James the Just: Sacral Topography in Jerusalem and Constantinople / Cecily Hennessy 194
11. Jerusalems in the Caucasus? / Antony Eastmond 211
12. Holy Russia and the ‘Jerusalem Idea’ / Robin Milner-Gulland 233
13. Jerusalem and the Ethiopian Church: The Evidence of Roha (Lalibela) / David W. Phillipson 255
14. The Origins and Meanings of the Ethiopian Circular Church: Fresh Explorations / Emmanuel Fritsch 267
Part V: Round Churches in the West
Introduction 297
15. Arculf ’s Circles, Aachen’s Octagon, Germigny’s Cube: Three Riddles from Northern Europe / Robin Griffith-Jones 301
16. Representations of the Holy Sepulchre / Eric Fernie 329
17. The Military Orders and the Idea of the Holy Sepulchre / Alan Borg 339
18. The English Round Church Movement. Table and Notes: English Round Churches / Catherine E. Hundley 352
19. The Use and Meaning of the Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Round Churches of England / Michael Gervers 376
20. Jerusalem in London: The New Temple Church. Appendix: The Indulgences of Cotton Nero E.VI / Nicole Hamonic 387
21. Commemorating the Rotunda in the Round: The Medieval Latin Liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and its Performance in the West / Sebastian Salvadó 413
22. The Temple Church in the Crusades / Robin Griffith-Jones 429
Appendix: The Knights’ Effigies: Newly Discovered Drawings by John Guillim, c. 1610 / Robin Griffith-Jones and Philip J. Lankester 457
Epilogue / Robin Griffith-Jones 479
Index

Citation preview

ROBIN GRIFFITH-JONES is Master of the Temple at the Temple Church in London and Senior Lecturer (Theology and Religious Studies) at King’s College London. He co-edited The Temple Church in London with David Park (2010). ERIC FERNIE is Director Emeritus of The Courtauld Institute of Art, London. CONTRIBUTORS: Alan Borg, Antony Eastmond, David Ekserdjian, Eric Fernie, Jaroslav Folda, Emmanuel Fritsch, Michael Gervers, Robin Griffith-Jones, Nicole Hamonic, Cecily Hennessy, Robert Hillenbrand, Catherine E. Hundley, Philip J. Lankester, Robin Milner-Gulland, Robert Ousterhout, David W. Phillipson, Denys Pringle, Sebastian Salvadó.

Re-imagining the Sacred Buildings of Jerusalem

COVER DESIGN: www.stay-creative.co.uk

Re-imagining the Sacred Buildings of Jerusalem

Boydell Studies in Medieval Art and Architecture COVER IMAGE: ‘The Temple Church, London, as Restored’, engraved by J. Carter, 1828, after T. H. Shepherd. Photo: London Metropolitan Archives, City of London.

J

Jerusalem has informed the Christian imagination from the time of Jesus himself… A pilgrimage to Jerusalem distilled into a single voyage the course of two journeys: the journey of an individual’s Christian life towards death and the final home after death; and the course of all history towards its consummation in the descent of the new Jerusalem and the end of death. In this book we describe the city’s two great buildings, the Holy Sepulchre and the Dome of the Rock; and the devices by which Christians in Western Europe, Byzantium, Russia, the Caucasus and Ethiopia have, over the course of 1,500 years, realised in their own churches and lives, far from Jerusalem, the city’s manifold sanctity.

EDITED BY ROBIN GRIFFITHJONES AND ERIC FERNIE

EDITED BY ROBIN GRIFFITH-JONES AND ERIC FERNIE

erusalem – earthly and heavenly, past, present and future – has always informed the Christian imagination: it is the intersection of the divine and human worlds, of time and eternity. Since the fourth century, it has been the site of the round Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built over the empty tomb acknowledged by Constantine as the tomb of Christ. Nearly four hundred years later, the Sepulchre’s rotunda was rivalled by the octagon of the Dome of the Rock. The city itself and these two glorious buildings within it remain, to this day, the focus of pilgrimage and of intense devotion. Jerusalem and its numinous buildings have been distinctively re-imagined and re-presented in the design, topography, decoration and dedications of some very striking and beautiful churches and cities in Western Europe, Russia, the Caucasus and Ethiopia. Some are famous, others are in the West almost unknown. The essays In this richly illustrated book combine to do justice to these evocative buildings’ architecture, roles and history. The volume begins with an introduction to the Sepulchre itself, from its construction under Constantine to the Crusaders’ rebuilding which survives to this day. Chapters follow on the Dome of the Rock and on the later depiction and significance of the Jewish Temple. The essays then move further afield, uncovering the links between Jerusalem and Byzantium, the Caucasus, Russia and Ethiopia. Northern Europe comes finally into focus, with chapters on Charlemagne’s chapel at Aachen, the role of the military orders in spreading the form of the Sepulchre, a gazetteer of English rounds, and studies of London’s Temple Church.

TOMB AND TEMPLE

BOYDELL STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL ART AND ARCHITECTURE ISSN 2045–4902 Series Editors Dr Julian Luxford Professor Asa Simon Mittman This series aims to provide a forum for debate on the art and architecture of the Middle Ages. It will cover all media, from manuscript illuminations to maps, tapestries, carvings, wall-paintings and stained glass, and all periods and regions, including Byzantine art. Both traditional and more theoretical approaches to the subject are welcome. Proposals or queries should be sent in the first instance to the editors or to the publisher, at the addresses given below. Dr Julian Luxford, School of Art History, University of St Andrews, 79 North Street, St Andrews, Fife KY16 9AL, UK Professor Asa Simon Mittman, Department of Art and Art History, California State University at Chico, Chico, CA 95929-0820, USA Boydell & Brewer, PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK Previously published titles in the series are listed at the back of this volume.

THE ROTUNDA OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE, JERUSALEM. THE ROTUNDA’S COLUMNS MAY HAVE BEEN FROM HADRIAN’S BUILDINGS, CUT DOWN AND REUSED IN CONSTANTINE’S (61 BELOW). ITS OUTER WALLS WITHSTOOD THE DESTRUCTION OF 1009 (78 BELOW) TO A HEIGHT OF 8 M.; THE ROOF, COLUMNS AND PIERS WERE BROUGHT DOWN. THE CENTRAL AEDICULE OVER THE EMPTY TOMB IS SEEN AS REBUILT IN 1809-10 AND AS RESTORED, AFTER EARTHQUAKE DAMAGE OF 1927, IN 2016–17. SEE BIDDLE, TOMB, 72–3, 103–8.

TOMB AND TEMPLE

RE-IMAGINING THE SACRED BUILDINGS OF JERUSALEM

Edited by Robin Griffith-Jones and Eric Fernie

THE BOYDELL PRESS

© Contributors 2018 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner

First published 2018 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge

ISBN 978 1 78327 280 8

The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk, IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mount Hope Ave, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library This publication is printed on acid-free paper

CONTENTS Illustrations xi Preface xxv Contributors xxvi Abbreviations xxvii Editors’ Note xxx Introduction 1 Part I: Re-presenting Jerusalem

1



Public, Private and Political Devotion: Re-presenting the Sepulchre Robin Griffith-Jones

17

Part II: The Church of the Holy Sepulchre Introduction 51

2



The Building of the Holy Sepulchre Robin Griffith-Jones

53



The Crusader Church of the Holy Sepulchre Denys Pringle

76

3

4 The Crusader Church of the Holy Sepulchre: Design, Depiction and the Pilgrim Church of Compostela Jaroslav Folda

95

Part III: The Noble Sanctuary / The Temple Mount Introduction 123

5



Medieval Muslim Veneration of the Dome of the Rock Robert Hillenbrand

125

viii CONTENTS

6



The Temple as Symbol, the Temple as Metaphor: Contrasting Eastern and Western Reimaginings Robert Ousterhout

146



Spiral Columns and the Temple of Solomon Eric Fernie

159



Raphael’s ‘Marriage of the Virgin’ and the Temple 164 at Jerusalem in the Italian Renaissance Imagination David Ekserdjian

7 8

Part IV: The Orthodox Churches Introduction

9



183



‘I have defeated you, Solomon’ Robin Griffith-Jones

187



Saint James the Just: Sacral Topography in Jerusalem and Constantinople Cecily Hennessy

194



Jerusalems in the Caucasus? Antony Eastmond

211



Holy Russia and the ‘Jerusalem Idea’ Robin Milner-Gulland

233



Jerusalem and the Ethiopian Church: The Evidence of Roha (Lalibela) David W. Phillipson

255



The Origins and Meanings of the Ethiopian Circular Church: Fresh Explorations Emmanuel Fritsch

267

10 11 12 13 14

Part V: Round Churches in the West Introduction

15



297



Arculf ’s Circles, Aachen’s Octagon, Germigny’s Cube: Three Riddles from Northern Europe Robin Griffith-Jones

301



Representations of the Holy Sepulchre Eric Fernie

329

16

17 The Military Orders and the Idea of the Holy Sepulchre Alan Borg

339

ix

CONTENTS

18



The English Round Church Movement Table and Notes: English Round Churches Catherine E. Hundley

352 371



The Use and Meaning of the Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Round Churches of England Michael Gervers

376



Appendix: The Indulgences of Cotton Nero E.VI Nicole Hamonic



Commemorating the Rotunda in the Round: The Medieval Latin Liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and its Performance in the West Sebastian Salvadó



The Temple Church in the Crusades 429 Robin Griffith-Jones Appendix: The Knights’ Effigies: Newly Discovered 457 Drawings by John Guillim, c. 1610 Robin Griffith-Jones and Philip J. Lankester

19

20 Jerusalem in London: The New Temple Church

387

21

413

22

Epilogue Robin Griffith-Jones Index



479 485

ILLUSTRATIONS Frontispiece The rotunda of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem. The rotunda’s columns may have been from Hadrian’s buildings, cut down and reused in Constantine’s (61 below). Its outer walls withstood the destruction of 1009 (78 below) to a height of 8 m.; the roof, columns and piers were brought down. The central aedicule over the empty tomb is seen as rebuilt in 1809–10 and as restored, after earthquake-damage of 1927, in 2016–7. See Biddle, Tomb, 72–3, 103–8. (Photo: Gali Tibbon / Stringer)

COLOUR PLATES Plates I–XVIII between pp. 130 and 131; Plates XIX–XL between pp. 306 and 307 I II III IV V VI

Map of Jerusalem, detail from the Madaba Map. (Photo: Church of Saint George, Madaba, Jordan / © Zev Radovan, Jerusalem / Bridgeman Images) The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem: South Entrance From J. Krüger, Die Grabeskirche zu Jerusalem, Regensburg, 2000, 110, pl. 117. (Photo: J. Krüger, Regensburg) The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem: South Transept Façade From J. Krüger, Die Grabeskirche zu Jerusalem, Regensburg, 2000, 117, pl. 129. (Photo: J. Krüger, Regensburg) (a) The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem: the church and bell-tower, seen from the south-east. (Photo: © Zev Radovan, Jerusalem / Bridgeman Images) (b) The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem: the Holy Fire. (Photo: Xinhua / Alamy Stock Photo) (a) The Temple Mount / Noble Sanctuary, Jerusalem. (b) The Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem: view from the ceiling. (a) The Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem. (Photo: De Agostini Picture Library / G. Dagli Orti / Bridgeman Images)

xii ILLUSTRATIONS VII VIII IX X

XI XII XIII XIV XV XVI XVII XVIII XIX XX

(b) The Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem. (Photo: Robin Laurance / Alamy Stock Photo) Carl Haag, The Holy Rock, Summit of Mount Moriah, Jerusalem The Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem. (Photo: © Zev Radovan, Jerusalem / Bridgeman Images) Bukhtnasar (Nebuchadnezzar) decrees the destruction of the Jewish Temple, from al-Biruni, Chronology of Ancient Nations, 1307, f. 134 The Prophet Muhammad sits with the prophets in Jerusalem, surrounded by angels, from a Mirajnama (Book of Ascension), Topkapı Palace, Istanbul. Persia, early fourteenth century. (Photo: History / Woodbury & Page / Bridgeman Images) Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Dome of the Rock, from the Prayerbook of René d’Anjou (‘the Egerton Hours’), c. 1442–43, London, BL MS Egerton 1070, f. 5r. (Photo: © The British Library) (a) The Apse-Mosaic of S. Pudenziana, Rome. (Photo: Mondadori Portfolio / Electa / Arnaldo Vescovo / Bridgeman Images) (b) The Apse-Mosaic of S. Pudenziana, Rome: drawing by Eclissi, 1595, Windsor, Royal Library, Inv. no. 9058. (Photo: Royal Collection Trust/ © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2016) The Orthodox Baptistery, Ravenna. (Photo: Architecture 2000 / Alamy Stock Photo) Reliquary box in the Sancta Sanctorum, Rome: interior of lid. (Photo: Vatican Museums) Reliquary box in the Sancta Sanctorum, Rome: painted lid; and interior with stones. (Photos: Vatican Museums) Silver-gilt reliquary box from the Pharos, Constantinople, now in Sainte Chapelle: sliding lid, front and back, Louvre MR 346. (Photos: © Réunion des Musées Nationaux – Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre) / Daniel Arnaudet) Silver-gilt reliquary box from the Pharos, Constantinople, now in Sainte Chapelle: front, with resurrection scene, Louvre MR 348. (Photo: © Réunion des Musées Nationaux – Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre) / Daniel Arnaudet) (a) Hagia Sophia, Istanbul. (Photo: Raul Touzon / National Geographic Creative / Bridgeman Images) (b) Hagia Sophia, Istanbul. (Photo: Ira Block / National Geographic Creative / Bridgeman Images) Topography of Echmiadzin, compared to Jerusalem. After N. Garibian de Vartanan, La Jérusalem nouvelle et les premiers sanctuaires chrétiens de l’Arménie. Méthode pour l’étude de l’église comme temple de Dieu, Yerevan, 2009, 242–80 (a) Homilies of James Kokkinobaphos, BNF cod. gr. 1208, f. 120r: the prayer of Zacharias. (Photo: © Bibliothèque nationale de France) (b) Homilies of James Kokkinobaphos, BNF cod. gr. 1208, f. 135r: the reception of Mary by Joseph. (Photo: © Bibliothèque nationale de France)

ILLUSTRATIONS

XXI

Homilies of James Kokkinobaphos, BNF cod. gr. 1208, f. 3v: the Ascension. (Photo: © Bibliothèque nationale de France) XXII Church of the Intercession (Pokrov) on the Nerl, 1165 XXIII Cathedral of St Demetrius, Vladimir, 1191–97 From D. Shvidkovski, Russian Architecture and the West, New Haven, 2007. (Photo: Y. Shorban) XXIV ‘St Basil’s’ with the Kremlin. (Photo: De Agostini Picture Library / W. Buss / Bridgeman Images) XXV ‘St Basil’s’: interior. (Photo: Arthur Lookyanov / Alamy Stock Photo) XXVI Model of the Holy Sepulchre, comparable to the model for the Cathedral of the Resurrection, New Jerusalem Monastery, Istra. (Photo: Museum of the Order of St John and University of Birmingham, 2016) XXVII Crucifixion with guardian angel and selected saints, end of the eighteenth century, Palekh; now in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow From O. Tarasov, Icon and Devotion, London, 2002 XXVIII The eastern complex of rock-hewn churches at Roha, photographed from the air before the recent erection of protective covers From J. Mercier and C. Lepage, Lalibela, Wonder of Ethiopia: The Monolithic Churches and their Treasures, London, 2012, fig. 3.13, reproduced by kind permission of the Ethiopian Heritage Fund XXIX (a) Roha: Beta Madhane Alem interior, from the south-west From J. Mercier and C. Lepage, Lalibela, Wonder of Ethiopia: The Monolithic Churches and their Treasures, London, 2012, fig. 9.1, reproduced by kind permission of the Ethiopian Heritage Fund (b) Roha: the rock-hewn cross in the bed of the Jordan. (Photo: David W. Phillipson, 2006) (c) Roha / Lālibalā: Bēta Giyorgis. (Photo: Emmanuel Fritsch) XXX (a) Maqdas and drum supporting conical roof, Abuna Batra Māryām church, Lake Ṭānā. (Photo: Philippe Sidot) (b) Sanctuary east window seen from outside, Abuna Batra Māryām. (Photo: Philippe Sidot) (c) West-north-east oblique view showing central doors to the sanctuary, fixed curtain, northern service door and cupola, Dabra Warq. (Photo: Philippe Sidot) (d) Coptic ciborium and bars, Dayr Abu Sayfayn. (Photo: Emmanuel Fritsch) XXXI (a) Central doors and curtains to sanctuary, Abuna Batra Māryām. (Photo: Philippe Sidot) (b) Ethiopian sanctuary screen (Coptic hiǧab). (Photo: Philippe Sidot) (c) East of the screen closing off the Coptic sanctuary at Dayr Abu Seyfein. (Photo: Emmanuel Fritsch)

xiii

xiv ILLUSTRATIONS

(d) Oblique view from outside the northern door to the central doors of the sanctuary, with presidency chair, Dabra Warq. (Photo: Philippe Sidot) XXXII The Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem: the Arculf / Adomnán plan, Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 458, f. 4v, 836–59. (Photo: Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna) XXXIII (a) The New Jerusalem, in the Valenciennes Apocalypse, c. 800–25, Valenciennes MS 99 f. 38. (Photo: Municipal Library of Valenciennes) (b) The planets, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Clm 16128, f. 27r, c. 800. (Photo: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich) (c) Map of the Holy Land, twelfth century, copied from a pre-Carolingian mappa mundi in the Irish tradition, BL Add MS 10049, f. 64v. (Photo: © The British Library) XXXIV The Palatine Chapel, Aachen. (Photo: Erich Lessing / lessingimages.com) XXXV (a) H. Sergios and Bacchos, Constantinople. (Photo: Scott S. Warren / National Geographic Creative / Bridgeman Images) (b) San Vitale, Ravenna. (Photo: AGF Srl / Alamy Stock Photo) (c) The Codex Aureus of St Emmeram: Charles the Bald enthroned opposite the Worship of the Lamb, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Clm 14000, ff. 5v and 6r, 870. (Photo: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich) XXXVI (a) Germigny-des-Prés: the ark of the covenant supported by cherubim, mosaic in the semi-dome of the east apse. (Photo: Peter Willi / Bridgeman Images) (b) Germigny-des-Prés: views of the apse, ‘Etat actuel’ and ‘Restauration’, watercolours by Juste Lisch, 1873. (Photos: Médiathèque de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine, © RMN – Grand Palais / Charenton-le-Pont) XXXVII (a) Christ enthroned, Sacramentary of Charles the Bald, BNF lat. 1141 f. 6r, 869–70. (Photo: © Bibliothèque nationale, Paris) (b) The women at the tomb, c. 860–70, ivory cover of the Metz Gospels, BNF MS Latin 9390. (Photo: © Bibliothèque nationale, Paris) (c) Hrabanus Maurus, seraphim and cherubim around the cross, De Laudibus S. Crucis, c. 810, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Clm 18077, f. 9v, Ms of 1459. (Photo: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich) XXXVIII (a) Map of Jerusalem, c. 1100–10, St-Bertin, Bibliothèque d’agglomeration de Saint-Omer, MS 776, f. 50v. (Photo: Bibliothèque d’agglomeration de Saint-Omer) (b) Map of Jerusalem, copy of Lambert of St-Omer’s lost copy, c. 1115, of the St-Bertin map, Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek, MS Lat. Vossianus 31, f. 85r. (Photo: Universiteitsbibliotheek, Leiden, Vossius Collection) (c) Map of Jerusalem, c. 1190–1200, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The

xv

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Hague, MS 76 F 5, f. 1r. (Photo: Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague) (d) Map of Jerusalem, 1200–50, BL Harley MS 658, f. 39v. (Photo: © The British Library) XXXIX (a) Pentecost, The St Albans Psalter, c. 1120–45, Basilica of St Godehard, Hildesheim (HS St. God. 1, 55). (Photo: © Dombibliothek Hildesheim) (b) Seven liberal arts as handmaidens of Philosophy, Herrad of Hohenbourg, Hortus Deliciarum, c. 1170, edited and reconstructed by R. Green, M. Evans, etc, 1979, II, 57, pl. 18. (Photo: © Warburg Institute) (c) Verger de Soulas: Mary on the throne of Solomon, c. 1270, BNF MS fr. 9220, f. 2r. (Photo: © Bibliothèque nationale, Paris) (d) Marian Wisdom enthroned, c. 1420, BL Add. MS 18856, f. 3. (Photo: © The British Library) XL The Temple Church, London: (a) The rotunda (1162), interior elevation, looking north. (Photo: Christopher Wilson) (b) View from the rotunda (1162) into the chancel (1240) (c) The rotunda from the south. (Photo: Miranda Parry)

FIGURES Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 1.3 Fig. 1.4 Fig. 1.5 Fig. 1.6 Fig. 2.1

Ampulla (oil-flask), late sixth century, Dumbarton Oaks BZ 1948.18. (Photo: © Dumbarton Oaks, Byzantine Collection, Washington DC) The cloisters of the Cistercian monastery, Bebenhausen: the measurements of Christ’s tomb, 1492 From K. M. Rudy, Virtual Pilgrimages in the Convent: Imagining Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages, Turnhout, 2011, 99. (Photo: Kate Rudy) The Baptistery, Pisa, begun 1152, with the Duomo beyond. (Photo: Gunter Kirsch / Alamy Stock Photo) The Baptistery, Pisa: plan and section. From B. Fletcher, A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method, New York, 1921, 258 Santo Sepolcro, Pisa, 1118–53. (Photo: Mondadori Portfolio / Electa / Arnaldo Vescovo / Bridgeman Images) The griffin from the Duomo, Pisa, with Arabic inscription, eleventh century, perhaps captured in 1087; now in Museo dell’ Opera del Duomo, Pisa (a) Jerusalem at the Time of Jesus: Tentative Map. (b) Aelia Capitolina around the Time of Constantine. Adapted from D. Bahat, The Illustrated Atlas of Jerusalem, New York, 1990, 55, 59; G. Wightman, The Walls of Jerusalem, Sydney, 1993, 197; J. E. Taylor, NTS 44 (1998), 185.

32 34

38 38 40 41

xvi ILLUSTRATIONS Fig. 2.2 Kokhim-tomb discovered at Bethany From J. Murphy-O’Connor, ‘The Argument for the Holy Sepulchre’, Revue Biblique 17/1 (2010), 55–91, fig. 5, now in ibid., ‘The Authenticity of the Holy Sepulchre’, in The Keys to Jerusalem, Oxford, 2012, 159–92, fig. 5 (redrawn from A. Kloner and B. Zissu, The Necropolis of Jerusalem in the Second Temple Period, Leuven, 2007) Fig. 2.3 Impression of Jerusalem in the sixth century, from the Madaba map From M. Gisler, ‘Jerusalem auf der Mosaikkarte von Madaba’, Das Heilige Land 56 (1912), 214–27 Fig. 2.4 In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem: retaining wall, probably from the buildings of the Emperor Hadrian, c. 125. From Corbo, Santo Sepolcro, Photo 118. (Photo: © Studium Franciscanum) Fig. 2.5 Impression of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem, before the construction of the rotunda From J. E. Taylor, ‘Golgotha: A Reconsideration of the Evidence for the Sites of Jesus’ Crucifixion and Burial’, NTS 44 (1998), 180–203 [181]. (© J. E. Taylor) Fig. 2.6 Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem, as completed in the fourth century From J. Bardill, Constantine: Divine Emperor of the Christian Golden Age, Cambridge, 2012, 256. (© A. Tayfun Öner) Fig. 2.7 Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem, as completed in the fourth century: cutaway From J. Bardill, Constantine: Divine Emperor of the Christian Golden Age, Cambridge, 2012, 257. (© A. Tayfun Öner) Fig. 2.8 Consecratio coin: nummus minted in Rome in ‘eternal memory’ of Valerius Romulus (d. 309), son of Maxentius. British Museum B.2087. (Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum) Fig. 3.1 Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem: the developing layout of the building complex between the fourth and twelfth centuries. (Drawn by the late Peter E. Leach) Fig. 3.2 Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem: plan at ground level. (Drawn by the late Peter E. Leach) Fig. 3.3 Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem: the eleventh- century chapel of the Holy Trinity; squinches at the transition between the square nave and the octagonal drum of the dome. (Photo: Denys Pringle) Fig. 3.4 Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem: chapel of St Helena below the cloister of the Augustinian canons. (Photo: Denys Pringle) Fig. 3.5 Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem: reconstructed east-west section through the twelfth-century church,

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58

64

65

65

73

77 80 82

83 85

ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 3.6 Fig. 3.7 Fig. 3.8 Fig. 3.9 Fig. 3.10 Fig. 4.1

Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 4.5 Fig. 4.6 Fig. 4.7 Fig. 6.1

Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3

looking south. (Drawn by the late Peter E. Leach, after M. C. J. de Vogüé, Les Eglises de la Terre Sainte, Paris, 1860; Vincent and Abel, Jérusalem nouvelle; Corbo, Santo Sepolcro) Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem: the choir and 86 apse (rebuilt 1809), now partly obscured by a modern iconostasis. (Photo: Denys Pringle) Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem: the arch linking 86 the rotunda to the crusader choir. (Photo: Denys Pringle) Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem: the south 87 transept looking east towards Calvary, with the Stone of Anointing in the foreground. (Photo: Denys Pringle) Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem: the gallery of the 88 south transept, looking east. (Photo: Denys Pringle) Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem: the newly 88 redecorated dome over the crusader crossing and the vaults of the choir and south transept. (Photo: Denys Pringle) Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem: lintels on the 100 South Transept Façade, late 1140s: (a) narrative lintel, scenes from the left end; (b) narrative lintel, scenes from the right end; (c) decorated lintel, detail. (Photos: École biblique, Jerusalem) Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem: decorated lintel 102 on the South Transept Façade, late 1140s, in situ. (Photo: École biblique, Jerusalem) Santiago de Compostela, South Transept Façade, built by 1111 106 Icon of six saints, Monastery of St Catherine, Mount Sinai, 107 late twelfth century, before 1187 City of Jerusalem and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at 112 the time of the First Crusade, Amiens, Bibl. Mun. MS 483, f. 202v, c. 1440s. (Photo: Bibliothèque Municipale d’Amiens) Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem, South Transept 115 Façade, woodcut by Erhard Reuwich, 1480 Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem, South Transept 118 Façade From G. Capodilista, Itinerario di Terra Santa (232 x 240mm) c. 1475 Ezekiel’s Temple, hypothetical reconstruction, with 149 measurements in cubits. (Redrawn by Robert Ousterhout after J. Wilkinson, From Synagogue to Church: The Traditional Design, London, 2002) Mount Nebo, chapel of the Theotokos, detail of the 152 sanctuary mosaic floor depicting the Temple From S. Saller, The Memorial of Moses on Mount Nebo, Jerusalem, 1941 H. Polyeuktos, Constantinople: reconstructed plan 154 Redrawn by Robert Ousterhout after J. Bardill, ‘A New Temple for Byzantium: Anicia Juliana, King Solomon, and

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xviii ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 6.4 Fig. 6.5 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3 Fig. 7.4 Fig. 7.5 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2 Fig. 8.3 Fig. 8.4 Fig. 8.5 Fig. 8.6 Fig. 8.7 Fig. 8.8 Fig. 8.9

the Gilded Ceiling of the Church of St Polyeuktos in Constan­ tinople’, in W. Bowden, A. Gutteridge and C. Machado (eds), Social and Political Life in Late Antiquity, Leiden, 2006 Istanbul, marble block from H. Polyeuktos, with a fragment 154 of the nave inscription, Istanbul Archaeological Museum. (Photo: Robert Ousterhout) Istanbul, Chora (Kariye Camii), inner narthex: mosaic of 156 the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple. (Photo: Courtesy of Dumbarton Oaks Visual Resources) Rome, St Peter’s, Treasury: the colonna santa 160 Palermo, Cappella Palatina, 1140s, plan 160 Capharnaum, Synagogue, third or fifth century: 160 reconstruction of a window From R. Ousterhout, ‘The Temple, the Sepulchre, and the Martyrion of the Savior’, Gesta, 29 (1990), 44–53, fig. 7 Rome, St Peter’s, sanctuary screen, 320s and 730s 162 From J. B. Ward Perkins, ‘The Shrine of St Peter's and its Twelve Spiral Columns’, Journal of Roman Studies 42 (1952), 21–33, fig. 2 Split, museum, fourth-century sarcophagus from Salona 163 From F. van der Meer and C. Mohrmann, Atlas of the Early Christian World, London, 1959, 127, fig. 402 Raphael, Marriage of the Virgin, 1504 (Brera, Milan). 165 (Photo: Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, Italy / Bridgeman Images) Fra Angelico, The Presentation in the Temple (from the 168 predella of the Annunciation Altarpiece, Cortona). (Photo: Art Collection / Alamy) Taddeo Gaddi, Presentation of the Virgin (Baroncelli 170 Chapel, Santa Croce, Florence). (Photo: De Agostini Picture Library / G. Nimatallah / Bridgeman Images) Giotto, Massacre of the Innocents (Scrovegni Chapel, 171 Padua). (Photo: Mondadori Portfolio / Archivio Antonio Quattrone / Antonio Quattrone / Bridgeman Images) Duccio, Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem (Maestá Altarpiece, 173 Siena), 1308–11. (Photo: Museo dell' Opera del Duomo, Siena, Italy / Bridgeman Images) Ambrogio Lorenzetti, The Presentation of Christ, 1342. 174 (Photo: Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy / Bridgeman Images) Perugino, Christ Giving the Keys to St Peter (Sistine 176 Chapel, Vatican), 1481. (Photo: Vatican Museums and Galleries, Vatican City / Bridgeman Images) Pintoricchio, Christ among the Doctors (S. Maria 177 Maggiore, Spello) Perugino, Marriage of the Virgin (Musée des Beaux Arts, 178 Caen), 1500–04. (Photo: Musée des Beaux-Arts, Caen, France / Bridgeman Images)

ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 8.10 Church of Sant’ Angelo, Perugia. (Photo: De Agostini 179 Picture Library / G. Roli / Bridgeman Images) Fig. 8.11 Raphael, St Jerome, Ashmolean Museum, University of 180 Oxford, Accession WA1846.10. (Photo: © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford) Fig. 10.1 Plan of the Church of the Chalkoprateia in relation to 198 Hagia Sophia and the Chapel of St James From W. Kleiss, ‘Neue Befunde zur Chalkopratenkirche in Istanbul’, Istanbuler Mitteilungen 15 (1965), Abb. 1 Fig. 10.2 Plan of the crypt of the Chapel of St James, Istanbul 200 From W. Kleiss, ‘Grabungen im Bereich der Chalkopratenkirche in Istanbul 1965’, Istanbuler Mitteilungen 16 (1966), Abb. 2 Fig. 10.3 Chapel of St James the Less, Dome of the Chain, Qubbat 202 as-Silsila, Jerusalem. (Image: Courtesy of Fine Arts Library, Harvard College Library © Creswell Archive, Ashmolean Museum, neg. EA.CA.5059) Fig. 10.4 Cross-section and plan of the Chapel of St James the Less, 202 Dome of the Chain, Qubbat as-Silsila, Jerusalem From Pringle, Churches, III, fig. 32 Fig. 10.5 Plan of Saints Karpos and Papylos, Istanbul 208 From A. M. Schneider, Byzanz. Vorarbeiten zur Topographie und Archäologie der Stadt, Istanbuler Forschungen 8, Berlin, 1936, Tafel 2 Fig. 10.6 Plan of the Balabanağa Mescidi, Istanbul 209 From A. M. Mansel, ‘The Excavations at the Balaban Agha Mesdjidi in Istanbul’, Art Bulletin 15 (1933), fig. 3 Fig. 11.1 Jvari church (Georgia), 586–605: distant view from the 213 south. (Photo: Antony Eastmond) Fig. 11.2 Svetitskhoveli cathedral, Mtskheta (Georgia), 1010–29, with 213 later alterations: exterior from the north-west, with Jvari in the background. (Photo: Antony Eastmond) Fig. 11.3 Svetitskhoveli: pillar over the robe. (Photo: Antony 215 Eastmond) Fig. 11.4 Map of Mtskheta, redrawn after R. Mepisashvili, V. Cincadze 216 and R. Schrade, Georgien. Kirchen und Wehrbauten, Leipzig, 1986, 33 Fig. 11.5 Plans compiled from the sequence in A. Alpago-Novello, 221 V. Beridze and J. Lafontaine-Dosogne, Art and Architecture of Medieval Georgia, Milan, 1980, 303–5 Fig. 11.6 Jvari church (Georgia), 586–605: view from the south. 222 (Photo: Antony Eastmond) Fig. 11.7 St Hripsime church, Echmiadzin (Armenia), by 618: view 222 from the south-west. (Photo: Antony Eastmond) Fig. 11.8 St Hripsime church, Echmiadzin (Armenia), by 618: 223 niche between main dome and corner chamber. (Photo: Antony Eastmond)

xix

xx ILLUSTRATIONS Fig. 11.9 St Hripsime church, Echmiadzin (Armenia), by 618: vault of corner chamber. (Photo: Antony Eastmond) Fig. 11.10 Sioni church at Bolnisi (Georgia), 486: view from the east. (Photo: Antony Eastmond) Fig. 11.11 Otkhta Eklesia (now Dört Kilise, in Turkey), c. 980: view from the west. (Photo: Antony Eastmond) Fig. 11.12 Otkhta Eklesia (now Dört Kilise, in Turkey), c. 980: wall painting of Sioni in apse. (Photo: Antony Eastmond) Fig. 11.13 Svetitskhoveli cathedral, Mtskheta (Georgia): Holy Sepulchre chapel in south aisle, fifteenth century. (Photo: Antony Eastmond) Fig. 12.1 Wayside shrine at Khaluyn near Oshevensk, Archangel province. (Photo: Robin Milner-Gulland) Fig. 12.2 Church of the Intercession (Pokrov) on the Nerl, 1165: sculptural detail on the façade, showing King David From D. Shvidkovski, Russian Architecture and the West, Yale, 2007. (Photo: Y. Shorban) Fig. 12.3 Sculpture on the southern front of the Cathedral of St Demetrius, Vladimir, 1191–97 From D. Shvidkovski, Russian Architecture and the West, Yale, 2007. (Photo: Y. Shorban) Fig. 12.4 Icon: ‘The Blessed Host of the Heavenly Tsar’, mid- sixteenth century, from the Dormition Cathedral, Kremlin; now in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow Fig. 12.5 ‘St Basil’s’: plan of the cathedral, 1555–61 From D. Shvidkovski, Russian Architecture and the West, Yale, 2007 Fig. 12.6 ‘The Moscow Kremlin: Palm Sunday Ceremony’, from Voyage du Adam Olearius, Paris, 1727. (Photo: Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo) Fig. 12.7 Plan of Moscow, 1610 (Killian, from an engraving after 1632) From D. Shvidkovski, Russian Architecture and the West, Yale, 2007 Fig. 12.8 Red Square: Palm Sunday, with Lobnoye mesto (engraving, 1867) From D. Shvidkovski, Russian Architecture and the West, Yale, 2007 Fig. 12.9 Cathedral of the Resurrection, New Jerusalem Monastery, Istra, 1658–85 From D. Shvidkovski, Russian Architecture and the West, Yale, 2007. (Photo: Y. Shorban) Fig. 12.10 Cathedral of the Resurrection, New Jerusalem Monastery, Istra, 1658–85: elevation and plan From D. Shvidkovsky, Russian Architecture and the West, New Haven, 2007 Fig. 12.11 New Jerusalem Monastery, Istra: Nikon’s hermitage. (Photo: Anatoliy Kosolapov / Alamy Stock Photo)

225 227 228 228 229 236 238

239

241 241 243 244 245

247

248

249

ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 12.12 Iconostasis of Grigoriy Shumayev: crucifixion with the 250 Mother of God and St John the Divine, the Heavenly City beyond From O. Tarasov, Framing Russian Art, Reaktion Books, 2011 Fig. 12.13 Iconostasis of Grigoriy Shumayev: detail of lower left, 251 showing the Holy Sepulchre From O. Tarasov, Framing Russian Art, Reaktion Books, 2011 Fig. 12.14 Comparative plans of central Moscow and of early 252 St Petersburg Redrawn by Kath D’Alton after Robin Milner-Gulland Fig. 12.15 Crucifixion with guardian angel and selected saints, end 254 of the 18th c., Palekh; now in the P. D. Korin Memorial House, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow From V. I. Antonova, Drevnerusskoe iskusstvo v sobranii Pavla Korina, Moscow, 1966, number 112. Fig. 13.1 Full-page illumination in the Abba Garima gospels: either 259 Mark the evangelist or Abba Garima himself. (Photo: Michael Gervers) Fig. 13.2 Roha: the Tomb of Adam viewed from the west 264 From D. W. Phillipson, Ancient Churches of Ethiopia: Fourth – Fourteenth Centuries, New Haven, 2009, fig. 268. (Photo: D. W. Phillipson, 2006) Fig. 14.1 Plan of Werā Kidāna meḥrat 269 From M. Di Salvo, Churches of Ethiopia, Milan, 1999, 91, fig. 98 Fig. 14.2 Recumbent Christ in the Bēta Golegotā chapel, Lālibalā / 284 Roha. (Photo: Sandro Angelini) Fig. 14.3 The translatio monumenti Christi in the Bēta Golegotā 284 chapel, Lālibalā / Roha. (Photo: Sandro Angelini) Fig. 14.4 Ruins of (Old) Dongola Cruciform Church. (Photo: 289 Emmanuel Fritsch) Fig. 14.5 (Old) Dongola Cruciform Church 291 Plan by W. Godlewski, ‘The Role of Dongolese Milieu in the Nubian Church Architecture’, in M. Krause und S. Schaten (eds.), Themelia: spätantike und koptologische Studien [FS Peter Grossmann], Wiesbaden, 1998, 127–35, fig. 7, reinterpreted by E. Fritsch Fig. 15.1 Clonmacnoise, Co. Offaly, Ireland. (Photo: © National 304 Monuments Service / Dept. of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht) Fig. 15.2 Ring forts, Rathbarna, Co. Roscommon, Ireland. (Photo: 304 Tony Cunningham) Fig. 15.3 Charlemagne, Christiana Religio coin, Staatliche Museum, 311 Berlin, no. 18202748. (Photo: Staatliche Museum, Berlin) Fig. 15.4 The Lebuinus Chalice (Lebuinuskelk). (Photo: Museum 311 Catharijneconvent, Utrecht) Fig. 15.5 The Narbonne model of the aedicule. (Photos: John Crook) 312

xxi

xxii ILLUSTRATIONS Fig. 15.6 Harley Gospels, illuminated Q with the archangel Gabriel confronting Zechariah, BL 2788, f. 109r. (Photo: The British Library) Fig. 15.7 Germigny-des-Prés: the apse mosaic, drawn by M. T. Chrétin, 1847, and reproduced by C.-F. VergnaudRomagnesi, Addition à la notice sur la découverte …, Orléans, n.d. Fig. 16.1 Qal’at Si’man, baptistery, late fifth century: plan From Krautheimer, ‘Introduction’, pl. 4, c Fig. 16.2 Holy Sepulchres: plans Fig. 16.3 San Stefano, Bologna: the tomb of St Petronius in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. (Photo: Scala, Florence/ Luciano Romano) Fig. 16.4 Brescia, Cathedral, c. 1100 After G. Brucher, Die Sakrale Baukunst Italiens im 11. und 12. Jahrhundert, Cologne, 1987, fig. 66 Fig. 16.5 Orphir, apsed rotunda, early twelfth century: plan Fig. 16.6 Poland: apsed rotundas at Gregorzowice, Cieszyn, on the Wawel in Krakow, and Lekno: plans From Z. Świechowski, Architektura Romańska w Polsce, Warsaw, 2000, 71, 48, 139 and 161 Fig. 16.7 The North and Baltic Seas Fig. 17.1 The Old and New Temples From M. D. Lobel (ed.), The British Historic Towns Atlas, III, The City of London from Prehistoric Times to c.1520. © Historic Towns Trust 1989 Fig. 17.2 Neuvy-Saint-Sépulchre, early eleventh century. (Photo: Hemis / Alamy Stock Photo) Fig. 17.3 Plan of the Holy Sepulchre, probably the latest known version of the Arculf-Adomnán drawing, England, late twelfth century, Oxford, Bod. MS Laud Misc 241, f. 85r. (Photo: The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford) Fig. 18.1 Round churches in England Fig. 18.2 English round churches: confirmed original plans. Plans: Catherine E. Hundley, after standing and excavated fabric Fig. 18.3 Marked foundations of original nave at Holy Cross (Temple Church), Bristol. (Photo: Catherine E. Hundley) Fig. 18.4 Foundations of Bradden Chapel, Dover. (Photo: Catherine E. Hundley) Fig. 22.1 Plan of Jerusalem during the crusades. (Drawn by Reginald Piggott) Fig. 22.2 Cosmic map with T-O in the centre of circles, Liber Floridus, Universiteitsbibliotheek, Ghent, MS 92, f. 103. (Photo: Ghent University Archive) Fig. 22.3 Jerusalem as a rotunda, Peter of Poitiers, Compendium,

314 327

331 332 333 334 336 337

338 344

347 350

353 357 365 366 436 439 440

ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. Fig. Fig.

Fig.

Fig. Fig.

Fig.

Fig. Fig.



Eton College MS 96 f.7v. (Photo: © The Provost and Fellows of Eton College) 22.4 Vierge Ouvrante, Metropolitan Museum, New York, 454 Accession no. 17.190.185a, b. (Photo: Metropolitan Museum, New York) 22.5 J. Guillim, drawing of effigy and gravestone in the 460 Temple Church, The Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC, V.a.447, f. 39. (Photo: The Folger Shakespeare Library) 22.6 J. Guillim, drawing of two effigies in the Temple Church, 461 numbered 3 and 4, The Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC, V.a.447, f. 40. (Photo: The Folger Shakespeare Library) 22.7 J. Guillim, drawing of two grave slabs in the Temple 462 Church, numbered 5 and 6, The Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC, V.a.447, f. 41. (Photo: The Folger Shakespeare Library) 22.8 J. Guillim, drawing of two effigies in the Temple 462 Church, numbered 7 and 8, The Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC, V.a.447, f. 42. (Photo: The Folger Shakespeare Library) 22.9 J. Guillim, drawing of two effigies, the left in the Temple 463 Church and numbered 11, The Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC, V.a.447, f. 43. (Photo: The Folger Shakespeare Library) 22.10 J. Guillim, drawing of two effigies in the Temple Church, 463 numbered 9 and 10, The Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC, V.a.447, f. 44. (Photo: The Folger Shakespeare Library) 22.11 The effigies’ layout in the Temple Church, c. 1610 and 464 after 1695 22.12 a) A cross-slab published in The Gentleman’s Magazine 21 474 (1751), Supplement, 602, as ‘lately dug up’ at Bolney, near Henley on Thames, Oxfordshire, late thirteenth to early fourteenth century; now lost b) Brass at Cassington, Oxfordshire, c. 1415. (From a rubbing by J. Bertram) c) A Purbeck marble cross-slab at East Dean, East Sussex, late thirteenth to early fourteenth century. (Photo: J. Bertram) d) Bishopstone, Wiltshire, cross-slab, mid fourteenth century. (Photo: Brian and Moira Gittos)

The editors, contributors and publishers are grateful to all the institutions and persons listed for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publishers will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

xxiii



PREFACE

E

ditors gladly and gratefully acknowledge many debts. Above all we are grateful to our contributors for their papers and for their patience during the book’s gestation. Further thanks quickly follow. Caroline Palmer and her colleagues at Boydell have taken all their characteristic care to make the book as handsome as its subject deserves; the J. C. Baker Trust and Lord Judge of Draycote have provided generous financial support. At the Temple in London Liz Clarke, Cath D’Alton, James Lloyd, Katrina Marchant and above all Catherine de Satgé have in various ways lightened our load. The book is particularly timely. The aedicule in the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem was damaged in the earthquake of 1927; in 1947 a steel frame was built round it to prevent its collapse. In March 2017, after several months’ work of restoration, the aedicule was re-opened to pilgrims and visitors. The steel frame has been removed and the stone has been cleaned; what had seemed for decades to be a sad symptom of scarce resources and of division is now, once more, a fitting centrepiece to the rotunda. We add our own congratulations to all those who made possible the repair. The rotunda of the Temple Church in London, modelled on the Holy Sepulchre, was in use by 1162. In 2010 Robin Griffith-Jones of the Temple Church and David Park of The Courtauld Institute of Art edited The Temple Church in London: History, Architecture, Art, published by Boydell. We are delighted to commit into our readers’ hands this sequel, produced with Boydell in a second happy collaboration between our two institutions, close neighbours in central London. Robin Griffith-Jones The Temple Church

Eric Fernie The Courtauld Institute of Art



CONTRIBUTORS Alan Borg (Victoria and Albert Museum) Antony Eastmond (The Courtauld Institute of Art) David Ekserdjian (University of Leicester) Eric Fernie (The Courtauld Institute of Art) Jaroslav Folda (University of North Carolina) Emmanuel Fritsch (Centre français des études éthiopiennes, Addis Ababa) Michael Gervers (University of Toronto) Robin Griffith-Jones (Temple Church; King’s College, London) Nicole Hamonic (University of South Dakota) Cecily Hennessy (Christie’s Education) Robert Hillenbrand (University of Edinburgh) Catherine E. Hundley (University of Virginia) Philip J. Lankester (Royal Armouries) Robin Milner-Gulland (University of Sussex) Robert Ousterhout (University of Pennsylvania) David W. Phillipson (University of Cambridge) Denys Pringle (Cardiff University) Sebastian Salvadó (Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim)



ABBREVIATIONS AB AV BAR BAS Biddle, Tomb BMGS Bordeaux Pilgrim

CCCM CCR

CCSL Coüasnon, Sepulchre Corbo, Sepolcro

CPR

CSEL DE DLS

Art Bulletin Authorised Version Biblical Archaeology Review Biblical Archaeology Society M. Biddle, The Tomb of Christ, Stroud, 1999 Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies J. Wilkinson, ‘Bordeaux Pilgrim’, in Egeria’s Travels, Liverpool, 1999, 22–34 (extracts in translation from Itinerarium Burdigalense, eds P. Geyer and O. Cuntz, CCSL 175, Turnhout 1965, 1–26). Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaeualis Calendar of the Close Rolls preserved in the Public Record Office, 47 vols organised by reign, London, 1892–1963 Corpus Christianorum Series Latina Ch. Coüasnon, The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, trans. J.-B. B. and C. Ross [The Schweich Lectures 1972], London, 1974 V. Corbo, Il Santo Sepolcro: Aspetti archeologici dalle Origini al Periodo crociato, 3 vols, Jerusalem, 1982 Calendar of the Patent Rolls preserved in the Public Record Office, 73 vols organised by reign, London, 1891–1986 Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum Eusebius, De Demonstratione Evangelii Adomnán, De Locis Sanctis

xxviii ABBREVIATIONS

DOP EAe

Ep. Folda, Art of the Crusaders GCS

Dumbarton Oaks Papers Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, 5 vols, Wiesbaden, 2003–14: vol. 1, ed. S. Uhlig, 2003; vol. 2, ed. S. Uhlig, 2005; vol. 3, ed. S. Uhlig, 2007; vol. 4, eds S. Uhlig and A. Bausi, 2010; vol. 5, eds S. Uhlig and A. Bausi, 2014 English Episcopal Acta, ed. D. Smith, Oxford (for the British Academy), 1980– J. Wilkinson, Egeria’s Travels, Liverpool, 1999, 22–34 (extracts in translation from Itinerarium Burdigalense, eds P. Geyer and O. Cuntz, CCSL 175, Turnhout 1965, 107–64). English Historical Review Encyclopaedia of Islam, eds H. A. R. Gibb et al., Leiden, 1960–2008 Epistulae J. Folda, The Art of the Crusaders in the Holy Land, 1098–1187, Cambridge, 1995 Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller

HE

Historia Ecclesiastica

Hom.

Homiliae

JEH

Journal of Ecclesiastical History

JRIBA JSQ JTS JWCI Krautheimer, ‘Introduction’

Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects Jewish Studies Quarterly Journal of Theological Studies Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes R. Krautheimer, ‘Introduction to an “Iconography of Mediaeval Architecture”’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942), 1–33; repr. R Krautheimer, Studies, 115–50, including a newly written Postscript R. Krautheimer, Studies in Early Christian, Medieval and Renaissance Art, London, 1971 B. Kühnel (ed.), The Real and Ideal Jerusalem in Jewish, Christian and Islamic Art: Studies in Honor of Bezalel Narkiss on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, Journal of Jewish Art (23/24), Jerusalem, 1997–98

EEA Egeria

EHR EI

Krautheimer, Studies Kühnel, Real and Ideal Jerusalem

xxix

ABBREVIATIONS

Kühnel, Visual Constructs LC Lees, Records of the Templars

MGH Morris, Sepulchre

NTS PA PG PL Pringle, Churches RB RCHME SC Serm. Temple Church

VC Vincent and Abel, Jérusalem

Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrimage Wilkinson, Pilgrims

B. Kühnel, G. Noga-Banai and H. Vorholt (eds), Visual Constructs of Jerusalem, Turnhout, 2014 Eusebius, De Laude Constantini, 1–10 B. A. Lees (ed.), Records of the Templars in England in the Twelfth Century: The Inquest of 1185 with Illustrative Charters and Documents, London, 1935 Monumenta Germaniae Historica C. Morris, The Sepulchre of Christ and the Medieval West from the Beginning to 1600, Oxford, 2005 New Testament Studies Palatine Anthology Patrologia Graeca Patrologia Latina D. Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, 4 vols, Cambridge, 1993–2009 Revue Biblique Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England Eusebius, De Sepulchro Christi, comprising De Laude Constantini 11–18 Sermones R. Griffith-Jones and D. Park (eds), The Temple Church in London: History, Architecture, Art, Woodbridge, 2010 Eusebius, Vita Constantini L.-H. Vincent and F.-M. Abel, Jérusalem: Recherches de topographie, d’archéologie et d’histoire, 2: Jérusalem nouvelle, 4 fascs + album, Paris, 1914–26 J. Wilkinson (ed.), Jerusalem Pilgrimage, 1099–1185, Hakluyt Society, series 2, clxvii, London, 1988 J. Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrims before the Crusades, new edn, Oxford, 2002



EDITORS’ NOTE Many of the footnotes are bibliographically rich; in each chapter we direct readers – with, we hope, useful but not wearying frequency – back to that chapter’s first reference to its primary and secondary sources. Our contributors vary in their preferred spellings of persons’ and places’ names and in the indication of vowel-values; we have let the variety stand.

INTRODUCTION I will sing you hymns of love while I am groaning with groans too deep for words [Rom. 8.26] during my pilgrimage, and remembering Jerusalem, towards which my heart is raised high, Jerusalem, my country, Jerusalem, my mother [Gal. 4.26]. And I shall remember you, her Ruler, her Father, her Guardian and her Spouse … I shall not turn aside until I come to that abode of peace, Jerusalem my mother. – Augustine, Confessions 12.16.23 The keeper let me enter the tomb alone. … Bowing down before the holy tomb and kissing with love and tears the holy place where the most pure body of our Lord Jesus Christ lay, I measured the tomb in length and breadth and height, for when people are present it is quite impossible to measure it. … I gave the keeper of the key a small present and my poor blessing. And he, seeing my love for the Lord’s tomb, pushed back for me the slab which is at the head of the holy tomb of the Lord and broke off a small piece of the blessed rock as a relic and forbade me under oath to say anything of this in Jerusalem. – Daniel the Abbot, in Jerusalem at Easter, c. 11061

Jerusalem has informed the Christian imagination from the time of Jesus himself: as the setting of events within human history which transcended and redirected all history; as the ‘New Jerusalem’, the final and longed-for home of the faithful, currently hidden in heaven and due at the last times to be realised on earth; as the representation in buildings of the living, human stones built by God into the present Church, herself already informed and animated by the spirit, the down-payment and seal of the 1 Trans. W. F. Ryan in Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrimage, 1099–1185, 166, 170–1. Daniel has left the fullest account of the miracle and ceremony of the Holy Fire; his own lamp, left unlit in the tomb on Good Friday on behalf of the whole Russian land, was still burning on his return on Tuesday/Wednesday.

2

TOMB AND TEMPLE

New Creation; and therefore as the centre, symbol and goal of God’s action in the individual soul and throughout creation. Our first series of colour plates (I–X) introduces the two buildings in Jerusalem to which we will revert throughout the following pages: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; and the Dome of the Rock. Much of this book is focused on architectural representations of the Holy Sepulchre, built on the supposed site of Jesus’ tomb. In a preparatory chapter, Robin Griffith-Jones surveys a number of certain and likely evocations, widely diverse in medium and scale, of the Sepulchre.2 GriffithJones, attending to some of the smallest and most elaborate mementos, asks if the sensibilities apparently deployed on such containers of stones and oil informed as well the experience of the entire buildings with which, in the main body of the book, we will be chiefly concerned. We then turn to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, from Constantine in the early fourth century through to the crusaders in the twelfth. Griffith-Jones surveys the early literary and archaeological evidence.3 Denys Pringle outlines the building programmes undertaken in the Sepulchre between the capture of Jerusalem and the works’ completion in the 1160s.4 Jaroslav Folda broadens our horizons: he shows the influences at work on the Sepulchre’s south transept façade, and in particular its connection to Santiago de Compostela and the pilgrim churches of southern Europe.5 Robert Hillenbrand ensures that we do some justice to the Dome of the Rock, built on the Noble Sanctuary/Temple Mount, in the centuries before its appropriation by the crusaders.6 He describes a deepening Muslim veneration for the city and in particular for the Dome over several centuries following its completion in 691 to 692. To conclude, Hillenbrand, writing from a personal experience of the Dome now rare for non-Muslims, evokes the rich sensory impact that the Dome would once have made. The rest of this book will be focused on Christian Jerusalem. We turn back in several chapters to the influence of the buildings on the Temple Mount. For the ‘Temple’, Eric Fernie finds the significance of supposedly ‘Solomonic’ spiral columns, before the fifteenth century, not in the Temple but in St Peter’s.7 David Ekserdjian takes us back to the Dome of the Rock and to the influence of its lovely symmetry on Renaissance depictions of the Temple.8 2 Robin Griffith-Jones, ‘Public, Private and Political Devotion: Re-presenting the Sepulchre’, 17–50 below. 3 Robin Griffith-Jones, ‘The Building of the Holy Sepulchre’, 53–75 below. 4 Denys Pringle, ‘The Crusader Church of the Holy Sepulchre’, 76–94 below. 5 Jaroslav Folda, ‘The Crusader Church of the Holy Sepulchre: Design, Depiction and the Pilgrim Church of Compostela’, 95–119 below. 6 R. Hillenbrand, ‘Medieval Muslim Veneration of the Dome of the Rock’, 125–45 below. 7 E. Fernie, ‘Spiral Columns and the Temple of Solomon’, 159–63 below. 8 D. Ekserdjian, ‘Raphael’s Marriage of the Virgin and the Temple at Jerusalem in the Italian Renaissance Imagination’, 164–80 below.

INTRODUCTION

Historians describe in ever closer detail the devices by which Christians of the Western and Eastern Churches, far from Jerusalem, have realised in their own churches and lives the city’s manifold sanctity. These were, at their simplest, decisions over the design of new churches and of cities, decisions made by the patrons and engineered by their architects or master-builders. Also at issue, however, has been the putative experience of a wide range of believers: those who travelled to Jerusalem – and in some cases, as serial pilgrims, to other holy places – and brought back both memories and mementos; those in secular and religious life who reflected on Jerusalem with the help of travellers’ reports or of devotional manuals; and those who worshipped in the many churches whose dedication, history, design, furnishings, relics or liturgies were intended to evoke quite specifically this terrestrial Jerusalem. The rest of this book is largely about such commissions as these, in Western Europe, Byzantium, Russia and the Caucasus, and Ethiopia. In a foundational article to which our contributors will make repeated reference, Richard Krautheimer drew attention to the churches that were intended – as we can see from their dedication and their description by chroniclers – to evoke the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.9 Most startling to modern eyes is the mismatch, in most such churches, between their dedications or descriptions that recall the Sepulchre and their designs that in any evident sense do not. As will become clear, we may seek an explanation for this oddity (i) in the general medieval understanding of a copy or representation;10 (ii) in the particular character of Jerusalem’s buildings and of their heavenly analogues; or (iii) in the liturgical, civic or political agenda of the copies’ patrons. Most elusive of these three avenues is the second. Here the copy would not, at root, be a copy of the earthly prototype in Jerusalem, but – in Augustinian terms – of the heavenly reality (res) which Jerusalem’s prototype had (as a signum) shared in, instantiated, prefigured or revealed. The copy would not so much represent as re-present – make present in the new setting – the res behind and within that prototype. Robert Ousterhout has in the past explored, from various angles, the character of such putative copying; and in his chapter here he distinguishes, in debts and allusions to the Temple, between (i) narrowly symbolic and (ii) rich, polyvalent metaphorical reference.11 We will be asking throughout, who noticed and who cared about such debts and allusions, and then further (with an eye on the buildings’ patrons, paymasters and architects) who noticed who noticed, and who cared who cared. Antony Eastmond refines the familiar notion that the centralised Krautheimer, ‘Introduction’. We will not be exploring the terms figura, similitudo, typus in detail; but we do not assume that they are interchangeable. 11 R. Ousterhout, ‘The Temple as Symbol, the Temple as Metaphor: Contrasting Eastern and Western Reimaginings’, 146–58 below. 9

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churches throughout the Caucasus were linked with the Holy Sepulchre. He asks us to pay greater attention to the buildings’ liturgical and other functional needs, and he looks to the inspiration – chiefly liturgical rather than martyrial – which the Caucasus drew in its basilicas from the Church on Mount Sion. The replication of Jerusalem in Mtskheta (Georgia) developed over centuries. In Armenia the links are rather with Jerusalem as a spiritual ideal than as a real city, matching an apparent preference for imagining Jerusalem and its sanctity rather than encountering it directly.12 One part of our interest – as historians, anthropologists or theologians – will be in the buildings’ particular capacity, when they were built, to represent or to realise not just the Jerusalem of this world but also the Jerusalem of the next. A pilgrimage to Jerusalem distilled into a single voyage the course of two journeys: the journey of an individual’s Christian life towards death and the final home after death; and the course of all history towards its consummation, envisioned at Rev. 20–21, in the creation of a new heaven and new earth, the descent of the New Jerusalem and the end of death in this home of God and urban Eden that will both recover and transcend the condition of pre-lapsarian paradise. It was a journey from geographical and spiritual peripheries to the navel of the old creation and, in Christ, of the new; and so to the origin and term of the whole world and of the individual soul. The city of God was the aim and destination of spiritual life, quite independent of any local or distant buildings; the buildings, their settings and the journeys needed to reach them were the visible counterpart to long-established traditions of interior space, travel, danger and destination. To be devoted to the city of God and to the journey there was already to be its citizen. For Augustine himself, the significance that once lay in the earthly Jerusalem and its Temple has now passed: The city of the saints is above, although here below it begets citizens, in whom it lives as a foreigner [peregrinatur] till the time of its reign arrives, when it shall gather together everyone when they rise in their bodies, when the promised kingdom shall be given to them, where they shall reign with their prince, the king of the ages, without any end of time. A certain shadow and prophetic image of this city did indeed serve on earth to signify it rather than to make it present, at the time when it needed to be represented; and this shadow was even called the holy city itself, by merit of the image and its significance, not of the actual and expressed truth as it is going to be.13 A. Eastmond, ‘Jerusalems in the Caucasus?’, 211–32 below. The second paragraph: umbra sane quaedam civitatis huius et imago prophetica ei significandae potius quam praesentandae servivit in terris, quo eam tempore demonstrari oportebat, et dicta est etiam ipsa civitas sancta merito significantis imaginis, non expressae, sicut futura est, veritatis, Aug., Civ. Dei 15.1–2. At 17.3 Augustine distinguished three kinds of such biblical prophecies: some relate to the earthly Jerusalem, some to the heavenly, 12 13

INTRODUCTION

This age and the next were, in some measure, porous. Patrons and artists would rather welcome to the present world a still-embattled New Jerusalem than none at all. The Westwerk at Corvey, massive and set square like the New Jerusalem, with three arches on each of its four walls (Rev. 21.12–21), needed protection; an inscription prays, ‘This city [civitas]: surround it yourself, O Lord; and may your angels guard its walls.’ A manuscript could show the New Jerusalem ‘and on its walls’, as an inscription confirms, ‘a guard of angels’.14 Dedication services revelled in the evocation of the New Jerusalem. Antiphons from a tenth-century Ordo play on the history and promises of the past, the present liturgy and its prefiguration of the final salvation to come: ‘Salvation will go out from Mount Sion, for protection will be upon this city and it will be saved for the sake of its servant David … Walk on, holy ones of God, enter into the city of the Lord, to your destined place, which has been prepared for you from the beginning of the world [Matt. 25.3].’15 Thus far, this all remains too narrowly devotional. We need as well the buildings’ wider political, economic and architectural contexts. Robin Milner-Gulland here sets Russia’s New Jerusalems into their dynastic settings.16 David Phillipson addresses the links and ease of travel between Ethiopia and Jerusalem during the centuries of Lalibela’s construction;17 and Emmanuel Fritsch finds the sources of Ethiopia’s round churches (i) in Dongola (in the Nubian kingdom of Makuria) several centuries before these round churches began to appear, then to be reinforced in (ii) the vernacular architecture of the rotundas’ own time.18 Griffith-Jones and Ousterhout summarise the dynastic rivalries behind Justinian’s boast over H. Sophia, ‘I have defeated you, Solomon’;19 and Griffith-Jones returns to address the cultures which informed the Arculf/Adomnán drawings of the Sepulchre, Charlemagne’s chapel at Aachen and Theodulf ’s oratory at

some to both. He thought those commentators very daring, who found in every prophecy of the earthly Jerusalem an allegory of the heavenly; but for as long as these thinkers retained the prophecies’ historical truth, he did not decry their effort to discover such allegorical significations. 14 Oxford, MS Bodl. 352 f. 13r, Y. Christe, ‘Et super muros eius angelorum custodia’, Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 24 (1981), 173–9. 15 L. H. Stookey, ‘The Gothic Cathedral as the Heavenly Jerusalem: Liturgical and Theological Sources’, Gesta 8 (1969), 35–41. 16 R. Milner-Gulland, ‘Holy Russia and the “Jerusalem Idea”’, 233–54 below. 17 D. W. Phillipson, ‘Jerusalem and the Ethiopian Church: The Evidence of Roha (Lalibela)’, 255–66 below. 18 E. Fritsch, ‘The Origins and Meanings of the Ethiopian Circular Church: Fresh Explorations’, 267–93 below. 19 R. Griffith-Jones, ‘“I have defeated you, Solomon”’, 187–93 below; R. Ousterhout, ‘The Temple as Symbol, the Temple as Metaphor: Contrasting Eastern and Western Reimaginings’, 146–58 below.

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Germigny-des-Prés.20 Cecily Hennessy links the architecture of devotion to St James in Jerusalem and in Constantinople.21 In the book’s final section we bring together architectural, social, political and devotional enquiries into Britain’s round churches, and in particular into London’s Temple Church. We hope thereby, in this one case, to approach a compendious overview. Eric Fernie analyses the supposed copies of the Sepulchre and the criteria that have been used to identify them.22 Alan Borg surveys judiciously the role of texts and of the military orders in the dissemination of the Sepulchre’s form; he draws our attention once more to the Arculf/Adomnán drawings.23 Catherine Hundley surveys the English round churches built during the crusaders’ rule over Jerusalem; she provides a welcome gazetteer.24 Michael Gervers takes up the theme, and asks what if anything was distinctive in these churches’ local social and economic functions.25 Nicole Hamonic then takes us onto a larger stage: twenty-one visitation indulgences issued in support of the Old and New Temple in London, c. 1145 to 1275, are recorded in BL Cotton MS Nero E VI; Hamonic gives them the attention that they have always deserved and never had.26 Here we do at least some justice to the exchange of benefits – spiritual and economic – possible at such pilgrim-shrines: indulgences on the one hand, offerings on the other; the hope of an eternal reward among patrons for the provision of the church, and among pilgrims from the blessings they secured there. Sebastian Salvadó introduces us to liturgy and to a startling evocation of the Orders’ likely processions within their European rotundas.27 GriffithJones brings us back at the close to questions of devotion: he sounds some of the theological harmonies implicit in a Marian rotunda built in imitation of the circular Sepulchre by an Order headquartered in Jerusalem opposite the octagonal ‘Temple of the Lord’, the Dome of the Rock; and he asks who will have heard, in the shape of the Temple Church and its allusions, how rich a symphony of thought and feeling.28 Thanks to our contributors we can map in outline a thousand years and three continents of architectural, devotional, cultural and political history, and we can survey at least some of the deep cultural shifts and divergences that have informed this landscape. Each of the contributors introduces the 20 R. Griffith-Jones, ‘Arculf ’s Circles, Aachen’s Octagon, Germigny’s Cube: Three Riddles from Northern Europe’, 301–28 below. 21 C. Hennessy, ‘Saint James the Just: Sacral Topography in Jerusalem and Constantinople’, 194–210 below. 22 E. Fernie, ‘Representations of the Holy Sepulchre’, 329–38 below. 23 A. Borg, ‘The Military Orders and the Idea of the Holy Sepulchre’, 339–51 below. 24 C. E. Hundley, ‘The English Round Church Movement’, 352–75 below. 25 M. Gervers, ‘The Use and Meaning of the Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Round Churches of England’, 376–86 below. 26 N. Hamonic, ‘Jerusalem in London: The New Temple Church’, 387–412 below. 27 S. Salvadó, ‘Commemorating the Rotunda in the Round: The Medieval Latin Liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and its Performance in the West’, 413–28 below. 28 R. Griffith-Jones, ‘The Temple Church in the Crusades’, 429–55 below.

INTRODUCTION

historiographical background, as and if needed, to his or her own study; and so they cumulatively reveal the advances in understanding offered through the course of the volume.

FROM THE TABERNACLE OF THE WILDERNESS TO THE TEMPLES OF JERUSALEM It may be helpful to sketch at the outset the succession of structures – real, envisioned and hoped for – which underlie much of this book. When the people of Israel were in the desert, Moses built the tabernacle in accordance with God’s commands in seven stages (Ex. 25.1–31.17), corresponding to the six days of creation and to the seventh, of God’s rest.29 Moses was ordered to build the tabernacle and its contents according to the design which was shown to him on the mountain (paradeigma LXX / similitudo Vg, Ex. 25.9; tupos / exemplar, 25.40; eidos / exemplum, 26.30; cf. 27.8); and the ark of the covenant was to be made ‘from incorruptible wood’ (ek xulōn asēptōn, LXX, acacia or incorruptible; de lignis setthim, Vg). The principal craftsman was Bezalel, filled with the spirit of God in wisdom, knowledge and skill (Ex. 31.1–11). Within the tabernacle were the mercy-seat and its two flanking cherubim: ‘from there’, God told Moses, ‘I shall teach you and speak to you, that is, over the mercy-seat [propitiatorium] and in between the two cherubim who will be above the ark of the testimony – everything which I will command through you to the children of Israel’ (Vg, Ex. 25.22). The tabernacle, therefore – and within it the incorruptible ark – were like no other artefacts on earth; and they established within scripture the existence of heavenly prototypes, plausibly read by later generations as Platonic forms in which their imperfect, perishable counterparts participate on earth. The tabernacle’s plan was the basis for the Temple’s, in Jerusalem. The sanctuary of Solomon’s Temple was an oblong block. A portico led into two rooms: the portico was 10 cubits deep and ran the whole 20 cubits’ width of the outer hall and Holy of Holies; the outer hall was 40 cubits long, 20 wide and 25 high;30 and beyond it stood the innermost Holy of Holies, a cube of 20 x 20 x 20 cubits (1 Kings 6.1–22; 2 Chron. 3.1–13). Both rooms were decorated with trees and fruits. It was a paradise. In the Holy of Holies stood the ark of the covenant. Behind the ark was a further pair of giant cherubim. Their wings were outstretched; the outer wing-tip of each cherub touched the wall, the inner wing-tip touched the other’s (cf. Ex. 25.22; 1 Sam. 4.4; 2 Sam. 6.2; Psalms 80.1, 99.1). This Temple was destroyed in 587 BCE; the ark and the cherubim were not seen again. 29 P. J. Kearney, ‘Creation and Liturgy: The P Redaction of Exodus 25–40’, Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 89 (1977), 375–87: God’s seven speeches to Moses start, ‘The Lord spoke to Moses’ (Ex. 25.1; 30.11, 16, 22, 34; 31.11, 12). 30 30 cubits high, 2 Kings 6.2 Vg and LXX vl.

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Ezekiel, in exile in Babylon after the Temple’s destruction, dreamt of a Jerusalem with a new Temple. To see it he was carried to the top of a high mountain overlooking Israel (Ez. 40.2). The Temple’s inner court was square, 100 x 100 cubits; the sanctuary’s outer hall and Holy of Holies were, as in Solomon’s destroyed Temple, 40 x 20 cubits and 20 x 20 cubits (Ez. 40.47, 41.2–4). Ezekiel saw the river of life, and on either side the trees of life bearing a crop of fruit in each month of the year (Ez. 47.12). It was to be set in a Jerusalem with twelve gates, three set in each of its four walls, and each named for one of Israel’s tribes (Ez. 48.30–35). The Temple in Jerusalem was rebuilt by the Jews, led by Zerubbabel, who returned from exile in Babylon in the sixth century BCE. The new building was consecrated in 515 BCE and then again, after desecration, in December 164 (1 Macc. 4). From 20/19 BCE, Herod the Great rebuilt the whole complex. He drastically expanded the Temple Mount, creating a vast esplanade for the outer court, the setting for the exchange of coinage and sale of sacrificially pure animals.31 Two flights of steps and a balustrade raised the enclosed area of the sanctuary twenty feet above the court’s level; within the enclosure twelve further steps led up to the sanctuary. Construction continued until the early 60s CE.32 Josephus gives a full account of the Temple as it stood in the first century CE. Protecting the outer hall and the Holy of Holies from daylight and from human sight were two sets of overlapping veils.33 One set was embroidered in blue, linen, scarlet and purple, representing for Josephus the elements of air, earth, fire and sea. So by its material the veil already signified the universe; and its embroidery showed the whole spectacle of heaven. In the sanctuary’s outer hall the seven-branched lampstand signified, for Josephus, the seven planets; the twelve loaves, the months and zodiac; the altar of incense, the due offering of all created things to their maker. To pass beyond the veil was to pass through and beyond the created universe and the heavens themselves to God’s domain above. The outer hall was entered by the priests on duty every day, morning and evening. The Holy of Holies was entered only on the Day of Atonement and by the High Priest alone. It was, as far as any such claim could be made for a single place in God’s creation, the home of God on earth; and so it was the intersection of earth and heaven. Adam had been the gardener of Eden, and named all the creatures there (Gen. 2.15, 19–20). As God had once walked with Adam in Eden in the cool of the day, so the place of such encounter was once more an Eden; Jewish mystics ascended, for a glimpse 31 The line of the expansion can be seen in H. Shanks, Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, New York, 2007, 117–18. 32 Chronology in E. Schurer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ (rev. edn), eds M. Black, G. Vermes et al., Edinburgh, 1973, I, 292–308. For a description and plans, E. P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 BC – 66 CE, London, 1992, 51–69, 306–14. 33 Jos. BJ 5.5.4–5 [213–18]; Ant. 3.6.4 [132], 3.7.7 [183].

INTRODUCTION

of God’s glory, to paradise (2 Cor. 12.2–4).34 At the time of Jesus, the Holy of Holies was empty. According to the gospel of Mark, the heavens had been torn open (schizomenoi) at Jesus’ baptism; the veil of the Temple was torn (eschisthē) from top to bottom when Jesus died (Mark 1.10, 15.38). The heavens and the veil alike, adorned with sun, moon and stars, hid God’s heaven and God’s plans from human view; the veil was torn at the moment of God’s ultimate self-disclosure on Golgotha. The Letter to the Hebrews expounds the death of Christ as the entry of the new High Priest into the Holy of Holies, taking the blood not of a sacrificial bull and goat but of himself. This Holy of Holies was in heaven; the author, then, most directly evoked not the Temple in Jerusalem but Moses’ tabernacle and its heavenly prototype. He describes the High Priest’s annual entry into the Holy of Holies, already ordained for the tabernacle (Lev. 16); ‘but Christ, having appeared as the High Priest of future benefits, through the fuller and more perfect tabernacle not made with hands – that is, not of this creation – and not through the blood of goats and bulls but through his own blood entered once for all into the eternal Holy Places, having found eternal redemption’. The earthly ministries have their role: ‘it is necessary that with these the antitypes [antitupa, LXX, exemplaria, Vg] of heavenly things should be cleansed, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these. For Jesus has not, in holy places made by hands, entered the antitypes of the true things but into heaven itself, so that he might now appear before the face of God on our behalf ’ (Hebr. 9.11–12, 24). The Book of Revelation knows the unique standing of the ark: at the sounding of the seventh trumpet in Revelation, ‘the sanctuary of God in heaven opened, and the ark of the covenant could be seen inside it’ (Rev. 11.19). At the close of Revelation we return to Jerusalem and Eden together. The Temple as imagined by Ezekiel informed Revelation’s closing vision, of a new heaven and new earth and a ‘heavenly Jerusalem’ that descends to earth as a bride adorned for her husband (Rev. 21.1–22.5). This Jerusalem is the tabernacle of God (Rev. 21.3); but there is no temple in it nor any sun or moon, for God and the Lamb are themselves its temple and its light (Rev. 21.22–3). It is a square, described as also ‘equal in height’ (Rev. 21.16); with twelve foundations and with twelve gates that bear the names of Israel’s tribes; and with Ezekiel’s river and fruitful trees. The earliest panegyric of a church to survive is Eusebius’ record of his own speech at the dedication of Paulinus’ church at Tyre, c. 315. It combines biblical and Platonic thought with startling complexity. The many later treatments of the theme, more directly homiletic, relish an exuberant but conceptually simpler range of interpretive possibilities. Eusebius compares 34 Within the large literature, C. R. A. Morray-Jones, ‘The Temple Within’, in A. D. DeConick (ed.), Paradise Now: Essays on Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism, Atlanta, 2006, 145–78; and the survey in P. R. Gooder, Only the Third Heaven? 2 Corinthians 12.1–10 and Heavenly Ascent, London, 2006.

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Paulinus to Bezalel, Solomon and Zerubbabel. The speech then follows a single theme in four ways. First, the human race was sunk under devils, in tombs and graves; once redeemed, the individual soul becomes a Holy of Holies, seen only by the High Priest Christ and (it may be) by the High Priest Paulinus. Secondly, there was the church at Tyre. The land had been covered with rubbish, the haunt of wild beasts. But as Christ did what he saw his father doing, so Paulinus used Christ’s actions as his patterns and archetypes; and as Bezalel was called to construct through symbols the sanctuary of heavenly types, so Paulinus, bearing the whole Christ, the Word, and Wisdom in his soul, had built Tyre’s sanctuary according to the pattern of the greater sanctuary, visible according to the pattern of the invisible. Thirdly comes the still greater wonder: the restoration of souls, previously captured and slain by demons, buried and covered in rubbish; these souls are the archetypes, the rational prototypes and divine models of the building, a spiritual edifice restored by God. Eusebius finally brings building and souls together, placing the believers of different calibres in suitable roles around the Church and church, and locating the altar in the Holy of Holies that is the soul of Christ himself. So the Church is the sanctuary built throughout the world as the spiritual image on earth of the vaults that stand beyond the vaults of heaven.35 Eusebius stands, unsurpassed, at the head of an enormous river of such interpretations, ever more varied in detail.

TEMPLE AND TOMB: JESUS AND HIS BURIAL The Temple, as the tabernacle before it, was a microcosm of creation; and by the time of Jesus its daily prayers were conceived as upholding creation’s order.36 John’s gospel is in turn the story of a new creation; and the links between the Temple and Jesus’ tomb find here their first expression. Genesis had opened ‘in the beginning’ with creation by God’s word (Gen. 1.1–3); so John’s prologue, a prefatory hymn, introduces the Word who was ‘in the beginning’, who was with God and was God, and through whom all things came to be. God’s first command had been for light (Gen. 1.3); in John’s ‘Word’ was life, and the life was the light of humankind (John 1.4–5, 9). The Word makes its tabernacle with humankind (1.14). Jesus is presented throughout as the new Temple: he speaks of the sanctuary that is his body (2.21); he makes present in his own person the light and water of the Feast of Tabernacles (7.37–9; 8.12).37 Eus., HE 10.4.13–14, 22–5, 55, 68–9. C. T. R. Hayward, The Jewish Temple, London, 1996, 1–12. 37 R. Griffith-Jones, The Four Witnesses, San Francisco, 2001, 337–41, with reference to Mishnah Sukkah. I have further explored John’s Easter story and its role in the gospel in R. Griffith-Jones, ‘Transformation by a Text: The Gospel of John’, in F. Flannery (ed.), Experientia I: Studies in Religious Experience in the Ancient World, Atlanta, 2008, 105–24, and ‘Apocalyptic Mystagogy: Rebirth-from-above in the Reception of John’s Gospel’, in 35

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Jesus died at Passover, the season of creation. God had begun creation on Day One with light and darkness; at the end of Day Six, with the creation of the Human(s), God ‘completed’ his works (sunetelesthēsan, sunetelesen, Gen. 2.1, 2). At the trial of Jesus on the morning of Good Friday, once more Day Six, Pontius Pilate presented Jesus to the crowd: ‘Look,’ said Pilate, ‘the Human!’ (19.5). He spoke more correctly than he knew. As the afternoon of Day Six drew towards its end, Jesus said: ‘It is completed [tetelestai]’, and died (19.30). In John’s gospel (and only in John’s), Jesus was buried in a garden (19.41). On Day Seven, with creation complete, God had rested; Day Seven became the Sabbath, and on it the story of John’s gospel pauses. On Day Eight, the day of perfection which is again Day One, ‘very early, when it was still dark’, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb (John 20.1). When at last she looked in, she saw two men standing, one at each end of the stone on which Jesus had been laid. Echoed here are the cherubim that flanked God’s throne; the tomb of Jesus is now the Holy of Holies, where he himself is at once sanctuary, priest and victim. When Mary turned and saw Jesus, she took him for the gardener; he called her by her name, and she recognised him. Light of all kinds, in John’s narrative, was rising on Day One. John was evoking an Eden, in a world reborn, where a new Adam – once more, supposedly, the gardener – and a new Eve were together again. At Jesus’ burial the Temple’s paradise became a tomb; through Jesus’ presence the tomb became the Temple. John needed his audience to enquire what human figure could possibly belong – let alone, as a corpse – between the cherubim, the guardians in the Holy of Holies of the throne of God.38 John’s gospel demanded of its audience a sensibility alert to nuance and allusion, and a bold typological imagination; for the audience was clearly being invited through the story not just to recognise but to occupy for themselves that new creation. John’s compositional devices show that he knew how drastic – and perhaps how difficult – would be the attainment of the insight to which he was leading his audience. Gregory the Great, expounding John’s Easter story at the end of the sixth century, considers the role played by these angels: the angel at the head represented the Word who was God, the angel at the feet the Word made flesh. But further: we can also see in the angels the two testaments: the Old at the head, the New at the feet; they form a proper pair, both announcing Jesus pari sensu. So they recall the cherubim in the Holy of Holies, facing with perfectly paired gaze each other and the mercy-seat C. C. Rowland and C. H. Williams (eds), John’s Gospel and Intimations of Apocalyptic [FS Ashton], London, 2013, 274–99. This remains a minority reading. 38 Ezekiel had seen one ‘in the likeness as the appearance of Adam’ on the chariotthrone of God (Ez. 1.26). Ezekiel’s vision gave rise by the second century BCE to a Jewish mystical tradition built around the contemplation of the chariot-throne and its dazzling occupant; the tradition was informing Christian mysticism, in The Ascension of Isaiah, by the late first century CE.

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(propitiatorium) which is a figure of the incarnate Lord (propitiatio, 1 John 2.2). These cherubim as the two testaments tell in harmony the mystery of Christ’s dispensation: the Old, what was, when it was written, yet to be done; the New, what has now been achieved.39 John’s particular typology did not come to dominate the Church. The sanctuary and the tomb have continued, nonetheless, to be inseparably linked in the liturgy. In the East, the altar was associated by the fifth century with Christ’s tomb. ‘We may think of him on the altar,’ wrote Theodore of Mopsuestia in a long account of the offerings brought out as Christ was led to his passion; they are placed on the altar ‘as if henceforth in a kind of sepulchre, and as having already undergone the passion’;40 the linens represent the burial cloths, the fans keep anything from falling on the body, the ministers are around the altar as the angels flanked Jesus’ tomb. Theodore’s pupil Narsai pursued the theme: ‘The altar is the symbol of the Lord’s tomb without a doubt, and the bread and wine are the body of our Lord which was embalmed and buried.’41 The tradition (untainted by Narsai’s heresies) has endured from John Climax of Mount Sinai until the present day.42 In the West, Hrabanus Maurus (c. 780–856) inherited the symbolism of the white, linen corporal (the cloth on which the chalice and host are placed) as the grave-clothes. The paten and chalice quodammodo Dominici sepulcri typum habent: the chalice as the grave, the paten as its cover; or the chalice as Christ’s suffering and the paten as the cross; the elements’ elevation as Christ’s elevation on the cross; the bread’s fragment, dropped in the wine, as the ongoing food of the risen Christ; the unconsumed bread on the altar as Christ’s abandonment by his disciples and his burial.43 From the ninth 39 Gregory, Hom. 25 (PL 76.1191). Odo of Chartres (PL 133.714) and Bruno Astensis (PL 165.593) make the same point. 40 Theodore, Homily 15.24–9 [at 26], trans. R. Tonneau and R. Devreesse, Les homilies catéchétiques de Théodore de Mopsueste (Studi e Testi 145), Vatican, 1949, 503–11 [at 505–7]. 41 Narsai, Homily 17, trans. R. H. Connolly, The Liturgical Commentaries of Narsai (Texts and Studies 8.1), Cambridge, 1909, 4. 42 R. F. Taft, The Great Entrance: A History of the Transfer of Gifts and other Preanaphoral Rites of the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, Rome, 1975, 37–41; A. St Clair, ‘The Visit to the Tomb: Narrative and Liturgy on Three Early Christian Pyxides’, Gesta 18 (1979), 127–35. Taft draws attention to Christ’s death as prior, in this conception, to his being offered at the altar. On the blessing for a pyx in Missale Francorum (c. 700), J. Braun, Das christliche Altargerät, Munich, 1932, 291: hoc vasculum sanctificetur et corporis novum sepulcrum spiritus sancti gratia perficiatur. On recollections of the Sepulchre in round pyxides with conical lids and in conical pyxes, ibid., 291; among the pyxides showing the women approaching the Sepulchre, see for example the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 17.190.57a, b (sixth century), http://www.metmuseum.org/ toah/works-of-art/17.190.57. On the paten (of the mid twelfth century) from the tomb of Hubert Walter (d. 1205) that associates the tools of the eucharist with the elements of the passion, J. Munns, Cross and Culture in Anglo-Norman England, Woodbridge, 2016, 127: ara crucis, tumulique calix, lapidisque patena / sindonis officium candida byssus habet (attr. Hildebert of Lavardin, 1055–1133). 43 Hrabanus, De institutione clericorum 1.33 (PL 107.323–5).

INTRODUCTION

century onwards it became standard practice for one or three hosts to be entombed in an altar at its dedication.44 In his Liber officialis III (issued in three editions, 821–35) Amalarius of Metz comprehensively described the ninth-century Mass as such an allegorical drama.45 It calls for mention precisely because of its apparently widespread appeal; the condemnation of Amalarius in 853 confirms that Amalarius had ‘infected and corrupted almost all the churches in France and many in other regions … the simpliciores are reputed to love them and read them assiduously’.46 The altar is the sepulchre from which Christ is risen at the communion; death, burial and resurrection are all enacted. At Nobis quoque peccatoribus Christ ‘is sleeping with head inclined’ on the cross. Amalarius notes that in the Gallican service the chalice was placed to the right of the paten, to catch the holy blood. From then on until the end of the consecration at Per omnia saecula saeculorum, priest and deacon were enacting the burial of Christ. The chalice and paten, elevated and then wrapped in sudarion and sindon, were replaced on the altar as in the tomb. At this point the drama turned to joy. A subdeacon received the paten, signifying that it was the women who first heard the news of the resurrection. The communion itself represented the events of Easter Day: the commingling reunited body and blood and so re-created the miracle of the resurrection; in the Pax Domini the Lord’s salutation made happy the disciples’ hearts (John 20.19, 21); the fraction was a symbol of the risen Christ and of his living presence at the service.47 Such a dramaturgical instinct is summed up by Honorius Augusto­ dunensis (c. 1100): Those who recited tragedies in theatres presented the actions of opponents by gestures before the people. In the same way our tragic author [the celebrant] represents by his gestures in the theatre of the church before the Christian people the struggle of Christ and teaches them the victory of his redemption.48

Such was the daily, transcendental drama of the Mass, performed in the 44 On hosts’ use in the consecration of churches as a form of relic, G. J. C. Snoek, Medieval Piety from Relics to the Eucharist, Leiden, 1995, 19, 68–9, 186–97; cf. J. Braun, Der christliche Altar in seiner geschichtlichen Entwicklung, 2 vols, Munich, 1924, I, 623–9. On the saints’ relics as membra Christi in altars and on the three hosts placed in the altar at churches’ dedication, see J. Gagé, ‘Membra Christi et la deposition des reliques sous l’autel’, Revue Archéologique 29 (1929), 137–53. Braun insisted that the Sepulchre is in the altar, but the altar is not the Sepulchre, Braun, Altar, I, 241. 45 Amalarius, Liber officialis (De ecclesiasticis officiis libri IV), book III (PL 105.1101–64); J. M. Hanssens, Amalarii Episcopi Opera liturgica omnia, 3 vols, Vatican, 1948–50, II, 255–399, summarised and analysed by O. B. Hardison, Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages, Baltimore, 1965, 35–79. 46 Hardison, Christian Rite, 38, quoting either Remigius or Deacon Florus (PL 121.1054). 47 Hardison, Christian Rite, 69-76; PL 105.1144–56, Hanssens, Amalarii Opera, II, 350–72. 48 Honorius, Gemma Animae (PL 172.570), trans. O. B. Hardison.

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many thousand theatres of liturgy created by the altar; we have not even touched on the special but ubiquitous ceremonies of Holy Week and Easter, or on their widespread props and drama.49 We concentrate for much of this book on representations of the Holy Sepulchre, as experienced all through the year. Throughout, we will ask what made these few programmatic – and often spectacular – architectural recollections of the Sepulchre how special and why in whose eyes and lives. This book is a study in architectural history, not in the recovery of medieval sensibilities. But we will from time to time look beyond the analysis of form and function, to acknowledge the part played by these places and the devotion they inspired, focused or amplified in cultures which can now seem irrecoverably distant from our own. An age becomes an age, all else beside, When sensuous poets in their pride invent Emblems for the soul’s consent That speak the meanings men will never know But man-imagined images can show. Archibald MacLeish, Hypocrite Auteur, 2

49 Classically, K. Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols, Oxford, 1933, I, 239–539, on the visit to the Sepulchre and the Easter season’s plays. J. E. A. Kroesen, The Sepulchrum Domini through the Ages, Leuven, 1975, gives an account of the Easter liturgy, 147–73.

PART I

RE-PRESENTING JERUSALEM

PUBLIC, PRIVATE AND POLITICAL DEVOTION: RE-PRESENTING THE SEPULCHRE ROBIN GRIFFITH-JONES

M

ost of this volume will be dedicated to architectural and political history, in the designs, sculptures and patronage of buildings. In this opening chapter we will give some context to the architectural studies that follow, in a reminder of other forms – some far less grand and costly than the buildings, and far more widespread – in which the Holy Sepulchre and its relics were made pervasively present throughout Europe. We will see the ambiguities that inform these other representations, between the Jerusalems of earth and heaven, of past, present and future, of interior and exterior space. This is a book of artistic rather than social history. Our focus will be largely (but not exclusively) on high-status buildings and artefacts, on their use, and on the ways in which they are likely to have guided, enriched and enlivened the liturgies and devotions of those who encountered them. How accessible and how often were these buildings and artefacts to people of what classes or education – and how much that ‘public’ mattered to the patrons – are questions underlying every page of the present chapter; and we will occasionally, here and later in the book, have good reason to articulate and address them. But on the page we will for the most part ask what the artefacts seem designed to effect or to make possible in unspecified individuals present ‘on their own’ within, before or in contact with them. At the book’s end, in the Epilogue, we will detach ourselves from these envisioned individuals and re-immerse them in the groups, crowds, processions and services in which priests and laity converged on Jerusalem, the earthbound version of the destination to which the elect were living out their lifelong pilgrimage.

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The recovery – at the distance of many miles and centuries – of such sensibilities will never be more than tentative. Buildings, mosaics, reliquaries and oil-flasks do not speak for themselves. During the course of this chapter we will look at a handful of small objects, all linked more or less directly with the Holy Sepulchre and all seemingly designed to engage their users intensely; and we will ask if architectural recollections of the Sepulchre may have presupposed analogous sensibilities and offered analogous rewards. We ask the question, and do not assume the answer; our venture will be more cautious than its brisk presentation will suggest. In particular, we do not assume that responses in one age and place will have matched those in other, far distant contexts; our examples can at best be indicative for their own setting, and suggestive for others. To attempt just one deeper and narrower probe, we will ask in a later chapter, on the Temple Church in London, whether we can hope to trace in the church’s design and contents any contribution or response to the developments, over the decades of its construction, in the devotional and political standing in England of the Holy Sepulchre.1 Here, meanwhile, are the subjects of this present chapter. Specialists will know them all. 1. Krautheimer emphasised the debt that centrally planned baptisteries owed to the rotunda of the Holy Sepulchre. The mosaics of the Orthodox baptistery in Ravenna (c. 420–50) encourage us to ask how the building was experienced, in particular by the candidates for baptism [Colour Pl. XIII]. The space was dominated by its vertical axis, from the baptismal font on earth to the depiction of Christ’s baptism above. In the ascending bands of the walls’ and ceiling’s decoration, earthly gives way to heavenly until we reach the final, celestial scene of the incarnate Christ submitting to the Baptist. In all that follows we should be alert to the potential, in any centrally planned evocation of the Sepulchre, for such a disclosure of heaven and of earth so interfused. At the end of the present chapter we shall find this potential realised in other rotundas too. 2. The cross dominates the apse-mosaic of S. Pudenziana in Rome (made between 402 and 417). The terrestrial Jerusalem – including the Holy Sepulchre – lies beyond the scene of heaven’s court within which the sanctuary of S. Pudenziana seems to be enclosed. The rest of Rome, including any lay worshipper, stands once more outside the boundary of the heavenly scene. The mosaic’s priorities and the cohesion of its elements offer us an introductory map, richly ambiguous as we shall see, of salvation’s whole topography [Colour Pl. XII]. 3. Among the most famous stone-relics from the Sepulchre are (i)

1

R. Griffith-Jones, ‘The Temple Church in the Crusades’, 429–55 below.

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4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

2

the stone in the painted relics-box in the Sancta Sanctorum, Rome, and (ii) the stone encased in a silver-gilt wooden box, once in the Pharos in Constantinople and now in the Louvre. They were to be seen or held close-up, as small parts standing for the whole. Both needed to be revealed. The relics-box held its wonders well hidden, until the box was opened; the stones could then (by those authorised) be touched [Colour Pls XIV, XV]. The Pharos stone was hidden behind a precious and numinous façade; to extract, see and touch the stone was to delve [Colour Pls XVI, XVII]. Both ensembles were seemingly designed to fire imaginative and devotional connections; such links will only have been made through the focused attention of a mind already attuned to their style and likelihood. It is natural to ask if analogous connections were made – and by whom – in the less intimate, more dominating contexts of the Sepulchre’s architectural re-presentation. Similarly small in scale, and far cheaper and more nearly massproduced, were the ampullae made to hold oil from Jerusalem. They could be hung round the neck or held in the hand, their decoration repeatedly viewed or traced with the thumb, their presence, sanctity and power retained or passed on to others [Fig. 1.1]. Most austere of the Sepulchre’s recollections are the measures of Christ’s body and tomb. The lines and inscriptions on the cloisterwall at Bebenhausen will have been an insistent reminder to those who walked the cloister [Fig. 1.2]. It remains to be made clear how richly visual – if visual at all – were the meditations which the measures focused and encouraged. Bebenhausen suggests a style of meditation, hard to reconstruct now, on which the monastery could rely. We would gladly know if such a style of thought would have responded in the same way to those churches whose dimensions were related – as only a few people were likely to know – to the Sepulchre’s inner or outer diameters.2 As one example of the Western churches, surviving and lost, whose medieval descriptions evoke the Holy Sepulchre, we bring to the fore Cambrai, and the work there of Bishop Lietbert in the 1050s and 1060s. From the cloister’s privacy to a proud political programme: in the baptistery the Pisans celebrated their ongoing role in the Holy Land [Figs 1.3–6]. This may have determined its uniquely full and accurate imitation of the Sepulchre. The baptistery reminds us not to divorce devotion from civic priorities. We need to acknowledge as well those centrally planned buildings that encouraged imaginative and spiritual ascent without any

E. Fernie, ‘Representations of the Holy Sepulchre’, 335 below.

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apparent reference to the Sepulchre. We glance at Eriugena’s poem Aulae sidereae for Ste-Marie at Compiègne (877); and at St-Bénigne (1018). 9. We turn finally to St Michael at Fulda (822), a centrally planned building whose significance was unclear even to a member of the monastery writing only twenty years after the church’s completion. We will not want to claim more certainty for our own interpretations than an author could claim for his, who still had access to one of his church’s founders.

RAVENNA’S ORTHODOX BAPTISTERY: BETWEEN EARTH AND HEAVEN, PRESENT AND FUTURE If we once think of the Sepulchre’s copies as designed to replicate its effect, far more is engaged in the copy than just the form of its shell. In Jerusalem’s Sepulchre the pilgrim underwent the narrow descent into the central tomb, the confined space, the handful of people, the quietness; and then the return to the relentless bustle of the rotunda. The aedicule’s drama is the drama of burial and rebirth. And in turn: every baptism, according to Paul, is baptism into the death of Christ; ‘we have been buried together with him through baptism into death, so that just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so might we walk in newness of life’ (Rom. 6.4). The baptismal gift of the Holy Spirit is a seal, pledge and down-payment of the fullness of life that is yet to come (2 Cor. 1.21–2 and 5.5; Rom. 8.23). The baptised have even been raised already with Christ (Col. 3.1); ‘if anyone is in Christ – a new creation’ (2 Cor. 5.17). There was a place to look forward to, no less than a time. The hope of heaven, whose worship was already revealed to the seer (Rev. 4–5), was refined by the promised descent of the New Jerusalem to earth (Rev. 21); Paul spoke of ‘our citizenship in heaven’, from which we await the Lord’s advent (Phil. 3.20). The font, then, is both the tomb in which the candidate is submerged and the womb of the neophyte’s rebirth.3 The rhetoric is existential. The baptisteries in Ravenna are octagonal and with a central or nearly central font. To be baptised in Ravenna was to be centrally buried, as Christ had been buried in the Sepulchre’s centre, and to rise as he had to new life. But the baptisteries themselves offer an elevation that is conceived in clearer and closer detail. In the Orthodox baptistery (c. 420–50) the decoration of the successive zones rises from earthly to heavenly: from the lowest level, of marble prophets and scenes from Jesus’ life; up to the zone in mosaic that evokes a liturgy awaiting its – earthly 3 On the convergence in later iconography of the aedicule and the Lateran baptistery, P. A. Underwood, ‘The Fountain of Life in Manuscripts of the Gospels’, DOP 5 (1950), 41–138.

PUBLIC, PRIVATE AND POLITICAL DEVOTION

or heavenly – celebrants with the crosses on thrones and the gospels on altars intercalated with paradisiac growth; up again to the apostles; and so finally up to the central roundel for the earthly scene, directly over the font, of Jesus’ own baptism set against the gold of heaven [Colour Pl. XIII].4 Where would the neophytes properly imagine their place to be in this visionary recapitulation of heaven and earth and the relation of one to the other? They are at once at every point on the vertical axis around which the whole baptistery is built: on earth and recalling Jesus’ baptism on earth, and so raised through the liturgy to the realm of the apostles and on upwards to the heavenly Jesus himself, where he is seen undergoing an earthly baptism echoed in their own. Here is their admission to the heaven beyond, represented in the heaven of the dome. The distinctions between earth and heaven, and between Jesus’ past, their own present and heaven’s eternity, are no longer clear at all. The baptistery incorporated the shape, dynamic and numen of the Holy Sepulchre; these were then channelled by the baptistery’s decoration into a vertical axis which encouraged an ascent in and of the imagination. The baptistery’s shape and the font’s setting were the armature supporting every detail of the pictorial and liturgical theatre of baptism. This already encourages us to turn back to a richer reading of the Sepulchre (whose original ceiling decoration is unknown) and of its vertical axis: designed as it was to evoke and realise the progress into a new life for the worshipper who was committed to a presently spiritual and ultimately physical ascent.

S. PUDENZIANA, ROME The apse-mosaic of S. Pudenziana in Rome confronts us majestically with the ambiguities of present and future, earthly and heavenly Jerusalems; and of the place within them both of the Holy Sepulchre and of the worshippers themselves [Colour Pl. XII].5 Here there is a greater detachment from 4 S. K. Kostof, The Orthodox Baptistery of Ravenna, New Haven, 1965: for the architecture and its significance, 46–56; for the decoration, 57–93. For the catechesis in Ravenna, A. J. Wharton, ‘Ritual and Reconstructed Meaning: The Neonian Baptistery in Ravenna’, AB 69 (1987), 358–75. 5 I deploy here B. Kühnel, From the Earthly to the Heavenly Jerusalem: Representations of the Holy City in Christian Art of the First Millennium, Freiburg, 1987, 66–72; F. W. Schlatter, ‘The Text in the Mosaic of Santa Pudenziana’, Vigiliae Christianae 43 (1989), 155–65, and idem, ‘Interpreting the Mosaic of Santa Pudenziana’, Vigiliae Christianae 46 (1992), 276–95; G. Hellemo, Adventus Domini: Eschatological Thought in 4th Century Apses and Catecheses, London, etc, 1989, 41–9; T. F. Mathews, The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art, Princeton, 1999 [1993], 92–114; J.-M. Spieser, ‘The Representation of Christ in the Apses of Early Christian Churches’, Gesta 37 (1998), 63–73 [66]; W. Pullan, ‘Jerusalem from Alpha to Omega in the Santa Pudenziana Mosaic’, in Kühnel (ed.), Real and Ideal Jerusalem, 405–17; S. Heid, Kreuz, Jerusalem, Kosmos: Aspekte frühchristlicher Staurologie, Münster, 2001, 176–88; E. Thunø, The Apse Mosaic in Early Medieval Rome: Time, Network and Repetition, Cambridge, 2015, 96–7. M. C. Carile, The Vision of the Palace of the Byzantine Emperors as a Heavenly Jerusalem, Spoleto, 2012,

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the Sepulchre and its power; the realia in the foreground outweigh their distant earthbound representatives. Of particular interest to us will be the imagined place of the worshippers in S. Pudenziana – both in the sanctuary and in the nave – in relation to the heavenly foreground, to the earthly Jerusalem beyond and, in between, to the vast transfigured cross. The church was dedicated in the pontificate of Innocent I (402–17). Christ sits on a jewel-encrusted throne. He wears a gold pallium and tunic, the latter with pale blue stripes or clavi; his right hand is extended in a gesture of instruction or command. It is famously disputed whether Christ more nearly resembles – in his dress, throne and gesture – an emperor or a god, and whether he is primarily teaching, judging or more generically enthroned.6 Beneath him (still visible in 1599) was a dove with wings outstretched, facing downwards to a lamb on a hillock.7 Jesus was, we might surmise, flanked by the twelve apostles, of whom ten survive.8 Behind Peter and Paul, on either side of Jesus, are two women – representing the churches of the Jews and of the gentiles – who are, it seems, about to crown Peter and Paul. The women’s place and posture, however, recall the winged victories who in imperial sculpture regularly flank and crown the emperor; Peter and Paul form an inner, framed triumvirate with Christ. Beyond the figures are the hill of Golgotha and a giant, bejewelled cross. To its left (as seen by the viewer) is the rotunda of the Holy Sepulchre. The buildings to the right cannot be confidently identified: perhaps the basilica of the Holy Sepulchre, with its apse to the left; or the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem; or, to restrict ourselves to the octagonal building immediately to the right of the cross, the circular Church of the Ascension in Jerusalem. The cross reaching into the sky recalls the 101–28, is valuable both for its full survey of the literature and for its own reading. The mosaic was trimmed and drastically restored in 1588; its base was trimmed in 1711. The most important records of its early appearance are two drawings: by Ciacconio, 1595, Vat. Lat. 5407 f. 156; and by Eclissi, 1630–44, now in the Royal Library at Windsor, Inv. No. 9058 [Colour Pl. XII b]. On crux gemmata mosaics and their relationship with Christ, Thunø, Apse Mosaic, 29–39, 58–60; and now R. M. Jensen, The Cross: History, Art and Controversy, Cambridge, Mass., 2017, 97–122. On the ambiguities of Christ’s enthronement in the New Testament, M. Hengel, ‘“Sit at my right hand!” The Enthronement of Christ at the Right Hand of God and Psalm 110.1’, in Studies in Early Christology, Edinburgh, 1995, 119–226. Revelation’s Christology is famously nuanced, and will where necessary defy grammar (1.4; 11.15; 6.17 and 22.3–4); R. Bauckham, The Climax of Prophecy, Edinburgh, 1993, 133–40. 6 The gathering of apostles round Jesus may have been closely mimicked by the liturgical gathering immediately beneath the mosaic in the apse: the bishop enthoned and flanked by his clergy, and before him the altar. S. Pudenziana, however, was not an episcopal church, and no sign of a synthronon was discovered in the excavations of the 1960s. 7 Krautheimer suspected that the lamb and dove were additions under Hadrian I (782–83). 8 Brenk emphasises the influence of the Lateran’s Constantinian fastigium on the design: the congregation would have seen on the fastigium-screen the silver statues of Christ and the twelve apostles, B. Brenk, The Apocalypse, the Image and the Icon, Wiesbaden, 2010, 50–2.

PUBLIC, PRIVATE AND POLITICAL DEVOTION

parhelion in the shape of a cross, recorded by Cyril of Jerusalem, that shone over Jerusalem for several hours on 7 May 351.9 The cross at Calvary in the papacy of Innocent I is likely still to have been the silver and gilded reliquary seen by Egeria.10 Its adornment in the mosaic with jewels is all the more telling, if the giant crux gemmata, installed under the Emperor Theodosius II (401–50), was not yet in place. The mosaic’s cross, spanning heaven and earth in splendour, is a symbol of triumph, not of death. The whole scene is informed by biblical visions. The composition is horizontally divided by the colonnade. The porches surely represent the twelve gates of the New Jerusalem – two of them trimmed away, four hidden by the mosaic’s figures – from Rev. 21.21.11 The four beasts in the sky are the four living creatures around the throne of heaven from Rev. 4.6–7; the apostles recall the twenty-four elders around the figure on the throne at Rev. 4.4. The heavenly worship described in Rev. 4–5 was in turn indebted to the visions of the prophet Ezekiel (Ez. 1 and 10). Ezekiel, in exile after Jerusalem’s destruction, saw on God’s throne similitudo quasi aspectus hominis; he then recounted his visions of God’s departure from the Temple before its destruction (Ez. 10) and of the future and ideal Temple (Ez. 40; it was never built). Jerome insisted in his commentary on Ezekiel, in circulation in Rome after 410, that the figure seen by Ezekiel on the throne (Ez. 1.26–8) was God the Father, not the Son. Similarly, in the heaven of Rev. 4–5, the figure seated on the throne is distinguished from the lamb, who is seen standing ‘in the midst of the throne and of the four creatures and in the midst of the elders’ (in medio throni et quattuor animalium et in medio seniorum, Rev. 5.6), and who comes forward to take the scroll from the one on the throne. The lamb is nonetheless given the worship (5.9–14) which has been given to God himself (4.9–11). At two climactic moments Christ actually shares God’s throne: at the culmination of the letters to the seven churches (3.21); and when, following Christ’s final triumph in Rev. 19, the New Jerusalem is home to ‘the throne of God and of the lamb’ (22.1, 3). At this culmination, the one on the throne reiterates the prefatory words both of the Lord God who was and is and is to come (1.8), and of the one who was dead and is alive and lives for ever (1.17): ‘I am alpha and omega, the beginning and the end’ (21.6). (We need not ask here how Revelation connected the order of the events described,

Cyril, Ep. ad Constantium 4 (PG 33.1170). C. Milner, ‘Lignum Vitae or Crux Gemmata? The Cross of Golgotha in the Early Byzantine Period’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 20 (1996), 77–99 [83–5]: the more famous crux gemmata was raised on Golgotha by the Emperor Theodosius II in 421 or 428/9; it was probably a reliquary of the true cross (cf. Breviarius B, 40–3). 11 Carile has urged caution here: the similar arcades in the city-gate sarcophagi and in the nave mosaics of S. Apollinare Nuovo signify a more general heavenly setting; the curve in S. Pudenziana’s arcade evoked the grandest such hemicycles in imperial Rome; S. Apollinare suggests as well that the buildings beyond the arcade are generically splendid – and as white as Rome’s own marble – rather than depictions of Jerusalem. 9

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of the disclosures made and of any deepening insight offered by the text’s progression.) The mosaic’s topography is acutely Christological. It maps and reveals the relationship between, on the one hand, the enthroned God of Ez. 1 and Rev. 4; and on the other, (i) the lamb himself, placed below (Rev. 4–5); (ii) the lamb’s historic triumph, behind the throne on Calvary; and (iii) the lamb’s final triumph, in the gemmed, cosmic cross above. For this is the lamb – revealed in (i), (ii) and (iii) – who now sits on God’s own throne at the centre of the mosaic. The worship of Rev. 4–5 was almost certainly, by the time of the mosaic’s creation, already read as revealing the present unity of worship in heaven and on earth. This, in two ways. First, with a parallel between heaven and earth: in the heaven of Rev. 4, the four living creatures sing the triple Sanctus, and the elders prostrate themselves, saying, ‘You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive honour and power’; in the Roman Eucharist, since the fifth century, the priest has offered such praise and the congregation has responded with the triple Sanctus. And secondly, through the antiphon of Rev. 5: the praise of thousands upon thousands of heavenly creatures is answered by ‘everything that lives in heaven and on earth and under the earth’, to which the four living creatures say ‘Amen’.12 The viewer’s engagement in the scene was not just liturgical. The scene raises the question, where does the viewer stand in relation to its enclosed and heavenly foreground and its earthly but distanced city-scape? The mosaic brought the land and figures depicted into the space, time and presence of the viewers. The viewers were, and most vividly within the context of the Mass, being given a vision of realities of which most were inaccessible to normal human gaze. Calvary’s cross belongs on earth, but this vast, jewelled cross reaches to heaven and is flanked by the four creatures of heaven. Below them is the earthly Jerusalem in which the cross was set. But below and in front of that, and so more nearly in the world of S. Pudenziana itself and of the viewer, are the enclosure and occupants of the heavenly Jerusalem. Upon this church, still intact after 410, have converged the two Jerusalems – one destroyed and one envisioned – of Ezekiel, the Jerusalem of the fifth century, the heaven of Rev. 4–5 and the New Jerusalem of Rev. 21. And the whole composition is unified by the vertical, Christological axis that descends from heaven through the cross, the enthroned figure and the (now lost) lamb, down to the Eucharistic elements. That vertical axis is dramatically matched by

12 Y. Christe, ‘Traditions littéraires et iconographiques dans l’interprétation des images apocalyptiques’, in L’Apocalypse de Jean: traditions exégétiques et iconographiques, IIIe– XIIIe siècles, Geneva, 1979, 109–34, with a critique by J. Engemann, 73–107; Hellemo, Adventus Domini [n. 5 above], 281; C. Flanigan, ‘The Apocalypse in the Medieval Liturgy’, in R. K. Emmerson and B. McGinn (eds), The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, Ithaca, 1992, 333–51; Thunø, Apse Mosaic [n. 5 above], 119–29.

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the horizontal division created by the colonnade; together they inscribe a giant cross of their own onto the whole composition. The mosaic is giving access to a vision; and the vision incorporates just such an accumulation of biblical elements as characterises the visions of Revelation. We should never assume that the uncertainties in our understanding reflect a multivalence intended by the artist or patron; but we might well wonder if the mosaic’s patrons understood the rich, confusing conditions of a biblical vision and reproduced them. Where then were the viewers imagined to be? If the colonnade’s curvature signified a hemicycle, then the priests beneath – and perhaps the whole sanctuary – were by implication enclosed and embraced by the colonnade too. The priests joined the occupants of heaven in this grand space. Pullan sees in the hemicycle the home of the glorified Christ in a heavenly version of the Sepulchre’s rotunda;13 within these walls, open to the sky, there is no temple, for the Lord and Christ are its temple (Rev. 21.22). The ‘temples’ and palaces of the earthly Jerusalem are beyond and behind this privileged arena; as the viewer’s own city of Rome – and perhaps the basilica’s own nave – are outside the enclave of heaven implied by the colonnade. But that heavenly city has descended (Rev. 21.2) by virtue of – and down the axis of – the cross, which stands on its hill within the terrestrial Jerusalem beyond the hemicycle’s wall. The Holy Sepulchre nestles at the foot of the cross and hill which in Jerusalem stood within the complex of the Sepulchre. Here the Sepulchre is an indispensable but terrestrial suburb in the scene that unites heaven and earth, with Rome on the viewer’s side and Jerusalem beyond. The mosaic illumined, with great subtlety, both (i) the identity of the one on God’s throne and (ii) the roles and relative standing of the people and places most central to God’s design.

BLESSINGS FROM THE HOLY SEPULCHRE STONE-RELICS IN THE SANCTA SANCTORUM At S. Pudenziana, Jerusalem and Rome, heaven and earth, past, present and eternity all converged in one grand liturgical setting. But Calvary and the tomb could be made present by far more modest tokens: stones and earth from the site.14 The Piacenza Pilgrim (c. 570) knew that ‘earth Pullan, ‘Jerusalem from Alpha to Omega’ [n. 5 above]. For the repertoire of such mementos, B. Bagatti, ‘Eulogie Palestini’, Orientalia Cristiana Periodica 15 (1949), 126–66. For earth-relics, some vivid examples in K. M. Rudy, Virtual Pilgrimages in the Convent: Imagining Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages, Turnhout, 2011, 107–18. Here is one among them. In the 1480s Felix Fabri spent a whole day by himself, gathering pebbles and thorn-twigs between Mount Sion and the Mount of Olives. He marked up the pebbles and wove the thorns into a crown, and brought them all in a basket back to Ulm. He wrote: ‘By no means … do pieces and bits of stone brought from that illustrious land deserve to be despised or cast away, but to be gathered up with great 13

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is brought to the tomb and put inside, and those who go in take some as a blessing’; the Pilgrim took (instead or as well) some oil from the lamp burning there.15 Gregory of Tours recorded a further simple technique: the ground around the tomb was sprinkled with water, dug up and shaped into tiny tokens to be taken away.16 Such earth-relics pervaded Europe. A rabbinic story from twelfth-century Germany tells of a Jewish mother with a sick child; a Christian woman offered her a pebble from the Holy Sepulchre, which, steeped in water, would make a curative drink.17 There is a larger purpose in these paragraphs devoted to stone-relics of the Sepulchre. What mattered was the transfer and re-presentation of a particular sanctity, its power and the blessings made available by that power. That sanctity was the res; its signum or sacramentum could take many forms. From this viewpoint, a copy of the Sepulchre might helpfully be compared to a reliquary whose importance lies in the lack of the central relic. A saint’s body was only a simulacrum of the saint’s living presence in heaven; but the body’s power was real, and its blessings passionately sought.18 Christ’s tomb bore witness to an incomparably greater power precisely by the body’s absence. From Easter there were then no contactrelics except the stones that had once entombed Jesus and could now themselves be enclosed in reliquaries of their own. Access to the event of Christ’s resurrection was never more suitably oblique than in these hidden stones that once had hidden him. We can recapture something of the care – and even of the detailed purposes – that went into the creation of the grandest earth-reliquaries; and will then be equipped to ask whether such acute sensibilities were engaged in the experience of those buildings too which made present devotion, and placed among the chief relics of churches.’ Naaman the Syrian, healed of his leprosy by Elisha, took as much earth home from Israel as two mules could carry; the text suggests that on this earth he would thereafter sacrifice to Elisha’s God (2 Kings 5.17). 15 Piacenza Pilgrim, 18, trans. Wilkinson, Pilgrims, 138; the pilgrim also had five pints of manna from Sinai that had solidified to gum but was potable [39]. 16 Gregory of Tours, De Gloria Martyrum 6 (MGH Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum, 1.492). 17 J. M. H. Smith, ‘Portable Christianity: Relics in the Medieval West (c. 700–1200)’, Proceedings of the British Academy 181 (2012), 143–67 [143]. The Jewish mother refused the offer; the rabbis who recorded the story praised her for avoiding defilement for herself and her child by an object associated with a dead body. 18 Bernard of Clairvaux wrote of St Malachy and of his relic at Clairvaux. He saw the relic as Malachy’s resurrection body and as the saint himself: ‘O good Jesus, that holy body is yours, put aside and entrusted to us … We shall keep it safe, to be returned to you in that time when you decide to demand its return. Only grant that it shall not go forth [to meet Christ] without its companions [i.e. the monks of Clairvaux], but let us have him as our leader whom we have had as our guest.’ There was a network of sanctity on which successive generations could rely. Bernard himself asked to be buried with Clairvaux’s bone of St Jude, in the hope that he would rise with the saint’s bone at the last day. Malachy had asked to be able to rise again where St Patrick had died, or – failing that – to await the resurrection at Clairvaux; when he was canonised in 1191 he was buried next to Bernard. C. Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body, New York, 1995, 163–76; Bernard, Life of St Malachy 31.75, trans. C. Walker Bynum.

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the Sepulchre’s sanctity. Did the patrons of the Sepulchre’s architectural re-presentations expect the design of their own giant ‘reliquaries’ to engage their congregations with a sense there of Christ’s absence that made possible his universal presence? If so, then the problem of the Sepulchre’s seemingly distant copies is a problem not only of architectural copying, but of the conditions that had to be fulfilled to make present in one place the power of another, a power which was already an extension to earth of the realia of heaven.19 In the late sixth century a box was filled with stones and other relics, encased in plaster, from the Holy Land; inscriptions on the stones identified their places of origin.20 The box became a treasure in the Sancta Sanctorum in the pope’s private chapel in the Lateran Palace.21 The box’s lid was painted: on the top, the cross on Calvary, embellished with diagonal radiate beams – perhaps showing the lance of Longinus and the staff of Stephaton – and a mandorla, flanked with the monograms [I]C and XC above and A and Ω below; on the inside, five crowded and colourful scenes from the life of Christ that express the stones’ sanctity [Colour Pls XIV, XV]. The box had to be opened, for viewing at close quarters. The stones could then be touched. The brilliance of the decoration within the lid stands in deliberate contrast with the lid’s top and with the dull normality of the stones themselves. The scenes bring purpose to the stones, and restore them to the settings of the life of Christ. Together they form a microcosm of Christ’s life as lived and walked on earth. The inscriptions still visible identify fragments ‘from life-giving resurrection’, ‘from the Mount of Olives’, ‘from Bethlehem’, ‘from Sion’. There is no painted scene located on Sion. The scenes do, however, correspond closely with the locations mentioned by the Bordeaux Pilgrim

19 We will be dealing here with stones from the Sepulchre encased and/or displayed, not with stones built in to the fabric of a building as at Konstanz (R. Ousterhout, ‘Loca Sancta and the Architectural Response to Pilgrimage’, in R. Ousterhout (ed.), The Blessings of Pilgrimage, Chicago, 1990, 108–24) and at Neuvy-St-Sépulcre (Morris, Sepulchre, 160). 20 The date: accepting Weitzmann’s (contested) argument that the rotunda is shown as it was before the damage of 614, ‘Loca Sancta and the Representational Arts of Palestine’, DOP 28 (1974), 31–55 [41]. The contents: C. R. Morey, ‘The Painted Panel from the Sancta Sanctorum’, in R. Klapheck (ed.), Festschrift sum sechzigsten Geburtstag von Paul Clemen, Düsseldorf, 1926, 151–67. None of the surviving inscriptions identifies a fragment as from the Jordan, to match the painted Baptism. 21 M. Bagnoli et al. (eds), Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics and Devotion in Medieval Europe (Exh. Cat.), London, 2011, no. 13, 69–78; E. Gertsman and A. S. Mittman, ‘Rocks of Jerusalem: Bringing the Holy Land Home’, in R. Bartal, N. Bodner and B. Kühnel (eds), Natural Materials of the Holy Land and the Visual Translation of Place, 500–1500, London and New York, 2017, 157–71; and on the papal collection of relics, M. Luchterhandt, ‘The Popes and the Loca Sancta of Jerusalem: Relic Practice and Relic Diplomacy in the Eastern Mediterranean after the Muslim Conquest’, in Bartal et al. (eds), Natural Materials, 36–63. Luchterhandt suggests that the box might originally have been a staurotheke [46]. I am grateful to Routledge, the publishers, for allowing me sight of Natural Materials before publication.

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(333–34); the box was probably prepared and painted independently of the particular fragments that were later encased in it. The lid’s radiate cross is echoed in the disposition of the stones around the central triumph at the Sepulchre of Christ’s resurrection and so of the viewer’s. The infant Christ is shown elevated on a (masonry) block-altar with a central fenestella for a relic beneath;22 the artist has combined the altar then in place at Bethlehem with a forecast of Christ’s Eucharistic self-sacrifice. The central, full-width painted scene is of the crucifixion; the central, triangular – and by association trinitarian – stone facing it within the box is labelled ap zōopoiou anastaseōs, ‘from [the place of] life-giving resurrection’. The centre of the story has moved on: from Jesus’ death on the lid, to his resurrection within.23 The painting of the Sepulchre is not of a bare tomb, but is one of the earliest records to survive of the aedicule and of the rotunda’s dome suspended above, with fenestrated drum and, on the ceiling, painted stars.24 The box was presumably made, filled and painted in the Holy Land, and acquired there by a pilgrim or presented as a diplomatic gift.25 The painted scenes both recall public worship and prompt private devotion: all five are of great liturgical feasts; the scenes of the nativity and resurrection recalled to any pilgrim the sites as he or she had seen them. Of the three registers of painted scenes, the lowest depicts Christ’s incarnation, the extended and so climactic middle band his death, the top his rising. Bottom and top, the left-hand scenes share the Virgin on the left and an upper arch or dome; the right-hand scenes, a central, vertical movement. Christ on the cross is central to the lid and its whole design: blue bands dividing the scenes above and below extend his vertical axis; the thieves’ arms, his horizontal. The stones are now not just part of the humdrum field in which treasure was buried but the treasure itself (Matt. 13.44), hidden 22 Weitzmann, ‘Loca Sancta’ [n. 20 above], 31–55 [36–7], with further images of the block-altar (altare fixum) and fenestella. The relics of the crib, five sycamore planks, were brought to Rome in the mid seventh century and are in S. Maria Maggiore. 23 This central stone forms the centre of an orthogonal and, more prominently, of a diagonal cross, emphasised by the central stone’s own upper edges and by the diagonal corner-stones on the left and the fragment of wood from Bethlehem. So it matches the radiate cross on the outer lid. The stones’ present arrangement, however, may be late, D. Krueger, ‘Liturgical Time and Holy Land Reliquaries in early Byzantium’, in C. Hahn and H. A. Klein (eds), Saints and Sacred Matter: The Cult of Relics in Byzantium and Beyond, Dumbarton Oaks, 2015, 111–32 [112, n. 3]. Krueger suggests that the stones were originally in pouches of leather or fabric, loose in the box. 24 Morey, ‘The Painted Panel’ [n. 20 above], reported a date for the labels of the seventh or even sixth century; P. A. Underwood, ‘The Fountain of Life in Manuscripts of the Gospels’, DOP 5 (1950), 43–138 [98] is cautious. For a comparable analysis of the nativity scene, Weitzmann, ‘Loca Sancta’ [n. 20 above], 35–6. 25 On diplomatic gifts of relics, Luchterhandt, ‘The Popes and the Loca Sancta’ [n. 21 above], 51–4: the Lateran’s collection included, according to their cedulae, three stones from the ‘resurrection stone’ and eight others from the rock of Golgotha. For a second lidded box of earth-relics in the Lateran, Bartal et al. (eds), Natural Materials [n. 21 above], pl. 2.

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once more and ready to be brought back to presence and sight; and so to bring back to mind, from the treasure-chest of memory, the still greater treasure that they re-present.26 The scenes encouraged an imagined reiteration of pilgrimage from Rome to the Holy Land and of its analogy in the pilgrim’s progress from material to spiritual life, from dead to living stone, from this world up to the next. This may be too exclusively intimate as an account of the stones’ use. Gerhard Wolf has pointed out the two lists, of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, of relics in the Lateran. They include stones from Bethlehem, Mount Tabor, the Lithostratos, the Flagellation column, Mount Calvary and Christ’s tomb; and a fragment of the stone on which the angel was seated at the Sepulchre. One of the lists places the stones ‘at the feet of the image’, that is of the Lateran’s Acheropeta, regarded as Rome’s palladium, which was by then encrusted with coverings that distinguished the head (of Christ’s divinity) from the feet (of his humanity).27 The Acheropeta was linked too with the Ascension from Mount Olivet, represented in our box and on its lid. We should perhaps envision the box and/or its contents as part of a sophisticated symbolical ensemble; in conjunction with the Acheropeta’s strangely abstracted image, they were the palpable link with the land on which Jesus had walked when he was on the earth, from which the worshipper hoped to rise with him to heaven. STONE-RELIC IN THE PHAROS, CONSTANTINOPLE A stone-relic from the Sepulchre was prized at Constantinople too, but with a quite different and startling emphasis. A stone from the tomb that once housed Christ’s body becomes the symbol of that body; we will then be bound to wonder what presence of Christ could be sensed in the stones of a whole building that replicated that tomb. The Chapel of the Virgin of the Pharos was the imperial reliquary chapel and functioned as a Holy Sepulchre. Its most prestigious relics included the crown of thorns, the holy nail, the lance, the shroud and a stone from the Sepulchre. The stone’s reliquary-icon survives, from the collection sold to Louis IX after the sack of Constantinople in 1204 and placed in Sainte Chapelle [Colour Pls XVI, XVII]. The reliquary’s front is a silver-gilt-repoussé icon, lavishly inscribed, of the women at the tomb; an angel points at the empty grave with its grave-clothes and separate cloth for the head. On the back is a sliding lid: its face shows a cross adorned with flowers and growth; on its 26 Gertsman and Mittman, ‘Rocks of Jerusalem’ [n. 21 above], emphasise the collection’s conformity to medieval mnemonic disciplines. 27 G. Wolf, ‘Laetare Filia Sion: Ecce ego venio et habitabo in medio tui: Images of Christ transferred to Rome from Jerusalem’, in Kühnel, Real and Ideal Jerusalem, 419–29 [423–4]; H. L. Kessler, ‘Turning a Blind Eye: Medieval Art and the Dynamics of Contemplation’, in J. F. Hamburger and A.-M. Bouché (eds), The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, Princeton, 2006, 413–39 [423–4, fig. 14].

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reverse is inscribed, ‘See, the place where they laid him’ (Mark 16.6). Once opened, then, the container is revealed by the inscription to be the tomb, which the icon’s own handler – and no angel (Matt. 28.2) – has opened. Behind the repoussé angel is a stone from the tomb on which the angel is seen sitting. The empty tomb bore witness to the resurrection; and now a stone from that tomb fills the emptiness and so in turn bears witness to it. The inscriptions articulate and frame the scene. Within the image, they nicely define the sequence of the events shown. Above the angel are just his words, ‘Come, see the place where the Lord was laid’ (Matt. 28.6); above the women (I add the emphases), ‘But trembling and ecstasy possessed them’ (Mark 16.8; ‘but’ replacing ‘for’, gar); and above the tiny guards lower right, in the damaged area, ‘And those who were guarding became lifeless’ (cf. Matt. 28.4). The inscriptions around the scene emphasise a familiar paradox – the material portrayal of an immaterial angel: ‘The angel – how beautiful/fitting [euprepēs] he is! – has now appeared to the women and bears brilliant signs of his innate, immaterial purity [tēlaugē tēs emphutou sumbola aülou katharotētos] and in his form discloses the glory of the resurrection, crying, The Lord has been raised’ (Matt. 28.6, Luke 24.6). The contrast is all the more telling, where the scene houses and hides something as stolidly material as a stone in witness of the event that, above all others, transcended the limits of material life. The winged angel bears his staff of office and fillets in his hair; but the shimmer of gilded silver, in which the whole scene shares, testifies too to the glory revealed here. Nicholas Mesarites (a sacristan at the shrine, c. 1200) wrote a Decalogue about the Pharos’s ten principal relics. Where the box in the Sancta Sanctorum directed the viewer to the life of Jesus, Mesarites discovers the connections of the small, single stone to the whole history of salvation. In the contemplation of this, as of any stone, there is room for a shifting scale: between the small sling-shot with which David killed Goliath (1 Sam. 17), the pillow-stone of Jacob (Gen. 28.22), and stones large enough to shatter altars (Deut. 12.3) and be ‘the cornerstone of the cornerstone’ (Eph. 2.20). So the icon can seem to grow, and to recall all scripture’s redemptive stones. The number that brings this Decalogue to perfection is the stone cut out of the tomb, the stone that shattered the altars of gentiles, made them shiver and reduced to ashes. This stone is another stone of Jacob, the witness of Christ’s resurrection from the dead. This stone is the cornerstone of the cornerstone Christ, that joined together the nations divided in their knowledge of God and united them in one unbroken solid faith; the stone that ministered as a tomb for the God-man [tou theanthrōpou]. We sling this stone and strike the Goliath of our minds [ton noēton Goliath] and put death to death.28 28 For the Pharos reliquary, J. Durand et al., Le Trésor de la Sainte Chapelle, Paris, 2001, 72–5; A. Lidov, ‘A Byzantine Jerusalem: The Imperial Pharos Chapel as the Holy

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The Pharos was, thanks to its relics, ‘another Sinai, Bethlehem, Jordan, Jerusalem, Nazareth, Bethany, Galilee, … Golgotha … In this [church] is his burial, and the stone which has rolled away from the tomb to this church bears witness to the claim. In this [church] he rises, and the sudarium and burial clothes are its evidence!’

BLESSINGS FROM THE SEPULCHRE: DECORATED AMPULLAE Such power could travel in many and accessible forms. A pilgrim’s ampulla (oil-flask) of the late sixth century, now at Dumbarton Oaks, famously shows on one side the women on Easter Day approaching (not a bare tomb but) the aedicule as it stood in the ampulla’s own time [Fig. 1.1]. The women carry, instead of their spices, censers.29 On the right is seated an angel. An inscription declares the angel’s message, but in liturgical form: ‘The Lord has risen’ (cf. Luke 24.34). Egeria reports that in the Holy Sepulchre at Easter the bishop stood by the tomb door and read the story of the resurrection, while clergy entered the tomb with censers.30 On the ampulla’s other side two pilgrims – as exotic as Magi, with their flowing hair, beards and trousers – kneel before an equal-armed cross such as pilgrims would have seen at Calvary. From the foot of the cross flow the rivers of paradise. The two thieves stand on either side. Free-standing above is a bust-length portrait of Christ, flanked by sun and moon, and surmounted by the titulus that was also preserved in the Sepulchre. This Christ has risen free from the cross. An inscription describes the ampulla’s contents: ‘Oil of the wood of life of the holy places of Christ.’ The Piacenza Pilgrim described the ritual that attended the oil: the wood of the true cross was brought out for veneration; at that moment a star appeared and stopped overhead while the cross was venerated and the oil blessed; ‘when the mouth of one of the flasks touches the wood of the cross, the oil instantly bubbles over, and unless it is closed very quickly it all spills out’.31 The first Easter and the pilgrims’ Easter have converged; and the star, recalling Bethlehem’s, Sepulchre’, in A. Hoffmann and G. Wolf (eds), Jerusalem as Narrative Space / Erzählraum Jerusalem, Leiden, 2012, 63–103 [85–9, figs 7–9]. On the wood of the damaged area, lower right, are traces of a painted ground; the front of the reliquary may once have been a painting, replaced in the twelfth century with the present silver-gilt panel. For Mesarites’ account, Nikolaos Mesarites, Die Palastrevolution des Johannes Komnenos, ed. A. Heisenberg, Würzburg, 1907, 31.24–30 and 31.35–32.25. 29 Dumbarton Oaks BZ 1948.18; G. Vikan, Early Byzantine Pilgrimage Art, Dumbarton Oaks, 2010 [1982], 38–40; and G. Frank, ‘Loca Sancta Souvenirs and the Art of Memory’, in B. Caseau, J.-C. Cheynet and V. Déroche (eds), Pèlerinages et lieus saints dans l’antiquité et le moyen age [FS Malaval], Paris, 2006, 193–201. 30 Egeria 24.9–10, trans. J. Wilkinson, Egeria’s Travels, Liverpool, 1999, 144. 31 Piacenza Pilgrim, 20, trans. Wilkinson, Pilgrims, 139. On the diffusion of fragments of the cross itself, Jensen, Cross [n. 5 above], 63–73.

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FIG. 1.1.  AMPULLA (OIL-FLASK), DUMBARTON OAKS

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invests the bubbling oil with the cosmic significance of Christ’s whole life and death.32 Some such ampullae, with or without ears, had leather straps around the neck. The pilgrims could keep the ampulla at their breast, enfold it (4.6cm diameter) in their own hands, and both see and feel on it the raised depiction of Calvary and the tomb where the very oil contained in it had responded to the touch of the cross. That close, private grasp of the ampulla was doubly important if pilgrims were still forbidden to lay hands on the cross; Egeria had told of the prohibition; the Piacenza Pilgrim just kissed the wood of the cross, but both handled and kissed the titulus.33 Here was a single and simultaneous witness both to the distant past and to the pilgrim’s own visit; ampulla and oil together formed an object of portable and palpable sanctity. The ampulla was not just a memento; it carried the power and offered the protection of the cross and the Sepulchre.34

32 The link with the pilgrims’ own visit was stronger still, if such a scene of the crucifixion was shown in the decoration of the Holy Sepulchre. Morris views the suggestion, often made, with caution, Sepulchre, 75–6. 33 Egeria 37.3, Wilkinson, Egeria [n. 30 above], 156–7. 34 The ampullae collected under the patronage of Queen Theodolinda at Bobbio and Monza (and said to have been a gift of Gregory the Great) are studied as collections, J. Elsner, ‘Replicating Palestine and Reversing the Reformation’, Journal of the History of Collections 9 (1997), 117–30. The box of ampullae and earthenware medallions at Bobbio, almost all commemorating Christ’s life, was buried in the crypt near the tombs of the founder St Columban (d. 615) and of his successors, and so became inaccessible; ‘they bolstered the holy presence of St Columban (and his successors) with items of still holier provenance’, Elsner, 121.

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THE MEASURES OF CHRIST One form of presence needed no imported object at all. We already hear from the Piacenza Pilgrim of the measures of Christ: at the scourging on Mount Sion Christ’s chest had cleaved to the stone, and the marks of his fingers and palms were still visible; the sick took ‘measures’ from the imprints and wore them round the neck as a cure for any kind of disease. Christ’s footprints were similarly preserved and used in the Praetorium.35 A manuscript of the Gesta Francorum has at its end the prayers particular to ‘the Mass in Honour of the Holy Sepulchre’, followed by a page of two lines and two inscriptions: one line of 129mm, inscribed, ‘This line, copied from the Sepulchre of the Lord at Jerusalem, and multiplied fifteen times, indicates the height of Christ. On the day on which you see it, you will not suffer sudden death’; and the second of 98mm, ‘This second line multiplied nine times, indicates the breadth of Christ’s body, and it gives the same protection against sudden death on the day on which it has once been seen.’36 Among the sparest and most startling records of such measurements, probably a trigger to meditation, was installed in 1492 in the cloisters of the Cistercian monastery at Bebenhausen37 [Fig. 1.2]. It extends over two bays. The first has a single incised line, 172.9cm long, with finials and inscription: here is the length of Mary’s tomb. In the next bay is a line 200.8cm long, and underneath it an open-topped rectangle (51cm x 24cm) surmounted by a small cruciform finial on each of the two verticals and a larger, central cross in between them. Above the long horizontal line is inscribed: ‘This is the true length of the sarcophagus of the one who was born of the Word, in which the microcosm of Christ rested for three days.’38 Flanking the rectangle is a rhyming inscription: ‘Look at this fissure and do not scorn what you read. The depth of this is that which the sepulchre of Christ had.’ The lines were perhaps giving the depth Piacenza Pilgrim, 22–3, trans. Wilkinson, Pilgrims, 140–1. Vat. Cod. Reginensis Lat. 572, ff. 66v, 67; R. Hill (ed.), Gesta Francorum: The Deeds of the Franks and the other Pilgrims to Jerusalem, London, 1962, xxxviii, 102–3. 37 Rudy, Virtual Pilgrimages [n. 14 above], 99, with further references. The inscriptions: Mary: Sepulcri longitudo hic est sculpta certa, in quo tumulata fuit gratie dei referta Maria. Christ: Haec longitudo vera est Verbigene sarcophagi in quo triduum requievit microcosmus Christi; and Hanc fissuram respice / nec quod legis despice // profunditas est isti / que fuit sepulcro Christi. Both the Piacenza Pilgrim and Gregory of Tours report that the faithful took mensurae from the column of the flagellation as blessings to help them in sickness. For further such measurements in the fifteenth century, G. Finaldi et al., The Image of Christ (Exh. Cat.), London, 2000, no. 64 and figs. 38 Verbigena, lit. ‘born of the Word’, Prudentius, Cathemerina (hymns), 3.1, cf. 11.17: unorthodox (Jesus was the Word incarnate, not the Word’s son), but emphatic of an inescapable relationship both with the Word and with Mary. Similarly, microcosmus Christi: Godfrey of St Victor (1125–c. 1195) had, long before the inroads of fifteenthcentury humanism, revived and systematised the classical account of a human being as a microcosm of the macrocosmic universe; here Jesus is designated the microcosm of the cosmic Christ (Col. 1.15–20, etc). The terms are striking. 35

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FIG. 1.2.  THE CLOISTERS OF THE CISTERCIAN MONASTERY, BEBENHAUSEN: THE MEASUREMENTS OF CHRIST’S

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(but not the width) of Christ’s sarcophagus as it was already imagined by Nicholas of Verdun, c. 1180.39 More fugitive is the hint, in the lines’ cruciform tops and in fissura, of the three crosses on Golgotha and the cleft in the rock underneath.40 The diagram as a whole would then signify (but not replicate) the equal depth of the tomb and of the fissure: the first recalled in the top horizontal line, the second in the chasm below. The monks had before them on every circuit of their cloister a severely formal, minimalist reminder – well suited to the Cistercians41 – of the two tombs,

TOMB, 1492 39 For the supposed sarcophagus (rather than burial couch) with three port-holes at Klosterneuberg, made by Nicholas of Verdun, Biddle, Tomb, fig. 47; the sarcophagus was still imagined by Piero della Francesca in the Resurrection, San Sepulcro, 1463, and at Valdesa, c. 1510 (Biddle, Tomb, fig. 30). W. Heinz, ‘Heilige Längen: zu den Massen des Christus- und des Mariengrabes in Bebenhausen’, Mediaevistik 28 (2015), 297–324: from Arculf via Adomnán (301 below), then Bede, then Lietbert of Cambrai (35 below), a tradition has Jesus’ tomb as seven feet long. Jesus’ tomb at 200.8cm gives seven feet of 28.69cm; Mary’s tomb at 172.9cm gives six feet of 28.8cm. Heinz undertakes further metrology to interpret the profunditas to be read out of the open-topped rectangle. 40 For the fissure at Calvary, Pringle, Churches III, 28 (John of Würzburg, Theodoric). The equality of depth or its significance could, it seems, be doubted at Bebenhausen (‘Do not despise what you read’) and may be still more elusive now. 41 Bernard of Clairvaux famously decried the ridiculosa monstruositas of some cloisters’ decorations, which distracted the monks from their reading and meditation, Apologia ad Guillelmum 12 (PL 182.914–6).

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from which they could elaborate a meditation. Here we can only wonder if such meditation involved the images of Augustine’s spiritual sight or the purity of intellectual sight. The diagrams surely encouraged a mental entry and exploration of the tombs’ own stone beyond the flat stones on which the diagrams themselves were shown. But that exploration might have been strangely austere: to reduce Christ’s tomb to one dimension and the fissure to two was to create an abstraction – almost a microcosm – that (could but) need not engender any visual imagination at all.

WESTERN EUROPE: REPRESENTING THE SEPULCHRE TYPICE AND FIGURALITER 42 Bishop Gerard of Cambrai built in the 1040s a cemetery outside the city and later consecrated beside it a church in honour of the Holy Sepulchre, for the burial of the poor and of pilgrims. Pilgrims away from their own churches and on their way to Jerusalem’s had a special claim to respect and burial. In 1054 Gerard’s successor Lietbert (we read in the Vita Lietberti) was blessedly stung by the benefits he had received into obeying the apostle’s command: ‘Let us go out to Christ, outside the camp, bearing his humiliation; for we do not have here an abiding city, but we look for that which is to come’ (Hebr. 13.13–14). He determined to travel to Jerusalem for the sake of embracing and kissing the footsteps trodden by the feet of Jesus. He believed it would be blessed to see the puny crib, in his mind to adore with the shepherds the crying child, to celebrate in the Church of Golgotha the sacraments of Christ’s blessed passion, crucifixion and death, with the blessed women to weep for Christ’s death at his grave, to enter the enclosure of the grave and wash clean with his tears his own and his people’s injuries, to want to follow in his heart’s inmost will, with Mary the 42 In the group of buildings in Bologna known collectively as S. Stefano the most famous component is S. Sepolcro, an irregular octagon perhaps built as the baptistery in the late fourth century. In 887 a diploma of Charles the Fat already referred to ‘St Stephen which is called Holy Jerusalem’. In 1141 there was a major inventio of relics in Bologna: they included relics from Christ’s garments, the flagellation’s cord and column, the cross, the crown of thorns, the key with which Jesus was confined and the sepulchre, F. Lanzoni, S. Petronio di Bologna nella storia e nella leggenda, Rome, 1907, 240–50. The discovery reignited the cult of St Petronius, bishop of Bologna, c. 432–50. Its sermo mentions ‘the sepulchre created by St Petronius’ and its two arcisolia: one represented the tomb of Christ in Jerusalem; the other contained the body of Petronius. Petronius himself, we are told, had typice called the complex Jerusalem. The sermo speaks throughout of ‘S. Stefano which is called Jerusalem’; in their search for relics the monks went in particular ‘to the holy cross in the place which is figuraliter called Golgotha by the blessed Petronius’. The fullest account of Petronius’ life was written 1164–80. It tells how the saint ‘with much labour typice created a work, marvellously constructed, like the sepulchre of the Lord in the form which he had seen, and carefully measured with a rod, when he was at Jerusalem,’ A. Kingsley Porter, Lombard Architecture, 2 vols, New Haven, 1917, II, 138, 142. For fuller details of Bologna, R. Ousterhout, ‘The Church of Santo Stefano: A “Jerusalem” in Bologna’, Gesta 20 (1981), 311–22; C. Morris, ‘Bringing the Holy Sepulchre to the West: S. Stefano, Bologna, from the Fifth to the Twentieth Century’, Studies in Church History 33 (1997), 31–59. See Fig. 16.3, p. 333 below.

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mother of Jesus and the blessed apostles, Christ ascending the Mount of Olives and into heaven.43 Lietbert undertook the journey when Jerusalem was in Muslim hands; he was heading ‘outside the camp’, as Jesus had at his crucifixion. The journey would be as perilous as the journey through life which it represented. Lietbert was faced with such difficulties that at Cyprus he turned back home. Nonetheless in 1064, when the bodies of the holy martyrs, confessors and saints of his whole diocese had been gathered together, he consecrated a church in honour of Christ, Mary and all the saints. He assigned an abbot and monks to the place, ‘like the women keeping vigil at the tomb, but to provide not perfume to a corpse but the mystical perfume of prayers to the Christ who reigns in heaven’. Within the church he constructed a rotunda, after the pattern (in modum) of the Sepulchre in Jerusalem, with a marble slab seven feet long, matching the stone in Jerusalem on which Jesus’ body had been laid. Two miracles confirmed God’s approval; the chronicler defied incredulity as he told of them, defended as he was by the viva voce account of reliable witnesses. All through the night before the consecration, a sphere of light in the style of a crown shone over the monastery. And when Lietbert visited Gerard’s small cemetery chapel at night and silently prayed for the souls of those buried there and of all the faithful departed, the spirit of all those buried there answered aloud, ‘Amen’. Proof enough that God’s honour was present where the bodies of so many saints had been gathered together.44 This story can stand for many from the Middle Ages. Just a couple of comparisons, from the many available, will enrich our picture of such patrons’ motivations. First, Piacenza had been on a pilgrim route to the Holy Sepulchre since the sixth century, with a monastery dedicated to the Sepulchre since the tenth. Around 1055 the monastery was rebuilt and a hostel for pilgrims (xenodochium)45 was added; as in Cambrai so in Piacenza, pilgrims raised a responsibility in their hosts en route. Piacenza’s sepulchre represented the present, old Jerusalem and symbolised the new. ‘Because we cannot all go to Jerusalem where the Lord was corporally buried, we have established in the same church a sepulchre in honour of the Saviour,’ to stir in those who saw it repentance, renunciation and merit enough to win reward on Judgement Day.46 Secondly, Bishop Meinwerk of 43 Mary Carruthers has emphasised that even those who did visit Jerusalem were reinvigorating and refreshing ‘the recollective images from their reading, which they already carried in their own memories’, M. Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric and the Making of Images, 400–1200, Cambridge, 1998, 40–3, 269. For a vivid example, see 484–5 below. 44 Vita Lietberti 27–41 (MGH Scriptores 30, 2.853–8). 45 Xenodochium, in use from the Fifth Synod of Orleans, 549, E. Boshof, ‘Armenfürsorge im Frühmittelalter: Xenodochium, matricula, hospitale pauperum’, Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftgeschichte 71 (1984), 153–74 [157–63]. 46 P. M. Campi, Dell’ Historia ecclesiastica di Piacenza, Piacenza, 1651, I, 513–14, no. 89. For the conference at Piacenza in Lent 1095 that led on to Clermont in November, see

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Paderborn acted ‘to obtain the heavenly Jerusalem’ when he determined to build a church, consecrated in 1036, in the likeness of the holy church in Jerusalem.47 It was to be the eastern arm of a series of churches that would inscribe a cross upon the whole city’s plan.48 Some part at least of the function of the church at Cambrai is revealed in the rituals and signs that accompanied its consecration. Lietbert gathered all the saints’ bodies of his diocese to his own Jerusalem, and the lesser dead acclaimed what he had done; it was the gathering of saints in this newly special place – not just the new building – that brought a blessing to the faithful departed. The whole dispensation of the dead was being stirred; and so provided the vindication that Lietbert needed for his enterprise.

THE BAPTISTERY, PISA We have just seen episcopal devotion and dignity converge. At Pisa we meet the baptistery most closely modelled on the Sepulchre, and therein Pisa’s claim to be Christendom’s protagonist in the crusades [Figs 1.3–6]. Pisa’s font replaces the aedicule in Jerusalem, and like the aedicule is set off-centre to the west. The Sepulchre in Jerusalem has twenty internal supports: a pair of piers at each of the cardinal points, with three columns between each pair. Pisa’s baptistery has just such an articulation on its exterior’s ground floor: pairs of clustered colonnettes flanking the door at each cardinal point, and between each cardinal point three single colonnettes. (Pisa’s interior has a similar but simplified variation in supports: a pier at each of the diagonals, and two columns between each.) An analogous manoeuvre exports the interior storeys of the Sepulchre’s central drum to Pisa’s three-level façade, behind which there are only two Morris, Sepulchre, 174–5. On the western Middle Ages, M. Bresc-Bautier, ‘Les imitations du S. Sépulcre de Jérusalem (IX–XVe siècles): archéologie d’une dévotion’, Revue d’Histoire de la Spiritualité 50 (1974), 319–42. 47 Pro optinenda celesti Ierusalem ecclesiam ad similitudinem sancte Ierosolimitane ecclesie facere disponens, Vita Meinwerki 216; for the charter of 1036, Morris, Sepulchre 163. According to the Vita, compiled over a century later, Meinwerk sent Wino of Helmarshausen to take the measurements of the Jerusalem church and of the tomb. If Wino did so, then the foundations of Meinwerk’s church in Paderborn, centrally planned with four square apses, is a striking example of the mismatch between the floor-plan of the Sepulchre and of supposed copies. Wino may in fact have travelled earlier, and without the commission that added prestige to the church and was eventually built into the Vita. R. Wesenberg, ‘Wino von Helmarshausen und das kreuzformige Oktogon’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 12 (1949), 30–40, suggests the influence on Paderborn of the octagon at Nyssa with its four square apses, as described by Gregory of Nyssa (Ep. 25.79–83). 48 E. Herzog, Die ottonische Stadt, Berlin, 1964, 102–15, 242–3. Chronicles make similar claims for Bamberg and Fulda; and the layout of Trier, Cologne, Strassburg, Hildesheim and Utrecht testify to such an aim. It is most fully stated for Chester, in the Liber Luciani in Laude Cestriae, 1195, ibid., 251.

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FIG. 1.3.  THE BAPTISTERY, PISA, BEGUN 1152, WITH THE DUOMO BEYOND

FIG. 1.4.  THE BAPTISTERY, PISA, BEGUN 1152: PLAN AND SECTION

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storeys. For the gallery over the ground floor’s ambulatory is as wide and almost as high as that ambulatory itself; in this, a formula rarely found at the time in Italy, it matches the Sepulchre, but without the Sepulchre’s further storey above. Measured between the columns’ centres, the diameter of Pisa’s central vessel is (just under) half that of the Sepulchre’s. Pisa reproduces as a whole the proportions of the Sepulchre’s tall and narrow inner drum, which (unlike the Sepulchre’s so-called rotunda as a whole) was an unimpaired circle; as Pisa’s floor-plan expands to match the Sepulchre’s full circumference, so its height rises.49 This is a striking manoeuvre: to make present the Sepulchre’s interior to the whole piazza and its public. An enclosed and centripetal sanctity is now diffused around the city. There had been an octagonal baptistery within the site of the present Campo Santo: its shape was familiar for a baptistery, but offered only an indirect recollection of the Sepulchre. A rotunda seems to have provided, in the baptistery of the crusading Pisans, what an octagon could not. The axial arrangement of baptistery and Duomo, on the other hand, clearly recalls the octagonal Dome of the Rock and Aqsa Mosque on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, related by the crusaders to the Temple of the Lord (Luke 2.22–38) and to the Palace or Temple of Solomon. The Pisans wanted, it seems, in the baptistery and Duomo to signal their dedication to the whole of Christian Jerusalem. Across the Arno, in the suburb of Chinzica, the Knights Hospitaller had used the architect Deotisalvi to build at least part of their own octagonal church of S. Sepolcro, some thirty years before he built the present baptistery [Fig. 1.5]. The Hospitallers were largely independent of the commune of Pisa; and S. Sepolcro was part of the Order’s hostelcomplex, built outside the city, catering for pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem. For the Hospitallers and their guests, S. Sepolcro’s octagon, ambulatory, eight piers, dedication and ownership all incorporated the church into the Order’s service of the Sepulchre and its pilgrims.50 The different connotations of the baptistery and S. Sepolcro are inseparable from their patronage and function. Baptisteries were used for far more than the (twice yearly) episcopal baptism.51 Angiola adduces the use of Lucca’s baptistery for the stational liturgies on Holy Saturday and for other festival vespers. In the baptistery 49 N. D. Bodner, ‘The Baptistery of Pisa and the Rotunda of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem: A Re-consideration’, in Kühnel, Visual Constructs, 95–108. On the dimensions, E. Fernie, 335 below. 50 In this paragraph I draw gratefully on N. Bodner, ‘Why are there Two Medieval Copies of the Holy Sepulchre in Pisa? A Comparative Analysis of San Sepolcro and the Baptistery’, in G. Wolf and H. Baader (eds), Pisa: The Mechanical City, Pisa, forthcoming 2018. My thanks to Dr Bodner for access to her paper before its publication. 51 E. M. Angiola, ‘Nicola Pisano, Federigo Visconti and the Classical Style in Pisa’, AB 59 (1977), 1–27: cum sit speculum civitatis istius, et sit porta paradisi. Idem, ‘“Gates of Paradise” and the Florence Baptistery’, AB 60 (1978), 242–8.

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FIG. 1.5.  SANTO SEPOLCRO, PISA, 1118–53

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in Florence donations to the city were received, the commune’s general council frequently met and the city’s standard was housed. In Pisa’s own baptistery the wine merchants arranged their confraternities. The baptistery was a centre of civic life; and baptism was an initiation into the civic community. More particular was the role of the Duomo, the baptistery and later the Campo Santo in the promulgation of Pisa’s crusades.52 The Duomo had been built to celebrate the victory over the Saracens at Palermo in 1064, 52 For this paragraph, M. Seidel, ‘Building a Cathedral at the Time of the Crusades: On the Iconography of the Architectural Complex of the “Primaziale” of Pisa’, in idem, Italian Art of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, 2 vols, Venice, 2005, II, 49–70; and I. Sabbatini, ‘“Pisa nova Hierusalem”: le “imitationes” gerosolimitane e la sacralizzazione civica’, in A. Benvenuti and P. Piatti (eds), Come a Gerusalemme, Florence, 2013, 251–78.

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FIG. 1.6.  THE GRIFFIN FROM THE DUOMO, PISA, WITH ARABIC INSCRIPTION, ELEVENTH CENTURY, PERHAPS CAPTURED IN 1087

and initially with funds made available by the victory. The Pisan victories at al-Mahdīya and Zawīla in 1087 soon led to a poem steeped in crusading ideology avant la lettre; the booty was given to the cathedral. A monumental copper-alloy griffin with Arabic inscription once adorned the apex of the Duomo’s eastern pediment; it had perhaps been captured in 1087 [Fig. 1.6].53 In 1092 Urban II elevated Pisa to the status of metropolitan see; of the three reasons he gave, one was the divine favour shown to the Pisans in their wars against the Saracens. The Liber Maiolichinus (initially c. 1125) extols the Pisans’ resolution in the Balearic campaign (1113–15), from which the booty again adorned the Duomo.54 The Duomo’s façade, built through the twelfth century, incorporates on either side of the left door two inscriptions devoted to the Pisans’ expeditions against the Saracens from 1005 to 1034 and then in 1064; in 1016 the Pisans and Genoese 53 G. Fowden, Before and After Muhammad, Princeton, 2014, 217. The griffin is now in the Museo dell’ Opera del Duomo. 54 Liber Maiolichinus de Gestis Pisanorum illustribus, ed. C. Calisse, Rome, 1904, adduced by Seidel, ‘Building’ [n. 52 above], 54–5, 57.

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had recovered Sardinia from Saracen rule. In 1088 the relics of Ephysius and Potitus, who under Diocletian had refused to persecute Christians in Sardinia and had been martyred, were translated to Pisa; an altar was dedicated to them in the Duomo. The cathedral, then, was a memorial to local triumphs in the defence of Christendom. The defence and mastery of Sardinia continued to dominate Pisan policy. The baptistery was begun in 1152; in 1161 two columns from Sardinia were installed there cum magno triumpho. It was more generally used to celebrate Pisa’s role in the larger movement of the crusades. In the First Crusade (1096–99), Archbishop Daibert of Pisa led a pilgrimage of 25,000 in 120 ships to Palestine and commanded the Pisan fleet; on the capture of Jerusalem he was named patriarch of Jerusalem.55 The Pisans recorded the Pisan Cucco Riccucci as the first crusader to scale Jerusalem’s walls at the capture. The city’s principal patron saint became Raynerius (d. 1160), a Pisan who was granted visions of Christ in the Holy Sepulchre and on Mount Tabor, renounced his libertine life and for years lived as a hermit in the Holy Land; it was visions in the Holy Sepulchre that brought Raynerius back to Pisa. Archbishop Ubaldo Lanfranchi (d. 1207) was said to have brought earth from Calvary back to Pisa in the Third Crusade; around it the present cemetery of Campo Santo (with stories of miraculously fast decomposition) would eventually be built; the cemetery may have been modelled on the Hospitallers’ charnel house at Akeldama.56 These Pisan triumphs were surely worthy of Rome herself. The poem celebrating 1087 compares Pisa’s achievement to Rome’s victory over Carthage: Inclitorum Pisanorum scripturus istoriam, / antiquorum Romanorum renovo memoriam. The Balearic campaign stirred the same analogy: Ego Roma altera iam solebam dici, / quae sum privilegiis dives Federici, / propter gentes barbaras quas ubique vici. The baptistery, recalling the Sepulchre and so Constantine’s Christian empire, was part of the Pisans’ proclamation of their civic, crusading, atavistically Roman pride. It was in this particular setting that such a direct imitation of the Sepulchre was called for.

CENTRALITY, PERFECTION AND ASCENT Pisa introduces us to the circular and other centrally planned buildings that evoked the Holy Sepulchre. But such evocations are not easily controlled, least of all in cultures that value their discovery and enrichment. Once we are concerned with those who encountered the buildings, we have to 55 On Daibert in the Holy Land, M. Barber, The Crusader States, New Haven and London, 2012, 56–61. 56 N. D. Bodner, ‘Earth from Jerusalem in the Pisan Camposanto’, in H. Vorholt and R. Bartal (eds), Between Jerusalem and Europe: Essays in Honour of Bianca Kühnel, Leiden, 2015, 74–93.

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acknowledge associations beyond the remit of the architects and masons. There were circular buildings that bore no reference to the Sepulchre; and there was simply the perfection of the circle. As Krautheimer emphasised in his later Postscript to ‘Introduction’, he wanted ‘to stress, even more strongly than I did then, the medieval pattern of double-think, or better “multi-think”. Indeed, what counts in medieval thought, in the context of any given theme … is the multitude of its connotations, fleeting, only dimly visible, and therefore interchangeable.’57 Architecturally, no rotunda could escape connection with the Pantheon; nor, conceptually, with the perfection of the circle. ‘The circle’, according to Augustine, ‘is more similar to virtue than are any other two-dimensional figures. … You will find nothing among the good things of the soul that is more perfectly consonant with itself than virtue, and nothing among the plane figures than the circle.’ For what mattered in the soul was a divine congruence and concord of reasons that surpassed all the soul’s other affections.58 Richard Southern observed that in the Middle Ages symbols were to inner world what pilgrimages were to outer: invitations to journeys of discovery.59 Medieval encyclopaedists may be wearying, and may offer only post festum interpretations. But they were among the widely used texts which will have informed the vision and experience of their readers. We can expect Durandus (1230–96) to have both summed up and fostered a way of seeing when he wrote that ‘some churches are built in the form of a circle: to signify that the church has been extended throughout the circle of the world … or because from the circle of this world, we reach forth to that crown of eternity which shall encircle our brows’.60 Mary Carruthers has shown how foundational to the medieval discipline of prayer was the controlled imagination of the tabernacle and Temple and of the subject’s place within them. Carruthers turns to actual (and in particular to monastic) buildings: to arrangements of their space and light, to the character and details of their decoration, to the ductus informed by the patterns within them of daily life and liturgy. We might add to the wealth of her reflections. Rotundas encourage circulation round the ambulatory; they are not clearly unidirectional. Chancels and exedrae are spaces distinct from a rotunda’s central vessel, which is spatially selfcontained; the unifying axis is upwards from the centre. This is a movement, in copies of the Sepulchre, on the path of Christ, from both baptismal and post-mortem burial through resurrection and on upwards to heaven. But

Krautheimer, Studies, 122. Aug., De Quant. Animae 16.27 (PL 32.1051). 59 R. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages, London, 1953, 212. 60 Durandus, Rationale 1.1.17, drawing on Honorius of Autun (1080–1154), N. Hiscock, The Symbol at Your Door: Number and Geometry in Religious Architecture of the Greek and Latin Middle Ages, Aldershot, 2007, 234. 57

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we should be alert to the other patterns of ascent that rotundas – without any reference to the Sepulchre – were well equipped to inspire. We can helpfully broaden out here to embrace some octagonal buildings too. John Scotus Eriugena (fl. c. 845 – c. 870) composed Aulae sidereae for Charles the Bald, probably for the dedication of the octagonal Ste-Marie at Compiègne in May 877.61 Eriugena valued cognitive and mystical ascent: ‘if you want to take your flight and raise yourself by heavenly airs … with an eye piercing the darkness, you will traverse the temples of Wisdom.’62 He described the final three degrees of such ascent in the Periphuseon: they culminate in the supernatural occasus when the very perfect solidity of the number eight will at last be achieved, like that of a supernatural cube. If anyone, writes Eriugena in Aulae, with pious heart raises the wings of his mind and enters the harmony of things with wisdom as his guide, he will see with the clarity of reason all times and places in the tetragonus mundus filled with the God-Word and showing the symbols of Christ’s birth. But what created mind can describe the descent of the Word into flesh and know the sublime ascents of the flesh to the Word?63 Eriugena is characteristically evoking a form of theophany, of the insight and elevation made possible by the disclosure of the Word. Eriugena draws on the octagon: The number eight harmonises the acts divine; For our Lord, whose form is expressed in every time, On the eighth day was born, conceived, returned from death, And on the eighth day submitted to the symbols of the ancient law. And on the octave the world will bring one end to all The changing courses of the years and all the things that fail … These are the thoughts which secretly within our hearts The sounding harp of the number eight unfolds. The Spirit within cries and ceases never, Always proclaiming what once the year intones.64 61 Eriugena, text and translation, J. O’Meara, Oxford, 1991, 182–7. Setting, M. Herren, ‘Eriugena’s “Aulae sidereae”, the “Codex Aureus” and the Palatine Church of St Mary at Compiègne’, Studi medievali 28 (1987), 593–608. On doubts over the poem’s reference to Compiègne, M. Vieillard-Troïekouroff, ‘La chapelle du Palais de Charles le Chauve à Compiègne’, Cahiers archéologiques 21 (1971), 89–108. On the poem and Eriugena’s thought, M. Foussard, ‘Aulae sidereae: vers de Jean Scot au Roi Charles’, Cahiers archéologiques 21 (1971), 79–88. On references in the poem to Ezekiel’s temple, Y. Christe, ‘Sainte-Marie de Compiègne et le Temple d’Hézéchiel’, in Jean Scot Erigène et l’histoire de la philosophie, Paris, 1977, 477–81. On the debt of Eriugena’s ideal temple in Aulae to Bede, V. V. Petroff, ‘The De Templo of Bede as the Source of an Ideal Temple Description in Eriugena’s Aulae sidereae’, Recherches de théologie et philosophie médiévale 68 (1998), 102. 62 Periphuseon V, 1020 C – 1021 A; Carmen VIII, 1–3, Foussard, ‘Aulae sidereae’ [n. 61 above], 83. 63 Aulae, lines 16–21, 65–8, trans. O’Meara [n. 61 above]. 64 Aulae, lines 33–8, 45–8, trans. O’Meara: Haec sunt, quae tacite nostris in cordibus intus

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The poem ends with a return to the noble race of David, favoured antecedent to the Carolingian kings: the new David sits enthroned in the church on earth as Christ himself is enthroned in heaven. The Word left his home to come to earth; entry to the King’s – present and accessible – church represents the soul’s longed-for ascent to the halls of wisdom. The direction of ‘ascent’ is direction into the octagon. Aulae is clearly the work of a theologian, not of a builder; and of a theologian who may have been (drastically) extending rather than summarising his readers’ response to Ste-Marie. Abbot William of Volpiano, by contrast, built at Dijon the basilica of St-Bénigne (dedicated in 1016), and attached to its eastern end a three-storey rotunda dedicated to the Virgin Mary and consecrated on 13 May 1018 in honour of the Virgin and all the martyrs, so sharing the date and dedication of the Pantheon’s consecration.65 An axial chapel projects eastwards from the rotunda. The chapel’s lowest level was dedicated to John the Baptist, the intermediary level to the Virgin; on the rotunda’s top floor were altars to the Trinity and to St Paul with St Denis, both admitted to visions of heaven. An uppermost chapel was reached up fifteen hidden steps from the top floor of the rotunda. This chapel was dedicated to St Michael, who conducted the blessed to heaven. The successive floors of the rotunda, then, all lit from an oculus above a central well, were designed to represent and realise the soul’s ascent from the dim light offered by John the Baptist, through the incarnation to the visionary privileges that led to the splendour of heaven. The movement towards heaven that had been engendered in the reason by earthbound entry into the octaves of Compiègne could be walked up the spiral staircase of Dijon’s rotunda.66

ST MICHAEL’S, FULDA In Aulae and St-Bénigne we look for no close connection with the Sepulchre. We are acclimatising ourselves to the world of imagination in which the medieval Sepulchre-copies were built and encountered. I close / octoni numeri modulatur nabla sonorum, / spiritus interior clamat nec desinit unquam [cf. Rom. 8.26] / semper concrepitans, quidquid semel intonat annus. 65 C. Heitz, ‘D’Aix-la-Chapelle à Saint-Bénigne à Dijon: Rotondes mariales carolingiennes et ottoniennes’, Les cahiers de Saint-Michel de Cuxà 25 (1994), 9; C. M. Malone, ‘The Rotunda of Sancta Maria in Dijon as “Ostwerk”’, Speculum 75 (2000), 283–317; and idem, Saint-Bénigne de Dijon en l’an mil, ‘totius Galliae basilicis mirabilior’: Interprétation politique, liturgique et théologique, Turnhout, 2009. 66 Aethelgar placed a series of six carvings on the outside of the six-storeyed tower at the New Minster, Winchester, between 980 and 988, representing the dedication of the ground floor to the Virgin and of the upper floors to the Trinity, the cross, all saints, St Michael and the heavenly powers, and the evangelists, Liber Vitae: Register and Martyrology of New Minster and Hyde Abbey, Winchester, ed. W. de G. Birch, London, 1892, 10, analysed by R. N. Quirk, ‘Winchester New Minster and its Tenth-Century Tower’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association 24 (1961), 16–54 [21–2, 33–5, 38–9].

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with a more enigmatic rotunda. We have been asking who was alert to how much of the symbolism under discussion throughout this book; St Michael’s at Fulda would be part of any answer. In 822 Abbot Eigil built the round funerary chapel of St Michael’s.67 It was surely an early example of the Holy Sepulchre’s representation in the West. According to the titulus at the main altar, its relics included fragments from the Sepulchre, Bethlehem and Sinai; and relics of the three boys cast by Nebuchadnezzar into the furnace, of Michael and of John the Evangelist. It was dedicated principally to Christ, ‘whose tumulus here helps our sepulchres’. The boys were widely allegorised as the soul, purged in fire and due to rise at the Day of Judgement. Michael had charge of souls’ passage after death; it was John’s Revelation that disclosed the Last Things. This was an emphatically funerary chapel, apparently modelled on Christ’s own tumulus. Hrabanus Maurus wrote the altars’ tituli. Twenty years later Candidus Bruun, a member of the monastery (in which Hrabanus was by then abbot), wrote a double life of Eigil, an opus geminum of which one version was in verse and one in prose. In both he describes the chapel: in the crypt was a central column with arches joined together at it; on the first floor eight columns and a single keystone. Most telling is Candidus’ own admission, in both versions of the Life, that he is devising his own explanation. According to the prose version (with the revealing anacoluthon retained), ‘this building – if that venerable father and the master mentioned above [Hrabanus] with their companions, devising I-don’t-know-what of great value and taught by divine instruction – which nonetheless I think, subject to the safety of the faith, can be marked out in advance [praesignari] as a figure of Christ and of the Church’.68 In the verse version, Eigil and his companions had planned the church ‘with a high/deep winding of the mind’; Candidus does not find its structure easy to explain: he adduces living stones, Christ the foundation and the Beatitudes. The church’s circular shape, continuous without end and enclosing the divine sacraments, ‘seems not incongruously to signify’ the eternal rewards that await the just. Candidus does not invoke Hrabanus’ own authority for his reading, and does not mention the Sepulchre at all; we can only assume that the chapel was not known within the monastery’s own community to copy the Sepulchre. Candidus’ opus geminum alerts us to further distinctions. The genre was in Christian use by the fourth century. The verse version was for the more 67 Candidus Bruun, Vita Aeigili, liber II (= vita metrica); G. Becht-Jördens, Vita Aegil abbatis Fuldenis a Candido ad Modestum edita prosa et versibus. Ein Opus geminum des IX. Jahrhunderts. Einleitung und kritische Edition [Diss. Heidelberg], Marburg, 1994; idem, Die Vita Aegil abbatis Fuldensis des Brun Candidus. Ein opus geminum aus dem Zeitalter der anianischen Reform in biblisch figuralem Hintergrundstil, Frankfurt am Main, 1992. In the titulus at the main altar: dedicatum Christo / cuius hic tumulus nostra sepulcra iuvat. 68 Prose Vita, 20, also conveniently in O. Ellger, Die Michaelskirche zu Fulda als Zeugnis der Totensorge, Fulda, 1989, 232–3. For the relics, 82–90.

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sophisticated readers. So Alcuin introduces his double Vita Willibrodi: ‘I have divided things as two small books: the one walks in the speech of prose, and could be read out publicly to the brothers in church, if it seems to your wisdom to deserve it; the other runs with the step of the Muses, and ought to be thought over in a private chamber among your scholars only.’69 Even within the monastery, there were distinctions between the brothers in general (who could understand the Latin read out to them) and those particular scholars who would penetrate the deeper significance of the life narrated. The verse Life of Eigel is pervasively subtle: as five is an inauspicious number and seventeen auspicious, so Chapter 5 has a story of evil to tell, and Chapter 17 of good. As Candidus turns to this happy climax, he urges his reader at the end of Chapter 16: Discern now, brother (no other is more distinguished than you!), With the eyes of your mind, and with me affirm/secure these holy things.

The monks of Fulda may stand for one cohort of those who would encounter the copies of Jerusalem to which the body of this book is devoted. Even within this narrow constituency, there were wide differences in learning and sensibility; and even the most learned were uncertain what their own chapel signified. The Life of Eigel accentuates the question to which we might have hoped it would provide an answer: who saw or sensed how much in such buildings, and to what effect? The question will be before us throughout the pages to come.

69

Alcuin, Vita Willibrodi (MGH Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum 7), Prologue, 113.

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PART II

THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE

FIG. 2.1.  (A) JERUSALEM AT THE TIME OF JESUS: TENTATIVE MAP. (B) AELIA CAPITOLINA AROUND THE TIME OF CONSTANTINE

INTRODUCTION

He was crucified, and we do not deny it; on the contrary, I  glory  to speak of it. For though I should now deny it, here is  Golgotha  to confute me, near which we are now assembled; the wood of the  Cross  confutes me, which was afterwards distributed piecemeal from hence to all the world. … From among the things upon earth, there will cry out upon you this  holy  Golgotha, which stands high above us, and shows itself to this day, and still shows how the rocks were then riven because of  Christ; the  sepulchre  near at hand where he was laid; and the stone which was laid on the door, which  lies  to this day by the tomb. But would you like to know the place too? Again he says in the Song of Songs, ‘I went down into the garden of nuts’ [Song of Songs 4.11]; for it was a garden where he was crucified [John 19.41]. For though it has now been most highly adorned with royal gifts, yet formerly it was a garden, and the signs and the remnants of this remain. … He says, ‘So wait for me, says the LORD, until the day of my resurrection at the Witness’ [marturion, Zeph. 3.8 LXX]. You see that the prophet foresaw the place also of the resurrection, which was to be surnamed ‘the Witness’. Why is this spot of Golgotha and of the resurrection not called, like all other churches, a church, but a witness? Perhaps, because of the prophet, who had said, ‘until the day of my resurrection at the Witness’. Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures, 347–48, delivered at Calvary in the Holy Sepulchre, extracts from 13.4, 13.39 and 14.5–61

1 Trans. E. H. Gifford, The Catechetical Lectures of St Cyril of Jerusalem [Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers 2.7], Edinburgh, 1894 (lightly edited).

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We begin with the Holy Sepulchre, from Constantine in the early fourth century through to the crusaders in the twelfth. Griffith-Jones surveys the early literary and archaeological evidence, and is among those who view Eusebius’ account with some caution. When completed, under Constantine or his son, the complex as a whole will have been of overwhelming grandeur: the eastern stairs, portico and entrance; westwards into the basilica; through to the courtyard; and finally, at the western end, the rotunda. Griffith-Jones then turns to the standing given in imperial propaganda both to Christ and to the emperor, and asks whether and how the Sepulchre’s design expressed the relationship between them and their dominions. Denys Pringle revisits a principal subject of his magisterial Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, and outlines the building programmes undertaken in the Sepulchre between the capture of Jerusalem and the works’ completion in the 1160s. The church of the eleventh century, intended to be the city’s principal church and the seat of the patriarch, was no longer adequate. It was now to be the setting for royal pageantry: in the coronation, marriage and burial of the Frankish kings. Pilgrims were flocking to Jerusalem, back in Christian hands, in increasing numbers. In the crusaders’ compact solution, Constantine’s courtyard was occupied by the apse and high altar, directly faced by the door of the empty tomb; the resurrection that was made present in the empty tomb was re-presented daily on the altar to its east. Jaroslav Folda broadens our horizons: he shows the influences at work on the Sepulchre’s south transept façade, and in particular its connection to Santiago de Compostela and the pilgrim churches of southern Europe. The Sepulchre was part of an international network of pilgrimage and craftsmanship; it needs to be seen alongside Santiago, the camino and Rome. In these chapters, then, we survey the development of the building whose impact on pilgrims and patrons – from Cyril of Jerusalem in the fourth century through to Riccoldo da Monte di Croce in the fifteenth – will inform much of this book.

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FROM JERUSALEM TO AELIA CAPITOLINA The first building that calls for our attention is the Holy Sepulchre as it was built by Constantine and perhaps finished by Constantius II. We need a brief survey of the literary and archaeological evidence in order to do justice, in the chapter’s second half, to the status implied by the building for Christ and for Constantine. Jesus was crucified in April 30 or 33 CE.1 Joan Taylor has shown that ‘Golgotha’ was the area of a disused quarry just outside and to the north of the Gennath (Gardens) Gate.2 She argues that the site of Jesus’ tomb identified under Constantine, some 250m north of the gate, was authentic; but that Jesus had been crucified at the quarry’s southern end, immediately outside the gate on a spot prominently visible from two roads, leading west to Emmaus and Joppa, and north to Samaria. (Crucifixion was designedly public; it was a deterrent.) Fig. 2.2 shows a tomb in Bethany, of the kind likely to have been used for Jesus: a rock between the vestibule and kokhim-chamber will have kept out scavenging animals; kokhim or I am grateful to Prof. Joan Taylor for her comments on this chapter. For a discussion, R. E. Brown, The Death of the Messiah, London, 1994, II, 1373–6. 2 The Gospel of Peter has Jesus buried by Joseph of Arimathea in his own sepulchre, called ‘Joseph’s garden’ (Akhmin fr. 6 [24]), W. Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, 2 vols, Cambridge, 1991, I, 216–27 [224]; Tertullian (De Spectaculis 30) records a legend that the gardener (cf. John 20.15) had removed Jesus’ body for fear that crowds coming to visit the tomb would trample his cabbages; Cyril of Jerusalem, using and emending John 19.41, has Jesus both crucified and buried in a garden, of which ‘tokens and traces still remain’ (Cat. 14.5, cf. 13.8). The Gospel of Peter may accurately record a narrow-entrance tomb and the women’s need to move in through the entrance to see the burial-ledge, J. E. Taylor, ‘Golgotha: A Reconsideration of the Evidence for the Sites of Jesus’ Crucifixion and Burial’, NTS 44 (1998) [hereafter ‘Golgotha’], 180–203 [200]. We should perhaps envisage a neighbourhood of prestigious burials: the Hasmonean high priests John Hyrcanus and Alexander Jannaeus were buried in this area, Jos. BJ 5.6.2 (259), 5.7.3 (304), R. E. Brown, The Gospel According to John, 2 vols, New York, 1970, II, 943. * 1

2

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FIG. 2.2.  KOKHIM-TOMB DISCOVERED AT BETHANY

horizontal shafts were dug for several bodies in the central chamber, and on use will have been plugged with stone; the arcosolium was ready for the ultimate deposit of bones. Jesus was buried in haste by frightened followers; his body was probably left, as a temporary measure, on such a ledge as shown here in the chamber beneath the kokhim.3 Jerusalem’s walls were rebuilt and extended by Agrippa I between 41 and 44 CE; the quarry was now enclosed within the city. In 70 CE, at the end of the Jewish rebellion against Rome, Jerusalem was sacked and the Temple destroyed. At least some Jewish life continued in and around the city.4 En route to Egypt, between 129 and 130 CE, the Emperor Hadrian (Publius Aelius Hadrianus) was adorning cities and celebrating games.5 Within this programme he determined to rebuild 3 J. Murphy-O’Connor, ‘The Argument for the Holy Sepulchre’, RB 117 (2010), 55–91 [89, fig. 5], repr. idem, Keys to Jerusalem, Oxford, 2012, 159–92. Foundational are L.-H. Vincent and F. M. Abel, Jérusalem nouvelle, Paris, 1914 [hereafter Jérusalem]; C. Couäsnon, The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, London, 1974 [hereafter Sepulchre]; V. C. Corbo, Il Santo Sepolcro di Jerusalemme, 3 vols, Jerusalem, 1981–82 [hereafter Sepolcro]; P. W. L. Walker, Holy City, Holy Places?, Oxford, 1990 [hereafter Holy City]; J. E. Taylor, Christians and Holy Places: The Myth of Jewish-Christian Origins, Oxford, 1993; S. Gibson and J. E. Taylor, Beneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem: The Archaeology and Early History of Traditional Golgotha, London, 1994 [hereafter Sepulchre]; and V. Shalev-Hurvitz, Holy Sites Encircled: The Early Byzantine Concentric Churches of Jerusalem, Oxford, 2015 [hereafter Holy Sites]. 4 J. E. Taylor, ‘Parting in Palestine’, in H. Shanks (ed.), Partings: How Judaism and Christianity Became Two, BAS, 2013. 5 Recent excavations to the west of the Temple Mount suggest that Hadrian (emperor

THE BUILDING OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE

Jerusalem and to rename it Colonia Aelia Capitolina. According to a later summary of Dio Cassius, ‘in the place of the temple of the god he set up in opposition a new temple to Zeus’, and this triggered a second Jewish revolt.6 Archaeological finds confirm the extent of the destruction wrought in the revolt’s suppression between 132 and 135. Hadrian then expelled the Jews from the city. Relations between Christian and non-Christian Jews in Judaea and Galilee collapsed in the Second Revolt. But some continuity was surely maintained in the Christian community, either by the arrival of gentile Christians or the abandonment of Judaism by some Jewish-Christians. For some sites were remembered. Eusebius includes in his Onomasticon, written well before Constantine’s discoveries, Bethabara (as the place of Jesus’ baptism), Gethsemane and Golgotha. Golgotha, Place of a Skull, where Christ was crucified, ‘is even [kai] shown in Aelia right beside the northern part of Mount Zion’.7 The vagueness is telling: Eusebius may indeed have known of Golgotha as a whole area. He avoids mention of any pagan overlay. Hadrian laid out a classic Roman city with two main roads running north-south (cardo maximus) and east-west (decumanus). In Aelia’s original design, the cardo ran south as far as the decumanus, then terminated in a T-junction.8 The Madaba Map [Colour Pl. I, cf. Fig. 2.3] still gives a powerful impression of the cardo in the sixth-century city. On the western side of that junction lay one of the city’s two fora. The forum’s southern border was the decumanus, its northern border the artificial platform built by Hadrian, under which Constantine discovered Christ’s tomb. The platform extended to the cardo, a grand street 12.5m wide with a colonnade and a pavement 5m wide on each side. Just to the south of the platform was a triple-arched entry to the forum. This was a spectacular from 117 to 138) had already been clearing the old city and preparing for its new layout from the first years of his reign, S. Weksler-Bdolah, ‘The Foundation of Aelia Capitolina’, Israel Exploration Journal 64 (2014), 38–62. 6 Dio, Hist. 69.12.1–3, in an epitome handed down (and perhaps edited) by Xiphilinus; see n. 20 below. For the revolt and further factors in its instigation, W. Horbury, Jewish Wars under Trajan and Hadrian, Cambridge, 2014. 7 Eus., Onomasticon 59.19–20 (Bethabara), 74.16–18 (Gethsemane), 19–21 (Golgotha, discussed again in Taylor, ‘Golgotha’ [n. 2 above], 191). Deiknutai is a term from tourism, Murphy-O’Connor, ‘Argument’ [n. 3 above], 73, 77, who argues for almost unbroken continuity in the Christian community and so for a reliable memory of its sacred places within Jerusalem. ‘See the place where they laid him’ (Mark 16.6) will have been the words of a cultic commemoration within the tomb long before the Second and perhaps before the First Revolt (63). 8 The cardo’s extension to the south was added when the Nea was built under Justinian, H. Amitzur, ‘Justinian’s Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem’, in M. Poorthuis and Ch. Safrai, The Centrality of Jerusalem: Historical Perspectives, Hague, 1996, 160–75. The identification of the forum is not quite assured. The site of the camp of Legio X Fretensis is much disputed, recently E. Mazar (ed.), The Temple Mount Excavations in Jerusalem … 1968–78: Final Reports IV: The Tenth Legion in Aelia Capitolina, Jerusalem, 2011, 255–304: at the foot of the Temple Mount’s south-west enclosure wall.

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FIG. 2.3.  IMPRESSION OF JERUSALEM IN THE SIXTH CENTURY, FROM THE MADABA MAP

ROBIN GRIFFITH-JONES

city centre. In Hadrian’s Aelia, then, the site of the crucifixion – 200m southwards from the tomb, across the forum – lay on the decumanus, consistent with the record of Melito of Sardis (c. 165) that Jesus was killed epi mesēs plateiās, en mesō poleōs, on the middle of a wide street, in the middle of the city.9 Jerome wrote to Paulinus of Nola: From the time of Hadrian to the reign of Constantine – a period of about 180 years – the spot which had witnessed the resurrection was occupied by a figure of Jupiter; while on the rock where the cross had stood, a marble statue of Venus was set up by the heathen and became an object of worship.10

Jerome offers us two statues. In this he echoes but emends Eusebius, who had written that Jesus’ tomb – rather than the place of the cross – was 9 For surveys of the large literature, H. Donner, The Mosaic Map of Madaba, Kampen, 1992; Y. Tsafrir, ‘The Holy City of Jerusalem in the Madaba Map’, in M. Piccirillo and E. Alliata (eds), The Madaba Map Centenary 1897–1997 [Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, Collectio Maior: 40], Jerusalem, 1999. Melito, Peri Pascha, 704. U. C. von Wahlde, ‘The References to the Time and Place of the Crucifixion in the Peri Pascha of Melito of Sardis’, JTS 60 (2009), 556–69, rejects any historical recollection in Melito’s rhetoric. MurphyO’Connor, ‘Argument’ [n. 3 above], reads plateia as the plaza on the Hadrianic templeplatform (74). 10 Jerome, Ep. 58.3, in loco resurrectionis simulacrum Iovis, in crucis rupe statua ex marmore Veneris.

THE BUILDING OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE

buried by Hadrian under earth and paving and a shrine to Aphrodite (Venus), ‘a terrible and true tomb, of souls’; Constantine, according to Eusebius, had the temple demolished and the site cleared and excavated, to remove the pollution of the blood of pagan sacrifices; and there the tomb of Christ was found.11 That platform over the tomb, built by Hadrian and cleared by Constantine, was large. Corbo believed that he had discovered the foundations of a temple there, 37m x 41m; and he estimated a fill – necessarily irregular, levelling such a quarry – over 5m deep. We must infer from Eusebius’ account that the tomb was completely covered. Some part of the rock that was putatively Calvary was probably visible above the pavement; the rock’s top rises above bedrock by 12.75m to the east, 9m to the north, 5m to the west.12 That protruding rock is startling; we may wonder if, thanks to some prior sanctity, it was a fittingly chthonic element and statue-base in Hadrian’s temenos. Hadrian’s platform was a grand construction; the walls were to dominate and to be seen from the forum to its south.13 Corbo identified lengths of the Hadrianic retaining wall, along the south and east of the temenos.14 Constantine was programmatically replacing the honour paid to the pagan gods with the honour due to Christ, at a point in his renewed and now Christian city where that honour had most conspicuously to be paid. In charge of the work was Bishop Macarius of Jerusalem. He would naturally have begun as he did: demolishing the pagan shrines on the podium that dominated the northern length of the forum. The place of Jesus’ crucifixion was not specified in the gospels as a rock; and the tall and steep rock of Calvary, with its small summit, is ill-suited to crucifixion.15 But Constantine would write to Macarius of the overall site as ‘hallowed from the start by God’s decree, and now proved holier still Eus., Vita Constantini [hereafter VC], 3.26. Gibson and Taylor, Sepulchre [n. 3 above], 56. 13 Gibson and Taylor, Sepulchre, 67 (and plan at 66) caution against Corbo’s ambitious reconstruction. They warn that the walls at the eastern end, giving onto the cardo, may have been reused there by Constantine’s builders from an original use elsewhere. For the most recent reconstructions of the Hadrianic platform and buildings, R. Sabelli, S. Fiamminghi and O. Garbarino, ‘Gerusalemme: la Collina del Golgotha prima della costruzione delle fabbriche cristiane’, Archäologischer Anzeiger 2013/12 (2014), 43–77; R. Sabelli, ‘Roman Changes to the Hill of Gareb in Aelia Capitolina through a Review of the Archaeological Data’, Restauro archeologico 1 (2015), 88–111. 14 Corbo, Sepolcro [n. 3 above], Photo 1: in the Constantinian cistern under the buildings to the east of the Sepulchre’s present entrance. Ibid., Photos 118, 119: at the eastern end of the temenos, where the entrance steps would have risen [118, here Fig. 2.3]. In these eastern walls Corbo identified reused Herodian stones, perhaps from the Temple area. The holes visible in Fig. 2.4 would have secured marble revetments to the core. Sabelli, ‘Roman Changes’ [n. 13 above], 97, n. 17, questions Corbo’s dating. The Hadrianic remains had previously been studied by Vincent and Abel, Jérusalem, II, 70–88. 15 The rock of Calvary in its present form has a top 1.7m x 3.5m; there is hardly space there for one crucifixion, let alone three (cf. Gibson and Taylor, Sepulchre [n. 3 above], 56). 11

12

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FIG. 2.4.  THE HOLY SEPULCHRE, JERUSALEM: RETAINING WALL, PROBABLY FROM THE BUILDINGS OF THE EMPEROR HADRIAN, C. 125

since it brought to light the evidence of the saving passion’;16 the area ‘shown’ in Eusebius’ Onomasticon was well known. The story that Helena identified Golgotha – exactly at the temple of Venus – by dint of dreams and a sign from heaven gave due authority to her claim, and may suggest that the Jerusalem church had identified the area and not the spot.17 Macarius’ seemingly miraculous fortune was to send in the workmen to the podium’s western end, and there to uncover a tomb. But it is at least a curious coincidence that the tomb of Christ was discovered under the podium on this pagan site, exactly where it needed to be if its memorial was to become the centre of this revived and refounded Jerusalem: entered from the cardo, parallel to the decumanus and, with these, defining and framing the forum. We may find ourselves straining to account for this connection between the site of Christ’s burial and of Hadrian’s cultic centre. The Christians may perhaps have been so prominent in Jerusalem by the 130s that Hadrian would bother to obliterate their most sacred site. Taylor makes a robust but more nuanced case: that Hadrian had indeed – and was known to have – placed the statue of Jupiter directly above Christ’s tomb, not to obliterate Christ but to assimilate Christ to Jupiter. Hadrian was, then, integrating the Christians’ new worship of the one with the empire’s atavistic worship of the other.18 The tomb, when excavated, was instantly recognised as the tomb of Jesus: it was exactly where it was expected to be, and matched in its form the gospels’ description. We already, in this scenario, have Christ’s tomb beneath a central civic space. But we have not yet accounted for the city’s grandest pagan site: Jupiter Capitolinus will have been the central god of Aelia’s principal temple, the Capitolium, flanked by Juno and Minerva to form the Capitoline triad. 16 17 18

VC 3.30.4. Rufinus, HE 10.7; Socrates, HE 1.17; Sozomen, HE 2.1–2. Taylor, ‘Golgotha’ [n. 2 above], 200.

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Some coins from Hadrian’s reign, albeit surprisingly few, show the triad in front of a distyle temple; and from the reign of Antoninus Pius, Jupiter in front of a tetrastylon.19 Vitruvius (Arch. 1.7.1) had specified that ‘for sacred buildings of the gods under whose protection the city most seems to be, both for Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, the sites are to be distributed on the highest ground from which the most part of the ramparts is to be seen’. The later site of the Holy Sepulchre matches just that description: at the highest point of the cardo maximus. If the Capitolium was here, and was purposefully built over Jesus’ tomb, then Hadrian centred not just one temple and one forum but his whole city around the tomb. He had destroyed the Jews’ holy site; and he would now appropriate the Christians’, as Aelia’s sacred hub. This will have had consequences for mainstream Judaism and for its increasingly gentile offspring: they were, on Taylor’s argument, being clearly distinguished from each other by the Roman authorities themselves. A more sceptical argument lies of course to hand: that Constantine’s agents found under the Capitolium what they needed to find.20 Corbo identified the Hadrianic foundations discovered under the present Holy Sepulchre as those of the Capitolium: at its west end a temple with three cellae, for Jupiter in the centre, flanked by Juno and Minerva; and at its east a giant portico and flight of steps giving onto the cardo maximus.21 Corbo followed Jerome and placed the statue of Venus right over the rock of Calvary, on the southern rim of the podium and outside Y. Meshorer, The Coinage of Aelia Capitolina, Jerusalem, 1989, 22, 27–8. The site of the Capitolium is not clear. Two sites on the Temple Mount have also been proposed: (i) at the place of the Jewish Temple; (ii) on the former site of the Antonia Fortress, on the north-west corner of the Temple Mount. See B. Flusin, ‘L’esplanade du Temple à l’arrivée des Arabes d’après deux récits byzantins’, in J. Raby and J. Johns (eds), Bayt al-Maqdis: Abd-al-Malik’s Jerusalem, Oxford, 1992, 17–31 [21, 26], adducing two seventh-century manuscripts. These MSS are, however, from a time at which Hadrian’s platform – by then long since replaced by the Holy Sepulchre – would not readily be identified as the pagan Capitolium. For (i): the supposed evidence of Dio (Hist. 69.12.1–2) has been challenged by Y. Z. Eliav, ‘Hadrian’s Actions in the Jerusalem Temple Mount according to Cassius Dio and Xiphilini Manus’, JSQ 4 (1997), 125–44, and further weakened by G. W. Bowersock, ‘A Roman Perspective on the Bar Kochba War’, in W. S. Green (ed.), Approaches to Ancient Judaism, 2 vols, Chicago, 1980, II, 131–41 [137]; the evidence of Jerome has been reinterpreted by J. Murphy O’Connor, ‘The Location of the Capitoline Temple in Aelia Capitolina’, Revue biblique 101 (1994), 407–14, repr. idem, Keys to Jerusalem, Oxford, 2012, 147–56. 21 If the Capitolium was not on this platform, we will have to postulate other buildings on it of suitable grandeur. Couäsnon (Sepulchre, 12) proposed that it was the site of Aelia’s civic basilica, which Constantine echoed in his own. D. Bahat, ‘Does the Holy Sepulchre Church mark the Burial Place of Jesus?’, BAR 12 (1986), 26–45 [40] argued that a round temple of Venus was on the platform (cf. Baalbek’s round temple of Venus) and determined the shape of the Holy Sepulchre’s rotunda. Vincent and Abel, Jérusalem, II, 887, argued that over time Aphrodite/Venus superseded Minerva/Athena in Aelia’s Capitoline triad and overshadowed Jupiter Capitolinus himself. For colonial Capitolia, M. Beard, J. North and S. Price, Religions of Rome, 2 vols, Cambridge, 1998, I, 334–7; II, 244–5 (with illustrations of Cosa and Sufetula); for Christians’ particular resentment of Capitolia and the annual vow made at them, ibid., I, 240–1. 19

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the temple itself.22 Fragments of a small quadrangular altar were found just to the east of Calvary. In 1988 Corbo was able to see and photograph the top of the rock of Calvary.23 He reported emphatically that its surface was unworked and in its natural state. This hardly coheres either with a statue directly on its top or with the rock as being the site for three crucifixions.24 Eusebius already knew the city before Constantine began work. In The Demonstration of the Gospel,25 Eusebius had contrasted the Temple, destroyed and never to be rebuilt, with the Mount of Olives over against (katenanti) Jerusalem to the east,26 where Christ will stand firm as upon his Church; believers congregated from all over the world, ‘not to the destroyed Temple but to the Mount of Olives opposite, to which the Lord’s glory migrated when it left the former city’, as the Lord’s glory had left the Temple in Ezekiel’s vision (Ez. 10); the Mount of Olives is to the east of the Temple, just as the Church is nearer to the gospel’s sun. Constantine’s buildings would turn Eusebius’ eyes from the east and the Mount of Olives to the west and the Sepulchre: here, by the 330s, he would find the renewed Jerusalem foretold by Ezekiel.

THE DISCOVERIES OF CONSTANTINE Constantine and Licinius had divided the Roman empire between them; Constantine ruled in the West, Licinius in the East. In 324 Constantine 22 Corbo, Sepolcro, Tav. 68 offers a reconstruction of the Hadrianic Capitolium: a tricameral shrine in honour of Jupiter Capitolinus (centre), flanked by Juno and Minerva, with the statue of Venus on the esplanade to the south. Cf. Chronicon Paschale (PG 92.613): Hadrian built a trikameron. Gibson and Taylor, Sepulchre [n. 3 above], 67 and plan at 66, show how much speculation was involved. 23 V. C. Corbo, ‘Il Santo Sepolcro di Gerusalemme: Nova et Vetera’, Liber Annuus 38 [Studium Biblicum Franciscanum] (1988), 391–422 [415–18], Pls 59–61. Further photographs in G. P. Lavas, ‘The Rock of Calvary: Uncovering Jesus’ Crucifixion Site’, in Kühnel, Real and Ideal Jerusalem, 147–50. 24 Further questions about the shrine to Venus raise complex arguments. The GraecoRoman fertility-goddess Venus/Aphrodite had roles analogous to those of the Phoenician fertility-goddess Astarte. Astarte was also the guardian goddess of cities, and was depicted with a turreted crown to represent the city under her protection. The goddess Tychē (Fortuna) wore a similar crown, not least in all of the many Tychē coin-types found in Aelia. When our Christian sources write of Venus, then, we should surely have Astarte and Tychē in mind as well – or instead. Of the coin-types found in Aelia, 40% are of Tychē (and not of Venus) with her turreted crown; only 6% are of Jupiter, L. Kadman, The Coins of Aelia Capitolina, Jerusalem, 1956, 36. Astarte meanwhile was the lover of Adonis, the dying and rising god; there had been a shrine to Adonis in the grotto at Bethlehem, where Jerome contrasts veneration for the new-born Christ with recent laments in the very same place for Adonis, the lover of Venus (Ep. 58.4.5). When Cyril of Jerusalem spoke of the gardens around Christ’s tomb (Cat. 14.5), he may have been referring to a grove to Adonis, next to a shrine to Venus/Astarte. E. Friedheim has argued strongly against the presence of any such syncretism in Aelia, a city newly founded by Hadrian and wholly Roman in its cults, ‘The Religious and Cultural World of Aelia Capitolina: A New Perspective’, Oriental Archive 75 (2007), 125–52. 25 Eus., De Demonstratione Evangelii [hereafter DE], 6.18, 287c–288d. 26 DE 288a. Cf. katenanti, 289a, revising Luke’s eggus, Acts 1.9.

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defeated Licinius and took control of the whole empire. Within a year he had construction under way in Jerusalem. Eusebius now tells the story with characteristic elaboration.27 Wicked men had sought energetically to consign to darkness and oblivion ‘that divinely foretold memorial/ tomb of immortality’ (to thespesion ekeino tēs athanasias mnēma). Those malefactors had hidden ‘the divine cave’, ‘the saving cave’, under earth and paving and a shrine to Aphrodite (Venus), ‘a terrible and true tomb, of souls’. Constantine, as we have seen, had the shrine demolished and the site cleared. This excavation revealed, contrary to all hope, the ‘solemn and all-holy witness [marturion] of the saving resurrection, and the cave, holy of holies, took on the likeness of the saviour’s revival to life’.28 Eusebius then includes a letter from the emperor to Macarius, bishop of Jerusalem, which (according to Eusebius) showed the emperor’s pure faith (pistis) in the saving word. Constantine writes about the token (gnōrisma) of Christ’s most holy passion. The newly discovered evidence (pistis) of its miraculous discovery exceeds the natural capacity of human reason. Its place, already holy, is holier still since it brought to light the evidence (pistis) of the saving passion. The bishop is to ensure a basilica better than those anywhere else at all; the greatest beauties in every city should be surpassed by this foundation. Constantine writes of the building and decoration of the walls, the columns of marble, and the vault of the basilica, perhaps to be coffered and if so perhaps to be made lovely with gold. (Such hints would have been hard for Macarius to ignore.) We will return to this letter and the token. Eusebius has set it into the context of the tomb’s discovery; without that setting its reference would most naturally be to the discovery of the cross, a clear token of Christ’s passion. Macarius was less drastic than Eusebius suggests. (Eusebius writes that Macarius cleared the place that had been hidden ‘by the conspiracies of enemies, with impure stuff ’, exactly as Paulinus had cleared the site at Tyre.29) The present columns in the rotunda are probably the columns from the Hadrianic portico, each cut in half or reduced and then reused.30 More significant is the use of a giant scallop-shell on the aedicule, to judge from the Narbonne model [Fig. 15.5, probably of the fifth century, p. 312 below]: 27 Text, Eusebius Werke I.1 (GCS 7.1), ed. F. Winkelmann, Berlin, 1975; translation and commentary, A. Cameron and S. G. Hall, Eusebius: Life of Constantine, Oxford, 1999. I have at times emended the translation, on which I draw with gratitude. 28 VC 3.28. 29 VC 3.26.6, HE 10.4.26, 9–10 above. For further such echoes of the speech in Tyre, H. A. Drake, In Praise of Constantine: A Historical Study and New Translation of Eusebius’ Tricennial Orations, Berkeley, 1975, 144, n. 48. 30 G. S. P. Freeman-Grenville, ‘The Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem: History and Future’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 2 (1987), 187–207 [192], Pls V.2, VI.1. For the reuse of other Hadrianic material, Corbo, Sepolcro, 30–2, Tav. 3, 34–5, 68; and n. 14 above. Sabelli, ‘Roman Changes’ [n. 13 above], 103–4, calculates from the columns’ diameter and the standard proportions for Corinthian columns that approx. 2m of their shafts have been cut away; their overall height will have been 9–10m. See Frontispiece.

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the scallop was a symbol of Venus and of her fecundity and regenerative power.31 Why was it retained on the aedicule? Venus and the sea were as regenerative in their way as baptismal water is in its own. There may, then, have been more continuity in the fabric and decoration of the sites’ successive shrines and of their supersession, one by another, than Eusebius could admit.32 The church was dedicated on 13 September 335: in Rome this was the beginning of the civic year, the anniversary of the foundation of the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, and the feast of Epulum Iovis in honour of the Capitoline triad. Jerusalem’s festival of dedication may have lasted until 18 September, the anniversary of Constantine’s victory over Licinius; the basilica, as we shall see, was a place of military triumph.33 By Egeria’s time the encaenia lasted for eight days. Solomon had dedicated his Temple in September at the Feast of Tabernacles, which lasts seven days with a final, eighth day of convocation. 13 September 335 was also probably The Day of Atonement.34 Eusebius reverts at this point to his own narrative. The emperor’s commands were put into instant effect. The contrast with the destroyed Temple now lies to the west, at the site of Christ’s tomb: At the saving witness itself [sōtērion marturion] the new Jerusalem began to be built over against [antiprosōpos] the one celebrated of old which had been turned, since the bloodthirstiness that killed the Lord, into the extreme of desolation and paid the penalty of its impious inhabitants. So opposite this [antikrus] the Emperor now began to elevate the saving victory over death with rich and plentiful munificence, this being perhaps [tacha pou] the fresh and new Jerusalem announced through prophetic foretellings [thespismatōn], about which long compositions sing, foretelling [thespizontes] thousands of things through a divine spirit.

That is, the buildings themselves were the new city; and perhaps, above all, the city of Ezekiel’s renewed Jerusalem.35 31 For the Narbonne model, see further R. Griffith-Jones, 310 below. On the model and the Temple of Venus at Baalbek (cf. n. 21 above), J. Lauffray, ‘La Memoria Sancti Sepulcri du Musée de Narbonne et le Temple Rond du Baalbek’, Mélanges de l’Université St-Joseph (38), 1962, 199–217. Eusebius, in nearly Caesarea, knew well and excoriated the worship of Venus/Astarte at Baalbek. 32 W. Pullan, ‘Regeneration and the Legacy of Venus: Towards an Interpretation of Memory at Early Christian Golgotha’, in A. W. Reinink and J. Stumpel (eds), Memory and Oblivion [Proceedings of the XXIXth International Congress of the History of Art, Amsterdam, 1996], Dordrecht, 1999, 595–602. 33 M. A. Fraser, ‘The Feast of the Encaenia in the Fourth Century and in the Ancient Literary Sources of Jerusalem’ [Ph.D. thesis, Durham, 1996], 120–7. 34 J. Schwartz, ‘The Encaenia of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Temple of Solomon and the Jews’, Theologische Zeitung 43 (1987), 265–81; Fraser, Feast of Encaenia; and idem, ‘Constantine and the Ecaenia’, in E. A. Livingstone (ed.), Studia Patristica 29, Leuven, 1996, 25–8. 35 R. L. Wilken, The Land Called Holy, New Haven, 1992, 92–100.

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And as a sort of head [hōsper tina kephalēn] of the whole thing he first of all began to decorate the holy cave; and it was a memorial/tomb [mnēma] full of eternal memory [mnēmē], encompassing the great saviour’s trophies over death, a memorial/tomb of divine foretelling [thespesion], in which once blazing with light an angel began to preach the rebirth revealed to all though the saviour. This then first, as if a head of the whole [hōsanei tou pantos kephalēn], the Emperor’s munificence decorated with choice columns and the richest adornment, cleansing the sacred cave with ornaments of every kind.36

Eusebius now attends to the basilica with a lavish description. There remains here one notorious ambiguity. Eusebius moves in his description from west to east, from the tomb at the western end into the basilica, ‘the royal temple’ (ho basileios neōs, 3.36.1), and on eastwards to the basilica’s main doors giving on to the cardo. He then turns round, as it were. At the far end from the doors – and so, it would seem, back at the western end of the basilica – was a hemisphere, the head of the whole (to tou pantos kephalaion), crowned with twelve columns, themselves topped with silver bowls, to match the twelve apostles (3.38).37 ‘Hemisphere’ properly designated a dome, but could be used of the half-dome of an apse. Is Eusebius, then, describing here the conch of the basilica’s apse, a dome over the basilica itself, a ciborium-dome over the altar, or some such rotunda further westwards and beyond the basilica as (after successive rebuildings) now exists there? His route through the building suggests the first. Eusebius’ terms may be nuanced here: kephalē is the head, the topmost extremity; kephalaion is the head or summation, the principal point or summary. Eusebius, then, may have seen the western end of the basilica as the distillation of the whole complex and its significance; whatever stood at that time above and around the tomb, the ‘head’ (kephalē) out of sight beyond the basilica’s western end, was encapsulated by the ‘head’ (kephalaion) within the basilica. Eusebius’ account is, in this case, less confused than it seems. He intuited well the relationship between the two columned spaces: the whole significance of the site – in Christ’s death, burial and rising – was already expressed within the basilica. All this, in Eusebius’ summary, was the temple (neōs), manifest witness (marturion) of the saving resurrection (40.1).38 VC 33.2–34. On the hemisphairion, A. Piganiol, ‘L’hémisphairion et l’omphalos des Lieux Saints’, Cahiers archéologiques 1 (1945), 7–14. Krautheimer suspected that the apse, at 8.2m wide, was too small to be plausibly described as the kephalaion of the complex, and that Eusebius was referring back to the rotunda, R. Krautheimer, Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture, Yale, 1965, 63. 38 For the use of marturion by Eusebius, Cyril and others, and the clues it may offer to the date of the rotunda’s completion, S. Borgehammar, How the Holy Cross was Found, Stockholm, 1991, 103–4; cf. Morris, Sepulchre, 33. 36 37

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FIG. 2.5.  IMPRESSION OF THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE, JERUSALEM, BEFORE THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE ROTUNDA

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Eusebius, then, gives no reliable indication that, when he wrote, the rotunda had been built; nor does the Bordeaux Pilgrim (333).39 The rotunda may have been built by Constantine and finished by 335, or by Constantius II – and perhaps in accordance with Constantine’s own intentions – as late as the 350s.40 If the rotunda’s columns are from Hadrian’s portico, they had surely been kept back from use in the basilica with that purpose in mind. Adopting the hypothesis of the later rotunda, Taylor offers a vivid reconstruction of the site in 335 (here Fig. 2.5).41 The floor of the basilica was about 2.5m higher than the floor of the western courtyard around the tomb; the top of the rock of Calvary was only a metre (or less) above the floor of the basilica.42 This is not to deny the grandeur, to which such a reconstruction can do no justice, created around the tomb by 335. Eusebius twice evokes the splendour of the dedication. As the gathering in Nicaea in 325 had celebrated Constantine’s victory, so at the synod in Jerusalem in 335 Constantine ‘consecrated the marturion to God, the giver of all good things, around the saving tomb as an offering of peace [amphi to mnēma to sōtērion eirēnes anathema]’ (VC 4.47). And in praise of the Sepulchre: 39 Nowhere in this account does Eusebius mention Calvary, the place of Christ’s crucifixion. Eusebius could keep silent about a structure to which he wished to draw no attention, 67 below. 40 For the attribution of the rotunda to one of the sons of Constantine, e.g. K. J. Conant, ‘Original Buildings at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem’, Speculum 31 (1956), 1–48 [47]; Couäsnon, Sepulchre [n. 3 above], 14–7; W. E. Kleinbauer, ‘The Anastasis Rotunda and Christian Architectural Invention’, in Kühnel, Real and Ideal Jerusalem, 140–6 [144, 146]; idem, ‘Antioch, Jerusalem and Rome: The Patronage of Emperor Constantius II and Architectural Invention’, Gesta 45 (2006), 125–45 [129–31]; and in particular an attribution to Constantius II, who had control of Jerusalem after his father’s death, Gibson and Taylor, Sepulchre [n. 3 above], 77. For the rotunda’s completion by Constantine himself, Biddle, Tomb, 69; D. Hunt, ‘Constantine and Jerusalem’, JEH 48 (1997), 405–24; and Shalev-Huvitz, Holy Sites [n. 3 above], 62–70. Cyril (Cat. 18.33), speaking at the tomb, says that ‘the emperors of our times have built this holy church of the Anastasis of our God and saviour’; he refers (Kleinbauer, ‘Antioch’, n. 63) to Constantius’ ‘customary philanthropy for the holy churches’. 41 Taylor, ‘Golgotha’ [n. 2 above], 181. 42 Gibson and Taylor, Sepulchre, 84, 77.

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FIG. 2.6.  THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE, JERUSALEM, AS COMPLETED IN THE FOURTH CENTURY

FIG. 2.7.  THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE, JERUSALEM, AS COMPLETED IN THE FOURTH CENTURY: CUTAWAY

You have displayed to all men a house of prayer as a trophy of his victory over death, a holy temple of a holy God, and splendid and great offerings to the immortal life and the divine kingdom – memorial of the All-Ruling Saviour entirely fitting and suitable to a victorious sovereign. This you have put round the marturion and memorial/tomb of eternal life, impressing on the heavenly Logos of God the imperial seal as victor et triumphator.43

Some impression of the complex when it was complete is given in Figs 2.6 and 2.7. 43 De Sepulchro Christi 18.3, trans. Drake. The closing words are a Greek version of the emperor’s official nomenclature, here in Latin. For De Sepulchro Christi [hereafter SC], see 67 below.

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CONSTANTINE AND THE WOOD OF THE CROSS The priorities and agenda in the construction of the whole complex were as much a political as an architectural issue. The basilica and the rotunda both express the status of Christ and Constantine in their relation to each other; and the basilica may well have been that part of the complex which most immediately served the emperor’s needs. The tide of scholarship is turning back in favour of the early discovery, during Macarius’ excavations, of the (supposed) wood of the cross.44 By 347 to 348, Cyril of Jerusalem tells of the wood’s discovery in the time of Constantine and of the whole world being filled with its pieces.45 Egeria (writing c. 384) records that the church had been consecrated on the date of the wood’s discovery; if Egeria was right, the church had surely been built in honour of the rediscovered cross. By the 390s the discovery was credited to the Empress Helena, who had visited Aelia in 326.46 The basilica was consecrated in 335. It is not easy to believe that in the years after the basilica’s completion the floor was dug up – on the belated receipt of information, or on speculation – and the cave of the cross(es) discovered right beneath it. According to the Breviarius A, the cross was found under the great apse.47 Prima facie, an early discovery of the cross is more plausible. We have already encountered Constantine’s letter to Bishop Macarius, and the context that Eusebius provides for it: the discovery of the tomb. Without that setting given by Eusebius, the ‘token’ and ‘evidence’ (gnōrisma, pistis) of the saving passion extolled by Constantine would as naturally be read as referring to the wood of the cross; and over the place of that wood’s discovery Constantine would then have ordered his vast basilica to be built. In this case the legend of the wood’s early discovery is well founded. But if the cross had been discovered early in the excavations, 44 For the early discovery of the wood: Z. Rubin, ‘The Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Conflict between the Sees of Caesarea and Jerusalem’, in L. Levine (ed.), The Jerusalem Cathedra: Studies in the History, Archaeology, Geography and Ethnography of the Land of Israel, 2 vols, Jerusalem, 1982, II, 79–99; H. A. Drake, ‘Eusebius on the True Cross’, JEH 36 (1985), 1–22; Walker, Holy City [n. 3 above], 127–30; S. Borgehammar, How the Holy Cross was Found, Stockholm, 1991; J. W. Drijvers, Helena Augusta: The Mother of Constantine the Great and the Legend of her Finding of the True Cross, Leiden, 1992; J. E. Taylor, The Christians and the Holy Places, Oxford, 1993, 137–9. 45 Ep. ad Constantium 3, Cat. 4.10. 46 For the story of Helena and the cross, Borgehammer, How the Holy Cross [n. 44 above], passim: it was first written down in a lost history of the church by Gelasius of Caesarea (c. 390), having already been in circulation by word of mouth. Rufinus translated it into Latin; thereafter it was widely known (e.g. by Ambrose, De obitu Theodosii, 43–8). Three versions spread: that the cross was discovered by Helena alone (Ambrose); that Macarius helped her (Rufinus); and that the Jew Judas Kyriakos helped her (The Finding of the True Cross: The Judas Kyriakos Legend in Syriac, trans. H. W. and J.-W. Drijvers, Louvain-la-Neuve, 1997). Further mentions by Cyril, Cat. 4.10, 10.19, 13.39. 47 Breviarius A, c. 525, 1. Taylor suspects that the letter purportedly written by the Emperor Leo (perhaps Leo III, 717–41) is indebted to imperial records: the three crosses were found in a trench where Constantine’s men were digging (PG 107.315), Christians [n. 44 above], 138.

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surely Eusebius – who knew so well of its value to the emperor – would have made much of it? Not necessarily. Eusebius would endorse neither his rival Macarius, who discovered the cross, nor any theology that valued it. Eusebius’ own theology led him away from the crucifixion and its memorials towards the resurrection.48 He writes tirelessly about the cross; but tends to avoid the term itself, and extols it as ‘the sign’ both of Christ and of Constantine’s victory under Christ’s suzerainty.49 Eusebius delivered two speeches before Constantine in 335 and 336: one on 17 September 335, following the dedication of the Holy Sepulchre; and the second at the thirtieth anniversary of the emperor’s accession, 25 July 336.50 They have been identified as the second and first parts respectively of Eusebius’ De Laude Constantini: we will (following convention) refer to the anniversary speech, De Laude Constantini 1–10, as LC, and to 11–18 as De Sepulchro Christi, or SC. One passage in LC will be important for its account of the buildings and of the political and dynastic importance that Eusebius saw in the cross, and so for our larger understanding of the rotunda. In the Palestinian nation, in the heart of the Hebrew kingdom, on this very site of the saving witness [to sōtērion marturion], Constantine outfitted with many and abundant distinctions an enormous house of prayer and [a] temple sacred to the saving sign, and he honoured a memorial/tomb [mnēma] full of eternal memory [mnēmē], and the great saviour’s own trophies over death with ornaments beyond all description.

Eusebius may be referring in total to two structures or to three, for the ‘house of prayer and temple sacred to the saving sign’ might be one building or two: that is, either the basilica, or the basilica and a ‘temple’ at Calvary. In the second case, Eusebius is moving westwards in his account, from the basilica, past Calvary and to the tomb. The next sentences round off this section. Eusebius describes the three ‘mystic caves’ honoured by Constantine, at Bethlehem, the Sepulchre and the mount of the Ascension. All these the sovereign adorned in order to herald the saving sign to all; the sign that, in turn, gives him compensation for his piety, augments his entire house and line, and strengthens the throne of his kingdom for long cycles of years, dispensing the fruits of virtue to his good sons, his family and their descendants. … Thus have the deeds of God become clear through the divine efficacy of the saving sign.51 Walker, Holy City [n. 3 above], 247–60, 265–9. For the exact form of Constantine’s sign, J. Bardill, Constantine: Divine Emperor of the Christian Golden Age, Cambridge, 2012, 159–83. 50 Text, Eusebius Werke I (GCS 7), ed. I. A. Heikel, Leipzig, 1902, 193–259. Translation: Drake, In Praise of Constantine [n. 29 above]. I have made some emendations to the translation, on which I draw with gratitude. 51 LC 9.17–18, trans. Drake. 48 49

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Telling of the emperor’s triumphs, Eusebius has already spoken of the saving and life-giving sign, the victory-bringing sign, the great trophy against all enemies, the explicit and indestructible salutary sign of the Roman empire and safeguard of the universal kingdom (LC 9.8); and of the saving trophy (9.14). He is writing throughout of the cross. The cross was initially a military sign;52 and like all such Christian basilicas the basilica built in its honour was (in Krautheimer’s memorable phrase) ‘the throne-room of the Lord, the Emperor of Heaven’.53 It was a military and imperial space. The cross was the sign and trophy of Christ’s triumph, and guarantor of the emperor’s. Eusebius himself had written of Constantine’s midday vision of a ‘cross-shaped trophy formed from light’ (VC 1.28.2) and of the dream that followed (VC 1.29.1); and he described the gold-plated pole with transverse bar that formed ‘the trophy of the cross’, which by the emperor’s permission he himself had seen, surmounted by the wreathed chi-ro (letters ‘which the Emperor used to wear on his helmet in later times’); ‘this saving sign was always used by the Emperor for protection against every opposing and hostile force, and he commanded replicas of it to lead all his armies’ (VC 1.31). For the battle with Maxentius, Constantine set ‘the victorious trophy, the truly salutary sign, before his escort’; after the victory Constantine, ‘proudly confessing the victory-bringing cross’, set up a statue of himself in Rome holding a tall pole in the shape of a cross, with the inscription: ‘By this salutary sign, the true proof of valour, I liberated your city’ (VC 1.37–9). Constantine ‘at one time marked his face with the saviour’s sign, at another proudly delighting in the victorious trophy’, displaying above the entrance to his palace a panel ‘showing the saviour’s sign above his own head’ (VC 3.2–3). The basilica in Jerusalem celebrated, in the sign of Christ, both Christ himself and his agent whom the sign protected. The sign, however, was only one element of Constantine’s privileged relation to Christ. It has long been recognised that Eusebius in his portrayal of Constantine is indebted to neoplatonic notions of kingship: the emperor’s reason (logos) has come by emanation from the Logos, his wisdom from communication with Wisdom, his goodness from contact with the Good, his justness from association with Justice (LC 5.1). Eusebius draws a close parallel between Christ the Logos, mediator between the supreme creator and the creation, and the emperor who had restored and who maintained the due social, political and religious order of that creation. As the Logos is the mediator between God and creation and governs all creation, so Constantine, bearing from and through the Logos the image of the higher kingdom, in imitation of the higher power

52 P. Bruun, ‘The Victorious Signs of Constantine: A Reappraisal’, Numismatic Chronicle 157 (1997), 41–59. 53 R. Krautheimer, ‘The Constantinian Basilica’, DOP 21 (1967), 115–40.

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set straight all things on earth (LC 1.6).54 God had made Constantine ‘the image [eikon] of his own monarchical reign’, made him ‘a pattern in godliness for the human race’ and ‘a clear example to all mankind of the life of godliness’. The emperor was an image of the one all-imperial being; he was an interpreter of the Logos, calling humanity to knowledge of the higher power and in its imitation cleaning error from the earth (LC 2.4–5).55 God works through two prefects or viceroys: the Logos in heaven, and the emperor on earth. In the Life of Constantine, written after the emperor’s death, Eusebius finds further grounds for comparison: Constantine’s final illness lasted from Easter through the Ascension until his death on the day of Pentecost; he was revered while he lay in state as he had been when alive, and so ‘alone of mortals the Blessed One reigned even after death’; thanks to his burial in the Church of the Apostles in Constantinople, his mortal dwelling has such ‘divine rites and mystic liturgies bestowed upon it’ as are bestowed upon the apostles themselves; he holds on to empire even after his death, ‘as if brought back to life’, still managing the empire through his son; the Thrice-blessed is less like the Egyptian phoenix than like Christ himself, for he lives on in his sons and has filled the whole world with his fruit (VC 4.64–72).56 This rhetoric is strained, to modern ears. It shows all too clearly what could not, after death, be claimed for Constantine. How, then, was Eusebius to draw more subtly the relation and distinctions between Christ and the emperor? One answer may lie in more of the distinctive terms of Eusebius’ rhetoric: mystic and sacred caves, initiates, and privileged access to understanding. The sign was revealed in a uniquely privileged disclosure. To Constantine ‘alone of those who have been here since the start of time has the Universal All-Ruling God given power to purify human life, to whom he has revealed even his own saving sign, by which he prevailed over death and fashioned a triumph over his enemies’ (LC 6.21). It must be interpreted by the mystagogues: 54 R. Farina, L’Impero e l’imperatore cristiano in Eusebio di Cesarea, Zurich, 1966, 113–27; S. Calderini, ‘Teologia politica, successione dinastica e consecratio in età constantiana’, in W. den Boer (ed.), Le culte des souverains dans l’empire romain, Geneva, 1973, 215–69; Drake, In Praise of Constantine [n. 28 above], 53–60, 61–74; G. Dagron, Emperor and Priest, Cambridge, 2003 [1996], 127–57; Bardill, Constantine [n. 49 above], 218–325. Monotheistic Arianism appeared to bring the emperor within reach of the subordinate Christ’s standing, which in classic trinitarianism the emperor could never attain; the most influential (and hostile) account of such Eusebian ‘caesaropapism’ was E. Peterson, Der Monotheismus als politisches Problem, Leipzig, 1935 [written in Germany in 1935]; Dagron, Emperor, 287, 131. 55 Cf. VC 1.3.4–5.1, LC 7.12; Bardill, Constantine [n. 49 above], 341, 354. On Eusebius’ Christology, J. M. Robertson, Christ as Mediator: A Study of the Theologies of Eusebius of Caesarea, Marcellus of Ancyra and Athanasius of Alexandria, Cambridge, 2007, 37–96. 56 Eusebius has adapted and heightened the rituals and panegyrics familiar from the obsequies of pagan emperors, S. MacCormack, Art and Ceremony in Late Antiquity, Berkeley, 1981, 117–21.

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about this sign the account may be lengthy indeed, when delivered by men initiated into the mysteries of divine knowledge. For this – remarkable as it is to say, and very remarkable to conceive – was truly saving.57

The Life of Constantine is shot through with such language. At first the emperor sought explanation of God’s sign from the initiates (tous mustas) in God’s words (VC 1.32.1–2). But Constantine himself became the deepest of all adepts, an initiate to whom theophanies were personally granted. Eusebius opened both his speeches before Constantine (335–36) with the mysteries. The dedication speech ‘is going to provide revelations about solemn mysteries. These of course are not intended to initiate you [Constantine], who have been instructed by God, nor to lay bare secrets for you, to whom well before our account God himself, not by men nor through men [Gal. 1.12] but by means of the Common Saviour himself and frequent enlightening visions of his divinity, revealed and uncovered the secrets of holy rites’ (SC 11.1). And in praise of Constantine: ‘Let those who have penetrated the sanctuary of that holy place, that innermost, most inaccessible of places, having barred the gate to profane hearing, narrate the sovereign’s ineffable mysteries to those alone who are initiated in these things … Instructed by these [oracles] in mysteries worthy of God, we may thus begin the divine rites’ (LC, Prologue 4–5). Eusebius concludes SC with a paean to the emperor’s privileged visions. You have frequently received perception of the Saviour’s divinity through actual experience and have become not by words but by events themselves a herald of the truth to all. You yourself, my Emperor, should leisure permit, could tell us if you wished of the countless manifestations of your Saviour and his countless personal visits during sleep. I do not mean those suggestions of his that are forbidden to us, but those implanted by reason in your own self, conveying what is publicly beneficial and universally useful for the care of all.58

Christ on earth had been a mystic revelation, and he continued to offer revelations to his followers – and above all to Constantine, the ultimate initiate, who is now a revelation to others. Christ was the subject of these revelations, Constantine their recipient; and such was Constantine’s status that he in his turn mediated and effected the revelations and their purposes. Eusebius, remarked Walker, had a curious fascination with caves, and may himself have been the first to see and promulgate a unity between the LC 9.19, 10.1, trans. Drake. SC 18.1–2. For Eusebius’ optimistic Christology and the beneficial role of the incarnate Logos, J. R. Lyman, Christology and Cosmology: Models of Divine Activity in Origen, Eusebius and Athanasius, Cambridge, 1993, 82–123. 57

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sacred triad: the caves of Bethlehem, the Sepulchre and the Ascension.59 Eusebius consistently uses the Homeric antra, rather than the more common spēlaia, to refer to them; his agenda creates an oddity, in setting the Ascension – which needs, above all, open air – at the cave where Jesus had taught his disciples (VC 3.43.3).60 Eusebius had already in his Demonstratio aligned the Mount of Olives (Matt. 23.3–51) with the Mount of the Transfiguration (Matt. 17.1–13), where Peter had offered to build three tabernacles and Jesus spoke further of his rising: Jesus ‘took the tabernacle of humanity which he bore up the Mount of Olives to the cave there and delivered the mysteries of his end to his disciples’ (DE 6.18, 288d). Caves had long been associated with mystery religions. Modern scholarship generally leaves ‘the mysteries’ to their few specialists; most of us can see little there beyond the confused obscurity to which the cults’ secrecy has committed them. But in the fourth century the notion of such mysteries was far more widely familiar than their details; and their terms were widely incorporated into Christian apologetics. Eusebius and Cyril, for all their differences, both thought in terms of mysteries to be unveiled by God to initiates: Eusebius in the revelations made to and through Constantine; Cyril in his whole mystagogic course of instruction. The Christians’ instruction and ritual had the air of the mysteries’; what Eusebius deployed to defuse opposition and encourage conversion, Cyril invoked to awe and inspire his catechumens.61 We need, then, no specific analogies to sense the aura of sacred caves. A famous passage from Porphyry, writing late in the third century, will suffice: The Persians call the place a cave where they introduce an initiate to the mysteries, revealing to him the path by which souls descend and go back again. For Eubulus [author of a history of Mithras, c. 185 CE] tells us that Zoroaster was the first to dedicate a natural cave in honour of Mithras, the creator and father of all … The cave bore for him the image of the cosmos which Mithras had created … After Zoroaster others adopted the custom of performing their rites of initiation in caves or grottoes which were either natural or artificial … Not only, however, did the ancients make the cave a symbol of the cosmos [i.e. of generated and sensible nature]; they also used it as a symbol of all invisible powers, because caves are dark and the essence of these powers is indistinct … Grottoes are proper to genesis [becoming] and departure from genesis.62 Eus., LC 9.16–17; VC 3.41–3; Walker, Holy City [n. 3 above], 184–94. Shalev-Hurvitz, Holy Sites [n. 3 above], 78–106, offers a full reconstruction of the structures around the supposed place of the Ascension. 61 E. Yarnold, ‘Baptism and the Pagan Mysteries in the Fourth Century’, Heythrop Journal 13 (1972), 247–67. 62 Porphyry, De Antro Nympharum, in Porphyrii … Opuscula Selecta, ed. A. Nauck, 59

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Eusebius’ terms may readily be set aside as mere tropes, the stock-intrade of any competent fourth-century orator; and his emphasis on caves as an idiosyncracy.63 But at the approach and aftermath of Constantine’s death, there was a pressing need to locate the emperor more clearly and convincingly in relation to Christ. Christian panegyrists were faced with a problem unknown to pagan apotheosis. The claims being made for Christ were, as we can surmise from Eusebius himself, resisted within the circles that he was addressing (SC 11.3–4): Constantine was bothering himself with memorials to human corpses and tombs, and should rather be propitiating the ancient heroes and gods. Eusebius did not write lightly of the divine enlightenment that had enabled the empire’s Christian subjects to see the light. He needed the sceptics in his audience to acknowledge the empire’s claims for Christ, and offered them a sophisticated way to do so. Eusebius and his fellow propagandists and courtiers faced a conceptual problem. The Christ in whose honour the Jerusalem complex was built was not a divinised emperor, nor a hero, nor a martyr. But who or what exactly was he? The answer given by Arius unsettled the whole reigns of Constantine and Constantius II. Inherited architectural forms, remodelled if necessary and with new liturgical provision, had to serve at the holy sites a new devotion with both residents and pilgrims in mind, at a time of intense dispute among church leaders over the standing of Christ before God, and in consequence of the emperor before Christ.64 The distinction or first step drawn by Eusebius between the Father and Christ prepares for the second step he needs, to subordinate Constantine to Christ. Eusebius wrote of Christ’s tomb as a memorial (mnēma) of eternal memory (mnēmē). Constantine’s rival Maxentius had struck consecration coins (in Rome and Ostia) in honour of his dead son Romulus (d. 309), with the inscription ‘AETERNAE MEMORIAE’ (‘To the eternal memory’) [Fig. 2.8]. Three further issues followed with the same iconography, commemorating three further divi: Constantius Chlorus, Maximian and Galerius.65 The coins showed a circular, domed and columned structure with half-opened door; an eagle of apotheosis rising above the dome. The imagery is rich and compact: descent through the door into death and its mausoleum leads to ascent to join the gods. They are surely related – but exactly how is not Hildesheim, 1963 [Leipzig, 1886], 6 (60.2–9, 11–14), 7 (60.21–5), 24 (73.1–2), 25 (73.11–12), trans. M. Gervers,, ‘The Iconography of the Cave in Christian and Mithraic Tradition’, in U. Bianchi (ed.), Mysteria Mithrae, Leiden, 1979, 580–96 [586–7]. On the contrasting light that was brought by Constantine, Bardill, Constantine [n. 49 above], 97–102, and further VC 1.41.2, 1.43.3, 2.2.3, 2.19.1, 3.2.3. 63 A.-J. Festugière, L’idéal religieux des Grecs et de l’Evangile, Paris, 1932, ch. 3, reveals how far Eusebius is from Festugière’s category of ‘literary mysticism’. 64 If the rotunda was built by Constantius II, we would need to be alert to his own Arianism; D. J. Geanakoplos, ‘Church Building and Caesaropapism, AD 312–565’, Roman and Byzantine Studies 7 (1966), 167–86; M. Humphries, ‘In Nomine Patris: Constantine the Great and Constantius II in Christological Polemic’, Historia 46 (1997), 448–61. 65 C. King, ‘The Maxentian Mints’, Numismatic Chronicle 19 (1959), 63–72.

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clear – to the tomb of Maxentius in Rome.66 Far more is involved here than we can address in this chapter. Constantine placed himself in an intimate relation to Christ; Diocletian before him had assumed the epithet Iovius, and granted Herculius to his junior co-Augustus Maximian.67 Diocletian’s sarcophagus was probably installed in the central crypt of his mausoleum during its construction.68 The relationship between Constantine, Christ and their sepulchres has six terms, not three: in the relationship between these three on the one hand, and on the other the triad, needing careful treatment, of Constantine’s predecessors, their gods and their mausolea. The Holy Sepulchre’s rotunda drew on a long tradition of circular imperial mausolea, a tradition which brought with it the legacy of past dynasties, both honoured and deposed. We now take for granted the centrality of Christ’s tomb in the rotunda and of the route down into the cave and up again taken by pilgrims. But more was signified by such a setting than the due control of traffic. Christ’s tomb was properly as central to the Sepulchre’s domed rotunda as he himself was central to creation, its renewal and its rule. If the original rotunda was – unlike all known imperial mausolea – lit by an oculus, then the vertical axis leading from the tomb up to the light of heaven will have dominated the whole space. Given the empty tomb at the base of this axis, the rotunda would 66 M. J. Johnson, The Roman Imperial Mausoleum in Late Antiquity, Cambridge, 2009, 86–93. On the coins, A. K. Frazer, ‘The Iconography of the Emperor Maxentius’ Buildings in Via Appia’, AB 47 (1966), 385–92; S. MacCormack, Art and Ceremony in Late Antiquity, Berkeley, 1981, 99–113. For Constantine’s comparable series of consecration coins (in honour of Claudius Gothicus, Maximius and Constantius Chlorus), but without the mausoleum, P. Bruun, ‘The Consecration Coins of Constantine the Great,’ Arctos 1 (1954), 19–31 [24]; also MacCormack, Art, 111–12. 67 Bardill, Constantine [n. 49 above], 66–7, 338. 68 Johnson, Mausoleum [n. 66 above], 59–68.

FIG. 2.8.  A CONSECRATIO COIN: NUMMUS MINTED IN ROME IN ‘ETERNAL MEMORY’ OF VALERIUS ROMULUS (D. 309), SON OF MAXENTIUS

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then hardly have been a mausoleum at all.69 Mango has emphasised the (startlingly) high standing claimed by Constantine in the arrangement of his own sarcophagus, flanked by the apostles’ thēkai, in the Apostoleion.70 The Sepulchre already raised the question to which the Apostoleion provided Constantine’s own answer. Eusebius did not supervise the building of the Holy Sepulchre. His accounts of the complex are the accounts of a theologian and panegyrist. We cannot read his priorities and agenda into the buildings themselves. But he may reveal, however indirectly, something of the emperor’s own priorities. Pilgrims entered the basilica through a grand portico from the cardo; here surely was the grand civic and judicial space that a basilica should be. It was that, and more: it was an imperial space, in which Christ was honoured in his sign, and Constantine by the victory and protection which that sign had given him. The dominions of Christ and of Constantine overlapped almost – but not quite – to the point of identity. At the basilica’s west end was the columned apse, the summation of the whole complex. Doors led past the apse westwards to the tomb. This may still in Constantine’s day – and perhaps even in his intention for the longer term – have been a columned and richly decorated shrine open to the air. This was already in 335 the summit of the whole ensemble. On its completion the rotunda was a shrine to the second of the three great mystic caves, this one unambiguously due to Constantine himself, the ultimate initiate of the mysteries revealed and realised by Christ. The cross, the sign of Christ’s victory and the sign in which Constantine had won his own, gave way here to the eternal memory of Christ’s resurrection. No imperial mausoleum is known to have had an oculus, Johnson, Mausoleum [n. 66 above], 92. Couäsnon, Sepulchre [n. 3 above], Pl. XVII, suggests one for the Sepulchre’s rotunda; the painted box in the Sancta Sanctorum, Pl. XXX, may tell against it. On the fourth-century evolution of windows in domes’ drums instead of oculi, Shalev-Hurvitz, Holy Sites [n. 3 above], 170–1. For the Church of the Ascension, ibid., 78–116: when Arculf saw the church, it had – very fittingly – an oculus, 109–12; c. 450 CE it had been surmounted by a cross that was burnt to ashes and replaced. Krautheimer suggests that the Constantinian octagon in Bethlehem had an oculus, Architecture [n. 37 above], 60: the hole in the floor and the opening in the roof ‘connected the place of Christ’s birth with the sky to which He had risen’. 70 C. Mango, ‘Constantine’s Mausoleum and the Translation of Relics’, Byzantinische Zeitschrift 83 (1990), 51–61. Recently on the debate over Constantine’s mausoleum, Bardill, Constantine [n. 49 above], 364–76. There was a well at the centre of the Mausoleum of Helena; the sarcophagus was probably in the wide south-eastern niche opposite the entrance, where supports for it were found (Johnson, Mausoleum, 110–18; there were also burials in the vestibule, some contemporary with the mausoleum). The imperial burials found in the Mausoleum of Honorius were all found in niches (ibid., 167–70). In the supposed Mausoleum of Constans at Centcelles in Spain, a circular room with four apsidioles was converted into a mausoleum by the digging of a central crypt and then the provision of mosaics in the dome; but the wall opposite the door, rather than the crypt, may in fact have housed the sarcophagus (ibid., 130–1, 138). The porphyry sarcophagus of Constantina was in the principal niche of her mausoleum (S. Costanza) or on the rose granite floor slab in front of it (ibid., 153). I am grateful to Prof. Johnson for his communication on the imperial mausolea. 69

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The liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre has been the object of intense study; so has the transfer of artefacts and associations from the Temple and its mythology to the Sepulchre. Less justice has been done to the status of the Christ and of the Constantine who were honoured there. We may baulk at the enquiry: it may seem inappropriate to expect a building to express or evoke such sensibilities with anything like the precision that we would need, if justice were to be done to the subtleties of Constantine’s propaganda. It may, on this argument, be easy and proper to find general analogies between the aims of literary and of architectural propaganda; but it would mistake the character of a building and its impact – and leads only to a confusion of categories and to eisegesis – to look for any more. Given the range, intensity and subtlety of Constantine’s self-promulgation, however, we can hardly be satisfied with this caution. The radiate statue in Constantinople, the ‘Saviour’s sign’ and speared serpent above the entrance of the imperial palace, and Constantine’s own mausoleum – to take just three inescapable examples from statuary, decoration and architecture – demand a rich and nuanced reading whereby alone we can hope to recover the impact they were designed to make.71 All of them stood within long social and political traditions, and evoked far more than just the history of their forms. Who recognised how much of the tradition deployed in such propaganda, and to what effect? This brings us back to a Leitmotif of this volume, which we cannot hope to answer here in isolation. More clearly problematic, as we study the Sepulchre, is the character of our particular witnesses. We have concentrated here on Eusebius and his distinctive presentation of Christ and Constantine. Eusebius emphasised the basilica. For Cyril of Jerusalem and his catechesis, in the 340s, Calvary and the rotunda had become the centre of emphasis for the whole drama of Christ’s death and rising. The movement from the basilica to the tomb – from the triumph of the cross to the triumph of the empty tomb – had been occluded once more. Eusebius and Cyril were theologians at a distance both from Constantine’s court and from direction of the Sepulchre’s construction. They can only ever be partial guides, cautiously used. They will not themselves offer satisfactory answers to our questions about the buildings; but Eusebius in particular – theologian, bishop and panegyrist – can help us to shape our questions, if we are to do justice to the theology and politics, inseparably joined, that shaped the Sepulchre. Eusebius sets the right agenda. To understand the architecture of the Holy Sepulchre is to understand the political theology that informed Constantine’s selfpromulgation. 71 Bardill, Constantine [n. 49 above], 361, reflects in similar terms on the first two. Much of what we reconstruct will have been readily discerned – perhaps with a rich ambivalence – in the fourth century, but will call for a full account in the twenty-first. We will need to preserve the ambivalence. The questions that we ask of the Sepulchre’s evocations – who noticed how much, and to what effect? – are fittingly asked of such other monuments too.

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T

he layout of the complex of fourth-century buildings begun by the Emperor Constantine I to enclose the tomb of Christ and the site of the crucifixion in Jerusalem is now reasonably well understood, as a result of excavations and restoration work undertaken over the last half century [Fig. 3.1].1 The rock-cut tomb, detached from its parent rock, was enclosed by a small chapel or aedicule, around which was constructed a timberroofed rotunda surrounded on all but the east side by an ambulatory with a timber gallery. The rotunda was entered on the east from a peristyled 1 This chapter is mostly based on the entry for the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in my four-volume corpus, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, Cambridge, 1993–2009, III, 6–72, where full bibliographical references may be found; here references have therefore been kept to a minimum. Among other secondary works that discuss the development of the building between the fourth and the twelfth centuries may be noted (in chronological order): R. Willis, ‘An Architectural History of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre’, in G. Williams, The Holy City: Historical, Topographical, and Antiquarian Notices of Jerusalem, 2nd edn, 2 vols, Cambridge, 1849, II, 129–294; M. C. J. de Vogüé, Les Eglises de la Terre Sainte, Paris, 1860, 118–232, pls VI–XIII; L.-H. Vincent and F.-M. Abel, Jérusalem: Recherches de topographie, d’archéologie et d’histoire, II, Jérusalem nouvelle, 4 fascs + album, Paris, 1914–26, 89–300, figs 124–40, pls II-XXXIII; G. Jeffery, A Brief Description of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem, and other Christian Churches in the Holy City, Cambridge, 1919; A. W. Clapham, ‘The Latin Monastic Buildings of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem’, Antiquaries Journal 1 (1921), 1–18, with plan; C. Enlart, Les Monuments des croisés dans le royaume de Jérusalem: architecture religieuse et civile, 2 vols + album, Paris, 1925–27, II, 136–82; W. Harvey, The Church of the Holy Sepulchre: Structural Survey. Final Report, London, 1935; Ch. Coüasnon, The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, trans. J.-B. B. and C. Ross, London, 1974; V. Corbo, Il Santo Sepolcro: Aspetti archeologici dalle Origini al Periodo crociato, 3 vols, Jerusalem, 1982; S. Gibson and J. E. Taylor, Beneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem: The Archaeology and Early History of Traditional Golgotha, Palestine Exploration Fund Monographs, Series Maior I, London 1994; J. Folda, The Art of the Crusaders in the Holy Land, 1098–1187, Cambridge, 1995, 175–245; M. Biddle, The Tomb of Christ, Stroud, 1999.

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FIG. 3.1.  CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE, JERUSALEM: THE DEVELOPING LAYOUT OF THE BUILDING COMPLEX BETWEEN THE FOURTH AND TWELFTH CENTURIES

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courtyard, which enclosed the rock of Calvary or Golgotha and other sites associated with the Passion. To the east of this stood a five-aisled basilica, also with galleries and with its apse on the west built over the spot where Helena was supposed to have found the relic of the True Cross. The basilica in turn was separated from the city’s colonnaded cardo by an atrium, propylaeum and steps. This complex of buildings survived in more or less the same form until September 1009, when most of it was demolished by the Muslim governor of Ramla, Yārūkh, on the orders of the deranged Fatimid caliph al-H  ākim, at a time when other Christian buildings in Palestine were also being attacked and destroyed. Rebuilding seems to have begun very soon afterwards. The Malkite Christian writer Yahyā ibn Sa‘īd al-Antākī relates, for instance, that in 1011 al-Mufarrij of the Jarrāh tribe seized Ramla during a revolt of the Arabs in Palestine. He appointed a new patriarch, Theophilus from Hibal in Wādī Mūsa, and encouraged the Christians to start rebuilding the Church of the Resurrection, even paying towards the work himself until his death in August 1013. When Theophilus died in 1020 he was succeeded as patriarch by Nicephorus (1020–36), a former joiner in al-H  ākim’s palace; but because of local Muslim opposition, Nicephorus returned to Cairo and sought from al-H  ākim a sijill granting protection to the Christian community, the restoration of the church’s endowments and ‘the cessation of all hostility against those of them who pray in the precincts of the church called the Resurrection [al-Quyāma] and of its court’.2 This chronology is broadly supported by the Western writer Ralph Glaber, who says that five years after its destruction the tomb of Christ was restored by al-H  ākim’s mother, Mary (or Maryam), who was a Christian.3 After al-H  ākim’s mysterious disappearance in February 1021, he was replaced by his son, al-Z āhir. In 1024, al-Sayyida Sitt al-Mulk, al-H  ākim’s sister and a Christian like her mother, sent Patriarch Nicephorus to Constantinople to begin negotiating a trade agreement with Basil II. The patriarch was also to report to the emperor about the restoration of churches in Syria and Egypt and the protection being given to Christians there; but Sitt al-Mulk died soon afterwards and Nicephorus returned to Palestine the same year.4 In 1027, however, French pilgrims returning from Jerusalem to Angoulême reported to Adhémar of Chabannes that it was al-H  ākim himself who had ordered the church to be rebuilt, but that the new church was not as splendid in size or beauty as the one that it replaced. Nonetheless, building work had been sufficiently well advanced 2 Yah  yā ibn Sa‘īd, Histoire, ed. and trans. J. Kratchkovsky, A. Vasiliev et al., Patrologia orientalis XVIII.v (xc), Paris, 1957, 803; XXIII.iii (cxiv), Paris, 1936, 487–8, 491–2, 504–5, 520; XLVII.iv (ccxii), Turnhout, 1997, 432–3, 436–8. 3 Historiarum Libri V, ch. III, ed. and trans. J. France, Oxford Medieval Texts, Oxford, 1989, 134–5. 4 Yah  yā ibn Sa‘īd, Histoire, ed. and trans. Kratchkovsky et al., Patrologia orientalis XLVII. iv (ccxii), 444–7, 468–71.

THE CRUSADER CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE

to allow the ceremony of the Holy Fire to take place at Easter earlier that year.5 Towards the end of al-Z āhir’s reign (1021–36), Patriarch Nicephorus appears to have sent an emissary, John Carianis, to Constantinople to appeal to Emperor Romanus III (1028–34) for help in completing the work.6 Negotiations between Romanus and al-Z āhir were interrupted by the emperor’s death in 1034; but a truce was finally made, in 1037 to 1038, between Nicephorus’s successor, Michael IV (1034–41), and Caliph al-Mustansir (1036–94). Under its terms, in return for releasing a number of Muslim prisoners, the emperor was accorded the right to rebuild (which in this context means ‘continue to rebuild’) the Church of the Resurrection and to appoint the patriarch of Jerusalem.7 Yahyā’s chronicle, which is our principal source for this period, ends around this point; but in 1047 the Persian traveller Nāsir-ī Khusraw visited Jerusalem and described the church, whose restoration was by then essentially complete: It is large enough to hold eight thousand people inside and is extremely ornate, with colored marble and designs and pictures. It is arrayed with Byzantine brocades and is painted. Much gold has been used, and in several places there are pictures of Jesus riding on an ass and also pictures of other prophets such as Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, and Jacob and his sons. The pictures are varnished in oil of sandarac and covered with fine, transparent glass that does not block any of the painting. This has been done so that dust and dirt cannot harm the pictures, and every day workers clean the glass. There are several other places just as elaborate, but it would take too long to describe them.8

THE REBUILT CHURCH IN THE EARLY TWELFTH CENTURY The church that Nāsir described would have been the one that the crusaders found when they captured Jerusalem half a century later, in July 1099. From surviving remains and from the accounts of pilgrims,

5 Adhémar of Chabannes, Historiae, ed. D. G. Waitz, in G. H. Pertz (ed.), MGH Scriptores IV, Hanover, 1841, 137; Biddle, Tomb, 75–6. 6 Yah  yā ibn Sa‘īd, Histoire, ed. and trans. Kratchkovsky et al., Patrologia orientalis XLVII.iv (ccxii), 533–4. Note that William of Tyre (Chronicon, I.vi, ed. R. B. C. Huygens, CCCM, LXIII, Turnhout, 1983, 112–14), writing over a century later, mistakenly placed this embassy in the reign of Constantine IX Monomachus (1042–55), who as a result is often erroneously credited with rebuilding the church. 7 Biddle, Tomb, 76–9. 8 Nasir-i Khusraw’s Book of Travels [Safarnama], ed. and trans. W. M. Thackston Jr, Bibliotheca Iranica, Intellectual Traditions Series 6, Costa Mesa CA, 2001, 48.

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FIG. 3.2.  CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE, JERUSALEM: PLAN AT GROUND LEVEL. KEY TO CHAPELS: 1. PRISON OF CHRIST; 2. ST NICOLAS; 3. CROWNING WITH THORNS; 4. FLAGELLATION; 5. ADAM

such as the Anglo-Saxon Saewulf (1103–04)9 and the Russian Abbot Daniel (1106–08),10 it is possible to gauge the effects of the eleventhcentury destruction and rebuilding. The most significant change was that Constantine’s basilica had not been rebuilt. Instead the restored rotunda, or Anastasis, had joined to it on the east a new projecting choir and apse where the principal east door from the courtyard had formerly been. The rotunda thus came to combine the roles of cathedral and shrine church that had previously been fulfilled by two separate buildings. At its centre, 9 Peregrinatio IX.xiii, ed. R. B. C. Huygens, Peregrinatores Tres = CCCM, CXXXIX, Turnhout, 1994, 64–7. 10 Trans. W. F. Ryan, in Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrimage, 127–30.

THE CRUSADER CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE

the aedicule containing the tomb of Christ was rebuilt with an enclosed porch on the east, doors for pilgrims to north and south and one for the priests on the east. Although vaulting now replaced timber for the flooring and roofing of the gallery over the ambulatory, the central drum of the rotunda had a conical timber roof with a broad circular opening at the top. It was flanked on the north side by a chapel of St Mary, and on the south by a suite of three chapels dedicated respectively to St John the Apostle, the Holy Trinity and St James the Apostle, the middle one domed and containing the baptistery [Fig. 3.2]. On the east side of the rotunda, the courtyard had also been rebuilt with vaulted porticoes supporting galleries on the north, east and south. These galleries were directly linked to the gallery inside the rotunda, and at the south-east corner enclosed the chapel over the Rock of Calvary and the chapel of Adam below it. Within the courtyard, east of the apse, lay the Compass or Centre of the World, and grouped around it were various other chapels, the disposition and layouts of which remain largely conjectural. The church of St Mary, which Adomnán had described in the later seventh century immediately south of Calvary, had also by now been replaced by the eleventh-century Benedictine abbeys of St Mary Latin and St Mary the Great, lying further to the south and south-east respectively.11 Two distinct building styles may be identified in the new building work. One makes use of a mixture of stone and brick in a similar manner to contemporary Byzantine work in Constantinople and elsewhere, while the other employs ashlar and incorporates architectural features such as squinches [Fig. 3.3] and rubble-built groin-vaults that point to the participation of local Syrian, Palestinian or Egyptian builders. Where the two styles occur together, the Byzantine is usually the earlier; but more work is needed to refine the chronology, since we know that there were a number of different rebuilding campaigns in the eleventh century – and indeed before that – employing builders from all over the Middle East, including Iraq.12 Following his visit in 1106 to 1108, Abbot Daniel wrote of the church: [I]t is circular, and it has 12 round pillars and six [var. 16] built. It is beautifully paved with marble slabs; it has six doors and on the galleries [?] it has 16 [var. 6, 8, 12, 40] columns, and above the galleries beneath the top there are depicted the holy prophets in mosaic as if they stood there alive, and above the altar Christ is depicted in mosaic. On the great altar the Creation [?] of Adam is depicted in mosaic; above there is a On which see Pringle, Churches, III, 236–61. R. Ousterhout, ‘Rebuilding the Temple: Constantine Monomachus and the Holy Sepulchre’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 48 (1989), 66–78; D. Pringle, ‘Church-building in Palestine before the Crusades’, in J. Folda (ed.), Crusader Art in the Twelfth Century [BAR International Series 152], Oxford, 1982, 5–46 [7, 9, fig. 1.1, pls 1.1–2]. 11

12

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mosaic of the Lord being Raised Up and on either side of the altar on two columns there is a mosaic of the Annunciation. The top of the church is not completely vaulted over in stone but is surmounted by fashioned timber planked like a floor and so there is no top and it is not covered with anything. Beneath this uncovered roof is the tomb of the Lord.13

FIG. 3.3.  CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE, JERUSALEM: THE ELEVENTHCENTURY CHAPEL OF THE HOLY TRINITY; SQUINCHES AT THE TRANSITION BETWEEN THE SQUARE NAVE AND THE OCTAGONAL DRUM OF THE DOME

What Daniel interpreted as a mosaic showing the creation of Adam and the Lord being ‘raised up’ was probably a combined resurrection and Ascension scene, such as later adorned the crusader apse. His description of the aedicule is detailed, though the only addition that he records the Franks having made to it was a silver statue of Christ, larger than life, which stood above it.14 Daniel also mentions that on the site of the large basilica of Constantine there was now only a small church. This is likely to have been the chapel of the Invention of the Cross, which had been built below the floor level of the ruined basilica in the late eleventh century by adapting a former rock-cut cistern of the Roman period. Sometime before 1114, however, an anonymous Latin pilgrim text records: ‘Outside [Golgotha] towards the east is the place where St Helena found the Holy Cross, and there a 13 14

Trans. Ryan, in Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrimage, 127. Ibid., pp. 127–8.

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THE CRUSADER CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE

large church is being built.’15 This was probably the medieval chapel of St Helena [Fig. 3.4], which would have been under construction at that time. It was built between the excavated foundations for the stylobates that had supported the nave colonnades of Constantine’s basilica. The chapel’s central dome – the only part of it to stand above ground level – was carried on a drum and pendentives, supported on four reused granite columns with Corinthianesque capitals. Two of these are of a basket type and all four have been pared down to fit the columns. At one time it was thought that they might have come from the basilica of Constantine itself; but, as John Wilkinson has proposed, it seems more likely that they are Abbasid and that they came from the Aqsa Mosque, which we know was partially dismantled by Baldwin I during the early years of the crusader kingdom in order to convert it into a royal palace.16 Abbot Daniel ends his description of the Holy Sepulchre with an account of the Holy Fire on Easter Saturday 1108, in which he highlights the role played by the Orthodox clergy. He himself, along with the abbot and monks of St Sabas, joined the king’s procession from the royal palace beside David’s Tower. After entering the church through the west door 15 ‘et ibi edificatur magna ecclesia’ (de Situ Urbis Ierusalem, ed. de Vogüé, Eglises [n. 1 above], 412). On the date of the text see Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrimage, 11, 352. 16 J. Wilkinson, Column Capitals in al Haram al Sharif (from 138 AD to 1118 AD), Jerusalem, 1987, 24–7, 47, 57, 64–5, 68; Pringle, Churches, III, 44–5, 420, pls IX–X.

FIG. 3.4.  CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE, JERUSALEM: CHAPEL OF ST HELENA BELOW THE CLOISTER OF THE AUGUSTINIAN CANONS

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they processed to the east side, where the king took up his accustomed position in front of the tomb, to the right of the screen in front of the high altar, where there was ‘raised up the place of the Prince’.17 This is significant, because it indicates not only that Baldwin I had a royal pew inside the church, but also that it was located on the south side of the choir or chancel, though outside the screen itself, in a similar position to that of the Byzantine emperor inside Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.18

THE TWELFTH-CENTURY ADDITIONS TO THE CHURCH From the time of the city’s capture on 15 July 1099, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre played a pivotal role in the religious and political life of the crusader city. On the same day in subsequent years a double feast was held, celebrating the capture of the city and the rededication of the church. As well as containing the most important of all the holy places, to which thousands of pilgrims flocked annually, the church was also the seat of the newly installed Latin patriarch; and, as we have seen, it was also a setting for the display of Christian kingship. A precedent for burying the kings of Jerusalem in the church was set when Duke Godfrey died on 18 July 1100 and was buried in the courtyard on the west side of Golgotha, before the chapel of Adam, recalling the promise of resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15.22: ‘For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive’ (AV). On Palm Sunday 1118, King Baldwin I was also interred beside him. Later royal burials included those of Baldwin II (1131), Fulk of Anjou (1143), Baldwin III (1163), Amalric (1174), Baldwin IV (1185) and Baldwin V (1186). The coronation of Fulk and Melisende on 14 September 1131 also established the church as the usual place for coronations. Nonetheless, however magnificent the rebuilt eleventh-century church may have appeared, it is clear that from early in the twelfth century the building was found to be inadequate for the new functions that it was required to fulfil. By the time that Jerusalem fell to Saladin in 1187, it had therefore been extended to the east with the Romanesque transept, choir, sanctuary and ambulatory that we see today [Colour Pls II–IV, Figs 3.5–3.10]. This would have entailed demolishing the eleventh-century choir-chancel and apse, and building over most of the courtyard. The effect was to bring the tomb of Christ and all the associated holy sites within a single building. The church was entered from the south through a double doorway opening directly into the south transept. Outside the Trans. Ryan, in Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrimage, 166–70. See R. Krautheimer, Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture, rev. edn, Harmondsworth, 1975, 228–30, 508 n. 16; cf. Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, De Cerimoniis Aulae Byzantinae, I.i (PG 112.79–210). 17

18

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FIG. 3.5.  CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE, JERUSALEM: RECONSTRUCTED EAST-WEST SECTION THROUGH THE TWELFTHCENTURY CHURCH, LOOKING SOUTH

doors, an external staircase led up to the right to an open domed vestibule, from which another door opened into the upper chapel of Calvary. Although the end result of this new building work is now fairly clear, the precise chronology of the building work is less so. An initial difficulty concerns a passage in Cherubino Ghiardacci’s Historia di Bologna (1596), which has led to a belief that important building work was undertaken in the church, particularly to the aedicule, in 1119. According to Ghiardacci: The brothers Roberto and Rengherio were living at that time in the house of Tancred and Bohemond, lords of Antioch, who were involved in the enterprise of the Holy Land [che erano all’impresa di terra santa, i.e. who were on crusade]. Rengherio was the one, who, dabbling in sculpture [della sculture dilettandosi], at the request of Baldwin carved the letters above the altar of the Holy Sepulchre, which is of marble, thus: Praepotens Genuensium praesidium.19

As Martin Biddle has pointed out, the marginal date ‘1119’ actually relates not to this event but to the election of Pope Calixtus II, which is signalled in the same chronicle. The words Praepotens Genuensium praesidium 19 Translated from the text reproduced by Biddle (Tomb, 90), whose own translation (91), however, is slightly different. Giorgio Stella (c. 1400) gives slightly different wording: Prepotens Ianuense presidium (‘The powerful Genoese assistance’), B. Z. Kedar, ‘Genoa’s Golden Inscription in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre: A Case for the Defence’, in G. Airaldi and B. Z. Kedar (eds), I Comuni italiani, Genoa, 1986, 317–35 [323].

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FIG. 3.6.  CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE, JERUSALEM: THE

FIG. 3.7.  CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE, JERUSALEM: THE

CHOIR AND APSE (REBUILT 1809), NOW PARTLY OBSCURED BY

ARCH LINKING THE ROTUNDA TO THE CRUSADER CHOIR

A MODERN ICONOSTASIS

(‘The powerful (military) assistance of the Genoese’), however, evidently refer to the famous (or infamous) ‘Golden Inscription’ that the Genoese were supposed to have had set up in the apse (or tribune) of the Holy Sepulchre between 1106 and 1109, to record the privileges granted to them by Baldwin I for their assistance in capturing Acre, Caesarea and Arsuf.20 It seems entirely plausible to envisage this grant as having been made and witnessed on the altar of the church itself. This passage cannot therefore be taken to indicate that any important sculptural work was undertaken in the church during the reign of Baldwin I – who in any case died in 1118 – still less that it concerned the aedicule. A likely spur to the Frankish rebuilding, however, would have occurred in 1114, when the secular canons whom Duke Godfrey had installed in the church were regularized as Augustinian canons by Patriarch Arnulf. 20

Pringle, Churches, III, 17, 65–8.

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FIG. 3.8.  CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE, JERUSALEM: THE SOUTH TRANSEPT LOOKING EAST TOWARDS CALVARY, WITH THE STONE OF ANOINTING IN THE FOREGROUND

This meant that they were now required to live communally, supported by a general endowment rather than by individual prebends. Not all of the canons accepted this, and as late as 1138 three houses in Jerusalem were still identified as belonging to canons. Even so, we may expect that the reorganization of the chapter would have entailed some architectural changes, notably the construction of a dormitory, refectory, chapter-

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FIG. 3.9.  CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE, JERUSALEM: THE GALLERY OF THE SOUTH TRANSEPT, LOOKING EAST

FIG. 3.10.  CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE, JERUSALEM: THE NEWLY REDECORATED DOME OVER THE CRUSADER CROSSING AND THE VAULTS OF THE CHOIR AND SOUTH TRANSEPT

DENYS PRINGLE

THE CRUSADER CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE

house and all the other buildings necessary for communal life. Evidence that building work around the church did indeed begin under Arnulf is demonstrated by an inscription attributing to him the construction of the Latin patriarch’s residence on the west side of the church, in what is now part of the Khanqa al-Salāhiyya. The surviving remains show that the canons’ cloister and monastic buildings were set out to the east of the church, in the area previously occupied by Constantine’s basilica. Significantly, they were laid out far enough east to allow sufficient space for the new choir and transepts to be built between them and the Anastasis. This suggests that the decision to extend the church had already been made when the cloister was built, even if the precise details of its overall plan had still to be worked out. Although Patriarch Arnulf is recorded issuing two acts in the canons’ chapter-house in 1112, it is quite possible that this was a pre-existing building adapted for the purpose. The first surviving document that refers to the new chapter-house is therefore probably a charter of April 1142, by which a visiting German pilgrim named Berthold confirmed to the canons of the Holy Sepulchre the church of Denkendorf, near Stuttgart, from which a contemporary reliquary containing a fragment of the True Cross still survives.21 The new cloister must have been essentially complete by the end of the patriarchate of Fulcher (1145–57), since it was he who instituted a weekly procession between Whitsun and Advent to bless the dormitory, refectory, cellar and kitchen. A charter of 1155 also refers to two shops on the west side of Khān al-Zayt Street (the former cardo) as being bounded on the west by the atrium of the Holy Sepulchre. But what of the church? It might be expected that William of Tyre, the leading chronicler of the kingdom in the twelfth century, would provide some clues about the dating of the building works; but, although he mentions the enlargement of the church to enclose the holy places lying east of it, he gives no specific indication of when this occurred.22 His reticence may have been due to his having been absent in the West between 1146 and 1165, in the period when the new building would have been taking shape; but it may also be that the work was sufficiently gradual and long drawn out to have made it difficult to name a specific moment at which it started or was deemed to have been completed. The sequence in which the building work was undertaken may also have added to this difficulty. It appears probable, for example, that the relative compactness of the available site between the Anastasis and new cloister led to the new building being set out and built in one continuous operation from the bottom up, rather than bay-by-bay from east to west as was more usual 21 G. Bresc-Bautier (ed.), Le Cartulaire du chapitre du Saint-Sépulcre de Jérusalem [Documents relatifs à l’Histoire des Croisades 15], Paris, 1984, 168–70 (no. 71); Folda, Art of the Crusaders [n. 1 above], 97–100, pls 5.16–17b. 22 Chronicon, VIII.iii, ed. Huygens [n. 6 above], 385–6.

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in this period. The fact that the area contained existing chapels and holy sites, to which access had to be maintained, would also have favoured the newly built parts being roofed (even temporarily) and brought into service as soon as possible, while work was still continuing on the galleries, clerestory and vaults above them. The supposition that building work on the church and canonry proceeded at the same time is supported by the observation that where the east end of the church meets the cloister, the cloister is clearly secondary to it. It is also apparent that the door on the north-east side of the ambulatory that gave access from the canons’ dormitory was a secondary insertion. The two corbels with architectural heads that flank it also appear to be by the same hand as the so-called ‘winged Solomon’ capital on one of the piers of the north transept. However, while all of this indicates that the lower parts of the choir were already standing when the cloister was attached to them, it says nothing about the relative chronology of the upper parts of the choir, nor of the other parts of the cloister. In his account of Fulk of Anjou’s burial in 1143, William of Tyre says that the king was interred ‘in the church of the Holy Sepulchre, below Mount Calvary next to the door on the right as one enters, among the other kings, his predecessors, of happy memory’.23 Although it is possible that William was simply describing the position beside the door where he saw the tomb at a later date, there are reasons for thinking that the lower parts of the choir and transept were already under construction by this date. The earliest clear evidence for new building work on the church is given by a mosaic inscription that formerly occupied one of the spandrels over the arch framing the west side of the chapel of Calvary, facing into the south transept just below the cornice at the level of the gallery. The first five lines were recorded by the pilgrims John of Würzburg (c. 1165) and Theoderic (1172), and fragments of what remained of the whole text were copied in the early seventeenth century by the Franciscan, Francesco Quaresmi, who also pinpoints precisely where the text was located. The inscription (now lost) recorded a service of consecration performed by Patriarch Fulcher and other prelates on 15 July 1149, exactly fifty years after the fall of Jerusalem to the First Crusade. Now, as Melchior de Vogüé and others have pointed out, this does not necessarily mean that the church was already complete by this date. However, after recording the first five lines of text, John of Würzburg adds: On the same day moreover four altars were consecrated in the same church, namely the high altar and the upper altar in Calvary and two in the aisle of the church on the opposite 23

Chronicon, XV.xxvii, ed. Huygens, 711.

THE CRUSADER CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE

[north] side, one in honour of St Peter and the other in honour of St Stephen the Protomartyr.24

Taken together with the location of the inscription, this would seem to suggest that by July 1149 most – or possibly all – of the new apse, choir and transepts was already standing, at least up to the level of the gallery. Patriarch Fulcher (1145–57) seems to have played a key role in bringing the building works to some sort of fruition. As already noted, the buildings of the canonry were also essentially complete by the end of his patriarchate. Alan Borg has also noted that Fulcher was the first patriarch to have illustrated on his seal the resurrection and Ascension of Christ, in what appears to be a miniaturized version of the apse mosaic of the new choir as described by John of Würzburg, Theoderic and Quaresmi.25 As already remarked, however, it is probable that the same scene had also been depicted in the eleventh-century apse mosaic of the Anastasis, so this piece of evidence is not conclusive. Muhammad al-Idrīsī, however, writing in Sicily on the basis of travellers’ reports in 1154, after describing the aedicule, says: ‘Over against this, on the east, is a great and venerable church where the Franks … have their worship and services.’26 Another source that bears obliquely on the dating of the new works is William of Tyre’s account of the dispute between the Hospitallers and the patriarch in 1153 to 1154, during which the Hospitallers took to disrupting the patriarch’s address to the people from Calvary by loudly ringing the bells of their church, which stood directly opposite the south doors of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and on one occasion shooting arrows into it.27 By the mid 1160s, there is clearer evidence that the Frankish additions to the church were essentially complete and much of the internal decoration was in place. As de Vogüé pointed out, when Patriarch Amalric confirmed the chapter’s privileges in 1168 to 1169, he included some additional altars at which offerings could be made, including those of the Prison of Christ, St Peter and St Stephen in the north aisle, the Invention of the Cross to the east, and the Compass, which was now described as being in the centre of the canons’ choir. De Vogüé also noted that, whereas Godfrey and the first three kings of Jerusalem had been buried beside the piers supporting the chapel of Calvary, Baldwin III (1163) and his successors were placed in a row below the southern arch of the crossing of the new choir, in effect just behind where the canons’ stalls would have been.28 Another indication of the structural changes that had been made is that in 1167

Peregrinatores Tres, ed. Huygens [n. 9 above], 124. ‘The Lost Apse Mosaic of the Holy Sepulchre’, in A. Borg and A. Martindale (eds), The Vanishing Past [BAR International Series 111], Oxford, 1981, 7–14. 26 Trans. G. Le Strange, Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement, 1888, 32; repr. in Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrimage, 224. 27 Chronicon, XVIII.iii, ed. Huygens [n. 6 above], 812–14. 28 Eglises [n. 1 above], 195–7, 218–20. 24

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to 1169 the Genoese prevailed upon Pope Alexander III to write to the king and patriarch to request the restoration of the Golden Inscription that recorded their privileges. This, they alleged, had been destroyed by King Amalric (1163–74). Since it appears that this text had been located in or beside the apse of the Anastasis overlooking the high altar, a likely occasion for its destruction would have been the moment when the apse was demolished in order to link the old and new parts of the church together. By the time of the visits of John of Würzburg (c. 1165) and Theoderic (1172), not only was the new work structurally complete and joined to the Anastasis, but much of its internal decoration was also in place.29 At this time the high rib-vaulting over the choir and transepts was finished, though as Camille Enlart noted, the idea for the ribs seems to have been an afterthought, as they do not match the piers.30 As for the dome over the crossing, it has been argued that this was also an afterthought, replacing an earlier lantern tower; but the blocked window on the west side is in fact simply a two-light clerestory window similar to those in the adjacent transepts. It seems that when the pendentives for the dome were sprung, their arches were accidentally set lower than those of the transepts, with the result that the window was partially blocked. The final element to consider is the bell-tower. Al-Idrīsī mentions a qanbinar (campanarium) above the south door in 1154,31 though it is possible that this was simply a bell-cote erected to take the bells installed in 1099. The present Romanesque bell-tower, originally four storeys high and built over the chapel of St John, was evidently constructed after the south transept, since it blocks one of the transept’s windows and the door into it from the transept’s gallery is an insertion. Although the upper part of the tower fell in 1545 and all but the lower two storeys were demolished between 1719 and 1720, fourteenth- and fifteenth-century illustrations show it to have been capped by a squat, domical spire, set within an enclosing parapet with triangular crenellations [Fig. 4.6, p. 115 below]. For the time when it was built – say, in the 1170s or 1180s – this would have represented, like much else in the church, an advanced though somewhat eclectic design. With Saladin’s capture of the city in 1187, all new building work ceased and the adjoining patriarch’s palace became a college (khanqa) for Sufis. In the following centuries the only works permitted were repairs to the existing structures. Over time most of the buildings of the canonry collapsed and were not rebuilt, while inside the church the paintings and mosaics that had covered the walls and vaults fell away, exposing the bare stone. As a result it is difficult for the modern visitor to appreciate fully 29 30 31

Peregrinatores Tres [n. 9 above], 117–26, 147–57. Monuments des croisés [n. 1 above], II, 148–9, pls 91–3. Trans. Le Strange, 32; repr. in Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrimage, 224.

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the richly coloured interior that would have confronted twelfth-century pilgrims entering the building.

CONCLUSION The rotunda built in the fourth century to enclose the tomb of Christ was in effect a mausoleum, standing architecturally in the tradition of late Roman imperial mausolea like those of Diocletian in Split, Galerius in Thessaloniki, and Constantine himself in the church of the Holy Apostles as originally planned in Constantinople.32 Its focus was the tomb itself, around which sufficient space was provided for pilgrims to congregate and for the liturgies associated with the burial and resurrection of Christ to be performed, particularly in Holy Week. Following the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre and the buildings around it in the early eleventh century, the rebuilt rotunda acquired additional functions that had previously been performed by Constantine’s basilica, including serving as the principal church in Jerusalem and the seat of the patriarch. In order to accommodate these functions, a new choir and apse were constructed on the east side of it, extending into the courtyard between it and the former basilica. Some of the holy sites and relics formerly seen by pilgrims in the atrium of the basilica, such as the icon of the Virgin Mary seen by St Mary the Egyptian, also migrated to the courtyard. It would probably have become clear in the early years of the crusader kingdom that the rotunda, as rebuilt in the eleventh century, was inadequate to accommodate all of its new functions. In addition to serving as the seat of the Latin patriarch and the principal parish church for Latins and Malkites in the city, the church was now also being used as a setting for the display of Christian kingship and the place where successive kings were crowned, married and buried. In the early years of the kingdom some of the business of royal administration, such as the issuing of charters, may also have taken place in it. In addition, the church also had to continue to commemorate the sites associated with the death and resurrection of Christ and to provide access to them for pilgrims, who were flocking to it in increasing numbers now that Jerusalem was again in Christian hands. In response to these demands, a new larger choir with transepts, apsidal ambulatory and galleries was built, filling up most of the space formerly occupied by the courtyard between the rotunda and Constantine’s basilica. To the east of this lay the conventual buildings of the canons, and to the north-west the palace of the patriarch. The construction of the new choir and chancel would have allowed the rotunda to revert to its earlier role of a shrine or mausoleum containing 32 Cf. J. B. Ward-Perkins, Roman Imperial Architecture, Harmondsworth, 1981, 449–59; Krautheimer, Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture [n. 18 above], 72–3; M. J. Johnson, The Roman Imperial Mausoleum in Late Antiquity, Cambridge, 2009.

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the tomb of Christ. Despite the centralized planning of the rotunda itself, however, the relative compactness of the new overall design compared to that of the fourth-century complex resulted in the retention of the visual relationship between the two parts of the church that had first been realized in the eleventh-century rebuilding, and reinforced its east-west axis. The door to the empty tomb on the west therefore faced directly east towards the apse and high altar, where the message of the resurrection was proclaimed in the mosaic decoration above and re-enacted daily in the celebration of the Eucharist.

THE CRUSADER CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE: DESIGN, DEPICTION AND THE PILGRIM CHURCH OF COMPOSTELA JAROSLAV FOLDA

MULTICULTURAL JERUSALEM When the First Crusade conquered Jerusalem on 15 July 1099, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (CHS) that the crusaders found was the one which the Byzantines had rebuilt in the 1040s.1 The large nave of Constantine’s basilica was gone. In the Byzantines’ configuration the rotunda over the aedicule had become the main space, with an apse to the east, and outside on the eastern side there was the Triporticus, a courtyard with three chapels. The Triporticus was entered from the parvis to the south. The crusaders eventually renovated and expanded this church, and it is aspects of this new crusader CHS that I would like to revisit here. It would be more than thirty years before the king and queen of the Latin kingdom and the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem began planning substantial changes to the CHS itself, but in the meantime crusaders in the Holy Land had undergone a serious change of world-view. By the 1120s the crusaders had fully established themselves in the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, and 1 For the Byzantine CHS as rebuilt in the 1040s, see J. Krüger, Die Grabeskirche zu Jerusalem: Geschichte – Gestalt – Bedeutung, Regensburg, 2000, 77, fig. 72; 86, fig. 83; see also Biddle, Tomb, 67, fig. 63b; 80, fig. 65. I refer frequently below to J. Folda, The Art of the Crusaders in the Holy Land, 1098–1187, Cambridge, 1995 [hereafter, Art of the Crusaders].

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as residents the second generation of Franks now had a new perspective on the Holy Land. Around 1127 the crusaders’ new situation in the Holy Land was reported by Fulcher of Chartres, chaplain to King Baldwin II, in his Historia Hierosolymitana [ch. 37]. He writes: Consider, I pray, and reflect how in our time God has transformed the Occident into the Orient. For we who were Occidentals have now become Orientals. He who was a Roman or a Frank has in this land been made into a Galilean or a Palestinian. He who was of Rheims or Chartres has now become a citizen of Tyre or Antioch. We have already forgotten the places of our birth … Some have taken wives not only of their own people but Syrians or Armenians or even Saracens who have obtained the grace of baptism … People use the eloquence and idioms of diverse languages in conversing back and forth. Words of different languages have become common property known to each nationality and mutual faith unites those who are ignorant of their descent.2

These observations are important indications about how the resident crusaders in the Holy Land, wherever they came from originally, were now becoming part of a multicultural, multilingual society in which they interacted with Christians and non-Christians in the Holy Land. It is in this situation that it was possible for these resident crusaders, whatever their European ancestry might have been, to become aware of and employ artistic ideas from both East and West.

FULK, MELISENDE AND THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE The birth of the main project to rebuild and redecorate the CHS seems likely to have begun early in the 1130s, to meet the new needs the church was facing. For one thing, the coronation of King Fulk I of Anjou with his queen, Melisende of Jerusalem, took place on 14 September 1131. The ceremony took place in the CHS for the first time. Previous coronations had taken place in Bethlehem, in the spacious sixth-century basilica of the Church of the Nativity. When the ceremony was moved to Jerusalem, no doubt the problematic experience of staging this coronation in the more cramped confines of the CHS from the 1040s was a factor in the decision to enlarge and redecorate the church.3 Significantly, the project to renovate and expand the CHS was sponsored by both the patriarch and the king and queen of Jerusalem. Indeed, it 2 Fulcher of Chartres, A History of the Expedition to Jerusalem, 1095–1127, ed. H. S. Fink, trans. F. R. Ryan, New York, 1969, 271–2. 3 Folda, Art of the Crusaders, 46 ff., 76, 119.

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seems evident that Queen Melisende must have had an important role as patron.4 Not only was she obviously a major participant in the coronation in 1131 – that is, a royal figure who experienced first-hand the practical limitations of the ceremony in this place – but she also became the greatest patron of art in crusader Jerusalem between 1131 and the early 1150s. This we see, for example, in her active work with other important royal artistic projects in and around Jerusalem, including the church of St Anne, the churches and convent at the holy site of the tomb of St Lazarus at Bethany, and the Armenian cathedral of St James, among others. At the CHS not only did she maintain a position as a great benefactor of the church, with numerous endowments to her credit, but also on 25 December 1143 she participated in a second coronation with her young son, Baldwin III. And when the time came to name a new patriarch in 1145, it was Melisende who nominated Fulcher. It was Melisende and Fulcher who made a formidable team collaborating on the expansion of the CHS. What were the needs that this newly configured CHS would be called on to serve? 1. The CHS was obviously a major site for pilgrimage, surpassing even Rome and Santiago de Compostela in the Christian world of the twelfth century, with unique holy sites linked to the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.5 The most holy sites in the church were of course the tomb of Jesus, the Holy Sepulchre, followed by the hill of Calvary, and there were other lesser sites, along with important relics contained in its chapels, the most important of which was the relic of the True Cross. 2. The CHS was the major centre for the Latin church hierarchy newly established in the Holy Land by the crusaders.6 It was the metropolitan cathedral for the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem and for the canons who served this holy place and resided there. 3. The CHS was the unique church for the royal ceremonial presence of the Latin king and queen of Jerusalem, with a variety of state functions. Some that started immediately included the funeral and entombment of these rulers; Godefroy de Bouillon was buried here in 1100, the first of a long series.7 Eventually, starting in 1131, this 4 J. Folda, ‘Melisende of Jerusalem: Queen and Patron of Art and Architecture in the Crusader Kingdom’, in T. Martin (ed.), Reassessing the Roles of Women as ‘Makers’ of Medieval Art and Architecture, Leiden and Boston, 2012, I, 429 ff. [459–70]. 5 See J. Folda, ‘Pilgrimage Sites in Jerusalem and Bethlehem with Reflections of the Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in the 12th Century’, in P. C. von Saucken and R. Vasquez (eds), Peregrino, ruta y meta en las peregrinationes maiores, Santiago de Compostela, 2012, 397–415, for discussion of the pilgrimage to the CHS as part of the world of pilgrimage in the twelfth century. 6 See B. Hamilton, The Latin Church in the Crusader States, London, 1980, 54–85, for a discussion of the establishment of the Latin Church in the Latin Kingdom, especially in Jerusalem in the twelfth century. 7 Folda, Art of the Crusaders, 37–40, 74–5, 114–15.

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church was also the site of the coronation of the crusader rulers, both kings and queens. The idea for a large project to rebuild and expand the CHS seems to have been prompted by the coronation of 1131, which must have been cramped and hard to stage around and between the aedicule and the high altar in the Byzantine space. The designs, drawn up over the following years, may have been ready by 1143, and it is likely the actual building activity was carried out after that, mainly in the 1140s and 1150s. (As we shall see, the ribbed vaults post-date those of St Denis and St Etienne in Sens of the 1140s.) No extant text provides the date when construction began or describes the process, but it probably started sometime shortly after the joint coronation on 25 December 1143 of Melisende – the queen regnant after the death of King Fulk – and her son, Baldwin III, who was only thirteen at the time.8 What were the special features of that crusader renovation and expansion?9 1. Among several excellent design ideas that were developed for the expanded CHS, one of the most brilliant was the plan. The architect and patrons, faced with severe constraints due to the already existing rotunda over the aedicule of the Holy Sepulchre to the west and the convent of the canons to the east, adapted the paradigm of what we call the ‘Romanesque pilgrimage church plan’10 to generate the nave, choir and ambulatory with radiating chapels in the CHS, to replace the Triporticus and its open courtyard [Figs 3.2, 3.3, pp. 80, 82 above]. The nave in fact became the crossing under a new dome, with two transepts to the north and south. These three elements were linked to the original rotunda to the west; to the east they led directly to the choir, apse and ambulatory; and the south transept extended into a narthex to the main entrance portal. In doing this, the crusaders unified the spaces of this church – including two domes, over the rotunda and the crossing – into a vaulted spatial continuum from east to west for the first time. This design linked the CHS to churches along the pilgrimage routes in western Europe, and we shall see other features that related the CHS directly to the great church at Santiago de Compostela. 2. Similarly innovative ideas marked the design of the new interior elevation. In nave and choir, part of the elevation near the high altar was perhaps based on three-storey Western churches (French For details about the crusader project to rebuild the CHS, ibid., 175–245. For documentation on the crusader CHS, see D. Pringle, ‘The Crusader Church of the Holy Sepulchre’, 76–94 above. 10 For the crusader plan, Pringle, Churches, III, 39, plan 2 [here Fig. 3.2, p. 80 above]; for the pilgrimage road type plan, see R. Calkins, Medieval Architecture in Western Europe from AD 300 to 1500, New York and Oxford, 1998, 124–8, and figs 10–19 [note especially the plan of Sainte Foi at Conques]. 8

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or English), covered with the first ribbed vaults in the crusader East; these vaults must have been slightly later than and structurally distinct from the pioneering examples found at St Denis, or St Etienne in Sens in the 1140s.11 The graceful, broad-pointed arches of the CHS were not drawn from the West, however; they were surely inspired by local models in Muslim architecture such as those found in the Cistern of Helena at Ramla (789) and the Aqsa Mosque, and perhaps first used in crusader architecture in the church of St Anne (c. 1140).12 The other part of the elevation consisted of the remarkable domed crossing/nave which echoed the large Anastasis rotunda to the west; this Byzantine feature significantly helped to give the crusader church its unique character. And by introducing a new dome over the crossing, which was in fact a second dome for the church, they made this building unique in Jerusalem, a city with a number of smaller single-domed churches and with the two great Muslim single-domed buildings, the Dome of the Rock and the Aqsa Mosque.13 Indeed, the suggestion has been made that because the royal crusader coronation ceremonies unfolded under this second dome, adjacent to the great dome over the sepulchre of Christ, the CHS thereby united Christ and king uniquely in this holy place.14 3. The third major feature of the crusader CHS was the new main entrance. On the outside of this church, the south transept façade replaced what had been the south entrance to the Triporticus and became the main point of entry for the newly configured CHS [Colour Pls II, III]. Architecturally, this façade is a remarkable combination of ideas found in both East and West, some very current ideas indeed. For the entry portal, the architect no doubt drew on the design of a local Jerusalem city gate, the Golden Gate, from the east side of the Haram al Sharif, for its double portal configuration. This architectural motif thereby alluded symbolically to the belief that, at the Second Coming, Christ would enter the holy city through the double portal of the Golden Gate, just as Christians enter the holy place of the CHS through 11 For views of the CHS interior vaulting, see Pringle, Churches, III, 52, figs. XIII and XV; 54, fig. XXI. (Cf. Figs 3.8, 3.10, pp. 87, 88 above.) See also Folda, Art of the Crusaders, 190, fig. 7.3f; 191, fig. 7.3h. For St Denis and Sens, see e.g. Calkins, Medieval Architecture [n. 10 above], 172–9, figs. 13.10, 13.11. 12 For the pointed arches at Ramla, see K. A. C. Creswell, Early Muslim Architecture, 2nd edn, II, Oxford, 1969, 161–4, fig. 152. For the Mosque Al-Aqsa arches, see R. W. Hamilton, The Structural History of the Aqsa Mosque, Jerusalem and London, 1949, passim; and for the Church of St Anne’s, see Folda, Art of the Crusaders, 133–5, fig. 6.6d. 13 N. Kenaan-Kedar, ‘Symbolic Meaning in Crusader Architecture: The Twelfth-Century Dome of the Holy Sepulcher Church in Jerusalem’, Cahiers Archeologiques 34 (1986), 109–17. 14 Ibid.

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FIG. 4.1 (A), (B) CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE, JERUSALEM: NARRATIVE LINTEL ON THE SOUTH TRANSEPT FAÇADE (DETAILS), LATE 1140s

its comparable double portal. And the broad-pointed arches with gadroons were again linked to Levantine origins. But such a summary does not do justice to the façade; we need to attend in more detail both to the sculptural decoration and to the doubledecker façade as a whole.

THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHURE: THE SOUTH TRANSEPT FAÇADE We look first at the details of the façade, a major if remarkably eclectic programme of external decoration designed to announce the importance of this building and this holy site [Colour Pl. III].15 The overall programme 15

J. Folda, ‘The South Transept Façade of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in

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contained both sculpture and mosaic decoration. It is the non-figural sculptural decoration that is the most important extant part of this façade; very little of the figural programme survives. Although later pilgrims report that both tympana and the spandrel above had mosaics illustrating scenes from the holy sites inside the CHS (e.g. especially the newly resurrected Jesus meeting Mary Magdalene in the garden), none is extant. Only the figural lintels over the two doors survive, preserved since 1927 in the Palestine Archaeological Museum, which is now the Rockefeller Museum in East Jerusalem [Figs 4.1, 4.2]. The lintel from over the right door contains an inhabited vine-scroll design evoking the idea of the tree of life, whereas over the left door the lintel contained narrative scenes of events at nearby holy sites related to Holy Week.16 At the far left there is Christ raising Lazarus at Bethany; in the center/ right are preparations for and the entry of Christ into Jerusalem (with major losses); and at the far right, there is the Last Supper. These scenes refer to holy sites a pilgrim could visit nearby, in conjunction with a visit to the CHS; they are also in effect prefigurations of what pilgrims would find on entering the CHS, namely, the tomb where Jesus rose from the dead, in the rotunda to the left, and the high altar to the right, where the Holy Eucharist was celebrated, commemorating the Last Supper. For the figural lintels, an Italian source – indeed, probably a Tuscan source – inspired their design. It is probable that the crusader sculptor had some kind of background training in Italian Romanesque sculpture. Here again is a feature of the CHS which links this design and programme to churches found on pilgrimage routes in the West, in this case to the Via Francigena in Italy.17 Jerusalem: An Aspect of “Rebuilding Zion”’, in J. France and W. Zajac (eds), The Crusades and their Sources [FS Hamilton], Aldershot, 1998, 239–57. 16 Folda, Art of the Crusaders, 220–7. 17 See D. F. Glass, Portals, Pilgrimage and Crusade in Western Tuscany, Princeton, 1997.

FIG. 4.1 (C) CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE, JERUSALEM: DECORATIVE LINTEL ON THE SOUTH TRANSEPT FAÇADE (DETAIL), LATE 1140s

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FIG. 4.2 CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE, JERUSALEM: DECORATIVE LINTEL ON THE SOUTH TRANSEPT FAÇADE, LATE 1140s, IN SITU

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As seen today [Colour Pls II, III], it is difficult to reconstruct visually how magnificent the south transept façade must have looked with its programme of mosaics and sculptural decoration. But some idea of the splendour of these portals can be realized when we discover that the extant non-figural architectural sculpture is so rich and that its sources are so varied. Remembering moreover the importance of this entry portal, and the fact that it was the architectural decoration that formed the matrix in which the figural sculpture and mosaics were meant to be presented, it is worth looking carefully at the basic elements of this sculptural programme. Starting with the top cornice and the heavy cornice moulding articulating the division between the two storeys, it is clear that the crusaders reused second-century Roman spolia on the upper cornice, and copied its design for the lower one.18 These unmistakable Roman architectural features referred to the Roman heritage of this site in terms of Hadrian’s temple, which was removed by Constantine to erect the first CHS. Within each storey the paired arches are visually articulated first by gadroons, the beveled or cushion-shaped archivolts which boldly define their monumental pointed arch shape.19 Gadroons are particularly effective in generating a strong pattern of shadow on the architecture of the façade in the brilliant Jerusalem sunlight. These elements, along with the graceful broad-pointed arches, are derived from contemporary Arab design and help to express the distinctively Mediterranean/Near Eastern character of this building. Secondarily, the paired arches also have pronounced hood mouldings. On the lower storey these hood mouldings consist of a strikingly flat, lacy, swirling rosette-shaped design.20 This distinctive type is found north of Jerusalem in Syria – for example, on the Christian tomb monuments of al-Bara from the sixth century. Clearly the parallel between early Christian tomb sculpture and sculpture on the church of Christ’s tomb is directly relevant. Another important component of this ensemble consists of a major programme of carved capitals found on the colonnettes flanking the paired portals and windows on both storeys. These capitals are clearly derived from Byzantine sources and, though varied, they feature especially a wind-blown acanthus type. Parallels with Justinianic examples as well as certain capitals on the church of San Marco in Venice have been

18 Folda, ‘South Transept Façade’ [n. 15 above], 254, figs. 4, 5; and see Krüger, Grabeskirche [n. 1 above], 110, fig. 117; 115, figs. 126, 127. (For Krüger, fig. 117, see here Colour Pl. II.) 19 Folda, ‘South Transept Façade’, 255, fig. 6; and see Krüger, Grabeskirche, 110, fig. 117; 114, fig. 125; 117, fig. 129. (For Krüger, fig. 129, see here Colour Pl. III.) 20 Folda, ‘South Transept Façade’, 256, fig. 7; and see Krüger, Grabeskirche, 116, fig. 128; 117, fig. 129.

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mentioned as possible sources of inspiration.21 But whatever the specific origin of their design, the overall Byzantine character of these capitals would be universally recognized. As such they speak eloquently of the Byzantine heritage of this building. The CHS contained not only a Roman and an early Christian building heritage, it was also a Byzantine building in a Near Eastern/Arab setting. Finally, the contemporary Romanesque character of this building is also expressed in two significant components of the non-figural façade sculpture. First, the hood moulding on the upper storey is a strongly sculptural, deeply undercut three-dimensional floral design with plant shapes consisting of thick curving stems terminating in paired fleshy leaves and spiral volutes. Parallels in Romanesque sculpture in the south-west of France, such as in the Saintonge, have been noted.22 Secondly, the imposts of the capitals on the upper storey and the impost mouldings on the lower storey are all ‘Romanesque’, in the sense of the sculpture being done ‘in the manner of the Romans’ at this time in the twelfth century.23 This impost sculpture, whether a stylized upright acanthus leaf design as above, or a pattern incorporating a fleshy, fat curving leaf form down below, reflects the European classical heritage of the medieval West reinterpreted in these new circumstances in crusader Jerusalem. In sum, taken together, the south transept façade’s non-figural architectural sculpture is a remarkably eclectic programme, but one that was created intentionally for a special purpose. Looked at by itself and in conjunction with the other elements of the façade, it proclaims the authentic fabric of this unique church and its rich Christian Near Eastern character in a direct and clearly stated way. I propose that the use of such richly varied sculpture creatively expresses a message to the onlooker that also reflects the cultural and artistic heritage of the Christian pilgrims who made their way to this supremely holy site. It constitutes a remarkably ecumenical artistic statement in which pilgrims could recognize their own distinctive visual tradition located within the artistic variety and multiculturalism that was crusader art in Jerusalem. We must finally do justice to the design idea of the façade as a whole.

Folda, ‘South Transept Façade’, 257, figs 9, 10; and see Krüger, Grabeskirche, 113, fig. 122. 22 Folda, ‘South Transept Façade’, 256, fig. 8; and see Krüger, Grabeskirche, 114, fig. 124. 23 Folda, ‘South Transept Façade’, 257, figs 9, 10; and see Krüger, Grabeskirche, 112, 113, figs 120–3. 21

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JERUSALEM, SANTIAGO AND ROME: A CIRCULAR PILGRIMAGE The double-decker/two-storey façade is unknown in the East, and its origin seems to have been inspired by the south transept façade of the pilgrimage church at Santiago de Compostela, built by 1111 [Fig. 4.3].24 Thus, a connection appears to have been formed between the new architecture found here at the CHS and in Santiago – that is, in two of the three most important pilgrimage sites in the Christian world by the 1140s. Manuel Castiñeiras has independently argued for this link, with references to pilgrims from Spain in the early twelfth century.25 There is also pictorial evidence from the Latin kingdom for the linkage of the three main Christian pilgrimage sites in the twelfth century, in this icon of six standing saints from the monastery of St Catherine on Mount Sinai [Fig. 4.4]. When this icon was first published in 1966 the emphasis was placed on identifying the crusader features of the painting, which include the choice and iconography of the saints depicted, and their connection to Jerusalem and the crusades.26 The icon was also dated in the second half of the twelfth century, prior to 1187. Although we do not know who the patron was who ordered this icon, we can confidently identify him or her as Frankish, and probably French, due to the presence of St Leonard of Noblac and St Martin of Tours in the lower tier. The patron probably ordered this icon in Jerusalem, given the Jerusalem connections of the saints in the upper tier: in the centre St James the Greater, martyred in Jerusalem, flanked by St Stephen the Deacon, first Christian martyr in Jerusalem, and St Paul, who (prior to his conversion) was complicit in Stephen’s death. Thinking now of this crusader icon as the product of a pilgrim’s patronage while in Jerusalem, we can see new meaning in its imagery.27 While the upper tier of saints firmly anchors the icon to Jerusalem, the lower tier of saints has important links to the two major pilgrimage routes in the West: to Santiago de Compostela and to Rome. The figure of St James the Greater in the upper tier of course also indicates the importance of the Santiago link here, and the figures of St Martin of Tours and St Leonard of Noblac in the Limousin reinforce this importance. St Martin converted 24 The foundations of the south transept façade at Santiago de Compostela were laid between 1101 and 1103. The façade was constructed between 1103 and 1111 with two storeys including a double round-arched portal and paired round-arched windows above. My thanks to Manuel Castiñeiras for his information about this dating. 25 M. Castiñeiras, ‘Compostela, Bari y Jerusalén: tras las huellas de una cultura figurative en los Caminos de Peregrinacion’, Ad Limina 1 (2010), 15–51; idem, ‘Puertas y metas de la peregrinación: Roma, Jerusalén y Santiago hasta el siglo XIII’, in Saucken and Vasquez, Peregrino, ruta y meta en las peregrinationes maiores [n. 5 above], 336–50; and see also Folda, ‘Pilgrimage Sites in Jerusalem’ [n. 5 above], 411–14. 26 K. Weitzmann, ‘Icon Painting in the Crusader Kingdom’, DOP 20 (1966), 54–6; Folda, Art of the Crusaders, 461–2. 27 Folda, ‘Pilgrimage Sites in Jerusalem’ [n. 5 above], 409–10.

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FIG. 4.3.  SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA, SOUTH TRANSEPT FAÇADE, BUILT BY 1111

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FIG. 4.4. ICON OF SIX SAINTS, MONASTERY OF ST CATHERINE, MOUNT SINAI, LATE TWELFTH CENTURY, BEFORE 1187

to Christianity as a Roman soldier in the fourth century and later became a famous bishop; he is, of course, one of the great saints of France, and his monumental pilgrimage church at Tours was a major destination for many pilgrims along the camino to Santiago de Compostela. St Leonard was converted to Christianity along with Clovis by St Remi in 496, and became a hermit of extraordinary holiness in the Limousin. He was renowned among crusaders as the patron saint of prisoners. His abbey at Noblac near Limoges was also an important site on the camino to Santiago

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from Burgundy. Rome, the third major holy site, is represented here by St Lawrence, one of the seven deacons of ancient Rome, who was martyred during the persecution of Valerian in 258. The choice of St Lawrence here, instead of perhaps St Peter, can only be accounted for by the specifications of the patron; perhaps Lawrence was the patron saint of the donor? But taken together the saints on this icon represent an ensemble which in its own way celebrates and relates to the three great pilgrimage destinations of the twelfth century – Santiago de Compostela, Jerusalem and Rome – seen from a uniquely crusader point of view in Jerusalem. And Jerusalem and Santiago are, as reflected in the choice of saints for this icon, the most important. The possibility exists therefore that this icon was commissioned in Jerusalem by a pilgrim who had visited all three major twelfth-century pilgrimage sites. Here we can see concrete evidence in the figural art of the crusader East for an idea advanced by Arthur Kingsley Porter in 1923 in regard to Romanesque architecture and sculpture, namely that there was a ‘circular pilgrimage which should include the Holy Land and Italy as well as Galicia’.28 It is important to consider the idea that Christian pilgrimage in the twelfth century could include travel to all three major sites for the most ambitious pilgrims, in order to understand how these sites could be known to each other and how artistic ideas could flow between and among them.

LAMENTS FOR JERUSALEM: 1187, 1291 AND BEYOND Whatever the exact dating of the completion of the crusader project to renovate and expand the CHS, it was probably mostly done in the 1150s; but it surely must have been completely finished well before 1167, when the great project to renovate and redecorate the Church of the Nativity apparently began in Bethlehem, under the auspices of King Amalrich I of Jerusalem, the Byzantine Emperor Manuel I Komnenos, and Bishop Raoul of Bethlehem. But alas, only eighteen years after the completion in 1169 of that Bethlehem project, the crusaders suffered the catastrophic defeat at the Horns of Hattin in July 1187, followed by the loss of Jerusalem in October 1187. At that point, the liturgical laments over the loss of Jerusalem began, but they were mixed together with the appearance of continuing commemorations of the crusaders’ capture of the city in 1099. On the one hand, for example, in 1215 Pope Innocent III’s encyclical, Quia major, ordered a special liturgical procession once a month in conjunction with fasting and almsgiving, and the preaching of the new crusade that became the Fifth Crusade of 1217.29 On the other hand, in 1225 there appears in 28 29

A. K. Porter, Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads, I, Boston, 1923, 177. J. Folda, ‘Commemorating the Fall of Jerusalem: Remembering the First Crusade

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the calendar of a royal Psalter (probably made for Isabel of Brienne) an entry for 15 July which states: ‘Dedicatio ecclesie S. Sepulchri, et festivitas ierusalem quando capta fuit a Christianis.’30 This indicates that the dedicatory event in the CHS in 1149 (even if the entire crusader project to expand the CHS had not been completely finished until later in the 1150s or early 1160s) was still thought to be important enough to commemorate the whole church in 1225. Then, after the city of Jerusalem was sacked by the Khwarismian Turks in August 1244 and the CHS was seriously damaged, a papal letter circulated in 1252; the Pope ordained that at daily mass the bells of all churches should be tolled for Jerusalem, so that special prayers could be said for a new crusade. By this time we find that, in the calendar of the Perugia Missal created in Acre in the 1250s, the July commemoration of the capture of Jerusalem and the dedication of the CHS had dropped out of the calendar, in favour of the commemoration of the dedication of the cathedral of Acre.31 But in the second half of the thirteenth century, and especially after the fall of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem in May 1291, while the bells tolled at mass and prayers were said for a new crusade, what had been a commemoration of the fall of Jerusalem had become a continuous lament for its loss. In the context of such commemoration of Jerusalem after 1291 in the Latin West there were included images of the Holy City and of the CHS. Indeed the memory of Jerusalem and the CHS with its holy sites was evoked in manuscript illustration more or less continuously in a variety of manuscript texts. Among these images there were features of the new Crusader CHS which we can recognize as signature visual elements, both for architects and for artists. In particular, the domes of the CHS and the south transept façade together with its campanile become distinguishing elements of this holy building in the pictorial remembrance of the CHS – after the fall of Jerusalem in 1187, and the invasion of Jerusalem in 1244 and finally the fall of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1291 – in the hands of differing artists. In this final section of the present chapter, I consider two examples from the fifteenth century. Amid the remembrance and lamentation of Jerusalem after 1291 there were of course numerous plans advanced to mount a new crusade. Such plans, starting almost immediately after 1291, have been ably discussed by a number of historians, among which I recall the late Sylvia Schein as one of the most lucid.32 Here I concentrate on Burgundy in the first half in Text, Liturgy, and Image’, in N. Paul and S. Yeager (eds), Remembering the Crusades: Myth, Image, and Identity, Baltimore, 2012, 125–45. 30 F. Wormald, ‘Appendix I: (a) The Calendars of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem’, in H. Buchthal, Miniature Painting in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, London, 1986, 116 [Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana MS 323]. 31 Ibid. [Perugia, Biblioteca Capitolare MS 6]. 32 S. Schein, Fidelis Crucis: The Papacy, the West, and the Recovery of the Holy Land,

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of the fifteenth century as one region where the old idea of mounting a new crusade was still being seriously thought about and, to some extent, actively pursued.33 And in this context we have pictorial evidence for the remembrance of the CHS that links up with the crusader church on the one hand, and yet demonstrates a newly developed sense of the whole crusade endeavour as a kind of chivalric dream directed against the infidels for the liberation of the CHS and the holy sites, aspects of which are depicted sometimes with great imagination and fantasy as part of an exotic oriental vision.

THE CRÉQUY MASTER’S HISTORY OF OUTREMER One of the many texts which enjoyed a certain popularity for telling the story of the crusades in Europe was the History of Outremer, written by Archbishop William of Tyre between 1165 and 1184.34 It became known as the Estoire d’Eracles when it was translated into Old French by about 1223 and was then given various continuations. Many Old French manuscripts of the Estoire were written and illustrated between 1291 and 1500, and one is of interest to us from the second quarter of the fifteenth century. Indeed, this pictorial evidence can be seen in Burgundy in the context of the Order of the Golden Fleece, founded in 1430 by Philippe le Bon, the duke of Burgundy, for the honour and increase of the Catholic faith – one aspect of which was the recovery of the Holy Land. It was initially restricted to a membership of thirty knights in 1433.35 Concrete evidence of interest in the crusades by members of the Order is indicated by the fact that handsome illustrated manuscripts of the History of Outremer (still extant) were commissioned by five members of the Order in the middle part of the century, starting in the 1440s. I list these members and their codices:36 1274–1314, Oxford, 1991, passim. 33 On this point see E. J. Moodey, Illuminated Crusader Histories for Philip the Good of Burgundy, Turnhout, 2012, 1–17, 241–5, and passim; J. Paviot, ‘Burgundy and the Crusade’, in N. Housley (ed.), Crusading in the Fifteenth Century: Message and Impact, Basingstoke and New York, 2004, 70–80, and idem, ‘La Dévotion vis-à-vis de la Terre Sainte au XVe Siècle: l’exemple de Philippe le Bon, duc de Bourgogne (1397–1467)’, in M. Balard (ed.), Autour de la Première Croisade, Paris, 1996, 401–11. 34 Folda, Art of the Crusaders, 345 ff. 35 The Order of the Golden Fleece was established on 10 January 1430 by Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, in celebration of the prosperous and wealthy domains united in his person that ran from Flanders to Switzerland. At its founding, it was restricted to a limited number of knights – initially 24, but increased to 30 in 1433. See e.g. P. Niederhäuser, ‘The Order of the Golden Fleece’, in S. Marti et al. (eds), Splendour of the Burgundian Court: Charles the Bold (1433–1477), Brussels, 2009, 186–93, and with a preface by Karl Habsburg-Lotharingen, Sovereign of the Order of the Golden Fleece, 9. 36 J. Folda, ‘The Illustrations in Manuscripts of the History of Outremer by William of Tyre’ [Dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1968], II, 327, 337, 346, 360, 366.

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1. Jean V de Créquy (Amiens, Bibl. Mun. MS 483), c. 1440–45, Northern France, illustrated by the Créquy Master. 2. Louis of Bruges (Paris, BNF MS fr. 68), c. 1445–55, Bruges, painted in grisaille. 3. Adolf of Cleves (Geneva, Bibl. de Geneve MS fr. 85), c. 1459–60, with illustrations done in the workshop of Loyset Liedet. 4. Edward IV of England (London, BL MS Royal 15.E.1), c. 1479–80, Bruges, painted by several artists. 5. Duke Philippe le Bon (Brussels, BR MS 9045), Flanders, c. 1460, painted in grisaille; scribe, Germain Picavet de Ruyelle. It is the codex ordered by Jean V de Créquy, the chamberlain of Duke Philippe le Bon and a knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece, which attracts our attention here.37 His codex was the earliest commission of these five, and not only did he commission a text copied from a History of Outremer manuscript actually created in the Holy Land, but he also had the manuscript given the traditional crusader programme of illustrations – that is, one miniature at the start of each book of the text, following the crusader cycle of images.38 It is instructive in this regard to consider the way the history of the First Crusade is depicted in these illustrations at the start of Books 1 to 8. One example is the miniature for Book 6, replete with anachronisms, where the crusaders enter Antioch during the siege of 1098.39 Here are Gothic style fortifications and the soldiers in plate armour, representing the famous sixth-century walls and the fortified citadel on Mount Silpius. And at Book 8 we find an equally imaginary image of Jerusalem as a late medieval fortified city. Here the miniature of the First Crusade at Jerusalem in 1099 shows the crusaders in fifteenth-century armour, preparing a cannon for the siege of the city [Fig. 4.5]. And the CHS is unmistakable, with its bulbous domes and the campanile – a tiny but splendid example of the way the CHS was viewed as an exotic eastern temple by some in the West at this time. We may think this is merely anachronistic, of course, but it can also be thought of as an image of the First Crusade transformed into an up-to-date depiction of how Jerusalem could be attacked by a new crusade in the mid fifteenth century. 37 E. K. Donovan, ‘Livre d’Eracles’, in E. Morrison and A. D. Hedeman (eds), Imagining the Past in France: History in Manuscript Painting, 1250–1500, Los Angeles, 2010, 236–8, 321; N. Reynaud, ‘Guillaume de Tyr, Histoire des croisades’, in F. Avril and N. Reynaud (eds), Les manuscrits à peintures en France, 1440–1520, Paris, 1993, 76; A. Desobry, ‘L’Histoire des Croisades de Guillaume de Tyr et ses continuateurs. Manuscrit 483 de la Bibliothèque Municipale d’Amiens’, Bulletin de la Société des Antiquaires de Picardie 54 (1970), 220–35; and Folda, ‘Illustrations in Manuscripts of the History of Outremer’ [n. 36 above], II, 366–70. 38 The artist, known as the Master of Créquy, is discussed by Reynaud, ‘Guillaume de Tyr’ [n. 37 above]. The patron, Jean V de Créquy, is discussed in detail by M. Gil, ‘Manuscrits enluminés et mécénat aristocratique dans le nord de la France au XVe siècle: la Librairie de Jean V de Créquy (vers 1395–1474)’ [Master’s thesis, Université de Paris IV, Sorbonne, 1997], catalogue entry for Amiens MS 483 in I, 87–90. 39 Folda, ‘Commemorating the Fall of Jerusalem’ [n. 29 above], 141, fig. 5.5.

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FIG. 4.5.  CITY OF JERUSALEM AND THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE AT THE TIME OF THE FIRST CRUSADE (PAINTED 1440s)

THE EGERTON HOURS: JERUSALEM AND SANTIAGO The most spectacular example of this kind of vision of the CHS in the mid fifteenth century is found in the Prayerbook of René d’Anjou – the Egerton Hours – which is now in the British Library.40 This fascinating codex was written and richly illustrated around 1410; and then, when the book came into the hands of King René d’Anjou, five additional miniatures were introduced around 1442 to 1443, painted by Barthélemy d’Eyck, who at the time was ‘varlet de chamber’ for René.41 Of those five additions, the first two, on fols 4v and 5r, refer to the territorial pretensions of René, as king of Sicily and king of Jerusalem. On fol. 4v is a magnificent coat of arms proclaiming his claims in heraldic glory; and on fol. 5r is this 40 Egerton MS 1070. For the bibliography on this codex, see E. König, ‘Les Heures Egerton’, in M.-É. Gautier and F. Avril (eds), Splendeur de l’enluminure: le roi René et les livres, Ville d’Angers, 2009, 196, 206–11, and the select bibliography presented in the online British Library Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts for Egerton MS 1070: http:// www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts. 41 For information on René d’Anjou, see M. Kekewich, The Good King: René of Anjou and Fifteenth Century Europe, Basingstoke, 2008, passim; J. Paviot, ‘Le roi René, l’idée de croisade et l’Orient’, in J.-M. Matz and N.-Y. Tonnerre (eds), René d’Anjou (1409–1480): pouvoirs et gouvernement, Paris, 2011, 313–23.

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remarkable vision of Jerusalem, with the CHS and the Dome of the Rock [Colour Pl. XI].42 Years ago, Otto Pächt argued that one of the van Eyck brothers went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem and made drawings on which this painting is based;43 others have continued to suggest that an artist in the circle of Jan van Eyck worked from sketches and written descriptions made by visitors to Jerusalem.44 Whatever we think of these proposals, subsequent arguments – starting with Nicole Reynaud, followed by François Avril with new documentation and most recently by Rose-Marie Ferré – have attributed all of these additional five miniatures to Barthélemy d’Eyck.45 And we can clearly see that this image on fol. 5r corresponds in spirit to the Créquy Master’s little miniature of Jerusalem in Amiens MS 483, but with a significant difference. Here we see the two most important buildings in Jerusalem viewed in considerably greater detail, albeit through a similar orientalist lens of exoticism, reflecting the chivalric spirit of traditional crusading among the knightly orders in Western Europe before the fall of Constantinople in 1453.46 What is fascinating about this view of Jerusalem [Colour Pl. XI] in the Egerton Hours is the fact that the CHS and the Dome of the Rock are both arbitrarily located quite close to each other with a gigantic fortified wall behind them, and they are conceived as fanciful Near Eastern Gothic buildings, with strong vertical emphasis, thin structural elements and delightful pastel-colored masonry. In the case of the Dome of the Rock, it is a bejewelled pink polygonal building with lancet windows on its second storey, a light blue dome and roof, and golden decorations. In the case of the CHS, we see the light blue dome with tiny oculus over the off-white rotunda with lancet windows to the west (at the left side). Then there is the tall, thin beige-brown campanile with six open storeys below the elegant light blue and gold umbrella-shaped roof. And to the east (to the right) is the bright pink bulbous dome over the crossing, with an enormous lantern above surmounted by a light blue and gold dome, topped with a golden orb. This is in principle the same skyline imagery as we found in Amiens MS 483. But along with these fundamental signature components of the CHS 42 The most detailed descriptive analysis of this miniature remains that of P. Durrieu, ‘Une vue de l’Eglise du Saint-Sépulchre vers 1436, provenant du bon roi René’, in the Florilegium ou Recueil de travaux d’érudition [FS de Vogüé], Paris, 1909, 197–207. See also the comments of Paviot, ‘Le roi René, l’idée de croisade et l’Orient’ [n. 41 above], 315–16. 43 O. Pächt, ‘René d’Anjou et les Van Eyck’, Cahiers de l’Association internationale des études françaises 8 (1956), 41–67; idem, ‘René d’Anjou – Studien’, Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien 69 (1973), 85–126 (Teil I); 73 (1977), 7–106 (Teil II). 44 Krüger, Grabeskirche [n. 1 above], 173. 45 N. Reynaud, ‘Barthélemy d’Eyck avant 1450’, Revue de l’art 84 (1989), 22–43; F. Avril, ‘Heures de René d’Anjou’, in Avril and Reynaud, Les manuscrits à peintures en France, 1440–1520 [n. 37 above], 226–7; and R.-M. Ferré, ‘Barthélemy d’Eyck’, in Gautier and Avril, Splendeur de l’enluminure [n. 40 above], 123–31. 46 On the exoticism of René of Anjou à propos of the crusades, see Paviot, ‘Le roi René, l’idée de croisade et l’Orient’ [n. 41 above], 318–20.

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represented in such a fanciful manner, the artist then also presents us with a powerful and boldly stated rendering of the south transept façade, the main entrance to the CHS47 [cf. Colour Pls II, III]. Focusing only on the essential features, we see the double portal in this accurate two-storey representation. Despite its lovely pale-blue masonry composed of large rectangular ashlar blocks, oversized entablatures, and clustered columns and capitals supporting striated round-arch archivolts, and with a scalloped intrados on all four openings, this can only be the unique south transept portal of the CHS, with its right-hand portal walled up as it remained after 1187. Clearly in this case, the patron of this miniature – the titular king of Jerusalem, René – apparently commissioned the artist, Barthélemy d’Eyck, to represent the CHS with a remarkable quality of authenticity and immediacy to go along with the fantasy of this building in the exotic Near East. In sum, what we see here is the distinctive skyline profile of the CHS, just as we found it in Amiens MS 483, combined with the equally distinctive main entry façade – the south transept façade. These are the major elements that painters and other artists used to signify the CHS in the late Middle Ages and beyond. The question is, where did the artist find his model for the south transept façade represented in this miniature? If the artist, Barthélemy d’Eyck, used accurate sketches of a model in creating his detailed image, it is unlikely that (in this period of increasing realism in painting) he would have represented the arches of the double portal and paired fenestration as round, when they are conspicuously pointed on the CHS as seen today, and as seen on certain fifteenth-century drawings. Here I am thinking of the famous woodcut image of Erhard Reuwich, created some forty years later in the 1480s for the travel book of Bernhard von Breydenbach, published in Mainz in 1486 [Fig. 4.6].48 It is also unlikely that Barthélemy d’Eyck would have depicted heavy straight entablatures with consoles below, when the façade itself in its actual state and as represented by various fifteenth-century drawings (some less detailed than this miniature) finds the entablature dividing the first and second storeys accurately represented as a broken entablature below the paired windows.49 It is also unlikely that the artist would introduce the motif of the scalloped intrados on the arches of the façade, when there is none on the CHS and none appears on any other fifteenth-century drawings of the CHS. Finally, it is unlikely that Barthélemy d’Eyck would significantly diminish the size of the paired windows on the second storey when proportionately the actual windows 47 Paviot, ‘Le roi René, l’idée de croisade et l’Orient’, 315, comments that ‘la façade de la basilique est véridique, avec ses deux rangées d’arcs légèrement brisés’. 48 See e.g. the reproduction in Z. Vilnay, The Holy Land in Old Prints and Maps, trans. E. Vilnay, 2nd edn, Jerusalem, 1965, 111, fig. 153. 49 See e.g. the drawing by Konrad Grünenberg from 1486, which accurately shows the broken entablature separating the first and second storeys, but omits the entablature at the top of the façade; he also draws the arches as round, not pointed. Cf. Krüger, Grabeskirche [n. 1 above], 138.

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FIG. 4.6 CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE, JERUSALEM, SOUTH TRANSEPT FAÇADE, WOODCUT BY ERHARD REUWICH, 1480

are much larger on the CHS, and none of the fifteenth-century drawings shows them as so small or as rectangular openings. These characteristics on the miniature of the Egerton Hours, fol. 5r, suggest that Barthélemy d’Eyck was using, for whatever reason, but presumably with the approval of his patron, King René d’Anjou, a different model for his image of the south transept façade. I suggest that his model was indeed inspired by the same model that the crusader architect used in the 1140s to design and build the façade itself – namely, the south transept façade of the church of Santiago de Compostela [Fig. 4.3]. For this suggestion the evidence is clear: the south transept façade at Santiago, as compared to the Egerton Hours miniature of the CHS [Colour Pl. XI], has the same double portal configuration with the paired windows above on the second storey, and with the following important details. The Santiago façade has the same round arches as the image in the miniature. The Santiago façade has the same straight, unbroken entablature with consoles dividing the first and second storeys, as seen on the miniature. The Santiago façade has the significant detail of a scalloped intrados on the round arches of the paired windows, which Barthélemy d’Eyck expands to all four arches on the miniature. And finally, the paired windows are quite small – significantly smaller than those on the CHS façade – even though they are not rectangular (the way they were interpreted on the miniature).

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And in the miniature, despite the fact that the model used seems to have been the south transept façade of the great pilgrimage church at Santiago de Compostela, the clear reference to the CHS is maintained by means of the right-hand portal being walled up, as had been the case since 1187. There is no way to know at present how or why these choices were made by Barthélemy d’Eyck for his miniature of the south transept façade of the CHS in the Egerton Hours miniature. We do not know, for example, if King René d’Anjou and/or Barthélemy d’Eyck had made a pilgrimage to Santiago and made sketches, and/or had written a description of the south transept façade there. What we do know is that many pilgrims in the fifteenth century were making the pilgrimage to all three holy sites: to Jerusalem, to Santiago de Compostela and to Rome, for which recent scholarship has provided numerous examples.50

CONCLUSIONS Based on our observations and discussion above, I offer the following concluding comments. The CHS, for all its unique importance, was seen in the high Middle Ages in the context of the culture of pilgrimage and the pilgrimage routes to the major holy places, both East and West. This results in the following features of the church, among others: 1. The plan of the crusader CHS is based on the ‘pilgrimage road design’ paradigm, linked especially to churches found on the camino to Santiago de Compostela. 2. The figural lintels of the CHS were partly based on notions of architectural sculpture from churches on the Via Francigena in Italy (the pilgrimage route to Rome), and partly on imagery related to the holy sites in and around Jerusalem pertaining to Holy Week. 3. The architectural sculpture on the south transept façade of the CHS was carefully orchestrated to proclaim the architectural heritage of the building, as a way of making the main entry-way to the CHS meaningful to the myriad Christian pilgrims who came there from all over Christendom. 4. The architectural configuration of the south transept façade was inspired both by the Golden Gate in Jerusalem itself and by the south transept façade of the great pilgrimage church at Santiago de Compostela, the Puerta de las Platerías. 50 In the acta of the VIII Congreso Internacional de Estudios Jacobeos at Santiago de Compostela in 2010, three scholars have discussed this phenomenon, in Saucken and Vasquez, Peregrino, ruta y meta en las peregrinations maiores [n. 5 above], see R. Plötz, ‘Triatlón germánico. Jerusalén – Roma – Santiago de Compostela desde 1320 a 1520’, 83–101; C. Deluz, ‘Les pèlerins français dans les peregrinations maiores’, 103–14; and Castiñeiras, ‘Puertas y metas de la peregrinación’ [n. 25 above], 327–77.

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In the fifteenth century, as we have seen, the pictorial remembrances of the CHS in the West, executed by travellers and artists, most of whom had not themselves visited Jerusalem, often focused on two features. 1. The first feature was the skyline silhouette of the CHS, with its distinctive two domes and the campanile in between. 2. The second feature was the representation of the south transept façade. The most exotic and arresting example painted before 1453 was the miniature commissioned for King René d’Anjou by Barthélemy d’Eyck, created about 1442 to 1443 [Colour Pl. XI]. The details of this very careful rendering of the south transept façade make it clear that, far from making a trip to Jerusalem, this artist, probably working in Provence for King René, had apparently made the trip to Santiago de Compostela himself. Either that, or he was using sketches done by someone who had been to Santiago as the basis for his design of the façade, proving once again the importance of the pilgrimage culture and the fact that pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela was alive and well in the mid fifteenth century. In sum, just as the Puerta de las Platerías of the church at Santiago de Compostela proved to be an important inspiration for the crusader architect who designed and built the south transept façade of the CHS in the 1140s, so Compostela’s south transept portal clearly appears to have been a major inspiration for Barthélemy d’Eyck in c. 1442 to 1443, when he painted the miniature on fol. 5r for King René d’Anjou in the Egerton Hours. In the midst of the exotic architecture replete with eastern onion domes, pastel colours, Gothic verticality, and the conspicuous presence of turbaned and non-turbaned figures in the parvis – seated, kneeling, standing, speaking and praying – the boldly stated image of the south transept façade anchors the vision of the crusader CHS in this miniature, with its powerful link to pilgrimage architecture in the West.

POSTSCRIPT The introduction of turbaned and non-turbaned figures – the latter possibly images of Western pilgrims – in the parvis of the CHS is an issue as yet apparently unstudied in this miniature in the Egerton Hours. The only other example in a painted miniature from the fifteenth century known to me is an interesting image (with turbaned and non-turbaned figures in the parvis of the CHS south transept façade) in a manuscript created in Padua, dating to about 1475.51 This codex is the dedication copy of Gabriele Capodilista’s Itinerario di Terra Santa, given to the Franciscan 51 I am grateful to my colleague, Jonathan Alexander, for bringing this miniature to my attention.

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FIG. 4.7 CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE, JERUSALEM, SOUTH TRANSEPT FAÇADE, FROM G. CAPODILISTA, ITINERARIO DI TERRA SANTA, c. 1475.

nunnery of San Bernardino in Padua.52 The image of the CHS (232mm x 240mm) appears at the end of the manuscript on the verso of a map of Palestine [Fig. 4.7]. The overall concept of the south transept façade and the parvis is the same as we see in Egerton MS 1070, but the details differ, including the activities of the figures in the scene. Rosamond Mitchell discusses the image in the Capodilista MS as follows: While they were waiting for admission to the church, the pilgrims sat about in the courtyard. The more conventionally religious were occupied with their devotions; others silently contemplated the exterior of the church, speculating about its dimensions and noting such details as the little wicket-gate in the wall through which the custodians were fed by their 52 This codex came on the market at a Sotheby sale, 11 July 1978. For this sale the manuscript was catalogued as lot 34 on 21–3, with three illustrations in the catalogue. Besides appearing in colour in the Sotheby catalogue, the scene of the CHS in the Capodilista MS is also illustrated in R. J. Mitchell, The Spring Voyage: The Jerusalem Pilgrimage in 1458, New York, 1964, opposite 99, in black and white.

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brethren. Others again amused themselves with conversation or restored their tissues with figs and wine, or even played cards or chess as they sat on benches provided for their comfort.53

The comparable figures are not so clear in the Egerton Hours’ miniature, because of damage done to the lower part of the image. In the figures of the Egerton miniature, however, one notices the striking red, blue and green costumes of those with turbans, in contrast to the bland greys and browns of what appear to be the pilgrims. The figures in the Capodilista scene, by contrast, were all drawn in sepia ink, undifferentiated in colouration. In both cases, however, it is clear that the presence of the figures in the parvis adds greatly to the immediacy of the scene and suggests the notion that the artist had possibly observed these figures, and the parvis of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, from life.

53

Mitchell, The Spring Voyage, 105.

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PART III

THE NOBLE  SANCTUARY   / THE TEMPLE MOUNT

INTRODUCTION The Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik  beheld Syria to be a country that had long been occupied by the Christians, and he noted there the beautiful churches still belonging to them, so enchantingly fair, and so renowned for their splendour, as are the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the Churches of Lydda and Edessa. So he sought to build for the Muslims a mosque that should be unique and a wonder to the world. And in like manner is it not evident that ‘Abd al-Malik, seeing the greatness of the martyrium [qubbah] of the Holy Sepulchre and its magnificence was moved lest it should dazzle the minds of Muslims and hence erected above the Rock the Dome which is now seen there. – Al-Maqdisi (984 CE), reporting words of his uncle1 In this place, by divine command, Solomon made the Temple of the Lord. He built it with magnificent workmanship without any equal, and decorated it with all the ornament about which one reads in the Book of Kings. In its glory it excelled all other houses and buildings. In the middle of this Temple is to be seen a rock which is high and large and hollow underneath, in which was the Holy of Holies. There Solomon put the Ark of the Covenant, with the manna and the rod of Aaron … and the two tables of the Covenant. … There the child Jesus was circumcised on the eighth day, and was named ‘Jesus’. There the Lord Jesus was offered by his parents with the Virgin Mother Mary on the day of her purification, and received by Simeon … – Saewulf, in Jerusalem between 1101 and 11032 1 As translated in O. Grabar, ‘The Umayyad Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem’, Ars Orientalis 3 (1959), 33–62 [55]. The passage has been central to modern interpretations of the Dome of the Rock. Pringle, Churches, III, 399, warns against putting on it more weight than it can bear. See V. Shalev-Hurvitz, Holy Sites Encircled: The Early Byzantine Concentric Churches of Jerusalem, Oxford, 2015, 303–7, 312–22. 2 Extracts from Saewulf, ‘A Reliable Account of the Situation of Jerusalem’, trans. Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrimage, 104–5.

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Robert Hillenbrand now ensures we do some justice to Islamic Jerusalem. He describes a deepening Muslim veneration for the city and in particular for the Dome of the Rock over several centuries following its completion in 691 to 692. Among his principal sources is The Merits of Jerusalem by the Baghdadi theologian Ibn al-Jauzi around 1200. Such Merits form a familiar genre from the ninth century onwards; Ibn al-Jauzi’s, however, here gets the attention it deserves for the first time. The Old Testament and eschatological associations of the Dome and of the Rock, often derived from Jewish traditions, are pervasively treated in such Merits; but over time the Rock became most famous and most revered for its part in Muhammad’s Night Journey. Here Hillenbrand draws on another unfamiliar – and beautiful – source: a Persian painting of the Night Journey now in Istanbul [Colour Pl. XXX]. One token of the reverence with which the Dome was invested is the need to cleanse it, in 1187, from Christian pollution. To conclude, Hillenbrand evokes the sensory impact that the Dome would have made, shimmering under vast candelabra, saturated in colour, textured with metalwork, marble and carpets, and richly perfumed. He writes from a personal experience of the Dome now rare for non-Muslims: of the warmth still perceptible in the hole in the Rock; of the Dome’s beauty under candlelight, free from neon. Eric Fernie finds the significance of supposedly ‘Solomonic’ spiral columns, before the fifteenth century, not in the Temple but in St Peter’s. David Ekserdjian takes us back to the Dome of the Rock and to the influence of its lovely symmetry on Renaissance depictions of the Temple. He deftly discovers an inspiration for Raphael’s Marriage of the Virgin (Brera) and its sixteen-sided Temple in the interior arcade, of sixteen columns and round arches, of S. Angelo, Perugia – a church which Raphael himself shows in an early pen-and-ink drawing of St Jerome (Ashmolean). Robert Ousterhout has over the years drawn fruitful contrasts between the sanctity of Jerusalem on the one hand and of Constantinople on the other. In his present chapter he takes a further turn: to study the contrast between western and eastern responses to Jerusalem’s Temple in the difference between a narrowly symbolic reference (more often seen in the West) and the rich polyvalence of metaphor (valued in the East). Hereby he enriches still further – this time, drawing on Ricoeur – the distinctions we need in order to do justice to the buildings and ways of thought that are, throughout this book, the subjects of our scrutiny.

MEDIEVAL MUSLIM VENERATION OF THE DOME OF THE ROCK ROBERT HILLENBRAND

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he veneration of the Dome of the Rock in medieval times is a huge topic, and a short chapter can do no more than tilt at it. But even so, given the huge literature on the Dome of the Rock1 [Colour Pls V–VIII] as a building and as a speaking symbol at the time of its completion in 691 to 692,2 it is curious that scholars have devoted so much less attention to how it functioned thereafter. The history of its construction, in short, has to some degree obscured its meaning for later Muslims, and in particular what they thought about it and what they did there. And this particular building has a way of transforming itself from one era to the next, constantly acquiring new associations – note, for example, its 1 The bibliography on it assembled by K. A. C. Creswell, Early Muslim Architecture: Umayyads AD 622–750, Oxford, 1969, I.1, 124–9, which takes the count to 1964, totals 334 items. Since then it has probably doubled at the very least. In this chapter I refer particularly to G. Le Strange, ‘Description of the Noble Sanctuary at Jerusalem in 1470 AD, by Kamal (or Shams) ad Din as Suyuti. Extracts retranslated by G. Le Strange, MRAS’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland (New Series) 19.2 (1887), 247–305 [hereafter Le Strange, ‘Description’]; G. Le Strange, Palestine under the Moslems: A Description of Syria and the Holy Land from AD 650 to 1500, repr. Beirut, 1965 [hereafter Le Strange, Palestine]; C. D. Matthews, Palestine: Mohammedan Holy Land, New Haven, 1949 [hereafter Matthews, Palestine]; W. M. Thackston, Jr. (trans.), Naser-e Khosraw’s Book of Travels, Albany, NY, 1986 [hereafter Travels, trans. Thackston]. 2 It was begun, according to al-‘Ulaimi (though this is a very late source), in 66/685–6. See Mujir al-Din al-‘Ulaimi, Uns al-Jalil, trans. H. Sauvaire as Histoire de Jérusalem et d’Hébron depuis Abraham jusqu’à la fin du XVe siècle de J.-C. Fragments de la Chronique de Moudjir-ed-dyn traduits sur le texte arabe, Paris, 1876, 48; this is the date accepted by S. D. Goitein, ‘The Sanctity of Jerusalem and Palestine in Early Islam’, Studies in Islamic History and Institutions, Leiden, 1968, 135. According to Sibt b. al-Jauzi, quoted by al-Suyuti from Jamal al-Din Ahmad al-Maqdisi’s Muthir al-Gharam ila Ziyarat al-Quds wa’l-Sham, it was begun in 69/688–9; see Le Strange, ‘Description’, 280 (for the Arabic text see 300, lines 5–6).

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formidable online presence. So this monument, like the memories that it evokes, is malleable and multivalent.3

THE INCREASING SANCTIFICATION OF JERUSALEM It will be convenient to begin with the increasingly intense sanctification of Jerusalem itself,4 which was especially marked in the Umayyad period.5 Indeed, many of the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad concerning Jerusalem have been attributed to the second half of the seventh century.6 There is space here to do no more than allude to the special place of Jerusalem for Muslims as the first direction of prayer (qibla),7 or to its special role as a place of pilgrimage,8 especially under the caliph ‘Abd al-Malik (685–705), who built the Dome of the Rock. Indeed, it has been suggested, on the basis of verses declaimed by a Bedouin chieftain of perhaps the sixth or early seventh century, that a sacrificial ceremony was instituted there which had a particular connection with the Umayya tribe, even though this ceremony was probably discontinued after the fall of

3 For my earlier attempts to explore this monument’s past and present, see respectively R. Hillenbrand, ‘Das Vermächtnis des Felsendoms’, in Forschungsforum. Berichte aus der Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, Heft 2, Orientalistik, Bamberg, 1990, 64–71 (trans. as ‘The Legacy of the Dome of the Rock’, in idem, Studies in Medieval Islamic Architecture, I, London, 2001, 1–26); and idem, ‘The Dome of the Rock: From Medieval Symbol to Modern Propaganda’, in J. A. Franklin, T. A. Heslop and C. Stevenson (eds), Architecture and Interpretation [FS Eric Fernie], Woodbridge, 2012, 343–56. 4 Goitein, ‘Sanctity’ [n. 2 above], 135–48. 5 I. Hasson (ed.), Abu Bakr Muhammad b. Ahmad al-Wasiti. Fada’il al-Bayt al-Muqaddas, Jerusalem, 1979, 18–21. 6 M. Kister, ‘A Comment on the Antiquity of Traditions Praising Jerusalem’, in L. I. Levine (ed.), The Jerusalem Cathedra: Studies in the History, Archaeology, Geography and Ethnography of the Land of Israel, Jerusalem, 1981, 185. A tradition related by al-Zuhri contextualizes this by stating: ‘Allah hath not sent a prophet to the earth since the descent of Adam (from Paradise) who hath not set as his point to face in prayer the Rock of Jerusalem’ (see al-Fazari’s 14th-century text Kitab Ba‘ith al-Nufus ila Ziyarat al-Quds al-Mahrus [The Book of Arousing Souls to Visit Jerusalem’s Holy Walls], trans. Matthews, Palestine, 18). Cf. al-Suyuti’s statement that the qibla of Moses ‘is said to have been the Rock of the Holy House’ (Shams al-Din al-Suyuti, Kitab ithaf al-akhissa bi fada’il al-Masjid al-Aqsa, trans. J. Reynolds [who was unaware that the chapter on the Dome of the Rock was taken from the Muthir al-Gharam by Jalal al-Din Ahmad al-Maqdisi] as The History of the Temple of Jerusalem, London, 1836, 286). His translation should be read in conjunction with Le Strange, ‘Description’. Le Strange replaces Reynolds’ translation of the work’s title (‘Choice gifts existing in the advantages of the Masjid al-Aqsa’) with one that makes better sense: ‘A Gift for Intimates concerning the Merits of the Aksa Mosque’ (Le Strange, ‘Description’, 249). 7 Le Strange, Palestine, 130. 8 Ibid., 116. The theme of pilgrimage runs through all the fada’il literature. For the highly contested theory that ‘Abd al-Malik sought to divert Muslim pilgrimage from Mecca to Jerusalem, see ibid. and I. Goldziher, in S. M. Stern (ed.), Muslim Studies (Muhammedanische Studien), trans. C. R. Barber and S. M. Stern, London, 1971, II, 44–5. This theory is convincingly trounced by Goitein, ‘Sanctity’ [n. 2 above], 135–8.

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the Umayyad dynasty in 750.9 And Jerusalem was venerated as the third holiest city of Islam after Mecca and Madina.10 Jerusalem was especially dear to those who lived in Palestine. There is a well-known literary equivalent to this devotion, namely the genre of sacred literature known as the Fada’il al-Quds (‘The Merits of Jerusalem’), examples of which are known to have existed from at least the late ninth century.11 These books incorporated a wealth of Jewish traditions about the city through the medium of Jewish converts,12 and it is even possible that guides for Christian pilgrims influenced Muslim writers in the later Middle Ages.13 This genre has its parallels in similar books14 praising not only Mecca and Madina but a host of other towns from Iraq to Central Asia.15 The many works of this type tend to recycle the same information, based largely on traditions attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, but their very number and popularity tell their own story. While many of these traditions were regarded by the learned as spurious, clearly both local people and visitors had an appetite for this material, which was regularly recited in mosques and thus reached maximum audiences. And its range was wide. In the particular case of Jerusalem, it set the city in the context of all three Abrahamic religions; explained its coming role at the resurrection and the Last Judgement; described the many sacred sites in the city; enumerated the many pious people who had lived there; and listed numerous traditions extolling the divine protection it enjoys and the extra value of prayer, pilgrimage and other religious exercises if they were carried out there.16 The Persian Nasir-i Khusrau, who recorded his impressions of Jerusalem (which he visited in 1047) in his book of travels,17 notes that: ‘This place is the third most 9 W. Caskel, Der Felsendom und die Wallfahrt nach Jerusalem, Cologne and Opladen, 1963, 27–30. 10 Le Strange, Palestine, 85, quoting al-Muqaddasi. 11 For a conspectus of this literature, see I. Hasson, ‘Muslim Literature in Praise of Jerusalem: Fada’il Bayt al-Maqdis’, in Levine, Jerusalem Cathedra [n. 6 above], 168–84. 12 Kister, ‘Comment’ [n. 6 above], 186; Goitein, ‘Sanctity’ [n. 2 above], 144–6. 13 E. Ashtor, ‘Muslim and Christian Literature in Praise of Jerusalem’, in Levine, Jerusalem Cathedra, 189. Ashtor makes this suggestion in the context of a stinging attack on the intellectual poverty and blinkered vision of the Fada’il al-Quds genre in comparison with the works of Christian visitors to Jerusalem. For further comparisons see Matthews, Palestine, xxvii and Goitein, ‘Sanctity’, 146, 148. 14 For an overview, see E. A. Gruber, Verdienst und Rang. Die Fada’il als literarisches und gesellschaftliches Problem im Islam, Freiburg im Breisgau, 1975; G. E. von Grunebaum, ‘The Sacred Character of Islamic Cities’, in A. Badawi (ed.), Mélanges Taha Husain, Cairo, 1962, 25–37; and R. Sellheim, s.v. ‘Fadila’, EI, 2nd edn, II, Leiden, 1965, 729a. For the early evolution of the genre, see E. Sivan, ‘The Beginnings of the ‘Fada’il al-Quds’ Literature’, Israel Oriental Studies 1 (1971), 262–71. 15 Sivan, ‘Beginnings’ [n. 14 above], 264. For a detailed study of one such case, namely Balkh, see A. Azad, Sacred Landscape in Medieval Afghanistan. Revisiting the Fada’il-i Balkh, Oxford, 2013, especially the general discussion on 12–15 and 46–7. 16 Sivan, ‘Beginnings’, 266–7. 17 Travels, trans. Thackston, 21–35; for the Dome of the Rock, see 30–2; J. M. Bloom, ‘Nasir Khusraw’s Description of Jerusalem’, in A. Korangy and D. Sheffield (eds), No

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holy place of God, and it is well known among those learned in religion that prayer made in Jerusalem is worth twenty-five thousand ordinary prayers. Every prayer said in Madina is worth fifty thousand, and every prayer said in Mecca is worth one hundred thousand.’18 To a modern mind such prayers, with their distinctive flavour of sacred arithmetic, are in the nature of plenary indulgences; some commentators say they wipe out all sin. Pilgrims to Jerusalem go to Paradise; a single silver coin given there as alms rescues the giver from the fires of hell, as does a day of fasting there.19 Jerusalem was also, according to the fourteenth-century Jewish traveller Ibn Chelo, the epicentre of a network of seven roads connecting it with many of the major shrines and places of visitation in the Holy Land, namely Bethlehem, Hebron, Ghazza, Nablus, Ludd, Tabariyya, Safad and Banyas.20 Some Fada’il works, such as that of al-Fazari, extend their scope to some of these other locations, for instance Hebron.21 The earliest book of this kind to survive, that by a certain al-Ramli, was written before 912 and is preserved, embedded as it were, in a later guide.22 The example set by al-Ramli was followed by a whole succession of later authors, from al-Wasiti,23 al-Raba’i24 and Ibn al-Murajja25 (all of the early eleventh century) through al-Fazari (early fourteenth century)26 to Jamal al-Din Ahmad al-Maqdisi (1351; his work is known as the first Muthir, and was comprehensively plagiarized by Shams al-Din al-Suyuti)27 and Mujir

Tapping around Philology [FS Wheeler McIntosh Thackston Jr], Wiesbaden, 2014, 395–406; for the Dome of the Rock, see 399. 18 Travels, trans. Thackston, 32; cf. Ibn al-Jauzi, Fada’il al-Quds, trans. J. S. Jabbur, ‘The Merits of Jerusalem’ [Ph.D. thesis, Princeton University, 1947], 23–4. 19 F. E. Peters, Jerusalem: The Holy City in the Eyes of Chroniclers, Visitors, Pilgrims, and Prophets from the Days of Abraham to the Beginnings of Modern Times, Princeton, 1985, 337–8. 20 H. Lutfi, Al-Quds al-Mamlukiyya: A History of Mamluk Jerusalem based on the Haram Documents, Berlin, 1985, 112. 21 Such as the work of al-Fazari (The Book of Arousing Souls) [n. 6 above]: see Matthews, Palestine, 34–9. 22 S. A. Mourad, ‘The Symbolism of Jerusalem in Early Islam’, in T. Mayer and S. A. Mourad (eds), Jerusalem: Idea and Reality, Abingdon and New York, 2008, 88–98. 23 For a brief summary of how al-Wasiti’s book is organized, see Hasson, ‘Muslim Literature’ [n. 11 above], 174–5. See too N. Rabbat, ‘The Dome of the Rock Revisited’, Muqarnas 10 (1993), 67–75 [68, 71]. 24 Fada’il al-Sham wa’l-Dimishq, ed. S. al-Munajjid, Damascus, 1950; his work was read out in public in April 1187, a time when Saladin was mustering his forces for a final and successful attack on Jerusalem (C. Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives, Edinburgh, 1999, 175). 25 Fada’il Bait al-Maqdis wa’l-Sham, trans. R. Hartmann, Der Felsendom in Jerusalem und seine Geschichte, Strassburg, 1909, 34–5 (this relates how ‘Abd al-Malik gathered men and money for the building of the Dome of the Rock and entrusted the project to Raja b. Halwa and Yazid b. Sallam). 26 Trans. Matthews, Palestine, 1–41. 27 Much of his text on the Dome of the Rock is reproduced in Shams al-Din al-Suyuti, Kitab ithaf, trans. Reynolds [n. 6 above]; for comments on this work, see Le Strange, ‘Description’, 247; Creswell, Architecture [n. 1 above], 125, n.1; and Le Strange, Palestine, 12.

MEDIEVAL MUSLIM VENERATION OF THE DOME OF THE ROCK

al-Din al-‘Ulaimi (the latter two both of the late fifteenth century).28 All these works would have formed the bedrock of the veneration accorded to the city, and to its key monuments, by both local Muslims and the numerous Muslim visitors and pilgrims who thronged to Jerusalem over the medieval centuries. These books have attracted significant scholarship, but this cannot be said for the work in this genre written by the celebrated Baghdadi theologian Ibn al-Jauzi around 1200.29 Hence in the next section it will be appropriate to use this particular text more than any other to give the flavour of such works. It is instructive to note that Ibn al-Jauzi’s treatment of his subject was innocent of any personal experience of the city whose praises he sang so enthusiastically.

RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS ASSOCIATED WITH THE DOME OF THE ROCK In Muslim tradition, perhaps the holiest place in the holy city which is itself in the Holy Land was the Rock over which the caliph ‘Abd al-Malik raised his great dome in 691 to 692. This emphasis is fully apparent in the early literature on the merits of Jerusalem.30 And indeed a hadith transmitted by Ka‘b b. Ahbar states: ‘the most beloved thing about Syria in the sight of Allah is Jerusalem; and the most beloved thing about Jerusalem in the sight of Allah are the Rock and the Mount of Olives’.31 Ibn ‘Asakir (d. 1176) is even more assertive, citing the following hadith recounted by Thaur ibn Yazid (d. 770): ‘The holiest part of earth is Syria; the holiest part of Syria is Palestine; the holiest part of Palestine is Jerusalem; the holiest part of Jerusalem is the Temple Mount area; the holiest part of the Temple Mount area is the Temple [al-masjid]; and the holiest part of the Temple is the Dome [of the Rock].’32 One tradition avers that the Rock was the very first part of the earth to be created;33 other traditions hold that Allah said to the Rock: ‘Thou art my strength; upon thee will I assuredly fix my friendship, that my people may assemble together upon thee.’34 So it is not surprising Al-‘Ulaimi, Uns al-Jalil, trans. Sauvaire [n. 2 above], preface. For the Arabic text, see J. S. Jabbur (ed.), Fada’il al-Quds ta’lif al-Shaikh al-Imam Abi’lFaraj ‘Abd al-Rahman ibn ‘Ali ibn al-Jauzi, Beirut, 1979. 30 Cf. the traditions collected by al-Wasiti and listed in Hasson, ‘Muslim Literature’ [n. 11 above], 178–81. For a note of warning on this material, with its emphasis on Jewish tradition even though ‘there were no Jews in Jerusalem’ in the late 6th century, see O. Grabar, The Shape of the Holy: Early Islamic Jerusalem, Princeton, 1996, 165–6, 170. 31 Matthews, Palestine, 17. 32 S. A. Mourad and J. E. Lindsay, The Intensification and Reorientation of Sunni Jihad Ideology in the Crusader Period. Ibn ‘Asakir of Damascus (1105–1176) and his Age, with an Edition and Translation of Ibn ‘Asakir’s The Forty Hadiths for Inciting Jihad, Leiden and Boston, 2013, 6. Al-Ya‘qubi employs a similarly reductive technique to exalt Baghdad (Ya‘kubi. Les Pays, trans. G. Wiet, Cairo, 1937, 4). 33 Shams al-Din al-Suyuti, Kitab ithaf, trans. Reynolds [n. 6 above], 19. 34 Ibid., 21; this tradition continues by stating that Allah promises that the rivers of the Rock shall be of milk, honey and wine. 28

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that a rich cluster of beliefs, myths and legends has accumulated around that numinous spot. Relevant examples of very early traditions include: ‘All sweet water originates beneath the Rock [foundation stone of the Temple]’; ‘The Rock is the navel of the Universe’, and the journey of the Ka‘ba to the Rock on the Day of Judgment.35 The Old Testament associations of the site are indeed tenacious. Al-Ramli asserts that: ‘No one visits the Temple but receives the blessing of Solomon’s prayer’ (the great prayer of Solomon at the consecration of the Temple in I Kings 8, 22–53), which the Muslim author interprets as not bounded by the constraints of time, so that he takes this prayer to refer to visitors to the Dome of the Rock.36 This prayer was believed to have been uttered while Solomon was actually standing upon the Rock,37 and some believed that he was buried here.38 Al-Ramli cites numerous other traditions that extol the sanctity of the Rock, seen as the sole survivor of Solomon’s Temple. He notes: ‘It is written in the Torah that God said to the Rock of Jerusalem: “You are my earthly throne. From you I ascended to Heaven. From beneath you I spread the earth, and every stream that flows from the mountains originates from underneath you.”’39 And not only the rivers of the earth, for: ‘From underneath the Rock spring four of the rivers of Paradise: Jaxartes (Sayhan), Oxus (Jayhan), Euphrates (al-Furat) and Nile (al-Nil).’40 Al-Fazari, writing in the fourteenth century, gives a different version: Sihon, Gihon, the Euphrates and the Nile.41 The connection with the rivers of the Garden of Eden mentioned in Genesis is patent.42 Later authors, moreover, stress the Rock as a source for water.43 More generally, various links between the Dome of the Rock and Paradise were proposed by medieval Muslim writers.44 But Muslim veneration of the site had a broader scope than this, encompassing as it did, in common with the sites in the city venerated by the other Abrahamic faiths, ‘a large

Kister, ‘Comment’ [n. 6 above], 185–6. Mourad, ‘Symbolism’ [n. 22 above], 92. Cf. the story of Solomon’s distress when his key was unable to open the door to the Rock, even though he called on mankind and the jinn for help, until an ancient retainer of his father David taught him the prayer which opened that door (al-Fazari, trans. Matthews, Palestine, 17). 37 Shams al-Din al-Suyuti, Kitab ithaf, trans. Reynolds, 38. 38 A.-M. Eddé, Saladin, Paris, 2008, 188. 39 Mourad, ‘Symbolism’ [n. 22 above], 93. Ibn al-Jauzi repeats this passage virtually word for word, attributing it to al-Walid on the final authority of Ka‘b (Fada’il, trans. Jabbur [n. 29 above], 79), and adding: ‘We have already mentioned in a citation from the Prophet that Gabriel brought him to the Rock and said: From here ascended your Lord to heaven’ (ibid.). The repetitive nature of the Fada’il al-Quds texts has often attracted unfavourable comment. Cf. Le Strange, Palestine, 11–12. 40 Mourad, ‘Symbolism’ [n. 22 above], 93. 41 Matthews, Palestine, 15. 42 In the bible, Gihon and Euphrates are two of the four rivers flowing from Eden; the other two are Pison and Hiddekel (Genesis 2, 11–14). 43 Le Strange, Palestine, 221. 44 M. Gil, A History of Palestine, 634–1099, trans. E. Broido, Cambridge, 1992, 95. 35

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I.  THE MADABA MAP. THIS MOSAIC MAP WAS LAID DOWN IN THE SIXTH CENTURY ON THE FLOOR OF A CHURCH IN MADABA; MADABA ITSELF, TO THE EAST OF JERUSALEM, WOULD HAVE BEEN SHOWN (IN A PORTION NOW MISSING) BETWEEN JERUSALEM AND THE CHURCH’S ALTAR. AN INSCRIPTION NAMES THE CITY NOT BY ITS OFFICIAL NAME OF AELIA (WITHOUT CAPITOLINA FROM THE FOURTH CENTURY) BUT ‘THE HOLY CITY JERUSALEM’. READING FROM THE LEFT (NORTH): THE NORTHERN GATE (TODAY, THE DAMASCUS GATE); THE COLUMN SQUARE; THE COLONNADED CARDO MAXIMUS, RUNNING STRAIGHT LEFT TO RIGHT (NORTH TO SOUTH); THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE, DOWNWARDS FROM THE CENTRE OF THE CARDO, WITH ITS FLIGHT OF ENTRANCE STEPS, PEDIMENTED PORTICO OF THREE DOORS (WHICH LED INTO THE OUTER COURTYARD, NOT SHOWN ON THE MAP), BASILICA AND ROTUNDA; TO ITS RIGHT, A BUILDING WITH DOOR, TWO WINDOWS AND RED ROOF OF FOUR TESSERAE, PERHAPS THE SEPULCHRE’S BAPTISTERY (IF IT WAS ON THE SOUTH SIDE); NEXT AGAIN TO THE RIGHT, THE DECUMANUS, AN INVERTED L LEADING UP (EASTWARDS) FROM THE WESTERN GATE OF DAVID TO THE CARDO, WITH A BRANCH TO THE RIGHT LEADING TO MOUNT ZION; IN THE WALL OF THE CHURCH SHOWN OPPOSITE THE DECUMANUS AND ABOVE THE CARDO, TWO DARK COLUMNS REPRESENTING THE TETRAPYLON AT THE STREETS’ CROSSING. THE BASILICA ON MOUNT ZION IS AT THE RIGHT HAND END OF THE CARDO’S BRANCH: THE DOUBLE YELLOW DOORS AND YELLOW PEDIMENT NEAR THE CITY’S LOWER RIGHT-HAND EDGE. THE TEMPLE MOUNT, WITHOUT ANY BUILDINGS AT THE TIME, IS SHOWN – IF AT ALL – ONLY BY THE SMALL ESPLANADE TO THE RIGHT OF THE TOP (EASTERN) GATE. THE FOOT OF THE SEPULCHRE’S STEPS (WHICH WERE ADORNED WITH A PROPYLON) IS SHOWN AS THE CENTRAL POINT OF THE OVAL CITY; AND THE CITY ITSELF IS LIKELY TO HAVE BEEN AT THE CENTRE OF THE WHOLE MAP.

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II.  THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE, JERUSALEM: SOUTH ENTRANCE

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III.  THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE, JERUSALEM: SOUTH TRANSEPT FAÇADE

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IV.  (A) THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE, JERUSALEM: THE CHURCH AND BELL-TOWER, SEEN FROM THE SOUTH-EAST

(B)  THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE, JERUSALEM: THE HOLY FIRE

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V.  (A) THE TEMPLE MOUNT / NOBLE SANCTUARY, JERUSALEM

(B)  THE DOME OF THE ROCK, JERUSALEM: VIEW FROM THE CEILING

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VI.  (A) THE DOME OF THE ROCK, JERUSALEM

(B)  THE DOME OF THE ROCK, JERUSALEM

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VII.  CARL HAAG, THE HOLY ROCK, SUMMIT OF MOUNT MORIAH, JERUSALEM

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VIII.  THE DOME OF THE ROCK, JERUSALEM

IX.  BUKHTNASAR (NEBUCHADNEZZAR) DECREES THE DESTRUCTION OF THE JEWISH TEMPLE, FROM AL-BIRUNI, CHRONOLOGY OF ANCIENT NATIONS, 1307

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X.  THE PROPHET MUHAMMAD SITS WITH THE ABRAHAMIC PROPHETS IN JERUSALEM, SURROUNDED BY ANGELS, FROM A MIRAJNAMA (BOOK OF ASCENSION), TOPKAPI PALACE, ISTANBUL, PERSIA, EARLY FOURTEENTH CENTURY

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XI.  CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE AND THE DOME OF THE ROCK, FROM THE PRAYERBOOK OF RENÉ D’ANJOU, c. 1442–43

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XII.  (A) THE APSE-MOSAIC OF S. PUDENZIANA, ROME

(B)  THE APSE-MOSAIC OF S. PUDENZIANA, ROME: DRAWING BY ECLISSI, 1595

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XIII.  THE ORTHODOX BAPTISTERY, RAVENNA

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XIV.  RELIQUARY BOX IN THE SANCTA SANCTORUM, ROME: INTERIOR OF LID

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XV.  RELIQUARY BOX IN THE SANCTA SANCTORUM, ROME: PAINTED LID; AND INTERIOR WITH STONES

XVI.  SILVER-GILT RELIQUARY BOX FROM THE PHAROS, CONSTANTINOPLE, NOW IN SAINTE CHAPELLE: SLIDING LID, FRONT AND BACK

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XVII.  SILVER-GILT RELIQUARY BOX FROM THE PHAROS, CONSTANTINOPLE, NOW IN SAINTE CHAPELLE: FRONT, WITH RESURRECTION SCENE

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XVIII.  (A) HAGIA SOPHIA, ISTANBUL

(B)  HAGIA SOPHIA, ISTANBUL

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MEDIEVAL MUSLIM VENERATION OF THE DOME OF THE ROCK

number of hallowed functions – commemoration, pilgrimage, prayer for forgiveness and eternal life’.45 Al-Ramli continues by emphasizing the apocalyptic element, quoting the tradition that: ‘God Almighty, when he rested in Heaven, said to the Rock of Jerusalem: “Here is my abode and the place of my throne on the Day of Judgment. My creation will be rushed to it. Here is Heaven to its right and Hell to its left, and I shall erect the scale in front of it.”’46 The connection with Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac also figures in al-Ramli’s text. He notes God’s command: ‘Take your only son, the one you love, go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there on one of the mountains that I shall show you. His saying [continues al-Ramli] the land of Moriah means Jerusalem, and one of the mountains means the Rock.’47 Such beliefs go far to explain the popularity of the Rock as a magnet for pilgrims48 in the earliest Islamic times, and hence why the caliph ‘Abd al-Malik built the dome over it. Some of these pilgrims, of course, were on their way to Mecca, since Jerusalem was an important stopping point on a key hajj route.49 Al-Ramli cites a report that the caliph sent letters to his governors announcing that ‘the caliph has ordered the construction of a dome to shelter the Rock of Jerusalem so that the Muslim [visitors] would not be exposed to the heat or cold’.50 The terminology used in the medieval texts on Jerusalem for the most frequently visited sacred sites deserves brief discussion at this point. Muslim authors readily and interchangeably use al-bait al-muqaddas (often figuratively rendered as ‘The Sanctuary’) both for the entire Haram al-Sharif (the huge walled esplanade behind the Herodian walls) and for individual buildings within it,51 such as the Aqsa Mosque or the Dome of the Rock – although both these latter buildings are often specified by name as well. This results in a frustrating ambiguity when this phrase is used – for example, in the account by Ibn al-Jauzi of miracles associated with al-bait al-muqaddas,52 the references to gates, doors, a mihrab and an underground pool make slightly better sense in the context of the Dome Grabar, Shape [n. 30 above], 172. Mourad, ‘Symbolism’, 94. Al-Fazari notes: ‘Allah said to the Rock of Jerusalem, In thee is my Paradise and my Hell, and in thee is my reward and punishment’ (Matthews, Palestine, 14). 47 Mourad, ‘Symbolism’, 95; cf. Rabbat, ‘Dome’ [n. 23 above], 72–3 and O. Grabar, ‘The Umayyad Dome of the Rock’, Ars Orientalis 3 (1959), 39, 42–6. The latter article remains the classic account of the building in the period of its construction. 48 Al-Fazari, whose book in praise of Jerusalem dates from the fourteenth century, apostrophizes the Rock as follows: ‘And blessed is he who visits thee! Again, blessed is he who visits thee! Again, blessed is he who visits thee!’ (Matthews, Palestine, 15). 49 Lutfi, Al-Quds [n. 20 above], 109. 50 Mourad, ‘Symbolism’ [n. 22 above], 95; cf. Le Strange, Palestine, 144. 51 A serious problem of nomenclature arises here, as in many other places in the Fada’il al-Quds literature and elsewhere (see Hasson, al-Wasiti [n. 5 above], 14). Sometimes the term al-Masjid al-Aqsa is used to describe the city itself (ibid.). 52 Ibn al-Jauzi, Fada’il, trans. Jabbur [n. 29 above], 18–19. 45

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of the Rock rather than the Aqsa Mosque, let alone the entire Haram. A relevant visual clue is found in an illustration of the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by Bukhtnasar (Nebuchadnezzar) in a manuscript of al-Biruni’s Al-athar al-baqiya ‘an qurun al-khaliya (translatable as ‘The Chronology of Ancient Nations’), dated 1307 and perhaps produced in north-west Iran. This painting depicts Solomon’s Temple in the guise of the Dome of the Rock, with an inscription in its cornice reading al-bait al-muqaddas (‘The Holy House’) [Colour Pl. IX].53 The Dome of the Rock, then, along with the Haram al-Sharif itself, of which it is part, gradually came to hold an exalted place in the hearts, imaginations and even dreams54 of many Muslims, including for example al-Ghazali (d. 1111), the Muslim Aquinas, who meditated in the Dome of the Rock.55 This veneration triggered numerous quite detailed prescriptions governing how pious Muslims should behave there. Examples include the need to descend to the chamber underneath the Rock and pray there, since ‘prayer in that place will be answered, if Allah the Exalted will’.56 Even the very act of entry has its rules: ‘It is considered fitting for him who enters unto the Rock that he place it on his right, so that he is in the reverse position to the circuit around the Sacred House of Allah’ (the Ka‘ba).57 Other instructions cover the exact wording that pilgrims to the Dome of the Rock should use in their prayers, the number of prostrations they should perform, which chapters of the Qur’an they should recite, the exact locations, such as three of the corners of the building and a particular slab (‘The Black Paving Stone’, al-balata al-sauda’)58 where some special exertion, repentance or alms-giving should be undertaken,59 and what they should and should not do. Thus to put one’s hands on the Rock is laudable; to kiss it is not.60 And it is one of seven places upon which it is unacceptable to perform prayer.61 The offering of special prayers at the 53 For the wider context of this image, see P. Berger, The Crescent on the Temple: The Dome of the Rock as Image of the Ancient Jewish Sanctuary, Leiden and Boston, 2012, 189–96. 54 A. Kaplony, The Haram of Jerusalem 324–1099: Temple, Friday Mosque, Area of Spiritual Power, Stuttgart, 2002, 75. This book is a treasure-trove of material on the Dome of the Rock, scrupulously organized on the basis of chronology and content. 55 In his autobiography al-Ghazali records: ‘I used to pray in seclusion for a time in the Mosque [of the Umayyads in Damascus], mounting to its minaret for the whole day and shutting myself in. Then I traveled from Damascus to Jerusalem, where I would go daily into the Dome of the Rock and shut myself in’ (R. J. McCarthy, Freedom and Fulfillment: An Annotated Translation of Al-Ghazali’s al-Munqidh min al-Dalal and Other Relevant Works of al-Ghazali, Boston, 1980, 93). 56 Matthews, Palestine, 17. Cf. Peters, Jerusalem [n. 19 above], 338. 57 Matthews, Palestine, 16. 58 Le Strange, Palestine, 164, quoting Ibn ‘Abd Rabbih. Cf. al-Fazari, trans. Matthews, Palestine, 18, where this piece of black marble is identified as ‘one of the gates of paradise … verily, prayers said there will be answered’. 59 Sivan, ‘Beginnings’ [n. 14 above], 271. 60 Peters, Jerusalem [n. 19 above], 338. 61 According to al-Fazari (Matthews, Palestine, 16).

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Black Paving Stone and in the cave under the Rock suggests an accretion of sanctity in some parts of the building over the centuries, since there is no mention of these sites in the Umayyad period.62 This process of growing sanctification took very visible form in the cordon sanitaire of buildings that in time surrounded the Dome of the Rock, focusing attention on it by means of such devices as variations in height, anticipation, distance, contrasting scales, prescribed stopping spaces and sight lines, all of them designed to exalt the great dome.63 Ibn al-Jauzi devotes several chapters of his work to this building: XXII (‘On the Virtue of the Rock’); XXIII (‘On the merit of prayer at both sides of the Rock’); XXIV (‘An account of the Rock on which Solomon stood when he completed [the construction]’); XXV (‘The fact that the Prophet of God ascended to heaven therefrom’ – compare XVI, ‘An account of the nocturnal journey of the Apostle of God to it [Jerusalem] and what he saw therein’), and finally XXVII (‘An account of the visit of the Ka‘bah to the Rock on Resurrection Day’). Very little of this is wholly new. Chapter XXIII, for example, takes up a theme already dealt with in greater detail by al-Wasiti,64 who devotes chapters 22 to 24, 26 to 27 and 32 of his work to the Rock.65 In al-Fazari’s text, on the other hand, only chapters 6 and 7 discuss the Rock.66 Ibn al-Jauzi notes: ‘Abu-al-Mu‘ammar al-Ansari related to us on the final authority of Ka‘b who said: Whosoever comes to the Sanctuary and prays at the right of the Rock or at its left and calls God at the place of the chain and gives alms little or much, his prayers shall be answered and God shall dispel his distress, and he shall be rid of his sins and become as he was on the day his mother bore him. If he asks God for martyrdom he shall be given it’.67 A similar tradition is related by al-Fazari: ‘Who prays in Jerusalem a thousand rak‘ahs on the right of the Rock and on the left of it, he shall enter Paradise before his death. Meaning, he shall see it in his dreams.’68 The Rock has miraculous properties, some of which are listed in Ibn al-Jauzi’s Chapter XXII, ‘On the Virtue of the Rock’: according to a tradition transmitted by Anas ibn Malik, it ‘is of the garden of Paradise, and it is the navel of the earth’,69 while another tradition, related by al-Walid on the final authority of Abu Huraira, says

62 O. Grabar, The Dome of the Rock, Cambridge, Mass. and London, 2006, 133–7; Kaplony, Haram [n. 54 above], 323–7, 510–12, 523–6, 735–7, 754–5. 63 See Grabar, Dome of the Rock, 137–40 and Kaplony, Haram, 71–3 for somewhat different ideas along these lines. 64 Hasson, al-Wasiti, Arabic text [n. 5 above], 72–6. 65 See Rabbat, ‘The Dome of the Rock Revisited’ [n. 23 above] for a detailed discussion of this material. 66 Matthews, Palestine, 14–18. 67 Ibn al-Jauzi, Fada’il, trans. Jabbur [n. 29 above], 75. 68 Matthews, Palestine, 16. 69 Ibn al-Jauzi, Fada’il, trans. Jabbur, 73.

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that ‘all the rivers, clouds, seas and winds come from under the Rock of the Sanctuary’.70 But perhaps the core of the Rock’s importance lies in its intimate connection with the Last Day in Muslim thought. A tradition transmitted by al-Khawlani states that: ‘God the Mighty and Glorious shall change the Rock of the Sanctuary on Resurrection Day into a white coral as broad as heaven and earth. Then He shall set up His throne on it and judge his servants. From it they shall go to heaven or to hell.’71 According to Ibn ‘Abbas: ‘the Rock of the Sanctuary is of the rocks of Paradise. The commentators said with regard to the words of God – “And listen on the day when the crier crieth”72 – He is Israfil who shall stand on the Rock of the Sanctuary and call [saying]: O people come to the reckoning, verily God commands you to assemble for the decision of judgment and this is the last blast.’73 The observant Persian traveller Nasir-i Khusrau notes that nobody has ever stood on the Rock, which he describes as bluish in colour.74 Yet in the very next sentence, without blinking an eyelid, he transmits the tradition that Abraham walked on it and that the footprints of Isaac as a small child, impressed onto the Rock as if it were soft clay, down to the imprint of his toes, can be seen there in seven different places.75 This touches on an ancient and numinous tradition. Many shrines throughout the Islamic world, especially in Iran and South Asia, continue this custom of displaying venerated footprints.76 Nasir-i Khusrau strangely does not mention the much-repeated belief that the footprint of Muhammad, made as he mounted his hybrid half-human, half-mule winged steed al-Buraq at the beginning of his ascension to Heaven (his mi‘raj), can also be seen there. And there is also a circular hole in the Rock, deep enough for the whole hand to be thrust in, which to this day is popularly believed to transmit heat, a reality I have myself experienced. For the devout, such vestiges provide the ocular and tangible proof for the oral tradition. Mystics were especially drawn to the Dome of the Rock. For Sufyan al-Thauri (d. 778), the greatest pleasure in life consisted in eating bananas (a rare treat at that time) in the shadow of this building.77 Nor should its political significance, especially in early Islamic times, be forgotten. Ibid. Ibid. 72 Qur’an 50, 41. 73 Ibn al-Jauzi, Fada’il, trans. Jabbur, 73. 74 Travels, trans. Thackston, 32. 75 Ibid. 76 P. Hasan, ‘The Footprint of the Prophet’, Muqarnas 10 (1993), 335–43 and M. Bernardini, ‘Popular and Symbolic Iconographies related to the Haram al-Sharif during the Ottoman Period’, in S. Auld and R. Hillenbrand (eds), Ottoman Jerusalem: The Living City: 1517–1917, London, 2000, I, 100–01 and colour plates III–VI. Cf. Le Strange, Palestine, 128. For a diverting popular account, see K. Makiya, The Rock: A Tale of Seventh-Century Jerusalem, New York, 2001, 177–86. 77 Goitein, ‘Sanctity’ [n. 2 above], 142, quoting Mujir al-Din al-‘Ulaimi. 70 71

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The Umayyad caliph Sulaiman received pledges of allegiance beside the Dome of the Rock in 715, and his successor, ‘Umar ibn ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, when he decided to call some of Sulaiman’s officials to account, had them brought to Jerusalem and received their oaths in the building by the Rock itself.78 Nearly five centuries later, in 1192, the amir ‘Izz al-Din Jurdik was appointed governor of Jerusalem by Saladin and formally installed in his post, after the Friday prayer, in the Dome of the Rock.79 So the ceremonial element associated with the building in its earliest days had not lapsed.

THE PURITANICAL BACKLASH Rich though the traditions relayed by the Merits literature are, they did not appeal to everyone.80 Perhaps the most vocal, eloquent and uncompromising opponent of the whole genre, especially in relation to Jerusalem, was the fourteenth-century iconoclast Ibn Taymiyya, a protoWahhabi who ranted against venerating Jerusalem as the site of the first qibla; against paying special respect to the Dome of the Rock, let alone praying in the direction of it; against the idea of visiting the tomb of anyone buried there (such as Zakariyya); against slaughtering animals anywhere near it; against the idea that the Rock bore any footprint; against the belief that the Sirat al-Mustaqim – the bridge, thin as a hair, that every soul must tread at the Last Judgment – was connected to it across the valley of Jehoshophat; and (above all, it seems) against the notion that circumambulation could be performed there.81 Yet Sibt ibn al-Jauzi, a thirteenth-century historian, says explicitly that people ‘used to stand by the Rock and circumambulate it as they used to circumambulate the Ka‘ba, and slaughter beasts on the day of the feast’ (i.e. ‘Id al-Adha).82 Saladin himself in 1189 chose the Dome of the Rock as the place in which to pray, give alms to the poor and to slaughter a sacrificial beast on the day of ‘Id al-Adha.83 He ordered a Qur’anic inscription (Sura 20, 1–21) to be set at the inner base of the Dome of the Rock. This gave the building a fresh nuance of significance in associating him with Moses and with the second caliph, ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab, as well as celebrating the return of A. A. Duri, ‘Jerusalem in the Early Islamic Period, 7th–11th Centuries AD’, in K. J. Asali (ed.), Jerusalem in History, Buckhurst Hill, 1989, 110; cf. A. Marsham, Rituals of Islamic Monarchy: Accession and Succession in the First Muslim Empire, Edinburgh, 2009, 135. 79 Eddé, Saladin [n. 38 above], 171. 80 For examples, see Goitein, ‘Sanctity’, 141 and Hasson, ‘Muslim Literature’ [n. 11 above], 176. See also H. Lazarus-Yafeh, ‘The Sanctity of Jerusalem in Islam’, in J. M. Oesterreicher and A. Sinai (eds), Jerusalem, New York, 1974, 221–2. 81 C. D. Matthews, ‘A Muslim Iconoclast (Ibn Taymiyyah) on the “Merits” of Jerusalem and Palestine’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 56 (1936), 2, 4–6; Hasson, ‘Muslim Literature’ [n. 11 above], 176–7. 82 A. Elad, Medieval Jerusalem and Islamic Worship: Holy Places, Ceremonies, Pilgrimage, Leiden, New York and Cologne, 1995, 53. 83 Eddé, Saladin [n. 38 above], 279. 78

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the city to Islamic rule.84 He is also alleged to have preached a sermon on the Haram al-Sharif (the precise location is not specified),85 and to have prayed in the Dome of the Rock a fortnight after capturing Jerusalem in 1187, so this demonstration of piety had clear triumphal associations.86 Ibn Taymiyya would not have approved. Not surprisingly, he spent a good deal of his career in prison. Anyway, for him there was no special merit in choosing Jerusalem, or indeed the Dome of the Rock, to carry out such religious exercises as prayer, fasting, alms-giving and pilgrimage, and in his view it was deluded to hope that these exercises would derive extra value from being carried out there.87 Yet his views were to leave no lasting impression on the Muslim world, and Jerusalem has maintained its hold on the Muslim imagination right up to our own times. King Faisal of Saudi Arabia said simply: ‘I do not want to die without having prayed in Jerusalem.’88

THE ROCK AND THE PROPHET MUHAMMAD’S NIGHT JOURNEY The strong biblical, and especially Jewish, flavour of the earliest traditions recorded about the site in the Muslim sources was gradually overlaid by exclusively Islamic material, and the association with Muhammad’s Night Journey, the mi‘raj, is an outstanding example of this trend. Nasir-i Khusrau was told in the early eleventh century ‘that on the night of the heavenly ascent, the Prophet first prayed in the Dome of the Rock and placed his hand on the Rock. When he had come out, the Rock rose up because of his majesty. He put his hand on the Rock, and it froze in its place, half of it being still suspended in the air … Beneath the Rock is a large cave where candles are kept burning. They say that when the Rock moved to rise up, this space was left, and, when it froze, this cave remained.’89 Over the 84 O. Latif, ‘The Place of Fada’il al-Quds (Merits of Jerusalem) Literature and Religious Poetry in the Muslim Effort to Recapture Jerusalem during the Crusades’ [Ph.D. thesis, Royal Holloway College, University of London, 2011], 151–8, who also discusses contemporary panegyric that takes up related themes; Grabar, Dome of the Rock [n. 62 above], 172–9; L. Korn, ‘Ayyubid Mosaics in Jerusalem’, in R. Hillenbrand and S. Auld (eds), Ayyubid Jerusalem: The Holy City in Context 1187–1250, London, 2009, 382–7; and M. Rosen-Ayalon, The Early Islamic Monuments of al-Haram al-Sharif: An Iconographic Study [Qedem. Monographs of the Institute of Archaeology. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 28], Jerusalem, 1989, which gives the complete inscription in colour (pls I– XVI). 85 Ibn al-Jauzi, Fada’il, trans. Jabbur [n. 29 above], 62. 86 Ibn al-Athir, Al-kamil fi’l-ta’rikh, trans. D. S. Richards as The Chronicle of Ibn al-Athir for the Crusading Period from al-Kamil fi’l-Ta’rikh. Part 2. The Years 541–589/1146–1193: The Age of Nur al-Din and Saladin, Farnham and Burlington, Vt., 2007, 334. 87 Travels, trans. Thackston, 33. 88 M. Gautier-Van Berchem and S. Ory, La Jérusalem musulmane dans l’oeuvre de Max van Berchem, Lausanne, 1978, back cover. 89 Travels, trans. Thackston, 33.

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centuries the mi‘raj narrative filled out. Among its earliest visual expressions is an undated but probably early-fourteenth-century Persian painting now in Istanbul [Colour Pl. X].90 Its large size (30cm x 24cm – it was probably a full-page picture) and lavish use of the most expensive materials (gold and ultramarine) create an atmosphere of heightened emotion, fervour, otherworldliness and spiritual significance that is fully appropriate to its subject – indeed, this is perhaps the closest that Islamic art had so far got to the idea of an icon. The scene focuses on Muhammad, the largest figure of all even though he is seated. He is anachronistically depicted Mongol-style with long plaits of hair, and attended by Adam, also seated, and identified – according to a near-contemporary Persian Mi‘rajnama manuscript narrating Muhammad’s Ascension – by his long black beard.91 This same text, dated 1286, singles out three prophets (Noah, Abraham and Moses) who speak in turn after Adam and whose comments on their prophetic calling are recorded.92 They are most likely the major standing figures on the right, clad in robes of pink, blue and red respectively. The speeches of what might be termed the minor figures in the text, namely David, Solomon, Job and Jonah, are not given. Still more prophets not mentioned by name were also present. The painting attempts to recreate the dramatis personae of this visionary scene, and does so with a spatial subtlety that is truly innovative in its use of a layered composition, overlap and repoussoir. In the left foreground stands Muhammad’s miraculous winged steed, al-Buraq, part human, part mule, in front of paired marble columns. The 1286 text notes that the archangel Gabriel tethered the reins of al-Buraq to a column by the Rock, and that ‘the trace of the rein will remain on that column until the Resurrection’.93 According to the same text in its description of al-Buraq, ‘its head was of ruby, its wings of pearl, its rump of coral, its ears of emerald and its belly of red coral’.94 But it is easier to imagine these exalted details than to render them visually, though it is evident that the painter did his best, as can be seen from the steed’s green ears and red belly. But al-Buraq is a peripheral figure here. The real subject of the painting is a test of Muhammad’s prophethood. Angels offer him a choice of four gold cups of water, milk, wine and honey – and of course he

90 R. Ettinghausen, ‘Persian Ascension Miniatures of the Fourteenth Century’, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei 12 (1957), 364–6; E. J. Grube, in E. G. Sims with B. Marshak and E. J. Grube, Peerless Images: Persian Painting and its Sources, London and New Haven, 2002, 147–8; S. S. Blair, ‘Ascending to Heaven. Fourteenth-Century Illustrations of the Prophet’s Mi‘rağ’, in K. Dévényi and A. Fodor (eds), Proceedings of the Colloquium on Paradise and Hell in Islam: Keszthely, 7–14 July 2002, Part One, Budapest, 2008, 22–4; and C. Gruber, The Ilkhanid Book of the Ascension: A Persian-Sunni Devotional Tale, London and New York, 2010, 27–8. 91 Gruber, Book of the Ascension [n. 90 above], 43. 92 Ibid., 43–4. 93 Ibid., 43. 94 Ibid., 39.

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makes the right choice, namely milk, thereby saving his community from drowning, drunkenness and unbelief. The setting is significant. A fully rationalized three-dimensional rendering of an octagonal building was plainly beyond the capacities even of this gifted artist, but there is a distinct nod to perspective, and the lofty mihrab, its polylobed arch95 enclosing a panel of blue-flecked green marble, the walls of gold enriched by scrollwork with clusters of dots, the Persian tilework, the serpentine verd-antique marble columns with gold imposts and stylobates, and finally the blue and white palette of the arcade, which reflects a contemporary Persian interest in glazed tilework – all this evokes a sumptuous interior. The Rock at centre stage in the foreground clinches the location. Not bad for a painter working more than a thousand miles away. Muhammad, seated cross-legged, is placed well above the Rock. His pose, his lobed halo and his mudra-like hand gesture all echo Buddhist devotional images. That these Far Eastern features should co-exist with others that recall Byzantine or even Sienese art should not be a surprise, for this painting was almost certainly produced at Tabriz, perhaps the most populous city on the entire planet at the time – a place where envoys from England and China rubbed shoulders. So this painting vividly evokes the wide reach of the Dome of the Rock in Muslim minds. And Christians too had their own traditions about this site. The Christian historian Eutychius, later patriarch of Alexandria, writing in 876, puts into the mouth of Sophronius, the patriarch of Jerusalem at the time of the Arab conquest in 638, the following interpretation of the Rock: ‘it is the rock where God spoke to Jacob and which Jacob called the Gate of Heaven and the Israelites the Holy of Holies. It is in the centre of the world and was a Temple for the Israelites, who held it in great veneration and wherever they were they turned their faces towards it in prayer.’96 Reliquary, omphalos of the earth, pathway to Heaven, entrance to the Garden of Eden, the epitome of fertility – this was indeed a numinous place without peer.

CHRISTIAN VENERATION OF THE DOME OF THE ROCK And so to the arrival of the Crusaders in Jerusalem in 1099.97 The Franks, for whom the building was the templum domini, put a huge golden cross on top of the Dome of the Rock, an altar on the rock itself, statues and images of Christ and the Madonna and Child inside the building, including (as one Muslim traveller noted) ‘an iron door This was not a feature of contemporary Persian architecture. Peters, Jerusalem [n. 19 above], 190. 97 For a magisterial survey of this question, see Berger, Crescent [n. 53 above], 75–91; and, for the further impact of the building in Western art between the Romanesque period and the early 16th century, see ibid., 93–188. 95

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[with] a representation of the Messiah in gold encrusted with precious stones’.98 Another Muslim visitor saw an image of Solomon there.99 All this was part of a general trend to revive the importance of the Haram area under Christian rule.100 The Crusaders put a metal grille around the Rock itself to prevent Christian pilgrims from breaking off bits of it, yet there was a thriving trade in these fragments, which were sold for their weight in gold as far afield as Constantinople and Sicily.101 This metal grille replaced the ‘marble balustrade to keep people away’ noted by Nasir-i Khusrau.102 And the Crusaders erected over the footprint of the Prophet Muhammad, as one chronicler says, ‘a small gilded dome with raised marble pillars and they said it was the place of the Messiah’s foot’.103 Ibn Wasil (d. 1298), says: ‘I saw monks and priests in charge of the sacred rock … I saw on it bottles of wine for the ceremony of the mass.’104 All these changes, which broke many a Muslim taboo, rendered the call to prayer invalid, polluted sacred space, and were symbols of political domination as much as of religious faith.

THE MUSLIM RESPONSE TO CHRISTIAN DEFILEMENT OF THE DOME OF THE ROCK Fundamentally, the Muslims regarded the Frankish occupation of the holy sites in Jerusalem as spiritual defilement, and their description of this almost century-long occupation is packed with references to stench, filth, pigs and excrement, overlaid with an atavistic disgust. If we are to believe the high-flown invective of the times, the mihrab of the Masjid al-Aqsa was full of pigs and excrement and had been used by the Franks as a lavatory.105 So the first priority after Saladin had recaptured Jerusalem in 1187 was the purification of the buildings of the Haram al-Sharif. This began on the very first day. As the Muslim historian Ibn al-Athir (d. 1233) puts it: ‘There was on top of the Dome of the Rock a large golden cross. When the Muslims entered the city on the Friday a group of them scaled up to the top of the dome to remove the cross. When they reached the 98 Hillenbrand, Crusades [n. 24 above], 290, quoting al-Harawi, Guide des lieux de pèlerinage, trans. J. Sourdel-Thomine, Damascus, 1957, 63. 99 Le Strange, Palestine, 133. 100 Y. Friedman, ‘The City of the King of Kings: Jerusalem in the Crusader Period’, in M. Poorthuis and C. Safrai (eds), The Centrality of Jerusalem: Historical Perspectives, Kampen, 1996, 195–6. 101 Hillenbrand, Crusades [n. 24 above], 290, quoting ‘Imad al-Din al-Isfahani, Kitab al-fath al-qussi fi’l-fath al-qudsi, ed. C. Landberg, Leiden, 1888, 66. 102 Travels, trans. Thackston, 32. 103 Hillenbrand, Crusades, 290, quoting al-Isfahani, Kitab al-fath [n. 101 above], 65. 104 Ibid., 291, quoting Mufarrij al-kurub, ed. J. al-Shayyal, Cairo, 1953–57, V, 333. 105 Hillenbrand, Crusades [n. 24 above], 300–1, quoting al-Isfahani, Kitab al-fath, trans. A.-C. Barbier de Meynard in Recueil des Historiens des Croisades: Historiens Orientaux, Tome IV, Paris, 1898, 333.

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top all the people cried with one voice.’106 Saladin quickly replaced it with a crescent. And this was only the beginning. When Frederick II visited the city some forty years later, he saw on the dome an inscription and noted that Saladin had purified this sacred house from the polytheists.107 And the chroniclers reveal exactly how this was done. Saladin’s nephew, Taqi al-Din ‘Umar, was charged with the oversight of the operation. Rose water was poured in lavish quantities over the floors and walls of both the Dome of the Rock and the Masjid al-Aqsa, and both buildings were perfumed with incense.108 A huge new wooden enclosure, richly carved and hundreds of metres in length – the most ambitious specimen to survive of medieval Muslim craftsmanship in wood – was erected to girdle the sacred Rock, a tardy replacement of the Umayyad lattice screen of ebony (sasim).109 ‘Behind the balustrade there were curtains made of variegated and decorated silk, hanging down among the pillars.’110 That screen in turn had been replaced by a wall of marble rising to half the height of a man, enclosing what one medieval geographer termed the Rock of Moses, which he likened to a platform.111 And of course the Muslims stripped away all signs of Christian worship. After being cleansed of these ‘filths’ and ‘impurities’112 (note the use of the plural), the Dome of the Rock emerged, in the words of Saladin’s secretary, ‘Imad al-Din al-Isfahani, like ‘a young bride’113 – exactly the simile so often used by medieval poets of the Ka‘ba in Mecca,114 whose flamboyant technicolour textile coverings (nothing like the sober black it wears nowadays) were changed frequently, sometimes several times a year.115 The allusion would not have been lost on contemporaries. In a triumphant letter to the caliph in Baghdad, in which he reports on the recapture of Jerusalem, the secretary goes on to say that: ‘The Rock has been cleansed of the filth of the infidels by the tears of the pious.’116 Sermons preached at the time praised God ‘for his cleansing of his Holy House from the filth of polytheism and its pollutions [by the] perfume of sanctification 106 Hillenbrand, Crusades, 289, quoting Al-Kamil fi’l-tarikh, ed. C. J. Tornberg, Leiden and Uppsala, 1851–76, XI, 364. Cf. Hillenbrand, Crusades, 305. 107 Ibid., 299, quoting Sibt ibn al-Jauzi, Mir’at al-Zaman VIII/2, 656. 108 Hillenbrand, Crusades, 299. 109 Le Strange, Palestine, 146. On the Ayyubid screen, see S. Auld, ‘The Wooden Balustrade in the Sakhra’, in Hillenbrand and Auld, Ayyubid Jerusalem [n. 84 above], 94–117. 110 Elad, Medieval Jerusalem [n. 82 above], 55. 111 Ibn Hauqal, Configuration de la Terre (Kitab Surat al-Ard), trans. J. H. Kramers and G. Wiet, Beirut and Paris, 1964, I, 168. 112 Ibn al-Athir, trans. Richards [n. 86 above], 334. 113 Hillenbrand, Crusades, 300 and 324, n. 85, quoting al-Isfahani, Kitab al-fath. 114 A. L. F. A. Beelaert, A Cure for the Grieving: Studies on the Poetry of the 12th-Century Persian Court Poet Khaqani Širwani, Leiden, 1996, 150–67; for relevant comments on much later practice, see W. C. Young, ‘The Ka‘ba, Gender and the Rites of Pilgrimage’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 25 (1993), 285–300. 115 A. J. Wensinck and J. Jomier, EI, 2nd edn, IV (1978), s.v. ‘Ka‘ba’, 317, 319. 116 Hillenbrand, Crusades, 301, 325, n. 92.

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and glorification’.117 None of this language makes any sense unless one can properly appreciate how seriously the Muslims, like the Jews of the Old Testament before them, took the whole issue of defilement.

LIGHTING It is time to look at two elements of the building’s embellishments which have vanished without trace. They concern lighting and sweet smells. First, lighting. Many years ago I had the privilege of working all day in the Dome of the Rock for several weeks. The experience clarified how neon lighting catastrophically diminishes this building. According to Ibn al-Athir, ‘the Franks stripped the Dome of the Rock of more than forty silver candelabra, each of them weighing 3,600 drams, and a great silver lamp weighing fortyfour Syrian pounds, as well as a hundred and fifty smaller silver candelabra and more than twenty gold ones, and a great deal more booty’.118 Sibt ibn al-Jauzi notes: ‘They used to light the Dome of the Rock with the oil of ben’119 (tamarisk). The number of lamps varies from one account to the next – between three hundred and, by implication, over two thousand. He continues: ‘Each night, one hundred candles are lit in the Sakhra’120 (‘Rock’ – i.e. taking the part for the whole, the Dome of the Rock). I have myself seen a massive pre-modern yellow beeswax candle in the Haram Museum and it looks like a mature tree. Nasir-i Khusrau notes that in the Dome of the Rock, ‘in the middle of the building is a silver lamp suspended over the Rock by a silver chain. There are many silver lamps here, and on each is written its weight. They were donated by the sultan of Egypt … I saw one enormous candle, seven cubits long and three spans thick; it was as white as camphor and mixed with ambergris. They said that every year the sultan of Egypt sends many candles, one of which was this one, for it had the sultan’s name written in gold letters around the bottom.’121 The effect of such illumination in the darkness of a medieval city must have been dramatic. The Franciscan friar Felix Fabri, viewing the Dome of the Rock from afar at night in 1483, ‘saw through the windows of the temple as bright a fire therein as though it were a lantern filled with clear flame’,122 just as the pilgrim Arculf some eight hundred years earlier had exclaimed in wonder (as Adomnán records) at the illuminated Church of

117 Ibn Khallikan, Kitab Wafayat al-‘Ayan wa Anba’ Ibna’al-Zaman, trans. Baron M. de Slane as Ibn Khallikan’s Biographical Dictionary, repr. Beirut, 1970, II, 635. 118 Ibn al-Athir, Al-Kamil, in F. Gabrieli, Arab Historians of the Crusades, trans. E. J. Costello, London and Henley-on-Thames, 1969, 11. 119 Trans. Elad, Medieval Jerusalem [n. 82 above], 56; Le Strange, Palestine, 147. 120 Trans. Elad, Medieval Jerusalem, 56. 121 Travels, trans. Thackston, 32. 122 H. F. M. Prescott, Jerusalem Journey: Pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the Fifteenth Century, London, 1954, 175.

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the Ascension on the Mount of Olives.123 In the Dome of the Rock alone there were some fifty tons of chains for hanging the candelabra, quite apart from the chains for the lamps;124 and some of these candelabra were larger by far than anything that has survived. In 1060 the Great Lantern that hung in the Dome of the Rock fell down; it contained five hundred lamps.125 Nasir-i Khusrau calculated that the silver utensils in the Dome of the Rock weighed more than a ton and a half.126 In the entire Haram in the time of ‘Abd al-Malik, we are invited to believe, there were five thousand lamps, and two thousand wax candles were lit every Friday night and in the nights that fell in the middle of the months of Rajab, Sha‘ban and Ramadan, as well as during the two ‘ids.127 Ibn al-Faqih, writing in 903, notes that the Dome of the Rock was lit by 1,600 lamps.128 Living, flickering light that was refracted from walls covered with mosaic would create pools of light and shadow, mystery and dimness: a visual experience decisively different from that of the steady, evenly distributed but dead illumination of neon bars.129

PERFUME What about scent? From the outset, it was the policy to perfume the building as well as lighting it. In the days of ‘Abd al-Malik, the Dome of the Rock ‘was entirely lighted with [oil of] the Midian Ban [the tamarisk or myrobalan] tree, and oil of Jasmin, of a lead colour. [This had such a sweet perfume that] the chamberlains were wont to say … “Pass us the lamps that we may put oil on ourselves therefrom, and perfume our clothes”.’130 Jamal al-Din al-Maqdisi, a mid-fourteenth-century source, describes how, to perfume the Dome of the Rock, ‘Each day fifty and two persons were employed to pound and grind down saffron, working by night also.’131 Sibt ibn al-Jauzi takes up the tale: ‘Every Monday and Thursday the gatekeepers used to melt musk, ambergris, rose water and saffron and prepare from it [a kind of perfume called] ghaliya, with rose water made of the [red] roses of Jur [in southern Iran]. This mixture was left during the night (so it will become good). Each morning of the above-mentioned days [i.e. Monday and Thursday], the attendants enter the bathhouse and wash and purify themselves. Then they enter the storeroom in which there is the

Adomnán, ‘The Holy Places’, trans. Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrims, 182. Le Strange, Palestine, 148, quoting Jamal al-Din al-Maqdisi. 125 Ibid., 130, quoting Jamal al-Din al-Maqdisi. 126 Travels, trans. Thackston, 32. 127 Le Strange, Palestine, 148, quoting Jamal al-Din al-Maqdisi. 128 Trans. Le Strange, Palestine, 161. 129 For a general treatment of this theme see R. Hillenbrand, ‘The Uses of Light in Islamic Architecture’, in S. S. Blair and J. M. Bloom (eds), God is the Light of the Heavens and the Earth, London and New Haven, 2015, 89–120. 130 Le Strange, Palestine, 147, quoting Jamal al-Din al-Maqdisi. 131 Ibid., 146, quoting Jamal al-Din al-Maqdisi. 123

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[kind of perfume called] khaluq, they take off their clothes and put on a garment made of washy [silk brocade adorned with figures].’132 Jamal al-Din al-Maqdisi, however, says that they wore ‘new garments made of the stuffs of Marv and Herat, also shawls (of the striped cloths of Yaman), called ‘Asb; and taking jewelled girdles, they girt these about their waists. Then, bearing the jars of the khuluk in their hands, they went forth and anointed therewith the stone of the Rock, even as far as they could reach up to with their hands, spreading the perfume all over the same. And for the part beyond that which they could reach, having first washed their feet, they attained thereto by walking on the Rock itself, anointing all that remained thereof; and by this the jars of khuluk were completely emptied. Then they brought censers of gold and silver, filled with aloes wood … [from Java], and the incense called nadd, compounded with musk and ambergris.’133 Next, according to Sibt ibn al-Jauzi, ‘the gatekeepers lower the curtains so that the incense encircles the Sakhra entirely and the odour [of the incense] clings to it. Then the curtains were raised so that this odour went out until it fills [sic] the entire city [Colour Pl. VII]. Then a herald called: “Now surely al-Sakhra has been opened. Whoever wants to perform a visit, let him come.” So the people came in haste to the Dome of the Rock, prayed [there] and went out. On whomever the odour of incense was found it was said that this person was today in the Sakhra.’134 To this day, it is not rare for wealthy Arabs to spend £1,000 a day on burning odoriferous wood or incense. This is and was a culture that valued sweet smells.

THE DAILY ADMINISTRATION OF THE DOME OF THE ROCK IN MEDIEVAL TIMES Finally, one should not forget the hewers of wood and the drawers of water. Predictably enough, they were not drawn from the chattering classes. So who did the dirty work? And how was the building administered? It was all carefully thought out. The sheer foresight of the endowments made for the Dome of the Rock over the centuries ensured that nothing was left to chance. Money was set aside by the pious or those eager to acquire religious merit for olive oil – the endowment for this provided 210 litres of olive oil per month135 – as well as cotton for lamp wicks, glass for the lamps and salaries for the workmen who repaired roofs.136 In the tenth century, eight thousand mats, each weighing nine pounds, were required

Trans. Elad, Medieval Jerusalem [n. 82 above], 55. Le Strange, Palestine, 146. So much for Nasir-i Khusrau’s statement that no-one had ever walked on the Rock. 134 Trans. Elad, Medieval Jerusalem, 55. 135 Al-Muqaddasi, Ahsan al-Taqasim fi Ma’rifat al-Aqalim, trans. B. Collins as The Best Divisions for Knowledge of the Regions, Reading, 2001, 144. 136 Le Strange, Palestine, 163, quoting Ibn ‘Abd Rabbih, writing c. 913 in Al-‘iqd al-farid. 132 133

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annually.137 And there was daily work to do. After prayer time was over, servants ‘washed off with water the marks left by the people’s feet, cleaning everywhere with green myrtle [brooms], and drying with cloths. Then the gates were closed, and for guarding each were appointed ten chamberlains, since none might enter the Dome of the Rock – except the servants thereof – on other days than the Monday and the Friday’138 [italics mine]. So this was emphatically not a building of open access. And its contents were valuable; Nasir-i Khusrau mentions silk carpets – he was a Persian and had an eye for such things – and the building contained literally tons of silver, teak, lead and of course gold galore, both in it and on it. So security was a live issue. Al-Muqaddasi notes that in his time the Dome of the Rock was ‘served by special attendants; their service was instituted by ‘Abd al-Malik, the men being chosen from among the Royal Fifth of the Captives taken in War and hence they are called al-Akhmas [the Quintans]. None besides these are employed in the service and they take their watch in turn.’139 The story is told somewhat differently, but crucially at a later date, by Jamal al-Din al-Maqdisi. The same caliph: appointed to guard the shrine three hundred black slaves in residence whom he had bought for the sanctuary out of the funds belonging to the ‘fifth’ of the Community Treasury. Whenever one of them died he was replaced in his duties by his son, by his grandson, or someone else of his family, and that was the procedure to be followed as long as they had offspring … Ten Jews, who were exempted from the poll-tax, were also employed in its service, and they and their children numbered twenty in all. They were charged with cleaning up whatever filth occurred at the time of the pilgrimage, summer and winter, and to keep in order the public places around the shrine. Ten Christians, members of the same family who had this as a hereditary charge, were attached to the shrine to remove the rubbish and to take care of the conduits that brought water to the cisterns [of the Haram] and the cisterns themselves. There were also a number of Jewish servants who busied themselves with the glasswork, the various types of lamps, and other such. They were not subject to the poll-tax, nor were those who prepared wicks for the lamps. This exemption applied to themselves and their families in perpetuity, as long as they had descendants, from the period of Abd al-Malik onward.140 137 Ibid. Al-Muqaddisi, writing in the 10th century in his Ahsanu-t-Taqasim fi Ma‘arifatil-Aqalim, trans. G. S. A. Ranking and R. F. Azoo, Calcutta, 1901, 279, notes that in the Dome of the Rock ‘in the year they use 800,000 cubits of matting’. 138 Le Strange, Palestine, 147, quoting Jamal al-Din al-Maqdisi. 139 Al-Muqaddasi, Ahsanu-t-Taqasim fi Ma‘arifati-l-Aqalim, trans. Ranking and Azoo [n. 137 above], 279. 140 Peters, Jerusalem [n. 19 above], 198–9; for a slightly different version, see Le Strange,

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LATER MEDIEVAL CHRISTIAN RESPONSES TO THE DOME OF THE ROCK The restrictions do not mean that only Muslims saw it. Its open site and unique visibility made it a visual magnet for Christian pilgrims visiting Jerusalem, even though it was out of bounds to Christians and Jews. In 1483 the lay members of the group of European Christians whom Friar Felix Fabri took around the sights of Jerusalem exclaimed on seeing the Dome of the Rock that there was ‘nothing more glorious or beauteous within sight’, even though Felix, correcting their mistaken impression that this was the Temple of Solomon, termed it nothing but an ‘abominable and desecrated church’ in which ‘Mahomet the accursed is praised’.141 A year later, the aged Milanese Canon Pietro Casola termed it the ‘one beautiful building … I saw nothing else beautiful in the said city’,142 while the English chaplain of Sir Richard Guylforde considered it ‘in largeness, height, and sumptuousness building far above and beyond any work that ever we saw in our lives’.143 And occasionally a bolder spirit among them, such as the German knight Arnold von Harff, was able by dint of bribery to enter it in disguise.144

ENVOI But it would be better to end on a more positive note. When the Dome of the Rock was completed, 100,000 gold dinars (some accounts say 300,000 or 600,000) remained. The caliph offered it to the men who had supervised the project, but they refused and ‘so he wrote to them: “Melt [the remaining coins] and pour [the metal] on the Dome [of the Rock] and the gates.” So they did. Nobody could contemplate the Dome because of the gold that was on it.’145 The geographer al-Muqaddasi, himself a native of Jerusalem and an architect, notes lyrically that: ‘As soon as the beams of the sun strike the cupola, and the drum radiates the light, then indeed is this marvellous to behold; in short, I have never seen in all Islam the like of it; nor have I ever heard that in all the realms of the idolaters is the like of this dome to be found.’146 Palestine, 149. 141 Prescott, Jerusalem Journey [n. 122 above], 128. 142 Ibid., 40. 143 R. Guylforde, The Pylgrymage of Sir Richard Guylforde to the Holy Land, ed. H. Ellis (Camden Society, NS 51), London, 1851, 43–4. 144 Prescott, Jerusalem Journey, 175–6. He paced out the dimensions of the Dome of the Rock and counted its pillars. 145 Among the earliest and least embroidered versions of this much-repeated story is that of Ibn al-Murajja (trans. Hartmann, Felsendom [n. 25 above], 35). 146 Al-Muqaddasi, Ahsan al-Taqasim, trans. Collins [n. 135 above], 143. Cf. the lyrical description given in ‘Imad al-Din’s Kitab al-fath [n. 101 above] of Saladin’s refurbishment of the building after his capture of Jerusalem from the Crusaders (Gabrieli, Historians [n. 118 above], 152–3 and 169–71).

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THE TEMPLE AS SYMBOL, THE TEMPLE AS METAPHOR: CONTRASTING EASTERN AND WESTERN REIMAGININGS ROBERT OUSTERHOUT

M

etaphors are slippery things, at once allusive and elusive. Indeed, metaphors are by their very nature subversive: rather than telling us what something is, they tell us what it is not. Aristotle understood this; as he explains, ‘Metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else.’1 Nevertheless, metaphors are a part of the language by which we construct the world as we perceive it. They both form our language and creatively transform it.2 By contrast, symbols seem more stable, more firmly grounded. A symbol can represent an abstract idea in concrete form, an intellectualized image; usually we can ‘see’ a symbol, whereas we can only imagine a metaphor. In the following short chapter, I shall attempt to come to grips with the rhetoric of architecture, looking at the idea of the Temple of Jerusalem as it was expressed in concrete form in Byzantine architecture. The Temple offers a unique perspective, for it survived more as a concept than as a reality. We can see its medieval replications, whereas we can only imagine its original appearance. Historically, texts about buildings range from the purely descriptive to

Poetics, XXI. See, among many others, Paul Ricouer, The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning of Language, Toronto, 1977. I thank Dr Tasos Tanoulas for a fruitful discussion of this book. 1

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the vacuously allegorical. Both symbolic and metaphorical language has been used to explicate their physical appearance or to provide them with additional meaning. For the architectural historian, the rhetorical tradition may consequently provide both insights and confusions, for a text may be descriptive, symbolic, or metaphorical – or a combination of all three. The difficulty is to determine which is which.3 Although the language employed is almost never scientific, with both symbols and metaphors, some sort of resemblance is assumed.4 But does the application of an allegorical language to architecture automatically signal the replication of meaningful forms? Symbols and metaphors may be difficult to pin down – both in texts and in buildings. By contrast, although a building may be the passive receptor of applied meanings, its architectural form is fixed and concrete. And although symbols and metaphors may be hard to isolate, their very elusiveness may also be the basis of their power. By definition and etymology, a metaphor transposes or transports its subject. A symbol, on the other hand, represents or associates a subject with something else, something that exists beyond it in time and space. In this respect, architectural form is passive; symbol and metaphor become its active manipulators.5 Confronting the rhetorical language of architecture, I distinguish word-driven meanings, which usually fall into the category of metaphors, from image-driven meanings, which usually fall into the category of symbols. The former is normally applied from the outside, usually in the form of a text that tells us how to interpret a building or its parts; the latter is embedded or encoded within the architectural forms of the building itself. There may be significant overlap between the two systems, and in many instances the architectural symbolism will exist within a larger program of applied meaning. The notion of resemblance lies behind much of the allegorical writing about architecture. Indeed, buildings are usually based upon buildings – they derive both their form and meaning in this way. This is the starting point for Richard Krautheimer’s famous study of the iconography of medieval architecture, in which he concentrated on the replication of forms to situate the study of medieval architecture within the mainstream of contemporary art-historical discourse, drawing upon Panofsky’s studies of iconography and iconology.6 Krautheimer’s premise was that meaning is 3 Note the careful study by Henry Maguire, Earth and Ocean: The Terrestrial World in Early Byzantine Art, Philadelphia, 1987; he contrasts the language used in early sermons on Creation with its representation in floor mosaics. 4 Ricouer, Rule, esp. ch. 6 (‘The Work of Resemblance’). 5 See the study by R. Webb, ‘The Aesthetics of Sacred Space: Narrative, Metaphor, and Motion in “Ekphraseis”’, DOP 53 (1999), 59–74. 6 R. Krautheimer, ‘Introduction’, reprinted in idem, Studies, 115–50, following E. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, New York, 1939. For a more recent assessment, see P. Crossley, ‘Medieval Architecture and Meaning: The Limits of Iconography’, The Burlington

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transferred in architecture through the repetition of significant, identifiable forms. Thus, for example, S. Stefano in Bologna repeats the signature features of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem [Fig. 16.3, p. 333 below]; and the Temple in London replicates basic elements of the Dome of the Rock, the Templum Solomonis of the Middle Ages. Both are simplified, reduced in scale and rendered in the local idiom, but their outward appearance, featuring an unusual aisled rotunda, distinguishes them immediately from standard church design. While focusing on medieval architectural ‘copies’, Krautheimer encouraged the importance of texts, inscriptions and dedications for verification of the architectural relationship.7 It was an important and influential thesis when it appeared, paralleling the contemporaneous theories of Grabar on martyria, and various German scholars who were pursuing the idea of architecture as Bedeutungsträger. As a formalist, however, Krautheimer may have over-emphasized the role of form as the locus of meaning – suggesting that meaning is inherent in architectural form – and this has unnecessarily complicated subsequent discussions of architectural symbolism. But form need not be the primary conveyor of meaning. As a rhetorical trope, a metaphor may be only loosely related to a specific architectural form, or not related at all; but following Krautheimer, we expect some sort of congruence. In the rhetoric of architecture, the Temple of Jerusalem looms large. Although it had disappeared in antiquity, the idea of the Temple lingered on.8 Throughout the Middle Ages, however, the Temple was invariably viewed through the lens of Christianity. Just as the Hebrew bible was never interpreted as a Jewish book but was instead read in relationship to the Christian bible (the New Testament), the Temple of Solomon was also Christianized. It offered a potent if problematic architectural image – or rather images. The Tabernacle, Solomon’s Temple, Zerubbabel’s Temple, Herod’s Temple and the visionary temple of Ezekiel all had distinct identities which may have come to the fore in specific contexts, but in the polyvalent metaphorical language of the Middle Ages, they were often conflated.9 Nevertheless, the basic features, proportions and dimensions were known from a variety of sources – from which the Temple could be Magazine 130 (1988), 116–21; note also N. Goodman, ‘How Buildings Mean’, Critical Inquiry 11 (1985), 642–53, who offers a somewhat anachronistic system of interpretation. 7 This was something Krautheimer failed to do in the second part of his study, as I have discussed elsewhere: see R. Ousterhout, ‘The Temple, the Sepulchre, and the Martyrion of the Savior’, Gesta 29 (1990), 44–53. 8 For much of what follows, see R. Ousterhout, ‘New Temples and New Solomons: The Rhetoric of Byzantine Architecture’, in P. Magdalino and R. Nelson (eds), The Old Testament in Byzantium, Dumbarton Oaks, 2010, 223–53. 9 The literature on the Temple is voluminous; for a convenient summary with extensive bibliography, see B. Narkiss, ‘Temple’, Encyclopaedia Judaica (1971), XV, cols. 942–88; for a popular survey, J. Comay, The Temple of Jerusalem, New York, 1975; and more recently, M. Goldhill, The Temple of Jerusalem, Cambridge, Mass., 2004.

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replicated [Fig. 6.1].10 Indeed, with the possible exception of Noah’s Ark, the Temple is the sole architectural exemplar presented in the Hebrew bible. All the same, there were scriptural objections to its reconstruction: Christ had prophesied the destruction of the Temple, and – according to Christian thought – it should remain in ruins until the end of time. Thus, the challenge for the builder would have been how to represent symbolically the sanctity, the divine presence of the Temple, without falling into theological error or, in the worst-case scenario, bringing about the Apocalypse. In a very general way, any Christian church could become an image of the Temple, simply by borrowing its terminology. In Greek, a church building is called a naos, and its sanctuary to hagion ton hagion. The borrowed vocabulary may begin with Eusebius, appearing for the first time in his dedicatory speech at the cathedral of Tyre, delivered in c. 315 to 317, but the terms became common in Byzantine usage.11 In the so-named ‘Panegyric on the Building of the Churches, Addressed to Paulinus, Bishop of Tyre’, Eusebius explores the spiritual meaning of the Temple as he develops a complex, three-fold parallelism: the church built by Paulinus is the image of the worldwide church, founded by Christ, which the Jerusalem Temple prefigured.12 In his description of the church, Eusebius clearly follows the familiar descriptions of the Temple, part by part, detail by detail, to symbolic ends.13 His point is that the new Christian church was to be understood in continuity with the Temple, which it replaced. The speech was included in Book 10 of Eusebius’ Church History, and he no doubt intended it to be widely circulated, to be read and followed. Indeed, it may have set the standard for Temple imagery in the Byzantine church. With well-constructed metaphors, Eusebius laid out for succeeding generations the meaning of the church building in respect to the Temple. But how much did the descriptions of the Temple influence actual church planning? Here the language of metaphor has been taken by scholars to imply physical similarity.14 Although the church at Tyre does not survive, 10 For the descriptions, see I Kings 6; 7:13–51; II Chron. 3–4; Ezek. 40–48; Ezra 1–6; Josephus, Jewish Wars, V, among others. 11 J. Wilkinson, ‘Paulinus’ Temple at Tyre’, Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik 32/4 (1982) [Akten II/4, XVI. Internationaler Byzantinistenkongress], 553–61. 12 T. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, Cambridge, Mass., 1981, 162–3. See now R. Griffith-Jones, 9–10 above. 13 Wilkinson, ‘Paulinus’ Temple’, 553–61. 14 See, for example, J. Wilkinson, From Synagogue to Church: The Traditional Design; its

FIG. 6.1.  EZEKIEL’S TEMPLE, HYPOTHETICAL RECONSTRUCTION, WITH MEASUREMENTS IN CUBITS

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we can be certain it looked nothing like the Temple. To begin with, as Krautheimer elucidates, a basilica is not a temple.15 A basilica is simply a large hall, designed for large crowds of worshippers to gather inside. In contrast, the interior of a temple (and most certainly of the Temple) was off-limits to most worshippers, and most ceremonies took place outside, where the altar was located. Although symbolic associations with the Temple may have been introduced into the early church, the typologies of the buildings remained inherently different. Krautheimer would like to see the formal distinctions as meaningful – visually there could be no confusion between a temple and a basilica; the latter, rising prominently on the skyline of a late Roman city, would advertise the presence of the new religion in a billboard-like manner – a subject nicely developed by Dale Kinney.16 Krautheimer made this distinction in relationship to the development of a new architecture in the city of Rome. His temples were pagan and not Jewish, but I believe his basic point holds. To repeat my basic question: does the application of metaphorical language to architecture signal the replication of forms? To paraphrase a recent American president, it all depends on how we define the word ‘is’.17 The sanctuary of a Byzantine church was regularly viewed in association with the Temple, in reliance on a long textual tradition, again beginning with Eusebius at Tyre. He writes, following Old Testament models: ‘Lastly, in the center, he placed the most holy altar (to ton agion agion thusiasterion), fencing it round … with wooden chancels to make it inaccessible to the general public.’18 A similar barrier in the atrium prevented ‘unhallowed and uncleaned feet’ from treading on the ‘holy places within’.19 Marking zones of sacrality and hierarchy, the barriers echo those of the Temple, and the association helps to legitimize the sacred space of the church by conjuring its predecessor, as Joan Branham has discussed.20 For the Byzantine sanctuary, the Temple symbolism continued: Paul the Silentiary refers to the sanctuary of Hagia Sophia as ‘set aside for the bloodless sacrifice’.21 Procopius calls the same ‘the part of the church which is Beginning, its Definition, its End, London, 2002. 15 R. Krautheimer, ‘The Constantinian Basilica’, DOP 21 (1967), 115–50. 16 D. Kinney, ‘The Church Basilica’, Acta ad Archaeologiam et Artium Historiam Pertinentia 15 (2001), 115–35. 17 See T. Noah, ‘Bill Clinton and the Meaning of “Is”’, Slate (13 September 1998): http:// www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/chatterbox/1998/09/bill_clinton_and_the_ meaning_of_is.html (accessed 27 November 2013). 18 Wilkinson, ‘Paulinus’ Temple’ [n. 11 above], 556. 19 Ibid. 20 J. Branham, ‘Sacred Space in Ancient Jewish and Early Medieval Architecture’ [Ph.D. thesis, Emory University, 1993], 63–70; idem, ‘Sacred Space under Erasure in Ancient Synagogues and Early Churches’, AB 74 (1992), 375–94, esp. 380–2; idem, ‘Penetrating the Sacred: Breaches and Barriers in the Jerusalem Temple’, in S. E. J. Gerstel (ed.), Thresholds of the Sacred, Dumbarton Oaks, 2006, 7–24. 21 M. L. Fobelli, Un temptio per Giustiniano. Santa Sofia di Constantinopoli e la Descrizione di Paolo Silenziario, Rome, 2005, 76–7, 11.682–4.

THE TEMPLE AS SYMBOL, THE TEMPLE AS METAPHOR

especially inviolable and accessible only to the priests’.22 The Patriarch Germanos I, writing in the eighth century, notes: ‘the cancelli [kangella] denote the place of prayer; and signify that the space outside them may be entered by the people, while inside is the holy of holies which is accessible only to the priests’.23 These and other writers judiciously borrow the language of the Temple to enhance their descriptions. The parts and furnishings of the church thereby become ‘hooks’ on which the writers hang their meanings. All the same, they do not force a one-to-one relationship, nor do they tell us that the plan of the sanctuary and the details of the cancelli are modeled on the Temple and its parts. The borrowed language never says the church is the Temple; rather, it suggests that meanings associated with the Temple may enlighten our understanding of the church as sacred space. We might also view this relationship in terms of medieval memory theory: informed by the text, the features of the sanctuary recall – that is, they call to our memory and act as loci of contemplation for – the meaning of the Temple.24 The sixth-century Chapel of the Theotokos on Mount Nebo offers a unique example in which the association with the Temple is visually manifest. Between the chancel barrier and the altar, a schematic representation of the Temple appears in the floor mosaic [Fig. 6.2]. A fire burns before it, and the Temple is flanked by two bulls, whose presence is explained by the inscription from Psalm 51: ‘They shall lay calves upon thy altar.’ Here it identifies the bulls as sacrificial; but as Sylvester Saller noted, the verse was repeated in the early Jerusalem liturgy when the offerings were placed upon the altar.25 The Temple is invoked, but its parts conflated: the altar of sacrifice and the Holy of Holies merge, for in Christian terms the Eucharist represents both the sacrifice and the divine presence. In the end, the relationship of the Byzantine sanctuary to the Temple is more metaphorical than mimetic; beyond the presence of a barrier and an altar, there seems to have been little attempt to replicate its forms. In fact, references to the Temple appear frequently in the metaphorical language of early Christianity, in a variety of contexts and often without reference to specific architectural forms. Ambrose, for example, introduced it into his explanation of the baptismal rite. He called the baptistery the sancta sanctorum and referred to the officiants as Levites.26 ‘The Holy of 22 Procopius, Buildings, trans. H. P. Dewing, Cambridge, Mass. (Loeb Classical Library), 1971, I.i.64–5. 23 Germanos, Historia mystagogica 7; see C. Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire 312–1453: Sources and Documents, Toronto, 1986, 143. 24 See M. Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200, Cambridge, 1998, esp. 7–21. 25 S. Saller, The Memorial of Moses on Mount Nebo, Jerusalem, 1941, 235–7; see also Branham, ‘Sacred Space’ [n. 20 above], 381–2 and figs 11–12. 26 Ambrose, De Mysteriis II.5–7.

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FIG. 6.2 MOUNT NEBO, CHAPEL OF THE THEOTOKOS, DETAIL OF THE SANCTUARY MOSAIC FLOOR DEPICTING THE TEMPLE

Holies was unbarred to you,’ he wrote, contrasting the accessibility of the baptistery to the lack of access at the Temple. Here he must be developing a theme that appears as early as the Epistle to the Hebrews: that in the New Covenant, Christ was both High Priest and sacrifice, bringing the benefits of the Temple to his followers with the promise of a heavenly sanctuary. Indeed, this conflation may lie behind the Temple symbolism of the altar, noted above. The idea that the Temple lived on in the Christian community and their ceremonies is a theme developed as early as the

THE TEMPLE AS SYMBOL, THE TEMPLE AS METAPHOR

writings of Ignatios of Antioch, and it seems to have been widespread in the early centuries of Christianity.27 Elsewhere I have examined the application of the metaphorical language of the Temple to two of the major buildings of the era: the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.28 In neither building is there a clear formal relationship with the Temple, but the meaning of both buildings was enhanced by the association. Thus, the Holy Sepulchre could represent the New Covenant; as Eusebius explicates, it is ‘the New Jerusalem … facing the famous Jerusalem of old’.29 At the Hagia Sophia, in turn, Procopius proclaims: ‘God … must especially love to dwell in the place, which he has chosen.’30 In short, the Temple provided a common metaphor for a variety of architectural forms, and to a variety of ends. At its simplest, an association with the Temple could offer a convenient shorthand for sacred space. On a theological level, it could emphasize the relationship of the Old and the New Covenants – that a Christian church, or specifically the sanctuary of the church, represents the New Covenant. Viewed more broadly, by situating the Temple symbolism amid the congregation, it could even signal that the Christians are the new chosen people. The church of Hagios Polyeuktos in Constantinople may stand as the exception to prove the rule – a unique attempt to replicate the Temple. Known only from its excavated foundations, the building was nevertheless well documented in Byzantine sources. Built immediately before Hagia Sophia by Justinian’s political rival, Anicia Juliana, there is much to encourage an Old Testament interpretation.31 As the excavator Martin Harrison has argued, H. Polyeuktos replicated the Temple of Solomon in its measurements, translated into Byzantine cubits: measuring one hundred royal cubits in length, as was the Temple, and one hundred in width, as was the Temple platform – following both the unit of measure and the measurements given in Ezekiel [Fig. 6.3]. Harrison estimates the sanctuary of the church to have been twenty royal cubits square internally, 27 See the fascinating essay by R. D. Young, ‘Martyrdom as Exaltation’, in V. Burris (ed.), Late Ancient Christianity: A People’s History of Christianity, II, Minneapolis, 2005, 70–92, who relates the concept of Christian martyrdom to Temple sacrifice; note also R. J. McKelvey, The New Temple: The Church in the New Testament, Oxford, 1969. 28 Ousterhout, ‘New Temples’ [n. 8 above], 233–43. 29 Eusebius, V. Const. 3.33.1–2, trans. A. Cameron and S. G. Hall, Life of Constantine, Oxford, 1999, 135, with extensive commentary, 273–91: ‘It is worthy of note that it is the building itself which is described as the “new Jerusalem” and identified with that spoken of by the prophets (“perhaps that fresh new Jerusalem proclaimed in prophetic oracles”; cf. Rev. 3.12, 21.2),’ 284. 30 Procopius, Buildings, trans. Dewing [n. 22 above], I.i.61–2. 31 M. Harrison, Excavations at the Saraçhane in Istanbul, I, Princeton, 1986, esp. 410–11; idem, A Temple for Byzantium, Austin, 1989; idem, ‘The Church of St Polyeuktos in Istanbul and the Temple of Solomon’, in C. Mango, O. Pritsak and U. M. Pasicznyk (eds), Okeanos: Essays Presented to Ihor Sevcenko on his Sixtieth Birthday by his Colleagues and Students, Cambridge, Mass., 1984, 276–9.

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FIG. 6.3.  H. POLYEUKTOS, CONSTANTINOPLE: RECONSTRUCTED PLAN

FIG. 6.4.  ISTANBUL, MARBLE BLOCK FROM H. POLYEUKTOS, WITH A FRAGMENT OF THE NAVE INSCRIPTION

ROBERT OUSTERHOUT

THE TEMPLE AS SYMBOL, THE TEMPLE AS METAPHOR

the exact measurement of the Holy of Holies. Similarly, the ostentatious decoration compares with that described in the Temple; if we let peacocks stand in for cherubim, we have cherubim alternating with palm trees, bands of ornamental network, festoons of chainwork, pomegranates, network on the capitals, and capitals shaped like lilies [Fig. 6.4].32 Why copy the Temple of Solomon? A powerful noblewoman, Anicia Juliana was one of the last representatives of the Theodosian dynasty, who could trace her lineage back to Constantine. When her son was passed over in the selection of emperor in favor of Justin I and subsequently Justinian, the construction of H. Polyeuktos became her statement of familial prestige. It was the largest and most lavish church in the capital at the time of its construction. The adulatory dedicatory inscription credits Juliana with having ‘surpassed the wisdom of the celebrated Solomon, raising a temple to receive God’.33 In this context, Justinian’s rebuilding of the Hagia Sophia could be seen as part of a larger, competitive discourse between political rivals, played out in architecture. Justinian’s famous, if legendary, exclamation at the dedication, ‘Enikesa se Solomon!’ (‘Solomon, I have vanquished thee!’) may have been directed more toward Juliana than toward Jerusalem.34 Ultimately the discourse was more about the construction of divinely sanctioned kingship than about architecture or sacred topography. Clearly, both Juliana and Justinian understood the symbolic value of architecture, with which they could make powerful political statements. In the case of H. Polyeuktos, it was a statement that could never be put into words.35 In the final analysis, neither the Holy Sepulchre nor the Hagia Sophia looked very much like the Temple, no matter how much we want them to, and even if rhetoricians were standing by to tell us they did. In this respect, H. Polyeuktos stands as an audacious anomaly, never to be repeated, and one that does not figure prominently in the later history of Constantinople – nor in the later history of Byzantine architecture. I would argue that the churches of the Holy Sepulchre and the Hagia Sophia succeed as works of architecture precisely because their meaning is elusive – it relies on metaphor, not on symbol. Both create an identity for their city, standing as powerful images; both celebrate the triumph of Christianity, both are imbued with tangible evidence of imperial patronage, both testify to the order and harmony of the Christian cosmos. Whereas they could be Ibid. Harrison, Excavations [n. 31 above], 5–7. 34 T. Preger (ed.), Scriptores Originum Constantinopolitanarum, I, Leipzig, 1901, 105; G. Dagron, Constantinople imaginaire: études sur le recueil des ‘Patria’, Paris, 1984, 303–9. 35 See also J. Bardill, ‘A New Temple for Byzantium: Anicia Juliana, King Solomon, and the Gilded Ceiling of the Church of St Polyeuktos in Constantinople’, in W. Bowden, A. Gutteridge and C. Machado (eds), Social and Political Life in Late Antiquity, Leiden, 2006, 339–70, with a thorough bibliography; note esp. 339–40; and my own comments in ‘New Temples’ [n. 8 above], 243–7. 32 33

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FIG. 6.5.  ISTANBUL, CHORA (KARIYE CAMII), INNER NARTHEX: MOSAIC OF THE PRESENTATION OF THE VIRGIN IN THE TEMPLE

ROBERT OUSTERHOUT

compared and contrasted with the Temple in all of its manifestations – as they no doubt were intended to be – this was never to be an exclusive meaning; moreover, they needed to function for the daily liturgy and to resonate with the various associations conjured by its ceremonies. In sum, with rare exception, the connection with the Temple is made by words and ceremonies, and occasionally relics, but not by architectural forms, nor by visual imagery. This is perhaps better represented in Byzantine art, where the setting for the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple is the sanctuary of a Byzantine church, as we see in narthex mosaics of the Chora in Istanbul [Fig. 6.5].36 The hymns associated with the feast of the Presentation of the Virgin emphasize the theme of Mary as

36 P. Underwood, The Kariye Djami, New York, 1966, 1:72–3; R. Ousterhout, ‘The Virgin of the Chora’, in R. Ousterhout and L. Brubaker (eds), The Sacred Image East and West, Urbana, 1995, 91–109 [99–100].

THE TEMPLE AS SYMBOL, THE TEMPLE AS METAPHOR

the true Temple, prefiguring the Nativity.37 The Chora image is set in the inner narthex on an axis above the entrance to the naos, so that anyone entering the church would see the image of the Temple in relationship to the bema – perhaps connecting the manna fed to the Virgin with the Eucharist offered at the bema.38 The mosaic with its Temple imagery is thus situated within the larger thematic program of the Chora, building upon the common theme. But even in an image like the Chora mosaic, we ‘see’ a bema (the symbol); we need the inscription to tell us it is the Temple (the metaphor). Understanding the liturgical service and the textual tradition may aid in the interpretation of architecture; but in the final analysis, words and images, ceremonies and settings, communicate in different ways. For the history of architecture, metaphors, although elusive, may be the more enduring. Symbols are more easily recognized, but they lack resonance; they are rarely polyvalent. and their exclusivity limits their potential. For the Byzantines after the sixth century, H. Polyeuktos must have seemed an oddity, like so many of the curious medieval architectural ‘copies’ discussed by Krautheimer – and, indeed, like the Temple of London. Their fixed symbolism, replicating a single, known exemplar, would override all other potential interpretations. While H. Polyeuktos might strike us as startling in its presumption, there are other, less programmatic associations with the Temple to be found elsewhere, such as Justinian’s Nea Church in Jerusalem. Like the Temple, it was marked by two grand columns at its entrance on the Cardo; moreover, it is often suspected of being the final destination of the Temple treasure when it was allegedly returned to Jerusalem by Justinian.39 However, if Justinian had intended to replace the Temple, the Nea nevertheless suffered the same fate as H. Polyeuktos: it vanished into obscurity shortly after its construction. In spite of its scale and its proximity to Sion, it was built on a site with no previous biblical associations and could not compete with the well-established loca sancta of the city. Finally, lest I seem too categorical in my terminology, it is worth recalling that even the most elaborate and rigid of symbols were both porous and malleable, and subject to notions inspired by the liturgy and a variety of other sources. While I argue that H. Sophia was not intended to be a physical copy of the Temple, certain of its architectural features might have been understood as references to it – such as the number of columns or the 100-ft measure of the central square. Allusions to the 37 R. Taft and A. Weyl Carr, ‘Presentation of the Virgin’, Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium 3.1715; I. E. Anastasios, ‘Eisodia tes Theotokou’, Threskeutike kai ethike Enkyklopaideia, Athens, 1962–68, 5.451–4; J. Lafontaine-Dosogne, Iconographie de l’enfance de la Vierge dans l’empire byzantin et en occident, 2 vols, Brussels, 1964, I, 136–67. 38 Ousterhout, ‘Virgin of the Chora’ [n. 36 above], 99–100. 39 See inter alia J. Taylor, ‘The Nea Church: Were the Temple Treasures Hidden Here?’, Biblical Archaeology Review 34/1 (2008), 50–9, 82.

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Temple abound in the period of Justinian, but these were part of a larger discourse on Old Testament kingship as a model for Byzantine rulership, marking the Byzantines as God’s chosen people.40 But even if we insist on an intended symbolic meaning behind the (limited) physical similarities, H. Sophia was never just a copy of the Temple – nor was it intended to be. H. Sophia needed to resonate with the celebration of the liturgy and imperial ceremony, as well as representing the power and dominion of its builder, his capital and his empire. Of course it gained immeasurably from its association with the Temple, but its forms could also find accord with Neoplatonic philosophy, Euclidian geometry and imperial ideology. In sum, although the Temple could be a symbol, it was far more potent as a metaphor.

40 Ousterhout, ‘New Temples’ [n. 8 above], passim; and see in particular G. Dagron, Emperor and Priest: The Imperial Office in Byzantium, Cambridge, 2003.

SPIRAL COLUMNS AND THE TEMPLE OF SOLOMON * ERIC FERNIE

S

piral columns in Christian buildings are often, even routinely, referred to as Solomonic.1 The evidence in favour of this reading is extensive, as is illustrated by a list of examples going back in time from the sixteenth century, as follows: a) Raphael’s cartoon of Peter healing a man in the porch of the Temple (Acts 3, 1–11), of 1515 to 1520. b) Jean Fouquet’s illumination of Pompei entering the Temple, in a manuscript of 1475.2 c) The column in St Peter’s known as the colonna santa, identified between 1362 and 1378 as one against which Christ lent while preaching in the Temple [Fig. 7.1].3

* I would like to record my gratitude for the help I have received in writing this chapter: to Richard Gem for his advice on the documentary evidence concerning St Peter’s; to Sandy Heslop for his comments on the Fulda inscription; to Catherine Hundley for her work on the Dover church (see 365–7, 372 below); to Stephen Holmes for bringing the Fouquet illumination to my attention; and to Klára Benešovska and Agnieszka Rożnowska-Sadraei for their essential help with the Czech and Polish material respectively. 1 See, for example, E. Borsook, Messages in Mosaic: The Royal Programmes of Norman Sicily (1130–1187), Oxford, 1990, 22: a pair of spiral columns, ‘which in the medieval mind were associated with those of Solomon’s Temple’. 2 Josephus, Antiquités Judaïques, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS Francais 247, fol. 293v. 3 W. Cahn, ‘Solomonic Elements in Romanesque Art’ [1976], reprinted in his Studies in Medieval Art and Interpretation, London, 2000, 157–82 [168, n. 29]. The best biblical reference for this is John 10.23, as suggested by D. Kinney, ‘Spolia’, in W. Tronzo (ed.), St Peter’s and the Vatican, Cambridge, 2005, 16–47 [35]. Kinney also (30) draws a helpful distinction between columns which are twisted or torqued (as in examples a, b, and c) and those which are cylindrical with spiral fluting. However, as the distinction is not relevant to this chapter, I have used ‘spiral’ alone, as, unlike ‘twisted’, it can describe both types.

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FIG. 7.1.  ROME, ST PETER’S, TREASURY: THE COLONNA SANTA

FIG. 7.2.  PALERMO, CAPPELLA PALATINA, 1140s, PLAN

FIG. 7.3. CAPHARNAUM, SYNAGOGUE, THIRD OR FIFTH CENTURY: RECONSTRUCTION OF A WINDOW

SPIRAL COLUMNS AND THE TEMPLE OF SOLOMON

d) The Cappella Palatina in Palermo, of the 1140s: two spiral columns support the west side of the domed bay, while Solomon is represented on the west side of the dome and on the soffit of the west arch, that is, the one supported by the spiral columns [Fig. 7.2].4 e) Two columns in San Carlo a Cave in Lazio, dated 1090 to 1100 by the style of their carvings, with sixteenth-century inscriptions on their plinths saying marmorae columnae and Salomonici templi.5 f) Half-columns from the synagogue at Capharnaum of the third century or the fifth, reconstructed as flanking windows on the side of the building facing Jerusalem [Fig. 7.3].6 Examined in detail, however, the picture is less clear. There is no doubt about the intended symbolism of the Raphael cartoon, the Fouquet miniature and the late-fourteenth-century identification of the colonna santa, but Walter Cahn concluded that the colonna is the earliest documentary reference associating spiral columns with the Temple.7 The sixteenth-century date of the inscriptions on the San Carlo a Cave columns places a question mark over their identification as Solomonic around 1100, if it does not remove them from consideration completely. The half-columns at Capharnaum are a distinct possibility, though it could be argued that they were purely decorative. If a question mark is allowed over the Capharnaum shafts, this leaves Palermo as the only convincing example before the colonna santa. It is possible that the spiral columns which occur frequently in twelfth- and thirteenth-century cloisters in Rome were intended as a reference to the portico of Solomon, but it is also worth noting the complete absence of spiral columns from the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian paintings of the Temple discussed in David Ekserdjian’s chapter in this volume.8 All this suggests that the identification of spiral columns with the Temple was not widespread until the fifteenth, or even the sixteenth, century.9 4 Borsook, Messages [n. 1 above]; W. Tronzo, The Cultures of his Kingdom. Roger II and the Cappella Palatina in Palermo, Princeton, 1997; B. Brenk (ed.), La Cappella Palatina a Palermo, 4 vols, Modena, 2010. 5 M. Castiñeiras, Compostela and Europe: The Story of Diego Gelmírez, Santiago de Compostela and Milan, 2010, 346–51. The San Carlo columns were brought from Rome in the sixteenth century. See also Castiñeiras for the columns at Santissima Trinità al Monte Pincio in Rome. 6 R. Ousterhout, ‘The Temple, the Sepulchre, and the Martyrion of the Savior’, Gesta 29 (1990), 44–53 [48–9, and fig. 7]. 7 Cahn, ‘Solomonic Elements’ [n. 3 above], 168, n. 29; B. Nobiloni, ‘Le colonne vitinee della basilica di San Pietro a Roma’, Xenia Antiqua 6 (1997), 81–142. 8 D. Ekserdjian, ‘Raphael’s Marriage of the Virgin and the Temple at Jerusalem in the Italian Renaissance Imagination’ (see 164–80 below). 9 There are also, as one might expect, columns associated with the Temple which are not spirals, such as the pair of c. 1230 at Würzburg Cathedral, which have knotted shafts inscribed ‘Jachin’ and ‘Boaz’, like those at the entrance to the Temple in I Kings 7, 21 (Cahn, ‘Solomonic Elements’ [n. 3 above], 162–3). Cahn also refers (168, n. 29) to Benjamin of Tudela, writing 1160–73, who says: ‘In San Giovanni in Laterano ... there are

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FIG. 7.4.  ROME, ST PETER’S, SANCTUARY SCREEN, 320s

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Turning to spiral columns which are not related to the Temple, the most prominent are those marking the tomb of the saint in St Peter’s church of the fourth century in Rome, as there is nothing to support an association before the colonna santa in the fourteenth century [Fig. 7.4].10 It is also the case that in the twelfth century the columns were identified as having been brought from the Temple of Apollo in Troy. This has value as negative evidence, but equally interesting is its association with the origins of the columns, which appear to have come as spolia from the Aegean.11 The absence of connections between St Peter’s and the Temple before the fourteenth century suggests that the numerous examples of spiral columns associated with sanctuaries and tombs in north-west Europe in the eleventh century, at places such as Utrecht, Deventer, Kerkrade, Durham, Norwich and Canterbury, are also unlikely to refer to the Temple. They are more probably references to St Peter’s, especially given the ways in which the cathedrals of Durham and Norwich parallel the dimensions of the Roman church.12

AND 730s

two copper pillars constructed by King Sh’lomo o.b.m. whose name Sh’lomo ben David is engraved upon each’, though this says nothing about either provenance or shape. 10 According to the Liber Pontificalis, six columns were given by Constantine, and the remainder by the Byzantine Exarch to Gregory III (731–41): Cahn, ‘Solomonic Elements’ [n. 3 above], 167. The fourth-century basilica is usually attributed to Constantine, but a strong case has been made in favour of his son Constans (ruled 337-50): G. W. Bowerstock, ‘Peter and Constantine’, in Tronzo, St Peter’s [n. 3 above], 2005, 5–15 [11]. C. H. Krinsky, ‘Representations of the Temple of Jerusalem before 1500’, JWCI 33 (1970), 1–19 [13], in commenting on the St Peter’s columns, says ‘which legends – repeated until the twentieth century – identified as spoils from Solomon’s Temple’. A. Ballardini and P. Pogliani, ‘A Reconstruction of the Oratory of John VII (705–07)’, in R. McKitterick, J. Osborne, C. M. Richardson and J. Storey (eds), Old St Peter’s, Rome, Cambridge, 2013, 190–213 [198–9] mention twisted columns as still existing, in association with the oratory of John VII (705–07), but there are no associations with the Temple. 11 The idea that the spiral columns came from Troy was first recorded by Petrus Mallius in the middle of the twelfth century: R. Valentini and G. Zucchetti (eds), Codice Topografico della Citta di Roma, III, Rome, 1946, 384: ‘Posuitque ibi ante venerabile altare eius, ad ornatum eiusdem basilicae, xii. Columpnas vitineas, quas de Graecia portari fecit, quae fuerunt de templo Apollonis Troiae.’ 12 For the spiral columns in these monuments see E. Fernie, ‘The Spiral Piers of Durham Cathedral’, Medieval Art and Architecture at Durham Cathedral [Transactions of the Annual Conference of the British Archaeological Association], 1980, 49–58.

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Alongside all of these arguments is the presence of spiral columns in other Christian contexts at the time of the Constantinian columns, as in the fourth-century sarcophagus from Salona in the museum at Split, on which spirals are used in representations which have nothing to do with the Temple [Fig. 7.5].13 This is because, as Robert Ousterhout has argued, iconography in this period (especially architectural iconography with its abstract character) is not a zero sum game: ‘It is a mistake to view these things in isolation. Pedimented arches, shell niches, and aediculae were all common elements in late Roman architectural vocabulary ... the suggestion of specificity of reference in the selection of forms ... must be tempered with a broader view of the architectural vocabulary of the period.’14 Bearing this in mind, one last item might be significant. This is a pilgrim’s pewter ampulla, one of a group dated around the year 600 in the Dumbarton Oaks collection, mentioned by Ousterhout, which has spiral columns placed round the tomb of Christ [Fig. 1.1, p. 32 above].15 To sum up, the Temple is not mentioned in connection with the spiral columns of St Peter’s before the fourteenth century and only becomes the widespread identification in the sixteenth, and Troy looks like an exotic version of the source of the spolia. Therefore, for the meaning of any particular set of columns earlier than the fourteenth century (apart from those in Palermo), St Peter’s and the Holy Sepulchre have as good a claim as any.

13 F. van der Meer and C. Mohrmann, Atlas of the Early Christian World, London, 1959, 127, fig. 402. 14 Ousterhout, ‘The Temple’ [n. 6 above], 49. 15 Ousterhout, ‘The Temple’, 48, fig. 6.

FIG. 7.5.  SPLIT, MUSEUM, FOURTH-CENTURY SARCOPHAGUS FROM SALONA

8

RAPHAEL’S MARRIAGE OF THE VIRGIN AND THE TEMPLE AT JERUSALEM IN THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE IMAGINATION DAVID EKSERDJIAN

I

n this short chapter on the Temple at Jerusalem in the Italian Renaissance imagination, I will principally be confining my investigation to the period that stretches from Giotto and Duccio in the first years of the fourteenth century to Raphael and his Marriage of the Virgin, now in the Brera in Milan but painted for Città di Castello, which is signed and dated 1504 [Fig. 8.1].1 For reasons of space, I will not be discussing the Temple’s appearance in Italian Renaissance narrative sculpture. This is the great period for representations of religious subjects in which the Temple either must or can play a starring role. The number of them is limited, and their relative frequency is very unequal, simply because some subjects were so much more popular within the visual tradition than others. In theory, they might include scenes from the Old Testament, but in practice they tend to be confined to episodes from the New Testament or from the apocryphal legends associated with it. In chronological order, the main ones are the Presentation of the Virgin, the Marriage of the Virgin, the Presentation of Christ, Christ among the Doctors, the Temptation of Christ, and the Expulsion of the MoneyChangers. Naturally, the Temple also tends to feature prominently – if on 1

J. M. zur Capellen, Raphael: The Paintings, 3 vols, Landshut, 2001–09, I, 138–41.

THE TEMPLE AT JERUSALEM IN THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE IMAGINATION

FIG. 8.1.  RAPHAEL, MARRIAGE OF THE VIRGIN, 1504 (BRERA, MILAN)

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a necessarily smaller scale – in more distant prospects of the city, most obviously in representations of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. Moreover, it is worth adding that on occasion Temple-type buildings are also included in other scenes. The most striking case in point, which will be more fully discussed below, is Perugino’s fresco in the Sistine Chapel of Christ Giving the Keys to Saint Peter [Fig. 8.7, p. 176 below].2 There seems no reason to suppose that a Renaissance artist like Perugino would have found the requirement to illustrate this narrative episode at all odd, although it is not precisely recorded in the New Testament. The justification for it is only found in Matt. 16.19, where Christ’s words to Peter are: ‘And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.’ It seems to be implied that the giving of the keys will take place – presumably at some indeterminate future date – and the donation certainly has no connection with the Temple at Jerusalem. Conversely, it is made clear that at the moment of Christ’s promise the action unfolds at Caesarea Philippi. It is not hard to illustrate the fact that, during the two centuries that separate Raphael from Giotto and Duccio, a common if far from universal convention tended to locate the action outside the building rather than within it, regardless of how strongly the narrative indicated the opposite. Later on, the action almost invariably takes place inside the Temple, and only a small fraction of it can therefore be shown. In virtually all these Trecento and Quattrocento examples, however, and for all their differences, it is clear that the Temple is conceived of as a proto-church. In view of the typological associations between the Old Dispensation and the New in Christian theology and exegesis, this is hardly surprising – but there is in addition one particular text that succinctly and memorably expresses this idea. In Bede’s extremely influential De Templo Salamonis, composed just before 731, he begins with the statement: ‘Domus Dei quam aedificavit rex Salamon in Hierusalem in figura facta est sanctae universalis ecclesiae.’ It now remains to try to put these multifarious figures into some sort of coherent order. As will be explored more fully in due course, there are a number of different ways in which the Temple is represented in the period, but their artistic style is almost invariably contemporary as opposed to archaising. Such an approach conforms in an entirely straightforward fashion with the tendency to bring biblical narratives up to date and to localise them. In the extreme case of Federico Barocci, who spent almost his entire career in his native Urbino, his religious compositions are frequently adorned with lovingly detailed prospects of the city, and above all its Palazzo Ducale, which are nothing more than a particularly homely variation on a standard theme.3 2 3

C. Pietrangeli, The Sistine Chapel: Michelangelo Rediscovered, London, 1986, 76–7. A. Emiliani, Federico Barocci, 2 vols, Ancona, 2008, I, 284–5, no. 35, 350–76, no. 39; II,

THE TEMPLE AT JERUSALEM IN THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE IMAGINATION

One of the most common modes of representation of the Temple is in the form of a centrally-planned structure which is frequently octagonal. It has often been suggested that this visual idea is a species of echo of the actual appearance of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, transmitted back to Europe by crusaders or other travellers to the Holy Land. It is perfectly possible both that this was one of the sources of inspiration for artists who wanted to depict the Temple, and that the Dome of the Rock was assumed to be a kind of record or replica of the original Temple. Nevertheless, what is undeniable is that the painters either received extremely garbled information about the details of its appearance, or alternatively chose to ignore what they were told. There are armies of centrally-planned Temples in Italian painting, ranging from those of Giotto and Duccio to Raphael’s and beyond. They are thrillingly various, but as it happens the one thing they have in common is that they are never even halfway faithful copies of the Dome of the Rock. In fact, in addition to the centrally-planned solution, there are two other main approaches, the second of which has two principal variants. They both imagine the Temple to have been a kind of basilican church, presumptively with a long nave. The first and unquestionably less common of these simply offers the main façade of the Temple to the viewer, whereas the second either sets the action within the building but allows us to see enough of it in order to deduce its approximate ground-plan, or exploits our willing suspension of disbelief and allows us to peer within a kind of see-through structure from outside. In Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel frescoes, the Temple appears in a multiplicity of guises. The first type – or at least a version of it – is found in the fresco of Christ Expelling the Money-Changers from the Temple, where the inclusion of sculptures of horses and lions on the façade transforms it into a species of homage to San Marco in Venice, and cannot fail to remind one of the links between Padua and the Serenissima.4 The action takes place in front of the Temple, with the result that (strictly speaking) the money-changers are being expelled from its forecourt. It is typical of many of these basilican solutions in showing the Temple at a slightly oblique angle, so that at least some sense of its ground-plan may be apprehended. Others maintained a rigorous frontality, as is the case with Andrea di Giusto’s fresco of the Marriage of the Virgin in Prato Cathedral, which dates from the second quarter of the Quattrocento, and includes a campanile as a natural enough adjunct to an ecclesiastical façade.5 Moving on into the final quarter of the same century, Botticelli’s fresco of the Temptations of 19–34, no. 42, 37–57, no. 45, 71–87, no. 47, 138–49, no. 54, 172–83, no. 59, 273–8, no. 74. 4 G. Badile, Giotto: The Arena Chapel Frescoes, London, 1993, 127. 5 R. Fremantle, Florentine Gothic Painters: From Giotto to Masaccio. A Guide to Painting in and near Florence 1300 to 1450, London, 1975, 520, fig. 1086.

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FIG. 8.2.  FRA ANGELICO, THE PRESENTATION IN THE TEMPLE (FROM THE PREDELLA OF THE ANNUNCIATION ALTARPIECE, CORTONA)

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Christ in the Sistine Chapel endows the Temple with a convincingly realistic Renaissance façade, again seen head on.6 Nevertheless, it also ingeniously allows the viewer to make various deductions concerning the organisation of the space beyond the façade. The most obvious detail is the inclusion of an admittedly weirdly diminutive dome, in front of which Christ and the Devil are placed. Such representations of the exterior only of the Temple as longitudinal church are extremely rare. The first variant within the second type, in which the action is set within the building, is found – inter alia – in the work of Fra Angelico. The classic example is his treatment of the Purification of the Virgin, a subject also and perhaps more commonly referred to as the Presentation of Christ in the Temple [Fig. 8.2]. It is represented in one of the scenes on the predella of Angelico’s altarpiece of the Annunciation in Cortona, and shows the event taking place within what might loosely be described as a Brunelleschian

6

Pietrangeli, Sistine Chapel [n. 2 above], 74–5.

THE TEMPLE AT JERUSALEM IN THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE IMAGINATION

church.7 The protagonists are located as close as possible to the picture plane, and the perfectly symmetrical interior beyond them is dominated by two receding arcades. The action takes place within the building, but Angelico has endowed it with a kind of frontispiece, and there is a sense in which we may imagine that its front wall has been removed to allow us to inspect its interior. As has been stated, there is good reason to expect it to be a figura of a church, but confirmation may be found in the way in which Angelico represented actual church interiors in his frescoes in the Chapel of Saint Nicholas in the Vatican. There, both the Ordination of Saint Lawrence and Saint Lawrence Distributing Alms place the action within eminently comparable – but by no means identical – structures, likewise viewed frontally.8 The second variant within this second type revolves around what I have dubbed a see-through structure, although – as will become apparent – much of the action tends to take place in front of it. The quintessential instance of this type is found in Taddeo Gaddi’s fresco of the Presentation of the Virgin in the Baroncelli Chapel at Santa Croce in Florence, where the narrative all but requires the Virgin to be shown on the steps leading up to the Temple, but the artist has more leeway about where to position the High Priest [Fig. 8.3].9 In Taddeo’s solution, he is at the front of but within the Temple, which is represented obliquely and is splendidly see-through. As is well known, this solution – with minor modifications and adaptations – was to prove extremely influential, and was memorably echoed within Santa Croce itself by the Master of the Rinuccini Chapel, who replaced Taddeo’s round arches with pointed Gothic ones, and altogether further afield in the corresponding miniature in the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry.10 Moving on in time, one of the most intriguing instances of a see-through presentation occurs in a painting in the Johnson Collection in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which depicts Christ Healing a Lunatic and Judas Receiving the Thirty Pieces of Silver. The work in question is currently attributed to Francesco d’Antonio, and opinions differ as to whether it is some species of echo of a now lost work referred to by Vasari and attributed by him to Masaccio.11 What is incontrovertible is both the confidence of the evocation of the building, which is seen obliquely from J. Pope-Hennessy, Fra Angelico, London, 1974, plate 23b. Ibid., plates 111, 112. 9 B. Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: Florentine School, 2 vols, London, 1963, I, plate 124; J. de Voragine, La légende dorée, 2 vols, Paris, 1967, II, 176, for the number of the steps being fifteen. 10 Fremantle, Florentine Gothic Painters [n. 5 above], 195, fig. 385; M. Meiss, J. Longnon and R. Cazelles, The Très Riches Heures of Jean, Duke of Berry, New York, 1969, 56. 11 C. B. Strehlke, Italian Paintings, 1250–1450, in the John G. Johnson Collection and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, 2004, 134–43; R. Bettarini and P. Barocchi (eds), Giorgio Vasari: Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568, Florence, 1975, III, 126. 7

8

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FIG. 8.3.  TADDEO GADDI, PRESENTATION OF THE VIRGIN (BARONCELLI CHAPEL, SANTA CROCE, FLORENCE)

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the other side, and the novel way in which – even more than was the case in Taddeo Gaddi’s Presentation and its progeny – the figures are convincingly dwarfed by the architecture. A third and final instance of this kind of solution is found in the presumed Presentation of the Virgin by Fra Carnevale, now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, but originally in Urbino, where it is hard to imagine that it was not admired by the teenage Raphael.12 Fra Carnevale was a true original, but the absence of both the steps and any hint of the High Priest might indeed almost make one wonder if this truly is a Presentation, were it not for the fact that it was paired with an almost equally clandestine treatment of the Birth of the Virgin, now in the Metropolitan Museum 12 Fra Carnevale: un artista rinascimentale da Filippo Lippi a Piero della Francesca [exhibition catalogue], Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2004–05, 258–66, no. 45b (entry by K. Christiansen).

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of Art, New York.13 In this case, the painter almost manages to convince us that the see-through effect has more to do with the nature of the Temple itself than with artistic fiction. Moreover, he genuinely endows it with a convincingly imposing front, and consciously elects to suggest the pre-Christian historical period by combining explicitly pagan reliefs with anticipations of episodes from the later life of the Virgin on the façade, and indeed resolutely anachronistic polyptychs within. To return finally to the centrally-planned solutions, one of the most striking early examples is found in Giotto’s Massacre of the Innocents in the Scrovegni Chapel [Fig. 8.4].14 In this instance, it seems clear that the

13 14

Ibid,, no. 45a (entry by K. Christiansen). Badile, Giotto [n. 4 above], 124.

FIG. 8.4.  GIOTTO, MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS (SCROVEGNI CHAPEL, PADUA)

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generic architectural prototype was an octagonal baptistery of the kind commonly found in the artist’s native Tuscany, and it seems equally plain that there was a reason for this conjunction. Strictly speaking, as Dante makes plain in the Paradiso (Canto XXXII, lines 76–84), the Old Dispensation equivalent of baptism is circumcision, and consequently the Holy Innocents are not precisely the counterparts of baptised children, but this choice of form for the Temple must be intentional.15 Perhaps surprisingly, the equivalent Giottesque scene in the basilica of San Francesco at Assisi, which is otherwise so slavishly similar, omits this Temple-baptistery, which may indicate that its meaning was not grasped by its adaptor.16 More generally, it is at least worth asking whether artists invariably understood the iconographic implications of what they were representing when they were following well-established precedents. Duccio likewise portrayed the Temple as a loosely Tuscan baptistery on three separate occasions within the elaborate narrative sequence of his Maestà for the high altar of Siena Cathedral. In both the Entry into Jerusalem [Fig. 8.5] and the Funeral of the Virgin, the upper section is seen as part of a townscape.17 Interestingly, while the broad lines of its architecture remain the same, there are minor variations of detail. One involves the number of blind arches per side, while another concerns what is suggested about the appearance of the lower levels of the building, since in the Entry it expands outwards, whereas in the Funeral it does not. The Temple also all but fills the panel depicting the second of Christ’s temptations, and here too the basic arrangement of the architecture – of which only the lower level is visible – is by implication the same.18 However, it differs in the substitution on the side of the building directly facing the viewer of a single larger window for the paired ones of the Entry and Funeral, which are found on the flanking sides, and by virtue of the inclusion for narrative purposes – albeit not quite at the top of the Temple – of a balcony on which Christ and the Devil are standing. Nevertheless – to repeat the point – there is strictly speaking no inconsistency in these departures, because the ground floor of the Temple is not actually visible in the other scenes. One of the most brilliant details in Duccio’s Temptation is the glimpse through a door into the murky interior of the building. It may well have been at the back of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s mind when he came to execute his Presentation of Christ for another altar within the same cathedral [Fig. 8.6].19 What he offers in terms of the architecture is a species of hybrid, with the lower level suggesting a nave with flanking aisles, but with what Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, ed. N. Sapegno, Florence, 1957, 405–6. E. Lughi, The Basilica of St Francis at Assisi: The Frescoes by Giotto, his Precursors and Followers, London, 1996, 124. 17 L. Bellosi, Duccio: The Maestà, London, 1999, 126–8, 330. 18 Ibid., 276–7. 19 E. Borsook, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Florence, 1966, 35–6, plate 57. 15

16

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FIG. 8.5.  DUCCIO, CHRIST’S ENTRY INTO JERUSALEM (MAESTÁ ALTARPIECE, SIENA), 1308–11

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FIG. 8.6.  AMBROGIO LORENZETTI, THE PRESENTATION OF CHRIST, 1342 (GALLERIA DEGLI UFFIZI, FLORENCE)

THE TEMPLE AT JERUSALEM IN THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE IMAGINATION

seems to read as a cupola fairly closely following the disposition of the baptistery type. This solution was to cast a long shadow, and was the direct source of inspiration well into the next century for his Sienese compatriot Giovanni di Paolo’s painting of the same subject, in which the major difference is the substitution of the baptistery-cupola by a triumphantly Renaissance-style dome.20 In Gentile da Fabriano’s Presentation of Christ from the predella of the Strozzi Adoration of the Magi of 1423, he may well have been directly inspired by Brunelleschi’s lost illusionistic panel depicting the Florentine baptistery.21 If so, however, he did not seek to reproduce the building exactly, since his octagonal structure has Duccio-style pinnacles at its corners, with triple windows – as opposed to Duccio’s double ones – up above, and also includes buttresses. Here too, there exists an even more dutiful repetition by Giovanni di Paolo, the only really significant difference being that the whole upper zone of the Temple is omitted.22 It is important to stress that it is not my intention to malign Giovanni as a serial plagiarist – not least since it is perfectly possible that he was asked to take the panel by Gentile as his model.23 One potential weakness of a necessarily highly selective examination of this kind is that it may seek to impose a neat but inevitably limiting order upon the chaotic variousness of the raw material, and consciously or unconsciously censor out the exceptions to its confected rules. One exception to the general rule is the fresco of the Presentation of the Virgin in the Cappella dell’Assunta in Prato Cathedral, now widely attributed to Paolo Uccello.24 For once, although this Temple is centrally planned, it has nothing to do with the baptistery type, but is instead an adulterated variation on the theme of an ancient Roman circular temple, very much in the manner of the Temple of Vesta on the banks of the Tiber in Rome and the so-called ‘Temple of Vesta’ at Tivoli.25 Perugino’s Temple in his Sistine Chapel fresco of Christ Giving the Keys to Saint Peter [Fig. 8.7] has already been referred to, and represents a fully Renaissance conception.26 It shows yet another centrally planned octagonal structure, but there are a number of features of it that are not 20 P. Torriti, La Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena: i dipinti dal XII al XV secolo, Genoa, 1977, 316–17, no. 211. 21 K. Christiansen, Gentile da Fabriano, London, 1982, 96–9, plate 38; G. Vasari, Le opere di Giorgio Vasari con nuove annotazioni e commenti di Gaetano Milanesi, 8 vols and index, Florence, 1878–85, II, 332, for Brunelleschi’s panel. 22 K. Christiansen, L. B. Kanter and C. B. Strehlke, Painting in Renaissance Siena, 1420–1500 [exhibition catalogue], Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1988, 190. 23 Ibid., 146, for a modo et forma contract of 1448 which required Sano di Pietro to ‘fare cinque storie di nostra donna alla similitudine di quelle che sonno a capo le porti dello spedale della scala’ for the predella of an altarpiece. 24 F. and S. Borsi, Paolo Uccello, London, 1994, 191. 25 F. Sear, Roman Architecture, London, 1982, 20, fig. 9, fig. 10. 26 Pietrangeli, Sistine Chapel [n. 2 above], 76–7.

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FIG. 8.7.  PERUGINO, CHRIST GIVING THE KEYS TO ST PETER (SISTINE CHAPEL, VATICAN), 1481

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particularly baptistery-like. The most significant are the cupola, which seems to be a classically rounded response to Brunelleschi’s dome for Florence Cathedral, and the fact that four of its eight sides are embellished by immense pedimented porticoes, with the result that it combines an octagonal ground-plan for the building itself with a Greek cross design. The same basic idea is repeated and extended in Pintoricchio’s fresco of Christ among the Doctors in the Baglioni Chapel in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore at Spello [Fig. 8.8].27 In this instance, the central portico is both projecting and enclosed, and is flanked by large niches housing classical statues in defiance of the interdiction in the Ten Commandments on the making of graven images. A strong sense of the Temple’s horizontality does not fight against its blatantly central plan. When Perugino returned to the charge, so to speak, in his Marriage of the Virgin for Perugia Cathedral, now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Caen, he produced a simplified, less fussy version of his Sistine Temple, in which the porticoes are still monumental, but definitely project less [Fig. 8.9].28 At the same time, the decoration of the sides of the central octagon is much plainer and more monumental. The effect of allowing light to filter through the central portal from its counterpart at the rear of the building is very striking, and provides a focus directly aligned with the head of the High Priest below. This effect must have struck Raphael, although in his aforementioned 27 G. Benazzi, Pintoricchio a Spello: la Cappella Baglioni in Santa Maria Maggiore, Cinisello Balsamo, Milan, 2000, 95. 28 P. Scarpellini, Perugino, Milan, 1984, 107–8, no. 129, 254, fig. 217.

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FIG. 8.8. PINTORICCHIO, CHRIST AMONG THE DOCTORS (S. MARIA MAGGIORE, SPELLO)

Marriage of the Virgin, which is signed and dated 1504, and was painted for the Cappella Albizzini in the church of San Francesco at Città di Castello, he somewhat toned it down [Fig. 8.1].29 More generally, and as has often been observed, it seems almost certain that the blatant similarities between the two altarpieces are a consequence of the fact that Raphael’s contract – now lost or untraced – was of the modo et forma type, in which a prototype was specified for imitation.30 Be that as it may, when it came to the Temple, as in so much else, Raphael was the very opposite of slavishly dependent on Perugino – in either Perugia or Rome – or indeed Pintoricchio at Spello. The most obvious difference in his approach – for all that it is habitually ignored – is that his Temple is not octagonal, but instead has sixteen sides.31 By implication, it is also – apart from its two or maybe four portals – absolutely uniform all Capellen, Raphael [n. 1 above], 138–41. M. O’Malley, The Business of Art: Contracts and the Commissioning Process in Renaissance Italy, New Haven and London, 2005, 221–2. 31 L. Pagnotta, Giuliano Bugiardini, Turin, 1987, 218, no. 61, and fig. 61, for a somewhat later Rape of Dinah in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, which also includes an admittedly very different sixteen-sided Temple. The work in question appears to have been begun by Fra Bartolomeo and completed by Bugiardini after his death in 1517. 29

30

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FIG. 8.9.  PERUGINO, MARRIAGE OF THE VIRGIN (MUSÉE DES BEAUX ARTS, CAEN), 1500–04

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FIG. 8.10.  CHURCH OF SANT’ ANGELO, PERUGIA

the way round. The two other compelling differences between it and all its predecessors are that it is surrounded by an arcade, and that low-lying and slender volutes bridge the gap between the central body of the structure and the external margins of the arcade. I would like to conclude by making a suggestion concerning what I believe to be a plausible – but hitherto unconsidered – source of inspiration for this highly innovative solution. In Perugia, where Raphael had by this time been based for some years, there is an early Christian church called Sant’Angelo, which is generally agreed to date from the late fifth or early sixth century [Fig. 8.10].32 It is circular and is topped by a low-slung cupola above a drum pierced by windows. Within, it has an ambulatory which consists of sixteen columns supporting round arches. It goes without saying that Raphael’s Temple is by no means a carbon copy of Sant’Angelo. On the other hand, and especially if – in the mind’s eye, so to speak – one turns Sant’Angelo inside out, so that the arcade is on the exterior, it seems to me they have a surprising amount in common. It is eminently possible to go to Perugia and fail to visit Sant’Angelo, because it is decidedly off the beaten track. I cannot actually prove that Raphael visited it either, 32

Touring Club Italiano, Guida d’Italia: Umbria, Milan, 1999, 153–5.

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FIG. 8.11.  RAPHAEL, ST JEROME (ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM, OXFORD)

but there can be no doubt that he knew of its existence. For in an early pen and ink drawing, now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, he portrayed the penitent Saint Jerome against a remarkably detailed and topographically accurate panorama of the Sobborgo Sant’Angelo quarter of Perugia [Fig. 8.11].33 The most prominent structure in this view is the church of Sant’Agostino, but in the far distance and silhouetted against the horizon is the distinctive outline of Sant’Angelo.

33 S. Ferino-Pagden, ‘Raphael’s activity in Perugia as reflected in a drawing in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Instituts Florenz 25 (1982), 231–52; E. Knab, E. Mitsch, K. Oberhuber and S. Ferino-Pagden, Raffaello: i disegni, Florence, 1983, 582, no. 19.

PART IV

THE ORTHODOX CHURCHES

INTRODUCTION

When they had arrived at the place which is called the Hill of Mercy, from which the city of God, the holy Jerusalem, can be seen, they all raised their arms towards heaven and offered up thanks to God. But when St David Garejeli saw Jerusalem he fell upon the ground and said to them, ‘No, brethren, I may venture to advance no further from this spot, for I judge myself unworthy even to approach those holy places. But you go and pray for me, a sinner.’ After he had spent much time there in praying and lamenting, bowed down towards the earth, he picked up three stones and packed them in his scrip as sacred relics, as if they had been hewn from the very sepulchre of Christ. After this he turned round and walked joyfully along the road which leads to Gareja. – The Life and Acts of our Holy Father David of Gareja.1 Any Ethiopian who, having heard about those so remarkable churches [of Roha/Lālibalā], does not go the holy city of Roha, is like a man who would not have any desire to behold the face of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. – The Life of Lālibalā (Gadla Lālibalā), 127.2

‘I have defeated you, Solomon.’ Robin Griffith-Jones summarises the context and arguments, well known to scholars, which clarify Justinian’s boast over H. Sophia; and then asks if the kontakion of 562 in praise of the church was drawing a distinction between the Tabernacle and the Temple that has not generally been seen. Cecily Hennessy, Antony Eastmond and Robin Milner-Gulland now take us to Orthodoxy north of the Holy Land; 1 D. M. Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, New York, 1976, 81-93 [91]; see further A. Eastmond, 231–2 below. 2 Quoted by E. Fritsch, 283 below.

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David Phillipson and Emmanuel Fritsch southwards to the Ethiopian Church and Roha/Lālibalā. Cecily Hennessy explores the sacred topography associated with St James, the Lord’s brother, in Jerusalem and Constantinople. The relics of St James, with those of Simeon and Zacharias, were taken to Constantinople in the sixth century, where the Chalkoprateia church, which housed the Virgin’s girdle, was rebuilt by Justin II (565–78) to include a chapel to James. The lower level of this chapel, with a painting of the murder of Zacharias, was rediscovered in 1953. Guide-books to the crusaders’ Jerusalem record that, in the twelfth century, James, Simeon and Zacharias were all honoured by sites on the Temple Mount, itself closely linked with the Virgin. The saints’ commemorations in Constantinople had probably been imported, with their relics, from Jerusalem. The illuminations in two manuscripts of the Homilies of James Kokkinobaphos probably reflect the twelfth-century veneration of St James in Constantinople, and perhaps in the setting of the Holy Sepulchre and Temple Mount in Jerusalem too. Antony Eastmond looks in turn at Georgia and Armenia. He warns against crediting too simply the replication of Jerusalem in Mtskheta (Georgia). It was an idea that grew out of the relationship between the city’s two principal churches, Jvari (‘Cross’) and Svetitskhoveli (‘Church of the Life-Giving Pillar’) and that developed over centuries. In Armenia the links are rather with Jerusalem as a spiritual ideal than as a real city. Throughout the Caucasus, the centralised churches suggest a link with the Holy Sepulchre; but the suggestion ignores the buildings’ liturgical and other functional needs. Eastmond draws attention instead to the inspiration – chiefly liturgical rather than martyrial – which the Caucasus drew in its basilicas from the Church on Mount Zion. It is possible (but by no means certain) that a connection with the Holy Sepulchre is rather to be found in three seventh-century steles topped with arcades surmounted by a domed roof. There is perhaps a larger sensibility at work here: in a preference to imagine Jerusalem and its sanctity, as did St David Garejeli, rather than to encounter it directly. Robin Milner-Gulland evokes the ‘holiness’ of Holy Russia: in the abundance of chapels and images; in the pervasive sound of bells, the ‘aural icons of Orthodoxy’; and in the breath-taking boldness of newly built Jerusalems. Milner-Gulland traces a series of traditions. White limestone buildings in the twelfth century marked the movement of power northwards to Moscow. The concept of the Russians as New Israelites, an Orthodox nation freed from Tatar power, set the scene for Ivan the Terrible’s victory over Kazan (1552) and for his creation of ‘St Basil’s’ (plainer then than now, without the side-domes), a heavenly city in itself, known in its early years as ‘Jerusalem’. From 1598 Boris Godunov asserted the claims of his new dynasty with the first wall around Moscow and his plan for a Holy of Holies in the Kremlin, of which the great bell-tower ‘Big John’ was built and survives. Aleksey Mikhaylovich – the second Romanov tsar (1645–76)

THE ORTHODOX CHURCHES

– and Patriarch Nikon chose Istra, forty kilometres from Moscow, for the creation of their Russian Palestine, the largest ever such endeavour, and in it the huge Cathedral of the Resurrection. Even Peter the Great called his westward-looking St Petersburg ‘Paradise’. Against this current there stood out, for centuries, an ‘unofficial Russia’ for which Nikon and Peter were the servants of Antichrist. For such Old Ritualist dissidents, the spiritual New Jerusalem was evoked, above all, in the Tale of the Invisible City of Kitezh, a counter-paradise submerged in safety from its enemies in Lake Svetloyar until Christ’s return; only the righteous, meanwhile, could hear its bells or glimpse its domes. David Phillipson corrects several widespread misunderstandings about the origin and character of Ethiopian Christianity. He sees Christianity taking root in the northern highlands of Ethiopia, at Aksum, in the first half of the fourth century, and spreading gradually over the following century and a half. There is intermittent evidence of links with Jerusalem before the eleventh century; the good knowledge of Jerusalem’s monuments and topography, clear by the late twelfth century, were probably already of long standing. Phillipson then turns to Roha/Lālibalā, and surveys the site and its evolution over five stages of creation spread over four or five centuries. An aerial view [Colour Pl. XXVIII] gives some sense of the buildings’ extraordinary construction and beauty. Emmanuel Fritsch poses a classic question: what was the origin in Ethiopia of the circular churches with a central, square sanctuary? Fritsch shows that they appear in the early sixteenth century, south of the old Aksumite empire and in regions where round houses were also common; it will have been easier, in the rebuilding needed after the Muslim invasions, to replicate domestic forms in church-building too. For the influences in church construction that led to these new rotundas, the answer may have seemed clear: we should look to the Holy Sepulchre or – following the prestigious authority of Ullendorff – to the Temple in Jerusalem. Fritsch, however, shows that neither of these is a satisfactory solution. He finds an answer, instead, in the layout of the sanctuary in the ancient ‘Cruciform Church’ of Dongola, the capital of the Nubian kingdom of Makuria, and looks forward to the discoveries that will bridge the gap between its destruction in 1275 and the emergence of the Ethiopian rounds. Over and again, then, we are asked in the following pages to revise well-known views about some famous buildings and to appraise other, glorious churches which will to many of us be almost unknown.

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n this short chapter I draw on the recent studies of Constantinople that have reinterpreted the most famous of imperial claims to have surpassed Solomon and his Temple. I close with some implications drawn from Romanos’ kontakion. The old Hagia Sophia was destroyed in the Nika revolt of 532 CE; thirty thousand people were said to have died in the Hippodrome during the revolt. The church was rebuilt with startling speed [Colour Pl. XXI]. Its consecration in 537 is described in the Diegesis, a ninth-century account of the rebuilding: Justinian came in procession from the Palace to the gates of the Augusteion which gives onto the Hōrologion, mounted on a chariot with four horses; and he sacrificed 1,000 cattle, 6,000 sheep, 600 hinds, 1,000 pigs, and 10,000 birds and cocks. And he gave to the poor and needy 30,000 measures of corn … Then the Emperor Justinian made his entry with the cross, accompanied by the Patriarch Eutychius. And escaping from the hands of the Patriarch, he ran by himself from the imperial gates to the ambo, and stretching out his arms [ekteinas tas cheiras autou, cf. diepatesen tas cheiras autou, 1 Kings 8.23] he said, ‘Glory to God, who has judged me worthy to bring to completion such a work. I have defeated you, Solomon [enikēsa se Solomōn]’ … The next day he went to the opening [ta anoixia] of the church, making as many sacrifices or more in holocaust.1 Diegesis 27: T. Preger (ed.), Scriptores Originum Constantinopolitanarum, I, Leipzig, 1901, 74–108 [104–5]. For translation and discussion, G. Dagron, Emperor and Priest: The Imperial Office in Byzantium, Cambridge, 2003, 207–8, 303–9; Flavius Cresconius Corippus, In laudem Iustini Augusti minoris, ed. A. Cameron, London, 1976, 204–5. Robert Ousterhout sets the questions raised here in a wider context: ‘The Temple as Symbol, the Temple as Metaphor’, 146–58 above.

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Reference to Solomon had been a commonplace at the dedication of churches since Eusebius had described Constantine as ‘our Solomon’ in his ekphrasis of the church of Tyre, consecrated in 318 (HE 10.45, 9–10 above). The church was dedicated once more in 562, after the earthquakes of 553 to 558, the dome’s collapse and the repair. A kontakion generally ascribed to Romanos praised this reconstruction, once more under Justinian: two hundred and fifty years had passed between the Temple’s destruction and the building of the Holy Sepulchre; Justinian had begun the rebuilding of H. Sophia the day after its destruction.2 According to the kontakion, the Temple had been built for Israel alone and offerings extracted by force in a place of blood-soaked sacrifices; H. Sophia had been built for all nations, who came to it freely as the place where God truly lived with humankind (2 Chron. 6.18) and was proclaimed aisthētōs and noerōs.3 Justinian had superseded and surpassed Solomon. Such praise of Justinian is not unanimous. The Diegesis was probably lampooning Justinian for the shockingly pre-Christian Solomonic holocausts (3 Kings 8.62) with which (according to the Diegesis) he celebrated H. Sophia. The manner of the emperor’s entry into the church was improper and indecorous: he should have been led in by the patriarch, not broken free and ‘run’ in by himself. In moving from the palace to the church, the emperor ‘was leaving a place where he was both soldier and high priest, directly delegated by Christ to the government of men, for a place where all power belonged to Christ through the intermediary of the clergy and where the cross was not that of imperial victory (the stauros nikopoios) but a replica of that of Jerusalem.’4 The rod of Moses, preserved by Constantine in the palace, did not signify supremacy in Christ’s church; at the church’s entrance, the emperor removed and laid aside his crown. Worse still, Justinian had blood on his hands and had never asked for pardon. The Diegesis stands then with Procopius and Evagrius in condemnation of Justinian and his pride.5 Behind the agenda of the Diegesis there may well, nonetheless, be the genuine recollection of a claim made by Justinian. Corippus (565), writing for the accession of Justin II and the Empress Sophia, had hinted at such a link:

Romanos, Hymn 54, str. 21–2, ed. Joseph Grosdidier de Matons, V, 492–5. C. A. Trypanis, Fourteen Early Byzantine Cantica, Vienna, 1968, 142, 145–6 (str. 2, 13–15); translation and commentary in A. Palmer and L. Rodley, ‘The Inauguration Anthem of Hagia Sophia in Edessa: A New Edition with Historical and Architectural Notes and a Comparison with a Contemporary Constantinopolitan Kontakion’, BMGS 12 (1988), 137–51. 4 Dagron, Emperor [n. 1 above], 97. 5 Ibid., 306, 212–13: some ninth-century texts attack the arrogant extravagance of Basil I by attacking Justinian. Justinian’s victory may, for the Diegesis, have been one of crude expense: he outspent Solomon. 2 3

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Wisdom [Sapientia] certainly made it worthy of [the empress] Sophia: it began a beautiful temple and made it solid and strong, it began it and completed it and ornamented it and glorified it with gifts. Let the description of Solomon’s temple now be stilled. Let all well-known wonders everywhere give place. There are two wonderful things imitating the glorious sky, founded by the advice of God: the venerable temple and the glorious building of the new [palace of] Sophianae.6

Justinian’s ‘victory’ will have been primarily political: over the dynastic ambitions of the noblewoman Anikia Juliana.7 In the 520s Juliana had completed the magnificently decorated H. Polyeuktos. The original H. Polyeuktos had been built by the Empress Eudokia, wife of Theodosius II. Anikia Juliana was her great-granddaughter, and daughter of the western emperor Olybrius. Her own husband Aerobindus had failed to take over the empire in place of the unpopular Anastasius in 512; she was probably nursing imperial ambitions for her son Olybrius. She was depicted on a dedication miniature of the Vienna Dioscurides with close links to the imperial virtues of megalopsychia, phronēsis and sophia (greatness of soul, intelligence and wisdom).8 All this was a far cry from Justinian’s modest Balkan background. The main body of Juliana’s new H. Polyeuktos was nearly square (51.5m x 52m), internally divided into a nave, aisles and a sanctuary in the east. Along each side were three exedrae supporting semi-domes decorated with mosaic peacocks, their tails fanned out to fill the semi-domes’ curvature [Figs 6.3, 6.4, p. 154 above]. A poem in honour of the church and its patron was mounted in sections: outside the entrance; on four slabs in the atrium; and on a marble entablature around the church’s inside walls. It survives in the Palatine Anthology (1.10); portions of the inscription were discovered in excavations of the 1960s.9 The Anthology’s version begins with the verses inside the church, then moves on to those displayed (in a now-uncertain disposition) in the atrium and finally those outside. The verses outside the entrance (PA 1.10. 66–76) described the glories within, including a mosaic of Constantine’s baptism. Of the four slabs in the atrium, the first and second are likely to have borne the verses as follows:

Corippus, trans. Cameron [n. 1 above], 4.280–7 (Cameron 81, 115, 204–5). J. Bardill, ‘A New Temple for Byzantium: Anicia Juliana, King Solomon, and the Gilded Ceiling of the Church of St Polyeuktos in Constantinople’, in W. Bowden, A. Gutteridge and C. Machado (eds), Social and Political Life in Late Antiquity, Leiden, 2006, 339–70; R. Ousterhout, ‘New Temples and New Solomons: The Rhetoric of Byzantine Architecture’, in P. Magdalino and R. Nelson (eds), The Old Testament in Byzantium, Dumbarton Oaks, 2010, 223–53. 8 B. Kiilerich, ‘The Image of Anicia Juliana and the Vienna Dioscurides: Flattery or Appropriation of Imperial Imagery?’, Symbolae Osloenses 76 (2001). 9 C. L. Connor, ‘The Epigram in the Church of Hagia Polyeuktos in Constantinople and its Byzantine Response’, Byzantion 69 (1999), 479–527. 6 7

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What choir is sufficient to sing the work of Juliana, who, after Constantine, embellisher of his Rome, after the holy golden light of Theodosius, and after the royal descent from so many forebears, accomplished in a few years a work worthy of her family, and more than worthy.10

Juliana had been active in the negotiations to reunify the eastern and western churches, writing to Pope Hormisda in 519 and greeting Pope John to Constantinople in 525 or 526. Constantine’s baptism in Rome was an emblem of such unity; so was Juliana’s whole lineage. The verses now evoke Solomon, as Justinian would in his turn: She alone has conquered time and surpassed the wisdom of celebrated Solomon, raising a temple to receive God, the richly wrought and graceful splendour of which the ages cannot celebrate …11

A story recorded by Gregory of Tours speaks at once of Justinian’s greed and of Juliana’s renunciation of her dynastic ambitions. Justinian sought to divert her wealth from the erection of churches to the defence and beautification of the city. In response she devoted enormous resources to gilding the roof of H. Polyeuktos. She invited Justinian to see the result. Before he left, she handed over a ring that might have been worn by the emperors from Nero through to her own father Olybrius, and with it her family’s imperial standing.12 Enikēsa se, ‘I have defeated you’: Justinian’s victory (nikē) was also over Anikia Juliana, and was more than architectural. What influence had Solomon’s Temple on the architecture and decoration of H. Polyeuktos? The clues are rich, but fugitive.13 The central area was 100 ancient royal cubits square. Such a square may evoke Solomon’s cubic Holy of Holies (20 x 20 x 20 cubits), but it more immediately recalls those other and ancient heirs of Solomon’s sanctuary: the square of Ezekiel’s new Temple (Ezek. 41.13–14)14 and the city of the New Jerusalem, which will as a whole be a square or cube with no need for a temple at all (Rev. 21.16). PA 1.10. 42–47a, trans. Connor, ‘Epigram’ [n. 9 above]. PA 1.10. 47b–52, trans. Connor, ‘Epigram’. 12 B. Croke, ‘Justinian, Theodora, and the Church of SS Bacchus and Sergius’, DOP 60 (2006), 25–63. 13 R. M. Harrison, A Temple for Byzantium: The Discovery and Excavation of Anicia Juliana’s Palace-Church in Istanbul, London, 1989; and in relation to the Temple of Solomon, idem, ‘The Church of St Polyeuktos in Istanbul and the Temple of Solomon’, in C. Mango, O. Pritsak and U. M. Pasicznyk (eds), Okeanos: Essays Presented to Ihor Sevcenko on his Sixtieth Birthday by his Colleagues and Students, Cambridge, Mass., 1984, 276–9. 14 For Ezekiel: C. Milner, ‘The Image of the Rightful Ruler: Anicia Juliana’s Constantine Mosaic in the Church of Hagios Polyeuktos’, in P. Magdalino (ed.), New Constantines: The Rhythm of Imperial Renewal in Byzantium, 4th – 13th Centuries, London, 1994, 73–81. Herod’s Temple was 100 cubits long, its façade 100 cubits high and wide (Jos. Ant. 15.390, BJ 5.207). 10 11

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The peacocks, vegetal motifs and internal structure of H. Polyeuktos prefigured this paradise.15 And what influence had Solomon’s Temple on the design of H. Sophia that can be traced without reference to H. Polyeuktos? We have no space here to follow this enquiry in its various forms: scholars have variously concentrated on dimensions and proportions, on other elements of design and decoration, and on liturgical forms and roles. The kontakion of 562 prompts a slightly different question. Strophes 1 to 3 celebrate the incarnation, H. Sophia and Christ’s people together: God has shown the beauty of his dwelling here below, the tabernacle of his glory; as we celebrate the Word’s sojourn in the body, may we be a worthy dwelling-place of knowledge and wisdom, ‘for in truth the Wisdom of the Father built for herself a house of incarnation and dwelt among us, above understanding.’ The kontakion expounds Solomon’s question, ‘Will God indeed dwell on the earth?’ (1 Kings 8.27); and the incarnation provides the answer. Now we see actually fulfilled the word of inspired scripture: ‘But can God indeed dwell with men?’, as Solomon of old says, not doubting, but in amazement, referring enigmatically to the incarnation of God in a localised residence; and so, by the agency of the Spirit, he sketched out in symbols what was to take place. For he [God] fenced himself round with the living temple of a virgin and was born ‘God with us’.16

H. Sophia will henceforth be the place where God shared a roof with those on earth (str. 4); it is itself a kind of heaven on earth (str. 5); it is a version of the universe created over the chaos when God said ‘Let there be light’ (str. 6–9). Now Romanos turns to the tabernacle, built by Moses in the wilderness after the design shown to him on the mountain: it is into that heavenly tabernacle that Jesus, who himself tabernacled on earth (John 1.14), has entered (Hebr. 8). The divinely inspired book tells that Moses of old, the man privileged to see God, inaugurated a tabernacle of witness and that he had examined the design of it mystically on the mountain, but because he was unable to teach through words the likeness of things beyond words, he had it executed by someone endowed with the spirit of God, Bezalel, who used all kinds of skills to construct [what] had been described in symbols, according to the instructions of the God who had spoken.17

The emperor (Basileus) is the new Bezalel, whose church will – as we have heard in the kontakion’s polemic – outshine Solomon’s Temple.18 It J. Bardill, ‘A New Temple’ [n. 7 above], 339–70. Kontakion, str. 3, trans. Palmer, ‘Inauguration Anthem’ [n. 3 above]. 17 Kontakion, str. 10, trans. Palmer, ‘Inauguration Anthem’. 18 According to Procopius, H. Sophia’s architect Anthemius was most learned in the wisdom that is called the art of building (Proc., De Aedificiis, 1.1.24); as Bezalel, who 15

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will indeed, for the model for H. Sophia is not Solomon’s Temple, but the structure on which the Temple had been based: the tabernacle constructed by Moses and Bezalel in direct imitation of the tabernacle that Moses saw in heaven.19 It was straightforward to assimilate tabernacle and Temple; but the kontakion mounts a polemic in favour of the one and against the other. Thus far, this need be no more than a rhetorical ploy. Solomon built a temple modelled on the earthly tabernacle, which was itself modelled on the heavenly; Justinian’s H. Sophia was based directly on the tabernacle not made with hands. Such an image takes precedence over the image of the image. This raises more questions than we can explore here, with far-reaching implications for biblical and architectural hermeneutics. Could anything in the actual architecture of H. Sophia plausibly be claimed – and on what authority – to resemble the heavenly tabernacle more closely than the Temple did? If there is an answer, it would, I suggest, lie in the introduction of the circle [Colour Pl. XXI]. Not because the tabernacle on earth had been curvilinear; on the contrary, both the tabernacle and the Temple were relentlessly orthogonal (except for the Temple’s giant circular basin, ‘the sea’, 1 Kings 7.23-6). Herod’s Temple rose in a series of rectangular spaces up the terraced slopes of God’s mountain – and open to the Middle Eastern sky – until their culmination at its summit in tightly restricted access to the sanctuary’s enclosed oblong and cube, the candlelit hall and the lightless Holy of Holies. This was a microcosm of creation as envisioned en route upwards towards the Holy of Holies and so towards heaven. But in a post-Parmenidean world any artefact that was, crudely and fleetingly, to mimic Being would be informed by the perfection of the sphere or of its planar reduction, the circle. The form of the tabernacle built according to the design shown to Moses on the mountain could, if this is right, be trumped by a form that more nearly disclosed Being. The Mosaic tabernacle had represented both the heavenly tabernacle and the creation of the physical cosmos. For Greek Christendom, a centralised plan and dome characterised architectural microcosms of the physical universe; and we might, then, have access in turn to no better or more authoritative model of the heavenly tabernacle than one partaking, however distantly, in the perfection of the sphere.20 Such distinctions would presuppose that a building on earth can indeed in principle participate in and mediate to human minds the realities of heaven; and that, whatever the revelation offered by scripture, there may be architectural forms foreign built the tabernacle, had been filled with divine spirit of wisdom, joining-together and understanding (Ex. 31.3). 19 R. Griffith-Jones, ‘Introduction’, 7 above. 20 The exception, Cosmas Indicopleustes, warns us against any easy assurance here; H. G. Saradi, ‘Space in Byzantine Thought’, in S. ĆurČić and E. Hadjitryphonos, Architecture as Icon, Princeton, 2010, 88–91.

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to that revelation that will be better equipped for such mediation. The tabernacle in heaven and its likeness on earth were the subject of intense theological exposition. And not for their own sake: to follow Moses in his ascent to the heavenly tabernacle was, as Gregory of Nyssa famously explained in his Life of Moses, to rise in contemplation to the domain of incomprehensible mystery.21 But Gregory did not allow an imagined architecture to inform his thought. He declared, without reference to architectural form, that the heavenly tabernacle was the Logos, the earthly tabernacle was the incarnate Christ; the architectonic details of the prototype and its representation, as described in the bible, must then conform to and illumine that identification. This is so far only to raise – and not to answer – the question, how deeply such hermeneutical concerns informed the design of H. Sophia.

21 Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses, trans. A. J. Malherbe and E. Ferguson, New York, 2006 [1978], 83–90. K. E. McVey, ‘The Domed Church as Microcosm: Literary Roots of an Architectural Symbol’, DOP 37 (1983), 91–121; exegesis of the tabernacle, 111–17. In this classic article we might only ask that the title had spoken of theological rather than literary roots.

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usebius set a high bar for the building of churches when he wrote to Paulinus, the bishop of Tyre: ‘shall I call you a new Bezalel, the master builder of a divine tabernacle, or a Solomon, king of a new and far nobler Jerusalem, or a new Zerubbabel, who adorned the temple of God with the glory that was far greater than the old?’2 This idea of the church replacing or surpassing the Temple, the new city as outdoing the old, is inherent in the relations between Jerusalem and Constantinople.3 With the establishment of Christianity as an imperially sponsored religion and the building by the Constantinopolitan emperors of the Holy Sepulchre complex on the purported site of Christ’s anastasis (resurrection), there was no drive to reconstruct the Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount. Christ prophesied after all that it would be destroyed (Matt. 24.1–2). In the late seventh century, the Temple site was claimed for Islam with the building of the Qubbat as-Sakhra, the Dome of the Rock, and when Jerusalem was recovered for Christianity from the Muslims in 1099, it was here that a new Christian focus developed. It was known as the Templum Domini, identified as being (or at least being on the site of) the Temple

1 I would like to thank Robin Griffith-Jones, Eric Fernie and Robin Cormack for their support in writing this chapter. 2 Eus., HE 10.4.3; Eusebius, The History of the Church from Christ to Constantine, trans. G. A. Williamson, London, 1989 [1965], 306. 3 On the relation of Jerusalem and Constantinople, see R. Ousterhout, ‘The Sanctity of Place and the Sanctity of Buildings: Jerusalem versus Constantinople’, in B. Wescoat and R. Ousterhout (eds), Architecture of the Sacred: Space, Ritual, and Experience from Classical Greece to Byzantium, Cambridge, 2012, 281–306.

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in which the infant Christ had been presented to Simeon forty days after his birth (Luke 2.22–38). Constantinople itself, however, had no heritage connected with either the Old or the New Law. It had, then, two principal ways of establishing its religious legitimacy and prestige as the centre of Christianity in the world. One was by building outstandingly beautiful and richly ornamented buildings to the glory of God, which perhaps symbolically surpassed the Temple. The other was by taking holy relics and reinstalling them in Constantinople, thus physically embedding sanctity in the capital city, and then developing the sites with liturgical rites. Sacred tradition was reinforced through the veneration of relics. Those of St James, the first bishop of Jerusalem, were honoured in both Jerusalem and Constantinople: in Constantinople, from the sixth century in a centralised chapel adjacent to the Church of the Virgin Chalkoprateia; and in Jerusalem, from the twelfth century in a similarly centralised building near the Dome of the Rock, linked with the Presentation and hence with the Virgin. During the twelfth century, at the time of the Christian restoration of the Holy Sepulchre and the embracing of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, imagery related to the apocryphal Infancy Gospel of James, by custom said to be written by St James, was admired in Constantinople and appeared in luxury editions of the Homilies of James Kokkinobaphos.4 This tradition is the subject of the following pages. In Constantinople, by contrast with the West, Jerusalem’s buildings were rarely, if ever, ‘copied’. However, Constantinople’s chapel of St James is doubly interesting: for its relationship to St James’s chapel in Jerusalem; and for the two chapels’ connections with their adjacent churches, the Virgin’s Chalkoprateia in Constantinople and the Virgin’s Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. At issue is not just the two similar planets, but the orbit of each around its star.

JAMES IN JERUSALEM: BISHOP AND MARTYR St James is known in the New Testament as ‘the brother of the Lord’ (Gal. 1.19; cf. Mark 6.3) and is held by tradition to be the son of Joseph by a previous marriage. He is sometimes known as James the Just or Jacob or James the Less, and in Constantinople as James Adelphotheos (brother of God). He was the first bishop of Jerusalem. He was venerated at various sites in Jerusalem from the earliest Christian times. He was said to have written the Protoevangelion or Infancy Gospel of Jacob/James, 4 For the text and most recent translation of the Infancy Gospel of James, with prior bibliography and commentary, see R. Hock, The Infancy Gospels of James and Thomas, Santa Rosa, CA, 1997; for the Homilies’ text, see PG 127.543–700; for recent bibliography on the manuscripts, see C. Hennessy, ‘The Stepmum and the Servant: The Stepson and the Sacred Vessel’, in A. Eastmond and L. James (eds), Wonderful Things: Byzantium through its Art, Farnham and Burlington, Vt, 2013, 79–98.

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which was the most popular and influential apocryphal text in Byzantium. By tradition he was killed c. AD 60 by being thrown from the pinnacle (pterugion) of the Temple by Ananus, the Jewish High Priest, and then stoned and clubbed to death. It was seemingly possible to identify the pinnacle as the south-eastern corner of the Temple Mount. James, then, will have been thrown from the walls into the Kidron Valley below; from this grew the links that we are about to sketch between James and the Valley’s tombs. This account of the martyrdom, however, is from Eusebius, who for his fullest story quotes Hegesippus (c. 150); and Hegesippus had recorded that ‘they buried him on the spot by the temple, and his gravestone is still there by the temple’.5 This suggests burial (unthinkable in practice, while the Temple was standing) on the Temple Mount. Jerome remarks that the tombstone had been well known up to the time of Hadrian (active in Jerusalem from 130), and resists the story which he already knew of James’s burial on the Mount of Olives, above the Kidron Valley.6 In the twelfth century, with the Temple Mount back in Christian hands, that old Eusebian tradition could revive. The pinnacle of the Temple from which James had been thrown will have been the roof of the Templum Domini; his grave then was to be found beside the Dome of the Rock, on the Temple Mount itself. We will return to this second tradition. James’s relics, along with those of Simeon and Zacharias, were said to have come to Constantinople from tombs in the Kidron Valley which still survive.7 The finding of the relics of James, Simeon and Zacharias is linked by a text that tells how a hermit Epiphanius, who lived in the Kidron Valley, had a dream in which James told him to go the bishop, St Cyril (c. 350–86) and ask him to dig up the bodies of the three saints. Cyril would not help. A certain Paul had been given a similar dream and sent an agent (fittingly named Anastasius) to excavate. The bodies were found, and in 352 Paul built a chapel in the Valley.8 It was these relics that went to Constantinople under Justin II in the sixth century. In the seventh century the valley itself was known as St James’s Valley. From the twelfth century, pilgrims to Jerusalem first mention a chapel to James in the Valley.9 John of Würzburg (c. 1170) writes of his visit here:

5 Eus., HE 2.23.1–25, after Hegesippus and Josephus; trans. Williamson [n. 2 above], 58–61; Pringle, Churches, III, 182–3. 6 Jerome, de Viris Ill., II, PL 23.613; Pringle, Churches, III, 185. 7 Pringle, Churches, III, no. 320, 185–9; the chapel containing his tomb was at the foot of the Mount of Olives from the mid fourth century, see 183, 185. 8 Pringle, Churches, III, 185–6; for the text, Apparitio SS Jacobi et Primi Archiepiscoporum, in Vincent and Abel, Jérusalem, 845–7, 854. No certain trace survives of this chapel. Of the two pyramids in the Kidron Valley, the lower was identified in the Middle Ages as the tomb of St Simeon or of St Zecharias. Rock-cut features in the podium of the colonnaded structure just to its north may be the remains of an apse, perhaps of the chapel to St James. 9 Pringle, Churches, III, 187, 188–9; also see B. Zissu and A. S. Tendler, ‘The Kidron

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‘In the Valley of Jehoshaphat was buried the blessed James Alphaeus, who … was thrown from the Temple. There is moreover in the same valley a beautiful chapel, in which there remains a token [indicium] of his burial with these verses set above it.’ He follows with a verse about James’s death, then concludes, ‘from here he was translated to Constantinople’.10 Later texts describe the site as having an upper and a lower church; it is mentioned by several other pilgrims.11

FROM JERUSALEM TO CONSTANTINOPLE: THE VIRGIN AND SAINT JAMES In the fifth century two highly valuable relics of the Virgin were brought from Jerusalem and had churches built for them: her veil; and her girdle (Soros). The Church of the Blachernai held the veil, and the Church of the Theotokos in the Chalkoprateia (the Copper Market) held the sacred girdle.12 The Blachernai does not survive, but the foundations of the Chalkoprateia were discovered by Ernst Mamboury in 1912 just northwest of Hagia Sophia [Fig. 10.1].13 The east end with the apse and sections of the north and south walls still stand. Another set of relics from Jerusalem was housed in a chapel adjacent to the north-east side of the atrium, next to the Theotokos in the Chalkoprateia. The chapel was dedicated to St James and contained the relics of James, Simeon and Zacharias (of which we have just heard), as well as those of the Holy Innocents.14 The Chalkoprateia church is recorded to have been rebuilt by Justin II (565–78) and his wife Sophia, and to then have had three chapels associated with it: one dedicated to the Virgin’s girdle, one

Valley Tombs in the Byzantine Period: A Reconsideration’, New Studies on Jerusalem 17 (2011), 7–43. 10 Pringle, Churches, III, 187; R. B. C. Huygens, Peregrinationes Tres: Saewulf, John of Würzburg, Theodericus, CCCM 139, Turnhout, 1994, 109; Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrimage, 269–70. 11 Pringle, Churches, III, 183, 187–8. On Theodoric, Huygens and Pryor, Peregrinationes, 162; Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrimage, 292; it is also mentioned by Daniel the Abbot (1106–08); see Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrimage, 134, trans. W. F. Ryan; the Seventh Guide (c. 1160), 235; the Second Guide (c. 1170), 240. 12 Sources confuse the two sites: see J. Wortley, ‘The Marian Relics at Constantinople’, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 45 (2005), 171–87 [174–87], repr. J. Wortley, Studies in the Cult of Relics in Byzantium up to 1204 [Variorum Reprints, Aldershot, 2009], Study XI. 13 For bibliography, see W. Müller-Wiener, Bildlexikon zur Topographie Istanbuls: Byzantion, Konstantinupolis, Istanbul bis zum Beginn d. 17. Jh, Tübingen, 1977, 76–8; Mathews summarises the controversy over its foundation, under Theodosius II (408–50) or Pulcheria (450–53) or Verina, wife of Leo I (457–74), see T. Mathews, The Early Churches of Constantinople: Architecture and Liturgy, University Park, PA and London, 1971, 29; on Blachernai, with bibliography, see Müller-Wiener, Bildlexikon, 223–4. 14 The relics of the Holy Innocents were also in Bethlehem, see H. Delehaye, Les origins du culte des martyrs, Brussels, 1993, 215–16, and these were probably brought from there, although this, to my knowledge, is not recorded.

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FIG. 10.1.  PLAN OF THE CHURCH OF THE CHALKOPRATEIA IN RELATION TO HAGIA SOPHIA AND THE CHAPEL OF ST JAMES

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to Christ and one to St James. Regarding the chapel dedicated to James, a record in the Patria of Constantinople reads: ‘the same emperor [Justin II] built also Saint James [which is close by] and he placed in reliquaries there the relics of the Holy Innocents, of Saint Simeon who received God, of the Prophet Zacharias, and of Saint James, the brother of the Lord’.15 These relics were still present in the twelfth century, as recorded by an English traveller, known as Anon. Mercati, who describes them in a crypt below the Church of St James.16 The placement of the relics of the three saints associated with the Temple (James, Simeon and Zacharias) close to the church dedicated to the Virgin may be associated with her connections with the Temple, where she was said to have been presented at the age of three.17 However, there is no way of proving this, and the feast of her Presentation was only celebrated at the Chalkoprateia later, as noted below. In 1953, Cyril Mango and Paul Underwood investigated an octagonal structure in Istanbul, lying at basement level, some one hundred metres west of Hagia Sophia (Aya Sofia) beneath a hotel on Zeynep Sultan Camii Sokağı. They identified, from an inscription alone, a painting of the Annunciation and, from traces of paint, two scenes depicting the three magi and the murder of Zacharias. Zacharias was martyred in the Temple for not telling where Elizabeth had hidden with her child, John the Baptist, in a cave during the time of the Massacre of the Innocents.18 All three events, then, are connected with the nativity. When he later published the site, Mango thought these paintings to be lost.19 He interpreted the building as the lower level of the Chapel of St James.20 It was surveyed in 1965 by Wolfram Kleiss [Fig. 10.2].21 On my visit to the site in 2009, it became apparent to me that the paintings were still extant with others not previously identified.22 The 15 T. Preger (ed.), Scriptores Originum Constantinopolitanarum, II, Leipzig, 1901, Patria III, 263, section 148; C. Mango, ‘Notes on Byzantine Monuments’, DOP 23 (1969–70), 369–72, figs 3–4, at 370 (with translation); Mango notes the text can be read as ‘in a reliquary’ or perhaps better ‘in reliquaries’, see n. 18; also H. Klein, ‘Sacred Relics and Imperial Ceremonies at the Great Palace of Constantinople’, Byzas 5 (2006), 88; J. Wortley, ‘Relics of “The Friends of Jesus” at Constantinople’, in J. Durand and B. Flusin (eds), Byzance et les reliques du Christ, Paris, 2004, 143–57; reprinted in Wortley, Studies [n. 12 above], Study XIV. 16 S. G. Mercati, ‘Santuari e reliquie Constantinopolitane secondo il codice Ottoboniano Latino 169 prima della conquista Latina (1204)’, Rendiconti: Atti della Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archeologia 12 (1936), 133–56 [144–5]; in Mango, ‘Notes’ [n. 15 above], 371; K. N. Ciggaar, ‘Une description de Constantinople traduite par un pèlerin anglais’, Revue des études byzantines 34 (1976), 211–45 (for a date of early twelfth century, see 212). 17 Infancy Gospel of James 7.1–10. 18 Infancy Gospel of James 22.5–23.9. 19 Mango, ‘Notes’ [n. 15 above], 370. 20 Ibid., 370–1. 21 W. Kleiss, ‘Neue Befunde zur Chalkopratenkirche in Istanbul’, Istanbuler Mitteilungen 15 (1965), 149–67; W. Kleiss, ‘Grabungen im Bereich der Chalkopratenkirche in Istanbul 1965’, Istanbuler Mitteilungen 16 (1966), 217–40; plan, fig. 2, 220. 22 For a fuller description and analysis, see C. Hennessy, ‘The Chapel of Saint Jacob at the Church of the Theotokos Chalkoprateia in Istanbul’, in J. Curtis, R. Matthews,

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FIG. 10.2.  PLAN OF THE CRYPT OF CHAPEL OF ST JAMES, ISTANBUL

building contains an octagonal chamber with a vaulted ambulatory surrounding a central octagonal pier, with various adjacent chambers. The eight outer walls of the ambulatory form semicircular niches on the cardinal points and are flat-backed on the diagonals, with variations. The A. Fletcher, C. Gatz, M. Seymour, St J. Simpson and J. N. Tubb (eds), Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East, 3 vols, Wiesbaden, 2012, II, 351–66.

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paintings are in poor condition but are datable by comparison with other paintings in Istanbul to the first quarter of the fourteenth century. The clearest is the murder of Zacharias, in which the canopy of the sanctuary is portrayed. One can see the shadow of the head of a figure, Zacharias, in front of the sanctuary and an inscription identifying the scene. This crypt contained the relics of the four martyrs or groups of martyrs brought from Jerusalem: St Zacharias, St Simeon and St James, with the Holy Innocents, presumably brought from Bethlehem.23 One imagines each might have been allocated a niche with space for an altar, but this is not clear. The painting of Zacharias is the only one of the martyrs to survive.

AFTER THE CAPTURE OF JERUSALEM, 1099 By the twelfth century the Temple Mount, now under the Christians, had its own site in honour of James: the place of his fall, now understood to have been from the roof of the Temple itself. After the Crusaders captured Jerusalem in 1099, the Templum Domini on the Temple Mount was used as an abbey church, run by Augustinian canons from 1112 and rededicated in 1141.24 The dedication was to St Mary. The Knights Templar used the Aqsa mosque as their headquarters.25 The Templum Domini was promoted by the Knights Templar, who sought to make it the most important site of pilgrimage, as if in competition with the Hospitallers who controlled the Holy Sepulchre.26 To what extent the Templum Domini was actually thought to be the first-century Jewish Temple is not clear. Sources suggest that many were aware of its Islamic heritage, but that it also marked the site of the Temple of Christ’s time.27 Immediately to the east of the Templum Domini is the Qubbat as-Silsila, the Dome of the Chain [Figs 10.3, 10.4].28 It is first mentioned in the ninth century, when it was attributed to ‘Abd al-Malik ibn Marwān, who built the Dome of the Rock itself. After 1099 it was used as a chapel dedicated to St James.29 The chapel reverted to Muslim control in 1187 but was used On the Holy Innocents, see n. 14. Pringle, Churches, III, 401; for a summary, see Folda, Art of the Crusaders, 249–51. 25 Pringle, Churches, III, nos. 368–9, 417–35 [420]. 26 A. Wharton, Refiguring the Post-Classical City: Dura Europos, Jerash, Jerusalem and Ravenna, Cambridge and New York, 1995, 99. 27 Ibid., 99; on the various views, see D. H. Weiss, ‘Hec est Domus Domini Firmiter Edificata: The Image of the Temple in Crusader Art’, in Kühnel, Real and Ideal Jerusalem, 210–17. 28 Pringle, Churches, III, no. 319, 182–5; on the date, 184; M. Rosen-Ayalon, The Early Islamic Monuments of Al-Haram al-Sharif: An Iconographic Study [Qedem: Monographs of the Institute of Archaeology 28], Jerusalem, 1989, 25–9; O. Grabar, The Dome of the Rock, Cambridge, Mass., 2006, 142, 152; for a summary of its building and associations connected with it, see O. Grabar, The Shape of the Holy: Early Islamic Jerusalem, Princeton, NJ, 1996, 130–2. 29 Pringle, Churches, III, 185. 23

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FIG. 10.3.  CHAPEL OF ST JAMES THE LESS, DOME OF THE CHAIN, QUBBAT AS-SILSILA, JERUSALEM

FIG. 10.4.  CROSS-SECTION AND PLAN OF THE CHAPEL OF ST JAMES THE LESS, DOME OF THE CHAIN, QUBBAT AS-SILSILA, JERUSALEM

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again by the Christians from 1240 to 1244.30 It is a circular building with eleven external facets. Six columns in the centre support the inner drum, which is surrounded by an ambulatory supported by eleven columns. It is unclear quite how it appeared in Christian hands; it seems that it was enclosed with walls, allowing for inscriptions and paintings recalling James’s death.31 This Chapel of St James is mentioned by various pilgrims.32 It is most fully described by John of Würzburg (c. 1170) and by Theodoric (1172). They both relate that a door in the east of the Templum Domini led to a chapel dedicated in honour of St James, for, in John’s words, ‘he was thrown down from that side of the Temple roof ’.33 On the wall is written: James, son of Alphaeus, similar to the Lord in countenance, Died for Christ, cast from the nearby Temple: Thus James the Just publicly preaching Christ Was beaten by the evil crowd and felled by a fuller’s club.34

It goes on with four more lines, with further lines around the ciborion of the chapel. Theodoric also gives the epitaph over James’s grave: Tell, stone and grave: Whose bones do you cover? They are James the Just’s, who lies here beneath the grave’s covering.35

Both John and Theodoric go on with further description of the Templum Domini; St James’s Chapel was included as part of a circuit for visiting the Templum. In the Templum Domini itself, events connected with the Temple were commemorated. Of the various sites mentioned by the pilgrim Saewulf (1101–03), two are of particular interest to us: where the angel appeared to Zacharias to tell him that Elizabeth would bear a son; and where Simeon saw Christ in the Presentation.36 Of the relics that were taken to

Ibid., 183. Ibid., 184. 32 The Second Guide, in about 1170, refers to it as being at the ‘head of the Temple’, trans. Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrimage, 240; the Seventh Guide mentions, ‘there is also a church where Saint James was thrown down headlong from the Temple. And there, outside the wall of the Temple, is a certain altar beside which Saint Zacharias was killed’; see Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrimage, 234. 33 Pringle, Churches, III, 183; Huygens, Peregrinationes [n. 10 above], 92; Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrimage, 248. 34 Pringle, Churches, III, 183; Huygens, Peregrinationes, 92; Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrimage, 248. 35 Pringle, Churches, III, 183; Huygens, Peregrinationes, 162; Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrimage, 292. 36 Pringle, Churches, III, 401, 404; Huygens, Peregrinationes, 68; Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrimage, 104–5. 30 31

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Constantinople and housed in the Chapel of St James Adelphotheos, as we have seen, three were of saints related to the Temple and commemorated in or beside the Templum Domini: Zacharias, Simeon and James. The main feast celebrated in this abbey church of the Templum Domini, dedicated to the Virgin Mary, was Christ’s Presentation; the Presentation of Mary herself in the Temple was celebrated too.37 It was an inescapably Marian shrine. In Constantinople, the four great feasts of the Virgin were shared between the two fifth-century churches dedicated to her: the Annunciation to the Virgin, the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, the Virgin’s own nativity and her Koimisis (Dormition).38 From the Typikon of Hagia Sophia (whose earliest text is late ninth century) and the Book of Ceremonies written for Constantine VII (913–59), it is known that the feasts of the Annunciation and of the Virgin’s nativity were celebrated at the Chalkoprateia.39 The emperor was present for processions from Hagia Sophia to the Chalkoprateia via the forum, in a tradition that probably dates from the seventh century.40 By the ninth century, and perhaps from origins in the early eighth, two new feasts were also celebrated in the Chalkoprateia: the Virgin’s Presentation and the feast of Joachim and Anna. A third was introduced by the second half of the ninth century: the Conception of the Mother of God by St Anna.41 The feasts of Simeon and Anna were also celebrated in St James’s Chapel, which housed Simeon’s relics.42 Joseph (Christ’s human father), James (Christ’s brother) and David (Christ’s ancestor) were celebrated on the Sunday after Christmas.43 These commemorations were themselves imported from the Holy Land – most likely when the relics of James, Simeon and Zacharias were brought from Jerusalem.44 In Jerusalem, the Presentation of Christ in the Temple and the deaths of Zacharias and of James were celebrated at the Templum Domini and at St James’s chapel; in Constantinople they were celebrated at the Chalkoprateia and at the chapel dedicated to James Adelphotheos. Both of the principal Pringle, Churches, III, 402–4. On the four feasts and the dates of their institution, see D. Krausmüller, ‘Making the Most of Mary: The Cult of the Virgin in the Chalkoprateia from Late Antiquity to the Tenth Century’, in L. Brubaker and M. Cunningham (eds), The Cult of the Mother of God in Byzantium: Texts and Images, Aldershot, 2011, 119–221; the Presentation and Koimisis were at the Blachernai from the time of Maurice (582–602). 39 J. Mateos (ed.), Le Typicon de la Grande Église: Ms. Sainte-Croix no. 40, Xe siècle [Orient. Christ. Anal. 165–6], 2 vols, Rome, 1962–63; on the date, see I, x–xix; A. Vogt, ed. and trans. (French), Le livre des ceremonies, Paris, 1935–40. 40 For Annunciation, Mateos, Typicon, I, 252.28–254.10; for the nativity, ibid., I, 18.8–10, 20.7–11; in Krausmüller, ‘Making the Most’, 224. 41 Mateos, Typicon, I, 110.8–11 and 22.1–3; H. Delehaye, Synaxarium Ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae, Propylaeum ad Acta Sanctorum Novembris, Brussels, 1902, 291.12–14; in Krausmüller, ‘Making the Most’ [n. 38 above], 230–1. 42 Mateos, Typicon, I, 226.1–3; Krausmüller, ‘Making the Most’, 241. 43 Mateos, Typicon, I, 160.20–3; Krausmüller, ‘Making the Most’, 225–6. 44 Krausmüller, ‘Making the Most’, 225; see also 235. 37

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churches were dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The churches in Jerusalem were clearly associated by biblical tradition to the sites; Constantinople by contrast had to import its relics and their sanctity. The revival in the twelfth century of the cult of James at his chapel in Jerusalem and of Simeon and Zacharias at the Templum Domini must have reverberated at the Chalkoprateia in Constantinople. In this way, the sacral topography of Jerusalem and Constantinople are interrelated. The choice of illuminations in two illustrated manuscripts of the Homilies of James Kokkinobaphos seems to reflect the twelfth-century veneration of James in Constantinople.45 They may bear witness to such veneration in Jerusalem too. The manuscripts, normally dated between 1130 and the 1150s, illustrate six homilies on major events in the Virgin’s life.46 In the illustrations, but not in the texts, there is an emphasis on the role of the Virgin’s stepson, James, as her companion and protector. It is possible that at least one manuscript was made for the sister-in-law of the Emperor Manuel I (1143–80), Eirene the Sebastokratorissa, or perhaps for the emperor himself, who was the youngest of four brothers (the four sons of Joseph are a feature of the illuminations). This family context may, as we will see in a moment, be significant. Manuel had a deep interest in Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre and was responsible for covering the burial couch at the Holy Sepulchre with gold.47 The events are set in Jerusalem and the scenes depict the urban landscape with a splendid array of buildings, some of them centralised. While many scenes take place within the Temple or houses, many miniatures somewhat unusually show the external appearance of buildings with an array of bright roofs. Colours of buildings seem to interchange in a random but rather beautiful way. It often looks as though similar scenes are shot, as it were, from different standpoints. There are various buildings in the background. For instance, in the Paris manuscript, in the scene depicting the second vision of Zacharias, there is a dome behind the altar and a building with a red tiled roof on the left.48 As the story progresses, the building is repeated – this time with a blue dome and roof in the right background, as in the prayer of Zacharias where Mary sits behind the ciborion [Colour Pl. XXa], and again when Zacharias returns the rods to the candidates and Joseph is elected.49 Then, in the reception of Mary by Joseph, the setting has turned around; the building has switched to the left side [Colour Pl. XXb].50 It appears again on the right behind the

Vatican, cod. gr. 1162 and Paris, cod. gr. 1208. For a brief summary of the dating issues, see Hennessy, ‘The Stepmum’ [n. 4 above], 89–90. 47 Biddle, Tomb, 91; Phokas, Description, PG 133.944, trans. in Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrimage, 315–36. 48 The second vision of Zacharias, Paris, BNF cod. gr. 1208, f. 103v. 49 The prayer of Zacharias, f. 120r; Zacharias returns the rods, f. 131v. 50 The reception of Mary by Joseph, f. 135r. 45

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table in Joseph’s house when Mary arrives there to meet his four sons.51 We may be looking here at just an imaginary world or chance buildings in Constantinople. But we must wonder if the building represents the Holy Sepulchre, the Templum Domini, or St James’s Chapel. The full-page illuminated frontispiece shows the Ascension of Christ and the magnificent decoration of a twelfth-century Byzantine building, a church with five domes, perhaps showing us the interior, perhaps the exterior, with elegant marble revetments and mosaics, with the Mother of God and his disciples standing below [Colour Pl. XXI].52 It has been suggested that this represents the church of the Holy Apostles, the traditional burial place of the Byzantine emperors in Constantinople, or that it is the Heavenly Jerusalem itself.53 It is perhaps more likely at this time to represent the Pantokrator monastery, the main imperial foundation in Constantinople in the first part of the twelfth century, built by John II Komnenos, to which his son Manuel brought a further relic: the stone on which Christ was laid to be anointed before his burial. It was placed near Manuel’s burial site in what was called the Heroon, the central church, which was the new imperial mausoleum.54 Bringing heaven to earth, the holy land to Constantinople, the presence of the stone of Unction in the Pantokrator burial chapel represented again the presence of the Holy Sepulchre in Constantinople. In this miniature – and in many throughout the Kokkinobaphos manuscripts, and numerous other Byzantine and indeed western manuscripts – the buildings have blue roofs. One might think they represent ceramic blue glazed tiles, which are currently used for roofing domes in certain areas.55 As far as can be determined, there is no archaeological evidence for blue tiled roofs, and it is probably a reference to leading, which was a common covering for buildings and was particularly suited to curved areas.56 The brightness of the blue is certainly arresting, and is perhaps a stylistic device to associate the roof with heaven. Eusebius’s early challenge to his Christian builders to counter the Jewish heritage, as celebrated by the Temple tradition, either established or reflected a then current metaphor for the construction of great churches; and the transposition of Temple and church is a persistent motif.57 There Mary’s arrival at the house of Joseph, f. 142v. Fol. 3v; titles in K. Linardou, ‘Reading Two Byzantine Illustrated Books: The Kokkinobaphos Manuscripts (Vaticanus graecus 1162, Parisinus graecus 1208) and their Illustration’ [Ph.D. thesis, University of Birmingham, 2004]. 53 For instance, see R. Ousterhout, ‘Sacred Geographies and Holy Cities: Constantinople as Jerusalem’, in A. Lidov (ed.), Hierotopy: The Creation of Sacred Space in Byzantium and Medieval Russia, Moscow, 2006, 98–116 [107]. 54 Ousterhout draws an analogy between the Pantokrator and the Holy Sepulchre, see Ousterhout, ‘Sacred Geographies’ [n. 53 above], 107–9. 55 For instance, the Ermito del Santo Cristo del Calvario in Javea, Spain. 56 On roofing materials in Byzantium, see R. Ousterhout, Master Builders of Byzantium, Princeton, NJ, 2008 [1999], 128, 147–51, with examples of leaded roofs as well as slate. 57 For examples of this regarding the rebuilding of the Holy Sepulchure in the eleventh51

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are several texts that refer to the relation of church buildings to God, Christ and the Holy Land.58 However, these do so very much in terms of the liturgy that is celebrated within the building, and not in reference to its physical presence. Part of the supremacy of Constantinople as the city of God was derived from the relics translated from the Holy Land to the new city. St Stephen’s arm came in the fifth century to be housed in a palace chapel dedicated to the saint, and John the Baptist’s arm arrived in the tenth century and was also kept in the palace, in the Church of the Virgin of the Pharos, along with especially esteemed relics from the Passion.59 At least one text suggests that Constantinople was so replete with relics from the Holy Land that there was no reason to go abroad to see them.60 Yet it has been argued by Robert Ousterhout that, in Constantinople, the references to a New Jerusalem are limited, since ‘Jerusalem provided no more than a convenient metaphor for a sacred city, and not a typological model’, and that the sacred topography of Constantinople was not modelled on Jerusalem.61 Sacral topography and the replication of buildings was a theme famously addressed by Richard Krautheimer. He showed that in the construction of buildings that purport to ‘copy’ others, it is the ‘content of architecture’ that is represented.62 The Holy Sepulchre is the most illustrative example: in the West there are several churches, such as S. Stefano in Bologna [Fig. 16.3, p. 333 below], that are in some sense modelled on it.63 This was, for the most part, not a Byzantine practice. There were perhaps only two examples in Constantinople. One is the church of Saints Karpos and Papylos (from the late fourth or early fifth century), identified by A. M. century ‘Theodore Psalter’ (London, BL Add. MS 19352), see C. Hennessy, ‘The “Theodore Psalter” and the Rebuilding of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem’, Electronic British Library Journal, 2017, no. 4 (http://www.bl.uk/eblj/2017articles/pdf/ebljarticle42017.pdf). 58 For a discussion of various texts, see H. Saradi, ‘Space in Byzantine Thought’, in S. Ćurčić and E. Hadjitryphonos (eds), Architecture as Icon: Perception and Representation of Architecture in Byzantine Art, Princeton, 2010, 73–111 [101–5]. 59 I. Kalavrezou, ‘Helping Hands for the Empire: Imperial Ceremonies and the Cult of Relics at the Byzantine Court’, in H. Maguire (ed.), Byzantine Court Culture, 829–1204, Dumbarton Oaks, 1997, 53–79; on the relics at the Pharos, see A. Lidov, ‘A Byzantine Jerusalem: The Imperial Pharos Chapel as the Byzantine Jerusalem’, in A. Hoffmann and G. Wolf (eds), Jerusalem as Narrative Space / Erzählraum Jerusalem, Leiden 2012, 63–104; Ousterhout, ‘Sacred Geographies’ [n. 53 above], 103–4. 60 A. Heisenberg (ed.), Neue Quellen zur Geschichte des lateinischen Kaisertums und der Kirchenunion, I: Der Epitaphios des Nikolaos Mesarites auf seinen Bruder Johannes, Munich, 1922, 27, in Ousterhout, ‘Sacred Geographies’, 104; Ousterhout, ‘Sanctity of Place’ [n. 3 above], 298; P. Magdalino, ‘L’église du Phare et les reliques de la Passion à Constantinople (VIIe/VIIIe–XIII siècles)’, in Durand and Flusin (eds), Byzance et les reliques du Christ [n. 15 above], 15–30. 61 Ousterhout, ‘Sacred Geographies’ [n. 53 above], 100; see also R. Ousterhout, ‘New Temples and New Solomons: The Rhetoric of Byzantine Architecture’, in P. Magdalino and R. Nelson (eds), The Old Testament in Byzantium, Dumbarton Oaks, 2010, 223–53 [239–43]; Ousterhout, ‘Sanctity of Place’ [n. 3 above], 296. 62 Krautheimer, ‘Introduction’, 1. 63 See for instance R. Ousterhout, ‘The Church of Santo Stefano: A “Jerusalem” in Bologna’, Gesta 20 (1980), 311–21.

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FIG. 10.5.  PLAN OF SAINTS KARPOS AND PAPYLOS, ISTANBUL

Schneider with the Church of St Menas [Fig. 10.5]. It was said to be built by Constantine’s mother, Helena, for the martyrs εἰς μίμησιν τοῦ τάφου τοῦ Χριστοῦ (in imitation of the tomb of Christ), and the circular crypt survives.64 The second is the Theotokos tou Kouratoros, said to be built by Verina, wife of Leo I (457–74), which had relics of Lazarus, Mary and Martha and is possibly identifiable with the Balabanağa Mescidi, whose remains are dated to the fifth or sixth century [Fig. 10.6]. It was said to be εἰς ὁμοίωμα τοῦ τάφοῦ κυρίου (in likeness of the tomb of the Lord) and was a hexagonal building.65 While the identifications and associations of 64 T. Preger (ed.), Scriptores Originum Constantinopolitanarum, III, Leipzig, 1907, 245, section 82; Krautheimer, ‘Introduction’, 14; A. M. Schneider, Byzanz: Vorarbeiten zur Topographie und Archäologie der Stadt [Istanbuler Forschungen 8], Berlin, 1936, 1–4, pls 1–3, text 3–4; Müller-Wiener, Bildlexikon [n. 13 above], 186–7. 65 Preger, Scriptores, III, 245, section 101; A. Van Millingen, Byzantine Churches in Constantinople: Their History and Architecture, London, 1912, 265–7; A. M. Mansel, ‘The Excavations at the Balaban Agha Mesdjidi in Istanbul’, AB 15 (1933), 210–29; Schneider,

SACRAL TOPOGRAPHY IN JERUSALEM AND CONSTANTINOPLE

these two buildings are uncertain, the floor plan of the Balabanağa Mescidi, while hexagonal and not octagonal, has clear visual associations with the crypt of St James Adelphotheos and similarly housed relics. However, there are no written accounts that associate the Chalkoprateia chapel with Christ’s tomb. And it must be coincidence that the chapels associated with James in both Jerusalem and Constantinople are polygonal in plan. This chapter has addressed the interrelation of the two cities – Jerusalem and Constantinople – in the light of cultural appropriation; the case of James the Just perhaps provides a thematic and topological connection Byzanz [n. 64 above], 53–4; Müller-Wiener, Bildlexikon [n. 13 above], 98–9; see also Ousterhout, ‘Sacred Geographies’ [n. 53 above], 107; R. Ousterhout, ‘Loca Sancta and the Architectural Response to Pilgrimage’, in R. Ousterhout (ed.), The Blessings of Pilgrimage, Chicago, 1990, 108–24 [112].

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FIG. 10.6.  PLAN OF THE BALABANAĞA MESCIDI, ISTANBUL

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between the two cities. As we have seen, the relics of James, the first bishop of Jerusalem and purportedly the Lord’s own brother, which were associated with the Temple in Jerusalem, were revered in Constantinople at a site adjacent to the Church of the Chalkoprateia, the location of one of the most sacred relics of Christ’s mother. Similarly, in the twelfth century in Jerusalem, James’s life and death and events associated with the Temple were marked at the Dome of the Chain, itself adjacent to the church at the Dome of the Rock, dedicated again to the Virgin Mary. The rich iconography in the twelfth-century Kokkinobaphos manuscripts, with numerous illuminations of Jerusalem and its Temple, highlight St James and his role as companion to the Virgin and point to his significance, and that of Jerusalem, in twelfth-century Constantinople.

JERUSALEMS IN THE CAUCASUS? ANTONY EASTMOND

J

erusalem has always been a major focus for Christians in the Caucasus. The imagined city played a role in the foundation myths of both Armenia and Georgia, and the real city attracted pilgrims over the centuries. There is ample evidence for the presence of people from the Caucasus in and around the Holy City. Their formal presence is preserved in the inscriptions that accompany some of the earliest Christian mosaic floors to survive from around Jerusalem;1 and their informal presence is marked by the graffiti that medieval and later pilgrims have left throughout the region.2 In this chapter I examine the ways in which the idea of Jerusalem returned to the Caucasus: how it was embodied in the art and architecture of the region. Centralised buildings play a very important role in the architecture of the Caucasus, but I will argue that they were not seen as imitations of the Holy Sepulchre: Jerusalem was seen very differently in this region compared to the west of Europe. A different building type became associated with the holy places. The chapter has two parts: a general consideration of the status of Jerusalem in the traditions of the Caucasus, and then a more detailed consideration of the centralised buildings of the region and the alternative building types that can be associated with the Holy City. 1 Armenian floor from by the Damascus Gate: S. Der Nersessian, L’art Arménien, Paris, 1977, 65–7; Georgian floor from Bir el-Qutt: G. Tsereteli, Udzvelesi kartuli tsartserebi Palestinidan [The Oldest Georgian Inscriptions from Palestine], Tbilisi, 1960; A. AlpagoNovello, V. Beridze and J. Lafontaine-Dosogne, Art and Architecture of Medieval Georgia, Louvain-La-Neuve, Milan, 1980, 45, fig. 17. 2 For some Armenian examples see R. W. Thomson, ‘Jerusalem and Armenia’, in E. A. Livingstone (ed.), Papers of the 1983 Oxford Patristic Conference [Studia Patristica 18], Kalamazoo, 1986, 77–91, reprinted in his Studies in Armenian Literature and Christianity [Variorum Reprints, Aldershot, 1994], Study V, esp. 77–8; Y. Tchekhanovets, ‘Early Georgian Pilgrimage to the Holy Land’, Liber Annuus 61 (2011), 453–71. For the comprehensive collection of Armenian graffiti see http://rockinscriptions.huji.ac.il [accessed 01/12/2014].

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THE TOPOGRAPHY OF JERUSALEM AND GEORGIA In Georgia, the arrival of Christianity in the early fourth century in the east of the country – the regions of Kartli and Kakheti – is linked to the evangelism of St Nino. Her tale is told in Moktsevai Kartlisai (the chronicle of the conversion of Kartli), which was probably written in the course of the seventh century.3 The text recounts St Nino’s works to convert Mirian, the king of the region, who then led the conversion of all his subjects. Mirian was inspired by a vision to mark his conversion and that of his realm by erecting three monumental crosses across his kingdom. Two crosses were set up in prominent hilltop locations at Tkhoti to the west and at Ujarma to the east.4 The third was set up in the heart of his kingdom on the plateau overlooking Mtskheta, the old Georgian capital at the confluence of the Mtkvari and Aragvi rivers [Figs 11.1, 11.6]. This site, now known as Jvari – Cross – became a permanent marker of Christianity. Mirian’s son, Rev, protected the cross with a canopy; and by the end of the sixth century the cross was entirely enclosed within a stone church, also named Jvari, the church of the Holy Cross.5 This is one of the great centralised buildings of the Caucasus, to which I will return later. The conversion of King Mirian was confirmed in Mtskheta by a miracle. A column for Mirian’s first church that could not be raised by his workmen was raised by angels during the night, whilst St Nino prayed.6 This became the origin of the patriarchal cathedral of Svetitskhoveli, whose name translates as the Church of the Life-Giving Pillar [Fig. 11.2].7 Svetitskhoveli and Jvari were the two most prominent foundations in Mtskheta, and rooted in their foundations are evocations of the holy sites of the passion in Jerusalem. The cross at Jvari inevitably recalled the cross erected at Calvary, in the south-east corner of the atrium of Constantine

3 I. Abuladze, Dzveli kartuli agiograpiuli lit’erat’uris dzeglebi [Monuments of Ancient Georgian Hagiographical Literature], I, Tbilisi, 1963, 98–163; S. H. Rapp, Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography: Early Texts and Eurasian Contexts [Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 601; Subsidia 113], Louvain, 2003, 245–55. See also M. van Esbroeck, ‘La place de Jérusalem dans la “Conversion de la Géorgie”’, in T. Mgaloblishvili (ed.), Ancient Christianity in the Caucasus [Iberica Caucasica 1], Richmond, Surrey, 1998, 59–74, translated as ‘The Place of Jerusalem in The Conversion of K’art’li’, in S. H. Rapp, Jr, and P. Crego (eds), Languages and Cultures of Eastern Christianity: Georgian [The Worlds of Eastern Christianity 5], Farnham, 2012, 175–91. 4 Kartlis Tskhovreba, ed. S. Qaukhchishvili, Tbilisi, 1955, 121; trans. R. W. Thomson, Rewriting Caucasian History. The Medieval Armenian Adaptation of the Georgian Chronicles: The Original Georgian Texts and the Armenian Adaptation, Oxford, 1996, 135. 5 D. Tumanishvili, T. Khundadze and D. Khoshtaria, Jvari, Church of the Holy Cross at Mtskheta, Tbilisi, 2008. 6 Kartlis Tskhovreba, ed. Qaukhchishvili, 111–13, trans. Thomson, Rewriting Caucasian History [n. 4 above], 123–5. 7 M. Bulia and M. Janjalia, Mtskheta, Tbilisi, 2000, 89–91; R. Mepisashvili and V. Cincadze, The Arts of Ancient Georgia, London, 1979, 115.

JERUSALEMS IN THE CAUCASUS?

FIG. 11.1.  JVARI CHURCH (GEORGIA), 586–605: DISTANT VIEW FROM THE SOUTH

FIG. 11.2.  SVETITSKHOVELI CATHEDRAL, MTSKHETA (GEORGIA), 1010–29, WITH LATER ALTERATIONS: EXTERIOR FROM NORTH-WEST, WITH JVARI IN THE BACKGROUND

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the Great’s Holy Sepulchre.8 It is possible that it also had contemporary resonance, as Cyril of Jerusalem reported a vision of the cross in 351.9 The cathedral of Svetitskhoveli – despite its name recalling the miracle of St Nino – can more properly be linked to the tomb of Christ itself. For the miracle of the life-giving pillar was intimately entwined with Christ’s burial. The miraculous pillar was erected over the robe of Christ, which had been buried at this site [Fig. 11.3]. Georgian legend claimed that the robe had been won by the Jew Elioz, a witness to the crucifixion, who brought it to his sister, Sidonia, in Mtskheta.10 The moment she held it she fell dead, partly overcome by holding the relic, and partly in shame at her brother’s complicity in the death of Christ. Mourners were unable to remove the robe from her tightly clutched arms and so it was buried with her. The site was lost, only to be miraculously revealed at the time of St Nino’s miracle. This combination of the robe of Christ from the crucifixion and a burial alluded to the absent body of Christ, and allowed the site to evoke the Holy Sepulchre itself. Thus the two key moments of the passion were embedded in the topography of the first Christian city in Georgia in the fourth century. Over time more churches were built around the city that continued to replicate the idea of Jerusalem. This notion of Mtskheta as a new, Georgian Jerusalem was first recognised and formulated in a paper written by Korneli Kekelidze in 1914.11 Kekelidze identified a series of other religious sites around the city, including Bethlehem [Betlehemi; a cave by the edge of the Mtkvari river, now lost], Mount Tabor [possibly to be identified with the late antique settlement of Armazistsikhe, a site to the south of the Mtkvari river that is associated in the early chronicles with idol-worship]; Bethany [c. 9km south-east of Mtskheta]; Gethsemane [Getsimania, about 500m west of Svetitskhoveli], Antioch [Antiokia, immediately to the east of Svetitskhoveli], and allusions to Mount Eleon to the north of the city [Fig. 11.4].12 Nearby was a monastery dedicated to St Saba, whose original foundation lay in the Kidron Valley to the south-east of Jerusalem. Kekelidze argued that these names were used to enable the Georgians to employ unchanged the liturgy of Jerusalem, with its topographical particularities now made evident in this city in Georgia.13 8 9

69.

Coüasnon, Sepulchre, 38–40. van Esbroeck, ‘La place de Jérusalem dans la “Conversion de la Géorgie”’ [n. 3 above],

Kartlis Tskhovreba, ed. Qaukhchishvili, 98–101, trans. Thomson, Rewriting Caucasian History, 107–9. 11 K .S. K’ek’elidze, ‘K voprosu ob ierusalimskom proiskhozhdenii gruzinskoi tserkvi’, in Etiudebi dzveli kartuli lit’erat’uris ist’oriidan, IV, Tbilisi, 1957, 358–63 [On the question of the Jerusalemic origins of the Georgian Church]. First written in 1914, the paper was only published in 1957. 12 D. Khoshtaria, ‘Adreuli shua saukuneebis eklesiebi mtskhetashi’, Academia [Historicalphilological magazine], 1 (2001) [Early medieval churches in Mtskheta], 31. 13 T. Mgaloblishvili, Klarjuli mravaltavi [Klarjeti Polycephalon] [Dzveli kartuli mtserlobis dzeglebi 12], Tbilisi, 1992. 10

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FIG. 11.3.  SVETITSKHOVELI: PILLAR OVER THE ROBE

The idea of the replication of Jerusalem in the Caucasus has proved very attractive in recent scholarship.14 However, it is a not unproblematic idea, both in terms of the historical evidence on which it is based and on the architecture that gives the myth its material form. When the names of the churches are listed, the allusions to Jerusalem appear strong, but we should question the way in which the Holy City was mapped onto Mtskheta. The buildings, where they survive at all, are of a size and variety 14 G. Gagoshidze, ‘Mtskheta – Georgian Jerusalem, Svetitskhoveli’, in A. Hoffmann and G. Wolf (eds), Jerusalem as Narrative Space / Erzählraum Jerusalem [Visualising the Middle Ages 6], Leiden and Boston, 2012, 47–61; M. Chkhartishvili, ‘Mtskheta kak Novyi Ierusalim: ierotopoiia ‘’Zhitiia sv. Nino’’’, in A. Lidov (ed.), New Jerusalems. Hireotopy and Iconography of Sacred Spaces, Moscow, 2009, 131–49 [English summary: ‘Mtskheta as New Jerusalem: Hierotopy in the Life of St Nino’, 149–50].

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FIG. 11.4.  MAP OF MTSKHETA 1. SVETITSKHOVELI; 2. JVARI; 3. ANTIOKIA; 4. GETSIMANIA; 5. SAMTAVRO; 6. ZEDAZENI MONASTERY; 7. RIVER MTKVARI; 8. RIVER ARAGVI

ANTONY EASTMOND

of designs such that an assumption that they all belong to one conceptual programme is difficult to sustain. The form of the Getsimania, a simple hall church recently rebuilt from ruins, has been argued to be eighth century or earlier, whereas the Antiokia, with its horseshoe apse, is no later than the sixth.15 It is also clear that the Jerusalemic topography has changed. The Antiokia church has no obvious place in the topography of Christ’s life; rather, Antioch features in Georgia’s later ecclesiastical history as the site of the patriarchate that claimed jurisdiction over Georgia. Indeed, most historians have sought to identify the Antiokia church with a fifth-century church dedicated to St Stephen, which Kartlis Tskhovreba says was built in the 420s in this location by King Archil.16 The adoption of an Antioch church within Georgia would best fit the circumstances of the eleventh century, when Georgia disputed Antioch’s claims to primacy, and sought independence for its own patriarch.17 I suspect its re-identification suited a Georgian claim to promote Svetitskhoveli as the principal monument of an autocephalous church, with Antioch an antiquated and minor site located literally in its shadow.

Bulia and Janjalia, Mtskheta [n. 7 above], 81, 87. Kartlis Tskhovreba, ed. Qaukhchishvili, 140, trans. Thomson, Rewriting Caucasian History [n. 4 above], 155: ‘Then king Archil built the church of St Stephen at Mtskheta, at the gates of the Aragvi, where were situated the strong military bastions which he had also constructed’. 17 D. M. Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, London, 1956, 165–8. 15

16

JERUSALEMS IN THE CAUCASUS?

We must therefore be more cautious about the nature of this Mtskheta as Jerusalem. It was not a planned idea, and certainly not one created by a single agent. Rather it was an idea that was rooted in the relationship of the central two churches in the city, and which then developed gradually over the centuries. More importantly, it was a topography that was never set; it could be expanded and adapted over time to suit different liturgical and political needs in Georgia.

THE TOPOGRAPHY OF JERUSALEM AND ARMENIA A similar attempt has been made to see the topography of Echmiadzin (ancient Vałaršapat), the spiritual capital of Armenia, as a reflection of the holy sites in Jerusalem. In this case, the link comes not from the names of the buildings in the city but from a conceptual association between their foundation and that of the churches in Jerusalem. As in Georgia, much of this correspondence relies on the importance of the cross: St Gregory the Illuminator, the evangelist of Armenia in the early fourth century, had a vision of four columns of fire with capitals made of clouds surmounted by crosses which rose over the city, marking what would become its four holiest shrines.18 Three appeared over sites associated with SS Gaiane and Hripsime, the virgin martyrs of Armenia (over their places of martyrdom, and over the building containing wine presses in which they had taken refuge from the Emperor Diocletian). The fourth appeared at the site on which St Gregory would build the mother church (katołike) of Armenia, now the cathedral of Echmiadzin.19 The theophanic nature of St Gregory’s vision has allowed the city to be seen as a conceptual copy of the celestial Jerusalem.20 More recently an attempt has been made to establish a physical correspondence between the relative locations of these four sites and those of the Holy Sepulchre, Eleon, Zion and Gethsemane in Jerusalem, although the proposal remains speculative and tenuous [Colour Pl. XIX].21 Elsewhere in Armenia a better case can be made. Tovma [Thomas] Artsruni’s History of the House of Artsrunik, written at the start of the tenth century (and continued by later writers) suggests that an 18 Agathangelos’ History of the Armenians, trans. R. W. Thomson, Albany, 1976 [trans. and comm.], 731–56. 19 A. Kazaryan, Kafedral’nyi sobor Surb Echmiadzin i vostochnokhristianskoe zodchestvo IV–VII vekov [The Cathedral of Holy Echmiadzin and the Eastern Christian Architecture of the 4th – 7th Centuries], Moscow, 2007; A. Plontke-Lüning, ‘Feurige Säulen. Zu den Gründungslegenden der Kathedralen in Valarsapat (Armenien) und Mcxeta (Georgien)’, in F. Jäger and H. Sciurie (eds), Gestalt. Funktion. Bedeutung [FS Friedrich Möbius], Jena, 1998, 30–49. 20 Agathangelos’ History of the Armenians, trans. Thomson [n. 18 above], lvi. 21 N. Garibian de Vartanan, La Jérusalem nouvelle et les premiers sanctuaires chrétiens de l’Arménie. Méthode pour l’étude de l’église comme temple de Dieu, Yerevan, 2009, 242–80.

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imitation of Jerusalem, analogous to the topographical transformation of Mtskheta, was created elsewhere in Armenia. This Jerusalem was built in the shadow of the great Rock of Van, a city utterly destroyed by the early 1920s.22 The History describes the building campaign of Gagik Artsruni that took place almost exactly a thousand years before the city’s destruction: He [Gagik] … built a church, constructed in wonderful fashion from stones cut in the city of Manazav and brought to Vantosp, dedicated to the holy Zion in the holy city of Jerusalem. To the right of the altar he built on the same foundation [a chapel] dedicated to the crucifixion of the Lord at Golgotha. Above it he constructed a church [dedicated] to the upper room of the mystical celebration of the transmission of the new covenant. On the left side of the altar he built a church in commemoration of the Resurrection of Christ on the third day from the tomb, having pillaged hell. Above that he built a church [dedicated] to the Ascension to heaven and the sharing of the Father’s throne, and in commemoration of the Second Coming, when he will come in the Father’s glory with the angels to the apostles, bringing them the consoling and encouraging gospel. He also built on the rock of Amrakan on the eastern and western sides banqueting halls decorated in gold, with verandahs, improving what had earlier been constructed by his father Derenik …23

Whilst the topographical relationship of the holy spaces at Van does not mirror that at Jerusalem (for example, the placement of the church of the Ascension above that of the Resurrection), the theological relationship is evident. Here we can see a clearer attempt to replicate the city; although the form of none of the churches is now known. King Gagik is more famous for the palace chapel he built on an island in Lake Van, the church of the Holy Cross at Aghtamar, built between 915 and 921. This was a centralised, tetraconch church, reviving the form of seventh-century Armenian churches.24 In all these cases it is clear that Jerusalem had a powerful impact on the first Christian centres in Georgia and Armenia, but that the city’s influence was most powerful as a spiritual ideal, rather than as a real city.

22 For an impression of the city before its destruction, see C. Texier, Description de l’Arménie, la Perse et la Mésopotamie, Paris, 1842–52, II, 9–19 and pls 35–38. 23 Thomas Artsruni, History of the House of Artsrunik, trans. R. W. Thomson, Detroit, 1985, 252–3. 24 For a summary of possible Jerusalemic associations see L. Jones, Between Islam and Byzantium: Aght’amar and the Visual Construction of Medieval Armenian Rulership, Aldershot, 2007, 101–6; S. Der Nersessian, Aght’amar [Documenti di Architettura Armena 8], Milan, 1974, 10.

JERUSALEMS IN THE CAUCASUS?

CENTRALISED BUILDINGS At this point it is possible to turn to the centralised buildings that form such an important part of the architectural traditions of the Caucasus from the fifth to the tenth centuries [Fig. 11.5]. These show that the relationship of these buildings to Jerusalem is equally problematic. One of the high points of the tradition of centralised architecture in the Caucasus is represented by the church of Jvari; its significance dramatically highlighted by its location overlooking the city of Mtskheta [Figs 11.1, 11.6]. It was erected between 586 and 607. With its combination of monumental cross and centralised design, it has the greatest claim to be seen to evoke Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre. At the same time that Jvari was built, one of the four main churches in Echmiadzin was erected to an almost identical design.25 This was the church of St Hripsime, built by 618 [Fig. 11.7].26 When judged by their ground-plans, these buildings present a fascinating play of geometry [Fig. 11.5, Plans V.a, V.c]. The central dome, the dominant feature of the interior, is supported by the four apses which terminate the cardinal axes of the building; and these are separated by high, narrow cylindrical niches which lead into four corner chambers [Fig.11.8]. These chambers are hidden from the main body of the church, but allow its exterior to be presented not as a circular or polygonal building, but as a rectangle. At Jvari the slight protrusion of the four apses, and the varying roof heights of the different spaces allow its interior space to be read easily. Whilst the arrangement of interior space at St Hripsime is the same as at Jvari, the arrangement of the exterior is more rigorous, with all walls being constrained within the rectangular frame of the groundplan. This produces a more austere domed cuboid, whose internal spaces are consequently harder to read from outside. Internally, both buildings are dominated by the central domed space but the extension of the eastwest axis allowed the designers also to focus worshippers’ attention on the main apse. The four corner chambers also suggest additional functions for the building that were not dependent on the central space. Although the core element of both buildings is the centralised structure and the dominant dome, it is difficult to trace the roots of this form back to Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre. This has been exacerbated by the way in which the churches have been studied by architectural historians in the twentieth century, who have focused on the evolution of the architectural 25 There is a long and largely fruitless debate about the possible ‘Georgian’ or ‘Armenian’ origins of this form of architecture. See G. N. Chubinashvili, Pamiatniki Tipa Dzhvari, Tbilisi, 1948; P. M. Muradian, ‘L’inscription arménienne de l’église de Djvari’, Revue des études arméniennes 5 (1968), 109–39, which provoked I. Abuladze, ‘Quelques remarques à propos de l’article de P. Mouradian, “L’inscription arménienne de l’église de Djvari”’, Revue des études arméniennes 6 (1969), 373–92, which in return provoked P. M. Muradian, ‘Encore au sujet de l’inscription arménienne de l’église de Djvari’, Revue des études arméniennes 6 (1969), 393–410. 26 P. Donabédian and J.-M. Thierry, Les arts Arméniens, Paris, 1987, 518–19.

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221

JERUSALEMS IN THE CAUCASUS? FIG. 11.5 (OPPOSITE) I.  QUADRICONCHS

III.  OCTOCONCHS

A.  DZVELI GAVAZI (GEORGIA)

A.  NINOTSMINDA (GEORGIA)

B.  MANGLISI (GEORGIA)

B.  IRIND (ARMENIA)

C.  AGARAK (ARMENIA)

C.  EGHVARD, ZORAVOR (ARMENIA)

II.  HEXACONCHS

IV.  DOMED QUADRICONCHS

A.  KATSKHI (GEORGIA)

A.  BANA (GEORGIA)

B.  BOCHORMA (GEORGIA)

B.  ZUARTNOTS (ARMENIA)

C.  GOGJUBA (GEORGIA)

V.  INSCRIBED QUADRICONCHS

D.  KIAGMIS ALTI (GEORGIA)

A.  JVARI, MTSKHETA (GEORGIA)

E.  ABUGHAMRENTS’ CHURCH, ANI

B.  ATENI (GEORGIA)

(ARMENIA)

C.  ST HRIPSIME, ECHMIADZIN (ARMENIA)

typology of the design. The Jvari type, for example, is seen to have its source in earlier buildings in the Caucasus, such as the church at Manglisi, founded in the fourth century, which is a simple tetraconch enclosed in an octagon [Fig. 11.5, Plan I.b].27 Historians have established a neat evolutionary sequence of buildings, which sees a gradual but continual development from those earliest designs to the high points of Jvari in Georgia or St Hripsime’s church at Echmiadzin in Armenia.28 Traced in ground-plans, the evolutionary analogy seems particularly apt, as the apses of the church appear, like petals, gradually to unfurl, multiply and open to reveal a radiant flower, before being transformed by the geometric rigour required by the framework of the rectangular ground-plan [Fig. 11.5, Plans I–V].29 The attraction of the typological approach belies the problems associated with it. It supposes a degree of ‘organic’ development that is divorced from the liturgical and other functional needs that actually determined the design of churches. The compilation of building ground-plans by type also disguises questions about their relative dating, giving the impression that all fit neatly into a single chronological sequence. The evolutionary approach also minimises any possible conceptual link between these centralised buildings as Jerusalem, as it divorces their form from any intentions on the part of their builders. Although Richard Krautheimer’s 1942 article on the iconography of architecture liberated the medieval idea 27 Kartlis Tskhovreba: A History of Georgia, eds R. Metreveli and S. Jones, Tbilisi, 2014, 62. For the disputed date of the church see M. Dvali, Manglisis khurotmodzghvruli dzegli, Tbilisi, 1974 [Manglisi, architectural monument] 51–2, 74–80; V. Beridze, Dzveli kartuli khurotmodzghvreba, Tbilisi, 1974 [ancient Georgian architecture] 28. 28 Mepisashvili and Cincadze, The Arts of Ancient Georgia [n. 7 above], 62. 29 R. Mepisashvili, V. Cincadze and R. Schrade, Georgien. Wehrbauten und Kirchen, Leipzig, 1986, 133; I. Giviashvili, ‘Georgian Polyapsidal Church Architecture’, in P. Skinner, D. Tumanishvili and A. Shanshiashvili (eds), Georgian Art in the Context of European and Asian Cultures, Tbilisi, 2009, 173–82; see the compilation of ground-plans in AlpagoNovello, Beridze and Lafontaine-Dosogne, Art and Architecture of Medieval Georgia [n. 1 above], 259–61.

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FIG. 11.6.  JVARI CHURCH (GEORGIA), 586–605: VIEW FROM THE SOUTH

FIG. 11.7.  ST HRIPSIME CHURCH, ECHMIADZIN (ARMENIA), BY 618: VIEW FROM THE SOUTH-WEST

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of the copy from slavish imitation, it surely cannot be diluted to the extent required for the final centralised buildings in this sequence still to be seen as copies of the Holy Sepulchre, rather than simply as elaborations of the buildings that preceded them in the typological sequence.30 Krautheimer also proposed an alternative source for these Caucasian buildings: he suggested that they needed to be seen in the context of the development of centralised buildings in Justinianic Constantinople, although structurally the buildings in the two locations are very different.31 The origins of the church at Manglisi have been associated with another of Constantine’s churches, the Domus Aurea in Antioch, based on the supposition that both were originally octagonal.32 A link is possible, given that the church at Manglisi was built to house the wood to which Christ’s feet had been nailed, which had been sent to Georgia by Constantine the Great along with masons; but the date of the structure at Manglisi is disputed, and the exact form of the Domus Aurea is unknown as it remains unexcavated.33 Krautheimer, ‘Introduction’. R. Krautheimer, Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture, Harmondsworth, 1975, 345–6. 32 Krautheimer, Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture, 79–80. 33 Kartlis Tskhovreba, eds. Metreveli and Jones [n. 27 above], 62. For the disputed date 30 31

FIG. 11.8.  ST HRIPSIME CHURCH, ECHMIADZIN (ARMENIA), BY 618: NICHE BETWEEN MAIN DOME AND CORNER CHAMBER

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More recently, there has been interest in a second group of centralised buildings in the Caucasus, the circular aisled tetraconch buildings such as Zuartnots in Armenia (built by Catholikos Nerses III, 641–61) and Bana in Georgia (probably a seventh-century foundation, now in Turkey) [Fig. 11.5, Plans IV.a, IV.b].34 These are more easily readable as imitations of the Holy Sepulchre, in that the buildings retain a circular exterior. However, scholarship has veered between seeing them as deriving from Syrian buildings (proposed Syrian models include the cathedrals at Bosra and Resafa)35 and asserting a pro-Byzantine ideology in their architectural iconography – both of which leave Jersualem as at best an indirect influence.36 The Caucasian tetraconches do not have the martyrial function of the Holy Sepulchre: the legend that the body of St Gregory the Illuminator was buried beneath the four piers of the church at Zuartnots is only recorded in the tenth century.37 When the Armenian king of Ani, Gagik Bagratuni, came to build a copy of the church of Zuartnots in his new capital in 998, he dedicated it to St Gregory the Illuminator: it was the specifically Armenian associations of the building and its relationship to the nation’s evangelist that attracted him, not its possible links to Jerusalem.38 More importantly, this approach also ignores the functional aspects of the buildings: how all the spaces, and particularly the subsidiary spaces, were used. At Jvari the main space was used to enclose the original cross of King Mirian. The base that was set up to support the cross survives, but oddly it is not directly under the dome; it lies off-centre to the southwest in a rather anomalous way. The idea of housing the cross within a church certainly did not come from Jerusalem, as the cross at Golgotha was only enclosed by the crusader rebuilding of the Holy Sepulchre in the early twelfth century.39 Equally, although the church of St Hripsime was a martyrium, that function did not dominate the internal space of the church. The virgin martyr’s body is commemorated in the south-east corner room. St Hripsime also indicates that the subsidiary rooms were of independent importance. They are not simply pastophoria, as none has direct access to of the church see Dvali, Manglisis khurotmodzghvruli dzegli [n. 27 above], 51–2, 74–80; Beridze, Dzveli kartuli khurotmodzghvreba [n. 27 above], 28. 34 W. E. Kleinbauer, ‘Zvart’nots and the Origins of Christian Architecture in Armenia’, AB 54/3 (1972), 245–62, 260; R. Mepisashvili and D. Tumanishvili, The Church of Bana: Problems of Research and Reconstruction, Tbilisi, 1989. 35 Krautheimer, Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture, 339; C. Mango, Byzantine Architecture, London, 1978, 98–107. 36 C. Maranci, ‘Byzantium through Armenian Eyes: Cultural Appropriation and the Church of Zuart’noc’, Gesta 40/2 (2001), 105–24. 37 Y. Drasxanakertc`i, History of Armenia, trans. K. H. Maksoudian, Atlanta, Georgia, 1987, ch. XI; from Kleinbauer, ‘Zvart’nots’ [n. 34 above], 248, n. 15. 38 Histoire Universelle par Etienne Asolic de Taron, eds E. Dulaurier and F. Macler, Paris, 1883, I, 280. 39 J. Folda, The Art of the Crusaders in the Holy Land, 1098–1187, Cambridge, 1995, 204.

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the main apse. At Jvari the south-west room, which has its own entrance from the outside, has an inscription naming a woman, Temestia, suggesting perhaps a gendered divide of the space of the church.40 The construction of the subsidiary spaces also suggests their importance: the masonry was carefully laid, and in both churches different colour stones were used in the vaults to embed the symbol of the cross into their fabric [Fig. 11.9].41 Thus although centralised buildings were very important across the Caucasus up until the tenth century, they do not seem to have a direct relationship to Jerusalem.

SIONI CHURCH In Latin Europe the key building to symbolise Jerusalem was the Holy Sepulchre, leading to the tradition of round churches such as the Temple Church in London or the Round Church in Cambridge. The Caucasus took a different approach to the symbolism of the Holy City, and chose to focus on a different building in the city. When they came to imagine and reproduce Jerusalem in the Caucasus, they looked not to the Holy Sepulchre, the site of the burial of Christ, but to the church on Mount 40 The inscription is given in Chubinashvili, Pamiatniki Tipa Dzhvari [n. 25 above], 74–5; mentioned in Tumanishvili, Khundadze and Khoshtaria, Jvari [n. 5 above], 25. 41 Tumanishvili, Khundadze and Khoshtaria, Jvari, 95.

FIG. 11.9.  ST HRIPSIME CHURCH, ECHMIADZIN (ARMENIA), BY 618: VAULT OF CORNER CHAMBER

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Zion, on the south side of the city. As the site of the Last Supper, the first building in which the Eucharist was celebrated, Zion was the supreme model for the buildings that were to follow its function. It was this liturgical idea of Jerusalem, rather than the martyrial one, that became embedded in the minds of the Christians of the Caucasus. Moktsevai Kartlisai records that when St Nino, the evangelist of Georgia, first wrote to the churches of Jerusalem, she addressed ‘the churches of the Holy Katolike Sioni’.42 From the late fourth century on, the church on Mount Zion took the form of a great basilica, as constructed by John II of Jerusalem by 415.43 It is in this form that it is commemorated on the sixth-century Madaba Map.44 It was therefore this basilical form of building, rather than the centralised architecture of the rotunda of the Holy Sepulchre, that became associated with the Holy City. When the cathedral at Svetitskhoveli in Mtskheta was first rebuilt in the fifth century by the Georgian king Vakhtang Gorgasali, he had it built as a three-aisled basilica.45 He chose as its primary, official dedication the Church of the Apostles, although it also attracted other names: the Holy of Holies (tsmiday tsmidatay),46 and the Great Sion.47 A number of other basilicas survive from the early centuries of Christianity in the Caucasus with Sioni (the Georgian equivalent of Zion) as their appellation, notably the Sioni church at Bolnisi, dated by its inscriptions to between 478 and 493 [Fig. 11.10], or the Sioni church at Ertso, built several centuries later.48 Moktsevai Kartlisai also records a Sioni church in Tbilisi (the current building in the city with this title dates largely to the seventeenth century).49 The Sioni church at Bolnisi is a three-aisled basilica,50 with two additional external aisles, and – like Vakhtang Gorgasali’s Svetitskhoveli – it employed cross-shaped piers. In Armenia, Gagik’s churches at Van were based around a church dedicated to holy Zion. There are exceptions to this: the Sioni church at Ateni is actually part of the tetraconch group of monuments that is headed by Jvari. Clearly there was no absolute consistency, but the great majority of the known Sioni monuments are basilical in design. Moktsevai Kartlisai, in Abuladze, Dzveli kartuli agiograpiuli lit’erat’uris dzeglebi [n. 3 above], I , 99. 43 Pringle, Churches, III, no. 336. 44 Y. Tsafrir, ‘The Holy City of Jerusalem in the Madaba Map’, in M. Piccirillo and E. Alliata (eds), The Madaba Map Centenary 1897–1997 [Studium Biblicum Franciscanum. Collectio Maior 40], Jerusalem, 1999, 155–63; Zion is no. 22 on the map on 161; cf. Colour Pl. I in the present volume. 45 V. Tsintsadze, ‘Sveti-Tskhoveli vo Mtskheta’, Ars Georgica 9 (1987), 15–25. 46 Abuladze, Dzveli kartuli agiograpiuli lit’erat’uris dzeglebi [n. 3 above], I, 160. 47 Kartlis Tskhovreba, ed. Qaukhchishvili [n. 4 above], 198; K’ek’elidze, ‘K voprosu ob ierusalimskom proiskhozhdenii gruzinskoi tserkvi’ [n. 11 above], 359–60. 48 Mepisashvili and Cincadze, The Arts of Ancient Georgia [n. 7 above], 60. 49 Moktsevai Kartlisai, in Abuladze, Dzveli kartuli agiograpiuli lit’erat’uris dzeglebi, I, 96. 50 V. Silogava, Bolnisis udzvelesi kartuli tsartserebi [The Oldest Georgian Inscriptions at Bolnisi], Tbilisi, 1994. 42

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The legacy of the association of Zion church with the basilica lasted until the tenth century. In the second half of that century, the main church at Otkhta Eklesia in Tao-Klarjeti (now Dört Kilise – Four Churches, in Turkey) was built in the form of a basilica at a time when such buildings were no longer being erected anywhere in the East Christian world [Fig. 11.11].51 Its apse was painted c. 980 with a complex programme of paintings over five registers, whose interpretation all hinges around the figure in the soffit of the single window that lights the apse [Fig. 11.12].52 With crown and halo, she is a personification, identified by inscription as Sioni, and she holds a model of the church – a basilica. This clearly replicates the architecture of the building in which it is painted, but it also looks back to the original church on Mount Zion itself. Otkhta Eklesia and its nearby sister basilica, Parkhali (built at the same time) were the last of these basilican churches to be built before the original Zion church was destroyed by al-Hakim in Jerusalem in 1009. That Z. Skhirtladze, Otkhta eklesiis preskebi [The Frescoes of Otkhta Eklesia], Tbilisi, 2009, ch. 4; N. Andghuladze and T. Dvali, Otkhta Eklesia [Monuments of Georgian Material Culture Abroad 3], Tbilisi, 2011; W. Djobadze, Early Medieval Georgian Monasteries in Historic Tao, Klarjet’i and Šavšet’i, Stuttgart, 1992, 158–77. 52 Z. Skhirtladze, ‘The Mother of All the Churches: Remarks on the Iconographic Programme of the Apse Decoration of Dort Kilise’, Cahiers Archéologiques 43 (1995), 101–16. 51

FIG. 11.10.  SIONI CHURCH AT BOLNISI (GEORGIA), 486: VIEW FROM THE EAST

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FIG. 11.11.  OTKHTA EKLESIA (NOW DÖRT KILISE, IN TURKEY), c. 980: VIEW FROM THE WEST

FIG. 11.12.  OTKHTA EKLESIA (NOW DÖRT KILISE, IN TURKEY), c. 980: WALL PAINTING OF SIONI IN APSE

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destruction is not mentioned in the Georgian sources; but the following year saw the rebuilding of Svetitskhoveli in Mtskheta by the PatriarchCatholicos Melkisedek, which was to last nineteen years.53 Melkisedek’s rebuilding was partly inspired by his rivalry with the great new cathedrals in Georgia, most recently the Bagrati in Kutaisi (completed in 1003), but it is possible that it was also inspired by the loss of the original Zion church. His decision to build a basilical church (albeit with dome) seems to fit the church into this tradition, rather than that of the Holy Sepulchre. It was only in the middle of the fifteenth century that Svetitskhoveli was to focus once more on the idea of the tomb of Christ, with the erection of the Holy Sepulchre chapel in the south aisle [Fig. 11.13].54 This is a small domed chapel which, although square in ground-plan, is dominated by its dome. One reason for the focus on basilicas in the Caucasus as symbols of Jerusalem is that it has often been argued that centralised buildings were intrinsic to the Caucasus, and so already had a series of independent functions and meanings. This idea derives from Vitruvius’ account of the wooden buildings of Colchis (western Georgia), known today in Georgia as darbazi.55 These domestic buildings already had a centralised interior, formed by vaulting the roof with a pyramid of stepped wooden beams

FIG. 11.13.  SVETITSKHOVELI CATHEDRAL, MTSKHETA (GEORGIA): HOLY SEPULCHRE CHAPEL IN SOUTH AISLE, FIFTEENTH CENTURY

53 Bulia and Janjalia, Mtskheta [n. 7 above], 89–91; L. Muskhelishvili, ‘Mtskhetis svetitskhovelis tadzris udzvelesi tsartserebi da mati damokidebuleba melkisedek katalikosis anderdztan’, Ars Georgica 1 (1942), 133–42. 54 Bulia and Janjalia, Mtskheta, 89. 55 Vitruvius, De l’architecture, eds L. Callebat and P. Fleury, II, Paris, 1999, II, ch. 1.4; L. Z. Sumbadze, Gruzinskie darbazi, Tbilisi, 1960; G. N. Chubinashvili, ‘On the Initial Forms of Christian Churches’, in T. Mgaloblishvili (ed.), Ancient Christianity in the Caucasus [Iberica Caucasica 1], London, 1998, 185–95 [195].

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that converged to a central oculus that admitted light and allowed smoke to escape. It was therefore the basilica, the imported design, which was the more striking introduction to the region and was more easily able to bear the symbolic burden of representing Jerusalem to Christians in the region.56 This distinction between indigenous centralised buildings and imported basilicas has long been noted in scholarship. It was one of the central theses of Josef Strzygowski’s Die Baukunst der Armenier und Europa, published in 1918.57 However, in that book he associated each type with national and racial characteristics as part of his search for an Aryan origin for European architecture. This racist angle has overshadowed the other arguments in the book.58

THE HOLY SEPULCHRE IN OTHER FORMS Although the Holy Sepulchre seems to have had relatively little monumental impact in the Caucasus, it has one possible influence on a much smaller scale. A group of steles erected in the seventh century has been suggested to evoke a more concrete link to the rotunda. These are found in the region known in classical sources as Gogarene, an area that overlaps parts of both Georgia and Armenia.59 It is most evident in three steles that were almost certainly made by the same workshop. One, destroyed in 1991, was found at Khandisi in Georgia; the other two survive on an arched podium by the church at Odzun in Armenia. In their form and design, the three steles share a common visual language: all are decorated with a series of figures in rectangular panels on the main faces of the steles, and all have angled corners. The less visible faces on both sets of steles were carved with similar sinuous vegetal scrolls and a striking, abstract design of interlocking circles. The choice of figures on the main face indicates that each was designed for its own community. This is most evident on the southern of the two steles at Odzun, which includes among the figures on its east face a man with a boar’s head: the form taken by Trdat, the first king of Armenia, before his conversion.60 The stele found at Khandisi in 56 V. Beridze, G. V. Alibegashvili, A. Vol’skaia and L. Xuskivadze, The Treasures of Georgia, London, 1984, 31. 57 J. Strzygowski, Die Baukunst der Armenier und Europa, Vienna, 1918. 58 See C. Maranci, ‘Armenia and the Borders of Armenian Art’, in M. J. Johnson, R. Ousterhout and A. Papalexandrou (eds), Approaches to Byzantine Architecture and its Decoration: Studies in Honor of Slobodan Ćurčić, Farnham, 2006, 83–95; C. Maranci, Medieval Armenian Architecture. Constructions of Race and Nation [Hebrew University Armenian Studies 2], Leuven and Sterling, VA, 2001. 59 Strabo, The Geography, ed. H. Jones, London, 1928, XI, ch. 14.4; C. Toumanoff, Studies in Christian Caucasian History, Georgetown, 1963, 468; N. Thierry, ‘Essai de définition d’un atelier de sculpture du Haut Moyen-Age en Gogarène’, Revue des études géorgiennes et caucasiennes 1 (1985), 169–225. 60 L. Der Manuelian, ‘Armenian Sculptural Images, Fifth to Eighth Centuries’, in T. J. Samuelian (ed.), Classical Armenian Culture: Influences and Creativity [University of Pennsylvania Armenian Texts and Studies 4], Chico, CA, 1982, 176–207.

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Georgia is dominated by the figure of Christ, venerated by an angel.61 The steles share one final feature: the decoration of their tops. In all three cases this takes an architectural form, with arcades of columns surmounted by a domed roof. A similar feature also appears on a sixth-century relief from Edzani that depicts a stele.62 Art historians have interpreted this feature as an evocation of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.63 There is no external contemporaneous evidence to support such an identification (although there is analogous later evidence),64 but the supposition has a certain credibility given the importance of the Holy City. However, the identification is somewhat weakened by our lack of knowledge about the function of these steles; what little evidence we have suggests that they were votive rather than funerary.65

CONCLUSION Jerusalem was, of course, of central importance to the Christians of the Caucasus, although the city had a very different impact in Georgia and Armenia from that which it had in the Latin West. The basilica, rather that the centralised church, became the form that most directly symbolised the mission of Christ in the Holy City. In more general terms, it was the imagined city of Jerusalem rather than the real city that had most impact. The attraction of the idealised city is reflected in the reluctance of some holy men to enter the real city at all. Some clearly found Jerusalem too awesome to approach. In the sixth century, St Davit Garejeli, one of the thirteen Syrian fathers credited with the establishment of ascetic monasticism in Georgia, set out on pilgrimage to Jerusalem – the heart’s desire of so many Christians throughout the ages.66 However, when he reached the city, rather than rushing to venerate its holy sites, he refused to enter through its walls, saying: ‘I dare not go further.’67 Refusing to enter 61 N. Chubinashvili, Khandisi, Tbilisi, 1972; K. Machabeli, Early Medieval Georgian Stone Crosses, Tbilisi, 2008, figs. 4–13, and p. 114 where she notes the destruction of the stele in 1991. 62 Chubinashvili, Khandisi, pl. 33b. 63 Most recently, K. Machabeli, Stèles géorgiennes en pierre, Lugano, 1997, 30; Machabeli, Early Medieval Georgian Stone Crosses, 116. 64 Skhirtladze, Otkhta eklesiis preskebi [The Frescoes of Otkhta Eklesia] [n. 51 above], 338. 65 Machabeli, Early Medieval Georgian Stone Crosses, 26. 66 B. Martin-Hisard, ‘Les “Treize Saints Pères”. Formation et évolution d’une tradition hagiographique géorgienne (VIe–XIIe siècles). Appendice de la Première partie’, Revue des études géorgiennes et caucasiennes 2 (1986), 75–111; for a summary of his life, Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints [n. 17 above], 81–93. 67 Martin-Hisard, ‘Les “Treize Saints Pères”’ 2 [n. 66 above], 89; Georgian: Abuladze, Dzveli kartuli agiograpiuli lit’erat’uris dzeglebi [n. 3 above] I, 238. It is possibly this scene that is represented at the end of the cycle of images devoted to the saint in the lower, tenth-century layer of the palimpsest wall at Udabno monastery in the Gareja desert: A. Eastmond and Z. Skhirtladze, ‘Tsminda davit garejelis ckhovrebis tsikli udabnos monastris mtavari eklesiis sadiakvnes mokhatulobashi: akhali monatsemebi da dakvirvebebi’, Sakartvelos Sidzveleni [Georgian Antiquities] 2 (2002), 42–63 [The Cycle

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the city, he chose instead to pick up three stones from the roadside ‘as sacred relics, as if they had been hewn from the very sepulchre of Christ. After this he turned round and walked joyfully along the road which leads [back] to Gareja.’68 God’s – somewhat surprising – reaction was to wake the patriarch of Jerusalem from his sleep and have him chase after St Davit in order to return two of the stones – there was enough grace in one stone, God’s vision to the patriarch revealed, to satisfy the monk. A similar reluctance to encounter Jerusalem directly has also been noted by Robert Thomson for Armenia.69 His analysis of Armenian literary encounters with Jerusalem equally show a marked reluctance to deal at first hand with the city, and a preference to imagine it instead. It is in such a light that the topographical recreations of the city gain their spiritual power.

of the Life of St Davit Garejeli in the Paintings of the Diakonikon of the Main Church at Udabno: New Facts and Observations]; A. Eastmond and Z. Skhirtladze, ‘Udabno Monastery in Georgia: The Innovation, Conservation and Reinterpretation of Art in the Middle Ages’, Iconographica. Rivista di iconografia medievale e moderna 7 (2008), 23–43. 68 Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints [n. 17 above], 91. But God appears to the patriarch telling him to take back two of the stones, ‘so that the city may not be entirely excluded from my mercies’, 92. 69 Thomson, ‘Jerusalem and Armenia’ [n. 2 above].

HOLY RUSSIA AND THE ‘JERUSALEM IDEA’ ROBIN MILNER-GULLAND

T

he term ‘Holy Russia’ is well known, and may seem an irritating cliché; what’s so holy about Russia, after all? The term ‘Silly Sussex’ (‘silly’ from Old English saelig, meaning holy or happy) is similar – both lands were latecomers to the ‘holy family’ of Christian nations in their respective parts of the world. A large exhibition called ‘The Art of Holy Russia: Icons from Moscow, 1400–1660’ took place in Frankfurt and at the Royal Academy in London from 1997 to 1998, but nowhere in its bulky catalogue is the term ‘Holy Russia’ discussed or explained – rather, it is simply taken for granted. Yet this, and the linked ‘Jerusalemic’ concept to which we shall devote attention, is one of the most distinctive of Russian cultural spaces – far from coterminous with the Russian political space. A brilliant investigation by Mikhail Cherniavsky in the 1950s, building on Solovyov, has demonstrated that the term (svyataya Rus) is first found in the mid sixteenth century as, probably, a play on words or verbal confusion with the expression svetlaya Rus (‘Bright Russia’), known centuries earlier.1 It became current from the Time of Troubles, c. 1600, and seems to have taken on an ideological dimension – referring to a certain national spirit within the Russian people as a whole, irrespective of (and often contrary to) any given ruler or dynasty. For a people to consider its land ‘holy’ is, of course, no rarity; the concept is known from biblical times. In Russia, as Daniel Rowland has well shown, a tradition of commenting on current events through Old Testament parallels goes back to the first years after the Conversion in the later tenth century, and remained powerful through the Muscovite period – and among

1 M. Cherniavsky, ‘“Holy Russia”: A Study in the History of an Idea’, American Historical Review 63/3 (April 1958), 617–37.

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schismatics later still.2 Why one nation, at some historical juncture, should strive for the designation ‘holy’ and others not, is an interesting but elusive psychological or ideological question that we shall not try to answer here. In Russia, anyhow, not only was the concept deep-rooted, popular and long-lasting, but it expressed itself in literal manifestations that aimed to sanctify the physical space of the Russian land, and led to an unparalleled series of buildings, objects, sound-worlds and landscapes created over a considerable time span. These emerge more specifically from what I shall term the Russian ‘Jerusalem idea’ – maybe more a series of ideas, relating to the concept of ‘Holy Russia’ (though predating its verbal formulation) and to the medieval thought-world of Christendom more generally. This will be our main theme. One initial, perhaps obvious, but fundamental point needs to be made. ‘Jerusalem’ has a triple aspect or set of references, determined by past, present and future: the first deriving from the Old Testament, and relating to the Temple and to the Chosen People of Israel; secondly, the contemporary city, focused on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (Anastasis); finally, the ‘New Jerusalem’ described in the Revelation of St John the Divine. In Russian cultural history, it became quite possible to combine one with others of these aspects. How does one make a land holy, or demonstrate its wished-for holiness? In the first place, of course, through filling it with sacred buildings (and the personnel who will render service to that holiness – though this may prove more chancy). In the fragmentary thirteenth- century ‘Tale of the Ruin of the Russian Land’, a poeticized list of the ‘brightly-brilliant’ Russian land’s ‘many beauties’ culminates with ‘monastic gardens’ and ‘church buildings’.3 These would be joined, as visitors abundantly testify, by countless shrines and chapels. Fantastical rumours circulated as to the number of churches (running into thousands), monasteries and monks filling the capital city of Moscow. Particularly in the seventeenth century, when the Muscovite realm had managed to re-establish itself after the Time of Troubles, and icon-painting became an ever-more industrialized process, both the public cityscape and the domestic space of people’s homes were saturated with sacred images. The most valuable witness to this was Paul of Aleppo. Paul, a Syrian archdeacon accompanying his father, Patriarch Makarios of Antioch, to Moscow in the 1650s, wrote (in Arabic) a long account of their journey. Not a supercilious Western visitor who might be keen to play to the notion of Russians as idolaters, Paul, himself an East Christian cleric, frequently expresses astonishment at the extent of ostentatious devotion, both in the vast numbers of images and in the degree of respect shown to them. In the eighteenth century, Peter the Great (with his Protestant leanings) tried to put a brake on these processes 2 D. B. Rowland, ‘Moscow – The Third Rome or the New Israel?’, Russian Review 55/4 (October 1996), 591–614. 3 Trans. in R. R. Milner-Gulland, The Russians, Oxford, 1997, 209.

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– making church-building, to take one example, subject to state approval – but the ‘saturation’ continued. In the nineteenth century it seems that every crossroads in the Old Russian heartland of Vladimir had its chapel, or a post on which an icon would be secured, and even the trees were so adorned: ‘To put icons in the trunks of old trees was a distinctive feature of Russian piety: such images, secretively hidden away from human eyes in the forest depths, seemed naturally to sanctify the wild space.’4 The same Vladimir province became the centre of Russian icon-manufacture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: three of its villages (Palekh, Mstyora and Kholuy) alone produced millions of icons every year, and were the centres of a distribution system whereby specialist travelling salesmen (ofeni) delivered them over the length and breadth of Russian territory. The contrast with most other East Christian lands, where public religious manifestations were suppressed under Ottoman rule, was stark.5 In the Soviet twentieth century, of course, these phenomena of the rural space could be rather easily ‘desanctified’ by the simple destruction of shrines, wayside crosses and icons (anyhow subject to decay); sacred groves could be cut down, pilgrimages forbidden. Yet not all such things disappeared: one rather remote shrine in Archangel province, standing above the place at which the River Churega vanishes into a limestone cleft, was photographed in 1998 and probably dates from the Soviet period [Fig. 12.1]. In post-Soviet times long pilgrimages and processions, sometimes attended by thousands, have resumed their perambulations of the land. Another pervasive, if often forgotten, sign of the sanctification of the land was achieved not through people’s eyes, but their ears. Russia was full of the sound of bells: ‘a mantle of ringing bronze’, the ‘aural icons of Orthodoxy’, as E. V. Williams puts it.6 Again, Paul of Aleppo testifies to the astonishing amount of bell-ringing. There is a direct and acknowledged link between church bells, the wooden or metal sounding-board (simandron; bilo) characteristic of early monasteries, and the Israelite trumpets whose sanctificatory sounding, from Moses onward, is often mentioned in the Old Testament. In Soviet times, when bell-ringing was prohibited or strictly controlled, it could live on in the imagination through the many bell-towers that still punctuated the Russian landscape: what D. S. Likhachov called ‘the peaceful invasion of space’. A bell-tower (Ivan the Great, or ‘Big John’, built between 1505 and 1600) was of course until recently the tallest structure in Moscow, dominating the Kremlin itself. Williams draws attention to a later structure, the freestanding bell-tower built by Russians between 1877 and 1886, atop the Mount of Olives (still one of the landmarks of Israel) – a symbol of spiritual prise de possession of the Holy Land. O. Tarasov, Icon and Devotion, ed. and trans. R. Milner-Gulland, London, 2002, 46. Ibid., 48–50. 6 E. V. Williams, ‘Aural Icons of Orthodoxy’, in W. C. Brumfield and M. M. Velimirovich (eds), Christianity and the Arts in Russia, Cambridge, 1991, 3–13. 4 5

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FIG. 12.1.  WAYSIDE SHRINE AT KHALUY NEAR OSHEVENSK, ARCHANGEL PROVINCE

HOLY RUSSIA AND THE ‘JERUSALEM IDEA’

Lastly, to make one’s own land holy, one could try a major voluntaristic act of sanctification, breathtaking in its boldness. One could erect a great building of dazzling complexity, in the most sensitive of locations, simultaneously memorial, church and wide-ranging symbolic landscape; its doors would be open day and night, its prayers continuous, so that it could act as a pathway for heavenly grace to reach the whole nation. This the Russians did in the mid sixteenth century, and it is the first of their consciously-realized New Jerusalems, about which we shall have a good deal more to say. Manifestations of a ‘Jerusalem idea’ are numerous throughout Europe (perhaps the most fully-realized example is the S. Stefano complex in Bologna, Italy).7 They overwhelmingly date from the era of the West European crusades. Often they involve the imitation of individual objects from sites of pilgrimage in the Holy Land, and the reproduction of precise measurements taken from them, which would to some extent partake of the same degree of holiness for the benefit of would-be pilgrims. Russia experienced the realization of this idea differently – mostly in the later medieval period, over a greater time span, and with a lesser degree of literalism. All the same, if we trace back visible indications of ‘Jerusalemic’ reminiscences, we can do so to before the Tatar invasion (c. 1240). A shift in the centre of political power from the south during the twelfth century led to the dominance of what we now think of as the central Russian lands (the ‘Land beyond the Forest’, Zalesskaya zemlya), whose capital was Vladimir, subsequently Moscow. This political shift seems to have been accompanied by demographic changes (not fully elucidated, but related to the vulnerability of the steppe lands to nomad incursions). It is anyhow clear that there was widespread renaming of north-eastern landscape and townscape features in imitation of Kiev and southern Russia generally, no doubt to acquire some of the aura of the old centres of princely power and to supersede them.8 A strong-willed prince, Andrey ‘Bogolyubsky’, and his successors (the first princely line to adopt the upgraded title ‘Grand Prince’) promoted the new capital of Vladimir, in part through a series of spectacular white limestone buildings, which from the Church on the Nerl (1165) onwards are characterized by low-relief sculptural schemes. The Church on the Nerl, by the way, now picturesquely isolated, was originally a key component of Andrey’s out-of-town palace complex – located on an artificial hill to greet travellers on the rivers Nerl and Klyazma [Colour Pl. XXII, Fig. 12.2]. On each of its facades the central sculpted figure is King David, playing and singing to the animal kingdom. Even more spectacular are 7 R. Ousterhout, ‘Loca Sancta and the Architectural Response to Pilgrimage’, in R. Ousterhout (ed.), The Blessings of Pilgrimage, Chicago, 1990, ch. 7; and here in summary, R. Griffith-Jones, ‘Public, Private and Political Devotion: Re-presenting the Sepulchre’, 35 above and Fig. 16.3, p. 333 below. 8 Discussed in greater detail in Milner-Gulland, The Russians [n. 3 above], 210–12.

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FIG. 12.2.  CHURCH OF THE INTERCESSION (POKROV) ON THE NERL, 1165: SCULPTURAL DETAIL ON THE FAÇADE, SHOWING KING DAVID

the carvings on the palace-church of St Demetrius (1190s) in the city itself, where not only David but also Solomon – representing the wise ruler – is featured (with Alexander the Great, saints and princely portraits thrown in for good measure) [Colour Pl. XXIII, Fig. 12.3]. It is now generally accepted that these churches – each originally surrounded by a lower-level arcade – were intended as a realization of the Old Testament description of the Jerusalem Temple. Russian pilgrims, incidentally, knew Jerusalem at first hand: one of the earliest and most famous to leave a written account, the Abbot Daniil, spent sixteen months in the Holy City (then in crusader hands) during the early twelfth century. With the establishment of Tatar rule (c. 1240) this remarkable succession of sculpted limestone buildings came to an end, though Vladimir itself remained significant (the Metropolitan – or head – of the Russian Church moved there from devastated Kiev in 1299, only to relocate to nearby Moscow in around 1321). The only buildings that seem to carry ‘Jerusalemic’ reminiscences are a few much-altered rotunda-churches of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the West Russian (soon to be Ukrainian) principality of Volhynia, that seem to derive from an East European type seen in eleventh- and twelfth-century rotundas in Wawel (Krakow), and ultimately from the Jerusalem Anastasis (Holy Sepulchre).9 We may also note a type of medieval ecclesiastical vessel in the form of a stylized church, representative of the Holy Sepulchre (and rather significant to architectural historians), called ‘Sion’ (= Zion). 9 On such rotundas, see E. Fernie, ‘Representations of the Holy Sepulchre’, 329–38 below.

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The concept of the Russians as ‘New Israelites’, subsequently giving rise to the ‘Jerusalemic’ visual manifestations that particularly concern us, gained traction in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when the gradual process of Moscow’s aggrandizement led to the ‘gathering-in’ of all the diverse Russian lands, save those western territories that fell into the Lithuanian and Polish political and cultural sphere. Every general history of Russia describes the chief landmarks in this process. On the international front, Islamic armies had long swept away the crusader kingdoms in the Holy Land; then (with the rise of Ottoman Turkish power) the East Christian states of the Balkans, followed in 1453 by Constantinople itself, succumbed. In the long reign of Ivan III (sometimes called ‘The Great’, 1462–1505) a whole set of centralizing measures was put in place, and Moscow stopped paying tribute to the Tatars (who proved unable to enforce control on the Russians – though that did not stop them trying, on several subsequent occasions). Russia’s self-awareness of its role as the one significant free Orthodox nation grew through a series of events, at least one of which had a curiously chance nature: the anticipated apocalyptic end of the world at the end of the seventh millennium by the Orthodox calendar (our year 1492). The documents surrounding this non-event, analyzed by Michael Flier,10 give clues not just to the history of Russian eschatological thought, but to ideological observations that point to the Russians’ self-definition as ‘New Israelites’. Historical events, as Daniel Rowland emphasizes, were matched with Old Testament parallels 10 M. Flier, ‘Till the End of Time’, in V. H. Kivelson and R. H. Greene (eds), Orthodox Russia, Philadelphia, 2003, 127–58.

FIG. 12.3.  SCULPTURE ON THE SOUTHERN FRONT OF THE CATHEDRAL OF ST DEMETRIUS, VLADIMIR, 1191–97

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from the time of Metropolitan Ilarion (eleventh century) and especially the Russian Primary Chronicle (1110s). This was simply a Russian variant of the usual medieval European idea of the historical process as the rise and fall of a succession of great empires going back to ancient Israel. Several other documents of the period attempt, some allegorically, to bolster Moscow’s credentials and give its rulers a suitable pedigree. In the reign of Ivan III’s successor, Vasiliy II, this process was given a novel twist by the articulation, in letters attributed to one Filofey of Pskov, of what has since become notorious as the theory of ‘Moscow the Third Rome’. The polemicist’s statement that ‘two Romes have fallen, a third stands, and a fourth there shall not be’ is certainly striking, and has fascinated later historians, but seems not to have caused any great stir (or influenced policy) at the time. In fact it had roots in the Balkans during the previous century, and had even been applied to a rival city, Tver. It fits in perfectly well with the normal ‘New Israelite’ historical schema, and we may note that one of these letters says to the Grand Prince: ‘If thou rulest thine empire rightly, thou wilt be the son of light and a citizen of the heavenly Jerusalem.’11 From the Time of Troubles onward the letters began to take on a special ideological significance, and with Peter the Great we can discern a ‘Roman’, as opposed to Byzantine, ideological thread in Russian thinking. The scene had been set for the remarkable phenomena deriving from the ‘Jerusalem Idea’ that originated when the young Ivan IV (dubbed the ‘Terrible’, i.e. ‘awe-inspiring’), grandson of Ivan III, was crowned in 1547. An elaborate coronation service, no doubt orchestrated by the Metropolitan Makariy, stressed that the new tsar (a title here first formalized) was to be compared with King David – with Makariy playing the role of Samuel: kingship as a divinely-sanctioned status. There was potential tension with the traditional concept, whereby the Grand Prince simply inherited the throne from his father; historians have discussed these matters exhaustively. In the very year of the coronation, Ivan combined both these ideas of kingship by launching the first of several attacks on Kazan, a powerful relic of the Great Horde (which had converted to Islam). This war took on the resonances of a crusade, and was eventually successful in 1552. The return from Kazan is symbolized in one of the most striking and important icons of the period, placed near the tsar’s throne in the Kremlin Dormition Cathedral, ‘The Blessed Host of the Heavenly Tsar’ [Fig. 12.4], with a transfigured Moscow (left) taking on the aura of a sacred city, while the tsar himself on horseback follows St Michael the Archangel, leading his victorious forces home. To commemorate the victory, Ivan commissioned one of the world’s most idiosyncratic and symbolically-resonant buildings, a whole ‘Heavenly City’ in itself – the ‘conduit of grace’ to which we earlier referred, known 11

J. Martin, Medieval Russia 980–1584, Cambridge, 1995, 261.

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generally as ‘St Basil’s’ [Colour Pls XXIV, XXV; Fig. 12.5]. It stands in a sensitive and significant location: in the bustling heart of the city, atop a slope above the wharves on the river, closing off the stupendous Red (or ‘Fine’) Square, outside but close to the Kremlin. It has an unprecedented, complex architecture, implying several layers of meaning. Nine chapels (eight were originally intended) are linked by a variety of interconnected passageways; four of these have dedications referring to events in the siege of Kazan; three (as Michael Flier has established) seem to have dynastic significance. We hardly know even how to refer to it. ‘St Basil’s’ is really a nickname, referring to Vasiliy (Basil) the Blessed, a ‘holy fool’ who stationed himself beside it and eventually got a chapel of his own

FIG. 12.4.  ICON: ‘THE BLESSED HOST OF THE HEAVENLY TSAR’, MID SIXTEENTH CENTURY, FROM THE DORMITION CATHEDRAL, KREMLIN

FIG. 12.5.  ‘ST BASIL’S’: PLAN OF THE CHURCH, 1555–61

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– an astonishing popular appropriation of a holy site. Its most ‘official’ name is Church (or Shrine – Khram) of the Pokrov (Intercession) on the Moat – ‘Pokrov’ is a largely Russian dedication, that of the central, tallest chapel, referring to the protection extended by the Mother of God over the Russian land. Ivan had stayed in the Pokrov monastery at Suzdal on his return from Kazan, celebrating the birth of a son. At first the building was widely termed ‘The Trinity’, the dedication of its easternmost chapel, recalling the ‘rededication’ of the city of Kazan after the Russian victory, and symbolic of reconciliation and the unity of the land. But what may particularly interest us is the most general early name for it, ‘The Jerusalem’. The westernmost chapel in the central ‘core’ of three is dedicated to the feast of the Entry into Jerusalem. It is accessed directly from the outside world by a ramp whose purpose is clear when one sees the remarkable early illustrations of the Moscow Palm Sunday procession: starting in the Kremlin, this wound its way through Red Square, with the head of the church (the Metropolitan, later patriarch) seated on a horse (representing an ass – the procession was its only annual task) led by the tsar [Fig. 12.6]. Peter the Great, refusing to act as a ‘groom’, discontinued the ceremony. Maybe, as has been suggested, the overall form of the building is intended to recall the Holy Sepulchre. Less in doubt is the remarkable comment by Paul of Aleppo that ‘the above mentioned churches are likened to the house of Annas and the palace of Jerusalem’: in other words, it was taken not just as the representation of a single church, but as a whole cityscape.12 Inside, there are frescoes on the walls (later, but no doubt reproducing an intended scheme) of fantastic vegetal motifs, surely representing the gardens of paradise [Colour Pl. XXV]. The whole is an extraordinary exercise in three-dimensional geometry: originally plainer, and perhaps more impressive, than now, since the garish sidedomes are a late modification. It is the relatively simple, high central dome that – as is clear when one stands beneath it – catches the light that symbolizes the holy fire of the Anastasis rotunda in Jerusalem, brilliantly investigated by Lidov,13 and thus the perpetual descent of grace on Russia [Colour Pl. XXIV]. The century following Ivan IV’s death saw the full flowering of ‘Russian Jerusalems’. Let us pause and take stock. Borne along on a current of biblical parallels, the Russians’ historical experience could easily be understood by the elite (and, after the Tatar invasions, by the people more generally) in such a way as to define them as ‘New Israelites’, with all the sense of privilege and burden of expectations that might involve. A series 12 Paul of Aleppo, ‘The Travels of Macarius’, trans. and ed. W. Palmer, The Patriarch and the Tsar, II, London, 1875, 180. 13 A. Lidov, ‘Svyatoy Ogon’, in A. Lidov (ed.), Novye Iyerusalimy / New Jerusalems: Hierotopy and the Iconography of Sacred Spaces, Moscow, 2009, 277–312 [with English language summary]; and idem, ‘The Holy Fire and Visual Constructs of Jerusalem’, in Kühnel, Visual Constructs, 241–52.

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of historical events (and the major non-event) in the fifteenth century encouraged a Muscovite mindset that Flier has aptly called ‘an attenuated, apocalyptic, millennial mode’, fearful yet also ‘optimistic, chauvinistic and formalistic’, ‘an age in which the ruling elite invested itself in the idea of Moscow as the New Jerusalem’.14 A further series of events, some traumatic, throughout the seventeenth century reinforced this way of thinking. With the death of Ivan IV’s son, Tsar Fyodor, in 1598, the dynasty that had originated with the Vikings was extinguished (though pretenders notoriously came forward). Boris Godunov, the able chief minister, was elected tsar – these events are well known from literature and opera. For the purposes of this chapter, it is remarkable how quickly Boris attempted to institute a series of building works that, among other things, would strengthen Moscow’s status as a ‘Jerusalem’ – partly perhaps inspired by the upgrading of Moscow to a patriarchate. He put the first wall around the city, and had the first proper map made of it [Fig. 12.7]; it has been claimed that it had four sides and twelve gates, to resemble the ‘Heavenly Jerusalem’ of Revelation. More dramatically, Boris wished to remodel the 14

Flier, ‘Till the End of Time’ [n. 10 above], 129, 158.

FIG. 12.6.  ‘THE MOSCOW KREMLIN: PALM SUNDAY CEREMONY’, FROM VOYAGE DU ADAM OLEARIUS, PARIS, 1727

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FIG. 12.7.  PLAN OF MOSCOW, 1610 (KILLIAN, FROM AN ENGRAVING AFTER 1632)

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interior of the Kremlin, building a massive ‘Holy of Holies’, for which he took great pains to find out about both Solomon’s Temple and the Holy Sepulchre, commissioning models and descriptions. That remained unbuilt, but the project has left a remarkable legacy in the form of the great bell-tower (begun by Vasiliy III), which is known as ‘Big John’ because it has a chapel dedicated to St John of the Ladder. Its startlingly phallic form dominated the city till modern times. It still carries a gold inscription to the hoped-for new dynasty of Boris and his unfortunate son, whose reign after Boris’ death (1605) was brief indeed. The close connexion of bells with the Holy Land, mentioned earlier, should be remembered. There is a further significant structure, often overlooked, that probably dates from Boris’ time: a small round platform (remodelled in the eighteenth century) in Red Square, close to St Basil’s [Fig. 12.8]. It is called Lobnoye mesto (‘Place of the Skull’) – not, as visitors often think, a place of execution, rather a tribune for proclamations; its name means ‘Golgotha’ (thus relating it

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to the ‘Jerusalem’ nearby). Like the original Golgotha, it is taken as an omphalos or navel, the symbolic centre of Russia and the world. The brief Godunov period slipped into the Time of Troubles, years of anarchy and foreign occupation until national resistance, mobilized largely on a popular level and through the great monasteries, permitted stabilization and (in 1613) the election of a tsar from a new dynasty – the Romanovs. Contemporary historians disapproved of Boris’ vainglory in his project for a ‘Holy of Holies’. Thereafter the ideological territory of ‘Holy Russia’ and ‘New Jerusalem’ was to be disputed – not just on an elite, but also on a popular level. The consequences were to be bizarre, explosive and long-lasting. The reign of the second Romanov tsar, Aleksey Mikhaylovich (1645– 76), witnessed the Great Schism within the Russian Church, a rift in the cultural fabric of Holy Russia that has never been fully repaired. In the wake of the disorder of the Time of Troubles, a reassertion of devotional rigour at the grassroots of the Church – provincial lower clergy and monks, the so-called ‘Zealots of Piety’ – produced both the eventual leaders of the Schism and the figure who did most to provoke it, the future Patriarch Nikon. A crucial participant in the dramatic series of events was the young tsar, sympathetic to the Zealots, but then even more in thrall to the domineering and self-assured Nikon, as the latter reformed the servicebooks and aspects of ritual in a way that his opponents felt was tainted with Western texts and practices, depriving Russia of heavenly grace.

FIG. 12.8.  RED SQUARE: PALM SUNDAY, WITH LOBNOYE MESTO (ENGRAVING, 1867)

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The story of the Schism is complex, and this is not the place to tell it; rather to point to some of its consequences in fields that interest us here – in particular, to examine the incredible efforts of Nikon to create a physical ‘Holy Land’ in Russia, and the counter-efforts of his opponents, mostly on a less material level. After Nikon’s remarkable rise to power, he enjoyed a mere half-dozen years of dominance before he suddenly fell out with the tsar in 1658 (for unclear reasons, presumably to do with their respective authority), and retreated in dudgeon to the countryside, never to resume his patriarchal role. In those few years, however, he was incredibly active: not only reforming the practices of the Church from top to bottom, but in many significant building works. The greatest of these, begun in 1656, was his New Jerusalem, the biggest such endeavour the world has seen. Nikon and Aleksey jointly (it seems) selected a site near the modern town of Istra, in a picturesque landscape some forty kilometres from Moscow, near the major routes westwards. Land was bought and villages remodelled to create a ‘Russian Palestine’, some ten kilometres from north to south and five from east to west. Where the small, south-flowing River Istra – representing the Jordan – looped round a hill, artificially raised, was to be ‘Zion’. Other sites represented the Mount of Olives, Nazareth, Bethany, the Brook Kidron and many other biblical locations. On ‘Zion’ stands, within its monastic walls, the huge Cathedral of the Resurrection, impressive even after major wartime damage [Fig. 12.9]. Nikon had acquired the most careful recent plans of the Jerusalem Anastasis (by Bernadino Amico) [cf. Fig. 12.10], and a model that has survived, in wood inlaid with mother-of-pearl [cf. Colour Pl. XXVI]. The ground-plan (the God’s-eye view, one might say) was carefully followed, but the elevation and materials are distinctively Russian. Much ceramic tiling was the work of West Russian craftsmen, and has, like the rest of the décor, a distinct iconographic programme relating to the Holy Land. The cathedral was supposedly (unlike the Anastasis) to have a chapel for every day of the year, and was in effect a huge reliquary and compendium of the Christian calendar. Close to the river, and once almost islanded by artificial lakes, is a precious survival: a unique small building on three floors, Nikon’s hermitage (or skete) for his personal use. This illustration [Fig. 12.11] was taken by the present author on a chilly October day in the 1960s; shortly thereafter he witnessed a group of people ritually immersing themselves, naked, in the river – the holy properties of the ‘Russian Palestine’ were evidently still revered in Soviet times (in 1990 he saw a homemade shrine in use at the same spot). But in Nikon’s own time, apart from the tsar (to whom Nikon indeed attributed the original project), both the schismatics and representatives of the official church reacted warily to Nikon’s ‘Jerusalemic’ pretensions. Before the Great Moscow Council of 1666 to 1667, which finally dethroned him while affirming his reforms, thirty accusatory questions were put to him, which he answered at great

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FIG. 12.9 CATHEDRAL OF THE RESURRECTION, NEW JERUSALEM MONASTERY, ISTRA, 1658–85

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FIG. 12.10.  CATHEDRAL OF THE RESUR­RECTION, NEW JERUSALEM MONASTERY, ISTRA, 1658–85: ELEVATION AND PLAN

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length. It is clear that his appropriation of Jerusalem particularly bothered his accusers, and the answers he gave are of much interest as a statement by a figure of, effectively, late-Byzantine mentality on the relation between prototype and image. He eloquently defended what he called his ‘new-old’ Jerusalem, and cut the ground from beneath his critics’ feet by pointing out that the sanctuary of every church is itself a ‘Jerusalem’ (not that the argument helped him).15 15

Palmer, The Patriarch and the Tsar [n. 12 above], I, 82.

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FIG. 12.11.  NEW JERUSALEM MONASTERY, ISTRA: NIKON’S HERMITAGE

New Jerusalem on the River Istra was by no means the only such construction of the time. Nikon himself had founded the Monastery of the Elevation of the Cross (a dedication which of course points to Jerusalem) on the small, rocky Kiy Island in the White Sea, where he had escaped from a shipwreck years before; its great treasure is a huge ornate cross which is itself a repository for many relics from the Holy Land. Actually, for Nikon, crosses themselves made a land holy. In exile at the northern Ferapontov Monastery as a simple monk (where he continued to behave commandingly), he built with his own hands an island of stones in the lake, on which he set up a cross with a minatory inscription testifying to his sufferings in a just cause, and others on the approach roads; turning it into his own sanctified territory. One of Nikon’s sympathizers, the Metropolitan bishop of Rostov (north-east of Moscow), started – after Nikon was dethroned and exiled – the building of a fairytale ensemble now usually called the Rostov ‘Kremlin’, but really a walled episcopal palace with deliberate ‘Jerusalemic’ resonances.16 But the last great structure whose relevance to our topic seems clear is the extraordinary iconostasis, or elaborated cross, over seven metres tall, completed (after many decades) as late as the 1750s by the then ninety-year-old master craftsman Grigoriy Shumayev, apparently on his own initiative [Figs 12.12, 12.13].17 Its multiple scenes, in carved wood and wrought metal, encrusted in precious stones 16 A. G. Melnik, ‘Moskovskiy mitropolit Iona kak tvorets sakralnykh prostranstv’, in A. Lidov (ed.), Iyerotopiya/Hierotopy, Moscow, 2006, 740–7 [with English language summary]. 17 See O. Tarasov, Framing Russian Art, trans. R. Milner-Gulland and A. Wood, London,

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FIG. 12.12.  ICONOSTASIS OF GRIGORIY SHUMAYEV: CRUCIFIXION WITH THE MOTHER OF GOD AND ST JOHN THE DIVINE, THE HEAVENLY CITY BEYOND

and mirror-glass, make up a fantastical ‘iconic presentation’ of the Holy Land, complete with labelled map and Heavenly City (equated it seems with Moscow), culminating in a weirdly rococo representation of the Holy Sepulchre [Fig. 12.13]. When it was finally installed in a Moscow church in 1755, crush-barriers had to be put up to hold back the throngs of marvelling spectators. It is now stored in a museum, dismantled, and not one general history of Russian art so much as mentions it. On an official level, though, the Old Russian pursuit of Jerusalem closes with the reforms of Peter the Great, turning Russian culture westwards and, significantly, founding a new city in 1703, whose ideological orientation was ‘Roman’ and Protestant-leaning rather than ‘Byzantine’ and East Christian. So, at least, is the general understanding. Yet even there we can find strange stirrings of the ‘Jerusalem Idea’. When the first panoramic picture of the new city was presented to Peter in 1716, one of his archbishops, Gavriil Buzhinsky, delivered a ‘Speech in Praise of St Petersburg and its Founder’, apostrophising it in these words: ‘Shine, shine, new Jerusalem! God’s glory 2007, 70–85; S. L. Yavorskaya, ‘“Shumayevskiy krest” i kalvariya Alekseya Mikhaylovicha’, in Lidov, Iyerotopiya/Hierotopy, 706–31.

HOLY RUSSIA AND THE ‘JERUSALEM IDEA’

FIG. 12.13.  ICONOSTASIS OF GRIGORIY SHUMAYEV: DETAIL OF LOWER LEFT, SHOWING THE HOLY SEPULCHRE

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FIG. 12.14.  COMPARATIVE SCHEMATIC PLANS OF CENTRAL MOSCOW AND OF EARLY ST PETERSBURG

illuminating thee.’18 Peter and his crony Menshikov habitually called their dream-city ‘Paradise’ from the start. Even the layout of the oldest part of Petersburg matches the sacred centre of Moscow, with its first cathedral, dedicated to the Trinity, located similarly to St Basil’s (one of whose names was also ‘The Trinity’)19 [Fig. 12.14]. ‘Unofficial Russia’, the sectarians and schismatics, religious dissidents of many kinds and numbering millions, were far from indifferent to the grandiose pretensions of churchmen and tsars that we have been describing. They were equally conversant with the prophecies of Revelation, but rather than focusing on St John’s vision of ‘a new heaven and a new earth … the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from G. Kaganov, Images of Space, trans. S. Monas, Stanford, 1997, 13. For further discussion of the ‘Trinity’ theme in this context, see R. R. Milner-Gulland, ‘16th May 1703 and the Petersburg Foundation-Myth’, in A. Cross (ed.), Days from the Reigns of 18th Century Russian Rulers, Cambridge, 2007, 37–48. 18

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God out of heaven’ and its concretization in the service of Muscovy, they sensed catastrophe, Armageddon and the coming of Antichrist. If they were New Israelites, it was because they were harried and exiled, while guarding the true faith; if they had a ‘Jerusalem’, it was a spiritual concept, but one that was perhaps more authentically inhabited by them. Nikon and subsequently Peter were perceived either as servants of Antichrist or Antichrist himself. Solid as St Petersburg might seem, it was really immaterial, and might dissolve as unpredictably as it had arisen; anyhow, Old Ritualists avoided going there. They had their own legends to nurture their imaginations. The most memorable of these was an ancient story, the ‘Tale of the Invisible City of Kitezh’, that takes us back indeed to the white stone churches of pre-Tatar Vladimir where we began. To guard its purity, the city was hidden from the enemy beneath the waters of Lake Svetloyar (a little to the east of Nizhniy Novgorod, marking the easternmost limits of the Old Russian lands) until the end of the world and the Second Coming. Only the righteous could hear its bells and glimpse its domes. After the seventeenth-century Schism, various versions of the tale were reworked in Old Ritualist circles; Ksana Blank has convincingly demonstrated how saturated these are with references to the apocalypse and with the sense of Kitezh as a spiritual New Jerusalem, a ‘counterparadise’ to Peter’s and Menshikov’s, not to mention to the all-too-solid constructions of Nikon.20 Other ‘lands of lost content’, notably the mythical Belovodye (= Whitewater, somewhere in the ‘blue distances’ to the east and/or south), lured the dissidents’ imagination – while there was a real example for them in the great northern monastery on the Solovki islands, whose inhabitants heroically underwent a siege several years long by government forces. It has recently been argued on the basis of icons from the Solovki monastery that here, too, there were deliberate topographical ‘Jerusalemic’ references.21 We should not imagine resistance to the attributes of modernity as having long ago died out: this writer witnessed seventeenth-century Old Ritualist clothing in everyday use in a northern village in 1998. As Oleg Tarasov puts it: ‘The sacred space of Russia as “Great Icon” was created not through the image alone, but through sacralised word and gesture.’22 Ultimately the mindset of the dissidents was catastrophic and pessimistic. Here was a sort of counterpart to Shumayev’s virtuoso and (if you like) triumphalist cross: a late-eighteenth-century crucifixion icon that incorporates the Holy Land itself. Adam’s skull has been replaced with a stone from Christ’s tomb in Jerusalem’s Holy Sepulchre, while four more bits of it have been included in each lower corner [Colour Pl. 20 K. Blank, ‘Iyerotopiya sokrovennogo goroda’/‘The Hierotopy of a Concealed City’, in A. Lidov (ed.), Novye Iyerusalimy / New Jerusalems [n. 13 above], 837–49. 21 R. Marks, ‘The Architectural Icon: Picturing Solovetski Monastery’, in A. Lidov (ed.), Novye Iyerusalimy / New Jerusalems, 681–3. 22 O. Tarasov, Icon and Devotion [n. 4 above], 57.

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FIG. 12.15 CRUCIFIXION WITH GUARDIAN ANGEL AND SELECTED SAINTS, END OF THE 18TH C., PALEKH; NOW IN THE P. D. KORIN MEMORIAL HOUSE, TRETYAKOV GALLERY, MOSCOW

XXVII, Fig. 12.15]. Let us take a look at the background to the scene: dead black, probably representing the darkness of the tomb itself ... So was the Jerusalem idea swallowed up in darkness.23 In a sense the Jerusalem idea was reinvigorated in the later nineteenth century. The imperial regime became fascinated, culturally and politically, with the Holy Land (as the great bell-tower on the Mount of Olives, already mentioned, bears witness); Holy Russia was much touted, even among the secular-minded intellectuals, several of whom enjoyed trips to Lake Svetloyar and listened out for bells. But by that time the cultural circumstances were quite different, self-conscious and calculating, and ‘New Jerusalems’ were no longer on the agenda. 23

Ibid., 303–5.

JERUSALEM AND THE ETHIOPIAN CHURCH: THE EVIDENCE OF ROHA (LALIBELA) DAVID W. PHILLIPSON

Studies of the early history of Christianity, whether based on doctrinal matters, on associated architecture or on other areas of material culture, have tended to pay remarkably little attention to the highland areas of Africa’s northern Horn, now divided between the nations of Ethiopia and Eritrea. Milburn’s Early Christian Art and Architecture,1 in all its 318 pages, devoted a mere thirty-one words to this region, while pro rata the ninevolume Cambridge History of Christianity2 did slightly better, with one whole chapter out of 273. Conversely, most studies of Ethiopian history have failed adequately to consider the existence of two-way relationships between their subject area and its co-religionist partners and neighbours. These blinkered perspectives do not adequately reflect past realities. In the first part of this chapter, I seek to remedy these deficiencies and to combine literary, archaeological and art-historical studies in an attempt to set Ethiopian Christianity in its broader context, with particular emphasis on its connections with Jerusalem. I then proceed to consider the renowned complexes of rock-hewn churches at the place now usually called Lalibela (but formerly Roha) and to re-evaluate claims that have been made regarding their age, affinities and significance in the wider history of Christianity prior to the thirteenth century. I conclude that Roha’s connections with Jerusalem may have been rather less strong than some previous writers have believed. R. Milburn, Early Christian Art and Architecture, Aldershot, 1988. M. M. Mitchell et al. (eds), The Cambridge History of Christianity, 9 vols, Cambridge, 2005–09. 1

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Much confusion has been caused by the various applications of the term ‘Ethiopia’ during the past two thousand years.3 First-millennium speakers of Greek and/or Latin used the term somewhat vaguely and indiscriminately to indicate any area of the African continent to the south of Egypt. Frequently, they referred to the parts of the Nile Valley now known as Nubia, but to the Ancient Egyptians as ‘Kush’; references to ‘Kus’ in the Hebrew bible were translated into Greek and Latin as ‘Ethiopia’. The ‘Ethiopian eunuch’ mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles4 was a servant of Candace, a designation applied to the queen mothers of Meroitic Nubia,5 yet to this day the Ethiopian Church claims him as evidence for its own existence in the first century AD.6 A further complication arises from the tendency for Graeco-Roman writers throughout the first millennium to refer to the Horn of Africa as part of India;7 in many cases, their mentions of India have been erroneously interpreted as referring specifically to the peninsula that has borne that name more recently. Later in this chapter I cite examples of the errors to which these confusions in geographical nomenclature have given rise. Before proceeding further, I should offer a very brief introduction to Ethiopian Christianity.8 Today, the highlands of the northern Horn are mainly populated by adherents of what is generally designated the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, formation of a separate Eritrean Church dating only from political events of the early 1990s. The term ‘orthodox’, of course, represents self-evaluation rather than a defined categorisation; Ethiopian orthodoxy is markedly distinct from those of the Greek, Russian or Georgian churches to which the term is more commonly applied.9 The Ethiopian Church is non-Chalcedonian or, in a now outmoded term, monophysite, thus having greater doctrinal affinity to the Coptic and Armenian churches than to those that adopted the decisions of the

3 D. W. Phillipson, Ancient Churches of Ethiopia: Fourth – Fourteenth Centuries, New Haven, 2009, 3; idem, ‘Aksum, the Entrepot, and Highland Ethiopia, 3rd – 12th Centuries’, in M. M. Mango (ed.), Byzantine Trade, 4th – 12th Centuries, Farnham, 2009, 353–68. 4 Acts 8.26–40. 5 E. A. W. Budge, A History of Ethiopia: Nubia and Abyssinia, 2 vols, London, 1928, 111–13; D. A. Welsby, The Kingdom of Kush, London, 1996, 25–6. 6 Kefyalew Merahi, The Contribution of the Orthodox Tewahedo Church to the Ethiopian Civilization, Addis Ababa, 1999, 31–2. This mistaken attribution has been repeated by several non-Ethiopian writers. 7 A. Dihle, ‘The Conception of India in Hellenistic and Roman Literature’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 190 (1964), 15–23; P. Mayerson, ‘A Confusion of Indias’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 113 (1993), 169–74. 8 J. Binns, An Introduction to the Christian Orthodox Churches, Cambridge, 2002, 33–4, 95–6, 118, 145–6; idem, The Orthodox Church of Ethiopia: A History, London, 2017; Getatchew Haile, ‘Ethiopian Orthodox (Tawahado) Church’, in EAe, II, 414–32; Phillipson, Ancient Churches [n. 3 above], 23–4, 29–32. 9 Cf. L.-A. Hunt, ‘Artistic and Cultural Inter-Relations between the Christian Communities at the Holy Sepulchre in the 12th Century’, in A. O’Mahony (ed.), The Christian Heritage in the Holy Land, London, 1995, 57–96.

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fifth-century Council of Chalcedon concerning Christ’s nature.10 The loose designation of the Ethiopian Church as ‘Coptic’ is nonetheless both misleading and resented. In recent years, it has described itself as Tewahedo (roughly translatable as ‘undivided’).11 Many writers have commented on the seemingly ‘Judaic’ or even ‘Jewish’ elements that feature prominently in Ethiopian Christianity,12 often assuming that these originated in pre-Christian times and linking them with legends relating to the Ethiopian origin of the Queen of Sheba, whose son (fathered by King Solomon) is said to have appropriated the Ark of the Covenant and brought it to Aksum. Critical examination,13 however, has suggested that these beliefs about the Ark did not develop before the closing centuries of the first millennium AD, and Taddesse Tamrat concluded that a resurgence of ‘Judaic’ elements may have taken place even more recently,14 perhaps inspired by the long-established use of the term ‘Jewish’ to designate any non-Christian or non-Muslim monotheist. As I have shown, there is no truth in the claim that biblical accounts of the Ethiopian eunuch relate to the region now known as Ethiopia. A different and more plausible account of the coming of Christianity to that region is preserved in the late-fourth-century writings by Rufinus of Aquileia.15 In a recently published book,16 I have evaluated his account, together with epigraphic, numismatic and archaeological evidence and the writings of St Athanasius of Alexandria,17 and argued that they relate to 10 R. V. Sellars, The Council of Chalcedon: A Historical and Doctrinal Survey, London, 1953; P. T. R. Gray, ‘The Legacy of Chalcedon’, in M. Maas (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian, Cambridge, 2005, 215–38; D. W. Phillipson, Foundations of an African Civilisation: Aksum and the Northern Horn 1000 BC – AD 1300, Woodbridge, 2012, 104. 11 Kefyalew, Contribution [n. 6 above], 163–9: Getatchew, ‘Ethiopian Orthodox’ [n. 8 above]. 12 E.g. E. Ullendorff, ‘Hebraic-Jewish Elements in Abyssinian (Monophysite) Christianity’, Journal of Semitic Studies 1 (1956), 216–56; M. Rodinson, ‘Sur la question des influences juives en Ethiopie’, Journal of Semitic Studies 9 (1964), 11–19; idem, ‘La problème du christianisme éthiopien: substrat juif ou christianisme judaïsant?’, Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 167 (1965), 113–17. 13 S. C. Munro-Hay, The Quest for the Ark of the Covenant, London, 2005; Phillipson, Foundations [n. 10 above], 66, 237–8; idem, ‘Aksum, Maryam Tsion’, in S. Wenig (ed.), In kaiserlichem Auftrag: die Deutsche Aksum-Expedition 1906 unter Enno Littmann, III, Wiesbaden, 2018, 259–74. 14 Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527, Oxford, 1972, 192. 15 Rufinus, Church History X, 9–11 [English translations in Sergew Hable Selassie, Ancient and Medieval Ethiopian History to 1270, Addis Ababa, 1972, 98–9; P. R. Amidon (trans.), The Church History of Rufinus of Aquileia, books 10 and 11, New York, 1997, 18–23]. 16 Phillipson, Foundations [n. 10 above], 91–104. 17 Athanasius, Apology to Emperor Constantius: Greek text and French translation in J.-M. Szymusiak (ed. and trans.), Athanase d’Alexandrie: Apologie à l’Empereur Constance, Paris, 1958, 125–6; English translations in J. Stevenson (ed.), Creeds, Councils and Controversies: Documents illustrative of the History of the Church AD 337–461, London, 1966, 34–5, and Sergew Hable Selassie, Ancient and Medieval [n. 15 above], 100–2; evaluation and discussion in A. Grillmeier (trans. O. C. Dean), The Church of Alexandria with Nubia and Ethiopia after 451 (Christ in Christian Tradition, II, 4), London, 1996, 299 [German original, Freiburg, 1990] and Phillipson, Ancient Churches, 94–5 [n. 3 above].

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the period between AD 337 and 350 when Christianity took root in the northern highlands of Ethiopia at Aksum, then the capital of a prosperous African kingdom with widespread trading contacts.18 Ezana, king of Aksum at that time, was no Constantine: he openly adopted and sought to impose the new religion, but it was only gradually, during the following century and a half, that his subjects, especially those in peripheral parts of the realm, followed suit.19 It is not easy to distinguish the extent to which early Ethiopian Christianity developed independently of trends in the circumMediterranean region. Attention is currently focused on two remarkable manuscripts of the gospels that are preserved at the monastery of Abba Garima, some thirty kilometres south-east of Aksum.20 These manuscripts contain canon tables and Ethiopic (Ge‘ez) text with, in one case, portraits of the evangelists [Fig.  13.1]. Although long-recognised as being of great antiquity, until recently their exact age remained controversial. Palaeographers attributed the text to the tenth or eleventh centuries,21 although Marilyn Heldman22 argued that the affinities of the canon tables were with much earlier examples. Radiocarbon dates obtained from samples of parchment indicated an age in the sixth or seventh centuries but, when published by Jacques Mercier in 2000,23 were effectively ignored. Further age determinations24 have, however, confirmed them; and it must now be accepted that the leaves from which the dated samples were taken do indeed date from around the sixth century. A biblical Ge‘ez text of this age need occasion no surprise, since most authorities are agreed that the gospels were translated from Greek into Ge‘ez by the fifth or sixth centuries.25 The affinities of the canon tables are also concordant. But what of the evangelists’ portraits? While their general Phillipson, Foundations [n. 10 above], passim. Ibid., 99–105. For comparisons with Constantine, see also E. Littmann et al., Deutsche Aksum-Expedition, Berlin, 1913, I, 48; C. Haas, ‘Mountain Constantines: The Christianization of Aksum and Iberia’, Journal of Late Antiquity 1 (2008), 101–26. 20 Phillipson, Ancient Churches [n. 3 above], 191; idem, Foundations, 100–2. This paper was written and presented before the conference on the Abba Garima gospels held in Oxford during November 2013. At that meeting, Jacques Mercier presented evidence suggesting that the illustrations were produced within Ethiopia, rather than brought from elsewhere and subsequently bound with the Ge‘ez text. See also J. S. Mackenzie and F. Watson, The Garima Gospels: Early Illuminated Gospel Books from Ethiopia, Oxford, 2016. 21 E.g. S. Uhlig, Äthiopische Paläographie, Stuttgart, 1988. 22 M. Heldman, ‘The Heritage of Late Antiquity’, in R. Grierson (ed.), African Zion: The Sacred Art of Ethiopia, New Haven, 1993, 117–32. For canon tables more generally, see C. A. J. Nordenfalk, Die Spätantiken Kanontafeln: kunstgeschichtliche Studien über die eusebianische Evangelien-Konkordanz in der vier ersten Jahrhunderten ihrer Geschichte, Gothenburg, 1938, and M. Heldman, ‘Canon tables’, in EAe, I, 680–1. 23 J. Mercier, ‘La peinture éthiopienne à l’époque axoumite et au XVIII siècle’, Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, 2000, 35–71; idem, pers. comm. 24 Sam Fogg, pers. comm.; Jacques Mercier, pers. comm. For further discussion, see Mackenzie and Watson, Garima Gospels [n. 20 above]. 25 M. A. Knibb, ‘Bible’, in EAe, I, 563; S. Uhlig, ‘Bible’, ibid., 563–4; see also A. Bausi, ‘The 18

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FIG. 13.1.  FULL-PAGE ILLUMINATION IN THE ABBA GARIMA GOSPELS. THE SUBJECT HAS BEEN INTERPRETED EITHER AS MARK THE EVANGELIST OR AS ABBA GARIMA HIMSELF

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stylistic affinity with the eastern Mediterranean world cannot be doubted, how did they come to be in Ethiopia? Were they painted there by an artist familiar with techniques and styles that prevailed far to the north? Were they brought by a visiting ecclesiastic? Or were they a diplomatic gift, brought by one of Justinian’s Byzantine ambassadors, who are recorded as having visited the Aksumite court of the potentate described by John Malalas26 as ‘King of the Indians’, but bearing regalia identical with those attested archaeologically as belonging to the rulers of Aksum? It is against this backdrop that we may consider the evidence for contacts between Ethiopia and Jerusalem. The documentary sources were comprehensively evaluated by Enrico Cerulli in the 1940s:27 his conclusions have been frequently repeated but not significantly augmented or cogently criticised.28 For pre-Crusader times, the evidence is scant. It has long been recognised that letters from followers of St Jerome29 mentioned the presence of ‘Ethiopians’ in Jerusalem around the end of the fourth century or the beginning of the fifth, but these (following the usage prevailing at that time) probably referred to people from Nubia who were visitors or pilgrims to Jerusalem, rather than members of a resident community. Some degree of contact with the northern Horn by way of the Red Sea may now, however, be demonstrated archaeologically: Aksumite copper coins of this period have been recovered from sites in Palestine, together with contemporary imitations that were evidently produced in Egypt and, less certainly, in Palestine itself.30 Although coins of the regular issues Aksumite Background of the Ethiopic Corpus Canonum’, in S. Uhlig (ed.), Proceedings of the XV International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, Wiesbaden, 2006, 532–41. 26 Malalas, Chronicle, 18, 56 [English translation in The Chronicle of John Malalas, trans. E. Jeffreys et al., Melbourne, 1986, 268–9]; Phillipson, Foundations [n. 10 above], 85–7. 27 E. Cerulli, Etiopi in Palestina: storia della comunità etiopica in Gerusalemme, 2 vols, Rome, 1943–47, passim. 28 O. F. A. Meinardus, ‘The Ethiopians in Jerusalem’, Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, ser. 4, 14 (1965), 112–47, 217–32; E. van Donzel, ‘The Ethiopian Presence in Jerusalem until 1517’, in Third International Conference on Bilad al-Sham, Amman, 1983, 93–101; K. S. Pedersen, ‘The Qeddusan: Ethiopian Christians in the Holy Land’, in O’Mahony, Christian Heritage [n. 9 above], 129–48; A. O’Mahony, ‘Between Islam and Christendom: The Ethiopian Community in Jerusalem before 1517’, Medieval Encounters 2 (1996), 140–54. 29 For details, see the sources cited in nn. 27 and 28 above, especially Cerulli, Etiopi in Palestina, and Meinardus, ‘Ethiopians in Jerusalem’, 116. For the background to these letters, see P. Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD, Princeton, 2012, ch. 16 and 17. 30 There are many references to Aksumite coins from Palestine, including A. Kindler, ‘Links between Palestine and Ethiopia during the Late Roman and Byzantine Periods in the Light of Numismatic Data’, in D. Jacoby and Y. Tsufir (eds), Jews, Samaritans and Christians in Byzantine Palestine, Jerusalem, 1988, 106–11 [Hebrew: I am grateful to Mr Bar Kribus of Jerusalem for providing me with a translation of this paper]; E. A. Arslan, ‘Monete axumite di imitazione nel deposito del cortile della sinagoga di Cafarnao’, Liber Annuus (Studium Biblicum Franciscanum) 46 (1996), 307–16, pls 17–20; and W. Hahn, ‘Touto arese te chora: St Cyril’s Holy Cross Cult in Jerusalem and Aksumite Coin Typology’, Israel Numismatic Journal 13 (1999), 103–17, pl. 16. Unfortunately, a summary quantification of ancient coins excavated within Jerusalem (H. Gitler, ‘A Comparative Study of Numismatic Evidence from Excavations in Jerusalem’, Liber Annuus (Studium Biblicum Franciscanum) 46 (1996), 317–62,

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have occasionally been recorded from sites within Jerusalem, they do not appear to be concentrated there, as opposed to being distributed through Palestine more generally; and one of the Aksumite coins recorded from Jerusalem itself is a pre-Christian issue.31 Indications of connections between the Ethiopian Church and Jerusalem during the period between the fourth and the eleventh centuries are scant and imprecise. It is recorded that, around the fifth decade of the sixth century, the Aksumite King Kaleb abdicated and donated his crown to the Holy Sepulchre.32 Some Aksumite coin-types of the late sixth or early seventh century were also inspired, it has been suggested, by knowledge of the Holy Sepulchre,33 a hypothesis that is strengthened by the recent suggestion that one of these coin-issues dates, not from the seventh century, but from the reign of Kaleb’s immediate successor.34 By early in the seventh century, however, control of the Red Sea was passing from Aksumite hands into those of Arabs.35 Direct maritime contact between Aksum on the one hand and Palestine and greater Syria on the other thus became impracticable; and a new route was established through the Nile Valley, where the Nubian kingdoms of Alwa and Makuria had shortly before been converted to Christianity.36 Thus, interest in affairs at Jerusalem was maintained: when the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius recovered the True Cross in 628 to 630, he was sent appreciative gifts by a certain ‘King of India’ who may, in fact, have ruled at Aksum.37 It remains uncertain, however, whether an Ethiopian religious community was already established in Jerusalem as early as the sixth century. There are thus indications for knowledge and contacts from at least the sixth century,38 although it must remain doubtful whether an Ethiopian community was permanently established in Jerusalem at this time. As I show in the second part of this chapter, by the late twelfth century the monuments and topography of Jerusalem were evidently well known in pls 21–30) does not differentiate Aksumite issues or their imitations. For the possibility that the Holy Sepulchre may be depicted on certain Aksumite coin-types, see G. S. P. FreemanGrenville, ‘Jerusalem, Aksum and Aachen’, Israel Numismatic Journal 12 (1993), 80–6, pls 18–19, and Hahn, ‘Touto arese’. See also nn. 33 and 34 below. 31 Kindler, ‘Links’ [n. 30 above]. 32 Martyrdom of Arethas IX, 39; G. Fiaccadori, ‘Kaleb’, in EAe, III, 329–32. 33 Types 125–6 and 151 of S. C. Munro-Hay and B. Juel-Jensen, Aksumite Coinage, London, 1995. For superior photographs, see W. Hahn and V. West, Sylloge of Aksumite Coins in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, Oxford, 2016, 120–3, 142–5. 34 Type 151 of Munro-Hay and Juel-Jensen, Aksumite Coinage; W. Hahn, ‘The Sequence and Chronology of the Late Aksumite Coin Types Reconsidered’, Journal of the Oriental Numismatic Society 205 (2010), 5–10. 35 Phillipson, Foundations [n. 10 above], 210. 36 Phillipson, Ancient Churches [n. 3 above], 31 and references. 37 Theophanes, Chronicle [English translation in The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor: Byzantine and Near Eastern History AD 284–813, ed. and trans. C. Mango and R. Scott, Oxford, 1997]. 38 Wine was imported to Aksum in amphorae that were produced in the vicinity of Ayla, at the northern end of the Red Sea (Phillipson, Foundations [n. 10 above], 197–9).

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the northern Horn, and it seems likely that this knowledge was of long standing, conditions for its development having become significantly less favourable in the course of the seventh century and highly unlikely during the period from 1099 to 1187, when Jerusalem was under Crusader rule.39 The situation under Salah ad-Din is considered below. Records of gifts from Ethiopian kings to their subject communities in Jerusalem provide good evidence for such communities by at least the thirteenth century. The situation in later times is not directly relevant to my present topic but, for the sake of completeness, it may be noted that far more data are available from both Ethiopian and European sources for the fifteenth century, when Ethiopians based in Jerusalem acted as their homeland’s principal channel of communication with the outside world, including representation (whether or not officially sanctioned) at the Council of Florence.40 This was probably the hey-day of the Ethiopian ecclesiastical community in Jerusalem; subsequent records emphasise impoverishment and demarcation disputes with other non-Chalcedonian communities (notably the Copts and, to a lesser extent, the Armenians) in which the Ethiopians were not infrequently the losers.

ROHA Let me now turn to Ethiopia itself, and consider the famous rock-hewn churches41 set in the mountains of Lasta, near the source of the Takezze, a major Nile tributary. This is the region south42 of Aksum to which the centre of political power was gradually transferred following the decline of the old capital in the seventh century. The rulers under whom this transfer took place are traditionally recalled as belonging to a dynasty known as Zagwe or Hepatsa.43 The finest churches are at the place now generally called Lalibela, after the late-Zagwe king who reigned at the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century, and to whose initiative they are traditionally attributed. To avoid confusion between the king and the homonymous place, I shall in this chapter revert to the Hunt, ‘Artistic and cultural inter-relations’ [n. 9 above]. S. Tedeschi, ‘Etiopi e Copti al Concilio di Firenze’, Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum 21 (1989), 380–407; A. Martinez, ‘Florence, Council of ’, in EAe, II, 554–5. 41 The hewing of churches from solid rock may be traced back to earlier times in eastern Tigray, where the oldest examples seem to have been funerary, following a tradition that may have originated during the Aksumite period if not before (Phillipson, Ancient Churches [n. 3 above], 88–92, 184–7). 42 The straight-line distance from Aksum to Lalibela is only 250km, but the nature of the terrain makes the only practicable route far longer. 43 The Zagwe dynasty and, in particular, its earlier kings remain poorly understood, not least because their successors late in the thirteenth century deemed them to have been usurpers: M.-L. Derat, ‘The Zagwe Dynasty (10th–13th Centuries) and King Yemrehanna Krestos’, Annales d’Ethiopie 25 (2010), 157–96; Phillipson, Foundations [n. 10 above], 227–9. The designation ‘Hepatsa’ is preferred by J. Mercier and C. Lepage, Lalibela, Wonder of Ethiopia: The Monolithic Churches and their Treasures, London, 2012, 27–31. 39

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old toponym ‘Roha’, still retained for formal purposes by the Ethiopian Church; please note, however, my belief that derivation of this name from the Arabic ‘ar-Ruha’, for Edessa in modern Turkey, should be discredited and regarded as a post-facto rationalisation.44 Two complexes of interconnecting rock-hewn features [Colour Pl. XXVIII]45 at Roha permit their interrelationships to be established and a relative chronology proposed. Details have already been published,46 and only a simplified summary is necessary in the present context. Although the site eventually became a centre of religious pilgrimage, it seems that its earliest rock-hewn features (provisionally dated to the eighth or ninth centuries) were defensive and did not serve initially as churches; they were subsequently extended and converted for ecclesiastical use.47 Later features were designed ab initio as churches, and took a remarkable and, at first sight, bewildering variety of architectural forms, being generally basilican in plan, sometimes with lofts over the side-aisles.48 The largest basilica, the five-aisled Beta Madhane Alem [Colour Pl. XXIXa], was surrounded by an external colonnade.49 Some of these churches display exceptional sophistication in their design and execution, with exact alignment of their internal and external features. The final phase saw excavation of churches (Beta Mika’el, alternatively Debra Sina, and Beta Golgotha) at a lower level [Fig. 13.2], beneath the earlier ones, with corresponding modification of access and drainage.50 I consider that these latest features were created 44 Published accounts of the Roha/Lalibela site (see Phillipson, Ancient Churches, 199–202) began in the sixteenth century (The Prester John of the Indies: A True Relation of the Lands of the Prester John, being the Narrative of the Portuguese Embassy to Ethiopia in 1520 written by Father Francisco Alvares, 2 vols, ed. C. F. Beckingham and G. W. B. Huntingford, London, 1961). Recent research by the present author (Phillipson, Ancient Churches, 123–98) focused particularly on the establishment of a chronology, and its conclusions are followed here. Despite some disagreements and corrections, investigations described by F.-X. Fauvelle-Aymar et al., ‘Rock-cut Stratigraphy: Sequencing the Lalibela Churches’, Antiquity 84 (2010), 1135–50, yielded broadly compatible results. A more recent publication (Mercier and Lepage, Lalibela [n. 43 above]) is problematic: although accompanied by superb photographs, and providing valuable details of associated artefacts previously unrecorded, the text is disappointing and some of its conclusions unacceptable. This is not the place for a detailed critique, but its authors’ insistence that all the churches were created within a mere quarter-century must be rejected. 45 Phillipson, Ancient Churches [n. 3 above], 123–5, 153, esp. figs 227, 271, 274 and 275. 46 Ibid., 146–8, 174–6, 177–80. 47 The churches concerned are Beta Gabriel-Rafael and Beta Merkurios (Phillipson, Ancient Churches, 126–36, 146–8). Other writers, including Mercier and Lepage, Lalibela [n. 43 above], 209–51, accept that they were not originally created as churches, but take no account of their subsequent conversion – which, in the case of Beta Merkurios, demonstrably predated the excavation of the Beta Emmanuel basilica. 48 The basilicas are Beta Maryam, Beta Emmanuel, Beta Madhane Alem and Beta Abba Libanos. Of these, the first two have galleries over the aisles; at the others, galleries were evidently planned but not excavated. 49 Phillipson, Ancient Churches, 153–60. The view that Beta Madhane Alem was intended as a counterpart or replica of Maryam Tsion cathedral at Aksum is contested (Phillipson, ‘Maryam Tsion’ [n. 13 above]). 50 It seems that Beta Giyorgis [Colour Pl. XXIXc] also belongs to this late phase as, less

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FIG. 13.2.  ROHA: THE TOMB OF ADAM VIEWED FROM THE WEST. PART OF THE FAÇADE OF BETA GOLGOTHA, WITH SEMI-CIRCULAR ARCHES, IS VISIBLE IN THE BACKGROUND; ABOVE IS A BLOCKED RECTANGULAR DOORWAY WHICH FORMERLY LED TO A WESTERLY ENTRANCE TO THE PIT SURROUNDING BETA MARYAM

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early in the thirteenth century (although Michael Gervers51 has argued that they are even later), thus implying that, collectively, excavation of the Roha rock-hewn features extended over a period of at least four and possibly five centuries. I discern evidence for five successive stages in the creation of the rock-hewn features at Roha, only the most recent of which coincided with the reign of the potentate whose name the place now bears.52 This is in marked contrast with the explanation entrenched in the traditions of the Ethiopian Church, which emphatically states that all the Roha churches were created in the reign, and at the instigation, of King Lalibela.53 This reign may with some confidence be dated between the closing decades of the twelfth century and the opening ones of the thirteenth. His inspiration for this work of piety is said to have been a dream about a journey to Jerusalem, and his desire to create a counterpart place of pilgrimage within Ethiopia.54 This belief has inspired Western scholars, who noted that the early years of Lalibela’s rule coincided with the capture of Jerusalem by Salah ad-Din in 1187, suggesting that fears of restrictions in access to that city by Ethiopian pilgrims may have stimulated the establishment of a local counterpart.55 Although any such fears in fact proved baseless, the fact remains that Lalibela’s ecclesiastical capital took form, attributions and toponyms that paralleled those of Jerusalem. For example, one of the low-level (i.e. final-phase) churches contains exceptional relief-carvings, including a feature that is designated the ‘Tomb of Christ’,56 and beneath the church floor it is held that King Lalibela certainly, does Beta Abba Libanos. The cruciform Beta Giyorgis has no known Ethiopian parallels, although cruciform built churches were known in Nubia at broadly this period. 51 M. Gervers, ‘The Rehabilitation of the Zague Kings and the Building of the Dabra Sina – Golgotha – Sellassie Complex in Lalibela’, Africana Bulletin (Warsaw) 51 (2003), 23–49; idem, ‘The Dabra Sina – Golgotha – Sellassie Complex in Lalibela’, in Birhanu Teffera and R. Pankhurst (eds), Sixth International Conference on the History of Ethiopian Art, Addis Ababa, 2003, 388–414. 52 Phillipson, Ancient Churches [n. 3 above], 177–80, 183–4, 187–91. The liturgical connotations of this heterogeneity remain to be investigated in detail: cf. E. Fritsch and M. Gervers, ‘Pastophoria and Altars: Interaction in Ethiopian Liturgy and Church Architecture’, Aethiopica 10 (2007), 7–51; Phillipson, Ancient Churches, 192–4; Mercier and Lepage, Lalibela [n. 43 above], ch. 6. 53 As noted above [n. 43], much uncertainty surrounds Zagwe chronology prior to the reign of King Lalibela, which began towards the end of the twelfth century and continued through the first quarter of the thirteenth. The primary source is the Life of Lalibela, for which the oldest extant manuscript may be of fifteenth-century age (Mercier and Lepage, Lalibela, 16–20), although the version usually cited (J. Perruchon, Vie de Lalibala, roi d’Ethiopie, Paris, 1892) dates from the nineteenth century. 54 See n. 53 above; also M. Heldman, ‘Architectural Symbolism, Sacred Geography and the Ethiopian Church’, Journal of Religion in Africa 22 (1992), 222–41; Phillipson, Ancient Churches, 181; Mercier and Lepage, Lalibela, 267–71. 55 Sergew Hable Selassie, Ancient and Medieval [n. 15 above], 262, 273; R. Pankhurst, The Ethiopians, Oxford, 1998, 52; E. van Donzel, ‘Ethiopia’s Lalibala and the Fall of Jerusalem, 1187’, Aethiopica 1 (1998), 27–49; Phillipson, Ancient Churches, 179; Mercier and Lepage, Lalibela [n. 43 above], 267–9. 56 Phillipson, Ancient Churches, 171–4. See Figs 14.2, 3, p. 284 below.

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himself lies buried.57 This church is named Golgotha. Adjacent to it is a strange cuboid rock-hewn feature known as the ‘Tomb of Adam’ [Fig. 13.2]. A canalised stream channel that bisects the site is named Yordanos (= Jordan), with a carved cross [Colour Pl. XXIXb] standing in its bed to commemorate Christ’s baptism, while a nearby hill goes by the name of Debra Zeit (= Mount of Olives).58 The point that should be stressed here is that none of the rock-hewn features with Jerusalem-derived names can be attributed to stages in the Roha sequence other than the most recent.59 There is thus no reason whatsoever to believe that the view of the churches as an Ethiopian recreation of Jerusalem predates the twelfth/ thirteenth century:60 indeed, the tightest concentration of features bearing Jerusalem-derived names was not created until that time. Despite the apparent contradiction, the chronology which I have outlined is not in fact incompatible with the traditional belief of the Ethiopian Church that the churches at Roha, as a symbolic recreation of Jerusalem, all owe their origin to King Lalibela.61 It was during or immediately after his reign that the latest churches were created, including that called Golgotha in which he was buried, and when the Roha site as a whole took the form that, as a major place of pilgrimage, it has retained ever since. My conclusion from this brief survey is that Ethiopian pilgrims frequented Jerusalem from at least the mid sixth century. It is on balance likely, but not yet proven, that they established permanent communities there before the early seventh century. Creation of rock-hewn churches at Roha seems to have begun during the closing centuries of the first millennium, although their greatest florescence was later, and it was not until the beginning of the thirteenth century that their present form was attained, together with their collective symbolism as a local counterpart to the holy sites of Jerusalem.

57 Gervers, ‘Re-habilitation’ [n. 51 above]; idem, ‘Dabra Sina’ [n. 51 above]; Phillipson, Ancient Churches, 171–2; Mercier and Lepage, Lalibela, 169–71, 199. 58 Heldman, ‘Architectural Symbolism’ [n. 54 above]; Phillipson, Ancient Churches, 181; Mercier and Lepage, Lalibela, 270. The site of Christ’s baptism in the Palestinian Jordan was a major place of pilgrimage even before St Helena’s ‘rediscovery’ of the Holy Sepulchre (P. Walker, ‘Jerusalem and the Holy Land in the 4th Century’, in O’Mahony, Christian Heritage [n. 9 above], 22–34. See also A. J. Butler, The Ancient Coptic Churches of Egypt, Oxford, 1884, II, 347). 59 In order to avoid confusion in this context, it must be emphasised that the name ‘Bethlehem’, applied to a rock-hewn feature at Roha that is not a church (Phillipson, Ancient Churches, 136–7), did not originate in this way. It was a place where sacramental bread was prepared, and its Semitic name simply means ‘house of bread’ – identity with the similarly-derived toponym of Christ’s birthplace being coincidental. Most Ethiopian churches have a separate place used for this purpose and known as ‘Bethlehem’. 60 For reasons not clearly stated, Mercier and Lepage (Lalibela, 267–71) considered that the Jerusalem-based toponyms were adopted at Roha after the thirteenth century. 61 Phillipson, Foundations [n. 10 above], 227, n. 2.

THE ORIGINS AND MEANINGS OF THE ETHIOPIAN CIRCULAR CHURCH: FRESH EXPLORATIONS 1 EMMANUEL FRITSCH

E

thiopia’s circular churches are so much a part of the country that most nationals as well as visitors take it for granted that they are simply the normal form of the country’s churches. This ignores the long tradition of basilicas, which used to be the norm from the very beginning of Christianity in the northern kingdom of the Aksumites in the fourth century up until the end of the fifteenth. The round churches, then, pose a cluster of questions: when did they first appear, and why; and – given that they represented a major liturgical change – on the basis of what precedent or authority? The conception of these round churches is significantly different from the conception of earlier churches in Ethiopia. These original elements are our first source of information; they may help us explain further when and particularly why the round churches appeared. We will then look

1 The present pages include some new developments from the third part of my paper, ‘New Reflections of the Image of Late-Antique and Medieval Ethiopian Liturgy (6th–16th centuries)’, in T. Berger and B. Spinks (eds), Liturgy’s Imagined Pasts [Liturgy International Congress, Yale, 15–18 June 2014], Collegeville, MN, 2016, 39–43. I am indebted to MarieLaure Derat, who allowed me to exploit her important dissertation, ‘Enquête sur les rois Zāgwē. Royaume chrétien d’Éthiopie, XIe–XIIIe siècle’ [Habilitation thesis HDR, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2013] long before publication and commented on the draft of this chapter. I would also like to thank Anaïs Wion, with whom I discussed the elements of this chapter, Claire Bosc-Tiessé who commented on the draft, and Mario Di Salvo who contributed challenging views to the discussion.

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more closely at the rationale of earlier explanations and at the history of Ethiopia during the likely period of these churches’ emergence. Scholars have generally looked to Jerusalem for an explanation: to the Temple, or to the Holy Sepulchre. We will see that neither of these can answer our questions. We will need to look more locally, at a convergence of traditions within Ethiopia, and at possible precedents to the west, in the Sudan.

A DESCRIPTION OF THE CIRCULAR CHURCHES An Ethiopian circular church is basically the association of two elements: (i) the outer circular wall – or concentric walls, on a module system – surrounded by a verandah; and (ii) a square sanctuary (Maqdas). The sanctuary is erected right in the middle of the circle, surmounted by a dome or, in the frequent case of a cubic sanctuary, by a drum. Dome or drum support the extremities of the long beams which form the structure of the wide conical roof, with their other ends resting on the peripheral wall. The sanctuary is erected on its own foundations and its floor lies several steps above the floor of the rest of the church. The area down the steps is called the Qeddest (lit. ‘the holy [place]’). There, the celebrant and his assistants perform the prayers of blessing and absolutions, the prayer of the faithful, the readings from the Holy Scriptures, and the distribution of Holy Communion.2 The sanctuary is in every way made according to the pattern developed in the east end of a Coptic basilica [Fig. 14.1, Colour Pl. XXXa]. Orientated by the window pierced through its eastern wall (Maskota berhān, ‘Window of the Light’), according to the traditional pattern [Colour Pl. XXXb], the sanctuary is entered from the west through a generally double set of large doors called ‘Gate of Zion’ (Anqasa Seyon),3 while a simple door guards its northern and southern accesses. The altar fills the eastern part of the sanctuary. This is the church’s only sanctuary, which contrasts with the former custom (prior to 1500) of having altars in several sanctuaries.4 The altar is tall, derived from the Coptic altar

2 Most of these functions used to be performed outside the sanctuary but within a chancel raised at the level of the sanctuary or close to it. The barrier disappeared around the end of the twelfth century and the platform of this bêma followed suit during the first part of the thirteenth, although it was maintained at Lālibalā in the monoliths of Madhanē ‘ālam, Māryām and Amānu’ēl, as well as the semi-monolithic church of Gabre’ēl. ˘ reason for this naming is unclear, as the nomenclature for such items lacks 3 The context. One may easily feel that it is an evocation of Jerusalem, matching the presence of the altar-tablet seen as a ‘replica’ of the ark of the covenant; but the date and exact sense of such a notion of replication are unclear. It may well be read in relation to the Entry of Jesus Christ into Jerusalem, as liturgically enacted on Palm Sunday. On this rite see E. Fritsch, The Liturgical Year of the Ethiopian Church [Ethiopian Review of Cultures, IX–X], Addis Ababa, 2001, 216–24, especially 223–4. 4 See ‘The Apparition of Churches with Several Sanctuaries’ (instead of one sanctuary and two side-rooms) in the mid-twelfth-century church of Mikā’ēl Ambā, in Fritsch, ‘New Reflections’ [n. 1 above], Part II. The fact that Mikā’ēl Ambā is documented in relation

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FIG. 14.1.  PLAN OF WERĀ KIDĀNA MEH RAT

equipped with a baldachin.5 A red screen is fixed between doors and altar [Colour Pl. XXXc], and could well be an avatar of the curtain which used to hang down from the Coptic ciborium and was wide enough to with Māryām Nāzrēt does not exclude the possibility that other churches may have had several sanctuaries; it remains to identify them in so far as they are extant. 5 E. Fritsch and M. Gervers, ‘Pastophoria and Altars: Interaction in Ethiopian Liturgy and Church Architecture’, Aethiopica 10 (2007), 7–50 [45–50]; E. Fritsch, ‘The Altar in the Ethiopian Church: History, Forms and Meanings’, in B. Groen, S. Hawkes-Teeples and S. Alexopoulos (eds), Inquiries into Eastern Christian Worship [Selected Papers of the Second International Congress of the Society of Oriental Liturgy, Rome, 17–21 September 2008], Eastern Christian Studies 12 (2012), 443–510 [500].

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hide the celebrants at the altar [Colour Pl. XXXd]. This screen keeps the latter out of sight.6 Large curtains are spread across the doorways, outside the doors [Colour Pl. XXXIa]. Contrary to the trend developed in the Ethiopian hall churches from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, where everything was apparently meant to be wide open,7 doors and curtains in every place block the view as well as free circulation. The wall enclosing the sanctuary, the doors and curtains which protect its secrecy, and the partitioning of the whole place through additional walls and curtains are all Coptic-Egyptian features. The wall and the solid and lockable sanctuary doors, which are a particularity of the Coptic higˇab, do not seem to be documented in Ethiopia outside or independently from this type of construction, where they are universally present [Colour Pl. XXXIb].8 As long as separate lockable pastophoria (sacristies) had existed on either side of the central sanctuary, that sanctuary could be readily identified as the open area where the altar stood. But once these secure places were abolished, there was no longer any area inside the church itself where precious items could be safely stored unless the whole building was locked. The sanctuary came to serve as a pastophorion and was therefore locked between the services. As a result two types of churches emerged: in 6 A. J. Butler, The Ancient Coptic Churches of Egypt, II, Oxford, 1884 (Piscataway, 2004), 28–31. 7 Fritsch and Gervers, ‘Pastophoria and Altars’ [n. 5 above], 16, 33. 8 The features of the round churches have so much become the norm that the lockable doors have been introduced in a number of older basilica churches such as Gannata Māryām, Bilbālā Qirqos, Marqorēwos (near and at Lālibalā), or Arbā‘etu Ensesā near  arāmāt (both in East Tigray), and many Frē Wayni, as well as Bēta Iyasus Gwāhegot in H other places. In the ancient small churches of Degum, Barāqit, H  awzēn or Gundefru (East Tigray), the western door became tantamount to the sanctuary doorway (the whole ancient church being taken as the sanctuary), even if actual doors were not set, communicating with a large qenē māḫlēt or assembly hall, relatively recently constructed and matching the size of the community. Avatars of the round churches include two categories, both rectangular but having very little to do with basilicas. The first one is made of the three rooms of the qenē māhlēt, qeddest and maqdas arranged in a westeast string and communicating through ˘central doorways equipped with doors. They are exemplified by the seventeenth-century churches of the monastery of Tānā Qirqos or Dāgā Estifānos, Galāwdēwos Dabra Nagwedgwād above the Abbāy River (I thank Anaïs Wion who let me know of it), the church of St Mary reconstructed by King Fāsilidas, as well as the chapel of St Pantālewon in Aksum, the famous Gondar Dabra Berhān Śellāsē, which replaced at the beginning of the nineteenth century the round church constructed by Iyāsu I (1682–1706). It is under the same ruler, ‘Egwāla Seyon (1801–18), that the church of Bētalehēm in Gāyent, which King Dāwit had constructed in c. 1400, received a conical roof resting on a drum erected in the place of the old covering and on a colonnade surrounding the basilica, the whole sometimes giving the impression that it is a round church. Mario Di Salvo, who interprets things differently, lists a number of those buildings in his Churches of Ethiopia: The Monastery of Nārgā Śellāsē, Milan, 1999, 69–71. The second category is the Tigrean rectangular church, apparently built in continuation with the ancient basilica tradition. However, it is nothing else but a section of a circular church. Due to the predominance of the Amhara centres on ecclesiastical matters, this type of omnipresent church is more open than the previous type and always include a qeddest gallery, allowing processions around the sanctuary. Such plans are also found outside Tigray.

THE ORIGINS AND MEANINGS OF THE ETHIOPIAN CIRCULAR CHURCH

one, the central sanctuary remains open as before and the side sanctuaries retain the appearance of pastophoria, but now have an altar standing in their centre; in the other, the whole sanctuary area is closed, with no further locked doors within that space. While in the Byzantine areas the iconostasis developed in the fourteenth century, the khurus wall9 gradually disappeared during the Mamluk period (thirteenth to sixteenth centuries) in Egypt, in the wake of the multiplication of altars. It was replaced by the higˇab (lit. ‘curtains’), which then took over the function of concealing the sanctuary, closing it off on the west from both the choir and the nave [Colour Pls XXXIc, d].10 This closing system has heavily affected the evolution of Ethiopian liturgy.11 On a more positive note, Mario Di Salvo, Claire Bosc-Tiessé, especially, and a few others have documented how, making the best of the large surfaces that the outer walls of the sanctuary were now offering, painters have developed iconographic programmes of a high relevance in terms of liturgy and artistic quality.12 Regarding this concealment of the sanctuary, we must distinguish the overall partitioning of the space with curtains. Of Egyptian origin, as already said, it is likely to have entered Ethiopia shortly before the spread of the round churches, if we are to give credence to Francisco Alvares, writing in the sixteenth century. Among others, the Portuguese priest described the church of St Michael near Dabra Bizan in Eritrea as having ‘a sanctuary and a crossing; in the crossing are curtains from end to end; and there are other curtains before the side doors, from wall to wall. They are curtains of silk: the entrance through these curtains is in three places, Separating the choir of clerics from the faithful. P. Grossmann, ‘Iconostasis’, ‘Khurus’ and ‘Sanctuary’ in ‘Architectural Elements of Churches’, in A. S. Atiya (ed.), The Coptic Encyclopedia, I, New York, 1991, 211–14, 221. 11 It emphasized the arcana separating the clergy members who know from the laity who are not supposed to know, adversely affecting the biblical sense of mystery (as expressed, for instance, in Eph. 1.9). While the Coptic Church has come out of this attitude, it is still strong in Eritrea and Ethiopia. As a clue showing a development of this type of arcana in relation to the time of the apparition of the round churches, the distribution of the antidoron is perhaps significant. While it has become a tight secret shared between clerics, as is the case even today, Alvares (a member of the embassy sent by Manoel I of Lisbon to Ethiopia from 1520 to 1526, who reported on what he saw during his travels in a book published in 1540, and who died before 1542) witnessed its distribution at the beginning of the sixteenth century as done openly: ‘On Saturdays and Sundays, and feast days, in all the churches and monasteries, blessed bread is distributed.’ English translation, The Prester John of the Indies: A True Relation of the Lands of the Prester John, being the Narrative of the Portuguese Embassy to Ethiopia in 1520 written by Father Francisco Alvares, 2 vols, ed. C. F. Beckingham and G. W. B. Huntingford [Hakluyt Society], London, 1961, I, ch. XI, 83; French translation, Description de l’Éthiopie, Anvers, 1558, 61 [155 of the PDF counter]. 12 C. Bosc-Tiessé, Les îles de la mémoire. Fabrique des images et écriture de l’histoire dans les églises du lac Tana, Éthiopie, XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle [Publications de la Sorbonne], Paris, 2008. See also Di Salvo, Churches of Ethiopia [n. 8 above]; C. Bosc-Tiessé and A. Wion, Peintures sacrées d’Éthiopie. Collection Dakar-Djibouti, Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, 2005; and earlier W. Staude, ‘Étude sur la décoration picturale des églises Abba Antonios de Gondar et Dabra Sina de Gorgora’, Annales d’Éthiopie 3 (1959), 185–250. 9

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they are open in the middle, and they reach one to another, they can also be entered close to the walls.’13 This text describes how curtains were made to divide up the space of the church, but the church is not described as round, no more than any other in his book. (Alvares assiduously noted what he saw, particularly when it contrasted with what he was used to back home.) Curtains served in Ethiopia as lattice barriers did in Egypt, separating the choir of the deacons (i.e. the old hurus) from the area of the men, then the choir of the men from the area of the women in the west.14 Although curtains are always part of the round churches, they should be seen as non-structural details rather than part of the essence of a round church or of the reason why they were built. It is clear that these churches represent a distinct turning point in the development of Ethiopian church architecture and, inseparably, of liturgy.15 In the following pages I seek to identify their origins and context, and to explore the meaning to be given to them in their two particularities: they are circular (or sometimes polygonal or even square); and the sanctuary is square and occupies the centre of the building.

THE TIME FRAME OF THE CIRCULAR CHURCHES Paradoxically, there is no evidence to help us specify the place or precise time in which such churches began – nor the occasion that triggered their appearance, nor the reason for them to be circular. No Ge‘ez text has so far ever been found concerning their origins. The texts available in the fifteenth century unsurprisingly refer to parallelepipeds only. Abbā Giyorgis of Saglā, in a passage of his Mashafa Meśtir (c. 1424), underscores the contrast between the poor appearance of an ordinary church and the glorious reality which inhabits it. The writer said that ‘the fourfold structure of its sides [is] in the image of the four living creatures’.16 The Acts of Marh a Krestos, abbot of Dabra Libānos (died 1497), written during 13 The Prester John of the Indies [n. 11 above], I, ch. XI, 75; Description de l’Ethiopie [n. 11 above], 57ff. 14 On these partitions and curtains, see A. J. Butler, The Ancient Coptic Churches of Egypt, I, Oxford, 1884 (Piscataway, 2004), 22; S. McNally, ‘Transformations of Ecclesiastical Space: Churches in the Area of Akhmim’, Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 35 (1998), 79–95; E. Fritsch, ‘Mägarägˇ a’ and ‘Mäqdäs’, in EAe, III, 629b–631b and 765–7. 15 They constitute a revolution as important as the apparition of churches with multiple sanctuaries and altars had been in the mid twelfth century. In fact, the major change entailed is that the one altar-table can receive a multiplicity of altar-tablets in succession, which equates it to as many altars as a given community would wish to possess. 16 Wa-terbe‘eta gabawātihā-sa ba-śe‘ela 4 ensesā, Giyorgis Sagla, Il Libro del Mistero, II, Yaqob Beyene (ed.), CSCO 532, text 87, 55.3–16; Italian translation reads: ‘la quadratura dei suoi lati è fatta a immagine dei quattro animali’, trans. 98, 33.33–34.9. Terbe‘et is used for the four sides of a square. G. Sagla, Il Libro del Mistero, II, 125–9 [text] = 76f. [trans.].This reference is found in R. Beylot, ‘Les règles de l’Église (d’après le ms éthiopien

THE ORIGINS AND MEANINGS OF THE ETHIOPIAN CIRCULAR CHURCH

the lifetime of Marha Krestos’s successor P˙ētros (died c. 1524 while Alvares was in Ethiopia), presents details which point to the church of Dabra Libānos having been rectangular at the time.17 This, again, is as we would expect. These Acts point to Zar’a Yā‘qob’s reign (1434–68), well before the earliest rotundas that have been discovered, from the sixteenth century; and Zar’a Yā‘qob himself ordered that three altars be erected in every church, which it is impossible to realize in a round church with a central sanctuary. Several altars require a rectangular church. This negative literary witness is congruent with the little we may know or guess regarding the churches of King Nā‘od and Lebna Dengel, as well as the ruins of all the known churches of Amhara.18 Only some fifteen years after Alvares’ departure in 1526,19 however, Miguel de Castanhoso (d. 1565?) came to Ethiopia from 1541 to 1543, as a member of the Portuguese force which rescued the Christian kingdom from the ğihad led by Imām Ahmad b. Ibrāhīm al-Ġāzī, nicknamed Grāñ, ‘the Left-handed’ (c. 1506 to 22 February 1543). Castanhoso described the Ethiopian places of worship with this sentence: ‘These churches are round, with a holy place in the centre, and all around outside are verandahs.’20 The soldier described as general the existence of round churches.

D’Abbadie 156) relues d’après de nouveaux documents, avec un texte inédit sur les anges et les ordres du clergé’, Pount 5 (2011), 129–37 [130–1]. 17 Actes de Marh a Krestos, ed. S. Kur (CSCO 330–1, Scr. Aeth. 62–3), Leuven, 1972, xvi. Again, the four angles of the church are mentioned [text 67, trans. 62]. 18 ‘[King Zar’a Ya’eqob] also taught that one was not to set up and place one unique altar [tabot, lit. altar-tablet] but rather two altars [tabotat] or [altars] which would be many, and that these altars [tabotat] were not supposed to be on their own, but one was to add the altar [tabot] of Mary among them’, J. Perruchon, Les chroniques de Zar’a Ya‘eqob et de Ba’eda Mâryâm rois d’Éthiopie de 1434 à 1478, Paris, 1893, 81 [author’s translation]. See L. Ricci, ‘Resti di antico edificio in Gimbi (Scioa)’, Annales d’Éthiopie X (1976), 177–211; S. Chojnacki, ‘Day Giyorgis’, Journal of Ethiopian Studies VII/2 (1969), 43–52; S. Chojnacki, ‘New Discoveries in Ethiopian Archaeology: Dabr Takla Haymanot in Dawnt and Eneso Gabre’el in Lasta’ [First International Littmann Conference (Munich, 2002)], 2004, 44–50; P. B. Henze, ‘The Monastery of Mertule Maryam in Gojjam. A Major Medieval Ethiopian Architectural Monument’, in P. Scholz (ed.), Äthiopien gestern une heute [Akten der 1. Tagung des Orbis Æthiopicus Gesellschaft, Nubica et Aethiopica 4/5, Warsaw, 1999, 520–50]; M.-L. Derat, Le domaine des rois éthiopiens, Paris, 2003; Deresse Ayenachew, Le kätäma: la cour et le camp royal en Éthiopie (XIVe–XVIe siècle). Espace et pouvoir, Paris, 2009; E. Fritsch and M.-L. Derat, ‘Une lecture architecturale et liturgique des ruines de Gabriel’, in M.-L. Derat and A.-M. Jouquand (eds), Gabriel, une église médiévale d’Éthiopie. Interprétations historiques et archéologiques de sites chrétiens autour de Mashala Māryām (Manz, Éthiopie), XVe–XVIIe siècles [Annales d’Ethiopie Hors-Série 2], Paris, 2012, 195–204 etc. 19 Alvares does not seem to have provided us with any single example of a church about which we may understand that it was surely round, but the interpretation of his report is arduous and not yet over. 20 Miguel de Castanhoso, The Portuguese Expedition to Abyssinia in 1541–1543 with some contemporary letters, the short account of Bermudez, and certain extracts from Correa, ed. and trans. R. S. Whiteway [Hakluyt Society 2/10], London, 1902, 90. The original title was: Miguel de Castanhoso, Dos Feitos de D. Cristovao da Gama em Etiópia: Tratado composto por Miguel de Castanhoso, ed. F. M. Esteves Pereira, Lisbon, 1898.

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The seventeenth-century Jesuit Manoel de Almeida (d. 1646)21 may have written the first record identifying a particular circular church, which would have been St Mary’s on Ambā Gešan (South Wallo), a building founded by King Nā‘od (1495–1508) and completed by his son, King Lebna Dengel (1508–40). Almeida adds that that very church had miraculously not been destroyed by gˇihadist Ahmad Grāñ’s troops, but the Short Chronicle states bluntly: ‘Geššē was destroyed and burnt down’ in 1540.22 King Nā’od is known to have been responsible for the construction of two other churches. One is Berārah, for which no detail is available and which is mentioned only in the Futūh al-H  abaša as ‘a church that belonged to the former king’.23 The second one is Makāna Śellāsē, which was a grand edifice, rectangular in shape, the base of which still exists.24 This monument would rather indicate that the third church ascribed to Nā‘od on Ambā Gešan would have been of the same basic design, all the more so as no comment is found that would emphasize the originality of the new plan. However, nothing is documented and a change from rectangular to circular cannot be ruled out.25 21 See C. Beccari (ed.), Notizia e saggi di opere e documenti inediti riguardanti la storia di Etiopia durante i secoli XVI, XVII e XVIII, con otto facsimili e due carte geographiche, Roma, 1903; repr. Brussels, 1969, V, 217; ‘Almeida on Ethiopia’, II, ch. 22, in Some Records of Ethiopia, 1593–1646. Being Extracts from the History of High Ethiopia or Abassia by Manoel de Almeida, together with Bahrey’s History of the Galla, eds and trans. C. F. Beckingham and G. W. B. Huntingford [Hakluyt Society 2/107], London, 1954; repr. Nendeln, Liechtenstein, 1967, 97–102 [99]. See also M. E. Heldman, ‘Church Buildings’, EAe, I, 739. 22 Šihabaddīn Ah mad ibn ‘Abdalqādir, Futūh al-H  abaša. Histoire de la conquête de l’Abyssinie (XVIe siècle) par Chihab Eddin Ahmed ben ‘Abd el-Qāder, surnommé ArabFaqih, ed. and trans. R. Basset [Publications de l’École des lettres d’Alger 19, 20], Paris, 1897, f. 7, 17 [text] / 109 [trans.]. The Short Chronicle states: ‘In questo mese di yakātit, ai 3, fu distrutta e saccheggiata Geššē, ambā dei re,’ La cronaca abbreviata d’Abissinia, ed. F. Béguinot, Rome, 1901, 25. Although Geššē is supposed to be ‘a region situated in northern Šäwa, bordered by Wärrä Illu (Wällo) in the north; it occupies the high plateau north of the Qaččine river and extended as far as the river Wänčit’ (Ahmed Hassen Omer, ‘Geššē’, EAe, II, 775–6), its identification with ‘the ambā of the kings’ in the Short Chronicle would be telling that in this case it is one and the same with Ambā Gešan. The site has been visited with Claire Bosc-Tiessé on the occasion of a mission in South-Wallo, set up under the aegis of the Centre français des études éthiopiennes (CFEE, Addis Ababa) in February 2010. 23 Šihāb ad-Dīn Ah mad bin ‘Abd al-Qāder bin Sālem bin ‘Utmān, also known as ‘Arab Faqīh, Futūh al-H  abaša, The Conquest of Abyssinia, trans. P. L. Stenhouse, Hollywood, 2003, 165; ‘une église construite par le roi précédent Nâod’, Šihabaddīn, Histoire de la conquête de l’Abyssinie, ed. Basset [n. 22 above], 217. See M.-L. Derat, ‘Na‘od’, EAe, III, 2007, 1134–5 [1135a]; M.-L. Derat, Le domaine des rois éthiopiens (1270–1527): espace, pouvoir et monachisme, Paris, 2003, 209, 214, 328. 24 M.-L. Derat, ‘Mäkanä Śǝllase’, EAe, III, 2007, 672. 25 From Egypt, no helpful text has been found so far regarding this matter. The current period was described by Pope John XIII of Alexandria (1484–1524) as a time of ‘great destruction, ruin, and want in every place’. In such a situation, we might not expect much Coptic influence to have diverted Ethiopians from their architectural and liturgical traditions, although this is roughly when the sanctuary was equipped with doors and curtains, contributing to creating or reinforcing a lasting trend of secrecy in the ethos of the whole community, while the rationale was probably about the safekeeping of the paraphernalia.

THE ORIGINS AND MEANINGS OF THE ETHIOPIAN CIRCULAR CHURCH

From the time of the churches’ appearance, to their place. The circular churches are found outside the area once occupied by the kingdom of the Aksumites, today roughly Eritrea and Tigray, where Ethiopian Christianity first took root. From there Christianity moved south, into lands which have been called ‘Amhara’; and it is in these southern areas that the round churches are found. Significantly, the toponyms mentioned above point to edifices which are to be ascribed to royal initiative and are often still visible, albeit as ruins. Their high standard is matched by their observance of the traditional ways of building a church (rectangular) and of the higher quality of their construction, which shows in their lasting existence as well as their ornamentation. This, however, does not tell anything of the ordinary villages. If the circular shape has always been the normal way to build south of Tigray, it may happen that churches have been built that way for ages in areas far away from centres; and the centres themselves were as peripatetic as the royal camps. The churches would remain undocumented because they would have disappeared from the scenery, being made of earth and straw, and of small proportions not needing durable foundations.26 But even if the round structure supported by a central pole was the endemic way to build in the ‘south’, the use of such a structure for churches nonetheless had a beginning and a reason for that beginning; we will return to this problem below. As if echoing what certain travelers had been thinking, Sergew Hable Selassie stated in one publication of the Church: ‘In the late medieval period, ecclesiastical architecture underwent radical change. Churches of octagonal or circular shape were constructed. It seems probable that these forms were increasingly adopted as Ethiopian power moved southwards and the churches acquired the form of the round dwellings common in the south. This type of circular or octagonal church is abundant in the southern and western areas where Christianity was introduced later.’27 Recently, Qasis Alemnew Azene reported in a similar manner that today’s liqāwent say that the churches are constructed according to the area’s traditional dwellings. If people were used to building their homes as round structures with thatched roofing, that would be the way to build churches too, with a difference only of size. This prevailed, for example, in the Lake Tāna area; while in the north, where people are used to building four walls with cut stones, the churches are also stone-built and rectangular. To sum up: Castanhoso’s presence in Ethiopia from 1541 to 1543 and the general character of his statement give us a terminus ante quem for the emergence of round churches. The round building may well be owed to 26 This is what happened even in the ‘historic north’, where the rock-churches witness to the existence of a disappeared network – except for a few exceptional actual buildings, like Giyorgis Zāramā or Māryām Nāzrēt above. 27 Sergew Hable Selassie and Belaynesh Mikael, ‘Worship in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church’, in Sergew Hable Selassie (ed.), The Church of Ethiopia: A Panorama of History and Spiritual Life, Addis Ababa, 1997 [1970], 63–71 [64].

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the traditional local way to build. The few identifiable elements obtained from the description of the sanctuary point to an evolution at or after the end of the fifteenth century. The likelihood is that the circular churches appeared in the ‘Amhara’ land under King Lebna Dengel (1508–40).28

THE CIRCLE AND THE SQUARE: A ‘JERUSALEM CONNECTION’ This still leaves the question: what other influences bore specifically on the churches’ shape and their central square sanctuary? We need a new reading of Ethiopian history, with Jerusalem’s Temple and the Holy Sepulchre in mind; both have been suggested as likely archetypes of Ethiopian rotundas. More prosaic explanations have to be considered, too. THE ETHIOPIAN TRADITION The Ethiopian tradition on such matters is accessible today only through two avenues: through learned ecclesiastics, sometimes documented in recent publications; or through texts called Śer‘āta Bēta krestiyān, literally ‘Church order’. Such texts are a form of ‘living literature’, which has been documented by Marcel Griaule29 and Roger Schneider30 and has come into print with Qasis Kenfa Gabre’ēl Altāya, who has been teaching liturgics to generations of students at the Holy Trinity Theological College of Addis Ababa.31 Denis Nosnitsin describes this form of writing as ‘akin to the tradition of Bible interpretation, i.e. the Andemtā and Tergwāmē, using partly similar methods and expressive means ,… The eighteenth century may be considered as the time when this kind of treatises started to appear, along with intensified church construction and the emergence of the traditional exegesis schools during the Gondärine kingdom.’32 Robert Beylot pushed the roots of the Śer‘āta Bēta krestiyān further back in time, pointing in particular to a passage of fifteenth-century Abbā Giyorgis Saglāwi’s Book of the Mystery.33 (The genre could be viewed as a continuation of a form of midrash found within the New Testament, both in Paul [1 Corinthians 10.4 is a good example] and in the dynamics of the Letter to the Hebrews.) This literary genre may have even more to do The Prester John of the Indies [n. 11 above], I, ch. XI, 80. M. Griaule, ‘Règles de l’Église (Documents Éthiopiens)’, Journal Asiatique 221 (July– September 1932), 1–42. 30 R. Schneider, ‘Nouveaux témoins du texte éthiopien des Règles de l’Église (Documents Éthiopiens)’, Journal Asiatique 276 (July–September 1988), 71–96. 31 Last of several editions: Liqa kāhenāt Kenfa Gabre’ēl Altāya, Śer‘āta Bēta krestiyān (‘The Order of the Church’), I, Addis Ababa, 1983 EC/AD 1991, and II, Addis Ababa, 1993 EC/AD 2000. 32 D. Nosnitsin, ‘Ś r‘atä Betä kr stiyan’, EAe, IV, 2011, 631–4. See also Bosc-Tiessé, Les îles de la mémoire [n. 12 above], 336–7. 33 See Beylot, ‘Les règles de l’Église’ [n. 16 above], 130. 28

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with Chapter 10 of the Ge‘ez Testamentum Domini, in a formal manner, from the title down to several details.34 This general and popular form of teaching produces in a simple presentation various similar symbolical interpretations based on what figures evoke. For example, what can be described as triple will be referred to the Holy Trinity; a container will evoke Mary while the contained will be her son Jesus; the number four will refer to the Four Living Creatures, etc.35 Griaule’s collection and other documents all describe the church as a round structure.36 The interpretation of the circle may be partly covered by the suggestion that the church is the ‘symbol of this world’, and the priests ‘turning three times around’ to cense ‘are the symbol of Jesus Christ who taught the Gospel by circulating in this world three years and three months’.37 But this is one sense among others, therefore not decisive.38 Qasis Alemnew further reports: ‘The circle is perfect, our religion (hāymānot) is perfect, and we make a church as the ark of Noah was, that is circular and compartmented according to species.’39 1 Peter 3.20 refers to the church as ‘ark of salvation’; homiletics links the flood with baptism. In this type of literature, reference should also be made to the Amharic Ya-Qeddāsē Tārik, ‘History of the Sanctification (the Mass)’, presented by Mamher Garimā, later Archbishop Mikā’ēl, in his Mash afa Qeddāsē andemtā, ‘Commentary of the Missal’.40 There, after reviewing the places of worship found in the different stages of the Old Testament (in which the ark of Noah holds a good place), the institution of the Eucharist is placed in the home of Lazarus,41 while the first church – placed at Philippi in Macedonia, where Paul and Barnabas preached (Acts 16) – is ascribed 34 R. Beylot (ed.), Testamentum Domini éthiopien, Louvain, 1984, 19–21 [text, which reads qannonā bēta krestiyān, ‘Rule of the Church’] and 157–8 [trans.]. 35 After Cohen’s introductory note to Griaule, ‘Règles de l’Église’ [n. 29 above], and Schneider, ‘Nouveaux témoins du texte éthiopien des Règles de l’Église’ [n. 30 above], 71. 36 This is no proof that there cannot be an Arabic or another foreign Vorlage to the church order, easily adapted to the local situation. Cf. D. Nosnitsin: ‘The Ge‘ez may indeed be a treatise regarding the structure of an individual church and the organization of the clergy, based on the translated writings of the Church Fathers (cf. Ethiopian Manuscript Microfilm Library, V, 437, 467). However, the text may also be an Ethiopian one; the existence of a foreign (Arabic?) Vorlage has been doubted since the work – an allegorical description of the church – seems to refer to an Ethiopian round church (Kleiner, 2000, I, 40)’, EAe, IV, 2011, 631–4. 37 Griaule, ‘Règles de l’Église’, 30. 38 Griaule, ‘Règles de l’Église’, 33. The Feth a Nagaśt (Law of the Kings, thirteenth century, by a Coptic Christian, later translated into Ge‘ez and expanded) says nothing about this matter. 39 I am grateful to Qasis Alemnew who kindly discussed this matter with me (19 February 2015). 40 Mas hafa Qeddāsē. Ka-qaddemo abbātoč siward siwārad ya-matāw nebābu-nnā tergwāmēw, ‘The Book of the Sanctification. Text and Interpretation come from the Fathers’ Tradition’, compiled by Mamher Garimā Walda Kidān [later Archbishop Mikā’ēl], Addis Ababa, 1918 EC/AD 1926; last printed 1988 EC/1996 GC [AD, Gregorian], 5–9 [6b] [hereafter ‘Missal Commentary’]. 41 Also referred to in the Institution narrative of the Anaphora of Epiphanius.

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to Jesus Christ himself and signals the beginning of church construction in general.42 Again, three areas within the church are indicated, but named as Adam’s tābot, Moses’ tābot and Jesus’ tābot. And to make it clear that the ‘rite of heaven is accomplished upon the earth’, three angelic domains are then listed, which in their turn are developed and matched by the full ecclesiastical hierarchy, underscoring a heavenly model.43 Remarkably, Jerusalem is mentioned only to say that Peter and John were joined there in their apostolic work and never left the city until Jesus Christ gathered them in Philippi. As for the shape of the building, the three stones gathered to structure its base – not four, as would be expected for a parallelepiped – suggest a circular church, besides naturally referring to the Holy Trinity.44 It should be noted, however, that inexactitudes such as Schneider’s translation of Maqdas as ‘Saint des saints’45 are misleading: they make one believe that there is a reference to the Jewish Temple of Jerusalem, while they only mean ‘sanctuary’ in the sense of the area in the church where the altar is placed.46 If it is true that the word is sometimes used, it is not in primary source documents but in modern presentations. For example, Sergew Hable Selassie and Belaynesh Mikael state the following: ‘The innermost part [of the church] is the Maqdas or Sanctuary, also known as the Qeddusa Qeddusan or Holy of Holies, where the Tabot or Ark rests; only priests and deacons have access to it.’ The reason for it, however, follows immediately: ‘The Tabot represents the Ark of the Covenant, believed to have been brought to Ethiopia by Menelik I, the son of King Solomon.’47 The actual connection with the Temple is thin. The Amharic-English bilingual official self-presentation, The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo 42  Coptic 21 Ba’ûnah and Ethiopian 20–21 Sanē (Julian 10–11 July / Gregorian 27–28 June, respectively) commemorate the building by Jesus Christ of the First Church for the Virgin Mary, as a model, and the consecration of the same through the first Eucharist which took place there. It was celebrated by Jesus Christ himself, in order to show that ‘it is his will that the apostles build churches named after his Mother from one end of the world to the other’ (Missal Commentary [n. 40 above], 6b). The story in the Missal Commentary derives from the reading found in the Synaxary (The Book of the Saints of the Ethiopian Church, trans. E. A. T. Wallis Budge, 4 vols, Hildesheim, 1976 [Cambridge, 1928], 1051 [the PDF version available online does not have this commemoration]; I. Guidi, ed. and trans., Le Synaxaire éthiopien, I, Le mois de sanê, Patrologia orientalis, I, part 5, no. 5, Turnhout, 2003 [1905], 645–7. There is no entry on 20 Sanē, but the reading for 21 Sanē is visibly the same story as that which the Missal Commentary records, despite significant differences. See also Fritsch, The Liturgical Year of the Ethiopian Church [n. 3 above], 63–4, 71 no. 20, 300–1. 43 Missal Commentary [n. 40 above], 7a. Cf. Beylot, ‘Les règles de l’Église’ [n. 16 above], 129–37. 44 Missal Commentary, 6b. 45 Schneider, ‘Nouveaux témoins du texte éthiopien des Règles de l’Église’ [n. 30 above], 81.17 and 84.9. 46 S. Munro-Hay, Ethiopia, the Unknown Land, London and New York, 2002, 50, also mentions the qeddesta qeddusan, Holy of Holies, as an alternative name of the maqdas without more explanation. 47 Sergew Hable Selassie and Belaynesh Mikael, ‘Worship in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church’ [n. 27 above], 65.

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Church Faith, Order of Worship and Ecumenical Relations, declares the Church’s attachment to the Old Testament tābot, the ark of the covenant, and mentions the Ark of Noah, the Tent of Abraham, the Tabernacle and the Temple of Solomon as Old Testament ‘examples of churches where offerings and worship to God were made’, but does not apply them to the New Testament times at all, or to any sort of Ethiopian church type.48 Archbishop Abuna Malka Sēdēq states about the prevalence of round churches: ‘It is not known when or how it started but all the country churches are round (literally bēta neguś, i.e. ‘the house of the king’) in shape. Even today, when a new church is built in the countryside, people like to build it in this form.’ No other reference is given. Only when he discusses the divisions found within the church does the archbishop refer to Solomon: ‘The division of a church. Any church, whatever its style [i.e. basilica or round], has three divisions in the likeness of the temple of Solomon because the Jewish order [śer‘āt] is the foundation and example of all the faith, teaching, service of Christianity.’49 In other words, this statement is universal and affects in no way the fact that certain churches are round. Qasis Kenfa Gabre’ēl Altāya says that the way in which the Tent of the Law (dabtarā ‘orit) and the Sanctuary of the Law (Maqdasa ‘Orit) were made has a messālēnnat, in this context an exemplary – or symbolical – character, which refers us to the typological language, for the way the church building is constructed.50 He explains further: ‘As the Tent of the Law and the Sanctuary of the Law used to be made in three parts, every church is made in the three parts of the qenē māhelēt, qeddest, maqdas’ (Ex. 36; 1 Kings 6.1–end).51 Here we should remember the Coptic notion that the altar – and therefore the sanctuary which contains this altar – is covered with a cupola. The cupola is called in the Arabic of Coptic Egypt after the Greek ἡ σκηνή, ‘the tent’. Indeed, there are as many cupolas as there are altars and sanctuaries.52 Ethiopian churches have had their sanctuaries covered with a cupola, or at least a carefully designed ceiling meant to stand for the cupola. In such circumstances, three factors converge: the conical 48 The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church Faith, Order of Worship and Ecumenical Relations, Addis Ababa, 1996, 62–7 [63, 65]. The Amharic texts do not differ, 59–61. 49 Archbishop Malka S ēdēq, Temherta Krestenna (‘Catechism’), Part 2, Addis Ababa, 1984 EC/AD 1992, 128–30. Abuna Malka Sēdēq was once the renowned Liqa śeltānāt Habtamāryām Warqneh, dean of the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Addis Ababa. 50 Liqa kāhenāt Kenfa Gabre’ēl, Śer‘āta Bēta krestiyān [n. 31 above], II, 5. 51 Kenfa Gabre’ēl, Śer‘āta Bēta krestiyān, 5–6. Qeddest (‘holy’) denotes the presbyterium, and more recently the place just outside and westwards of the sanctuary, where the readings, blessings and Holy Communion are given. Maqdas (‘holy place’) denotes the sanctuary. 52 This points to the three-cupola church painted in the mural of Lālibalā Bēta Māryām, representing the Flight to Egypt (executed between end twelfth and early thirteenth century, according to E. Balicka-Witakowska, to whom I am indebted) as possessing three sanctuaries, each with its own altar.

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roofing of the circular churches with their apex right above the sanctuary does meet the visual need for the sanctuary to be seen as covered with a cupola; secondly, it makes it possible to realize this demand in a general way, not just when a qualified mason is available; and finally, it obliges the churches to have one altar only, as there is but one possible apex.53 Kenfa Gabre’ēl counts three sorts of church plans. The first is like a rectangular hall (saqalā) and oblong (molālā); the second is circular (kebb), a shape known as bēta neguś (‘the house of the king’), in which the three compartments are defined according to their purpose (gebru); the third is the church-in-cave (wāšā), which has but one entrance door and one sanctuary door, while its different areas are defined by curtains only. Kenfa Gabre’ēl grants a particular rationale to the first type only, which he says imitates both the Temple of Solomon and, in the New Covenant, the churches built by St Helena at Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The Temple and the basilica are now united under the rectangular plan, while no particular meaning is ascribed to the circular church or the central sanctuary. A round church, then, is made in the image of the Old Testament sacred places by virtue of its division into three areas, a feature that it shares with any other church type. THE TEMPLE The definite association between the Jerusalem Temple and the circular church was expressed by Aymro Wondmagegnehu and Joachim Motovu only when they stated the prevalence of round churches in a short sentence: ‘The form of the Hebrew sanctuary was preferred by Ethiopians to the basilica type.’54 No other detail explains how the paralellepipedic Jerusalem Temple would have been closer in shape to the round church than to the basilica. There is, then, almost no support for the notion that a church is specifically related to the Jerusalem Temple, either in the present stage of the tradition’s development or in objective observation. or (still less) in documentation from sources. It is curious that the notion continues to attract interest. This seems to be an effect of Edward Ullendorff ’s lasting authority. Professor Ullendorff stated: The way in which Abyssinian churches are built is clearly derived from the threefold division of the Hebrew temple. That had already been recognized by Ludolf … The outside ambulatory 53 Hence the almost necessary appearance of altar-tablets including several dedicatory names in place of the several tablets dedicated to one name only, which had been in use until then and remains the norm for the main altar-tablet of any given church. See Fritsch, ‘The Altar’ [n. 5 above], 468–9. 54 Aymro Wondmagegnehu and J. Motovu, The Ethiopian Orthodox Church, Addis Ababa, 1970, 46. The sentence, hardly touched up, is in fact taken from Ullendorff ’s quote below.

THE ORIGINS AND MEANINGS OF THE ETHIOPIAN CIRCULAR CHURCH

of the three concentric parts of the Abyssinian church (which is either round, octagonal or rectangular) is called k’ǝne mahlet, i.e. the place where hymns are sung and where the däbtära or cantors stand. This outer part corresponds to the häsēr of the Tabernacle or the ’ulām of Solomon’s Temple. The next chamber is the k’ǝddǝst where communion is administered to the people; and the innermost part is the mäk’däs where the tabot rests and to which only priests and the King have access. In some parts of Abyssinia, especially in the North, the k’ǝddǝst (the qodeš of the Tabernacle or hēk āl of Solomon’s Temple) is called ’ǝnda ta’amǝr, place of wonder, and the mäk’däs is named k’ǝddusä k’ǝddusan (the qodeš haqqodāšīm of the Tabernacle and the dǝbīr of the Temple). This division into three chambers applies to all Abyssinian churches, even to the smallest of them. It is thus clear that the form of the Hebrew sanctuary was preferred by Abyssinians to the basilica type which was accepted by early Christians elsewhere. Similarly, churches throughout Ethiopia are usually built upon a small hill overlooking the village or, at any rate, at the most elevated place available.55

The first problem is the statement: ‘This division into three chambers applies to all Abyssinian churches, even to the smallest of them [we read a few lines above: ‘the Abyssinian church (which is either round, octagonal or rectangular)’]. It is thus clear that the form of the Hebrew sanctuary was preferred by Abyssinians to the basilica type which was accepted by early Christians elsewhere.’ In response to Ullendorff, we must make four observations: (1) The model of the Hebrew sanctuary is universally applied to all Ethiopian churches, whether basilica or circular in plan, removing from them any important difference. It is the threefold division which relates such churches to the Temple, not their being round. (2) Ullendorff maintains that the form of the Hebrew sanctuary was preferred by Abyssinians to the basilica type. In fact, from the earliest churches of the kingdom of the Aksumites up until the end of the fifteenth century and King Nā‘od’s Makāna Śellāsē, all churches without exception are basilicas, at least in their ground-plans, sharing their structure with the other basilicas of the Christian world. The latter should therefore also be referred to the Hebrew Temple. But basilicas are not in essence made on the model of any cultic place, be it the Temple at Jerusalem or pre-Christian temples elsewhere. (3) The triple-space division follows an order which is quite natural. It is not surprising to find it almost everywhere, not just in Ethiopia, 55 E. Ullendorff, ‘Hebraic-Jewish Elements in Abyssinian Christianity’, Journal of Semitic Studies 114 (1956), 216–56 [235–6]; E. Ullendorff, Ethiopia and the Bible, Oxford, 1968, 87–9. Although he is initially more careful, Di Salvo also shares leanings towards the ‘mythic’ Temple of Jerusalem: see his Churches of Ethiopia [n. 8 above], 64–9.

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which was herself an heir of other local church-building traditions. More interesting are the exceptions: in a number of Ethiopian churches there are two, not three divisions. A famous example is Yemrehanna Krestos, near Lālibalā. (4) The terminology used to name the three areas of the church is of no importance. The Maqdas, ‘sanctuary’, and Qenē māhlēt, the ‘service of praise’, are descriptive while Qeddest, the ‘holy place’, refers to the presbyterium which, until at least the twelfth century, was protected by a chancel; lay people used to receive Holy Communion outside it, in the nave. We cannot then make the general claim that the ‘next chamber is the k’addast where communion is administered to the people’. Another example: the porch is not the Qenē māhlēt, which is not an outer ambulatory either. The term Qeddesta qeddusān is traditionally not employed by Ethiopians for the Maqdas, but to speak of the Jerusalem Temple. The vocabulary and the ascription are approximate.56 Moreover, the emergence of these names cannot be dated; they do not exist in the circa sixth-century Testamentum Domini.57 We cannot rely on the universality of these terms or of their evocations. If there was ever a connection between the Ethiopian churches and the Temple, it should probably be thought of as literary, engendered by a common reading of Holy Scripture and, for the Christian side, by the application of the Temple’s typology to the ἱερωσύνη of Christ (Hebr. 9). This, naturally, is in no way particular to Ethiopia but has affected all Christian churches. In the end, there is nothing tangible to this familiar claim; there is just an apparent congruence with the so-called special Judeo-Christian character of the Ethiopian Church – or, rather, with the leanings for the Old Testament found in the Ethiopian Church. But this is an altogether different story. THE HOLY SEPULCHRE Failing the reference to the Hebrew Temple, might the circular shape of Ethiopian churches have been inspired by the shape of the rotunda surrounding the empty tomb of Christ – the sanctuary – still in Jerusalem? The tomb has always been a persistent focus of great spiritual interest of the Ethiopians, as of the members of any Christian church.58 Even after the fall of Jerusalem in 1187, Ethiopians do not seem to have been

E.g. in Ethiopia and the Bible, 88. Cf. A. Bausi, ‘Testamentum Domini’, EAe, IV, 927–8. 58 E. Van Donzel, ‘Ethiopia’s Lalibäla and the Fall of Jerusalem, 1187’, Aethiopica 1 (1998), 27–49 [43–4, 47]. An attempt at understanding the round churches as proceeding from a vision encompassing the Temple and then the Holy Sepulchre has been presented in J.-N. Pérès, ‘Du Temple à l’église. Les églises de plan circulaire en Éthiopie’, in C. Braga (ed.), L’espace liturgique: ses éléments constitutifs et leur sens [Bibliotheca Ephemerides Liturgicae 138], Rome, 2006, 157–66. See also Di Salvo, Churches of Ethiopia [n. 8 above], 73. 56 57

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prevented from reaching the holy places, as often believed. Pilgrimages and monastic settlements are as many witnesses of this fact. Yet it was not something everyone could undertake, and local replicas of sorts may have been sought. In this regard, the idea that the relationship with Jerusalem would have been symbolical in character would be appealing. Marie-Laure Derat has recently studied the history of the Life of Lālibālā, known for the eponymous place in which the famous churches have been hewn. An authentic translatio Hierosolymae can even be found in the church of Golegotā at Lālibālā.59 The oldest text referring to it is the Life of Lālibālā, which was written before the middle of the fifteenth century, since a copy of it was offered by King Zar’a Yā’eqob (1434–68) to the church of Golegotā.60 This reveals precisely that a relationship had been established between King Lālibālā and that particular church.61 The Life states that the saintly king made marvelous things in that place, referring to ‘the dead body, glorious, which belongs to the Lamb whose body does not become corrupted, and several other representations [se’elt] which he [Lālibālā] was thinking of night and day’.62 This is a reference to the recumbent statue of Jesus Christ and the sculptures of saints standing around the church of Golegotā [Fig. 14.2]. It confirms that the funerary recess of the recumbent is an actual representation of Jesus Christ’s Holy Sepulchre at the time [Fig. 14.3]. This is confirmed by the Life: ‘Any Ethiopian who, having heard about those so remarkable churches, does not go to the holy city of Roha [i.e. Lālibalā] is like a man who would not have any desire to behold the face of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.’63 That lasting attachment to the Holy Sepulchre down to our days is manifest. For example, according to the Acts of Marha Krestos, it was from Jerusalem that the abbot of Dabra Libānos (d. 1497) received new sacred vessels for his church during the reign of Nā‘od.64 Later still, just before the period of time which concerns us most, around 1520, when Father Francisco Alvares visited the church of Golegotā, he was shown the tomb 59 As emphasized by M.-L. Derat: ‘On peut ajouter que la transposition de Jérusalem en dehors de la Palestine, la translatio Hierosolymae, n’est pas propre à l’Éthiopie et surtout est rarement liée à la difficulté de se rendre sur les Lieux Saints pour les chrétiens. Il s’agit le plus souvent de revendiquer sur son territoire la présence d’une petite Jérusalem, symbole de la Nouvelle Alliance et de l’élection divine. Dans l’Occident médiéval, entre le IXe et le XIe siècle, pas moins de 19 églises furent construites à l’image du Saint Sépulcre, et après la première croisade, entre 1110 et 1187, ce sont 49 églises qui, toujours en Occident, ont été placées sous le vocable du Saint Sépulcre. La transposition de la Terre Sainte à Lālibalā participe donc de ce mouvement, où des pèlerins, de retour dans leur pays d’origine, inspirent la construction d’édifices copiant les lieux saints de Jérusalem et tout particulièrement le Saint Sépulcre’ (‘Enquête sur les rois Zāgwē’ [n. 1 above], 161). 60 British Library, MS Or. 719. 61 Derat, ‘Enquête sur les rois Zāgwē’, 169. 62 M.-L. Derat translated: ‘le corps (mort) glorieux qui appartient à l’agneau au corps indestructible et plusieurs autres représentations [se’elt] auxquelles il [Lâlibalâ] pensait nuit et jour’ (‘Enquête sur les rois Zāgwē’, 166, n. 83). 63 Gadla Lālibalā, 127, quoted in Derat, ‘Enquête sur les rois Zāgwē’, 166. 64 Actes of Marh a Krestos [n. 17 above], 101 and 92.

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FIG. 14.2. RECUMBENT CHRIST IN THE BĒTA GOLEGOTĀ CHAPEL, LĀLIBALĀ / ROHA

FIG. 14.3.  THE TRANSLATIO MONUMENTI CHRISTI IN THE BĒTA GOLEGOTĀ CHAPEL, LĀLIBALĀ / ROHA

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THE ORIGINS AND MEANINGS OF THE ETHIOPIAN CIRCULAR CHURCH

of the holy King Lālibālā. He remembered further: ‘On the left-hand side, going from the principal door in front of the chancel, there is a tomb cut in the same rock as the church, which they say is made like the sepulchre of Jesus Christ in Jerusalem. So they hold it in honour and veneration and reverence.’65 The same Alvares also tells how important in his time is the physical link of Ethiopia with the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem itself: ‘As to the silks and brocades, Pero de Covilham said that they often took them out to give them to churches and monasteries, as was done three years before our arrival, when the Prester sent large offerings to Jerusalem of the silks and brocades from the caves, because of the multitude he possessed; they were so many that they covered the walls of the church of the Holy Sepulchre. He also sent some of the other gold …. The ambassador who conveyed these offerings to [Jerusalem] is named Abba Asrat.’66 A little further, Alvares tells of a caravan of monks going in pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Despite the fact, however, that Ethiopians knew the Holy Sepulchre was circular, the church of Golegotā in Lālibalā, which contains the recumbent Christ, is not circular. The recumbent Christ found in Golegotā was of course meant to refer to the tomb inside the square aedicule in the centre of the rotunda of Jerusalem, rather than to that church as such. The wallniche tomb represents the aedicule of Jerusalem. The circular ambulatory around the Jerusalem aedicule is visibly of no importance in Lālibalā. One clue may have reached us, as to the type of event which would have brought together both the general mind and the executive will in the decision to replicate the Holy Sepulchre. Cerulli noted the following fact: ‘In 1522 the French pilgrim Bartholomé de Salignac informs us that the Ethiopian community of Jerusalem had disappeared altogether.’67 Kirsten Stoffregen Pedersen further notes: ‘The rise of Ottoman Turkey and the wars of Ahmad b. Ibrāhīm al-Ġāzī caused a swift impoverishment and decline of the Ethiopian community in Jerusalem … From descriptions of the Ethiopian community in Jerusalem in foreign sources from the sixteenth till the end of the nineteenth century it is clear that it lost its privileges in the holy places and was finally confined to the dilapidated Dayr al-Sultān.’68 There may well be an analogy here with the new Dabra Metmāq built by King Zar’a Yā‘eqob after he received in 1441 a message from Pope John of Alexandria informing him that the Egyptian original Place of the Bath (Arabic: maġtis/miġtas), which was serving as a station 65 The Prester John of the Indies [n. 11 above], I, ch. LIV, 207–21 [221]. The French reads: ‘Audevant de la grande chappelle en [?] une autre, entaillée dans la même pierre de l’Eglise laquelle ils disent être faite à l’imitation de Jésus Christ en Jerusalem,’ which the marginal title helps us to understand: ‘Sepulchre à l’imitation de celuy de Iesu-christ’ [between 161 and 162]. 66 The Prester John of the Indies, II, ch. CXXVIII, 448. Abbā Asrāt went to Jerusalem in 1516. He assumed the function of nebura ed of Aksum in 1528–29. 67 E. Cerulli, Etiopi in Palestina, I, Rome, 1943, 395. 68 K. S. Pedersen, ‘Jerusalem’, EAe, III, 273–7 [275].

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for Ethiopian pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land, had been destroyed.69 In a similar way, the adverse circumstances affecting the Ethiopians in Jerusalem may have triggered in their homeland a demonstration of their attachment to Jerusalem, and of their decision to host the Holy Sepulchre wherever they were – or to be hosted by it. This cannot be demonstrated without some kind of textual support. It must remain for the moment a similarity which is only formal and accidental.

MIGHT SYMBOLISM EXPLAIN THE SQUARE SANCTUARY IN THE CIRCLE? No firm ground, then, can be identified in Jerusalem as a base for anything more than a good guess to explain why a round shape was given to Ethiopian churches. Perhaps, then, we do best to return to an earlier observation. A number of Ethiopian and foreign scholars have suggested that circular churches are a particular trend of purely local inspiration, drawing from the traditional model of a home and repeating the concentric areas surrounding the fireplace, matching the daily experience of people.70 Mario Di Salvo takes the argument further, including the circular churches in his essay to draw a systematic typology.71 (He counts among the very few authors who have recently addressed the circular churches in their study of the ancient Ethiopian churches.72) We might expect that the differentiation of the complementary sections would develop in as many concentric rings as necessary. Why, then, is the sanctuary (Maqdas) square, not circular as expected? Di Salvo feels that integrating both circle and square within one same physical structure represents an unnecessary technical complication – entailing, for example, the introduction of a drum above the cubic sanctuary – unless the integration was specifically desired. The explanation would lie in symbolism: the sanctuary itself would have remained square for the sake of the imago mundi carried in the collective unconscious by the encounter of the circle (the infinite, the Divine) with the square (the finite, or created). M.-L. Derat, ‘Däbrä Mǝtma’, EAe, II, 34–5. E. Hammerschmidt, among others, observes this possibility while considering the influence of the mausolea of Rome and the East, in Äthiopien. Christliches Reich zwischen Gestern und Morgen, Wiesbaden, 1967, 92; Di Salvo, Churches of Ethiopia [n. 8 above], 76–7. I am not considering here the hypothesis according to which ‘hall-churches’ would originally have been covered with a conical thatched roof so as to hide them from the Muslim troops of Grañ. 71 Di Salvo, Churches of Ethiopia, 76–95; correspondence with Mario Di Salvo, 27 May 2015. 72 It was not the topic of D. W. Phillipson, who nonetheless devotes a few paragraphs to the round churches in his Ancient Churches of Ethiopia: Fourth–Fourteenth Centuries, New Haven, 2009, 25–6, where he states that ‘the oldest surviving examples appear to date from the fifteenth century’. Unfortunately, none of these examples are named. 69 70

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The thesis is interesting, but hard to establish. It has so far proved impossible to document; and such symbolism is not clearly related to the actual circumstances under which – and thanks to which – such a form appeared. Other arguments remain more precise and more closely related to Ethiopia’s history. The circular churches are found south of the area where Christianity began in Ethiopia; we are likely then to see a correlation between their round shape and the traditional way of building in those southern areas. We have encountered the square sanctuary with its particular elements: the dome, the altar with baldachin, the marking of the east, the full wall and its locking doors, the curtains, and the fixed screen derived from the curtain once hanging after the altar’s baldachin. These are all elements which are required by the particular ecclesiastical norms regarding what the sanctuary of a church belonging to the Coptic Church tradition should include. They must not be ignored, even though they may undergo an amount of – more universally symbolic – adaptation in their historical development. To invoke universal symbolism is not yet to acknowledge this particularity. We are probably in the presence of a particular historical juxtaposition: a ‘southern’ traditional expertise in round-house construction has been united with a square structure, organized according to ecclesiastical norms of liturgy that have their own separate history and reflect the earlier arrangement of a basilica’s eastern end. The adoption of a circular plan in the time frame indicated by Castanhoso would have greatly facilitated the rebuilding urgently needed in the wake of the devastations caused by the Muslim gˇihad of the sixteenth century.73 This then leaves us with one vital and ecclesiastical point to be explained: what would authorize the novelty of a central sanctuary and altar, when ecclesiastical tradition demands that they be at the east end of the building?

THE SANDS OF SUDAN: A RIDDLE SOLVED? The sanctuary placed right in the middle of the church is fundamental to our puzzle. What encouraged and authorized this setting? The Holy Sepulchre may have had some influence: its sanctuary is the orthogonal aedicule in its centre. But a more promising clue is found in one older Ethiopian church which drew inspiration from a quite different direction: the thirteenth-century cruciform church of Bēta Giyorgis at Lālibalā [Colour Pl. XXIXc].74 In an earlier study I referred to this renowned This idea would be shared by Aynachew and Derat. Claude Lepage adds to Bēta Giyorgis the much earlier church of Zāramā, in ‘L’Église de Zaréma (Ethiopie) découverte en Mai 1973 et son apport à l’histoire de l’architecture éthiopienne’, Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, Comptes-rendus de 1973, Paris, 1974, 446 ff. Lepage does not, however, promote this view in his more recent work, C. Lepage and J. Mercier, Art éthiopien: les églises historiques du Tigray – Ethiopian Art: The Ancient Churches of Tigray, Paris, 2005, 64. 73

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rock-hewn church, following Jean Doresse’s views on the relationship that obtained between it and the now submerged Nubian church of the Archangels at Tāmit.75 In fact, several features of the monolithic churches of Lālibalā do point to Nubia as being their likely source of inspiration.76 In the specific case of cruciform Bēta Giyorgis, its sanctuary is found in the eastern branch of the cross, not in its centre. A fully centralized plan was not yet to be realized in Ethiopia. A precedent, however, was available: not at Tāmit, but (far more appropriately) the so-called ‘Cruciform Church’ of Dongola, the capital of the Nubian kingdom of Makuria.77 Even covered with sands, the ruins of this church reveal an imposing building going back to the ninth century [Fig. 14.4]. It has been identified with the church of Sus or Usus (i.e. Jesus) which Mamluk Baibars’ troops destroyed in 1275, shortly after the demise of the Zāgwē dynasty at the hands of Yekunno Amlāk in 1270. The Baibars looted in particular a golden cross estimated at 4,640.50 dinars.78 The central part of the Cruciform Church is a 14m x 14m domed square, with an inner square space marked by four columns 6.6m tall and surrounding a structure covered with a stone ciborium. A two-column portico forming a trifolium opens in the middle of each side, from which the arms of the cross radiate towards the four corners, ending in porches on the north, south and west. On the east, the arm was longer and its easternmost segment was separated from the rest by a wall pierced with a doorway. A synthronon was lying at the foot of its trifolium, with side chancels forbidding the laity from going farther east. Eastwards, beyond a door, a red brick table was leaning against the far east wall; opposite to it, a low elongated structure in the shape of a Latin cross was found on the pavement.79 75 E. Fritsch, ‘The Churches of Lalibäla (Ethiopia): Witnesses of Liturgical Changes’ [Proceedings of the First SOL (Society for Oriental Liturgy) Congress, Eichstätt 2006], Bollettino della Badia Greca di Grottaferrata 5, Rome, 2008, 69–112. 76 I have initiated a discussion of this matter in ‘Liturgy and Architectonics in Lālibalā Monolithic Churches: Accounting for a Mismatch’, a paper delivered at the 18th Conference of Ethiopian Studies, Dire Dawa (Ethiopia), 2012 (no proceedings). The topic is under further study. There is a remote possibility that some features I call Nubian might pastiche ancient Aksumite precedents rather than contemporaneous Nubian monuments, which has not been documented so far archaeologically (see Lepage, ‘L’église de Zaréma’ [n. 74 above], 450; D. Buxton, ‘The Christian Antiquities of Northern Ethiopia’, Archaeologia 92 (1947), 1–42 [29–30]). The socle à gradins does not prove an Aksumite origin any more than the imitations of beams jutting out of certain doorways or windows at Lālibalā; it would rather point to a stylistic, as opposed to genetic or ‘real’, imitation intending to demonstrate an ideological relationship with the ancient capital, source of legitimacy and inspiring continuing identity. 77 Today’s Old Dongola. 78 Al-Malik az-Zâhir Rukn ad-Dîn Baybars al-Bunduqdari, better known under the name of Baybars, a Bahrite Mamluk sultan of Egypt (r. 1260–77). See J. Cuoq, Islamisation de la Nubie chrétienne. VII e – XVI e siècles [Bibliothèque d’études islamiques 9], Paris, 1986, 75 and sources. 79 See W. Godlewski, ‘The Cruciform Church Site in Old Dongola: Sequence of Buildings from the 6th to 18th Century’, Nubica 1–2 (1990), 511–34; W. Godlewski, ‘The Role of Dongolese Milieu in the Nubian Church Architecture’, in M. Krause and S. Schaten

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Professor Godlewski had thought that the table he discovered in the extremity of the building’s eastern arm was the altar.80 He agreed in conversation, however, that at this period the prothesis was still performed in its pastophorion.81 The very existence of the prothesis room points to a lockable place. That such a room would also include the access to an important tomb is not unexpected. It would hardly have made sense to have the altar in such a narrow place isolated from the assembly, beyond

(eds.), Themelia: spätantike und koptologische Studien [FS Peter Grossmann: Sprachen und Kulturen des christlichen Orients 3], Wiesbaden, 1998, 127–35. First-hand information on Nubia was obtained during the mission organised by the Centre français des études éthiopiennes (CFEE, Addis Ababa) in cooperation with the corresponding centre in Sudan (SFDAS, Khartoum) in February 2011. Other participants were Ewa BalickaWitakowska, Claire Bosc-Tiessé, Marie-Laure Derat, Jan Retsö and Robin Seignobos. Éloi Ficquet, director of the CFEE at the time, Claude Rilly, director of the SFDAS, and Włodzimierz Godlewski have all generously welcomed us and we would like to express our gratitude for their support. I am in particular indebted to Prof. Włodzimierz Godlewski, who kindly guided the group on site and discussed with us the various issues reflected here. 80 Almost as at Bēta Giyorgis at Lālibalā, for at Lālibalā there were no synthronon, chancels, tomb, doors, central pillars and dome. In particular there was no need any more for a pastophorion. 81 Godlewski, ‘Dongolese Milieu in the Nubian Church Architecture’ [n. 79 above], 132.

FIG. 14.4.  RUINS OF (OLD) DONGOLA CRUCIFORM CHURCH

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an off-centered door and chancels, while the seats of the clergy would have been turned westwards towards the centre of the large edifice instead of looking towards the altar. The evidence, then, leads us to understand the church in a way which differs significantly from the interpretations given so far.82 The easternmost arm actually is the (unique) pastophorion where the prothesis was performed and where the access to the tomb is found. That room is accessed from the church through chancels fixed in the sides of the eastern trifolium, on either side of the synthronon which occupies the centre. The seats of the bishop and presbyters are as usual turned west, looking towards the centre of the whole structure. There the altar will have been placed, surmounted by a ciborium, inside its enclosed sanctuary shaped by four columns. The celebrant was normally standing west of the altar, facing eastwards.83 That the ciborium may have been the place where the golden cross stolen by the Baibars was hanging makes no structural difference. It (or another) would have been a normal accessory to the sanctuary and altar, its price being congruent with the likely royal status of this grand church [Fig. 14.5]. This type of free-crossed structure is a martyrium, familiar in Palestine, Syria and Asia Minor, where they are all earlier than the church in Old Dongola.84 It points to the high importance for the local community of the two persons buried in the crypt of this Nubian cathedral. And the Holy Sepulchre itself is a martyrium, although with good reason it was not made according to what became standard form: the tomb in its emptiness witnesses to Christ’s resurrection. The Cruciform Church has been an inspiration for many Nubian churches,85 and it is not surprising that its influence was felt in Ethiopia when so many travelers of every condition were (whatever the hardships) using the Nile valley as a thoroughfare. In fact, it is clear that borrowings 82 Cf. Godlewski, ‘The Cruciform Church’ [n. 79 above], 530–1; W. Y. Adams, The Churches of Nobadia, II [BAR International Series, Sudan Archaeological Research Society 17], Oxford, 2009, 409. 83 A last detail: unless the arrangements of chancels made it otherwise, the synthronon/ presbyterium would have been separated from the sanctuary, which it is impossible to verify. 84 Godlewski, ‘The Cruciform Church’ [n. 79 above], 531. This is not to put too great a weight on the notion of martyrium. It seems not to have taken root in Ethiopia; it is associated by definition with particular forms of burial which are not found in Ethiopia, at any rate in relation to the circular churches. Moreover, they do not alone explain the systematic transformation of the churches into rotundas, nor why such a model would have suddenly become the general pattern. It is noteworthy that the twin basilicas and tombs found in Aksum as the tombs of Kālēb and Gabra Masqal are related to martyria, although they do not seem to have the system of confessio and are not cruciform in ground-plan. But neither were the churches which preceded the Cruciform Church and were built above the very same tomb, enshrining the very same relics. To be cruciform is one characteristic form of architecture for a martyrium, but is not of the essence of the martyrium. 85 Godlewski, ‘Dongolese Milieu in the Nubian Church Architecture’ [n. 79 above], 132.

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from Nubia did take place at a significant rate. Examples of this would be the passage from the prothesis door directly to the altar at Gāzēn (East Tigray, c. eighth century?), the west rooms at Mikā’ēl Ambā (East Tigray, 1150), and the later monolithic churches at Lālibalā. They feature in particular the porches of Bēta Māryām (turn of the thirteenth century), the cruciform structure of Bēta Giyorgis (thirteenth century), the ambo platforms at Lālibalā (end of the twelfth into the thirteenth centuries) and surroundings – especially at Gannata Māryām (thirteenth century), also distinguished by its synthronon, at Yemrehanna Krestos (c. mid thirteenth century), Emmakinā Madhanē ‘ālam (end thirteenth century) ˘ – then the murals of Māryām Qorqor (1260–1320). In such context, of course, the prestigious cruciform cathedral of Sus at Old Dongola was authorizing by its mere existence the imitation of its central square sanctuary.86 This cathedral was standing around the time of Lālibālā 86 Literature on the Ethio-Nubian connections is scarce, e.g. J. Doresse, ‘Nouvelles recherches sur les relations entre l’Égypte copte et l’Éthiopie: XIIe–XIIIe siècles.

FIG. 14.5.  (OLD) DONGOLA CRUCIFORM CHURCH

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(Baibars destroyed the cathedral in 1275); but Christian Nubia was almost a thing of the past by the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, when we can place the appearance of the round churches. In order to see its influence on the round churches, we will need to invoke those earlier appropriations at Lālibalā and elsewhere; no written sources yet bridge the gap between the central sanctuaries at Old Dongola and the later rotundas.

CONCLUSION We are ready to draw the threads together. The round churches are likely to have emerged in the first third of the sixteenth century. They are characterized by their central sanctuary. They systematically integrate Egyptian developments, which simultaneously make of the now lockable sanctuary a pastophorion in which the valuable paraphernalia required for the liturgy can be kept safe. The three sectors dividing the space are an almost universal feature which does not point specifically to the Jerusalem Temple. The shape of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre may have been the inspiration, but this is undocumented and apparently out of the mind of visitors such as Alvares and the Ethiopian scholars, as witnessed in the last three centuries or so and until today. A visit to Nubia afforded the opportunity to reassess the liturgical architectonics in the Cruciform Church at (Old) Dongola, a ninth-century martyrium of great importance at the gates of Ethiopia, which may have been instrumental in ushering the central sanctuary, several centuries later, into Ethiopian round churches. Round buildings may have been the normal form for all buildings in peripheral areas; we would then need no recourse to a specific time frame or initiative from authorities. Round churches would have been easier for carpenters to build when it

Communication’, Comptes-rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, July– October 1970 [1971]), 557–66; J. Doresse, Review of ‘Tamīt (1964), Missione archaeologica in Egitto dell’Università di Roma’, Revue d’Égyptologie 21 (1969), 183–5; H. de Contenson, ‘Les fouilles à Haoulti-Melazo en 1958’, Annales d’Ethiopie 4 (1961), 39–60 ; H. de Contenson, ‘Relations entre la Nubie chrétienne et l’Ethiopie axoumite’, Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference of Ethiopia Studies, Addis Ababa, 1969, I, 17–18; M. MartensCzarnecka, ‘Certain Common Aspects of Ethiopian and Nubian Painting’, Nubica et Aethiopica, IV–V (1999), 163–76, fig. 15; B. Żurawski, ‘Nubia and Ethiopia in the Christian Period: Some Affinities’, in P. Henze (ed.), Aspects of Ethiopian Art from Ancient Axum to the 20th Century [Proceedings of the Second International Conference on the History of Ethiopian Art, September 1990, Nieborów, Poland], London, 1993, 33–41. The overall context needs to be put together, from archaeology (e.g. A. Manzo, ‘Between Nile Valley, Red Sea and Highlands: Remarks on the Archaeology of the Tigre Area’, in G. Lusini (ed.), History and Language of the Tigre-Speaking Peoples [Proceedings of the International Workshop, Naples, 7–8 February 2008, Università degli studi di Napoli ‘l’Orientale’, Dipartimento di studi e richerche su Africa e paesi arabi, Studi Africanistici, Serie Etiopica 8], Naples, 2010, 15–29), and from better known passages of the History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria, etc.

THE ORIGINS AND MEANINGS OF THE ETHIOPIAN CIRCULAR CHURCH

was necessary to replace the many churches destroyed by the sixteenthcentury gˇihad. Whatever the case may be, the requirements of the Alexandrian liturgical tradition could still be satisfied, in an oriented sanctuary surmounted by a cupola, in a form compatible with the means available at the time in southern Ethiopia. The last word on the development of these round churches has certainly not been spoken. We can still hope for yet another discovery of a text, a building or both. An understanding of the phenomenon, meanwhile, real if incomplete, seems now to be within our reach.

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PART V

ROUND CHURCHES IN THE WEST

INTRODUCTION

At that time a pilgrim from Jerusalem arrived, and offered to the man of God [Godric of Finchale] a portion of various relics from those most sacred places. The servant of God accepted the presents gratefully, and with a wonderful and emotional kissing he put them over and again to his mouth; and so, while we sat there, in a deep, projected voice and clear tone he sang a verse which he repeated over and again, six times, with an iteration of the same chant. This was the verse: Jerusalem, which is built as a city that is compact together with itself: For thither go up the tribes, the tribes of the Lord, And the testimony of Israel, to confess the name of the Lord. [Ps. 122.3–4] He sang this in the same order and chant in which it had up until then been customarily sung as the [post?] communion prayer in that church … And after it he added, ‘This city, about which I have just sung, is a type [typus] of heavenly blessedness, for which I have always been panting with a heaving chest. For although these words seem unknown to me, nonetheless I know – with Christ my teacher – what they sing of and what they figuratively [figurate] signify; and the Spirit which has unlocked such things to me will be able in his mercy to lead all of us whom he chooses to the joys of the heavens above which are figured [figurata] in these words!’1 Reginald of Durham, Life and Miracles of St Godric of Finchale (1065–1170)

1 Reginald of Durham, Libellus de Vita et Miraculis S. Godrici, Heremitae de Finchale, 158 (284), ed. J. Stevenson, London, 1847, 301.

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We turn in this section to round churches in northern Europe, and in particular to England. It is time to look afresh at the question with which this book began: to ask both what our predecessors saw and what they saw in what they saw. We will describe the buildings and their settings; and will then seek to do some justice to these churches’ place in the priorities of their patrons and in the devotion, thought and imagination of those who spent time in them. The hermit Godric of Finchale was not typical. He had himself been to Jerusalem more than once; the mixture of memory, longing and reliance on the scripture of liturgy was, we may think, more intense in Godric than in most of his contemporaries. But he and his beneficent pilgrim remind us of the movement of people, relics, sanctity and prayer. First, then, Robin Griffith-Jones looks at one set of drawings and two buildings: Arculf ’s drawing of the Sepulchre transmitted by Adomnán and Bede; Charlemagne’s chapel at Aachen; and Theodulf ’s chapel at Germignydes-Prés. Each is a puzzle. Griffith-Jones’ chapter invites us to enrich the influences that we acknowledge on the drawings and on Aachen; and to find at Germigny, decorated in direct response to the iconodules’ Nicaea II, an intense engagement not with the cherubim who are shown in the mosaic but with the Christ who so startlingly is not. Eric Fernie then reassesses the evidence commonly adduced to argue for a debt to the Holy Sepulchre in a church’s function, form or dimensions. Alan Borg next asks a helpfully practical question: how was knowledge of the Sepulchre spread through Europe? He draws attention to literary sources, and in particular to the Arculf / Adomnán drawings. Catherine Hundley surveys the English round churches built during the crusaders’ rule over Jerusalem; she provides a welcome gazetteer. These churches functioned variously as military order chapels, parish churches, private oratoria and pilgrimage destinations. She emphasises their topography: even the rural rotundas were prominently placed. She then concentrates on the Templars’ churches at the New Temple in London, at Bristol and at Dover. An account by Richardson in 1845, previously unnoticed, records in the foundations of the New Temple’s rotunda at least one burial and perhaps three that must have taken place while the church was under construction. We will naturally ask if the significance of the Round for burials – in imitation of Christ’s own sepulchre – was, then, clear from the outset. Hundley evokes in conclusion the role of such churches for those in their neighbourhood who never went to Jerusalem. Michael Gervers takes up the theme, and asks what if anything was distinctive in their local social and economic functions. The Hospitallers’ and Templars’ churches in London attracted some distinguished burials; and the houses were used for royal diplomacy and finance. But there is as well, once again, a steadier hum of local and quotidian use in the business of the Orders themselves, their tenants, clients and neighbours. Nicole Hamonic then

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takes us onto a larger stage. Twenty-one visitation indulgences issued in support of the Old and New Temple in London, around 1145 to 1275, are recorded in BL Cotton MS Nero E VI, ff. 24r–26r. Hamonic gives them the attention that they have always deserved and rarely had. She traces the links between the Temple and the English bishops who issued various of the indulgences; between the indulgences and the Templars’ place in the national and papal politics of those decades; and in particular between the Marshals, lords of Leinster from 1189, and the Irish bishops who issued nine of the indulgences from 1206. Hamonic provides as an Appendix the first publication of the indulgences’ texts. Sebastian Salvadó brings us to liturgy and to a startling evocation of the Orders’ likely processions within their western rotundas. All Hospitaller commanderies adhered to the rites of the Sepulchre; the Templars’ practice appears to have varied between East and West. Salvadó reveals the nice and telling distinctions in the processions and their stations round the Sepulchre, inside and out, over the course of the year; and the ever greater emphasis on the aedicule during Holy Week. The liturgy was attuned, subtly but dramatically, to the architecture. Salvadó invites us to ask how the Hospitallers – and perhaps the Templars – might have recreated such processions in the West, and what dismountable sepulchres or aedicules will have been their necessary props. Griffith-Jones, concluding this last section of the book, also leaves us with a question rather than an answer. He sounds some of the theological harmonies implicit in a Marian rotunda built in imitation of the circular Sepulchre by an Order headquartered in Jerusalem opposite the octagonal ‘Temple of the Lord’, the Dome of the Rock. From the virginal womb of Mary to the new tomb, both still sealed when Jesus left them (and the tomb then opened only to disclose its emptiness): theologians and preachers had deployed the pairing for centuries. Griffith-Jones asks who will have heard, in the shape of the Temple Church and its allusions, how rich a symphony of thought and feeling.

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ne set of drawings and two buildings from northern Europe, c. 680 to 850, raise an insistent question: what influenced the form of an imitation beyond the architecture and decoration of its prototype? This needs to be refined: in one vital case we are speaking of a supposed prototype. Charlemagne’s chapel at Aachen was linked with Solomon’s Temple by the panegyrists of his court, and has been linked with both the Temple and the Holy Sepulchre in one strand of modern scholarship. But any such link is uncertain. The uncertainty adds to Aachen’s value for our own enquiry. What architectural, political or theological features, c. 800, might have marked the chapel out, for whom, as being a copy or evocation of Jerusalem’s buildings at all?

ARCULF, IONA AND THE HOLY PLACES In the winter of 679 to 680 Arculf, a bishop from Gaul, was in Jerusalem. On his homeward journey he was cast onto the west coast of Britain by a storm.1 He gave an account of his travels to Adomnán, abbot of Iona, who wrote down his visitor’s account and made a copy of Arculf ’s 1 According to Bede, HE 5.15, Arculf, episcopus Galliarum, was on his way home from the Mediterranean; vi tempestatis in occidentalia Britanniae litora delatus est. Historians have long wondered whether Arculf could have been blown as far off course as this seems to suggest.

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own drawings of four sites: in Book 1 the Holy Sepulchre, the basilica on Mount Sion and the Imbomon or Church of the Ascension; and in Book 2 Jacob’s Well in Samaria. Adomnán writes that he questioned Arculf especially about the Sepulchre and the church built over it, ‘and Arculf drew its shape for me on a wax tablet’. Adomnán’s account of the Holy Places, De Locis Sanctis (hereafter DLS), survives in over twenty manuscripts. (Bede embedded in his History an abridgement of Adomnán’s account of the places of Christ’s own life, and reworked DLS into his own work of the same name.) At least nine known manuscripts preserve Adomnán’s plans. In the rotunda, wrote Adomnán, ‘three walls rise from the foundations, and the distance between one wall and the next is about the width of a street’ (DLS 1.2.3). We reproduce the plan in the Vienna MS [Colour Pl. XXXII].2 The drawings’ division of space, as defined by the rings of colours and lines, is not obvious. Heitz read them as follows.3 There was a ring of colonnettes around the aedicule; this is the second ring. Between the third and fourth rings is the gallery, for catechumens and women. The fourth ring is the outer wall. The fifth marks the ambulacrum, for processions outside the rotunda. This does not yet do justice to any possible symbolism in the drawings.4 The Valenciennes Apocalypse, c. 800 to 825, shows ‘sancta Jerusalem nova’ as a circle of twelve concentric rings of colour, with three gates at each cardinal point and the lamb in the centre. The gates create a cross; they also radiate from the lamb as beams from the sun.5 Above the lamb in the central circle is inscribed: ‘and the city had no need of sun or moon, for 2 Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 458, f. 4v. This may have been corrected from first-hand knowledge of Jerusalem, Wilkinson, Pilgrims, 379–83: the open east ends of the northern and southern recesses on the north and south relate closely to the rotunda itself; the inscriptions confirm that the recesses are round, by contrast with the square recesses shown on other versions. For a list of the principal manuscripts of Adomnán and of Bede that include the drawing, Wilkinson, Pilgrims, 193. Oxford, Bodl. MS Laud Misc. 241, f. 85r contains one of the latest known versions, late twelfth century, in an English MS of Gregory the Great’s Homiliae in Evangelia, L. Donkin and H. Vorholt (eds), Imagining Jerusalem in the Medieval West, Oxford, 2012, colour pl. 1, 10–12; here Fig. 17.3, p. 350 below. On the dissemination of Adomnán, T. O’Loughlin, ‘The Diffusion of Adomnán’s De Locis Sanctis in the Medieval Period’, Ériu 51 (2000), 93–106; and, among Bede’s writings, (i) of DLS, M. D. W. Laistner and H. H. King, A Hand-List of Bede Manuscripts, New York, 1943, 83–6 (47 manuscripts, 11 now in England), and (ii) of his History, ibid., 94–113 (more than 160 manuscripts ‘showing the wide appeal of Bede’s masterpiece all over Europe from the 9th to the early 16th century’); of the manuscripts that include only extracts, six include just History 5.16–17, on the Holy Places (109). 3 C. Heitz, Recherches sur les rapports entre architecture et liturgie à l’époque carolingienne, Paris, 1963, 113–17, 133–7. 4 Valenciennes MS 99, f. 38r; cf. B. Kühnel, From the Earthly to the Heavenly Jerusalem, Rome, etc, 1987, 128–31, fig. 78; idem, ‘Geography and Geometry of Jerusalem’, in N. Rosovsky (ed.), City of the Great King, Cambridge, Mass., 1966, 288–322. 5 An apocalypse now in Paris, copied from the Valenciennes MS or from a common prototype, shows a similar Jerusalem, with the river of life flowing from the Lamb’s mouth, BNF Nouv. Acq. Lat. 1132, f. 33r, Heitz, Recherches, pls XXXIVB, XXXV.

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the glory [claritas] of God illumined it, and its lamp was the lamb’ (Rev. 21.3). Revelation’s New Jerusalem, however, with twelve foundations and twelve gates, is square (Rev. 21.16). Heitz argued that the Valenciennes Apocalypse showed it as round under the influence of the Holy Sepulchre. Adomnán’s drawing of the Holy Sepulchre stands in the same tradition: the rotunda is shown as the New Jerusalem.6 The one building stands for the whole city; and in doing so it stands for the whole perfected order of creation, prefigured in the plan’s perfect circles, which the New Jerusalem represents [Colour Pl. XXXIIIa]. The circles surrounding the tomb signify the whole circle of the cosmos redeemed by the Christ who rose from that tomb [Colour Pl. XXXIIIb]. Recent scholarship has recognised the more local background to Adomnán’s plans. Adomnán seems to have thought of the complex as oriented to the east.7 The basilica is made to resemble Irish churches of its own time. The rectangular chapels are shown as independent unicameral units within the complex; the chapels of Golgotha and of the chalice are each shown with one western door, and proportions of approximately 1:1.5. The basilica does not dwarf the other units as it did in Jerusalem, but stands to them as the principal church as (for example) the principal church at Clonmacnoise stands to its subsidiary churches [Fig. 15.1]. As the basilica shows an Insular layout, so does the rotunda. Its rings recall the concentric enclosure of sacred space required in the earlyeighth-century Collectio Canonum Hibernensis, one of whose compilers was Cú Chuimne of Iona: there should be two or three termini around a holy place, and access to the inner and increasingly sacred areas should be restricted to those who are worthy. The Collectio most comprehensively sets out to model holy sites on Jerusalem. ‘Based on textual evidence alone, one would conclude that if ever this idea is given monumental expression it was on Iona in the eighth century.’8 For Adomnán, Jerusalem’s aedicule is the most sacred place of all. Adomnán refers to the tomb as Christ’s locus resurrectionis; the same term was used of saints’ graves that became the defining characteristic and eventually the focus of ecclesiastical centres. Others would benefit from the power of the saint’s presence. The first Latin Life of Ciarán, who was the son of a carpenter and died at the age of thirty-three, has him say when he arrives at Clonmacnoise: ‘Here will I live; for many souls shall go forth in this place to the kingdom of God, and in this place 6 For the text, D. Meehan, Adomnán’s De Locis Sanctis, Dublin, 1983. The Salzburg MS of De Locis Sanctis was already there by the ninth century. ‘Otoltus’ is a name known in the century in the diocese of Salzburg; the Valenciennes Apocalypse is signed ‘Otoltus indignus presbyter’ (Meehan, 30). 7 The details in this and the next paragraph are drawn from T. Ó’Carragáin, Churches in Early Medieval Ireland, New Haven, 2010, 35, 59, 72–5. 8 Ó’Carragáin, Churches, 78. The circles recall the ring-forts of the time, Fig. 15.2.

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FIG. 15.1. CLONMACNOISE, CO. OFFALY, IRELAND

FIG. 15.2.  RING FORTS, RATHBARNA, CO. ROSCOMMON, IRELAND

ROBIN GRIFFITH-JONES

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shall be my resurrection.’ His Middle Irish Life has him rise from Temple Ciarán at Clonmacnoise after three days, ‘as Christ rose after three days from the grave in Jerusalem’. Clonmacnoise held in its present evocation of Jerusalem the implied promise of the Jerusalem to come. Adomnán writes of the aedicule as a tugurium, a word he used (with its diminutive tuguriolum) of Columba’s hut. 9 Jerusalem’s walls in the Valenciennes Apocalypse stretch upwards. But on the page their rings expand outwards too. O’Loughlin relates Adomnán’s drawings to the sacred geography that informed Adomnán’s own narrative in De Locis Sanctis: Book 1 describes Jerusalem; Book 2, the surrounding areas that are mentioned in scripture; Book 3, the realms stretching out to the end of the earth.10 This conforms to Adomnán’s conception of the physical world, with Jerusalem at its centre and Iona set in the outer ocean; but the schema’s significance lay in the concentric rings of the gospel’s expansion from Jerusalem outwards through the whole world (Luke 24.47, Acts 1.8). The drawing of the rotunda, then, was a plan of the place of the Church and of Jerusalem in God’s plan: the gospel radiates outwards until it reaches even Iona. One catalogue of the library at Bobbio (founded by the Irish St Columban) lists an immense mappa mundi in the Irish tradition with text in a pre-Carolingian script. Dalché has connected it with the map from which two twelfth-century maps, now in the British Library, were copied [Colour Pl. XXXIIIc].11 On the sheet showing the Holy Land, Jerusalem is already a double circle with multiple gates, tightly composed by contrast with the rest of the map’s freehand cartography. Adomnán’s Holy Sepulchre resembled, to its first viewers, a familiar complex of Insular churches. It signified the presence and so the sanctity 9 R. A. S. Macalister (ed.), The Latin and Irish Lives of Ciarán, London, 1921, paras 1, 41 (Latin); 97 (Irish). Tugurium: Wilkinson, Pilgrims 171; the word could be used too of an artefact as grand as the superstructure over the mausoleum of St Denis, marmoreum miro opere de auro et gemmis, Vita Eligii 1.32 (MGH Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum, 4.688–9). 10 T. O’Loughlin in a series of works: ‘Perceiving Palestine in Early Christian Ireland: Martyrium, Exegetical Key, Relic and Liturgical Space’, Ériu 54 (2004), 125–37; ‘The View from Iona: Adomnán’s Mental Maps’, Peritia 10 (1996), 98–122; Adomnán and the Holy Places: The Perceptions of an Insular Monk on the Locations of the Biblical Drama, London, 2007, here 157; ‘The De Locis Sanctis as a Liturgical Text’, in J. M. Wooding et al. (eds), Adomnán of Iona: Theologian, Lawmaker, Peacemaker, Dublin, 2010, 181–93; ‘Adomnán’s Jerusalem Plans in the Context of his Imagining “the Most Famous City”’, in Donkin and Vorholt (eds), Imagining Jerusalem [n. 2 above], 15–40. The argument is critically reassessed by R. G. Hoyland and S. Waidler, ‘Adomnán’s De Locis Sanctis and the Seventh-Century Near East’, EHR 129 (2014), 787–807. I am grateful to Peter Yeoman for his account of this revisionist reading of Adomnán. 11 Descriptio totius orbis secundum scoticam traditionem, quo alio nomine appellatur mapa mondi et continetur in quadam carta maxime magnitudinis et grossitudinis in litera longobarda (Naples, Biblioteca Nazionale IV.D.21), P. G. Dalché, ‘Eucher de Lyon, Iona, Bobbio: le destin d’une mappa mundi de l’antiquité tardive’, Viator [multilingual] 41 (2010), 1–22 [11–14]. The maps: BL Add. MS 10049, f. 64r (Asia Minor) and f. 64v (Palestine).

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of Jerusalem on Iona. The gospel’s outward movement in the circles that expand from the tomb was realised in the buildings on Iona that themselves recalled the tomb; and conversely, to occupy such buildings at the edge of the outer ocean was to be in Jerusalem, at the centre of the world. Adomnán was writing to inform and enrich the biblical contemplation and the liturgy of Iona’s own monks. The monks were to fulfil Adomnán’s vision of a perfect monastery, modelled on Jerusalem and created on Iona in their own present ‘liturgical landscape’. At this point the role of Arculf comes under fresh scrutiny: there is no other record of him; his route is implausible. The waxed tablet is a familiar image for the impressions of memory on the mind; Arculf ’s tablet and its impression become an image for the memory that is required of Adomnán’s own readers and aided by his plans. The Irish church had knowledge of the Sepulchre independent of Adomnán.12 It is now a nice question for some historians, whether Adomnán was indebted for his information to any such Arculf at all.

AACHEN: IUXTA SAPIENTISSIMI SALOMONIS EXEMPLUM 13 The student of architectural influence confronts, in Charlemagne’s chapel at Aachen, an embarrassment of riches [Colour Pl. XXXIV]. So many earlier churches jostle for our attention. The clearest influence is from San Vitale in Ravenna. The full height of San Vitale’s elevation has been echoed in Aachen’s upper two storeys; San Vitale’s ‘billowing exedrae’ (in Krautheimer’s memorable phrase) have been replaced in Aachen by the octagon’s severe lines. But there are clearly other debts to be acknowledged: in Rome, to the Pantheon (S. Maria Rotonda); in Constantinople, to H. Sergios and Bacchos or the Chrysoklinos;14 or in Jerusalem, to the Holy Sepulchre or the Dome of the Rock. A recent study has finessed the argument: Judith Ley suggests that the chapel’s lower level is indebted chiefly to the Holy Sepulchre, and its upper to S. Vitale; and that there

12 There was knowledge of the Sepulchre independently of DLS: the scallop motif at Illaunloughan and Killoluaig refers to the scallop on the aedicule, which is not mentioned by Adomnán, Ó’Carragáin, Churches [n. 7 above], 75; the columns and arches framing the canon tables in the Book of Kells, probably produced on Iona, are likely to be based on the colonnade of the Holy Sepulchre’s rotunda, C. Neuman de Vegvar, ‘Remembering Jerusalem: Architecture and Meaning in Insular Canon Table Arcades’, in R. Moss (ed.), Making and Meaning in Insular Art, Dublin, 2007, 242–56. 13 Notker, Gesta Caroli 1.27 (MGH Scriptores 2, 744). 14 The fullest survey: G. Bandmann, ‘Die Vorbilder der Aachener Pfalzkapelle’, in W. Braunfels and H. Schnitzler (eds), Karolingische Kunst (Karl der Grosse. Lebenswerk und Nachleben 3), Dusseldorf, 1965, 424–62. Now C. B. McClendon, The Origins of Medieval Architecture, New Haven and London, 2005, 123. H. Fichtenau, ‘Byzanz und die Pfalz zu Aachen’, Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung 59 (1951), 1–54 [1–24], for Charlemagne’s links, competition and disputes with Constantinople; for more strictly architectural debts, Fichtenau turns to S. Vitale, 19.

XIX.  TOPOGRAPHY OF ECHMIADZIN, COMPARED TO JERUSALEM

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XX. (A) HOMILIES OF JAMES KOKKINOBAPHOS: THE PRAYER OF ZACHARIAS

(B)  HOMILIES OF JAMES KOKKINOBAPHOS: THE RECEPTION OF MARY BY JOSEPH

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XXI.  HOMILIES OF JAMES KOKKINOBAPHOS: THE ASCENSION

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XXII.  CHURCH OF THE INTERCESSION (POKROV) ON THE NERL, 1165

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XXIII.  CATHEDRAL OF ST DEMETRIUS, VLADIMIR, 1191–97

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XXIV.  ‘ST BASIL’S’ WITH THE KREMLIN

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XXV.  ‘ST BASIL’S’: INTERIOR

XXVI.  MODEL OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE, SEVENTEENTH OR EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

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XXVII.  CRUCIFIXION WITH GUARDIAN ANGEL AND SELECTED SAINTS, END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, PALEKH

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XXVIII.  THE EASTERN COMPLEX OF ROCK-HEWN CHURCHES AT ROHA (LALIBELA), PHOTOGRAPHED FROM THE AIR BEFORE THE RECENT ERECTION OF PROTECTIVE COVERS. SEEN FROM THE SOUTH, THE DEEP RECTANGULAR PIT OF BETA EMMANUEL IS VISIBLE NEAR THE UPPER RIGHT CORNER. BETA GABRIEL/RAFAEL IS IN THE CENTRAL FOREGROUND OF THIS VIEW, WITH BETA ABBA LIBANOS TO ITS RIGHT. BETA MERKURIOS LIES BETWEEN BETA EMMANUEL AND BETA ABBA LIBANOS. DEEP TRENCHES SURROUND THE COMPLEX ON ITS SOUTH AND EAST SIDES, WITH ANOTHER EXTENDING FROM SOUTH TO NORTH TO THE WEST OF BETA EMMANUEL AND BETA ABBA LIBANOS.

XXIX (OPPOSITE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT) (A) ROHA (LALIBELA): BETA MADHANE ALEM INTERIOR, FROM THE SOUTH-WEST (B) ROHA (LALIBELA): THE ROCK-HEWN CROSS IN THE BED OF THE JORDAN (C) ROHA (LALIBELA): BĒTA GIYORGIS

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XXX.  (A) MAQDAS AND DRUM SUPPORTING CONICAL ROOF, ABUNA BATRA MĀRYĀM CHURCH, LAKE ṬĀNĀ

(B)  SANCTUARY EAST WINDOW SEEN FROM OUTSIDE, ABUNA BATRA MĀRYĀM

(C)  WEST-NORTH-EAST OBLIQUE VIEW SHOWING CENTRAL DOORS TO THE SANCTUARY, FIXED CURTAIN, NORTHERN SERVICE DOOR AND CUPOLA, DABRA WARQ

(D)  COPTIC CIBORIUM AND BARS, DAYR ABU SAYFAYN

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XXXI.  (CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT) (A) CENTRAL DOORS AND CURTAINS TO SANCTUARY, ABUNA BATRA MĀRYĀM ˇ AB) (B) ETHIOPIAN SANCTUARY SCREEN (COPTIC HIG (C)  EAST OF THE SCREEN CLOSING OFF THE COPTIC SANCTUARY AT DAYR ABU SEYFEIN (D)  OBLIQUE VIEW FROM OUTSIDE THE NORTHERN DOOR TO THE CENTRAL DOORS OF THE SANCTUARY, WITH PRESIDENCY CHAIR, DABRA WARQ

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XXXII.  THE HOLY SEPULCHRE, JERUSALEM: THE ARCULF / ADOMNÁN PLAN (MS OF 836–59)

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XXXIII.  (A) THE NEW JERUSALEM, IN THE VALENCIENNES APOCALYPSE, c. 800–25

(B)  THE PLANETS (MS OF c. 800)

(C)  MAP OF THE HOLY LAND, TWELFTH CENTURY, COPIED FROM A PRE-CAROLINGIAN MAPPA MUNDI IN THE IRISH TRADITION

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XXXIV.  THE PALATINE CHAPEL, AACHEN

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XXXV. (A) H. SERGIOS AND BACCHOS, CONSTANTINOPLE

(B) SAN VITALE, RAVENNA

(C) THE CODEX AUREUS OF ST EMMERAM (870): CHARLES THE BALD ENTHRONED OPPOSITE THE WORSHIP OF THE LAMB

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XXXVI.  (A) GERMIGNY-DES-PRÉS: THE ARK OF THE COVENANT SUPPORTED BY CHERUBIM, MOSAIC IN THE SEMI-DOME OF THE EAST APSE

(B) GERMIGNY-DES-PRÉS: ‘ETAT ACTUEL’ AND ‘RESTAURATION’, WATERCOLOURS BY JUSTE LISCH, 1873

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XXXVII.  (A) CHRIST ENTHRONED, SACRAMENTARY OF CHARLES THE BALD, c. 869–70

(B)  THE WOMEN AT THE TOMB, c. 860–70, IVORY COVER OF THE METZ GOSPELS

(C)  HRABANUS MAURUS, SERAPHIM AND CHERUBIM AROUND THE CROSS, c. 810 (MS OF 1459)

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XXXVIII. (A) MAP OF JERUSALEM, c. 1100–10 (ST-BERTIN)

(C) MAP OF JERUSALEM, c. 1190–1200 (THE HAGUE)

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(B) MAP OF JERUSALEM, COPY OF LAMBERT OF ST-OMER’S LOST COPY, c. 1115, OF THE ST-BERTIN MAP (LEIDEN)

(D) MAP OF JERUSALEM, 1200–50 (LONDON)

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XXXIX (A) PENTECOST, THE ST ALBANS PSALTER, c. 1120–45 (B)  SEVEN LIBERAL ARTS AS HANDMAIDENS OF PHILOSOPHY, HERRAD OF HOHENBOURG, HORTUS DELICIARUM, c. 1170 (RECONSTRUCTION)

(C)  VERGER DE SOULAS: MARY ON THE THRONE OF SOLOMON, c. 1270

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(D)  MARIAN WISDOM ENTHRONED, c. 1420

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XL. (A) THE TEMPLE CHURCH, LONDON: THE ROTUNDA (1162), INTERIOR ELEVATION, LOOKING NORTH

(B) THE TEMPLE CHURCH, LONDON: VIEW FROM THE ROTUNDA (1162) INTO THE CHANCEL (1240)

(C) THE TEMPLE CHURCH, LONDON: THE ROTUNDA FROM THE SOUTH

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is an indirect reference in each to the two temples built by Solomon and imagined by Ezekiel.15 Such nuance at Aachen makes it a useful test-case. Which debts were in the minds of Charlemagne, his advisers and his architects? Which of these debts were deployed as allusions, to impress on those who noticed them the theological and imperial standing of the building and its patron? And who in fact, among those who saw the chapel, will have noticed how many of these allusions or have seen how much in them? Notker wrote in the 880s, eight decades after the chapel’s dedication. But he may capture the tone of Charlemagne’s ambitions well, when he describes the emperor’s buildings (edificiis, pl.) at Aachen which were wonderfully constructed ‘after the example of the most wise Solomon, for God or for himself or for all the bishops, abbots, earls and for all the visitors coming from all over the world’. He built ‘on his native soil a basilica more distinguished than the ancient works of the Romans … for whose construction he summoned from all the regions on this side of the Sea the masters and workmen of all the relevant arts’.16 Charlemagne’s debts were to be sacred, imperial and apparent to all; and to outshine Rome’s achievements he used, in his apparently barbarian homeland, the greatest craftsmen of the West. Notker’s Charlemagne is an autonomous, western Solomon. The chapel had a triple function: as palace chapel, collegiate foundation and parish church. Charlemagne established a college of canons with a double task: to pray for the imperial family and for the realm; and to serve the parish.17 The small square eastern end was the sanctuary: the high altar (on the ground floor) was dedicated to Mary, with an altar to Peter to its west. There was probably, from the start, an altar to Christ and the Holy Cross on the gallery. The octagonal nave was the canons’ choir. In the Westwork’s gallery was the throne and font; the rest of the gallery may have been for the laity.18 None of this, however, suggests for Aachen any sepulchral function. As we know from Einhard, Charlemagne had not declared the chapel – or indeed any setting – to be his intended burial 15 J. Ley, ‘Warum ist die Aachener Pfalzkapelle ein Zantralbau? Der neue Salomonische Tempel als Vorbild herrschaftlicher Kirchenstiftung’, in H. Muller, C. M. M. Bayer and M. Kerner (eds), Die Aachener Marienkirche. Aspekte ihrer Archäologie unde frühen Geschichte, Regensburg, 2014, 95–112 [hereafter Marienkirche]. 16 Notker, Gesta Karoli 1.27 (MGH, Scriptores 2, 744). 17 The chapel’s roles have been re-addressed by L. Geis, ‘St Marien als “Pflazkapelle”? Eine alte Frage erneut gestellt’, in Marienkirche [n. 15 above], 209–14 [211–12]. The chapel as Pfarrkirche and as Stiftskirche is considered by H. Müller and C. Bayer in the same volume. Notker describes the Persian envoys going up to the solarium and looking down on clerum vel exercitum in amazed delight, Gesta Karoli 2.8; partial text and commentary in Marienkirche, ‘Schriftquellen’, 134 (Quellen 14); it is not clear to which building Notker is referring. 18 For the (ordinary) laity’s presence in the gallery, E. Rice, Music and Ritual in Charlemagne’s Marienkirche in Aachen, Kassel, 2009, 140–9. The first mention of the altar of Christ and the Holy Cross: Louis the Pious was crowned there in 813 (ibid., 415).

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place. Until recently it was broadly agreed that Charlemagne was buried in the chapel’s narthex, and reburied in the centre of the octagon by the thirteenth century; Bayer now argues in favour of the old tradition that Charlemagne was buried in the ambulatory round the octagon, just south of the sanctuary. 19 This still leaves the octagon’s centre with the clergy but no burial.20 Martin Biddle has traced national differences in the history of scholarship on Aachen: German scholars tend to refer the chapel to S. Vitale [Colour Pl. XXXVb], French scholars to the Holy Sepulchre.21 The history of the debate encourages us to acknowledge a more diffuse, less systematic aggregation of influence. All the buildings adduced evoked far-flung Christian imperial splendour and emphasised the power of a sovereign who could summon such riches to his court. Among Charlemagne’s courtiers, some bore nicknames that take us back to the Old Testament and encourage scholars to find Jerusalem’s influence on the chapel: Einhard was Bezalel, architect of the Mosaic Tabernacle in the desert (Ex. 31.2); Archchaplain Hildebold was Moses’ half-brother, the priestly Aaron; Odilo was Hiram, craftsman of Solomon’s Temple (1 Kings 7.13–14). But the court’s conceit was not restricted to biblical figures: Angilbert was Homer; Theodulf of Orleans, of whom we shall hear more, was Pindar; Alcuin was Horace. Charlemagne certainly expressed in his patronage the renewed romanitas of his realm.22 In 787 he received permission from Pope Hadrian I to remove mosivo atque marmores and other spolia from the walls and floors of the palace – probably Theoderic’s – in Ravenna; Einhard records that he had columnae et marmora, otherwise unobtainable, brought from both Rome and Ravenna.23 In 801 he had a bronze equestrian statue of Theodoric brought from Ravenna.24 (Charlemagne was emulating the Lateran’s statue C. M. M. Bayer, ‘Das Grab Karls des Grossen’, in Marienkirche [n. 15 above], 225–36. Aachen’s most famous relics were of fabric: Jesus’ swaddling-clothes, the loincloth he wore at the crucifixion, his mother’s shift (camisia) and the Baptist’s decollation cloth. Some or all may have arrived in 799. They were enshrined in the eastern apse, perhaps within the chapel’s high altar there (dedicated to the Virgin), or perhaps in an original Marienschrein. L. V. Ciresi, ‘The Aachen Karlsschrein and Marienschrein’, in S. Blick and R. Tekippse (eds), Art and Architecture of Late Medieval Pilgrimage in Northern Europe and the British Isles, Leiden, 2005, 753–86 [754]. 21 M. Biddle, ‘Æthelwold’s Abbeys in Abingdon and Winchester’, in Aspects of Abingdon’s Past 3 (2006), 3–16. 22 Classically, R. Krautheimer, ‘The Carolingian Revival of Early Christian Architecture’, AB 24 (1942), 1–38, repr. Studies, 203–56. 23 Texts and commentary in C. M. M. Bayer, M. Kerner, H. Müller, ‘Schriftquellen zur Geschichte der Marienkirche bis c. 1000’, in Marienkirche, 113–89: Hadrian I, 115; Einhard, 129. Binding warns against the assumption that Charlemagne’s request to the Pope had concerned Aachen. 24 B. Brenk, ‘Spolia from Constantine to Charlemagne: Aesthetics versus Ideology’, DOP 41 (1987), 103–9: Charlemagne was imitating Theodoric as recorded in Cassiodorus’ Variae; perhaps he even copied S. Vitale because he recognised Theodoric – and not Justinian – in the mosaics. 19

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of Marcus Aurelius, believed in the Middle Ages to be of Constantine. A bronze she-wolf in the vestibule of Aachen’s chapel paralleled the Lateran’s lupa.) He was to be the new Theodoric: a Germano-Roman emperor who stood alongside Constantine’s heir in Constantinople. And Aachen was to be Rome reborn, the new head of the world under the dominion of Charlemagne, father of Europe.25 Charlemagne presented himself as the emperor of a newly reunited, Christianised Roman Empire with a single centre of rule. Charlemagne’s seal post-800 boasts of the RENOVATIO ROMAN[I] IMP[ERII] around a portrait based on Constantine’s. Constantine had built a city under God’s protection and had defended faith in God against pagans and Arians; so Charlemagne – the new Constantine – would from Aachen defend orthodoxy against the Adoptionists.26 Jerusalem, then, is just one of the centres of empire and of Christendom to which Charlemagne had good reason to refer. Charlemagne, according to Einhard (writing c. 829), brought marble from Rome and Ravenna, probably for the chapel; if this stone included the marble from Ravenna allowed by Pope Hadrian, then the chapel’s construction was under way by the time of Hadrian’s letter in 787. Charlemagne’s most famous links with Jerusalem date from 799 onwards. In that year a monk came to Aachen from Jerusalem and its new patriarch, bringing benedictionem et reliquias de sepolchro Domini.27 A second delegation (together with Charlemagne’s own emissary, the tellingly named Zechariah) reached Rome just in time for Charlemagne’s coronation. It brought gifts for Charlemagne: the keys of Jesus’ sepulchre and of Calvary; perhaps the keys of Jerusalem and Mount Sion; and vexillum crucis, a banner (or perhaps a fragment) of the cross.28 What spiritual or political authority was being acknowledged or offered in 800 is not clear; but a sophisticated diplomatic dance was under way. The ‘hostel of Charlemagne’ may have been sited just to the south of the Holy Sepulchre. It is not clear how much was ceded to Charlemagne when his embassy reached Harun al Rashid in 802 to 806.29 Charlemagne R. McKitterick, Carolingian Culture: Emulation and Innovation, Cambridge, 1994, 140–1. 26 We return to the opposition within Charlemagne’s court to the apparent endorsement of the (idolatrous) worship of images at the Second Council of Nicaea, 320–8 below. 27 S. Runciman, ‘Charlemagne and Palestine’, EHR 50 (1935), 606–19 [609–10]; A. Graboïs, ‘Charlemagne, Rome and Jerusalem’, Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 59 (1981), 792–5; A. A. Latowsky, Emperor of the World: Charlemagne and the Construction of Imperial Authority, Cornell, 2013, 20–3. For this period Annales Regni Francorum survive in two forms: the later version (a revision made pre-817 of the earlier) omits the city’s and the mountain’s keys. 28 In 796 Pope Leo III sent a delegation to Charlemagne to let him know of Leo’s election to the papacy. The delegation presented Charlemagne with the keys to the tomb of St Peter and the banners of the city of Rome, Annales Regni Francorum, Hanover, 1895, 98. 29 Einhard, Vita Karoli 16, 19.22: ut illius potestati adscriberetur, concessit. This may refer only to a transfer of St Mary, south of the Sepulchre, to the Latins; and so may be connected with Charlemagne’s hostel, Runciman, ‘Charlemagne’ [n. 27 above], 612. 25

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sent a further embassy (c. 806–08) to survey the Holy Land’s churches and monasteries.30 Landes has argued for a surge of eschatological expectation c. 800, in which Jerusalem inevitably played the central role.31 Charlemagne was crowned Anno Domini 800, alias – climactically – Anno Mundi 6000. If the Sepulchre informed Aachen’s design and decoration, the chapel translated the focus of expectation to Charlemagne’s own homeland. The Apocalypse of Ps.-Methodius had been translated into Latin c. 700, bringing its myth of the last Roman emperor to the West: the last Roman emperor would go to Jerusalem, reclaim Golgotha, place his crown on the true cross, consign his kingdom to God and die; then the end of the world would come.32 Such expectations, then and later, may have been the projections of political fears and ambitions; but their expression encouraged leaders and followers alike to see cosmic significance in the affairs of the day. We are bound to ask, then, if the second Constantine recreated in Aachen the greatest Christian monument of the first; if the old Jerusalem was rebuilt in Aachen to prefigure the new. In particular, there are hints of an aedicule at Aachen. In 1963 Elbern identified the ‘temple’ on Charlemagne’s ΧΡΙΣΤΙAΝΑ RELIGIO coinage [Fig. 15.3; now generally dated c. 806–12] as the Holy Sepulchre’s aedicule.33 The aedicule and the Lateran baptistery together lie behind the Carolingian adoption of the fountain of life in the Godescalc Gospels (Aachen, 783). The implied architecture of the Lebuinus Chalice of 780 [Fig. 15.4] looks back to the aedicule and forward, in its own time, to the grilles in Aachen.34 Biddle has pursued the argument. The model of the aedicule, 1.24m (4ft 1in.) high, found at Narbonne in southwest France and made of Pyrenean marble, must have been made locally, and therefore on the basis of a drawing or more probably of a wooden and perhaps dismountable replica [Fig. 15.5].35 The die-engravers of 30 M. McCormick, Charlemagne’s Survey of the Holy Land, Dumbarton Oaks, 2011; the hostel, 81–6. 31 R. Landes, ‘Lest the Millennium be Fulfilled: Apocalyptic Expectations and the Pattern of Western Chronography 100–800 CE’, in W. Verbeke, D. Verhelst and A. Welkenhuysen (eds), The Use and Abuse of Eschatology in the Middle Ages, Louvain, 1988, 137–211 [168–201]. Landes analyses further eschatological calculations in the eighth century: the calculation of the world’s age by Eusebius and Jerome placed the incarnation anno mundi 5199; the sixth and final millennium of the world’s present order would end anno mundi 6000; Bede and his successors skirted round the calculation by using the Lord’s years, not the world’s. M. Alberi, ‘“Like the Army of God’s Camp”: Political Theology and Apocalyptic Warfare at Charlemagne’s Court’, Viator 41 (2010), 1–20 is sceptical. 32 Ps.-Methodius, Apoc. 14.2–6 (Greek: Die Apokalypse des Ps-Methodios, ed. A. Lolos, Meisenheim, 1976, 132–5); see McCormick, Survey, 193. A version may even have been prepared for Charlemagne’s expedition against Muslim Spain in 778. 33 V. Elbern, ‘Der eucharistische Kelch im frühen Mittelalter’, Zeitschrift des deutschen Vereins fur Kunstwissenschaft 17 (1963), 1–76, 117–88; similarly, the Dumbarton Oaks relief, G. Vikan, Catalogue of the Sculpture in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection from the Ptolemaic Period to the Renaissance, Dumbarton Oaks, 1995, 82–6, cat. 34A–C (BZ 1938.56). 34 Elbern, ‘Kelch’, cat. 35, figs 10, 11; now in Utrecht. 35 The Narbonne model, important in the reconstruction of the early aedicule, is no less

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FIG. 15.3.  CHARLEMAGNE, CHRISTIANA RELIGIO COIN

FIG. 15.4 LEBUINUS CHALICE (LEBUINUSKELK)

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FIG. 15.5.  THE NARBONNE MODEL OF THE AEDICULE

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Charlemagne’s coins will similarly have worked from drawings made from such a replica.36 It is surely in Aachen that the stonemasons and engravers alike will have seen such a replica; and surely thanks to its presence in Aachen that Charlemagne showed the aedicule on his programmatic coinage. The sequence of these events does not quite clarify the character of the Sepulchre’s influence on the chapel. Biddle suggests that the aedicule’s model reached Charlemagne among the gifts at his coronation. By then, Aachen’s chapel was well under way. The insertion of a central aedicule may indeed have reinforced a significance already intended for the chapel. But we are, so far, still short of evidence for such a connection with the Sepulchre intended from the start. We may find it in Aachen’s construction on the site of Roman baths, whereby Charlemagne evoked the familiar links between such baths, centrally planned baptisteries and the Holy Sepulchre; interesting for its own devotional use. The opening beween the portico and the tombchamber has been eroded by the passage of fingers inserted to caress the tomb, M. Biddle, ‘ΧΡΙΣΤΙAΝΑ RELIGIO and the Tomb of Christ’, in R. Naismith, M. Allen and E. Screen (eds), Early Medieval Monetary History [FS Blackburn], Farnham, 2014, 132. The central section of the tomb-chamber’s wall may have been left open, both to facilitate carving and as a fenestella to make available a view of the chamber; a groove (early but not original) in the floor was made for the passage through the model – and so the sanctification – of water or oil; holes in the sides of the base may have supported drapery for the model’s dignified elevation and better display, A. Bonnery, ‘L’édicule de Saint-Sépulcre et l’Occident’, Les Cahiers de Saint-Michel de Cuxa 22 (1991), 7–42 [31]. 36 Biddle, ‘RELIGIO’ [n. 35 above], 115–44.

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but that underplays the civic dignity of classical baths. Or we may look, as Biddle does, to the dimensions of the chapel and the Sepulchre;37 to these we will return below. A more nuanced alternative, however, lies to hand: that the aedicule appreciably extended and enriched the chapel’s significance, bringing into sharp focus a particular connection that had until then been the faint, diffuse recollection of the Sepulchre inseparable from such a grand centrally-planned chapel. We must here do justice to sacral kingship’s still deeper roots, in the Old Testament. At issue is Charlemagne not only as a new Constantine, but as a new David and – central to our purposes – a new Solomon.38 Solomon’s throne, with its six steps, clearly inspired Charlemagne’s (1 Kings 10.18– 20).39 From the 690s CE onwards there was, on the Temple Mount, the Dome of the Rock built on or near the site of Solomon’s Temple. In the Carolingian Harley Gospels, the illuminated Q introducing Luke’s gospel shows the angel confronting Zechariah as he censes an altar outside a rotunda whose golden dome surmounts a fenestrated drum [Fig. 15.6]; the connection between the Temple and the Dome had been made.40 Bernard the Monk, writing shortly before 870, is then the first traveller known to have made the connection: ‘to the north is the Temple of Solomon, having a synagogue of the saracens’.41 Invoking Aachen’s domed octagon parallel to the adjacent palace, the fenestrated drum and the inscription connected to the chapel’s patron and dedication, Gustav Kühnel has argued for a direct influence of the Dome and its setting opposite the Aqsa Mosque.42 These are thin threads from which to weave a rope of influence. The chapel, however, invited its literate visitors to notice its own dimensions and proportions; and it is in such mathematics that generations of scholars have sought links with Jerusalem and its Temples.43 An inscription was reinstated in the nineteenth century, round the inner wall of the central vessel, between the ground and first floors: Biddle, ‘RELIGIO’, 131. For David, T. F. X. Noble, Images, Iconoclasm and the Carolingians, Philadelphia, 2009, 234. 39 On the age of the throne and its steps, U. Lobbedey, ‘Beobachtungen und Notizen zum Königsthron’, Marienkirche [n. 15 above], 238–49. For a cautionary note, M. Garrison, ‘The Franks as the New Israel?’, in Y. Hen and M. Innes (eds), The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages, Cambridge, 1999, 114–61, here 154. 40 BL 2788, f. 109r. See further P. Berger, The Crescent on the Temple: The Dome of the Rock as Image of the Ancient Jewish Sanctuary, Leiden, 2012, 58–61, in particular BL Cotton Claudius BV, f. 132v (late eighth c., Berger, pl. 4.2). 41 Wilkinson, Pilgrims, 266. 42 G. Kühnel, ‘Aachen Byzanz und die frühislamische Architektur im Heiligen Land’, in Ex Oriente. Isaak und der weisse Elefant. Baghdad – Jerusalem – Aachen (Exh. Cat.), Aachen 2003, III, 52–67; U. Heckner, ‘Der Tempel Salomos in Aachen: Datierung und geometrischer Entwurf der karolingischen Pfalzkapelle’, in A. Pufke (ed.), Die karolingische Pfalzkapelle in Aachen. Bauforschung – Bautechnik – Restaurierung, Worms, 2012, 25–62. 43 For a survey of this notorious problem, U. Heckner, ‘Zwischen Intuition und Messgenauigkeit’, in A. Lang and J. Jachmann (eds), Aufmass und Diskurs [FS Norbert Nussbaum], Berlin, 2013, 11–25. 37

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FIG. 15.6.  HARLEY GOSPELS, ILLUMINATED Q, WITH THE ARCHANGEL GABRIEL CONFRONTING ZECHARIAH (ENLARGED)

When living stones are joined together in the structure of peace, And all things converge into equal numbers [inque pares numeros], The work of the Lord is clear, who constructs the one whole And who gives fulfilment to the pious endeavours of men; Their building of eternal beauty will endure If its author protects and rules what has been completed; Thus may God will that this temple, which prince Charles established, Be safe with a stable foundation.44

44 Recorded in Leiden Cod. Vossianus lat. 4o 69, f. 19r: Cum lapides vivi pacis conpage ligantur, / Inque pares numeros omnia conveniunt, / Claret opus domini totam qui construit unam, / Effectusque piis dat studiis hominum. / Quorum perpetui decoris structura manebit, / Si perfecta auctor protegat atque regat: / Sic Deus hoc tutum stabili fundamine templum, / Quod Carolus princeps condidit, esse velit. Einhard mentioned an inscription in margine coronae, quae inter superiores et inferiores arcus interiorem aedis partem ambiebat: its last verse included KAROLUS PRINCEPS. The present lettering was installed at the end of the mosaics’ restoration under Hermann Schaper, 1902, Heckner, ‘Der Tempel Salomos‘ [n. 42 above], 54–5; U. Wehling, Die Mosaiken im Aachener Münster, Cologne, 1995, 99.

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The first six lines are quoted from Prosper of Aquitaine (c. 390–455).45 The convergence upon equal numbers is not specific to Aachen. The whole set can be seen as a mere commonplace from late-classical Christendom. But they were chosen for use in the chapel; and suggest that at their prompting at least some literate worshippers or visitors were expected to recognise or intuit the chapel’s most significant proportions. But which proportions were they, and what did they signify? The mid-wall diameter of the outer (sixteen-sided) sedecagon and the mid-vault height of the dome are the same; the sedecagon’s mid-wall diameter is twice the octagon’s inner diameter or span; the original length of the building, including the western tower and small eastern apse, was three times the octagon’s span.46 The equal span and height of the centrally-planned building might recall the cube of the New Jerusalem (Rev. 21.6–7); but such equality in diameter and height could as readily be derived from the Pantheon. The reference will be more telling, if the dimensions themselves recall Jerusalem’s. Scholars have sought to identify a basic unit of measurement (a ‘foot’) which in some significant multiple such as 100 or 144 would both match the chapel’s principal dimensions and evoke the 100 cubits square of Ezekiel’s inner courtyard (Ez. 40.47–41.4; 70 cubits occupied by the main Temple building), or the multiples of twelve that define the New Jerusalem (Rev. 21.16–17). No consensus has been reached.47 Heckner has recently adopted a more purely arithmetical approach, and looked for a unit, on the duodecimal system familiar in the Middle Ages, whose simple multiples will account for the chapel’s principal and subsidiary dimensions. She started with the chapel’s simple ratios and the practical value that such a number as 96 (divisible by 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 16 and 24) has for an architect. Given the octagon’s height of 30.95m, she postulated a foot of [30.95 ÷ 96 =] 32.24cm. The chapel’s principal dimensions can now be expressed as multiples of six such feet and its proportions recognised as straightforward ratios between them. The chapel represents the perfection of the completed creation (Gen. 1) in its multiples of a perfect number (6 = 1 + 2 + 3 = 1 x 2 x 3). Does this evoke Jerusalem? As the New Jerusalem 45 C. M. M. Bayer, ‘Die karolingische Bauinschrift der Aachener Dom’, in M. Kerner (ed.), Der verschleierte Karl. Karl der Grosse zwischen Mythos und Wirklichkeit, Aachen, 1999, 445–52. The verses start not with the building but with the living stones of God’s people (1 Peter 2.5), united in the bond of peace (in vinculo pacis, Eph. 4.3 Vg) and built as a living temple (cf. 1 Cor. 3.16–17) upon the foundation of Christ (1 Cor. 3.11). Cf. Aug., Enarr. in Psalmos 39.1: multi lapides vivi in structura templi Dei conveniant, unus lapis ex omnibus fiat. 46 Heckner, ‘Der Tempel Salomos’ [n. 42 above]. 47 Among other schemata, W. Horn, ‘On the Selective Use of Sacred Numbers and the Creation in Carolingian Architecture of a New Aesthetic based on Modular Concepts’, Viator 6 (1975), 351–90; and L. Hugot, ‘Die Pflaz Karls des Grossen in Aachen’, in Karolingische Kunst [n. 14 above], 542–3. Both incorporate the whole Aachen complex. For the difficulties in determining the Carolingian foot and other medieval measurements, E. Fernie, ‘Historical Metrology and Architectural History’, Art History 1 (1978), 383–99, with cross-section and dimensions, 390, fig. 1.

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is a cube of 12,000 furlongs and its wall is 144 cubits high (Rev. 21.16–17), so the chapel is 144 x 32.24cm long; but without a matching breadth or height, this 144 offers, at most, a meagre link. Binding gives a similarly austere account of pares numeri. Par numerus is simply an even number, a multiple of 2 (2, 4, 6, 8, 10…); pariter par numerus is a power of 2 (2, 4, 8, 16, 32…). The inscription may have been drawing attention to the simplest of relationships: the inner octagon and outer sedecagon both represent – in their eight and sixteen sides – pariter pares numeri.48 In the links that we have had under investigation here, we may be looking at Aachen with eyes at once too precise and too detached. We should perhaps allow the culture of the Carolingian court back into view. Notker referred to the chapel at Aachen as built iuxta sapientissimi Salomonis exemplum. Alcuin wrote elaborately to Charlemagne, who had asked Alcuin to visit him on Charlemagne’s campaign in Saxony. Alcuin, then bishop of Tours, said he was too fearful to come out on campaign, and hoped to see Charlemagne on his return. He writes, in a characteristic conflation of cultures, as Flaccus (Horace) to King David. To join Charlemagne would indeed bring a blessing as great as the Queen of Sheba’s when she heard the wisdom of Solomon; but she heard it in Jerusalem, not in enemy territory. What value was there in a little lambkin among lions (inter leones agniculus)? As Vergil wrote to Augustus (Verg., Eclogue 3.75), the emperor could catch the boar, the poet would look after the nets. May these prayers, I beg, come into the heart of Your Piety, that it may be pleasing to you and permitted to me with branches of palms and singing boys to meet the glory of your victory, and in the Jerusalem of the longed-for fatherland, where a Temple is by the art of the most wise Solomon being built to God, to be present at the lovable sight of you [et in Hierusalem optatae patriae, ubi templum sapientissimi Salomonis arte deo construitur, adsistere amabili conspectui vestro] and to say, ‘Blessed be the Lord God, who has led up and led back the beloved David with prosperity and safety to his servants.’49

This evokes the biblical past, the Carolingian present and the promised future. From Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem come the palms (John 12.13), the children (Matt. 21.15–16) and the acclamation, adapted to be a blessing not on God’s emissary but on God himself (cf. 1 Macc. 4.24, 55).50 If Aachen 48 G. Binding, ‘Zur Ikonologie der Aachener Pfalfkapelle nach der Schriftquellen’, in D. R. Baurer (ed.), Mönchtum – Kirche – Herrschaft 750–1000, Sigmaringen, 1998, 187–212 [205–7]. 49 Alcuin, Ep. 145 (MGH Ep. 4.2.1, 231–5 [234–5]), in reply to Charlemagne, ibid., Ep. 144. 50 Such entries did indeed generally follow (and not, as in Jesus’ case, precede) victory:

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(not mentioned by name) is Alcuin’s Jerusalem, then the temple and choir are Charlemagne’s. Alcuin is, then, weaving gossamer links between two longed-for patriae: the present Aachen under construction and the final home that awaits the blessed in heaven (Hebr. 11.14); and so between the various crowds of ancient victories, of Jesus’ entry, of Charlemagne’s return and of the acclamation that will greet Jesus himself, the still greater David, at his final, eschatological return (Matt. 23.38–9). The allusions multiply; their common point is Jerusalem, distant and past, present in Aachen, and still to come. In such terms Charlemagne’s courtiers enjoyed their learning. At the risk of suggesting a closer analogy than can bear real weight, we might wonder if the influences on – and evocations within – Aachen’s chapel were a similarly sophisticated accumulation of Old Testament, New Testament, classical and early Christian motifs, stirred into a compound that could accommodate new elements and emphases. We shall see briefly, below, how the chapel became a ‘Holy Sepulchre’ in honour of Charlemagne himself in the eleventh century, and a Heavenly Jerusalem in the late twelfth. Alcuin already shows, in the years of the chapel’s construction, the facility with which theologians and panegyrists could deploy such motifs. Here is a subsequent litterula from his Horace to Charlemagne as King David. He writes about Charlemagne’s kingdom as theologians wrote about the Church: as a building of living stones, united in love and the virtues. To the desirable and truly most blessed King David, Flaccus Albinus sends Greeting. … I know that the glorious sublimity of Your Power does not bear command over a Jerusalem that will be destroyed in Babylonian flames, but rules and steers a city of perpetual peace built with the blood of Christ, whose living stones are assembled by the glue of love and whose walls rise up together to the height of a heavenly building from the various jewels of the virtues – the city about which the psalmist says, ‘The Lord loves the gates of Sion above all the tabernacles of Jacob’ [Ps. 87.2], and again, ‘Mount Sion, the sides of the north, the city of the great king’ [Ps. 47.3].51

We might surmise, then, a wide aggregation of influences on the chapel’s design. The Sepulchre and the Dome of the Rock are two among many. But neither provides a precedent for the most striking feature of the chapel’s design: it was a startling theatre for imperial liturgy. Charlemagne’s throne on the western gallery looked across the central space: directly opposite, in the small eastern apse, was the high altar to Mary on the ground floor;

Simon Maccabaeus and the Jews entered Jerusalem carrying palms and chanting hymns and canticles (1 Macc. 13.51), having entered Gaza to hymns and songs (1 Macc. 13.47). 51 Alcuin, Ep. 198 (MGH, Ep. 4.2.1, 327).

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on the gallery, at eye-level to the emperor, was the altar to the Holy Cross; and above, the painting of Christ enthroned or of the Lamb, as the twentyfour elders rise from their throne to cast their crowns before him (Rev. 4–5). The laity were with the emperor on the gallery. Their vantage point took in heaven and earth. He and they looked down upon the liturgy in the octagon below and up to the elders in the dome [cf. Colour Pl. XXXVc]. The space was conspicuously tiered. So is the liturgy in Rev. 4–5. When the elders have thrown their crowns before the lamb, John ‘heard all the living things in creation, everything that lives in heaven and earth and under the earth and in the sea, singing praise to the one seated on the throne and to the lamb. The four creatures say Amen; the elders prostrate themselves.’ Aachen’s disposition makes vivid the sense of its own worship as the worship of Rev. 4–5, in which the emperor and laity have a startlingly elevated view (like the seer’s own) of the events above and below. They remain, nonetheless, at one remove from that worship: the emperor is a privileged observer opposite Christ or the Lamb, in an imperial tower of his own; but he is not aligned with Christ nor an extension of the scene that shows him. There may be a deliberate contrast here with the relationship between Christ and the emperor expressed in the Chrysoklinos, and so with the standing implied there for the emperor.52 But such a contrast brings our attention back to Constantinople and the settings for its imperial ritual: in particular, to the tiered liturgy implied by Justinian’s H. Sergios and Bacchos [Colour Pl. XXXVa]. Those who worshipped in the chapel at Aachen, who envisaged in the chapel and in Charlemagne’s kingdom the creation of a Solomonic Jerusalem and who knew the shape of the Sepulchre and of the Dome of the Rock would have been hard pushed to miss in the chapel a glimpse (i) of the past and present Jerusalem and (ii) of creation’s united worship that would be fully expressed in the final descent of the New Jerusalem to earth. But this was a glimpse of a few among the chapel’s many associations. At issue were the sensibilities of an élite, equally at home in the scriptures and the classics, in Christian, pagan and biblical kingship, who saw themselves 52 T. F. X. Noble, Images, Iconoclasm and the Carolingians, Philadelphia, 2009, 239. The illuminations of the Codex Aureus of St Emmeram, ff. 5v and 6r, probably alluding to the throne and ceiling, give an impression of the chapel’s magnificence. Charles the Bald (f. 5v) is opposite the lamb (rather than the figure of Christ), who is adored by the elders (f. 6r). The last hexameters in the titulus under the Adoration emphasise the direction of his gaze: et princeps Karolus vultu speculatur aperto / orans ut tecum vivat longevus in aevum. See H. S. Kessler, ‘Turning a Blind Eye: Medieval Art and the Dynamics of Contemplation’, in J. F. Hamburger and A.-M. Bouché, The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, Princeton, 2006, 413–40 [422, pls 10, 11]. Modern reconstructions generally show the enthroned Christ, Wehling, Mosaiken [n. 44 above], passim. Some have surmised a lamb, see R. Dutton and E. Jeauneau, ‘The Verses on the Codex Aureus of St Emmeran’, Studi Medievali 24 (1983), 75–120 [113–17]. Dutton and Jeauneau demonstrate the links between the tituli and Eriugena’s Aulae sidereae; they suggest a connection between the Codex Aureus and Ste-Marie at Compiègne, see 44 above.

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as the entourage of a new Solomon and new Constantine in his recreation of God’s once and future empire on earth.

AACHEN: BECOMING JERUSALEM It is ironic – but telling – that the chapel at Aachen became more vividly an evocation of the Sepulchre in the centuries after Charlemagne. We can only glance here at the development. First: at Pentecost in the year 1000, Otto discovered the crypt in which sat the body of Charlemagne, enthroned. Over the preceding century a mythology had burgeoned of Charlemagne’s authority over the Holy Land;53 and successive accounts of his body’s discovery assumed features of Helena’s discovery of the true cross. Aachen was becoming a shrine to the emperor’s burial as the Sepulchre was to Christ’s; the chapel was becoming a holy sepulchre, not of Jesus but of Charlemagne. Secondly: around 1165, the year of Charlemagne’s canonisation, Frederick Barbarossa installed the great candelabrum in the centre of the octagon. Charlemagne’s body was again exhumed, and his remains were then kept in a wooden casket in the middle of the chapel. In 1215 they were translated into a golden shrine above the altar that stood at the centre of the octagon, immediately under the candelabrum. The candelabrum’s inscription proclaimed the celica Iherusalem which the candelabrum represented, casting its light upon the chapel’s living and quarried stones alike, suspended between the dome and the choir as a crown over the body of Charlemagne. The chapel, like the New Jerusalem, was now illumined from within by the Beatitudes and scenes from the life of Christ on the candelabrum’s plaques. Its inscription required the clergy – literate, repeatedly present and able over time to read the whole circuit of the inscription – to note the conformity of the octagonal, central and proportional candelabrum to the chapel itself. Yet again, as in Ravenna’s baptisteries, the area most pregnant with significance in a centrally planned, domed vessel is the centre of the space – alive with the possibilities of descent, ascent and mediation – that it encloses. All of this served Barbarossa’s imperial agenda. The candelabrum was dedicated to the Virgin, who was herself crowning Charlemagne – and so his successors – with the light of the New Jerusalem.54

53 S. Runciman, ‘Charlemagne’ [n. 27 above]; S. G. Nichols, Romanesque Signs: Early Medieval Narrative and Iconography, New Haven, 1983, 66–86. 54 G. Minkenberg, ‘Der Barbarossaleuchter im Dom zu Aachen’, Zeitschrift des Aachener Geschichtsvereins 96 (1989), 69–102. For the inscription, C. M. M. Bayer, ‘Die beiden grossen Inschriften des Barbarossa-Leuchters’, in Chelica Iherusalem [FS Stephany], Cologne-Siegberg, 1986, 213–40. For Barbarossa’s propaganda, H. Wimmer, ‘The Iconographic Programme of the Barbarossa Candelabrum in the Palatine Chapel at Aachen: A Reinterpretation’, Immediations 1/2 (2005), 25–39.

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GERMIGNY-DES-PRÉS: GAZING ON THE HOLY OF HOLIES I have suggested an analogy between the wide-ranging sophistication of Alcuin’s cultural references and the aggregation of allusions in Charlemagne’s chapel. This implies that both were primarily directed at an élite as highly educated as Alcuin and as appreciative of self-consciously cultivated finesse. Our next building makes clear how serious and intense such sophistication could be. Among Charlemagne’s courtiers was Theodulf, born in Spain, appointed bishop of Orleans c. 798. He was a fine poet. He collected and with delighted sensibility wrote about works of art. Following the Second Council of Nicaea (787) he wrote Opus Caroli (known as Libri Carolini), a polemic against the veneration of images that had been endorsed at Nicaea II in decrees available to Theodulf in a mistranslation that (it seems) commended such images’ adoration.55 Theodulf ’s oratory at Germignydes-Prés was consecrated between 805 and 806. It was almost certainly Theodulf ’s private chapel; and its decoration clearly reflects Theodulf ’s own understanding of images and their role.56 André Grabar showed that Theodulf ’s whole chapel was a homage to the Holy of Holies of the Solomonic Temple.57 Its central area was a cube of just under nine metres; it may have been designed to recreate not only the proportions but the dimensions in the Temple’s Holy of Holies. The walls of the apse were decorated with palmettes that evoked the decoration of the Temple’s Hall and the Holy of Holies (1 Kings 6.29, 35). The great mosaic in the apse’s half-dome shows the ark of the covenant with its cherubim facing each other at each end; from here, in the tabernacle, the Lord would speak to Moses (Ex. 25.18–20). The ark was eventually installed by Solomon in the Temple’s Holy of Holies (1 Kings 8.1–9, 2 55 Theodulf, Opus Caroli regis adversus synodum (Libri Carolini), ed. A. Freeman with P. Meyvaert (MGH Leges III, Concilia 2, Supp. 1), Hanover, 1998. 56 Two sources claim that Germigny was built in imitation of Aachen: more fully in the Catalogus abbatum Floriacensium (854); and then in Letaldus’ Miracula Sancti Maximini (986–87). The connection is hard to see; J. H. Schaffer, ‘Letaldus of Micy, Germignydes-Prés, and Aachen: Histories, Contexts, and the Problem of Likeness in Medieval Architecture’, Viator 37 (2006), 53–83. 57 On the references to the Solomonic Temple, A. Grabar, ‘Les mosaiques de Germignydes-Prés’, Cahiers Archéologiques 7 (1954), 171–83; P. Bloch, ‘Das Apsismosaik von Germigny-des-Pres. Karl der Grosse und das Alte Bund’, in Karolingische Kunst [n. 14 above], 234–61; M. Vieillard-Troiekouroff, ‘Nouvelles études sur les mosaiques de Germigny-des-Prés’, Cahiers Archéologiques 17 (1967), 103–12; A. Freeman and P. Meyvaert, ‘The Meaning of Theodulf ’s Apse Mosaic at Germigny-des-Prés’, Gesta 40 (2001), 125–39; E. Revel-Neher, ‘Antiquus populus, novus populus: Jerusalem and the People of God in the Germigny-des-Prés Mosaic’, Jewish Art 23–4 (1997–98), 54–66. Now McClendon, Origins [n. 14 above], 128–36, with discussion of the dimensions: the Holy of Holies measured 20 x 20 x 20 cubits; the most common cubit in the Middle Ages was 1.5 Roman feet = 0.445m; a medieval Holy of Holies might well, then, have measured 20 x 0.445m = 8.90m, very close to Germigny’s dimensions.

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Chron. 5.2–10); and flanking the ark and its small figures are the two large cherubim, a perfect pair in shape, measurements and height, whose wings spanned the Holy of Holies (1 Kings 6.23–8, Colour Pl. XXXVIa). As we have seen (7 above), the ark was like no other artefact. Moses had been ordered to build the tabernacle and its contents according to the design which was shown to him on the mountain; and the ark was to be made ‘from incorruptible wood’. God would dwell in the tabernacle; and from above the propitiatorium or mercy-seat which formed the ark’s lid, between the cherubim at either end, God would meet Moses and speak to his people. In Carolingian iconography, the ark and cherubim formed a natural throne for Christ himself. For good reason: the Holy of Holies in the Old Testament was the house of propitiation, domus propitiationis; and for the New Testament, Jesus himself is the propitiatio.58 A miniature in the Sacramentary of Charles the Bald shows Christ enthroned between two six-winged seraphim; it may be indebted to apse-decorations [Colour Pl. XXXVIIa]. Alcuin records a titulus at Gorze (765) for a mosaic of Christ enthroned between seraphim and cherubim: ‘On this ark sits God the judge, image of the Creator. Here the seraphim shine, burning with the love of the Lord. Here among the cherubim the Thunderer’s secrets fly to and fro.’59 The ark’s long history is distilled into the mosaic. Freeman and Meyvaert have identified the Jordan as the blue band at the mosaic’s base, and the twelve stones placed in the river as a sign of the tribes and their crossing into the Promised Land (Joshua 3).60 When Solomon placed the ark in his Temple’s Holy of Holies, four angels, not two, now flanked it. A sketch by Fournier, of the 1860s, records a fragmentary mosaic of an angel’s lower body, covered by wings down to the feet. Such were the six-winged seraphs who sang the Trisagion in Isaiah’s vision of the Lord in the Holy of Holies (Is. 6.2). An inscription runs along the mosaic’s base: Look here, gazing, on the oraclum and the cherubim And, see, the ark of God’s testament is shining. Perceiving these things and preparing with prayers to beset the Thunderer, Add, I ask you, Theodulf to your prayers.61 58 The house of propitiation, domus propitiationis (I Chron. 28.11; LXX: ho oikos tou exilasmou); and for the New Testament, Jesus himself is the propitiatio (LXX: hilastērion, Rom. 3.25; hilasmos, 1 John 2.2, 4.10). 59 Grabar, ‘Mosaiques’ [n. 57 above], 174: the Sacramentary of Charles the Bald, BNF lat. 1141, f. 6r. For the watercolours by Fournier (assistant to Juste Lisch, who directed the restoration, 1866–74), A.-O. Poilpré, ‘Le décor de l’oratoire de Germigny-des-Prés: l’authentique et le restauré’, Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 41 (1998), 281–98 [296], figs 11, 12. Alcuin, in J. von Schlosser, Schriftquellen zur Geschichte der karolingischen Kunst, Vienna, 1892, no. 900. For Lisch’s watercolours, 1873, see Colour Pl. XXXVIb. 60 Freeman and Meyvaert, ‘Meaning’ [n. 57 above]. 61 Oraclum s[an]c[tu]m et cherubin hic aspice spectans / Et testamenti en micat arca Dei /

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Oraclum refers either to the lid of the ark (Ex. 37.6) or, following the usage of Bede and of the Libri Carolini themselves, to the Holy of Holies.62 The tabernacle and its contents had for theologians a particular importance: they embodied the coherence of God’s purpose and of his successive and progressive revelations. The Jews’ tabernacle, its successor – the Temple – and the ark that they housed must be integral to God’s irrefragable design. They raised most acutely the question, how was God’s consistency to be convincingly described; and in the two pairs of cherubim – God’s old and new dispensations and people – they provided a vivid, architectonic answer. Augustine, Isidore and Bede inform Theodulf ’s discussion of the ark and cherubim in the Libri Carolini;63 and it is on this exposition that the mosaic’s interpreters have rightly focused. This particular convergence of text and mosaic may, however, also have diverted us from the mosaic’s principal concern with the subject of the Libri as a whole: the role and capacity of representations. Two of the Council’s claims attacked by Theodulf adduced the propitiatorium and cherubim. With one, Theodulf introduces Libri 1.15: ‘How absurdly they behave, who for the confirmation of images adduce the example of the divine law, saying that Moses made the mercy-seat and two golden cherubim and the ark of the covenant at God’s command.’ They are mad, to try to establish the adoration of images by comparison with such terrible and famous mysteries. The ark was given not ‘on account of the memory of various past events but on account of the most holy prefiguration of future mysteries’.64 Theodulf describes the ark, mercy-seat and cherubim: The golden propitiatorium, in the form of a flat top, was placed above the ark, of the same width and length as the ark, so that the ark was covered by the same propitiatorium and the two golden cherubim were above the propitiatorium, facing each other from either side so that their faces were turned to the propitiatorium, and the propitiatorium was overshadowed by their wings and from there God spoke to Moses, that is from the propitiatorium or from the midst of the cherubim [Ex. 25.22] … The ark of the Haec cernens precibusque studens pulsare tonantem / Theodulfum votis iungite queso tuis. 62 Freeman and Meyvaert, ‘Meaning’, n. 3; McClendon, Origins [n. 14 above], 134. To account for the mosaic, Freeman and Mayvaert suggest that his visit to Rome intervened between Libri and Germigny’s commission: Theodulf had seen the ark depicted in S. Maria Maggiore and elsewhere. 63 Augustine, Quaestiones in Heptateuchum (Ex.) (PL 34.633–4); Isidore, Quaestiones in Vetus Testamentum (Ex.) (PL 83.311–12). The cherubim’s disposition vindicated Isidore’s style of reading: ‘These, with their faces turned, look at each other, while they turn to the spiritual sense; for then they better conform to each other and in everything are more perfectly attuned to each other. From each side they cover (tegunt) the oraculum or mercy-seat, because the Old and New Testament hide (operiunt) both Christ’s sacraments and the Church’s mysteries beneath enigmatic figures (sub aenigmatum figuris).’ 64 Libri, ed. Freeman [n. 55 above], 169.12–14, 170.10–15.

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covenant, according to some [Theodulf here quotes from Bede, De Templo], signifies [designat] our Lord and Saviour, in whom alone we have a covenant of peace with the Father, who after his resurrection, ascending into heaven, placed his flesh at the right hand of the Father … From above this propitiatorium, that is from the midst of the cherubim, God speaks, because the same Son is the Word of God through whom all things were made. And since he is of one substance with the Father, the voice of God the Father is heard from the midst of the two cherubim.65

Theodulf now quotes at length from Augustine, Quaestiones in Heptateuchum. This time the distinction between Old Testament and New is made through God’s first and second issue of commandments through Moses (Ex. 19–20; then Ex. 34). ‘What was difficult in the Old Testament is made easy in the New, that is for the person who has faith, which works through love, and with the finger of God – that is the spirit of God – writing it internally in the heart and not outwardly in stone’ (2 Cor. 3.3). Theodulf concludes: Let these famous things, the ark and what are in it, the mercyseat or cherubim, always be discerned by us with spiritual insight and sought with the full focus of the mind [spiritali intuitu, tota mentis intentione]. Let us not seek them in painted panels or walls, but let us gaze in the depths of our heart with the mind’s eye.66

Augustine had distinguished in De Genesi ad Litteram 12 between physical, spiritual and intellectual vision. Intellectual vision (where intellectus and mens are equivalent) does not have images as its object; the object of such vision can be God, the truth, the virtues or such an entity as love. When Paul was taken to the third heaven (2 Cor. 12.2–4) and Moses – as no other prophet – saw God face-to-face (Num. 12.8), no physical mediation was involved; the purely intellectual saw the purely intelligible. But no one can see God and live (Ex. 33.20); Moses and Paul, at the time of their vision, in some sense died or were at least so far removed from any physical senses that Paul, who speaks of the experience, was not sure if he was in or out of his body. Augustine does not specify the occasion of Moses’ vision of this kind, but distinguishes it from Moses’ own vision on Sinai (visio significans sive corporalis) and from his encounters with God in the tabernacle (Ex. 33.11).67 Ibid., 169.29–170.26, 172.2–8. Ibid., 175.2–8. 67 Aug., De Gen. ad Lit. 12.1.1–4.12 sets the problem raised by 2 Cor. 12.2–4; and reaches its solution at De Gen. 12.26.54–27.55. Text (= CSEL 28) and French translation, P. Agaësse and A. Solignac, De Genesi ad Litteram [Oeuvres de St Augustin 7.49], 1972, with 65

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Theodulf cannot offer, to those who read his Libri or saw his mosaic, the intellectual purity of Moses’ vision or of Paul’s ascent; but he can recall the objects of Moses’ spiritual sight. He may belittle images; but they connect the viewer with the sights they show – in this case, as rare and heavenly as the sights offered to Moses himself on the mountain and in the tabernacle. Theodulf has a delicate path to tread. Theodulf reverts to the passage in 2 Corinthians that he has quoted from Augustine: We who with unveiled face gazing on the glory of God are being transformed into the same image, from brightness to brightness as from the spirit of God, not adulterating the word of God but in the manifestation of the truth, we do not now seek the truth through images and pictures but have come to [or, are coming to] the same truth, which is Christ, through hope, faith and love.68

Theodulf had a clear view on the capacity of any pictorial images of physical objects.69 With only a few and fully explicable exceptions, no physical object or visible action could raise the mind beyond the physical world of which it is part, up to the level of transformative vision to which we are called. To gaze upon a material object can never be to gaze upon the glory of God. The exceptions were res sacratae: the eucharist; liturgical vessels; the cross; scripture; and the ark which, with its components, ‘radiates forever with holy and excellent mysteries and glows with sacraments’.70 Barbara Raw has identified in the Libri Carolini a sensibility informed, as we would expect, by Augustine.71 The divine imprint on human individuals lay in the soul’s three faculties: the memory, imagination and will. Images, for the Libri Carolini, stir the memory; but leave the other faculties untouched. commentary 559–85. Isaiah’s sight of the Lord enthroned was spiritalis; so, with a divinely granted certitude, were the Seer’s prophetic visions in Revelation. Augustine is severe: Moses wanted to see God in ea substantia qua Deus est; neither corporalis creatura nor in spiritu figuratae similitudines corporum would be engaged; he would reach the limits of the capacity of a rational and intellectual creature detached from all bodily sense and all significativum aenigma spiritus. For a refinement in the understanding of Augustine’s intellectual vision, to include the interpretation of a perceived object si illud alicuius rei signum est, K. Schlapbach, ‘Intellectual Vision in St Augustine, De Genesi ad Litteram 12; or: Seeing the Hidden Meaning of Images’, Studia Patristica 39 (2006), 239–44. 68 Libri, ed. Freeman [n. 55 above], 173.11–175.1, 175.2–8. In 1.16 Theodulf expounds (i) the ark as the Church and (ii) Bezalel, who made the ark, as typus of Christ, once more with reference to the cherubim: ‘Beneath the shadow of your wings cover/protect me’ (Ps. 17.8); ‘Beneath the shadow of your wings I will hope’ (Ps. 57.2). 69 This paragraph draws on C. Chazelle, ‘Matter, Spirit and Image in the Libri Carolini’, Recherches Augustiniennes 21 (1986), 163–84. 70 On the centrality of consecration and consequent holiness in Byzantine iconoclasm, P. Brown, ‘A Dark Age Crisis: Aspects of the Iconoclastic Controversy’, in Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity, Berkeley, 1982, 251–301. 71 B. Raw, Anglo-Saxon Crucifixion Iconography, Cambridge, 1990, 6–7. Christ as image of God: Libri, ed. Freeman [n. 55 above], 2.15–16; present in the heart, 4.2; in the Eucharist, 2.27.

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Christ is the true image of God as the knowledge of God, the image of God, the face of God, the brightness of God’s glory and the figure of his substance.72 But none of this, for Theodulf, would be revealed or realised through seeing any depiction of his bodily form. Christ must be present in the human heart; and he is made present in the Eucharist, in its true memorial of the Passion and direct contact with God. The ark at Germigny is ambiguous: it may depict both (i) the ark carried across the Jordan and eventually housed in the Holy of Holies; and (ii) that ark’s prototype in the heavenly Holy of Holies. The six-winged seraphim recalled both Isaiah’s vision in the earthly Temple and his sight there, proper to heaven, of the Lord. The ambiguity was surely deliberate: the viewers were left uncertain what and where was the object of their gaze, and so where they themselves were placed as they stood or knelt before it.73 Theodulf ’s concern here was far more central to his Libri Carolini than was the relationship between the two covenants and their beneficiaries. He was exploring the capacity of the ark’s physical image to be a sign of the ark’s glowing mysteries. The ark on earth must be accorded at least something of the glory of its heavenly prototype; and here at Germigny, in a new Holy of Holies dedicated to the mystery of the Mass, was a representation on earth that embodied something of heaven.74 Since Nicaea II had invoked the ark in defence of images, Theodulf must both vindicate and isolate the earthly ark in his own terms. What is at issue in the mosaic is not negative: what should not be shown. It is positive: how we transcend what can be shown. Theodulf acknowledged the objects of sight; the faculties with which we see them; and the rare possibility, in the ark’s depiction, of a material, visible representation that raised the mind via the material ark to an invisible, heavenly prototype. But the image of the ark is a sign of something greater.75 We must return to the mosaic’s most striking and significant feature: the absence of Christ, the propitiatio itself.76 Libri, ed. Freeman, 1.23, 209.29–210.11; Col. 1.15, John 14.9, Hebr. 1.3. We must wonder if Theodulf was encouraging a sense of access to a heavenly vision in the sight of the mosaic. He treats visions carefully, dreams scornfully (3.26). 74 The historical ark had immense power, shared by no other artefact on earth (2.26); Theodulf mocked images which Nicaea II justified by analogy with the ark but which lacked its power. For Theodulf on representations of the cross and on the cross in heaven, Chazelle, ‘Matter, Spirit and Image’ [n. 69 above], 167–8. 75 For the distinction between sign and image in Byzantine iconoclasm, H. Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Period of Art, Chicago, 1994, 158–9. 76 There were perhaps clearer allusions to Christ and his death here than we now readily see. Hrabanus Maurus (780–856, favoured pupil of Alcuin) shows on one page of In Honorem Sanctae Crucis two six-winged seraphim above the arms of the cross and two two-winged cherubim below (ed. M. Perrin, CCCM, 100–1, Turnhout, 1997, here 100, B4, 50–5) [Colour Pl. XXXVIIc]. In his commentary, Hrabanus touchingly acknowledges the variety of (entirely orthodox) interpretations that had been offered for them. He himself sees in them all an image of the cross. In the page’s carmen figuratum the verses inscribed within the vertical and horizontal beams of the cross read: En arx alma crucis, en fabrica sancta salutis and En thronus hic regis, haec conciliatio mundi. The verses across the page link the 72 73

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Even when we have taken account of Theodulf ’s theology of images and of its centrality here, the mosaic is unsettling. Theodulf has portrayed the ark in an unexpected way.77 The lid was the propitiatorium. But the ark here appears to be open, with a fold of cloth – the rest of it inside the ark – visible over the ark’s front edge. The lid has been removed. We have seen (p. 11 above) that Gregory had linked the angels of the resurrection, ‘one at the head and one at the feet where the body of Jesus had been laid’ (John 20.12), with the cherubim of the Holy of Holies. In this light the mosaic’s cloth suggests the grave-clothes of Jesus, found in the empty tomb by Simon Peter on Easter morning (John 20.6); they are visible too on the ivory cover of the Metz Gospels [Colour Pl. XXXVIIb]. John alone of the evangelists places the grave in a garden that evokes the Holy of Holies (John 19.41).78 We need, then, to bring our interpretation of the mosaic back to Jesus himself. The absence of a figure on the throne is true to the Holy of Holies; but the throne is now the empty grave, an ark-reliquary with no relic.79 Carolingian iconography encouraged viewers to expect a sight of Christ, risen and enthroned in the Holy of Holies; and the mosaic demands that we look for what is missing.80 We find it in the elements of the Mass, below the mosaic; and as they remind the viewer of Christ’s descent, so seraphim with the cross as throne, the cherubim with the cross as altar and ark. Ark, throne and cross are inseparable; all proclaim Christ’s triumph. Hrabanus had a distinctive agenda, to find the cross’s exaltation in every setting; but he may nonetheless be deploying familiar connections, not inventing de novo. 77 It is hard to distinguish with confidence the details of a mosaic that has been heavily restored. On the restorations: Poilpré, ‘Le décor’ [n. 59 above], here 285 (on Chrétin) and 292 (on the ark’s lacunae shown in a watercolour by Mérimée/Dufeux, 1841); P. Meyvaert, ‘Maximilien Théodore Chrétin and the Apse Mosaic at Germigny-des-Prés’, Gazette des beaux arts 143 (2001), 203–20, argues that Chrétin worked at Germigny for only two weeks, and did little more to the mosaic than clean it. The print made from Chrétin’s drawing (March 1847), made when he had removed the plaster and paint, clearly suggests fabric, Fig. 15.7; but Chrétin is not reliable even here, Meyvaert, 212. Duchalais compared Vergnaud-Romagnesi’s print of 1841 with Chrétin’s of 1847, to the latter’s advantage. He mentions: ‘à l’arche d’alliance se trouve un voile’, perhaps still covered in 1841, but shown by Chrétin. The ark’s internal edges and the cloth have more frequently been read as Aaron’s rod. On Lisch’s restoration of the stucco and stone decoration, F. Héber-Suffin, ‘Germignydes-Prés: une oeuvre exemplaire?’, in C. Sapin (ed.), Stucs et decors de la fin de l’antiquité au Moyen Age (V–VIIe siècles), Turnhout, 2006, 179–95. See Colour Pl. XXXVIb. 78 I. Foletti, ‘Germigny-des-Prés, il Santo Sepulcro e la Gerusalemme Celeste’, Convivium 1 (2014), 32–49. We cannot ask here if Theodulf knew of the sudarium that had been in Asturia since 718; Alfonso built a chapel for it in 840. Pelayo’s story of the council of Oviedo, 800, at which Theodulf represented Charlemagne, has been exposed as a fantasy. 79 For the most famous ark-reliquary, D. Appleby, ‘Rudolph, Abbot Hrabanus and the Ark of the Covenant Reliquary’, American Benedictine Review 46 (1995), 419–43; C. Hahn, ‘Metaphor and Meaning in Early Medieval Reliquaries’, in G. de Nie, K. F. Morrison and M. Mostert (eds), Seeing the Invisible in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, Turnhout, 2005, 239–63. The Synod of Braga (675), canon 5 (PL 84.589–90), compared reliquaries to the ark. 80 The denial of sight – either by the absence of the image desired or by the eyes’ aversion from it – could be used to stir the ardour of the viewer’s soul, H. S. Kessler, ‘Real Absence: Early Medieval Art and the Metamorphosis of Vision’, in idem, Spiritual Seeing: Picturing God’s Invisibility in Medieval Art, Philadelphia, 2000, 149–80.

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FIG. 15.7.  GERMIGNYDES-PRÉS: THE APSE MOSAIC, DRAWN BY M. T. CHRÉTIN, 1847

they elevate the viewer to that Holy of Holies in which he pleads his own blood, offered at the altar, before the Father. Once more the worshippers’ position in space and time is being enriched. Christ has both joined them on earth and given them access to heaven. Viewers were being given privileged access (through the paradox of an image on earth) to the Holy of Holies and to sight of the true ark that is in heaven. But what they must adore was not in or on the ark; he was on the altar. According to Theodulf, the Church rejoices in the extraordinary things of the mysteries, more eminent than the two tablets and cherubim themselves. The Jews had material things that were typice prefigurations of what was to come; the Church in truth has spiritually the things that were prefigured.81 But Christians are still in hope and on pilgrimage, and still need signs of what is hidden and to come. The ark in the mosaic was such a sign: of the empty throne and empty tomb. It directed attention away from itself to the altar on which the body of Christ was now displayed. Theodulf reduces to absurdity any attention given to the mosaic’s cherubim as objects of our physical gaze. They direct us away from themselves to the gap on the throne which can only be filled with spiritual insight and sought with the full focus of the mind. Germigny reminds us of the acuity, care and sensitivity that such a patron could expect of those who worshipped in his private chapel. We have touched 81

Libri, ed. Freeman [n. 55 above], 193.13–28.

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as well on Augustine, and his distinctions between image, likeness and sign. In the following chapters we will focus on the monuments themselves, not on the theories of sight, significance and understanding that Augustine bequeathed to the West. But Germigny may helpfully remind us: the patrons of those other buildings to which these chapters – and this whole book – are devoted will have expected no less, in their own circle and their peers, than Theodulf could expect in those who worshipped in his chapel.

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ome publications remain useful and in circulation for decades after their appearance. I think, for example, of Robert Willis’s studies in the nineteenth century of English medieval cathedrals and abbey churches, and Arthur Kingsley Porter’s volumes on Lombard architecture of the early twentieth century.1 But even beside these two illustrious examples, Richard Krautheimer’s article of 1942 on architectural iconography, really on the Holy Sepulchre, stands out.2 I say this because the publications of Willis and Porter are primarily empirical studies, collections of documentary and material information, whereas Krautheimer’s empirical base is much smaller and the area of interpretation correspondingly larger, and for that to have survived in the way it has is remarkable. Krautheimer stresses the great latitude medieval patrons and architects allowed themselves in making connections, adding that the results are hardly copies; and Peter Fergusson has suggested that similitudo should be translated ‘representation’,3 while ‘association’ is even more circumspect. It may, however, be convenient to continue to use the word ‘copy’, as long as one is careful to note its shortcomings. The chief question then is, whatever they are called, how are they identified? The main elements of the Holy Sepulchre relevant to the discussion are the following [Fig. 3.1, p. 77 above]. The building erected by Constantine was based on a Roman tomb and was therefore centralised. It was circular with an aisle and three absidioles, and had an arcade with pairs of piers marking the west, north and south sides, and probably the east as well, and three columns in each section between, making six or eight piers and

1 R. Willis, Architectural History of Some English Cathedrals, 2 vols, Chicheley, 1972–73 [1841–63]; A. K. Porter, Lombard Architecture, New York, 1967 [1917]. 2 Krautheimer, ‘Introduction’. 3 Peter Fergusson [pers. comm.].

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twelve columns. In elevation it had a main arcade, a gallery and (at least from the rebuilding in the first half of the eleventh century) a conical roof with an oculus.4 The Incarnation, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection are the three most important events in the life of Christ. Of these, the Resurrection lends itself most easily to being represented by a building, so it is perhaps not surprising that the Holy Sepulchre was so widely copied. Restricting myself to the Latin West, I have arranged the candidates under four headings: baptisteries, those with evidence from both function and form, those based on form alone, and dimensions.5

BAPTISTERIES In one sense all baptisteries are representations of the Holy Sepulchre, in that they are centrally planned tombs in which a resurrection takes place [Fig. 16.1].6 Many baptisteries are circular, like the Holy Sepulchre – but many more, even the majority, are octagonal, unlike the Holy Sepulchre. A possible explanation for this is offered by a late-fourth-century poem attributed to Ambrose, which states that fonts are eight-sided because the day after the seven days of creation is the day of the Resurrection.7 The location of the baptistery in relation to the church may also be significant, especially in later centuries. The Holy Sepulchre lay beyond the sanctuary of its attendant basilica – that is, to the west of it, as the basilica was occidented. Designers of oriented churches therefore had two options: placing the baptistery near the sanctuary, or placing it at or near the west end of the church. The first choice was more usual during the first millennium, and the second became increasingly common from the ninth century.8 4 The number of six piers, at least in the early twelfth century, is supported by the account of Abbot Daniel, visiting between 1106 and 1108, that there were twelve columns and six other forms of support (R. Ousterhout, ‘Rebuilding the Temple: Constantine Monomachus and the Holy Sepulchre’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 48 (1989), 66–78; D. Pringle, ‘The Crusader Church of the Holy Sepulchre’, 76–94 above). The case for there having originally been two eastern piers as well is supported by two things. The first is the reasonable assumption that the arch at that point (the main entrance to the fourth-century building or, in the eleventh-century reconstruction, the entrance to the sanctuary) would have been supported on a pair of features more substantial than the adjacent columns. The second, if back-formation is permitted, is the frequency with which representations of the Holy Sepulchre have eight supports. 5 Very few examples of copies are claimed in the Eastern Church. 6 Krautheimer, ‘Introduction’, 20–33. One of the exceptions to the rule that baptisteries are centralised is the statement, in the Testamentum Domini, that they should be twenty-one cubits long, for the prophets, and twelve cubits broad, for the apostles, where number symbolism appears to have trumped symbolic form, but in any case the idea does not seem to have caught on (C. Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire 312–1453, Englewood Cliffs, 1972, 25). 7 Krautheimer, ‘Introduction’, 29. 8 On the position of baptisteries see J. E. A. Kroesen, Sepulchrum Domini through the

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Despite the closeness of the symbolic associations, baptisteries remained different in form from the Holy Sepulchre (the often-used conches, for example, being difficult to parallel with the absidioles, because of where they are located). There is, however, at least one instance where the parallels with forms of the Holy Sepulchre are difficult to reject, namely the baptistery at Pisa, begun in 1152 [Figs 1.3–1.4, p. 38 above], which is circular with twelve supports, a gallery and a conical roof.9 Also, as Krautheimer points out, from the eleventh century a number of baptisteries, such as that at Galliano, had galleries.10 FIG. 16.1.  QAL’AT

EVIDENCE FROM BOTH FUNCTION AND FORM

SI’MAN,

Representations are especially common in the Carolingian and immediately following centuries, with nineteen claimed as having been erected between 820 and 1208. They can be most convincingly identified where there is a centralised plan and a documentary association with the Holy Sepulchre.11 A case can be made on these grounds for the Carolingian church of St Michael at Fulda, a building of the ninth century altered around 1000. The plan is centralised, and the dedication to St Michael may be less important than the recording by Hrabanus Maurus (780–856) of an inscription on an altar which relates it to Christ’s tomb (Christo cuius hic tumulus nostra sepulcra juvat). Colin Morris, however, is understandably cautious, seeing St Michael’s not as a copy of the Holy Sepulchre but as a burial place with relics of Jerusalem.12

LATE FIFTH

Ages: Its Form and Function, Leuven, 2000, 34–5; and P. Barnwell, The Place of Baptism in Anglo-Saxon and Norman Churches, Friends of Deerhurst Church, 2014. 9 G. Brucher, Die sakrale Baukunst Italiens im 11. und 12. Jahrhundert, Cologne, 1987, 129–31; A. Peroni, Il Duomo di Pisa, Modena, 1995. 10 Krautheimer, ‘Introduction’, 32; Porter, Lombard Architecture [n. 1 above], pls 95 and 96; Brucher, Die sakrale Baukunst [n. 9 above], 99–101. 11 The Dome of the Rock, built in the late seventh century, is by definition not a copy of the Holy Sepulchre, but that it was based on the building is indicated by the statement of Moqqadasi, writing in the tenth century, that it was built to rival the Christian building: ‘Abd al-Malik, seeing the greatness of the qubbla of the Holy Sepulchre and its magnificence, was moved lest it should dazzle the minds of Muslims and hence erected the Dome of the Rock’ (Ousterhout, ‘Rebuilding the Temple’ [n. 4 above], 47; R. Hillenbrand, ‘The Dome of the Rock: Medieval Symbol to Modern Propaganda’, in J. A. Franklin, T. A. Heslop and C. Stevenson (eds), Architecture and Interpretation [FS Eric Fernie], Woodbridge, 2012, 343–56). The Dome resembles the Holy Sepulchre in having a circular core with four sets of three columns, but it has four piers rather than four pairs of piers, and a double aisle. 12 Krautheimer, ‘Introduction’, 3–7; Morris, Sepulchre, 121. For the building see F. Oswald, L. Schaefer and H. R. Sennhauser, Vorromanische Kirchenbauten: Katalog der Denkmäler

BAPTISTERY, CENTURY: PLAN

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FIG. 16.2.  HOLY SEPULCHRES:

A) JERUSALEM, FOURTH CENTURY



E) NEUVY-SAINT-SÉPULCHRE, ELEVENTH CENTURY



B) PADERBORN, BUSDORFKIRCHE, 1030s



F) LANLEFF, CHURCH OF THE VIRGIN, C. 1100



C) BRINDISI, SAN GIOVANNI AL SEPOLCRO, C. 1100



G) NORTHAMPTON, TWELFTH CENTURY



D) BOLOGNA, SAN STEFANO, C. 1150

Instances of the combination in the later eleventh century and twelfth century are much clearer, especially the site of Santo Stefano in Bologna, which includes a Holy Sepulchre of the middle of the twelfth century [Fig. 16.2; Fig. 16.3]. This is a polygonal brick-built structure which adapts the baptistery of the Byzantine period that previously occupied the site, with twelve columnar piers and galleries. Santo Stefano includes not only the Holy Sepulchre, but also references to its context in Jerusalem, in the form of the Courtyard of Pilate and the site of Calvary.13 In Italy there is a church at Brindisi [Fig. 16.2]; in France at Parthenay (one of the earliest and probably the largest) and Neuvy-Saint-Sépulchre [Fig. 16.2]; in England at Cambridge, Northampton [Fig. 16.2] and (in aisleless form) the Templar church at Dover; and in Navarre at Torres del Rio.14 bis zum Ausgang der Ottonen, 3 vols, Munich, 1966. While the associations implied by the statement are clear, it is not easy to translate. A possibility is: ‘This altar is dedicated to God, especially to Christ, whose tomb here supports our tombs.’ It is similar to Kroesen’s: ‘This altar is dedicated to God, in particular to Christ, whose tomb stands by our graves’ (Sepulchrum Domini [n. 8 above], 16). Morris, Sepulchre, 122, suggests: ‘This altar’s mainly dedicated here to Christ, whose tomb will also help our tombs.’ See also R. Griffith-Jones in Part I, 46 above. 13 Krautheimer, ‘Introduction’, 17–19; R. Ousterhout, ‘The Church of Santo Stefano: A “Jerusalem” in Bologna’, Gesta 20 (1981), 311–21; Brucher, Die sakrale Baukunst [n. 9 above], 109–10; Morris, Sepulchre, 124. Morris, 121, notes that Santo Stefano was first called ‘Jerusalem’ as early as 887. 14 For San Giovanni al Sepolcro at Brindisi see Brucher, Die sakrale Baukunst [n. 9

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE

FIG. 16.3.  SAN STEFANO, BOLOGNA: THE TOMB OF ST PETRONIUS IN THE OCTAGONAL CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE. THE TOMB-CAVITY IS THROUGH THE ENTRANCE AT THE BASE. A ‘SEPULCHRE’ IS RECORDED IN 1141. THE PRESENT TOMB-STRUCTURE, PROBABLY LATE TWELFTH CENTURY IN DESIGN, HAS BEEN MUCH REWORKED. THE STUCCO ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE EASTER STORIES ARE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. THE STRUCTURE WAS RECONFIGURED IN THE 1870s TO 1880s: THE STAIRCASE TO THE CALVARY WAS REDESIGNED, THE PULPIT WAS MOVED FROM THE STRUCTURE’S OTHER SIDE. THE OCTAGON ITSELF WAS REPRISTINATED; ALL SIGNS OF ITS EVOLUTION AND OF ITS (LAVISH) POST-MEDIEVAL DECORATION AND ALTARS WERE ERASED.

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EVIDENCE FROM FORM ALONE

FIG. 16.4.  BRESCIA, CATHEDRAL,

Examples of representations proposed on the basis of their form alone include one cathedral and one church of the Virgin. Cathedrals are almost never associated with the Holy Sepulchre – perhaps not surprisingly, given their primary eucharistic function of providing for lay worship. There is nonetheless one example, namely the cathedral of Brescia (c. 1100) [Fig. 16.4].15 This is linked by being circular (among cathedrals as unusual a form as associations with the Holy Sepulchre), by its arcade on eight piers, and especially by its clerestory with twenty windows – that is, the total number of piers and columns in the Holy Sepulchre. I say ‘especially’ because it is a number which does not arise naturally from the eight arcade bays, as would, for example, sixteen at two windows per bay. The centralised church of the eleventh or twelfth century at Lanleff in Brittany is dedicated to the Virgin, but whether that is the original dedication is unclear [Fig. 16.2, 10f]. In favour of it being a Holy Sepulchre is its aisled circular form, twelve piers which could reflect the same number of columns, and (the clincher for Krautheimer) three absidioles.16

C. 1100

EVIDENCE FROM DIMENSIONS Dimensions can also form a link, but in seeking to establish one it is necessary to acknowledge the difficulty of deciding which points the original planners measured between, and to be even more wary of the possibility of coincidence than with other elements of building types. In fact, making a case from the empirical end is very difficult indeed, given the medieval approach to the representation of a building, with the possibility that even one dimension could suffice – and that we may have no means of knowing which one. There are two safeguards which can be used. The above], 309; for Parthenay, R. A. Maxwell, The Art of Medieval Urbanism: Parthenay in Romanesque Aquitaine, Pennsylvania, 2007, 58–60; for Neuvy, K. J. Conant, Carolingian and Romanesque Architecture 800 to 1200, Harmondsworth, 1974 [1959], 271–2; for Cambridge and Northampton, Krautheimer, ‘Introduction’, 4–7; for Dover, C. E. Hundley, ‘The English Round Church Movement’, 365–8, 372 below; and for Torres del Rio, Conant, Carolingian, 182–3. 15 Brucher, Die sakrale Baukunst, 113. 16 Krautheimer, ‘Introduction’, 4.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE

first is the documentary assurance that the practice existed, as with the record of Bishop Meinwerk of Paderborn in 1036 sending Abbot Wino to Jerusalem to get ‘mensuras ... S. Sepulgri’, and the claim in the foundation charter of the contemporary Busdorfkirche, in the same city, that it was planned using dimensions derived from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre [Fig. 100, 10b].17 The second safeguard is to restrict possible examples to buildings which have an established connection with the Holy Sepulchre. The figures in the table illustrate how the copies (which are mostly smaller than their model) might have used fractions of the diameter of the core and the diameter of the whole of the original for their equivalents, and in some cases the core dimension of the Holy Sepulchre for their whole one. Brescia is the exception, as its core and overall diameters approach those of the Jerusalem building. Main dimensions of the Holy Sepulchre and equivalents in supposed copies.18 i) Diameter between the column centres of the core Holy Sepulchre: 22.5m Brescia (cathedral): c. 21.5m Pisa (baptistery): 10.8m or half of 21.6m Northampton: 10.6m or half of 21.2m Cambridge: 7.3m or a third of 22m ii) External diameter, i.e. including the aisle and the aisle wall Holy Sepulchre: 36.5m Brescia: 38m Brindisi: 18.5m or half of 37m Neuvy-St-Sépulchre: 22.5m for 22.5m Northampton: 22m for 22.5m

With my next and last example, I would like to argue in the opposite direction to all the preceding instances; that is, taking a building which has been claimed as a copy of the Holy Sepulchre, but which I think might not be. The aisleless apsed rotunda at Orphir in Orkney [Fig. 16.5] has been identified as a copy on the grounds that it is centrally planned and that the earl of Orkney made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land between 1117 and 1122, a date which does not conflict with the evidence of the building techniques.19 Looking for a possible source, the nearest geographically is the Templar church at Dover, which can certainly be taken as a copy of the Krautheimer, ‘Introduction’, 4–7. Based on G. Bresc-Bautier, ‘Les imitations du St-Sépulchre de Jerusalem (IXe–XVe siècles). Archéologie d’une dévotion’, Revue d’histoire de la spiritualité, 50 (1974), 330–7. 19 A. Ritchie, Exploring Scotland’s Heritage: Orkney and Shetland, Edinburgh, 1985, 96. 17

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FIG. 16.5.  ORPHIR, APSED ROTUNDA, EARLY TWELFTH CENTURY, PLAN

ERIC FERNIE

Holy Sepulchre. Three other considerations, however, suggest a different explanation. The first is the immediate context of the building: it is described as standing at the door of a drinking hall, and excavations indicate that there were living quarters nearby. This grouping has all the hallmarks of a magnate’s residence, with hall, chamber and chapel, as in the great tower of a castle.20 Second is the large number of apsed rotundas in central Europe, where they are one of the most popular church types. None of them as far as I know was a Holy Sepulchre, the commonest function being that of a private chapel. Examples in Bohemia and Moravia can be dated as early as the tenth century, when the most important was St Vitus in Prague, built for Wenceslas (Vaclav) I (921–29), while other instances datable to the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries include those at Mikulčice, Budeč, Starý Plzenec and Prague.21 In Poland there are apsed rotundas of the eleventh and twelfth centuries at Gregorzowice, Cieszyn, Krakow, Łekno and elsewhere [Fig. 16.6].22 Central Europe might seem to be lacking in connections with Orphir, but that introduces the third and in many ways the most important consideration – namely. the political context. Orkney was at the time not part of Scotland but a Norse earldom: the pilgrimage was undertaken by Earl Hakon Paulsson, and the documentary source for the drinking hall is the Orkneyinga Saga. As part of Norway, Orkney belonged to the archbishopric of Hamburg-Bremen and was intimately linked to Denmark and the Baltic, and (via the Elbe, Oder and Vistula) with central Europe and its culture of aisleless apsed rotundas [Fig. 16.7]; it would be 20 Most magnates’ chapels of whatever date and place are centralised, including the most famous, such as Justinian’s Saints Sergios and Bakchos in Constantinople and Charlemagne’s building. The type was presumably derived from the audience halls of Roman emperors, of which the forecourt and centralised audience chamber in Diocletian’s palace at Split of around 300 AD is a good example. The centralised chapel may also offer an explanation for the replacing of the longitudinal church, used throughout the empire in the fourth and fifth centuries, with centralised types in the Eastern empire, the change starting in the sixth century and becoming universal from c. 800. That is, unlike in the West where there was no emperor between 476 and 800, the Eastern emperor’s chapel type was so prominent and important that it came to be emulated in the design of ordinary churches. On the unresolved question of the relationship between private chapels and the Holy Sepulchre see also Catherine Hundley (360 below), Alan Borg (339–51 below) and Robin Griffith-Jones (306–19 above). 21 Oswald, Schaefer and Sennhauser, Vorromanische Kirchenbauten [n. 12 above], 217; K. Benešovska, P. Chotěbor, T. Durdík and Z. Dragoun, Architecture of the Romanesque, Prague, 2001, 58, 89, 94, 68–9. All these examples appear to be palace chapels. The dedications of the churches of the Holy Cross the Lesser and St Longinus in Prague concern events closely related to the burial of Christ, but the first may have been built as a private chapel, and the dedication to Longinus is fourteenth century (ibid., 68, 69). 22 Z. Świechowski, Architektura Romańska w Polsce, Warsaw, 2000, 70–1, 47–8, 139 and 160–2.

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A

B

C

D

FIG. 16.6.  POLAND: APSED ROTUNDAS AT (A) GREGORZOWICE, (B) CIESZYN, (C) ON THE WAWEL IN KRAKOW, AND (D) ŁEKNO: PLANS

interesting to know how the earl began his pilgrimage, via the Rhine to the Mediterranean or via the Baltic to the Black Sea. Given the political context, therefore, the numerous Bohemian, Moravian and especially Polish buildings offer a source which is as likely as that in Dover, and possibly more so.23 To conclude, I feel I should apologise for attempting to reduce the number of copies of the Holy Sepulchre with this argument concerning Orphir. It would obviously have been better, given the theme of the present volume, if I had been able to propose the addition of a new example of a Holy Sepulchre, but the Orphir argument at least has the advantage of taking us near the opposite edge of the Christian world from Ethiopia, thus illustrating the breadth of the subject under discussion. 23 The circular churches on the Danish island of Bornholm have also been claimed as copies of the Holy Sepulchre, because of their shape and because they appear to have been built around the time of a pilgrimage made to Jerusalem by King Sigurd between 1107 and 1111, but there are also convincing arguments against the identification (C. Stewart, ‘The Round Churches of Bornholm’, RIBA Journal (1961), 539–42; and A. Andersson, L’Art scandinave, 2 vols, La-Pierre-qui-Vire, 1968–69, II, 144–6). The difficulties attendant upon determining architectural symbols are neatly pointed up by the church of St Donatus at Zadar of c. 800. This church ticks many of the formal boxes for being a Holy Sepulchre, including being round and having three radiating apses and a gallery, but, as it was a larger and more important building than Lanleff, the documentary silence may be significant (S. Ćurčić, Architecture in the Balkans, New Haven and London, 2010, 340–2).

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FIG. 16.7.  THE NORTH AND BALTIC SEAS

THE MILITARY ORDERS AND THE IDEA OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE * ALAN BORG

I

t has long been suggested that London’s round churches were in some sense ‘copies’ of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, but exactly how this came about and what it really means has not been clearly defined. The starting point for any investigation is that round churches are the exception rather than the rule in medieval architecture. The Roman origin of the traditional Christian basilican form is undisputed, but the Romans built round buildings as well, the most famous of which, the Pantheon in Rome, was converted into a church. They also constructed round buildings specifically as tombs or mausolea, such as the Mausoleum of Hadrian in Rome. Round temples and mausolea were probably the source for some round churches, such as the early example in Rome, Santo Stefano Rotondo, dating from the time of Pope Simplicius (468–83). The most famous early Christian round structure, also derived from Roman mausolea, was that built over the tomb of Christ in Jerusalem by the Emperor Constantine [Colour Pls II–IV, Figs 3.3–3.10, pp. 82–8 above]. Despite these examples, round churches remained rare in the Western world throughout the first millennium. However, there is a concentration of medieval round churches either extant or recorded in England – the total is fifteen – and this is more than in any other region of comparable size in Europe. London in the twelfth century possessed three (and possibly four) round churches, all just outside the city walls and each one probably visible from the other. The sudden appearance of these round churches is traditionally associated with the Hospitallers and Templars. * This chapter is a version of a lecture given at Reading University in 2013. It is included here as its central ideas are relevant to the theme of the present book. The editors are grateful for its inclusion.

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The military orders, which emerged as a consequence of the First Crusade, normally adopted churches of a traditional basilican form. The majority of both Hospitaller and Templar churches and preceptory chapels are not round, including those that date from the twelfth century. There are none in the Holy Land, and in Europe there are not very many, apart from the extant church at Tomar in Portugal and the lost Templar church in Paris. Tomar is hexagonal on the exterior and more likely to be thirteenth than twelfth century, since its closest relation is the Templar church of Vera Cruz near Segovia in Spain, which was consecrated in 1208. Paris is considered below, but in other cases a circular or octagonal church has been assumed to be Templar, although there is no evidence to support this, as is the case at Torres del Rio in Spain. Elsewhere in Europe, other round churches are sometimes termed Templar: there are four round churches on the Danish island of Bornholm, which have been deemed to be Templar but which have no connection with the military orders and were probably defensive in form. The various round and octagonal churches in Italy, such as San Sepolcro in Pisa and in Barletta, are similarly unconnected to but are sometimes associated with the various Orders. London’s round churches form a distinct group and were all constructed within a period of perhaps thirty years. They are St John’s, the church of the Knights Hospitaller in Clerkenwell; the first church of the Knights Templar, at the top of what is now Chancery Lane, in the parish of St Andrew, Holborn, and less than half a mile from the Clerkenwell priory; and the second church of the Templars, dedicated to the Virgin, which remains the centre of the Temple complex between Fleet Street and the Thames [Colour Pl. XL]. The fourth possible round church was St Sepulchre without Newgate, which was established in 1137; a late Gothic church on the site was burnt in the Great Fire. The remains of that building, restored by Wren, show that it was then an aisled rectangular structure. The suggestion that it may have been built as a round church in the twelfth century derives entirely from its dedication – the round churches in Cambridge and Northampton are dedicated to the Sepulchre – but this speculation is discounted here, as there have always been basilican churches as well as round ones dedicated to the Holy Sepulchre. The group of round churches in England was identified by the appropriately named J. H. Round, followed by W. H. St John Hope and subsequently by A. W. Clapham.1 Outside London, the following additional examples associated with the military orders can be identified: Temple Bruer, Garway, Bristol Temple, Aslakeby Temple and Dover, all 1 See J. H. Round, ‘The Foundations of the Priories of St Mary and St John Clerkenwell’, Archaeologia 56 (1899), 223–8; W. St John Hope, ‘The Round Church of the Knights Templars at Temple Bruer, Lincoln’, Archaeologia 61 (1908), 177–98; and A. W. Clapham, English Romanesque Architecture after the Conquest, Oxford, 1934, 109–12. For a description and gazetteer, see Catherine E. Hundley, ‘The English Round Church Movement’, 352–75 below.

THE MILITARY ORDERS AND THE IDEA OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE

of which were Templar. There is only one additional Hospitaller round church, Little Maplestead, and this dates from the thirteenth or fourteenth century. There are at least three other round churches: Cambridge and Northampton, both dedicated to the Holy Sepulchre, and the small church at West Thurrock, along with three private chapels, in Ludlow Castle, Woodstock Palace and St Giles’s Hospital, Hereford. It is apparent that the last four of these – West Thurrock and the four chapels – are small and simple aisleless structures and, apart from being round, are not related to the others. Also in this secondary group is the little round chapel at Dover, which is assumed, without firm evidence, to be the Templar preceptory. The round churches with an ambulatory and a central ring of columns supporting a triforium, creating a round nave from which a choir of several bays projects on the eastern side, form a clearly definable group. In addition to the three London examples, the other English members of what may be termed this Holy Sepulchre group are Cambridge, Northampton and Temple Bruer. We do not know – and excavation has not revealed – whether Bristol and Garway were part of this group. There is however only one non-English building that adopts the same plan, namely the (lost) Templar church in Paris.2 The London examples will be considered first. The Hospitaller Priory of St John was founded in 1144 by Jordan de Bricet and his wife Muriel de Munteni, who granted a chaplain called Robert land in the field adjoining the Clerk’s well; Robert in turn granted some portion of the same field to the Hospitallers in lieu of the thirteen pence that he had promised to give as a yearly offering to the Hospital in Jerusalem.3 We do not know a great deal about the first English brethren of this priory; Walter was the first prior, and his seal survives attached to a document of 1148; at this date the priory was dependent upon that of St Gilles in Provence and this link continued until at least 1185. A land transaction dated 1179 to 1181 gives the names of four other brother chaplains: Alan, Godard, Henry de Loering and Matthew. Turning to the elements of the Priory Church itself, the size and shape of the round nave are known from excavations, but its elevation can only be reconstructed by informed guesswork, the interpretation of the archaeological evidence, and comparison with other surviving round churches. It consisted of a circular aisle 3.12m wide, divided from the central round space by an arcade of eight piers or columns. Its overall diameter was some 19m. Comparison with other round churches suggests that there was probably a triforium above the aisle and a clerestory above that. Fragments of sculpture discovered during excavation also point to

See H. de Curzon, La maison du temple de Paris, Paris, 1888. B. Sloane and G. Malcolm, Excavations at the Priory of the Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem at Clerkenwell, London, 2004. 2 3

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some sculptured decoration, including a corbel table of the sort found at the Temple and the Holy Sepulchre, Cambridge. The chancel of the Hospitaller church almost certainly mirrored the size and shape of the surviving crypt, but we have virtually no other information about its appearance; we do not know how high it was, whether or not it was vaulted, or whether the east end was apsidal. The surviving crypt is the best evidence for the appearance of the rest of the twelfth-century church. It was entered from the nave aisle by a steep, slightly curving staircase, and today consists of three rib-vaulted bays, possibly with an apsidal fourth bay (now lost). A particular feature was that from the start the walls incorporated a stone bench that runs the full length of the structure, providing sufficient seating for up to forty people. This has led to the suggestion that the crypt may have served as a form of chapter house. We can say with certainty that the entire church building was complete well before 1185, when Heraclius, patriarch of Jerusalem, dedicated it, while he was in Britain drumming up support for a new crusade to save the Latin Kingdom. This is a terminus ante, but it is safe to assume that the Priory Church had been finished and was in use some years before this. The surviving physical evidence suggests that the plan must have been laid out in the 1140s, and the vaulting in the crypt accords with this. It is therefore most likely that the Priory Church was commissioned shortly after Jordan de Bricet had given the land. Knowledge of the first Templar church depends primarily on a passage in Stow’s Survey of London: Beyond the barres had ye in olde time a Temple builded by the Templars, whose order first began in the yeare of Christ 1118 in the 19 of Henry the first. This Temple was left and fel to ruine since the yeare 1184 when the Templars had builded them a new Temple in Fleet Street, neere to the river of Thames. A great part of this olde Temple was pulled downe but of late in the yeare 1595. It hath of late years belonged to the Earles of Southampton and therefore called Southampton house. Mayster Roper hath of late builded there, by means whereof part of the ruines of the Old Temple were seene to remain builded of Caen stone, round in forme as the new Temple by Temple barre.4

Stow’s statement was confirmed in 1875 when, during excavations for the building of a new London & County bank, the foundations of a round building were uncovered. Further archaeological investigation was possible during renewed building work in 2002.5 W. St John Hope, writing in 1908, 4 First published in London in 1598. This passage occurs in the section on ‘The Suburbs without the Walls of the City’, 391. 5 A. Telfer, ‘Locating the First Knights Templar Church’, London Archaeologist, 10/1 (2002), 3–6.

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records that he was lent a plan made by Mr Zephaniah King, showing concrete foundations, 5½ft broad, of a circular wall, with an internal diameter of 20ft, and upon it the bases of six round pillars, each 2ft 9in. across, and resting on a square plinth. These evidently belonged to the central vessel of the Old Temple’s rotunda, but no other material seems to have been recorded and unfortunately Hope did not publish the plan itself. However, the existence of the round church was confirmed by the further excavations that took place in 2002. The date of this first Temple church remains uncertain, but it seems very likely that it can be connected with the visit of the founder of the Order, Hugh de Payens, who came to London in 1128 when he was granted the site. It is also likely that the construction of the church was not long delayed and that the building was erected in the 1130s, a decade before the Hospitallers built their church in Clerkenwell. The old Temple church had an overall internal diameter of some 17m, slightly smaller than the Hospitaller church where the diameter was 19m; it is conjectured that there was a simple chancel, and it is not known if there was a crypt. The passage in Stow’s Survey reveals that the old and new Temple churches co-existed, but he was incorrect in saying that the first Temple soon fell into ruin. In fact it was sold in 1161, when the Templars moved to their new site; the purchaser was Robert de Chesney, bishop of Lincoln, who paid one hundred marks for it and the other buildings on the site [Fig. 17.1].6 He converted some of these into his London home, with the church as his bishop’s chapel. Although de Chesney died in 1166, the house and chapel continued to be used by the bishops of Lincoln for many years. It can be presumed that the new Temple church would have been an updated version of the old Temple church, and the internal diameter of the round was the same, 17m. Despite its restored state, it can provide some guide as to the general appearance of its predecessor. Dedicated to the Virgin Mary, it was also consecrated by Heraclius during his visit to London in 1185; it was clearly relatively new then and in the latest early Gothic style. The Templars had moved to the site in or by 1161, and their new church was probably built in the course of that decade. Most scholars have in fact dated it to the 1180s, but Christopher Wilson has convincingly argued, on the basis of comparisons with northern French buildings, that it is earlier.7 A date in the 1160s seems more likely than the 1150s, since the Templars probably needed the money from the sale of the old Temple in 1161 to undertake the building of the new one. Notwithstanding its Gothic forms, in plan and elevation the building has much in common with St John’s and the Old Temple, with an outer aisle, triforium and clerestory. 6 See the entry for Chesney by D. M. Owen in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004. 7 C. Wilson, ‘Gothic Architecture Transplanted: The Nave of the Temple Church in London’, in Temple Church, 19–44.

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The outlying member of this group of round churches is the Temple church in Paris, dedicated, like the Temple Church in London, to the Virgin.8 This was totally destroyed during the French Revolution, but its plan was recorded and consisted of a six-columned rotunda, 19m in diameter (the same as St John’s but larger than both London Temples), and a long narrow chancel. It was rib vaulted and a surviving engraving of the interior suggests that it was similar to the second Temple in London, which would indicate a date in the 1160s. It is known that Patriarch Heraclius spent some time in Paris before coming on to England and it is not impossible that he consecrated this church too, but it is not recorded. Given the total loss of the Parisian church and the severe damage sustained by the London Temple, it is impossible to be precise about the relationship between the two buildings, beyond their similar plans and dedications. Such evidence as there is suggests the link was a close one. The issue of the Holy Sepulchre and its copies was first seriously investigated by Richard Krautheimer.9 He FIG. 17.1.  THE OLD AND NEW TEMPLES

8 See n. 2. Knowledge of the size and appearance of the building is derived from the report of a visitation in 1733. 9 Krautheimer, ‘Introduction’. More recently J. E. A. Kroesen produced a volume entitled The Sepulchrum Domini through the Ages: Its Form and Function, Leuven, 2000, but

THE MILITARY ORDERS AND THE IDEA OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE

demonstrated that the medieval notion of a copy was quite different from what it is today. A building could be considered a copy of another if it conveyed the same meanings as the original or had some of the same functions. A link between two buildings could be as tenuous as sharing a dedication, or having one feature that could be regarded as similar. There is certainly contemporary evidence to suggest that some buildings were regarded as copies of other, more famous ones. Churches are sometimes described by contemporaries as being ‘like’ or ‘in the manner of ’ or ‘derived from’ another. Krautheimer argued that this concept of copying arose from the medieval mindset, which placed a higher value upon symbols and allusions than upon literal accuracy. Few would doubt this conclusion, but it does not explain the way in which ideas and visual information were actually transmitted. One of the questions that should be asked is what twelfth-century English citizens knew or thought about the form of their round churches. Did the honest twelfth-century burgher contemplate a round nave and mutter to himself: ‘There’s another of those Holy Sepulchre imitations’? Almost certainly not, and most probably he simply did not bother to wonder why churches were different shapes. But this cannot be true of the people who were responsible for building them. What did they think – and what did they know – about the model they are presumed to have followed? The question is pertinent because one of the most frequent explanations for these round churches, both in England and on the continent, is that they were built following a visit to the Holy Land by one of those involved in their construction. It is not recorded whether any individual English members of the military orders visited Jerusalem in the first half of the twelfth century. Hugh de Payens, first Grand Master of the Templars, visited London in 1128; he was certainly familiar with the Sepulchre, but it is unlikely that he had a plan of it in his pocket. There were also people in London who had been to the Holy Land, either on pilgrimage or on crusade, but they did not go with the specific purpose of studying the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in order to bring back plans or measurements that would allow the creation of ‘copies’. If London’s round churches were based on any direct knowledge of the Holy Sepulchre then they might be expected to look a bit more like their model than they do; as it is, they have little in common except their roundness. this is primarily concerned with imitations of the Sepulchre itself (as distinct from the rotunda which surrounded it), and as such it does not add a great deal to Krautheimer’s essay. A further contribution was made by Morris, Sepulchre, but this remains a wideranging general study. Most recently, Eric Fernie included a section on copies of the Holy Sepulchre in Romanesque Architecture, New Haven, 2014, 216–17. Here he suggests that some round churches reflect the measurements of the Sepulchre, scaled down proportionally, but this does not apply to the churches of the military orders. See also E. Fernie, ‘Representations of the Holy Sepulchre’, 329–38 above.

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A possible starting point for further investigation is the question of whether the three originally similar round churches in London – St John’s and the Old and New Temple – were directly connected in some way. Did the seemingly contemporaneous St John’s and the Old Temple involve the same master planner, did they use the same teams of masons, and were they based on the same model? Here we are hampered by the fact that only fragments of the twelfth-century Hospitaller church survive, and the Old Temple is known only from excavation, while the New Temple church was subject to major rebuilding following bomb damage in the Second World War. Some clues can be found by observation – to take just one distinctive feature, the nave of St John’s was built as a rotunda with eight columns, but the naves of both the Old and New Temple churches were built as rotundas with only six. Constantine’s rotunda in Jerusalem had a total of twelve columns, divided into groups of three by pairs of square columns – quite unlike the arrangement found in any of the ‘copies’. The Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem underwent an almost continual series of changes. The largest part of the church we now see was constructed after the fall of the city to the crusaders in 1099. This structure was consecrated on the fiftieth anniversary of the capture of Jerusalem, on 15 July 1149. There is virtually no information about its builders or its building programme, but it is generally agreed that it dates from the period 1140 to 1149, and the construction is possibly connected with the fact that William of Tyre records that a thunderbolt struck the church on the Feast of the Epiphany, 1146. But no elements of the crusader structure ever feature in the Western ‘copies’ of the Sepulchre. Indeed, the only element of the crusader Sepulchre to be found in Europe is the south transept door, with its double portals, that derives from the south transept Puerta de las Platerias at Santiago de Compostela.10 The Holy Sepulchre which the crusaders first encountered in 1099 was not Constantine’s original construction, but the result of a reconstruction on the site following the destruction of the buildings by the fanatical caliph al-Hakim in 1009.11 At this time much of the church was destroyed. Adhemar of Chabannes, the eleventh-century French chronicler, recorded that the ‘basilica of the Lord’s Sepulchre was razed to the ground’. Another Christian writer, Yahya ibn Sa’id of Antioch, reported that everything was demolished except those parts which were impossible to destroy or would have been too difficult to carry away.12 The church’s foundations were hacked down to bedrock. The aedicule, the east and west walls and

10 Cf. J. Folda, ‘The Crusader Church of the Holy Sepulchre: Design, Depiction and the Pilgrim Church of Compostela’, 95–119 above. 11 Coüasnon, Sepulchre; and now D. Pringle, ‘The Crusader Church of the Holy Sepulchre’, 76–94 above. 12 The story is told in detail in Pringle, Churches, III, 10–11.

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the roof of the rock-cut tomb it encased were destroyed or damaged, but the north and south walls were likely protected by rubble from further damage. The mighty pillars of the rotunda were thrown down, but parts of the outer wall resisted destruction up to the height of the gallery pavement. Nonetheless, the structure would have appeared as a complete ruin, until in 1048 a version of the rotunda was rebuilt by the Byzantine emperor Constantine Monomachos, seemingly on the original plan and re-using elements rescued from the earlier demolition. It is important to bear this history in mind, in relation to the suggestion that Western ‘copies’ of the Sepulchre result from particular visits to Jerusalem. One of the first eleventh- century round churches in Europe, which pre-dates the foundation of the military orders, is Neuvy-SaintSépulchre in central France [Fig. 17.2]. Contemporary sources identify this as deriving from the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem; it has been asserted that its construction followed a visit by Eudes de Déols and Guillaume Taillefer, count of Angoulême, to the Holy Land between 1026 and 1028, and that the foundation of the church may be dated to between 1042 and 1045, when it is referred to as being ad formam Sancti Sepulchri Yerosolymae. But Eudes de Déols’ pilgrimage in 1026 took place at the one time the

FIG. 17.2.  NEUVY-SAINTSÉPULCHRE, EARLY ELEVENTH CENTURY

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Sepulchre’s rotunda was a ruin, destroyed by al-Hakim in 1009 and only rebuilt by Constantine Monomachos in 1048. Two of the round churches in Britain – one in England, the other on Orkney – have been connected with visits to the Holy Land, and on this basis dated earlier than those of the military orders. In neither case is the evidence convincing. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Northampton is traditionally associated with the fact that the earl of Northampton, Simon de Senlis, went on the First Crusade in 1096, and for this reason built a copy of the Holy Sepulchre on his return.13 The date normally given for the church is c. 1110, but this is simply based on the assumption that the earl caused it to be built shortly after he returned from the crusade in 1099. The second building is the tiny round chapel at Orphir on Orkney, which is an aisleless structure and not part of the main Holy Sepulchre group [Fig. 16.5, p. 336 above]. However, it is normally linked with the murder in 1117 of St Magnus by Hakon, earl of Orkney, who subsequently went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to expiate his guilt. The Orkneyinga Saga specifically relates that he visited the Holy Places when he reached the city, and it is assumed that he ordered the construction of the chapel on his return. However, any such a ‘copy’ of the Holy Sepulchre would most probably have been built on the site of the cathedral of St Magnus in Kirkwall, not in remote Orphir, and this tiny chapel is dedicated not to the Holy Sepulchre but to St Nicholas.14 The Holy Sepulchres in Cambridge and Northampton are very similar in plan and appearance, but are traditionally dated differently. Northampton is assumed to have been complete by 1115, when the site was granted by Earl Simon to the Cluniac priory of St Andrew’s, Northampton. The site of the Cambridge church was granted by Abbot Reinald of Ramsey (1114–30) to the members of the Fraternity of the Holy Sepulchre, an organisation about which nothing else is known, but perhaps can be identified with the Canons of the Holy Sepulchre. Such authentic work as remains (mainly the arcade columns; the sculptural detail dates from the nineteenthcentury restoration) suggests a date no earlier than the end of Reinald’s abbacy (that is, c. 1130), and probably later. However, the similarity in plan (both rotundas have eight columns) and in size, not to mention geographical proximity, suggest that we are looking at closely related buildings constructed at much the same time, and a date of around 1130 to 1150 seems most likely for the Northampton building as well. Against this background, we can try to define where the information came from to allow the construction of these churches in a form that some would recognise as derived from the Holy Sepulchre. If, as seems to be the case, these buildings are not the result of visits to the Holy Land 13 C. Cox and R. Serjeantson, History of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre Northampton, Northampton, 1897. 14 Cf. E. Fernie, ‘Representations of the Holy Sepulchre’, at 336–7 above.

THE MILITARY ORDERS AND THE IDEA OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE

or direct knowledge of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, can we define an alternative source for them? The answer may well lie in the literary accounts preserved in monastic libraries. The Clerkenwell priory in the twelfth century was a place of some learning and literary distinction, where knowledge of the form of the Sepulchre could have survived. It was here that The Hospitallers Riwle appears to have been written.15 This is a version of the Regula or Rule that was drawn up by the second Master of the Hospital in Jerusalem, Raymond du Puy, around the year 1130 and which was to form the essential code of the Order throughout its history. This text dates from 1181 to 1185 and is now the earliest extant version of the Rule. It seems to have been written by an Englishman, most probably a chaplain at Clerkenwell. The AngloNorman text varies slightly from the Latin original, in ways which suggest that the translator was thinking of the community in which he lived. He refers to a highway running past the house, where the poor and sick are lying on pallets, and to a church, where the clergy occupy the chancel. The latter reference, although not especially revealing, does indicate a building of some size, with both a nave and a chancel. Whoever translated the Riwle was not only fluent in Latin and French, but was in all probability familiar with the texts commonly found in monastic libraries throughout the kingdom. These normally included some of the accounts of pilgrims and travellers to Jerusalem, and there is one that would almost certainly have been known to a literate English cleric. This is the version of Adomnán’s history of the Holy Places that the Venerable Bede included in his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum. According to Bede: Adomnán [ninth abbot of Iona, 679–704] wrote a book about the Holy Places ... the man who dictated the information to him was Arculf, a bishop from Gaul, who had visited Jerusalem to see the Holy Places. Having toured all the Land of Promise, Arculf had travelled to Damascus, Constantinople, Alexandria and many islands; but as he was returning home, his ship was driven by a violent storm onto the western coast of Britain. After many adventures, he visited Christ’s servant Adomnán, who finding him learned in the Scriptures and well acquainted with the Holy Places, was delighted to welcome him and eager to listen to him. As a result he rapidly committed to writing everything of interest that Arculf said that he had seen at the Holy Places.16

K. V. Sinclair (ed.), The Hospitallers’ Riwle: Miracula et Regula Hospitalis Sancti Johannis Jerosalimitani, Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1984. The manuscript is in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 405. 16 Bede, A History of the English Church and People, trans. L. Sherley-Price, Harmondsworth, 1956, 294–6. The Arculf/Adomnán drawings are further discussed by R.

15

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FIG. 17.3.  PLAN OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE, PROBABLY THE LATEST KNOWN VERSION OF THE ARCULFADOMNÁN DRAWING, ENGLAND, LATE TWELFTH CENTURY

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Bede goes on to give a summary of Adomnán’s work, and subsequently wrote his own version of it under the title of De Locis Sanctis. However, his best known work remained his Ecclesiastical History, which was to be found in many monastic libraries and was read very widely; Bede specifically states that Adomnán’s record of Arculf ’s voyage would be of value to those people who lived far away from the Holy Places and could not visit them. Arculf ’s sojourn in the Middle East can be dated to 679 to 682, probably arriving in Iona in 683 or 684. His description of the Sepulchre is detailed, and Adomnán starts his transcription with the disclosure that Arculf made a drawing on a waxed tablet to demonstrate the form of the round church. This evidence of a plan of the Anastasis rotunda, drawn by Adomnán after Arculf, is given substance by several of the earliest surviving manuscripts of the text. There are forty-seven surviving medieval copies of Bede’s History scattered throughout Europe. Nine of these contain versions of Arculf ’s plans, including the Vienna Codex Griffith-Jones, ‘Arculf ’s Circles, Aachen’s Octagon, Germigny’s Cube: Three Riddles from Northern Europe’, 301–6 above, and Colour Pl. XXXII.

THE MILITARY ORDERS AND THE IDEA OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE

458, dating from the first half of the ninth century [Colour Pl. XXXII; cf. Fig. 17.3].17 Arculf describes the rotunda as ‘circular in shape surrounded by three walls and supported on twelve columns. Between each of the walls there is a broad passage, where three altars stand at three places against the central wall, to the north, south and west. There are eight doors or entrances through the three walls, four facing east and four facing west.’18 In the original fourth-century rotunda the twelve columns were arranged in groups of three and separated by pairs of large square pillars, giving a total of twenty supports. Moreover, the Byzantine restoration of Constantine Monomachos (1048) reduced the twelve columns to ten. However, the plan that Arculf sketched on a wax tablet and that Adomnán reproduced does not show the columns at all. Additional sources for the medieval round churches can be found in the images of the Holy Sepulchre that were widely distributed from early Christian times on ampullae, ivories and in mosaic. These survive in numbers in the West and, although representing the tomb rather than the rotunda, show one half of a round structure with either four or six columns. Thus, confusion about the number of columns in the Sepulchre is understandable. In conclusion, the English round churches which are commonly considered to be ‘copies’ of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem were probably not based upon direct knowledge of the Holy Places in Jerusalem, but were inspired by the written descriptions of pilgrims, especially Arculf as transmitted to Adomnán and related by Bede. These ideas were first expressed in the Old Temple in Holborn and the Hospitaller church in Clerkenwell, and these two buildings provided the first examples of the type in England.

17 18

 Vienna, Österreichisches Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 458, f. 4v. In Adomnán, DLS 1.2.3–4 (cf. Wilkinson, Pilgrims, 171).

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B

etween the Western capture of Jerusalem in 1099 and its eventual return to local control in 1187, a little-understood architectural movement swept throughout southern England and the Midlands [Fig. 18.1].1 For the first time, the English landscape featured local ‘copies’ of the Anastasis Rotunda of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the site traditionally associated with Jesus’ resurrection and empty tomb.2 At least fifteen Holy Sepulchre copies were built in England between the First Crusade and the fall of Jerusalem; a sixteenth was built when Latin Christians briefly regained Jerusalem by treaty (1229–44) [Table 18.1, p. 371 below].3 Therefore, there is a direct correlation between the Western Christian capture of Jerusalem and the appearance of the first English round church, just as there is a direct correlation between the Latin loss 1 This chapter includes research conducted for my doctoral dissertation, ‘The Round Church Movement in Twelfth-Century England: Crusaders, Pilgrims, and the Holy Sepulchre’ [Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 2017]. This research was made possible by a two-year fellowship to the Warburg Institute from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and by short-term grants from the Lindner Center for Art History at the University of Virginia and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. It is a pleasure to acknowledge their generous support. Thanks also to Lisa A. Reilly, Robin Griffith-Jones and Eric Fernie for their helpful comments on this chapter. 2 On round churches as Holy Sepulchre ‘copies’, see Krautheimer, ‘Introduction’. For an introduction to English round churches, see W. St John Hope, ‘Round-Naved Churches in England and their Connexion with the Orders of the Temple and of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem’, Archaeologia Cantiana 33 (1918), 63–70, and M. Gervers, ‘Rotundae Anglicanae’, Actes du XXIIe Congrès International d’histoire de l’art: Budapest 1969. Évolution générale et développements régionaux en histoire de l’art [Acts of the 22nd International Congress of the History of Art, Budapest, 1969], 3 vols, Budapest, 1972, I, 359–76. 3 Note that St John the Baptist, Little Maplestead, is often described as a fourteenthcentury building, but Michael Gervers has shown that documentary evidence supports a construction date of c. 1240–45. M. Gervers (ed.), The Cartulary of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem in England: Secunda Camera, Oxford, 1982, xliv, 70. See notes at the end of Table 18.1 for further explanation of round church dates.

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FIG. 18.1.  ROUND CHURCHES STILL STAND IN CAMBRIDGE, LITTLE MAPLESTEAD, LONDON (NEW TEMPLE) AND NORTHAMPTON. RUINS OR ABOVE-GROUND FOUNDATIONS ARE VISIBLE AT LUDLOW, DOVER, GARWAY AND WEST THURROCK. FOUNDATIONS

of the city and the end of the English round church movement. The full significance of this phenomenon has been overlooked due to the poor survival rate of English round churches: nearly three-quarters of these structures have been destroyed.4 Yet, by analysing the full round church corpus in its architectural, political, religious and geographical contexts, we can finally begin to understand the importance of the round church movement to twelfth-century English society. These distinctive churches, unknown in England before the crusades, allowed the English to claim the Church of the Holy Sepulchre as part of their own spiritual heritage. Above all, architectural copies of the Anastasis Rotunda signified the resurrection of Jesus, the core tenet of the Christian faith. Yet the round church took on additional meaning in the crusade era: Western Christian control of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was a stated objective of the First Crusade. The sudden appearance of round churches in England after the crusader capture of Jerusalem simultaneously introduced religious and political signifiers within the rotunda building form. Personal devotion to the site of the resurrection could thus work in tandem with the potential political agendas of English Holy Sepulchre patrons, and these emphases

HAVE BEEN EXCAVATED AND REBURIED AT LONDON (OLD TEMPLE), TEMPLE BRUER AND HEREFORD. EXCAVATED FOUNDATIONS ARE MARKED IN MODERN STONE AT BRISTOL AND LONDON (CLERKENWELL). THE SITES AT ASLACKBY, CHICHESTER AND WOODSTOCK HAVE NOT YET BEEN EXCAVATED.

Only the rotundas of the Temple Church, London; Holy Sepulchre, Cambridge; Holy Sepulchre, Northampton; and St John the Baptist, Little Maplestead, are still in use. The chapel of St Mary Magdalene at Ludlow Castle stands as a roofless ruin. Foundations of former round churches are visible at Dover, Garway and West Thurrock, while modern stones mark the location of round naves in Bristol and at St John’s, Clerkenwell, in London. Foundations have been excavated and reburied in Hereford, London (Old Temple) and Temple Bruer. Former round churches at Chichester and Woodstock were sketched in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries respectively, while the round church at Aslackby is known through antiquarian descriptions. 4

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could shift depending upon the attitudes of the specific congregants, pilgrims and passers-by who interacted with the building. In addition to allowing lay and monastic worshippers to associate personally with the site of Jesus’ resurrection, the English round church movement shows that the English were heavily invested in Jerusalem from the early days of the twelfth century. The political message embodied in the English round church movement contradicts traditional narratives regarding England and the crusades. These histories, based primarily upon textual evidence, typically begin with Richard the Lionheart and the Third Crusade (1189–92).5 There are two key reasons for this focus. First, the number of documented English fighters who participated in the First and Second Crusades (1096 to 1102 and 1147 to 1149) is small compared with that of the Franks.6 This could be attributed in part to the surviving chronicles of the early crusades, which were written by and about Frankish fighters.7 But other twelfth-century documents also reinforce this imbalance. Christopher Tyerman’s exhaustive search for English crusaders in the textual record has revealed far more English fighters than previously imagined, yet the number of Englishmen on the First and Second Crusades remains small when compared with their Frankish neighbours.8 If evidence of crusade interest is sought only in charters, wills and chronicles, then it is natural to conclude that the crusades did not play a significant role in the culture of early twelfthcentury England. Secondly, the larger political picture in England could lead historians to the same conclusion. The First Crusade was launched only thirty years after the Norman Conquest, a time of continued upheaval in the newly 5 C. Tyerman, England and the Crusades, 1095–1588, Chicago and London, 1988, 35; S. Lloyd, English Society and the Crusade: 1216–1307, Oxford, 1988, 2. On the long-standing assumption that English crusade history really begins with Richard I, Tyerman cites R. W. Southern, Medieval Humanism, Oxford, 1970, 158, although this theory has been widespread throughout crusade studies for generations. Lloyd is consistent with previous scholars in noting: ‘So far as participation is concerned, the period stretching from the Third Crusade, when Englishmen first participated in large numbers under the banner of Richard I, until the crusade of 1270–72, the last large-scale expedition to leave these shores, was certainly the heyday of English crusading activity.’ 6 Tyerman, England and the Crusades, 15–18. 7 Such as Guibert of Nogent, The Deeds of God through the Franks [Gesta Dei Per Francos], trans. R. Levine, Woodbridge, 1997. Although Western fighters could be generically lumped together as ‘Franks’, this is not enough to account for a potentially under-documented English presence. 8 Tyerman, England and the Crusades [n. 5 above], 15, 32, 58. Tyerman essentially confirms that the number of English participants in the First Crusade is low compared with the Franks, but his enumeration of English fighters on the Second Crusade shows that participation was much higher than previously understood. Still, he admits, ‘the Third Crusade was also the first in which the participation of the English was crucial’. Also, Tyerman rightly points out that notions of ‘Englishness’ are complicated in the Anglo-Norman era. For my purposes, I define an English crusader as one who departs from or returns to England. By expanding the definition to include anyone who was born in or owned a home in England, even Richard I could be considered English.

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reorganized English political landscape. After Henry I’s long and stable reign (1100–35), the Anarchy of Stephen and Matilda (1135–54) might have monopolized the country’s attention. One could assume that these domestic issues would leave little time for an English interest in international affairs. Yet, by looking at the pattern of round church construction, it becomes clear that English interest in the Holy Land began to emerge during the reign of Henry I and only grew during the chaos of Stephen and Matilda. The English round church movement shows that local concern for Jerusalem was strong, even in a time of national political uncertainty and low crusader participation. England’s broader architectural context confirms that the timing of these Holy Sepulchre copies was significant. From the Anglo-Saxon era through the modern period, centrally planned churches were extremely rare in England; round-naved churches were almost unknown before the time of the crusades.9 English round churches therefore did not emerge from a long-standing local aesthetic, nor did the English adopt the practice of creating Holy Sepulchre copies in the ninth, tenth or eleventh centuries, as their neighbours on the continent had done. Such references could take the form of a Holy Sepulchre side chapel, a copy of the aedicule surrounding Christ’s empty tomb, or a domed structure incorporated into a basilican church; these continental ‘copies’ could also feature either a truly round or polygonal nave.10 English builders, however, did not confuse the Anastasis Rotunda with the octagonal Dome of the Rock, nor did they approximate the circular form with a polygon.11 While each church varied in its diameter, presence of arcading, shape of its east 9 Of the five Anglo-Saxon churches sometimes described as ‘round’, only two actually fit that description. Centrally planned churches were known at Hexham Priory (early eighth century) and Athelney Abbey (late ninth century), both consisting of a central space flanked by four lobes or arms. The octagon at Canterbury (begun in the mid eleventh century but never completed) was intended to connect the earlier axial churches of St Mary and SS Peter and Paul; it was not a freestanding church but an awkward (and ultimately abandoned) architectural experiment. Only the naves at Abingdon Abbey (tenth century) and Bury St Edmunds (eleventh century) have textual evidence of round naves, though Gabrielle Lambrick has raised doubts about the reliability of the Abingdon Chronicle (Cotton Vitellius A xiii), the source of the Abingdon rotunda tradition (cancellus rotundus erat; ecclesia et rotunda, duplicem habens longitudinem quam cancellus; turris quoque rotunda erat). Gervers considers Abingdon, Bury St Edmunds, Hexham and Canterbury under the broader umbrella of Anglo-Saxon rotundas, but I would place only the first two within the true rotunda category. M. Biddle, G. Lambrick and J. N. L. Myres, ‘The Early History of Abingdon, Berkshire, and its Abbey’, Medieval Archaeology 12 (1968), 42–5 and 60–4; H. M. and J. Taylor, Anglo-Saxon Architecture, Cambridge, 1965–78, I, 137–41, and III, 979–80; R. Gem, ‘Toward an Iconography of Anglo-Saxon Architecture’, JWCI 46 (1983), 8–12; Gervers, ‘Rotundae Anglicanae’ [n. 2 above], 360–2. 10 Krautheimer, ‘Introduction’; J. A. E. Kroesen, The Sepulchrum Domini through the Ages: Its Form and Function, Leuven, 2000, 14–34; Morris, Sepulchre, 121, 131, 154–7, 162–4, 230–8. 11 Krautheimer, ‘Introduction’, 119. In cataloguing continental Holy Sepulchres, Krautheimer suggested that round and polygonal forms were ‘interchangeable’ to medieval builders, but he did not analyse English examples in any detail. If medieval builders were as casual in reproducing geometric forms as he suggests, the English were an exception to his rule.

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end, use of materials and other details, the consistency of their nave plans is striking: every English Holy Sepulchre copy with a confirmed ground plan included a truly round nave [Fig. 18.2].12 The following plans reveal the current state of knowledge regarding the original building forms of English round churches.13 While writers over the course of the last century and a half have offered speculative reconstructions of selected sites, these plans may embellish or occasionally contradict the actual archaeological evidence for details such as the original east end or the number of columns found in the nave arcade.14

12 Plans of standing fabric for churches at Cambridge, Northampton, Little Maplestead and Temple Church in London are based upon my own measurements. Sources of measurements and descriptions of excavated fabric are noted below. Many thanks to Matthew W. Bruce for technical advice in the creation of these plans. 13 Although more than half of the churches featured later medieval additions, Fig. 18.2 represents original ground-plans as confirmed by standing fabric or excavated remains. Extrapolations have been made only in the following situations: (1) if part of a rounded nave wall has been excavated, the entire round nave is depicted in the plan; and (2) if a north or south chancel wall has been excavated, its presumed parallel is depicted in the plan. Where eastern terminations, number of arcade columns or other details are unconfirmed, they are not included in these plans. A combination of original phase, multi-phase and later medieval phase plans of English round churches have been published by Hope, ‘Round-Naved Churches in England’ [n. 2 above], pls I–VI; Gervers, ‘Rotundae Anglicanae’ [n. 2 above], III, 110 (fig. 92); and B. Sloane and G. Malcolm, Excavations at the Priory of the Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem, Clerkenwell, London, London, 2004, fig. 4. 14 Such as the presumed (but archaeologically unsupported) apsidal east ends suggested at St John’s (Clerkenwell), Temple Church (London) and St Giles (Hereford). At Clerkenwell, all evidence of the original east end has been lost due to later building on the site, and stone robbing in the nave arcade was so thorough that no column bases survived. Despite these gaps, E. W. Hudson postulated an eight-column arcade, and Alfred Clapham went on to assume that the east end must have been apsidal. Perhaps more surprisingly, the squared east walls documented by excavators at Temple Church, London, and St Giles, Hereford, have not informed their published ground plans. When Walter Godfrey uncovered the foundations of the original east end at Temple Church, he noted that ‘the eastern face [of the cross-wall] was tolerably intact’, and he did not describe any remnant of curved stone beyond this face. He concludes that this wall ‘would appear to have represented either a square east end, or more probably the chord of the apse’. At St Giles, Hereford, Alfred Watkins clearly notes that the church foundations include a ‘square-ended’ chancel, and his site photographs do not reveal any curvature to the chancel wall. Only four years later, the RCHME published a plan of St Giles drawn by Hereford Cathedral architect W. E. H. Clarke that included part of a small, rounded apse; justifications for this decision were not offered. In all three cases, the delineators’ hopes for a rounded apse outweighed the archaeological evidence, and I have therefore followed the excavators’ descriptions and measurements in my plans. E. W. Hudson, ‘The Church of St John of Jerusalem (Knights Hospitallers), Clerkenwell’, JRIBA, 3rd series, 7 (Nov. 1899 – Oct. 1900), 465–9; A. W. Clapham, ‘St John of Jerusalem, Clerkenwell’, in Some Famous Buildings and their Story, Westminster, 1913, fig. 72; W. H. Godfrey, ‘Recent Discoveries at the Temple, London, and Notes on the Topography of the Site’, Archaeologia 95 (1953), 125–7 and pl. XLVI; A. Watkins, ‘St Giles Chapel, Hereford. Discovery of a Round Church’, Transactions of the Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club (1927), 104, vs RCHME, An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in Herefordshire, I, South West, London, 1931, 131. Additional measurements for Clerkenwell in Sloane and Malcolm, Excavations at the Priory [n. 13 above], 29–32.

FIG. 18.2.  ENGLISH ROUND CHURCHES: CONFIRMED ORIGINAL PLANS AFTER STANDING AND EXCAVATED BUILDING FABRIC. FOR DATA SOURCES, SEE NOTES 12–17, ABOVE.

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The following plans do not include those speculations, even when such reconstructions have become part of the accepted history of a given site. Of the sixteen confirmed English round church sites, Aslackby, Chichester and Woodstock have not been excavated and are therefore not included in Fig. 18.2. It is possible to partially plot the original plans of round churches at Cambridge, Garway, Clerkenwell, Northampton and the Old Temple in Holborn, though their original east ends remain unconfirmed.15 Complete ground-plans for the remaining eight churches have been established, either through standing fabric or excavation.16 As these plans reveal, every English Holy Sepulchre church began as a two-celled structure with a round nave and oblong chancel. Most chancels terminated in either a squared east end or a rounded apse, though the chapel of St Mary Magdalene at Ludlow Castle was known to feature a polygonal apse.17 This consistency has been forgotten due to later medieval additions such as chancel extensions, side aisles, chapels and towers, but it was a key part of the experience of the English round church movement. English builders adapted the highly evocative rotunda form to fit the two-cell plan typical of many smaller English churches, allowing worshippers to embrace the resurrection symbolism of the Anastasis Rotunda while retaining the separate chancel that was so vital to their established patterns of worship.18 This simple plan aided the adoption of the rotunda form by a diverse set of worshipping communities. 15 The eastern terminations at Cambridge and Garway have not been excavated, nor has any part of the chancel at the Old Temple in Holborn. At Northampton, Cox and Serjeantson offered the conflicting assertion that the east end was apsidal, ‘although its exact position could not be definitely traced’. I have therefore left the eastern termination blank, pending further discoveries. Other descriptions and measurements from RCHME, An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in the City of Cambridge, London, 1959, 255; RCHME, Herefordshire, I, 19–20; A. Telfer, ‘Locating the First Knights Templar Church’, London Archaeologist, Summer 2002, 5; Hope, ‘Round-Naved Churches’ [n. 2 above], 65; J. C. Cox and R. M. Serjeantson, A History of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Northampton, Northampton, 1897, 39. 16 Descriptions and measurements from S. Brown, ‘Excavations at Temple Church, Bristol: A Report on the Excavations by Andrew Saunders, 1960’, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society 126 (2008), 119, 127; Wessex Archaeology, Temple Church, Bristol: Building Recording Archive Report I: Text (October 2000), 5; ‘Ruins of a Round Church at Dover’, Archaeologia Cantiana 11 (1877), 45–6; G. Coppack, ‘The Round Chapel of St Mary Magdalene’, in R. Shoesmith and A. Johnson (eds), Ludlow Castle: Its History and Buildings, Little Logaston, 2006, 145–6; W. St John Hope, ‘The Round Church of the Knights Templars at Temple Bruer, Lincolnshire’, Archaeologia 61 (1908), 186–8; B. Milton, ‘Excavations at St Clement’s Church West Thurrock, Essex, 1979’, in Four Church Excavations in Essex, Chelmsford, 1984, 7; Watkins, ‘St Giles Chapel, Hereford’ [n. 14 above], 104; Godfrey, ‘Recent Discoveries at the Temple, London’ [n. 14 above], 125. 17 Coppack, ‘The Round Chapel of St Mary Magdalene’ [n. 16 above], 145–6. 18 On Templar liturgy in Jerusalem and its potential translation to Temple Church, London, see S. Salvadó, ‘Commemorating the Rotunda in the Round: The Medieval Latin Liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and its Performance in the West’, 413–28 below.

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THE EXPERIENCE OF THE ENGLISH ROUND CHURCH MOVEMENT Even more than a large crusade muster roll, English round churches showed that the Holy Sepulchre was part of the lives of English worshippers across social strata. Used as military order chapels, parish churches, private oratoria and pilgrimage destinations, English Holy Sepulchre copies could be found in towns, cities and rural settings throughout the southern half of the country. English round church sites are almost equally divided between town and country settings. In addition to the three round churches in London, the towns of Bristol, Cambridge, Northampton, Dover, Chichester and Hereford all boasted Holy Sepulchre copies on the periphery of their urban cores.19 Round churches could also be found in the small villages and settlements at Aslackby, Temple Bruer, Little Maplestead, West Thurrock and Garway, as well as the more private communities at Woodstock Palace and Ludlow Castle. Although these landscape settings are diverse, they share a certain level of accessibility and, in most cases, visibility. This visibility, coupled with the novelty of the round church form, could have made these new structures a matter of interest among local residents and passers-by. While we unfortunately do not have any surviving architectural critiques of these buildings, the lack of a round church tradition before the twelfth century indicates that these new churches would have quickly become landmarks in their local communities. The rarity of a round church plan within the larger corpus of twelfthcentury English churches suggests the question: why build a round church in a specific location? Eight of the nine urban churches were located outside the original walls of their respective towns, though this should not be viewed as a type of urban exile.20 Instead, land-rich suburban sites would have been the most logical places to build new monastic communities, and the creation of a new parish would necessarily happen in a newly settled (or soon-to-be settled) part of the town. More important than their extramural location is their proximity to, rather than exclusion from, such population centres. Round churches in London, Bristol, Cambridge, Northampton, Dover, Chichester and Hereford were highly visible from major roads and/or waterways going into and out of the town centres. These Holy Sepulchre analogues would have thus reminded thousands of English residents of the site of the resurrection and the fight for Jerusalem on a daily basis. 19 For a more detailed assessment of the Old Temple, New Temple, St John’s (Clerkenwell) and the non-round church of St Sepulchre-without-Newgate within the London landscape, see C. E. Hundley, ‘A New Jerusalem in Four Parts: The Holy Sepulchres of Twelfth-Century London’, in B. Quash, A. Rosen and C. Reddaway (eds), Visualising a Sacred City: London, Art and Religion, London, 2016, 52–65. 20 Holy Sepulchre, Northampton, was built just inside the city walls, near the north gate.

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Rural round churches would seem to contradict this pattern, but many were also placed in highly visible locations. The placement of a round church in the village of Aslackby in Lincolnshire seems particularly difficult to understand until its location is pinpointed on a map of Roman Britain.21 Both Aslackby and Temple Bruer were located along the network of Roman roads between London and York – a system which continued to serve its purpose through the medieval era and beyond. Sited in the midst of heathland, Temple Bruer would have been visible for miles around; even today, its surviving tower is a landmark in the modern farmland. Similarly isolated amidst the fields of Essex, Little Maplestead was sited near the road (possibly a Roman road) from Braintree to Bury St Edmunds.22 Attracting travellers from the river, today’s heavily industrial West Thurrock was once a rural community near a Thames river crossing. The Greenhithe ferry near West Thurrock has been associated with pilgrimage traffic to Canterbury since the late twelfth century, but it surely served other travellers long beforehand.23 The West Thurrock rotunda, the smallest English Holy Sepulchre copy, was thus accessible and visible to thousands of travellers in the course of a year, even though its primary parish audience must have remained small. Although these rural round churches may have seemed remote, they were all visible and accessible by established roads and/or waterways. Unlike most English round churches, the private chapels at Woodstock Palace and Ludlow Castle were truly hidden from passers-by. While the roof over the round chapel at Woodstock was visible above the surrounding palace walls, this view would only have been available to a visitor who was already in the grounds of the palace; it was not an inviting pilgrimage stop, as other Holy Sepulchres in the landscape may have been.24 The chapel of Mary Magdalene at Ludlow Castle, on the other hand, is entirely hidden by the curtain walls of the castle. Although Ludlow Castle is situated immediately adjacent to the town of Ludlow, the round chapel itself is not visible outside the castle. By definition, these private chapels served the residents and guests of each respective complex. These chapels brought the Holy Sepulchre into the homes of a select few, and they logically serve as exceptions to the general rules regarding high levels of visibility and accessibility shown by other English round churches. Ordnance Survey Map of Roman Britain, 6th edn, Southampton, 2011. OS Map of Roman Britain. 23 B. Milton, ‘Excavations at St Clement’s Church’, in Four Church Excavations in Essex, Chelmsford, 1984, 1; P. Andrews et al., ‘West Thurrock: Late Prehistoric Settlement, Roman Burials and the Medieval Manor House, Channel Tunnel Rail Link Excavations 2002’, Essex Archaeology and History 40 (2009), 43. 24 David Park has recently discussed the history of Woodstock Palace in ‘“Built in the Jewish Fashion”: The Round Chapel of Woodstock Palace in a Crusader Context’ (paper presented at Tomb and Temple: Reimagining the Sacred Buildings of Jerusalem, Courtauld Institute and Temple Church Conference, 16 March 2013). I appreciate his generosity in sharing his findings with me. 21

22

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Although stretching for less than 150 years, the English round church movement made the Holy Sepulchre a part of at least sixteen neighbourhoods. The pervasiveness of this trend throughout southern England and into the Midlands can be seen in the varied worshipping communities who employed the Holy Sepulchre form. Of the sixteen confirmed round church sites, nine were built by the Knights Templar or Knights Hospitaller; three were originally built for parish use; one was built by the Canons of the Holy Sepulchre and later used by a parish; two were built as private chapels; and one served as a hospital chapel [Table 18.1, p. 371 below]. Though round churches have been closely linked with the military orders, this short inventory shows that they were not the exclusive domain of the Knights Templar and Hospitaller. Nor was the rotunda the default form of a military order chapel or church. Of the English military order properties with a confirmed chapel or local advowson church, only 6.7% featured a round chapel or church, 53.3% included a rectilinear chapel or church, while the form of the remaining 40% is not known.25 Similarly, the vast majority of parish churches, pilgrimage sites and private chapels built in England in the twelfth century were rectilinear – either rectangular or cruciform. Even though additional round church sites may still be confirmed, the existing corpus shows that these unusual structures must have been a remarkable presence in the English landscape.26 After building a round church in a well-trafficked area, worshipping communities might employ these structures for multiple purposes. Just as a round church could signify multiple meanings to various audiences, each structure could accommodate more than one use. The following short studies of Templar churches at London, Bristol and Dover reveal the diverse uses to which a military order church could be put, and 25 When both a military order chapel and an advowson church are documented in the same village or town, the chapel is presumed to be the primary worship space of the Templars or Hospitallers. When no record of a chapel survives but the military monks held the local advowson, then the parish church is presumed to be the primary worship space of the Templars or Hospitallers. Traditionally, scholars had assumed that only preceptories and commanderies would have a chapel on site, though more recent discoveries by Roberta Gilchrist and others have challenged this notion. The question is further complicated by the changing status of Templar and Hospitaller sites over time. A one-time preceptory could be demoted to a manor or vice versa, complicating the historian’s expectations regarding standard space allocation within a specific type of settlement. My list includes all preceptories, camerae and manors with a standing, excavated or documented chapel, chaplain and/or local advowson church. Sources for this data include L. B. Larking (ed.), The Knights Hospitallers in England: Being the Report of Prior Philip de Thame to the Grand Master Elyan de Villanova for AD 1338, Camden Society, 1857; B. A. Lees (ed.), Records of the Templars in England in the Twelfth Century: The Inquest of 1185 with Illustrative Charters and Documents, London, 1935; D. Knowles and R. N. Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses: England and Wales, 2nd edn, London, 1971, 290–309; R. Gilchrist, Contemplation and Action: The Other Monasticism, London, 1995, 79, 87–96; English Heritage Pastscape, http://www. pastscape.org.uk; and the respective Victoria County Histories. 26 Additional rumoured sites are currently under investigation.

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they expand our understanding of the importance of the round church movement to lay and monastic worshippers. Military order chapels served the daily religious needs of the resident community, but they could also function as parish churches, pilgrimage destinations and even burial sites. Holy Sepulchre burials emphasized the religious message of the round church movement, but their spiritual significance within such an evocative architectural form has received little attention.

TEMPLE CHURCH, LONDON: BURIALS AT THE SITE OF THE RESURRECTION The well-known effigies at Temple Church in London date to the thirteenth century, which could suggest that burial within the twelfthcentury rotunda was a later practice, an adaptation of the space [Colour Pl. XL].27 However, the excavated remains tell a different story. During renovation works in the early 1840s, workmen discovered eight coffins in the centre of the rotunda and one coffin in the western portion of the ambulatory.28 The discovery of coffins under the nave floor would hardly be surprising in light of the effigies above, but the placement of the coffins was significant. According to C. G. Addison, the coffins were housed within an ‘arched vault, which had been formed in the inner circular foundation of the church, supporting the clustered columns and the round tower’.29 It would only have been practical to create such an arched vault as part of the original building campaign, though the effigies post-date the construction of the Round by about a hundred years.30 Further evidence for early burials was found within the rubble foundation of the arcade itself. Edward Richardson, restorer of the effigies, explains: This line of Stone and Leaden Coffins was terminated on the north by a recess resembling a grave … which was constructed in the inner circular rubble foundation, and would have remained unknown, but for the circumstance of a scaffold-pole breaking into it. This grave was found to contain the remains of a human skeleton, small portions of coarse cloth, and some pieces of rotten wood. It seemed to have been constructed at the time of building the foundation wall in the latter half of the 27 The original placement of the effigies and their potential correspondence with known coffins has been a matter of debate. For more on the burials and the effigies, see D. Park, ‘Medieval Burials and Monuments’, in Temple Church, 67–91, and P. J. Lankester, ‘The Thirteenth-Century Military Effigies in the Temple Church’, Temple Church, 93–134. 28 E. Richardson, The Ancient Stone and Leaden Coffins, Encaustic Tiles, etc. Recently Discovered in the Temple Church, London, 1845, Pl. I. 29 C. G. Addison, The Temple Church, London, 1843, 91. Here, the ‘round tower’ is actually the round nave. 30 Lankester suggests that the effigies date to c. 1240–80: Lankester, ‘The ThirteenthCentury Military Effigies’ [n. 27 above], 133–4.

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twelfth century, and appearances indicated that the body was placed in it before the building was completed. Probably there had been a Coffin of wood which had perished, as decayed pieces of wood were found, and there was no arching over the recess, but only six inches of horizontal rubble work of the same kind as the rest of the wall.31

Additionally, Richardson notes that two of the lead coffins ‘were found partially inclosed by a decayed wall of rubble, of the same kind as the rubble work throughout the basement of the building’.32 The presence of one burial within the arcade foundation itself, and of two more surrounded by a similar rubble wall, shows that the knights intended to harness the resurrection symbolism of the Holy Sepulchre from the very beginning; it was not a thirteenth-century afterthought.33 Yet neither Addison nor Richardson commented upon the spiritual significance of designing this Holy Sepulchre copy for use as a burial space. Burials within a medieval church would hardly be worthy of comment were it not for the extraordinary form of the Temple Church nave. A church explicitly constructed to resemble the Anastasis Rotunda brought the empty tomb of Christ home to England. By filling this empty tomb with the faithful, the Templars emphasized the personal hope of the resurrection, even as they fought for control of the earthly Jerusalem.

HOLY CROSS, BRISTOL: PARISHIONERS IN THE TEMPLE While burial within London’s New Temple was restricted to a select few, prayer in the places recalling Christ’s empty tomb was much more accessible. When the Templars or Hospitallers acquired land, they often obtained the advowson of the nearest parish church. In the cases of St Michael’s (Garway) and St John the Baptist (Little Maplestead), the Templars and Hospitallers, respectively, inherited churches in use by existing lay congregations.34 In both cases, the military orders chose to 31 Richardson, Stone and Leaden Coffins [n. 28 above], 14, 19. He goes on to suggest that this grave ‘may have been the last resting place of an early benefactor, or a distinguished member of the Order’. It is worth noting that Richardson’s ‘restoration’ of the effigies attracted much criticism, but his account of the building fabric here is invaluable. 32 Richardson, Stone and Leaden Coffins, 11, 13. 33 Based upon the details of the coffins (four of lead, four of Purbeck marble), Richardson dated the burials to the early thirteenth century, but his descriptions make it clear that at least some of the burials date to the earliest days of the building. He noted that the four lead coffins were buried deeper than the marble coffins, which may indicate that all of the lead coffins date to the first generations of the community: Richardson, Stone and Leaden Coffins, 18. 34 J. H. Matthews, Collections Towards the History and Antiquities of the County of Hereford in Continuation of Duncumb’s History: Hundred of Wormelow, Lower Division, Part I, Hereford, 1913, 39–41; Gervers, Secunda Camera [n. 3 above], xliv, 59.

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rebuild the parish churches as Holy Sepulchre copies. The exact methods for sharing the space are undocumented, though it was not unusual for monks of other orders to share their churches with lay congregations. Neither the Templar nor Hospitaller Rules specifically prohibit laity in their churches, as evidenced by the shared spaces at Garway and Little Maplestead.35 Either church could easily accommodate a few military monks in a small choir space within the chancel, along with a modest local congregation in the round nave. Other preceptories, such as London’s New Temple and the Priory of St John of Jerusalem, would have made exclusive use of their round churches: twelfth-century parish congregations are not recorded in either location.36 However, Templar preceptories without a neighbouring parish church would have served double duty, even if lay participation was not part of the original plan. The Templars’ suburban church of the Holy Cross in Bristol provides an interesting example of dual military order and lay use [Fig.18.3].37 Built by the Knights Templar c. 1145 and later passed to the Knights Hospitaller, Holy Cross/Temple Church served a lay congregation by at least the early fourteenth century, if not sooner.38 After the dissolution of the Templars, King Edward II presented the vicarage of Holy Cross to the nobleman John de Derneford in 1308.39 By 1349, the congregation had so many parishioners that their allocated churchyard was filled during the Black Death; in the same year, the knights are described as ‘parsons of that church’, indicating that perhaps the vicarage had passed back to the 35 J. M. Upton-Ward (ed. and trans.), The Rule of the Templars: The French Text of the Rule of the Order of the Knights Templar, Woodbridge, 1992, 23, 29, 100, 123; K. V. Sinclair (ed.), Latin Appendix to The Hospitallers’ Riwle, London, 1984, 70–2. For more on the general lay accessibility of Temple Church and the potential use of the space by the Templar community, see H. J. Nicholson, ‘At the Heart of Medieval London: The New Temple in the Middle Ages’, in Temple Church, 11–15, and V. Jansen, ‘Light and Pure: The Templars’ New Choir’, Temple Church, 57. 36 By the end of the twelfth century, William FitzStephen recorded 126 parish churches in London, which would reduce the need for military monks to share their churches with parishioners: William FitzStephen, Fitz-Stephen’s Description of the City of London [Descriptio noblissimae civitatis Londoniae], trans. [Samuel Pegge], London, 1772, 23. 37 The round nave was replaced in the later medieval era. The current church, bombed in World War II, consists of a ruined late-fourteenth-century rectangular nave and chancel, and a fifteenth-century tower: Brown, ‘Excavations at Temple Church, Bristol’ [n. 16 above], 125–6. Brown also points out the dual parish/military order use. 38 For the initial land grant, see Lees, Records of the Templars [n. 25 above], cxxxi and 58. Robert of Gloucester granted the land to the Templars some time before his death in 1147. The patronage of Robert, half-brother to Matilda, further undermines traditional historical narratives regarding England’s low level of interest in Jerusalem during the time of the Anarchy. If a partisan such as Robert had the time and money to patronize a Holy Sepulchre copy, it is hardly surprising that other patrons funded round churches throughout southern England and into the Midlands throughout the twelfth century. 39 Cal. Pat. R. Edward II: AD 1307–1313, 134. Stewart Brown also highlights this text to point out the presence of a congregation: Brown, ‘Excavations at Temple Church, Bristol’ [n. 16 above], 117. For additional documentation on the parishioners of Holy Cross during the Hospitaller era, see Cal. Pat. R. 5 Edward III – Part I, 1331, 68; Cal. Pat. R. 14 Edward III – Part I, 1340, 453.

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knights themselves.40 Together, these clues indicate that Holy Cross was used by both the Knights Hospitaller and by a lay congregation of some size by at least the middle of the fourteenth century. The Templars were effectively pioneers in this part of Bristol, and the support community that grew up around the preceptory would have logically used the nearest available church.41 Even if the preceptory church was not initially intended to serve a lay congregation, the separate nave and chancel plan made it possible for the two communities to worship together, separately. The Holy Sepulchre thus became a founding symbol of this newly settled tract of land, just across the river from Bristol.

BRADDEN CHAPEL, DOVER: PILGRIMS AND KNIGHTS ABOVE THE WESTERN CLIFFS Another example of a shared military order church could be found in the lost village of Bradden, near Dover. Today, the round chapel site Cal. Pat. R. 23 Edward III – Part III, 1349, 441. Archaeological investigations indicate that the Templars were probably the first occupants of the Temple Fee area: Bristol and Region Archaeological Services, ‘Archaeological Watching Brief at Temple Church, Church Lane, Bristol, Avon for English Heritage’, BA/D163, July 1995, 3. 40 41

FIG. 18.3.  MARKED FOUNDATIONS OF ORIGINAL NAVE AT HOLY CROSS (TEMPLE CHURCH), BRISTOL

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FIG. 18.4.  FOUNDATIONS OF BRADDEN CHAPEL, DOVER

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consists of complete nave and chancel foundations on the Western Cliffs, rediscovered in the early nineteenth century [Fig. 18.4].42 This church has not received the attention that it deserves, perhaps due to confusion over the actual name of the site.43 Yet the church’s Templar and later Hospitaller ownership, situation within a village and location along a pilgrim road reveal the likelihood that three worshipping communities shared this small chapel. The two-cell design would have allowed a few military monks and a few villagers to share the church during divine 42 The ruins were first discovered in 1806, W. H. Ireland, A New & Complete History of the County of Kent, II, London, 1829, 84. 43 This place-name confusion has caused controversy regarding the actual builders of the church. The round church near Dover was sited within the lost medieval village of Bradden or Braddone, where the Templars and later Hospitallers owned lands. The 1338 Hospitaller inventory of former Templar lands describes the assets of Temple Ewell: est ibidem unum manerium, iij. carucate terre, j. carucata apud Bradden, et xxx. marce de redditu assiso, et una ecclesia in proprios usus, que valent … xx. marcas. The location of the church – at Ewell or Bradden – is unclear from this text. But two years later, a document from the Canterbury Consistory Court describes ‘the chapel of Bradden’ as part of the holdings of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem. C. E. Woodruff, editor of the consistory court documents, notes that Bradden was located on the Western Heights at Dover. The chapel at Bradden and the round church usually described as sited in Dover are clearly one and the same. Larking, Knights Hospitallers in England [n. 25 above], 173; C. E. Woodruff, ‘Notes from a Fourteenth-Century Act-Book of the Consistory Court of Canterbury’, Archaeologia Cantiana 40 (1928), 57 [citing f. 17b Kl. December 1340]; Exchequer Minister’s Accounts, 38 Henry VIII, Roll 32, transcribed by J. F. Wadmore (Kent Archaeological Society Archives); and C. Cotton, ‘A Kentish Cartulary of the Order of St John of Jerusalem’, Kent Archaeological Society 9 (1930), 16.

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service, much like the small church at Little Maplestead. Its high levels of visibility and accessibility would also have made it an appealing stopping point for pilgrims.44 Later medieval pilgrims would have passed right by this small chapel on their way to the shrine at Canterbury, though the round church probably predates the death of Thomas Becket (1170).45 Both before and after the time of Becket, this English Holy Sepulchre would have been the last church a departing pilgrim might visit on the way to the harbour, and the first church he or she would see upon return to Dover. Located mere steps from the ancient North Downs Trackway, the foundations of this small church overlook the western harbour, which is an easy downhill walk from the church. The site’s ease of access would also make it an attractive destination for local residents, not merely a pious detour for pilgrims about to undertake a larger journey. Diana Webb has emphasized the local nature of medieval English pilgrimage,46 and this pattern suggests that the highly visible Holy Sepulchre churches may have been on the local pilgrim’s itinerary, despite the paucity of surviving textual evidence for such visits. Although the presence of pilgrims at Bradden is not confirmed through the textual record, the chapel’s landscape setting argues strongly for this use. Located on a well-travelled pilgrim road in the midst of a small village affiliated with the military orders, this church probably served a mixed audience of pilgrims, military monks and villagers. While pilgrimage churches were often designed to accommodate crowds of worshippers, it is important to remember that a small-scale building does not preclude a pilgrim presence. Although Temple Church in London could have physically accommodated more worshippers at one time than the chapel at Bradden, this alone is not proof of the New Temple’s pilgrim primacy. A small Holy Sepulchre replica offers a more personalized devotional experience, allowing individuals or small groups to spend time in prayer at a localized reminder of Christ’s resurrection. Such intimate settings encourage a prayer experience that is contemplative, affective, and shares more with the silent tomb on Easter morning than with the chaotic crush of a large pilgrim church. By design, such small pilgrimage chapels would have limited the number of worshippers who simultaneously participated in such a prayer experience. This exclusivity may have been appealing, and any resultant queues outside served to heighten the anticipation of the pilgrims’ eventual entrance into their local Anastasis Rotunda. While crowds could certainly worship at a larger 44 On continental Holy Sepulchres as proxy pilgrimage sites, see R. Ousterhout, ‘Loca Sancta and the Architectural Response to Pilgrimage’, in R. Ousterhout (ed.), The Blessings of Pilgrimage, Urbana, 1990, 108–24; on pilgrim indulgences to Old Temple and New Temple, see N. Hamonic, ‘Jerusalem in London: The New Temple Church’, 387–410 below. 45 See Table 18.1, p. 371 below. 46 D. Webb, ‘Pardons and Pilgrims’, in R. N. Swanson (ed.), Promissory Notes on the Treasury of Merits: Indulgences in Late Medieval Europe, Leiden, 2006, 268.

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Holy Sepulchre copy, as they did at the Jerusalem original, smaller round churches enabled pilgrims to imagine more effectively that they were in close contact with the empty tomb of their risen Lord.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ENGLISH ROUND CHURCH MOVEMENT The English round church movement was limited in its duration and precise in its evocation of the Anastasis Rotunda, but broad in its audience. Round naves were virtually unprecedented in England until the time of the crusades, and the varied worshipping communities who used these spaces should have ensured the survival of the round church tradition. The trend, however, died with the Western loss of Jerusalem in 1187. Only one round church, at Little Maplestead, was built after this date, but it was constructed around 1240 to 1244, during the time that Latin Christians briefly held Jerusalem by treaty (1229–44) [Table 18.1]. If Western Christians had held Jerusalem for an extended period of time, it is likely that Little Maplestead would have been the leader in a second wave of round church building, rather than a final echo of the round church movement. This direct correlation between Western Christian control of Jerusalem and the construction of English Holy Sepulchre copies shows that the English firmly identified with Jerusalem as co-inheritors, not as exiles. Even as the number of English fighters remained small, their contribution to the First and Second Crusades gave them a personal and national stake in the Holy Land. Unless the English and their continental allies maintained direct control over the holy city, English builders seemingly had no interest in constructing a Holy Sepulchre replica. And in subsequent years, the round church movement not only ceased but was partially erased from the English landscape. This erasure was gradual [Table 18.1]. Of the sixteen confirmed English round church sites, four replaced their round naves with rectangular naves in the later medieval period. Four more retained their original naves but added massive choirs and side-chapels, thereby altering the prominence of the round nave and changing the worshipper’s experience of the interior space.47 Ludlow Castle’s round nave still stands without its roof, though 47 Temple Church, London, gained a (now demolished) southern chapel dedicated to St Ann c. 1220 and its current hall choir c. 1240; the east end of St Sepulchre, Cambridge, was altered in the thirteenth and again in the fifteenth centuries; expansion of the east end at St Sepulchre, Northampton, began as early as the late twelfth century and continued through the fourteenth century; and Temple Bruer gained two eastern towers in the late twelfth century (one of which still stands), as well as a southern chapel, probably in the fourteenth century. Godfrey, ‘Recent Discoveries at the Temple, London’ [n. 14 above], 129; Jansen, ‘Light and Pure’ [n. 35 above], 45–66; RCHME, Cambridge, 255–6; W. Page (ed.), A History of the County of Northampton, III, London, 1930, 44–8; Hope, ‘The Round Church of the Knights Templars at Temple Bruer’ [n. 16 above], Pl. XX.

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later access passages from castle chambers to the nave and chancel would have altered its exterior appearance.48 Little Maplestead is the only English round church to retain its original nave and chancel, though the ruined foundations at Dover and the excavated (and reburied) foundations at Hereford retained their initial form until the buildings fell out of use.49 Documentary evidence indicates that an addition was built onto the Old Temple at Holborn, though the partial excavations of the site preclude the creation of a phased plan.50 Located within the palace, Woodstock chapel would have been difficult to drastically alter and it probably maintained its original round nave until the palace itself was demolished. Round churches at Aslackby and Chichester have not yet been excavated, so the extent of their medieval renovations remains unknown. The Holy Sepulchres of twelfth- and thirteenth-century England offer evidence of English commitment to Jerusalem despite limited military involvement, but they were perhaps more important for the thousands of English worshippers who would never visit the Holy Land in person. As landmarks in the heart of the city or in the midst of the heathland, these round churches served to remind passers-by that England held a claim to the spiritual heritage of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. For military monks, their own Holy Sepulchres provided a clear reminder of the goals of their work. Even as English Templars and Hospitallers were busy with everyday farming and financial activities, knights who lived next to a round chapel could not forget that their labours were in service of the war effort in the Levant. Most significantly, worshippers could stand in a structure that directly evoked the place of Christ’s resurrection. The English round church movement was important because it made the empty tomb of Jesus personally accessible to a wide audience of lay and monastic worshippers, and it made the Holy Sepulchre visible to thousands more who may simply have glimpsed the church from a busy road or waterway. Although three-quarters of the churches with round naves survived to the Reformation, only one quarter are still in use today. The churches of the Holy Sepulchre at Northampton and Cambridge preserve their dedications and thus maintain the memory of their inspiration. Temple Church in London and St John the Baptist in Little Maplestead are still strongly linked to their history with the military orders, even as they serve modern congregations. The resurrection symbolism of the rotunda remains a part of the worship life at Temple Church: recent Easter Saturday services have been held in the round nave, explicitly evoking the setting of Christ’s tomb. Yet the broader implications for English crusade history offered by

Coppack, ‘The Round Chapel of St Mary Magdalene’ [n. 16 above], 152–4. Watkins, ‘St Giles Chapel, Hereford’ [n. 14 above], 104. 50 In 1485, the king’s seal was transferred to a courier ‘at the Old Temple, London, in a low oratory by the chapel thereof ’. This suggests an addition to the round chapel, CCR 3 Richard III, 1485, 431. 48 49

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the round church movement have been forgotten. In a country without a tradition of round-naved churches, and in an era when English interest in the crusades was supposedly very low, church patrons, masons and worshippers created a set of Holy Sepulchre copies within the towns and countryside of twelfth-century England. English fighters would eventually join the crusades in greater numbers, beginning with the Third Crusade of Richard the Lionheart.51 But the round church movement reminds us that first they had to bring the Holy Sepulchre home.

51 Lloyd, English Society and the Crusade [n. 5 above], 2, 82. Lloyd notes particularly strong English participation in the Fifth Crusade (1218–22), while the crusade of 1270–72 sent the last major wave of English fighters to the Holy Land.

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TABLE 18.1: ENGLISH ROUND CHURCHES Site name Aslackby Preceptory (Lincs.) Holy Cross (Temple Church), Bristol (Som.) Holy Sepulchre, Cambridge St Sepulchre & St Bartholomew, Chichester (Ssx) Bradden Chapel, Dover (Kent) St Michael, Garway (Heref.) St Giles, Hereford St John the Baptist, Little Maplestead (Essex) St John, Clerkenwell (London) Old Temple, Holborn (London) New Temple (Temple Church), London St Mary Magdalene, Ludlow Castle (Salop.)

Founding community Knights Templar Knights Templar Canons of the Holy Sepulchre Parishioners Knights Templar Knights Templar & Parishioners Hospital community Knights Hospitaller & Parishioners Knights Hospitaller Knights Templar Knights Templar Castle residents

Holy Sepulchre, Northampton

Parishioners

Temple Bruer Preceptory (Lincs.)

Knights Templar

St Clement, West Thurrock (Essex) Woodstock Palace Chapel (Oxon.)

Parishioners Palace residents

Later communities Foundation Round date demolition date Knights Hospitaller c. 1164 Post-1540 [ruins still visible into 18c] Knights Hospitaller c. 1145 Late 14c & Parishioners Parishioners c. 1114–30 Still in use Parishioners

c. 1150s

1642

Knights Hospitaller Mid 12c

Post-1540

Knights Hospitaller c. 1170–87 & Parishioners

Late 13c / early 14c

Almshouse community Parishioners

Still in use

c. 1130s–50s 1682 c. 1240–44

Knights Hospitaller c. 1144

c. 1280–1330

Bishop of Lincoln

1595

c. 1140

Knights Hospitaller c. 1161 Still in use / legal community Castle residents c. 1120s–30s Roofless by early 18c but ruin still stands Parishioners c. 1100–15 Still in use Knights Hospitaller c. 1150s–60s Post-1540 [ruins still visible 1726] Parishioners c. 1100–40 Late 15c Palace residents

c. 1100–35

1720

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Aslackby Preceptory. Despite the acknowledged 1164 foundation grant, the actual construction of the preceptory is sometimes erroneously dated to the 1190s. Lees, Records of the Templars [n. 25 above], clxxxvi–clxxxvii, 80 and 96; William Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum, rev. ed., eds J. Caley, H. Ellis and Rev. B. Bandinel, London, 1846, VI.ii.835; Lincoln Diocesan Architectural Society Report, in Associated Architectural Societies’ Reports and Papers, 1861, VI, pt 1, xv. Holy Cross (Temple Church), Bristol [Fig. 18.3, p. 365 above]. The grant by Robert of Gloucester is undated, but construction must fall between the papal bull of 1139, which allowed the Templars to build their own churches, and the death of Robert in 1147. Lees, Records of the Templars, cxxxi and 58; Brown, ‘Excavations at Temple Church, Bristol’ [n. 16 above], 117 and 125–26; Innocent II, Omne Datum Optimum (29 March 1139), in M. Barber and K. Bate (eds), The Templars: Selected Sources, Manchester, 2002, 63. Holy Sepulchre, Cambridge. There has been some debate over whether the fraternitate Sancti Sepulchri mentioned in the Ramsey Abbey Chronicle (c. 1114–30) refers to the Canons of the Holy Sepulchre, but I have found no evidence to link the church with another order. W. D. Macray (ed.), Chronicon Abbatiae Rameseiensis, London, 1886, 258–9, 264; J. C. Dickinson, ‘English Regular Canons and the Continent in the Twelfth Century’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Fifth Series, 1 (1951), 73 n. 8; RCHME, Cambridge, lxvii; C. N. L. Brooke, ‘The Churches of Medieval Cambridge’, in D. Beales and G. Best (eds), History, Society and the Churches, Cambridge, 1985, 56. St Sepulchre & St Bartholomew, Chichester. The church first appears in the documentary record c. 1227–30. However, the small, round-headed windows in Dunstall’s sketches argue for a twelfth-century date. Local context would further narrow the range to the mid-twelfth century. Diocesan Record Office, Chichester, Ancient Charters of the Dean & Chapter of Chichester, 689–1674, Lists and Indexes no. 4. (1972), item 18; The Rev. Dr. Wellesley, ‘On Two Engravings, by John Dunstall, of “A Temple by Chichester”’, Sussex Archaeological Collections (SAC) V (1852), 277–80; P. Freeman, ‘On the Site of “A Temple by Chichester”’, SAC VII (1854), 56–60. R. Dally, The Chichester Guide: Containing the History and Antiquities of the City, Chichester, 1831, 17 and 86. Bradden Chapel, Dover [Fig. 18.4, p. 366 above]. No foundation documents survive. However, Ireland notes that when the ruin was uncovered in 1806, ‘the walls of the circular portion, from four to five feet high when cleared, were thirty inches thick, and ornamented by pilasters and niches’. This wall thickness and presence of pilasters suggests a twelfth-century, rather than later, date. Ireland, A New & Complete History of the County of Kent, II, London, 1829, 84; W. Minet, ‘Some Unpublished Plans of Dover Harbour’, Archaeologia 72 (1922), pl. XXXVI & XXXIX.

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St Michael, Garway. Although a foundation charter has not yet emerged, Richard I confirmed the grant at Garway in 1189. Rees suggests that the original charter dates c. 1185–88. The RCHME dates the extant chancel arch to c. 1175–80 and the current nave to the late thirteenth century, though an early fourteenth-century rebuilding date is also possible. ‘P.R.O. Cartae Antiquae, RR. 41, no. 12, July 6–December 31, 1189’, in Lees, Records of the Templars, 141; W. Rees, A History of the Order of St John of Jerusalem in Wales and on the Welsh Border, Cardiff, 1947, 51; RCHME, Herefordshire, I, 69–70; George Marshall, “The Church of the Knights Templars at Garway, Herefordshire,” Transactions of the Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club 1927– 29, pt. 1 (Dec. 1929), 87, 92–3, 97. St Giles, Hereford. Foundation documentation has not yet come to light, but its surviving tympanum has been linked with similar tympana at Shobdon and Rowlestone, both carved c. 1130s–50s. C. E. Keyser, A List of Norman Tympana and Lintels with Figure or Symbolical Sculpture Still or Till Recently Existing in the Churches of Great Britain, London, 1927, lxvii; M. Thurlby, The Herefordshire School of Romanesque Sculpture, Little Logaston, 1999, 71–2, 111–14, 116–17; R. Johnson, The Ancient Customs of the City of Hereford, London, 1882, 183. St John the Baptist, Little Maplestead. The RCHME dated the church of St John the Baptist, Little Maplestead to c. 1340, but Michael Gervers has argued that the current church was actually built a century earlier. He links the replacement of the original church of All Saints with a massive land donation by Simon of Odewell in 1242; Holy Land traveller William Joy also offered a small gift to light the newly renamed chapel of St John the Baptist c. 1245. Although the decorated windows are later insertions, the bell capitals in the nave arcade would be consistent with a c. 1240s date. RCHME, An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in Essex, I: North West, London, 1916, 184; Gervers, Secunda Camera [n. 3 above], xliv, 70; R. E. G. Kirk (ed.), Feet of Fines for Essex, I (AD 1182 – AD 1272), Colchester, 1899–1910, 142–3. St John, Clerkenwell (London). When the foundations of the round nave at Clerkenwell were unearthed in 1900, archaeologists and local historians assumed that this hitherto forgotten nave must have been the same structure destroyed in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. However, Barney Sloane and Gordon Malcolm have shown that a robber trench, dated c. 1280–1330, cut through the former site of the round nave wall. My thanks to Barney Sloane for discussing this evidence with me in greater detail. J. H. Round, ‘The Foundation of the Priories of St Mary and of St John, Clerkenwell’, Archaeologia 66 (1899), 226 and P. Taylor, ‘Clerkenwell and the Religious Foundations of Jordan de Bricett: A Re-examination’, Historical Research 63 (1990), 17–18; T. W. Wood and H. W. Fincham, An Illustrated Guide to the Remains of the Ancient Priory, and the Present

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Parish Church of St John at Clerkenwell, 1903, 8; Sloane and Malcolm, Excavations at the Priory [n. 13 above], 69–71. Old Temple, Holborn (London). The foundation date of the church is not recorded, but it could not have been built before 1139, when the papal bull of Innocent II, Omne Datum Optimum, allowed the Templars to build their own oratories for the first time. David Park comes to a similar conclusion; Helen Nicholson dated the acquisition of the Old Temple site to c. 1135–44, with Christopher Wilson placing the actual construction date of the church to some time before 1144. D. Park, ‘Medieval Burials and Monuments’, in Temple Church, 70; H. J. Nicholson, ‘At the Heart of Medieval London: The New Temple in the Middle Ages’, Temple Church, 1; and C. Wilson, ‘Gothic Architecture Transplanted’, Temple Church, 21. Innocent II, Omne Datum Optimum (29 March 1139), in M. Barber and K. Bate, The Templars: Selected Sources, Manchester, 2002, 63; J. Stow, A Survey of London: Reprinted from the Text of 1603, ed. C. L. Kingsford, Oxford, 1908 [1603], 87. New Temple (Temple Church), London. Foundation documentation for the New Temple does not survive, but construction must have begun shortly before the Old Temple was sold to the Bishop of Lincoln in 1161. Lees, Records of the Templars, xxxix, liii, lxxxvii–xc, 158–60; also discussed by C. Wilson, ‘Gothic Architecture Transplanted’, in Temple Church, 21. St Mary Magdalene, Ludlow Castle. No foundation documents have come to light, but Coppack dates the church to c. 1120s–30s on architectural grounds. Coppack, ‘The Round Chapel of St Mary Magdalene’ [n. 16 above], and P. Hughes, ‘The Castle in Decline’, in R. Shoesmith and A. Johnson (eds), Ludlow Castle: Its History and Buildings, Little Logaston, 2006, 150 and 90. Holy Sepulchre, Northampton. Although the church is traditionally credited to the early twelfth-century patronage of Earl Simon de Senlis I, Michael Franklin and the Royal Commission proposed that the church was actually constructed in the second quarter of the twelfth century. However, a close analysis of the nave column capitals reveals that the tectonic cushions are more typical of an early twelfth-century date, as are the multi-scalloped capitals with wide scallops. Northampton’s surviving corbel table, too, would comfortably fit within the early twelfth century. The extant original building fabric argues for the traditional, c. 1100–15 date. My thanks to Malcolm Thurlby for discussing this evidence with me. J. C. Cox and R. M. Serjeantson, A History of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Northampton, Northampton, 1897, 21–6; BL Royal MS 11B IX, ff. 18v and 20v, also in Charles Johnson and H. A. Cronne, eds., Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum 1066–1154, II: Regesta Henrici Primi 1100–1135, Oxford, 1956, item 1317 and 1318; M. J. Franklin, ‘Minsters and Parishes: Northamptonshire Studies’ [Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge, 1982],

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94–8; RCHME, An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in the County of Northampton, V: Archaeological Sites and Churches in Northampton, London, 1985, 53–4. Temple Bruer Preceptory. The original foundation grant by William of Ashby is undated, but his supplementary grant is c. 1169 or earlier. Lees, Records of the Templars, clxxxi–clxxxii, 250–2; S. Buck, ‘The North View of Temple Bruer in the Middle of the Great Heath on the South side of the City of Lincoln’, BL  K.Top.19.56; also published in Hope, ‘Temple Bruer’ [n. 16 above], plate xix. St Clement, West Thurrock. Based upon excavated fabric, Milton dates the round church to the early twelfth century. Joining the archaeological date range with the confirmed owners of lands at West Thurrock, Christopher Harrold has argued that Count Henry of Eu (active 1095–1140) was the most likely founder of the church. Milton, ‘Excavations at St Clement’s Church West Thurrock’ [n. 16 above], 5–9; Christopher Harrold, The Story of St Clement’s, 4th edn, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2009, 10–11. Woodstock Palace Chapel. The construction date of the round chapel is not recorded, though a chapel of unknown form was repaired in 1186; a specifically round chapel is first mentioned in 1233. Henry I spent time at Woodstock from at least 1106. A chapel would have been a vital part of the first phase of palace construction, either contemporary with or shortly after the first set of apartments and kitchen facilities. I agree with Brown, Colvin and Taylor that the ‘great chapel’ and ‘round chapel’ described in later sources must have been one and the same, and I also agree with the VCH assessment that the round chapel was probably the same as the chapel that was repaired in 1186. I have therefore dated the round chapel to the reign of Henry I (1100–35). An architectural confirmation of this date is not possible; early antiquarian drawings only show the chapel peeking out from above the palace walls. R. A. Brown, H. Colvin and A. J. Taylor, The History of the King’s Works, II, London, 1963, 1010–12; C. Johnson and H. A. Cronne (eds), Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum 1066–1154, II: Regesta Henrici Primi 1100–1135, Oxford, 1956, items 660 and 783; A. Crossley and C. R. Elrington (eds), A History of the County of Oxford, XII: Wootton Hundred (South) including Woodstock, London, 1990, 436; S. Gale and I. Wood, ‘The Antient and Royal Mannor House of Woodstock Demolished AD 1720’ [etching, Society of Antiquaries of London].

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THE USE AND MEANING OF THE TWELFTH- AND THIRTEENTH-CENTURY ROUND CHURCHES OF ENGLAND MICHAEL GERVERS

C

onstruction of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century round churches of England coincides largely with the period from the Latin conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 to the city’s brief recapture by the Emperor Frederick II in the 1230s and early 1240s. The first such rotunda was built by the independent Augustinian Order of the Holy Sepulchre on lands in Cambridge, granted sometime between 1114 and 1130 by Reinaldus, abbot of Ramsey, to three men of the confraternity.1 This church, still dedicated to the Holy Sepulchre, is a classic example of Norman architectural style, with a double-shelled interior supported on eight massive stone columns.2 The last to be constructed is the church of St John the Baptist in Little Maplestead, near Halstead, in north-central Essex. Its Gothic elements

1 W. Dunn Macray (ed.), Chronicon Abbatiae Ramesiensis a saec. X usque ad an. circa 1200, RS 83, London, 1886, 258–9. Also cited in M. Gervers, ‘Rotundae Anglicanae’, in Évolution générale et développements régionaux en histoire de l’art [Acts of the 22nd International Congress of the History of Art, Budapest, 1969], 3 vols, Budapest, 1972, I, 359–76, and III, figs 91–6 [here, 363 and n. 21, and figs. 2 and 3]. 2 RCHME, The City of Cambridge, Part II, London, 1959, 255; L. F. Salzman (ed.), Victoria History of the Counties of Cambridge and the Isle of Ely, II, London, 1948, 146, and III, 1959, 124; J. Britton, ‘An Essay towards a History of Temples and Round Churches’, in The Architectural Antiquities of Great Britain, I, London, 1807, 9–10; J. Essex, ‘Observations on the Origin and Antiquity of Round Churches, and of the Round Church at Cambridge in Particular’, Archeologia 6 (1782), 163–8.

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and a change of designation from ecclesia to capella point to a date of construction between 1240 and 1245.3 Two-thirds of England’s rotundas from the period can be attributed to the military orders, that is, the Order of the Temple and the Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem. The Templars, together with the Cistercians, were encouraged to enter the country by King Henry I in, or shortly after, 1128, and the Hospitallers very likely came at the same time.4 While these orders were together responsible for building many preceptory or commandery churches throughout the land, we know currently of only eight rotundas which can be attributed to them. Of these, six were Templar foundations and two were Hospitaller. The numbers correspond in very general terms to the relative wealth and influence of the two orders, the Templars having a distinct advantage from the start over their sister, Hospitaller, order. This prominence on the part of the Templars developed early, despite the Hospitallers having been granted their foundation charter by Rome five years earlier than the former; that is, in 1113 as opposed to 1118. They were founded to meet the very specific needs of an age which invested heavily in the salvation of the soul through pilgrimage, the most outward expression of which was participation in the crusades, themselves conceived as nothing short of armed pilgrimages.5 The Hospitallers were to provide for the sick and wounded by means of what became regarded as a highly respected hospital in Jerusalem, while the Templars were to protect pilgrims as they made their way overland from the coastal routes to the holy city. Needless to say, despite such different objectives, the two orders quickly became competitors for the funding in alms which contemporary society was ready and able to provide. The Templars did better from the start, undoubtedly because then, as now, donors with means were more inclined to support potentially successful military undertakings than to care for those who had come in harm’s way by dint of their religious convictions or by having been wounded on the field of battle. The difference lay in a twelfth-century expression of conservatism versus one with a higher degree of social consciousness. Struggling to make their way forward and to have access 3 M. Gervers (ed.), The Cartulary of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem in England, Secunda Camera, Essex, published for the British Academy, Records of Social and Economic History, new series, VI, London, 1982 [hereafter Gervers, Secunda Camera], xliv and n. 59, 70 no. 107, 355 no. 627. 4 For the arrival of the Templars, see B. A. Lees (ed.), Records of the Templars in England in the Twelfth Century: The Inquest of 1185, London, 1935 [hereafter Lees, Records of the Templars], xxxviii–xxxix. The first recorded donor to the Hospitallers was Letitia, of the Ferrières family, whose grant of a mill at Passenham (Northants) was made during the reign of Henry I (d. 1135), for which see J. M. Delaville le Roux (ed.), Cartulaire général de l’Ordre des Hospitalliers de Saint-Jean de Jérusalem (1100–1310), 4 vols, Paris, 1894–1906, I, no. 337. Robert de Lucy’s grant of eighty acres in Chrishall (Essex) appears equally early (Gervers, Secunda Camera [n. 3 above], 134–5, no. 215). 5 E. Barker, ‘Crusades’, in The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edn, 1911, VII, 524–52 [524].

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to grants of land, upon the exploitation of which the medieval economy depended, the Hospitallers were obliged to compromise; at the time of the Second Crusade in 1144, or shortly before, they too undertook to become engaged in military activities. Nevertheless, throughout the duration of their parallel existence – that is, until the dissolution of the Templars in 1312 – the Hospitallers found patronage among the lesser nobility, the knightly class and the yeomen, while the Templars were more generously supported by royalty and the baronage.6 In this context, the round church took on a particular meaning. In the popular imagination, it was symbolic of the objective of pilgrimage: the Holy Land and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Under the circumstances, it is by no means coincidental that the Templars exploited the image, and the Hospitallers followed their initiative; both had the churches at their head priories in London built as rotundas.7 The Templars’ first construction was that of the Old Temple in Holborn, built c. 1135.8 The building had a diameter of some 14m.9 This they abandoned when they moved to Fleet Street, where they were already established by 1161 [Fig. 17.1, p. 344 above]. Thereafter, competition to exploit the symbolic value of the rotunda began in earnest and, in 1185, both orders had their round, priory church dedicated by the patriarch of Jerusalem, Heraclius,10 who had come to England both to raise funds for a new crusade and in the hope of convincing King Henry II to lead it. (Discussions to that effect took place on 17 March in the king’s presence at St John’s, Clerkenwell.)11 The diameter of the Templar rotunda reached 18m, while that of the Hospitallers topped the scale at nearly 20m. As such, it was virtually on a par in size with the diameter of the inner circle of columns of the fourthcentury Anastasis of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, which measured 20.66m.12 6 M. Gervers, ‘Donations to the Hospitallers in England in the Wake of the Second Crusade’, in M. Gervers (ed.), The Second Crusade and the Cistercians, New York, 1992, 155–61 [159–60]. 7 B. Sloane and G. Malcolm, Excavations at the Priory of the Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem, Clerkenwell, London [Museum of London Archaeology Service Monograph], London, 2004, 28; Lees, Records of the Templars [n. 4 above], 159, n. 4. 8 M. Gervers, ‘The Commandery as an Economic Unit in England’, in A. Luttyrell and L. Pressouyre (eds), La Commanderie, institution des ordres militaires dans l’Occident medieval, Paris, 2002, 245–60 [252 and n. 32]. 9 W. H. St John Hope, ‘Round-Naved Churches in England and their Connexion with the Orders of the Temple and of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem’, Archaeologia Cantiana [Transactions of the Kent Archaeological Society], 33, 1918, 63–70; idem, ‘The Round Church of the Knights Templars at Temple Bruer, Lincolnshire’, Archaeologia 61 (1908), 177–98 [179]; Gervers, ‘Rotundae Anglicanae’ [n. 1 above], 365 and n. 30. 10 C. N. L. Brooke, assisted by G. Keir, London 800–1216: The Shaping of a City, Berkeley, LA, 1975, 231–3, 331–2; C. Wilson, ‘Gothic Architecture Transplanted: The Nave of the Temple Church in London’, in Temple Church, 19–43 [20]. 11 E. J. King, The Knights of St John in the British Empire, London, 1934, 18; H. E. Mayer, The Crusades (trans. J. B. Gillingham), London, 1972, 136. 12 J. Murphy-O’Connor, Keys to Jerusalem: Collected Essays, Oxford, 2012, 204 and n. 53.

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Other Templar rotundas are known, from Temple Bruer, Lincs., c. 1185 (diameter 15.39m); Garway, Herefordshire, also founded c. 1185 (diam. 13.33m); Dover, Kent, a very small building with a diameter of only 8.23m;13 Aslackby, Lincs., probably constructed c. 1164;14 Bristol;15 and apparently Dunwich.16 The only other clearly identifiable Hospitaller rotunda is the apparently thirteenth-century example at Little Maplestead, Essex. Another, which may be attributed to one or other of the orders, is the small rotunda (7.62m diameter) known from excavations below the tower of St Clement’s church in West Thurrock, Essex. The Templars received land in West Thurrock in the third quarter of the twelfth century, and the Hospitallers in neighbouring Grey’s Thurrock, c. 1190.17 Further such remains may yet be found, through excavation under the churches of the military orders and of other sites, reflecting the popularity of the symbolism of the Holy Sepulchre and the attraction to the earthly Jerusalem in the English realm. That symbolism was deeply rooted in the then Christian world, for it traced its origins to a late Roman architectural form used regularly to house the remains of the upper-class deceased, or to recall their memory.18 The rotunda served to represent the world in microcosm, and the dome the firmament of heaven. Well-known examples are the tombs of Galerius in Thessalonike, Diocletian in Split, Santa Costanza in Rome and Theodoric in Ravenna, not to mention the Pantheon in Rome. The Pantheon, which has survived as the finest example of late Roman architecture, was already a source of inspiration for Constantine and his successors, who constructed large rotundas over, and commemorated what by the fourth century were commonly understood to be, the sites of Calvary and the tomb of Christ, and surrounded the aedicule of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre with columns taken from Hadrian’s Capitolium.19 Before the century was out, the rotunda (or Anastasis) marking the site of the resurrection of Christ 13 The Templar rotunda at Dover is said to be the site where King John submitted the kingdom of England to the papacy as a fiefdom on 15 May 1213; see J. P. Davis, The Gothic King: A Biography of Henry III, London, 2012, 21 and illustration between 156 and 157. 14 Gervers, ‘Rotundae Anglicanae’, 365–8. 15 G. H. Cook, The English Medieval Parish Church, London, 1956, 273. By the late twelfth century, Bristol was the fiscal centre for the south-west; see Lees, Records of the Templars, cxxxi–cxxxv. 16 R. Parker, Men of Dunwich: The Story of a Vanished Town, London, 1978 (repr. 1980, 2002), 31, 204–9. 17 Gervers, ‘Rotundae Anglicanae’, 367–8. 18 A. Grabar, Martyrium. Recherches sur le culte des reliques et l’art chrétien antique, 2 vols, Paris, 1943–46, I, 141–52 (repr. London, 1972); K. Weitzmann (ed.), Age of Spirituality: Late Antique and Early Christian Art, Third to Seventh Century, New York, 1979 [hereafter Weitzmann, Age of Spirituality], 119–23, cat. nos 107–9; see also B. Caseau, ‘Sacred Landscapes’, in G. W. Bowersock, P. Brown and O. Grabar (eds), Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Post-Classical World, Cambridge, Mass., 1999, 21–59 [52, 57 n. 74], and A. J. Wharton, ‘Baptisteries’, in the same volume, 332–3 [333a–b]. 19 G. S. P. Freeman-Grenville, ‘The Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem: History and Future’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1987), 187–207 [187].

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had been constructed, like the Pantheon, with a large central opening in the massive dome to permit the passage of light, both spiritual and actual. The choice of shape in the case of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem was thus determined by contemporary custom.20 Rotundas constructed in the wake of the First Crusade in England and throughout the world of Roman Christianity would have been recognized as symbols of Jerusalem and even as copies of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. They were purpose built by their patrons to raise popular awareness of the foreign policy of the day, which was the massive and continuing phenomenon of the pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and a virtually unbroken series of crusades. The military and other orders, as well as select patrons among the nobility, would have promoted this awareness to the fullest. The round church was a statement of the times; it was built specifically as a symbol of the crusading society which the twelfth century was, while the long-enduring form of church architecture adopted from the Roman basilica, was not.21 The round of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was a memorial structure and, of itself, not a church. The church, on the other hand, was a basilica which, by the late fourth century, was adjoined to it on the east. The round was a double-shelled building with an outer wall and an inner ring of columns around the aedicule which covered the sepulchral grotto. When the form was copied as a church, it needed to function like one in every way. It would be oriented; it needed a western entrance; and an appropriate place had to be selected for the altar. The natural solution was to place the altar at the east end, but since a rotunda has no distinct east end, a chancel apse was invariably added in English (not to mention many continental) examples, to house the sacrificial table.22 The placement of the altar determines the spatial relationships of the structure. It is also the centre of the activity for which the building is intended. Charter sources provide a glimpse of the activities which took place on a daily basis in the twelfth- and thirteenth-century English rotunda. A small number of charters in the Hospitaller Cartulary (and 20 R. Krautheimer, Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture, Harmondsworth, 1965, 38–42, 50; idem, ‘Sancta Maria Rotunda’, in Studies, 107–14, and ‘Introduction’, in Studies, 115–50 [116–23]. 21 K. J. Conant, Carolingian and Romanesque Architecture, 800–1200, 2nd edn, Harmondsworth, 1966, 203–6. 22 The only formula I am aware of in which the altar was placed centrally within a central church (i.e. a rotunda or a square), thus reflecting the relationship of the aedicule of the Holy Sepulchre to the surrounding structure, is the Ethiopian round church, first remarked by Europeans as being an established form in the late sixteenth century. There, the sanctuary, with north, south and western entrances, is a square supporting a drum, standing in the centre of the building. The drum commonly served to hold up the wooden roof. Once it was covered by thatch, now more usually by corrugated steel. See further E. Fritsch, ‘The Origins and Meanings of the Ethiopian Circular Church: Fresh Explorations’, 267–93 above.

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others) refer to activities of the sort.23 A series of examples will emphasize the point; but because their occurrence is limited, I will take licence to include several that concern churches in which the military orders held interests, but which may not have been round. An early case refers to the Hospitallers’ first preceptory church in Essex, at Chaureth, near Stanstead.24 There, in 1155, Robert de Besvile and Albretha de Tresgoz granted the Hospitallers a full virgate of land in Pilchedon, Essex. Robert then went on by way of confirmation to swear super altare de Chaur’ ecclesie, on the altar of Chaureth church, that in the case of default he would give them an equal exchange from his propria hereditate, his own inheritance. At that time, altars were probably more available than bibles for the taking of oaths.25 In the last decades of the century, Peter, son of Melanie (undoubtedly a Hospitaller tenant, since the transaction is recorded in the Hospitaller Cartulary), gave seven shillings rent in perpetual alms to the church of St Mary Southwark, stipulating that after his death, his body was to be buried in the Chapter House of the same. To give permanency to these alms (ut ista elemosina stabilis permaneat), he placed the rent on the church’s altar.26 In 1261 Thomas, bishop of Elphin (Archdiocese of Tuam, Ireland), granted an indulgence of forty days to those who, on the various feasts of the Blessed Virgin Mary, offered prayers before the altar dedicated to Her in the New Temple, London.27 In the late thirteenth century, Matilda, daughter of Pagan of Tolworth, and her daughter, also Matilda, granted Henry le But and his wife Lecia a half acre in South Tolworth, for which the latter proffered five shillings sterling as gersum, or entry fee, and a penny at the feast of St Katherine the Virgin, for a candle to be offered to the altar dedicated to the saint in the church of Long Ditton, Surrey.28 At a chapter meeting held at Clerkenwell on 18 June 1336, Hospitaller Prior Phillip de Thame and the brethren conceded to William de Langford, knight (one of their most cherished donors, and custodian of the New Temple),29 a place for the construction of a burial tumulus located between the church’s main altar and the altar dedicated to St John the Evangelist, together with a perpetual chantry.30 Two years later, William gave them his British Library, Cotton MS Nero E VI. The present structure, a thirteenth-century basilica, clearly replaced this earlier church, which may have been a rotunda. 25 Gervers, Secunda Camera [n. 3 above], no. 394. 26 British Library, Cotton MS Nero E VI, ff. 30v–31r. See further N. Hamonic, ‘Jerusalem in London: The New Temple Church’, 387–412 below. 27 British Library, Cotton MS Nero E VI, f. 25v. 28 British Library, Cotton MS Nero E VI, f. 179r. 29 Helen J. Nicholson, ‘At the Heart of Medieval London: The New Temple in the Middle Ages’, in Temple Church, 1–18 [15–16]. 30 British Library, Cotton MS, Nero E VI, ff. 3v–4r. During the nineteenth-century 23

24

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tenement with buildings situated in Fleet Street directly opposite the New Temple. The purpose of the gift was to provide for a candle to burn before, and to illuminate, the main altar when daily high mass was celebrated.31 Four years after that, in 1344, Prior Nicholas Hale, upon presentation by London’s mayor, John Hammond, admitted Henry de Heperton, chaplain, to the perpetual chantry set up for the same William de Langford. This was done ‘at the altar of St John the Evangelist’, beside which William’s tomb by then presumably lay.32 On 19 February 1349, Peter atte Gate conceded to Robert atte Gate a messuage surrounded on three sides by a garden and tenements belonging to the Hospitallers in the parish of St Sepulchre, outside the bar of West Smithfield. Service amounting to twelve silver pence was to be rendered to the chief lords of the fee, who must have been the Hospitallers as payment was to be made ad altare [sancte] Iohannis [Evangelist] de Clerkenwelle.33 Nearly a century later, in 1434, undoubtedly at a chapter meeting held at Clerkenwell, Prior Robert Mallory, together with eighteen preceptors including Thomas Launceleve, Turcopolier of Rhodes, and confrater John Stillingfleet34 made a sacrifice for the salvation of their souls in altari mediatoris Dei videlicet et hominum Domini nostri Iesu Christi.35 The foregoing are only a few of the contexts for the altar, but they are all that appear in some 1,500 Hospitaller and Templar sources of the twelfth through fifteenth centuries. They are nevertheless representative, reflecting the attraction by members of these Orders and their lay patrons to the place of sacrifice in churches which carried with them the popular image of Jerusalem. The case of William of Langford is particularly enlightening, because of his choice of burial place between the two principal altars of the round at Clerkenwell. This would, in his mind and in those of his contemporaries, have been considered as though he were buried close to Christ Himself, proximity to the holy serving to provide spiritual security for the soul of the deceased. The daily offering of light for the altar at high mass evokes the image of light symbolism in Christian worship.36 The renovations, displaced medieval burials were dumped ‘into a vaulted grave dug in the reconstructed Round Church’; see W. J. Loftie, The Inns of Court and Chancery: With Many Illustrations by Herbert Railton, new ed., London, 1895; The Making of Modern Law, Gale, 2015 (Cengage Learning: http://galenet.galegroup.com.myaccess.library.utoronto. ca/servlet/MOML?af=RN&ae=F3701135616&srchtp=a&ste=14 [accessed 2 January 2015]), also cited in J. Mordaunt Crook, ‘The Restoration of the Temple Church: Ecclesiology and Recrimination’, Architectural History 8 (1965), 39–51 [43]; and now C. E. Hundley, ‘The English Round Church Movement’, 362–3 above. 31 British Library, Cotton MS Nero E VI, ff. 32v–33r. 32 British Library, Cotton MS Nero E VI, f. 4r. 33 British Library, Cotton MS Nero E VI, f. 15r. 34 John Stillingfleet is known from other sources to have created a register of Hospitaller documents now in the College of Arms; see M. Gervers, The Hospitaller Cartulary in the British Library (Cotton MS Nero E VI), Toronto, 1981, 29–30. 35 British Library, Cotton MS Nero E VI, f. 5v. 36 Light symbolism can be traced to Christ’s roles both as a sun god and as the purveyor of

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offering of candles to a church is not infrequently attested in the charters of the day. There is also the chantry, by which William’s memory would be preserved for as long as prayers were sung on his behalf. The altar was further seen as a place for the receipt of elemosina, or alms; a sort of chancery table and a temporary resting place, then as now, for the collection plate. It was, too, a table for the making of oaths, a public act which an oath should be before a host of witnesses. It was at the altar, furthermore, that one would pray for the salvation of one’s own and others’ souls. That the Temple Church served as a preferred (or only possible) place of burial for some, is witnessed by the presence in the round of the effigies, especially of knights, for whom it served as their final resting place. Possibly among them is the rogue, Geoffrey de Mandeville, earl of Essex, who died excommunicate due to the atrocities he committed during the Anarchy of Stephen’s reign, but whose body is recorded as having found haven in the precincts of the Old Temple until it was translated to the New in 1163.37 The Order, we remember, found patronage among royalty and their prestige was such that, as a young man in 1235, King Henry III wrote ‘Ad omnium volumus noticiam pervenire’ that he had granted his body to God, the Blessed Mary and to the house of the Knights of the Temple in London.38 The intention may still have been current in 1270 when, during the king’s illness, a procession of monks from Westminster Abbey made their way barefoot in the rain ‘to the New Temple in London to invoke the divine powers in their ruler’s favor’.39 He obviously had second thoughts before his death in 1272, as he chose instead to be buried in his new Westminster Abbey.40 In addition to the religious activities which took place there, the Orders’ head priories were first and foremost administrative centres. truth to the unenlightened; see M. Gervers, ‘The Iconography of the Cave in Christian and Mithraic Tradition’, in U. Bianchi (ed.), Mysteria Mithrae [Proceedings of the International Seminar on the ‘Religio-Historical Character of Roman Mithraism, with Particular Reference to Roman and Ostian Sources’, Rome and Ostia, 28–31 March 1978], Leiden, 1979, 579–96 [589]); Weitzmann, Age of Spirituality [n. 18 above], 522–3, cat. no. 467; D. R. Cartlidge and J. K. Elliott, Art of the Christian Apocrypha, London, 2001, 64, 89. 37 D. Park, ‘Medieval Burials and Monuments’, in Temple Church, 67–91 [68–74]. Templars and Hospitallers were criticized in France for welcoming excommunicates; see D. Carraz, ‘Templar and Hospitaller Establishments in Southern France: The State of Research and New Perspectives’, in M. Piana and C. Carlsson (eds), Archaeology and Architecture of the Military Orders: New Studies, Farnham, 2014, 107–32 [128]. The Hospitallers also had the right and privilege, if not the obligation, to collect the criminal dead at the gallows, and to bury them; see R. B. Pugh, ‘The Knights Hospitallers of England as Undertakers’, Speculum 56 (1981), 566–74. 38 British Library, Cotton MS Nero E VI, f. 26r. 39 As quoted from W. C. Jordan, A Tale of Two Monasteries: Westminster and Saint Denis in the Thirteenth Century, Princeton, 2009, 150, citing Flores historiarum, 3.22. 40 D. A. Carpenter, ‘King Henry III and Saint Edward the Confessor: The Origins of the Cult’, EHR 122 (2007), 865–91 [871–2 and n. 38]. Upon Henry’s death, the Templars nevertheless attempted to claim his body; see Jordan, Two Monasteries [n. 39 above], 154.

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Daily business was carried out in the compound, or at the annual chapter meeting (wherever that might be), on a regular basis. In the twelfth century, precise topographical reference is rare; but when, in 1189, Hospitaller Prior Garnier de Naplouse ‘et totum capitulum nostrum’ granted Stephen Blunt the liberties which the king had granted them for a tenement in London, the act was issued at the chapter meeting held in London during the Feast of St Michael (ad capitulum Sancti Michaelis apud London). ‘Apud London’ almost certainly refers to the precincts at Clerkenwell.41 Several generations earlier, sometime between 1146 and 1149, when King Stephen granted his Essex manor of Witham to the Templars ‘apud London’, he may have done so at the Old Temple in Holborn.42 Similarly, a grant by Henry II to the Templars of a rent of sixteen pence from land which lay behind their garden in London may have been made at the Old or New Temple site.43 Otherwise, it is not until the third decade of the thirteenth century that surviving documents provide direct evidence for administrative activities taking place at the New Temple and Clerkenwell. Thus, on 1 December 1221, the abbot and convent of Oseney Abbey in Oxford conceded their possession of tithes from the dominico de Eura to the church of St George in Castello Oxonie, the transaction taking place apud Novum Templum London.44 There is no apparent link in this case to the Templars themselves. It is quite clear, however, that the New Temple was made available for important ecclesiastical matters, for here the process takes place in the presence of the papal legate, Pandulf Masca.45 The crusading subsidy of six thousand marks ordered by Pope Innocent IV in 1246 was to be rendered at the New Temple on 15 August of that year.46 Other issues concerning the papal see were dealt with at the New Temple in the 1270s, as witnessed by documents from other monastic cartularies.47 As for the Templars themselves, their tenants were to submit their rents at the New Temple at various times throughout the year. Specifically mentioned as payment dates are the feast of St Michael (29 September

41 British Library, Cotton MS Nero E VI, f. 35v. Printed in J. Delaville le Roulx (ed.), Cartulaire général de l’Ordre des Hospitaliers de St Jean de Jerusalem: 1100–1310, IV, 1906, 324–5. 42 Gervers, Secunda Camera, no. 4. 43 British Library, Cotton MS Nero E VI, f. 52v. Printed in Lees, Records of the Templars [n. 4 above], 156–7. 44 H. E. Salter (ed.), Cartulary of Oseney Abbey, V, Oxford, 1935, no. 808. 45 Papal legate to England variously from 1211 to 1221; bishop of Norwich from 1215 to 1226; died 16 September 1226. See E. B. Fryde, D. F. Greenway, S. Porter and I. Roy (eds), Handbook of British Chronology, London, 1986, 261. 46 Davis, Gothic King [n. 13 above], 161. 47 J. W. Clark (ed.), Liber Memorandorum Ecclesie de Bernewelle, Cambridge, 1907, no. 149; J. S. Brewer (ed.), Registrum Malmesburiense. The Register of Malmesbury Abbey. Preserved in the Public Record Office [Rerum Britannicarum Medii Aevi Scriptores 72], 1879, no. 90.

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1223),48 the eve of the feast of the Apostle St Thomas (2 July 1251)49 and Easter.50 These were normal dates for such payments to be made. Otherwise, activities of this sort were reserved for the annual chapter meeting which, in the case of the Templars in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, took place either at the New Temple, documented in 127351 and 1306, or at their rural commandery of Dinsley in Hertfordshire in 1263,52 in the 1280s,53 in 130054 and in 1307,55 or at Bisham in Berkshire in 1278.56 These chapter meetings generally took place in conjunction with the celebration of the feast of St Barnabas (11 June). The Hospitallers, similarly, saw to the administration of their properties at Clerkenwell both on the occasion of chapter meetings (documented in 1189,57 and not infrequently in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries), or whenever it was needed. Like the Templars, they too retired to their preferred rural preceptory for a June chapter meeting, held regularly from the thirteenth century at Melchbourne (Bedfordshire). These were busy times, for the Order seems to have dealt with the issuing, confirmation and receipt of grants for several days consecutively (for example, 15 and 16 June 1339, at Melchbourne).58 Since we are interested in Order rotundas, we may close by observing what the documents tell us the Hospitallers were doing ‘apud Mapeltrestede parva’, that is, at their Essex preceptory of Little Maplestead. Remembering that private charters are rarely dated in England before the start of the reign of Edward II in 1307,59 it is rewarding to find a grant to the Hospitallers at Little Maplestead, issued at Little Maplestead, of six quarters of grain in November 1275,60 and of homage, service and 48 W. T. Reedy (ed.), Basset Charters c. 1120 to 1250 [Pipe Roll Society, New Series 88], London, 1995, no. 121. 49 G. H. Fowler (ed.), Records of Harrold Priory, Bedfordshire Historical Records Society 17 (1935), no. 11. 50 M. Gervers (ed.), The Cartulary of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem in England, Part 2: Prima Camera, Essex, published for the British Academy, Records of Social and Economic History, NS 23, London, 1996, no. 106. 51 Gervers, Secunda Camera, no. 78. 52 Fowler, Harrold Priory [n. 49 above], no. 185. 53 British Library, Cotton MS Nero E VI, f. 29v. 54 Gervers, Prima Camera [n. 50 above], no. 30. 55 British Library, Cotton MS Nero E VI, ff. 29v–30r. 56 Trevor Foulds (ed.), The Thurgarton Cartulary, Stamford, 1994, no. 958. 57 British Library, Cotton MS Nero E VI, f. 35v. Printed in Cartulaire general [n. 41 above], 324–5. 58 Gervers, Secunda Camera, no. 100; British Library, Cotton MS Nero E VI, f. 26v. 59 M. Gervers, ‘The DEEDS Project and the Development of a Computerised Methodology for Dating Undated English Private Charters of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries’, in M. Gervers (ed.), Dating Undated Medieval Charters, Woodbridge and Budapest, 2000, 13–35 [13–14]; idem, ‘Pro Amore Dei: Diplomatic Evidence of Social Conflict during the Reign of King John’, in K. Pennington and M. H. Eichbauer (eds), Law as Profession and Practice in Medieval Europe [FS Brundage], Farnham and Burlington, Vt, 2011, 231–59 [231]. 60 Gervers, Secunda Camera, no. 144.

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rents in August and November 1283.61 Like those dealt with in chapter at Clerkenwell, Melchbourne and elsewhere, there is nothing particular about these transactions, other than that they were issued at the end of the harvest season (grain in the summer and legumes in the autumn) and before the start of the next agricultural year. Activities of the sort which took place at rural preceptories where the Orders had round churches were very likely conducted inside the rotunda, in the presence of the parishioners who would have served as witnesses.62 As far as the administrative activities of the Hospitallers are concerned, no distinction has been found between those undertaken at sites with rotundas and those without.63 The New Temple, however, was clearly a place where matters of no immediate concern to the Templars could be conducted by highly appointed members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. This preference to hold assembly within the confines of the Templar compound provides enduring evidence that the Order was given priority over the Hospitallers in both the civil and ecclesiastical affairs of the day.

Gervers, Secunda Camera, nos. 41, 136. Charter witness lists regularly end with et multis aliis, referring undoubtedly to the community present. 63 The same may be said of the liturgy as it pertains to central and basilica churches, for which see K. G. Holum, ‘Church Architecture’, in Bowersock, Brown and Grabar (eds), Late Antiquity [n. 18 above], 376: ‘thus the central plan, like the basilica, established itself in the Holy Land, the imperial capitals, and the rest of the Empire. Provided with a bema and apse, it took on the same liturgical functions as the longitudinal plan.’ 61

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B

etween c. 1145 and 1275, twenty-one visitation indulgences were issued in support of the Temple Church in London.1 Historians have referenced these indulgences in passing, but no one has yet examined the corpus of pardons as a whole to determine what it reveals about the Templar Order in England.2 The highly formulaic vocabulary of the charters, along with the growing ubiquity of pardons in England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, has likely contributed to this oversight.3 I will demonstrate in this chapter that the indulgences provide new and important information on the Templar Order in London, particularly in regard to their building campaigns at the New Temple. The Templars, through their invocation of their association with the Holy Sepulchre, aimed to provide for medieval Christians an alternative Jerusalem in London. After papal recognition of the Templars at the Council of Troyes in 1129,4 the earliest examples of solicitation of financial support for the Order were associated with papal indulgences. In Milites dei (1144), Pope Celestine 1 British Library, Cotton MS Nero E VI, ff. 24r–26r. A transcription of these indulgences can be found below, Appendix 1, 401–12 below. 2 M. Reddan, ‘The Temple’, in C. M. Barron and M. Davies (eds), The Religious Houses of London and Middlesex, London, 2007 [1909], 103; B. A. Lees (ed.), Records of the Templars in England in the Twelfth Century: The Inquest of 1185 with Illustrative Charters and Documents, London, 1935, lii, lv, lxxxvi; V. Jansen, ‘Light and Pure: The Templars’ New Choir’, in Temple Church, 45–66. 3 N. Vincent, ‘Some Pardoners’ Tales: The Earliest English Indulgences’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 12 (2002), 23–58 [38–9]. For the late Middle Ages, see R. N. Swanson, Passports to Paradise? Indulgences in Late Medieval England, Cambridge, 2007, 23–76. 4 J. M. Upton-Ward (ed. and trans.), The Rule of the Templars, Woodbridge, 1992, 1–5, 19; M. Barber, The New Knighthood, Cambridge, 1994, 8–9.

20

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II commanded the clergy to urge all Christians to support the Templars financially in return for remission of one-seventh of their enjoined penance.5 The crusader state of Edessa fell to the Muslims on Christmas Eve that same year, and Pope Eugene III reissued the indulgence in July 1145,6 followed by his formal crusade encyclical, Quantum predecessores, on 1 December 1145.7 The first visitation indulgence in support of a specific Templar site in England appeared shortly thereafter. Between c. 1145 and 1161, Theobald of Bec, archbishop of Canterbury, promised twenty days’ remission from enjoined penance to all who visited the Old Temple church in London on the anniversary of its dedication and gave alms in remission of their sins.8 Theobald cited financial provision as his reason for issuing the indulgence, which suggests that he was responding to the papal bulls of 1144 and 1145. Furthermore, the recent establishment of the headquarters at the Old Temple in London (c. 1140–44) would have stimulated interest in supporting the new site.9 Theobald was serving as papal legate when he issued the pardon and, although his formal legation began in 1150 and lasted until his death in 1161, he was often employed as papal legate earlier than 1150.10 The Templars’ plan to relocate their headquarters to a new site was likely under way, or at least under contemplation, by the late 1150s. If Theobald issued the indulgence closer to the end of his archiepiscopate, then one could reasonably presume that the call for financial support was to help finance the construction of the new headquarters – specifically the new round church. The Templars sold the Old Temple in 1161 to Robert de Chesney, bishop of Lincoln, and relocated to a new site, thereafter called the New Temple.11 Three bishops subsequently issued indulgences in support of the new location, probably to support the construction of the new round church. Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, and Robert de Chesney, bishop of Lincoln, each offered twenty days between 3 June 1162 and Becket’s exile in October 1164.12 Roger de Pont l’Evêque, archbishop of York, granted ten days between 1164 and 22 November 1181.13 Each bishop’s reason for the R. Hiestand (ed.), Papsturkunden für Templer und Johanniter, Göttingen, 1972, no. 8. J. Delaville Le Roulx, Documents concernant les Templiers: extraits des archives de Malte, Paris, 1882, no. 1. 7 PL 180.1064–5. 8 Appendix 1, no. 1; Lees, Records of the Templars [n. 2 above], 162; A. Saltman, Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, London, 1956, no. 261. 9 Lees, Records of the Templars, lxxxv–lxxxvi. David Park has argued that Geoffrey de Mandeville founded the Old Temple c. 1140, ‘Burials and Monuments’, in Temple Church, 68–74. 10 Saltman, Theobald [n. 8 above], 30–1. 11 Lees, Records of the Templars, 158–60. 12 Appendix 1, nos 2–3; Lees, Records of the Templars, 162–3; C. R. Cheney and B. E. A. Jones (eds), EEA II: Canterbury, 1162–1190, Oxford, 1986, 26, no. 42; D. M. Smith (ed.), EEA I: Lincoln, 1067–1185, Oxford, 1980, no. 258. 13 Appendix 1, no. 4; Lees, Records of the Templars, 163–4; M. Lovatt (ed.), EEA 20: York, 5

6

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pardon was the visitation and veneration of the holy places of God. The onus on the penitent was the same: visit the New Temple and give alms on the day of its dedication. The precise completion date of the new church is unknown, although the traditional date of the early 1180s has been discredited in favor of a date sometime in the early 1160s or 1170s.14 Christopher Wilson has recently argued from architectural evidence that construction was started as early as 1158, and was finished before the sale of the Old Temple to the bishop of Lincoln in May 1161.15 According to the documentary evidence, the earliest reference to a consecrated churchyard is 1163, when the corpse of Geoffrey de Mandeville was pardoned and transferred there from the Old Temple.16 The first reference to a completed church (ecclesiam … constructam) appears in the archbishop of York’s indulgence, issued no earlier than 1164. The indulgences issued by Archbishop Becket and Bishop Robert de Chesney do not mention a church at the New Temple, but rather that the penitent should visit the house of the Temple (domum Templi). This omission of reference to either a church or chapel is significant, since all but one of the remaining indulgences mention either the church or the chapel of the Temple.17 A completed church would not have been a prerequisite for a consecrated churchyard or the issuance of pardons, provided a consecrated altar was present on the site.18 While the indulgences do not clarify when the church was completed, they provide an example of how subtle variations in vocabulary can shed important light on the issue at hand, and support the likelihood that the church was not yet fully completed when the Templars moved to their new site. When Heraclius, patriarch of Jerusalem, visited England in 1185 to raise support for the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, he dedicated the church and granted an indulgence of sixty days.19 Subsequent archbishops of Canterbury, Baldwin of Forde (1184–90) and Hubert Walter (1193– 1205) each issued a pardon to the Temple Church, following the common practice of reissuing the charters of their predecessors.20 Nevertheless, the close connection that each man had with the Holy Land likely influenced their decision to support the Templars in London. Both Baldwin and 1154–1181, Oxford, 2000, 110–11, no. 96. 14 J. H. Round, Geoffrey de Mandeville: A Study of the Anarchy, London, 1892, 225 n. 3; Lees, Records of the Templars, lxxxiv–lxxxvi; G. Zarnecki, ‘The West Doorway of the Temple Church in London’, Beiträge zur Kunst des Mitelalters [FS Wentzel], Berlin, 1975, 245–53. 15 C. Wilson, ‘Gothic Architecture Transplanted: The Nave of the Temple Church in London’, in Temple Church, 19–43 [21–3]. 16 William Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum, London, 1718, IV, 142; W. D. Marcay (ed.), Chronicon Abbatiae Rameseiensis, London, 1886, 306, 332–3; Round, Mandeville [n. 14 above], 225–6, n. 3; Lees, Records of the Templars, lxxxvii–lxxxix. 17 For the third indulgence without mention of a church or chapel, see Appendix 1, no. 6. 18 Lees, Records of the Templars, 163 n. 2; Cheney and Jones, EEA [n. 12 above], no. 42 note. 19 J. B. Williamson, The History of the Temple, London, London, 1924, 11 and n. 2. 20 Appendix 1, nos 5 and 6.

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Hubert, while he was bishop of Salisbury, accompanied Richard I on the Third Crusade, and Baldwin died in the Holy Land in 1190.21 Before Hubert returned to England in 1192, he secured permission from Saladin to have two priests and two deacons celebrate the Western rite in the churches of Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth.22 Pope Celestine III later commanded Archbishop Hubert Walter in 1196 to preach the cross and proclaim indulgences for those who contributed to the cause in the East.23 Templar houses elsewhere in England also received financial support in direct response to the events in the Levant. Between 1196 and 1198, John of Coutances, bishop of Worcester, granted the church of Sherbourne (Warwickshire) to the Templars ‘in consideration of the loss and damage caused to their house in Jerusalem by the Saracens’.24 William de Sainte-Mère-Église, bishop of London (1198–1221), issued in 1205 the first (and only) known indulgence in support of the Temple Church by a London diocesan bishop. He offered forty days, but obligatory almsgiving was replaced with veneration of the relics.25 The conspicuous absence of any other indulgence from a London diocesan to the Temple Church undoubtedly reflects the strained relationship concerning its exemption from the bishop’s jurisdiction.26 William’s predecessor, Richard of Ely, for example, suspended the New Temple in 1192 from celebrating divine offices and ringing their bells when the Templars provided hospitality to Archbishop Geoffrey of York.27 In March 1200, Innocent III responded to a series of complaints by the Templars concerning the prelates’ negligence with respect to their privileges.28 He issued a series of bulls reconfirming the privileges of the Templars in England – episcopal

21

115.

R. Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin Kings, 1075–1225, Oxford, 2000,

22 W. Stubbs (ed.), Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi, London, 1864, I, 438; N. Vincent, ‘Goffredo de Prefetti and the Church of Bethlehem in England’, JEH 49 (1998), 218. 23 W. Stubbs (ed.), Randulphi de Diceto decani Lundoniensis Opera Historica, London, 1876, II, 134–5; W. E. Lunt, Financial Relations of the Papacy with England to 1327, Cambridge, Mass., 1939, 422. 24 M. G. Cheney, D. Smith et al. (eds), EEA 34: Worcester, 1186–1218, Oxford, 2008, no. 90. 25 Appendix 1, no. 7; D. P. Johnson (ed.), EEA 26: London, 1189–1228, Oxford, 2003, no. 125, where it is mistakenly attributed to the Hospitallers. 26 Among the numerous privileges enjoyed by the Templars, exemption from episcopal jurisdiction was one of the more contentious. For references to tensions between the Templars and diocesan bishops during the pontificate of Pope Innocent III, see C. R. Cheney and M. G. Cheney (eds), The Letters of Pope Innocent III (1098–1216) Concerning England and Wales: A Calendar with an Appendix of Texts, Oxford, 1967, nos 192–4, 196, 197–99, 203, 204, 583, 584. 27 W. Stubbs (ed.), Chronica Magistri Rogeri Houeden, London, 1868–71, III, 187. Geoffrey had carried his cross in London in open defiance of the bishops of the archiepiscopate of Canterbury. 28 Cheney and Cheney, Letters [n. 26 above], nos 193, 198–9, 204.

JERUSALEM IN LONDON: THE NEW TEMPLE CHURCH

exemption in particular – and commanded the bishops in England to observe certain rules about legacies and gifts to the Templars.29 The bishop of London offered the indulgence to those who venerated the relics in the ‘church of the Blessed Mary of the brothers of the Knights Templar of Jerusalem, London’. His pardon was the first to invoke Jerusalem in the mind of the penitent Christian. The twelfth-century charters never refer to Jerusalem itself, but rather contain variations of the ‘house of the Temple on the River Thames’ or ‘the religious brothers and knights of the Temple’. William’s inclusion of Jerusalem was likely influenced by Pope Innocent III’s aggressive campaigns for a crusade to the Holy Land, and the special consideration and provisions he gave to the military orders – the Templars in particular. When the pope called a crusade in 1198, he ordered those who were to preach the crusade and issue indulgences to associate themselves with a Hospitaller and a Templar, who were responsible for collection of financial contributions.30 In the following year, he mandated that a clerical fortieth be collected throughout England in support of the Holy Land, and ordered that all bishops collect and dispose of the proceeds in collaboration with a Hospitaller and a Templar.31 He would later designate the New Temple as a repository for financial contributions intended for the Holy Land.32 Bishop William’s willingness to issue an indulgence to the Templars may have been due to his loyalty to the papacy and Rome, at a time when it was questionable whether Innocent III’s idea of his supremacy as vicar of Christ resonated with the English prelates.33 William’s loyalty is best reflected in his service to the pope during the interdict (1208–14), when seven bishops fled their positions in support of King John.34 William remained steadfast in his support of the pope, executing Innocent’s mandates in England.35 Sometime between 1206 and 1216, three Irish prelates issued one joint indulgence totaling seventy-four days.36 Eugene, archbishop of Armagh, offered thirty-four days, while Cornelius, bishop of Kildare, and Ailbe, bishop of Ferns, each offered twenty days. Following the same template as that of the bishop of London, this indulgence also invokes Jerusalem. Archbishop Eugene was the first Irish prelate appointed by the pope, and both he and Ailbe occasionally served as suffragan bishops in England; Eugene in Exeter and Worcester in 1207, and Ailbe in Winchester in 1201

Ibid., nos 192–200. Stubbs, Chronica [n. 27 above], IV, 70–5; Lunt, Financial Relations [n. 23 above], 422. 31 Stubbs, Chronica, IV, 108–12; Lunt, Financial Relations, 423. 32 Cheney and Cheney, Letters [n. 26 above], nos 737–8. 33 C. R. Cheney, Innocent III and England, Stuttgart, 1976, 16–21. 34 C. R. Cheney, ‘King John’s Reaction to the Interdict on England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th series, 31 (1949), 140–1. 35 Cheney and Cheney, Letters, nos 763, 770, 790, 794, 795, 796, 799, 800, 823, 824, 825, 827, 834, 835, 839, 845, 852, 905, 907-10. 36 Appendix 1, no. 8. 29

30

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and 1214.37 Suffragan bishops rarely identify themselves as such in their charters,38 but the close similarities with the bishop of London’s pardon suggests that these prelates were probably in London when they issued the document, and possibly serving as suffragan to the diocesan. Irish bishops issued most of the thirteenth-century indulgences to the New Temple, a point to which we shall return below. Thereafter, no known indulgences were issued in support of the New Temple until 1246. A combination of religious, political and theological factors was likely responsible for the absence of pardons in this period. Innocent III had placed England under general interdict from 23 March 1208 until 2 July 1214, during which time as many as nine of the fifteen bishoprics in England lay vacant at one point or another, along with the two archiepiscopates.39 No episcopal pardons, visitation or otherwise, can be securely dated to this time period in England, which suggests that indulgences, as part of the sacrament of penance, were not issued during the interdict.40 The Irish joint indulgence may have been issued just before or after the interdict, but the accumulation of seventy-four days suggests that the pardon was issued before the Fourth Lateran Council in November 1215. Pope Innocent III limited the amount of an indulgence to forty days, except on church dedications, when bishops could offer up to one hundred days in total.41 If the pardon was issued during the interdict, then the Templars must have circumvented episcopal authority in England to secure an indulgence from Irish bishops. In 1215, Pope Innocent III also forbade abbots from granting pardons, and reasserted that their issuance fell under episcopal privilege and authority.42 In an attempt to prevent alms-seekers from misrepresenting themselves with false or forged pardons, he also offered a diplomatic template that had been drafted by the papal chancery.43 Legislation such as this does not explain the absence of pardons for the New Temple thereafter, unless it is considered alongside late-twelfth-century theological discussions concerning the efficacy of indulgences and the spiritual condition of the penitent. Interest in confession and contrition necessitated a change in how indulgences should be received. Theologians recognized that the remission of penance for those who could afford to give money or material wealth as part of their penance discriminated 37 E. B. Fryde et al. (eds), Handbook of British Chronology, 3rd edn, Cambridge, 1986, 334, 355. 38 D. M. Smith, ‘Suffragan Bishops in the Medieval Diocese of Lincoln’, Lincolnshire History and Archaeology 17 (1982), 17–27. 39 C. R. Cheney, ‘King John’s Reaction’ [n. 34 above], 140–1. 40 For two examples of indulgences whose tentative or suggested dates fall within, or overlap, the interdict, see N. Vincent (ed.), EEA 9: Winchester, 1205–1238, Oxford, 1994, no. 58; M. J. Franklin (ed.), EEA 17: Coventry and Lichfield, 1183–1208, Oxford, 1998, no. 76. 41 N. P. Tanner (ed.), Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, London, 1990, I, no. 62. 42 Ibid., no. 60. 43 Ibid., no. 62.

JERUSALEM IN LONDON: THE NEW TEMPLE CHURCH

against the poor.44 When Pope Celestine III ordered the English prelates to preach the cross in 1196, for example, he declared that the amount of penance that would be remitted depended upon the size of the gift in relation to the wealth of the contributor.45 Scholastic theologians, however, stressed interior contriteness, and that the penitent should perform a good (preferably spiritual) deed.46 The twelfth-century indulgences in support of the Temple Church do not mention the expected spiritual condition of the penitent. Those issued from the last decade of the twelfth century onwards, however, invariably required that he be confessed and truly penitent. In the two indulgences issued in the first two decades of the thirteenth century, the onus on the penitent was to visit the church and venerate the relics, with reference to almsgiving entirely omitted. With the shift away from financial profit to devotional indulgences, where internal and spiritual works took precedence, the Templars’ interest in acquiring visitation indulgences for the New Temple church seems to have diminished. The New Temple itself reached unprecedented political importance in England between 1200 and 1240. Henry II used it as a royal treasury by 1185,47 and, in the thirteenth century, it functioned as a financial office where much of the financial business of the crown passed through it.48 The royal wardrobe was located there in 1225,49 and Geoffrey of the Temple, who had been the king’s almoner since 1229, became Keeper of the Wardrobe between 1236 and 1240.50 The crown’s close association with the Temple Church is also reflected in the maintenance there of priests who regularly celebrated mass for the soul of King John,51 and in Henry III’s grant in 1231 of £8 per year to support three chaplains in the church 44 R. W. Shaffern, The Penitents’ Treasury: Indulgences in Latin Christendom, 1175–1375, Chicago, 2007, 94–7. 45 Stubbs, Randulphi de Diceto [n. 23 above], II, 134–5; Lunt, Financial Relations [n. 23 above], 422. 46 Shaffern, Penitents’ Treasury [n. 44 above], 95–6; R. N. Swanson, Indulgences in Late Medieval England: Passports to Paradise?, Cambridge, 2007, 224–9; R. N. Swanson, ‘Praying for Pardon: Devotional Indulgences in Late Medieval England’, in R. N. Swanson (ed.), Promissory Notes on the Treasury of Merits: Indulgences in Late Medieval Europe, Leinden, 2006, 215–16; Vincent, ‘Pardoners’ Tales’ [n. 3 above], 33. 47 H. Hall (ed.), Receipt Roll of the Exchequer for Michaelmas Term XXXI Henry II, AD 1185, London, 1899, 30–1; Lees, Records of the Templars, lv; H. J. Nicholson, ‘At the Heart of Medieval London’, in Temple Church, 6. 48 A. Sandys, ‘The Financial and Administrative Importance of the London Temple in the Thirteenth Century’, in A. G. Little and F. M. Powicke (eds), Essays in Medieval History presented to Thomas Frederick Tout, Manchester, 1925, 148–9; Nicholson, ‘Heart of Medieval London’ [n. 47 above], 6–10; T. Rymer (ed.), Foedera, Conventiones, Literae, etc., 3rd edn, London, 1739, I, pt.1, 56b; CPR 1216–25, 243, 284, 303, 317, 318, 523; CPR 1225–32, 54, 466; CPR 1232–47, 5, 81. 49 Rotuli Litterarum Clausarum, II, 20a, 21a; CPR 1216–25, 505, 506, 508, 510, 538. 50 Calendar of the Liberate Roll, 1226–40, 160; CPR Henry III 1232–47, 161; CCR 1237–42, 172. 51 J. Raine (ed.), The Register, or Rolls, of Walter Gray, Lord Archbishop of York, Edinburgh, 1872, 24, no. 115.

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to pray for his soul.52 The New Temple must have appeared more like an administrative branch of the crown than a spiritual center, modeled on the tomb of Christ and worthy of veneration and charity. Sometime in the later 1230s, the Templars embarked upon the expansion of the chancel of the church, motivated perhaps by Henry III’s promise in 1237 to be entombed there.53 The project was completed in 1240, and the king was present for its dedication.54 Eight indulgences issued between 1246 and 1252 suggest that the Templars’ building campaigns were not complete, and that they continued to build at least one, and possibly two, new chapels in the courtyard.55 One chapel was located within the enclosure (infra septa) of the New Temple, and the other was situated at the door of the hall (ad hostium aule); both chapels were dedicated to the Blessed Virgin. The chapel located within the enclosure received six of the pardons.56 The indulgence of twenty days offered in 1250 by Geoffrey, bishop of Ossory, specifies that the chapel was new (novam capellam).57 These pardons may represent the construction of the Chapel of St Ann, which faced the cloisters from the south side of the church,58 and was later demolished in 1826. Its dedication to St Ann has never been definite, and rests solely on a reference to the chapel in 1664.59 Doubt has been cast recently on the construction of the chapel of St Ann c. 1220, with a more likely date of the later 1240s, after the completion of the chancel in 1240.60 If this is the case, then the pardons issued to the New Temple church from 1246 represent the earliest documentary reference to the Chapel of St Ann. The second chapel, located at the door of the hall (ad hostium aule), received just one indulgence in 1247 from Stephen, bishop of Waterford.61 Nevertheless, the pardon provides important information about the chapel. The reference in the pardon corresponds with the church of St Mary, ‘situated without the door [hostium] of the hall’, that was included among the Templars’ possessions at New Temple after the arrest of the 52 Calendar of the Charter Rolls, 1226–57, 135; Calendar of the Liberate Rolls, 1267–72, 244, no. 2183. 53 CCR 1237–42, 6. Henry later annulled the bequest and was interred at Westminster Abbey. See Calendar of the Charter Rolls, 1226–57, 306; H. R. Luard (ed.), Flores Historiarum, London, 1890, III, 28. 54 H. R. Luard (ed.), Matthaei Parisiensis Monachi Sancti Albani Chronica Majora, London, 1877, IV, 11; Calendar of the Charter Rolls, 1226–57, 210. In 1239 and 1240, Henry III had given to the master gifts of wine, a gold cup, and vestments for the church, CCR 1237–42, 160 (bis), 179. 55 Appendix 1, nos 9–16. 56 Appendix 1, nos 9, 10, 12–16. 57 Appendix 1, no. 13. 58 The earliest reference to a chapel attached to the south side of the church is in 1282, Rymer, Foedera [n. 48 above], I, pt. 2, 201a; W. H. Godfrey, ‘Recent Discoveries at the Temple, London’, Archaeologia 95 (1953), 128. 59 Ibid.; and D. Lewer and R. Dark, The Temple Church in London, London, 1997, 43. 60 Godfrey, ‘Recent Discoveries’ [n. 58 above], 128–9; Lewer and Dark, Temple Church, 42–3. 61 Appendix 1, no. 11.

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brethren in 1308.62 This latter church has been interpreted as the nave of the main church, while the ‘Great Church’ of the inventory was the oblong chancel.63 However, the vocabulary of the indulgence supports W. H. Godfrey’s assertion in 1953 that the church of St Mary in the inventory of 1308 referred to another chapel located at the south end of the cloisters.64 This chapel had been dedicated to St Thomas Becket,65 but, along with the first chapel, was often ascribed to the Virgin Mary because it belonged to the main rotunda, or ‘Great Church’.66 The eighth document in this cluster of pardons came from Pope Innocent IV in 1251. His indulgence of forty days for those who visit the Temple Church is the only surviving papal indulgence for a specific Templar site in England.67 The Templars’ building campaign into the late 1240s corresponded with a contentious time in the Holy Land. Jerusalem fell into the hands of the Khorezmian Turks in 1244, prompting Pope Innocent IV to call a crusade in 1245, proclaiming indulgences for participants and contributors.68 England was expected to play a leading role in the financing of the crusade. The arrival in England by December 1246 of the bishop-elect of Bethlehem, Goffredo de Prefetti, was followed by the arrival of the Holy Blood Relic, a vessel of the blood of Jesus Christ sent to London by the patriarch of Jerusalem. Both of these events must be seen as a part of the propaganda efforts to encourage Henry III to support the crusade.69 It is not surprising, therefore, to see Jerusalem invoked in a pardon once again.70 In 1247, Henry III tried to organize an English contingent to take the cross,71 and in a procession throughout London on 13 October 1247, the king himself carried the Holy Blood Relic, which he then delivered to the monks at Westminster Abbey.72 Bishop Goffredo offered an indulgence

62 T. H. Baylis, The Temple Church and Chapel of St Ann, etc.: An Historical Record and Guide, London, 1913, 144. 63 Lewer and Dark, Temple Church [n. 59 above], 50–1; Jansen, ‘Light and Pure’ [n. 2 above], 57. 64 Godfrey, ‘Recent Discoveries’, 130, esp. reconstructed maps on 138, 141 (Plate LI); Jansen, ‘Light and Pure’, 57 n. 31. Godfrey makes no reference to the pardons for the New Temple. J. B. Williamson referenced the chapel of St Thomas next to the hall, but did not connect it with the church of St Mary listed in the inventory of 1308. See Williamson, History of the Temple [n. 19 above], 71. 65 The first reference to its dedication to Thomas Becket appears in 1336, then again in 1337, CPR 1334–38, 314; CCR 1337–39, 72–3. 66 Godfrey, ‘Recent Discoveries’ [n. 58 above], 130; Jansen, ‘Light and Pure’ [n. 2 above], 57 n. 31. 67 Appendix 1, no. 14. 68 Lunt, Financial Relations [n. 23 above], 435. 69 Vincent, ‘Goffredo de Prefetti’ [n. 22 above], 222–3, 226. 70 Appendix 1, no. 9. 71 É. Berger (ed.), Les Registres d’Innocent IV, Paris, 1884, I, nos 4054–5; C. Tyerman, England and the Crusades, 1095–1588, Chicago and London, 1988, 105–6. 72 Luard, Matthaei Parisiensis [n. 54 above], IV, 640–5; N. Vincent, The Holy Blood: King Henry III and the Westminster Blood Relic, Cambridge and New York, 2001, 3.

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that day to all who visited and venerated the Holy Blood.73 Between 1247 and 1250, numerous other prelates issued visitation indulgences for the relic, many of whom were foreign bishops from Ireland, Scotland, Wales and France.74 Gerald, archbishop of Bordeaux (France), Stephen, bishop of Waterford (Ireland), and Geoffrey, bishop of Ossory (Ireland), each issued indulgences for the Holy Blood, as well as for the Temple Church in London.75 The sentiment attached to the relic and to the Templars, who reportedly transported the Holy Blood from Jerusalem to London, contributed to the willingness of some of these bishops to also issue indulgences for the chapel at the New Temple. That the Templars were actively soliciting these pardons is supported by the fact that five of the bishops used an identical template. The use of a common template for engrossment by several different bishops often signified that a church or religious order was actively soliciting indulgences.76 The Templars’ solicitation of the pardons  might have been motivated by more than the opportunity to benefit from the wave of enthusiasm for the Holy Blood relic and the crusade. On 23 October 1247, the sheriff of London granted the bishop and church of Bethlehem all of his property in the parish of St Botolph outside Bishopsgate to found a priory under the obedience of the church of Bethlehem.77 The foundation of a religious house associated directly with the Holy Land, and specifically with the nativity, created a new sort of competition for the Templars in London for the solicitation of alms.78 It comes as no surprise, therefore, that solicitation of alms is found once again in some of the pardons issued for the New Temple, mostly for the lights of the chapels, although usually in a secondary position to the required spiritual deeds – in this case for the sake of praying (causa orandi). The Hospitallers also had direct association with the Holy Land and possessed a round church at Clerkenwell in London. However, the Templars had always benefitted more from royal patronage and gifts of land from Londoners than the Hospitallers. In fact, no indulgences were issued to the Hospitaller church in London until after the dissolution of the Templar Order in 1312.79 In the final five indulgences issued between 1260 and 1275, the onus on the Christian was veneration of relics or prayers for the dead at the Temple Church, while financial obligation disappears for good. But the vague reference to praying (causa orandi) is replaced by strict instructions for the penitents. The pardons detail which prayers should be recited, on which Vincent, ‘Goffredo de Prefetti’ [n. 22 above], 235. Vincent, Holy Blood [n. 72 above], 162. 75 Appendix 1, nos 11–13, 16. 76 Vincent, Holy Blood, 162 and n. 21. 77 Vincent, ‘Goffredo de Prefetti’, 224. 78 The London house of the Bethlehemites received royal protection and support for their alms-seekers, ibid., 227–8. 79 BL Cotton MS Nero E VI, f. 3r. 73

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day or at which hour they should be recited, and, in one example, at which altar the penitents should stand when praying.80 Prayer pardons reflect the development of purgatory, and Christians were coming to understand an indulgence as a promissory note that they could apply against their debt of penalty in purgatory.81 Such indulgences are also indicative of the connection between the living and the dead, and the expectation that, through their prayers, the living will help the dead through purgatory.82 Prayer indulgences, then, became a way in which a church could advertise the tomb of a high-profile individual, and thus attract more pilgrims. The Templars were sure to exploit the fact that several famous and influential men were entombed at the New Temple church,83 several of whom were specified in the indulgences. In 1262, Thomas, bishop of Elphin (Ireland) offered ten days for those who visited the grave of Geoffrey de Gramund and prayed for his soul and the souls of all those entombed at the New Temple.84 In 1269, Lawrence of St Martin, bishop of Rochester, offered thirteen days for those who prayed for the souls of the Earls Marshal, Lord Hugh Bigod, and for all the deceased in Christ.85 Walter Giffard, archbishop of York, granted thirty days on 11 May 1275 for those who visited and prayed for the soul of John de Muchegros, although the pardon does not specify if he was buried at the New Temple.86 The reference to the Earls Marshals is of particular interest here. The high number of pardons from Irish bishops to a church and religious order favoured by the Marshal family, several of whom were entombed there, and who were also powerful lords in Ireland, warrants exploration. All four of the historic episcopal provinces (Armagh, Dublin, Cashel and Tuam) are represented in the indulgences, and the episcopal sees of three of the bishops who issued pardons were located within the Marshal lordship of Leinster (Ossory, Ferns and Kildare). The bishopric of Waterford was situated just south of the boundary of the fee, and the archbishopric of Dublin was situated just north of it. The Irish bishops were likely serving as suffragans in London, since they were all present in London when they issued the pardons.87 The Marshal family’s connection with the Templar Order dates to the Appendix 1, nos 17–21. Shaffern, Penitents’ Treasury [n. 44 above], 26; Swanson, Passports to Paradise? [n. 3 above], 14, 21; R. N. Swanson, ‘Indulgences for Prayers for the Dead in the Diocese of Lincoln in the Early Fourteenth Century’, JEH 5 (2001), 197, 201. 82 Swanson, ‘Prayers for the Dead’, 207–12. 83 For a discussion of those entombed at the Temple Church, see Park, ‘Burials and Monuments’ [n. 9 above], 67–92; S. Painter, William Marshal, Knight-Errant, Baron, and Regent of England, Baltimore, 1933, 289; Williamson, History of the Temple [n. 19 above], 22–3. 84 Appendix 1, no. 19. 85 Ibid., no. 20. 86 Ibid., no. 21. 87 The joint indulgence from 1206–16 and the bishop of Leighlin’s charter of 1246 are the only pardons that do not indicate where it was issued, ibid., nos 8, 9. 80 81

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twelfth century, when John Marshal, William’s father, granted to the Order his manor of Rockley in Wiltshire.88 William himself later bequeathed his Herefordshire manor of Upleadon to the Templars. These grants were neither remarkable nor unique; John’s patronage of the Templars was in line with aristocratic practice of the time. David Crouch refers to William Marshal’s patronage of the church as thoroughly conventional, and even old fashioned.89 His use of Geoffrey the Templar as his almoner, who wrote his last will and testament, also followed the custom of the time.90 While on crusade between 1183 and 1186, William promised to become a Templar before he died, and to be buried in a Templar house.91 Returning to England, he formed a close friendship with the master of the Order, Aimery de Saint-Maur. When William’s son, William the younger, joined the baronial rebellion against King John, it was Aimery whom the king appointed to escort the rebel to visit his father, to negotiate returning his allegiance to the king.92 Aimery reportedly attended William Marshal’s deathbed in 1219, and inducted him into the Templar Order before he died. William was wrapped in silks from Jerusalem and entombed at the New Temple church. Aimery himself died shortly thereafter, requesting to be buried next to William Marshal.93 The Marshal family’s close relationship with the Templars must have continued under two of his sons, William II and Gilbert III, since they were also buried at the Temple Church in London,94 although documentary evidence for their relationship is scarce. As the lords of Leinster in Ireland from 1189 onwards, the Marshals had a tumultuous relationship with the Irish justiciar, and were often embroiled in bitter wars there with the Lacy family.95 William Marshal’s relations with the Irish bishops appear to have been tense at best, with the occasional outbreak of hostilities at worst. His interference in ecclesiastical appointments is alluded to when, in 1208, King John required William to give up the right to investiture of bishops and abbots in his lordship of Leinster.96 His Irish lands were placed under interdict by the archbishops of Dublin and Tuam in 1216 for seizing and withholding some of the estates of Ailbe, bishop of Ferns. When William Marshal died in 1219, he

88 D. Crouch (ed.), The Acts and Letters of the Marshal Family: Marshals of England and Earls of Pembroke 1145–1248, Camden Society, 2015, Appendix I, no. 8. I thank Professor Crouch for generously sharing his manuscript with me before publication. 89 D. Crouch, William Marshal: Knighthood, War and Chivalry, 1147–1219, 2nd edn, London, 2002, 24, 140, 155, 213–14; Painter, William Marshal [n. 83 above], 56. 90 Crouch, William Marshal, 155. 91 P. Meyer (ed.), L’histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal, Paris, 1891–1901, II, 295–6, lines 18233–43, trans. N. Bryant, The History of William Marshal, Woodbridge, 2016, 217. 92 Rotuli Litterarum Patentium, 175b; Painter, William Marshal, 185–6. 93 Meyer, L’histoire, II, 295–302, lines 18233–418; Painter, William Marshal, 284–5, 289; Park, ‘Burials and Monuments’ [n. 9 above], 76–7. 94 Luard, Matthaei Parisiensis [n. 54 above], III, 201; IV, 135–6. 95 Crouch, Acts and Letters [n. 88 above], 17–18, 22, 26, 28, 32. 96 Ibid., Appendix I, no. 14.

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was under excommunication by Bishop Ailbe for this reason.97 Matthew Paris believed that William’s treatment of the bishop was so appalling that it cursed the family, causing the termination of his male lineage in 1245.98 Not all of his disputes with bishops ended badly. While in Ireland between 1208 and 1213, he made amends to the bishop of Ossory over property claims and rights. He promised to restore to the bishop his market at Kilkenny, support the bishop in his claims of land, restore the church’s liberties, renounce any ill intentions towards the bishops of Ossory, and that any future damages be pursued in the bishop’s court.99 He also ordered an ounce of gold be paid to the bishop each year.100 These early concessions may have established a long-lasting relationship between the Earls Marshals and the bishops of Ossory. Geoffrey, bishop of Ossory, would offer two pardons in support of the Temple Church in 1250, after three of the Earls Marshals were entombed there.101 Evidence is slight for the interactions between William Marshal II and the Irish bishops, and non-existent for Gilbert Marshal III. One suspects that William attempted to placate the bishops whom his father had so greatly outraged. Between 1220 and 1224, he made two grants of land to the archbishop of Dublin,102 and resolved a disagreement over the advowson to the church of Moone (Co. Kildare).103 When he gave the church of Rathmacknee, Co. Wexford, to the canons of the prior of All Saints, it was at the will and approval of the bishop of Ferns.104 Peter, bishop of Ossory, witnessed William Marshal II’s confirmation of his father’s grants to the Cistercian monks of the Holy Saviour in 1222/23, while Ralph, bishop of Kildare, and Deodatus, bishop-elect of Meath, witnessed William II’s concession of land in Kilkenny to the canons of the abbey of St Thomas the Martyr in 1224.105 Gilbert Marshal III, the last of the Marshals to be entombed at the New Temple, died in 27 June 1241. He had spent little time in Ireland, concentrating most of his efforts in his earldom of Pembroke, Wales.106 His brother and heir, Walter Marshal, did homage for the Marshal lands and castles in Leinster on 12 August 1241.107 Like his predecessor, Walter spent very little time in Ireland, although he secured on 6 June 1244 at Westminster the submission by homage of Maurice fitz Gerald, justiciar of

97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107

Luard, Matthaei Parisiensis, IV, 492–3; Crouch, William Marshal [n. 89 above], 114. Luard, Matthaei Parisiensis, IV, 492–5; Crouch, Acts and Letters, 34 n. 156. Ibid., no. 80. Ibid., no. 81. Appendix 1, nos 12, 13. Crouch, Acts and Letters [n. 88 above], nos 132–3. Ibid., nos 157–8. Ibid., no. 131. Ibid., nos 138, 136. Ibid., 29. CCR 1237–42, 365; Crouch, Acts and Letters, 32.

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Ireland, and the Marshal’s principal enemy in Ireland.108 This victory brought about a compromise in a contentious dispute between the Earls Marshals and justiciars of Ireland that had existed since the time of William Marshal I. The large amount of indulgences issued to the New Temple by Irish bishops from 1246 onwards may be a reflection of the Marshals’ settled affairs in Ireland, or perhaps in response to the ending of the Marshals’ male lineage with the death of Ansel Marshal on 23 December 1245.109 The Marshalcy thereafter fell to Matilda, the eldest daughter of William Marshal I and widow of Hugh Bigod, third earl of Norfolk. She reportedly granted the office of marshal to her son, Roger Bigod, fourth earl of Norfolk, before she died. The reference in the bishop of Rochester’s indulgence of 1269 to the Earls Marshals entombed at the New Temple church, along with the body of Lord Hugh Bigod, poses a peculiarity. This is the only evidence for a Hugh Bigod entombed at the New Temple church, and must refer either to Matilda’s first husband, who died in 1225, or to their younger son, also named Hugh, who had recently died in 1266. Hugh was neither Marshal nor Earl of Norfolk – those honours fell to his older brother, Roger – but he did serve as justiciar of England between 1258 and 1260. The collection of indulgences issued in support of the New Temple church allows for a new perspective on the Templars in England. The pattern of their issuance suggests an active attempt by the Order to solicit the pardons from the episcopal authority in England, particularly during periods of renewed enthusiasm for the Holy Land and the crusading movement. Their reminder that the Earls Marshals were entombed there, with William Marshal the elder, himself a Templar, wrapped in silks from Jersusalem, provided for penitent Christians an alternative Jerusalem, one that was situated in the New Temple church of London.

108 109

CCR 1242–47, 246–7; Crouch, Acts and Letters, 32. Ibid., 34.

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APPENDIX 1 TABLE OF INDULGENCES Source: British Library Cotton MS Nero E VI Date c. 1145 x 1161 1162 x 1164 1162 x 1164 1164 x 1181 1184 x 1190 1193 x 1205 10 June 1205 1206 x 1216

1246 April 1246 1247 1250 (15 days) 1250 (20 days) 8 March 1251 4 June 1251 21 May 1252 1260 1261 1262 7 June 1269 11 May 1275

Grantor Theobald of Bec Thomas Becket Robert de Chesney Roger de Pont L’Êveque Baldwin Hubert Walter William of Sainte-Mère-Eglise Echdonn mac Gille Uidir alias Eugene Ailbe O Maelmuidhe alias Albinus A? (prob. Cornelius Mac Gealain) William Hugh of Northwold Stephen Geoffrey de Turville Geoffrey de Turville Innocent IV Brendán Mac Teichthecháin Géraud de Malemort Tomàs Ó Miadacháin alias Dionysius Tomàs mac Fergail Mac Diarmata Tomàs mac Fergail Mac Diarmata Lawrence of St Martin Walter Giffard

Title Archbishop of Canterbury Archbishop of Canterbury Bishop of Lincoln Archbishop of York Archbishop of Canterbury Archbishop of Canterbury Bishop of London Archbishop of Armagh (Ireland) Bishop of Ferns (Ireland) Bishop of Kildare (Ireland) Bishop of Leighlin (Ireland) Bishop of Ely Bishop of Waterford (Ireland) Bishop of Ossory (Ireland) Bishop of Ossory (Ireland) Pope Bishop of Ardagh Archbishop of Bordeaux (France) Bishop of Achonry (Ireland) Bishop of Elphin (Ireland) Bishop of Elphin (Ireland) Bishop of Rochester Archbishop of York

(1) Theobald, archbishop of Canterbury and papal legate, grants twenty days’ indulgence. c. 1145–61 MS, f. 24r. Printed: Lees, Records of Templars, 162; Saltman, Theobald, no. 261. T. Dei gratia Cantuarien’ archiepiscopus Anglorum primas et apostolice sedis legatus universis sancte ecclesie fidelibus salutem. Ad pastoris spectat solicitudinem omnibus maxime religionis cultum professis in sua providere

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necessitate. Proinde universitati vestre pro religiosis fratribus militibus de Templo preces porrigimus et in Domino obsecramus quatinus ecclesiam eorum que dicitur Dominicum Templum extra London’ in honore beate Marie dedicatum in ebdomada pentecostes singulis annis cum devocione visitetis et elemosinas vestras eidem loco pro Dei amore et in remissionem peccatorum vestrorum inpendatis. Quicumque ergo singulis annis predicto tempore ecclesiam illam devote visitaverint eis viginti dies de penitencia sibi iniuncta relaxamus et oracionum et beneficiorum Cantuarien’ ecclesie participium concedimus. Valete. Theobald’s legation began formally in 1150, but he occasionally served as legate before then. See Saltman, Theobald, 30–1. (2) Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury, grants twenty days’ indulgence. 3 June 1162 x October 1164 MS, f. 24r–v. Printed: Lees, Records of Templars, 162; EEA II: Canterbury, 1162– 1190, no. 42. Thomas Dei gratia Cantuariensis ecclesie minister humilis universis sibi in Christo dilectis fratribus et filiis salutem. Inter precipua pietatis et caritatis opera unum est quod deo acceptum esse credimus loca videlicet sancta visitare et visitando venerari ea maxime que ad honorem dei devocionis causa specialius fundata sunt. Hac igitur consideracione domum Templi que Londoniis (sic) super Tamensem fluvium sita est omni cum devocione diligere et promovere cupientes universitatem vestram monemus et exhortamur in Domino ut locum illum ob salutem animarum vestrarum nobiscum unam (sic) veneremini et in die maxime dedicacionis eius eum celeberrime visitetis. Omnibus autem qui hanc nostram exhortacionem iniuncta sibi penitencia viginti dies relaxamus et omnium bonorum que in sancta Cant’ ecclesia fiunt communionem concedimus. Valete. Thomas Becket’s charters were likely issued in England before he fled for the continent in October 1164, where he remained in exile until 1170. See EEA II: Canterbury, 1162–1190, lxxvii, no. 42, note. (3) Robert, bishop of Lincoln, grants twenty days’ indulgence. May 1161 x 27 December 1166 (probably between 3 June 1162 and October 1164)

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MS, f. 24v. Printed: EEA I: Lincoln, 1067–1185, no. 258. Robertus Dei gratia Lincoln’ episcopus universis catholice ecclesie filiis per episcopatum Lincoln’ constitutis salutem. Inter precipua pietatis et caritatis opera unum est quod Deo acceptum esse credimus loca videlicet sancta visitare et visitando venerarei (sic) ea maxime que ad honorem Dei devocionis causa specialius fundata sunt. Hac igitur consideracione domum Templi que London’ super Tamensem fluvium sita est omni cum devocione diligere et promovere cupientes universitatem vestram monemus et exhortamur in Domino ut locum illum ob salutem animarum vestrarum nobiscum una veneremini et in die maxime dedicacionis eius eum celeberrime visitetis. Omnibus autem qui hanc vestram (sic) exhortacionem beningne admiserint et iam dicto die dedicacionis loco illi elemosinam aliquam devote eregaverint [sic] de iniuncta sibi penitencia viginti dies relaxamus et omnium bonorum que in sancta Lincoln’ ecclesia fiunt communionem concedimus. Valete. Robert likely issued this charter at the same time as Thomas Becket’s indulgence. See note for no. 2 above. (4) Roger, archbishop of York and papal legate, grants ten days’ indulgence. 1164 x November 1181 MS, f. 24v. Printed: Lees, Records of Templars, 163–4; EEA 20: York, 1154–1181, no. 96. R. Dei gratia Eboracen’ ecclesie archiepiscopus sedis apostolice legatus omnibus sancte ecclesie filiis salutem et Dei benedictionem. Universis Dei fidelibus et precipue religiosis in locis ad honorem Dei fundatis et dedicatis habitantibus modis omnibus quibus valemus et prodesse volumus et debemus inter insignia autem pietatis opera excellencius ceteris et Deo acceptabile esse credimus loca sancta visitare et visitando venerari ea propter devocionem vestram. Rogamus et attencius exhortamur in Domino quatinus pro Dei amore et animarum vestrarum salute domum Templi que London’ super Tamensem fluvium sita est et ecclesiam in honore Dei genitricis Beate Marie ibidem constructam cum omni devocione veneramini et diligatis et de bonis vestris a Deo vobis collatis partem aliquam pietatis intuitu inpartiri dignemini et maxime in die dedicacionis eius celeberrime visitare studeatis. Omnibus autem hanc exhortacionem nostram benigne suscipientibus qui iam dicte ecclesie in anniversaria eius dedicacione elemosinas suas erogaverint decem dies de iniuncta sibi penitencia confisi de beatorum apostolorum Petri et Pauli

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meritis relaxamus omnium quoque beneficiorum et oracionum que in ecclesiis nostris fiunt participes esse concedimus. Valete. Dated between Roger’s legation and death. Lees mistakenly dates Roger’s legation to 1169. (5) Baldwin, archbishop of Canterbury, grants twenty days’ indulgence. No text, referenced in no. 6 below. (6) Hubert, archbishop of Canterbury, grants twenty days’ indulgence, following the example of his predecessor, Baldwin. November 1193 x April 1195 or February 1198 x 13 July 1205 MS, f. 24v. Printed: EEA III: Canterbury, 1193–1205, no. 630. H. Dei gratia Cantuarien’ archiepiscopus tocius Anglie primas universis in Christo fratribus et filiis salutem in auctore salutis. Cum super vos dilectissimi tanquam animarum vestrarum custodes simus a Domino constituti ad ea vos debemus solicita in Domino exhortacione allicere que saluti animarum vestrarum noverimus amplius expedire quia igitur inter precipua caritatis et pietatis opera post ea que pauperibus fiunt id Deo acceptissimum esse creditur per quod locis sacris digna veneracio inpenditur circa id studiosius nos decet intendere ut ita anime vestre possint in celo locum digne veneracionis invenire. Hac igitur consideracione domum Templi London’ que super Tamensem fluvium sita est cum omni devocione promovere et venerari cupientes universitatem vestram monemus et exhortamur in Domino ut locum illum ob salutem animarum vestrarum nobiscum una venerari et maxime in die dedicacionis eius celeberrime visitare velitis. Nos autem de misericordia Dei confidentes intuitu promocionis eiusdem loci et ad exemplum bone memorie Baldwini predecessoris nostri omnibus qui hanc nostram exhortacionem benigne admiserint et iam dicto die dedicacionis loco illi digne veneracionis obsequium inpenderint et elemosinas suas erogaverint confessis et vere penitentibus de iniuncta sibi penitencia viginti dies relaxamus et omnium orationum et beneficiorum que in sancta Cantuarien’ ecclesia fiunt participes esse concedimus. Valete. Hubert was papal legate between April 1195 and February 1198. Since he does not identify himself as papal legate in this charter, he likely issued it before or after his legation.

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(7) William, bishop of London, grants forty days’ indulgence. Park, 10 June 1205 MS, f. 24v. Printed: EEA 26: London, 1189–1228, no. 125. Willelmus Dei gratia London’ episcopus universis Sancte Matris ecclesie filiis per episcopatum London’ constitutis salutem gratiam et benedictionem. Sancta quidem et salubris est cogitacio sanctorum suffragiis adherere ut hii quibus in huius vite fluctuantis adversis merita propria non sufficiunt sanctorum meritis et intercessionibus invitantur. Quia vero ex virorum fide dignorum assercione certa relatione cognovimus plurimorum sanctorum reliquias in ecclesia Beate Marie fratrum Milicie Templi Ierosolimit’ London’ contineri. Omnibus qui ad eundem locum ob veneracionem memoratarum reliquiarum die ad hoc solempniter constituto accesserint confessis et vere penitentibus de dei misericordia confisi de iniuncta sibi penitencia quadraginta dies relaxamus. Quod ne ab universitatis vestre noticia futuris temporibus elabatur presentis scripti testimonio sigilli nostri apposicione muniti duximus roborando. Datum apud Parcum quarto idus iunii anno ab incarnacione domini millesimo ducentesimo quinto. (8) Eugene, archbishop of Armagh, grants thirty-four days’ indulgence, and the bishops of Kildare and Ferns grant twenty days each. 1206 x 1216 MS, f. 26r. E. Dei gratia Ardmachan’ archiepiscopus et tocius Hibernie primas et eadem gratia A. Darensis et A. Farden’ episcopi universis sancte matris ecclesie filiis salutem gratiam et benedictionem. Sancta quidem et salubris est cogitacio sanctorum suffragiis adherere ut hii quibus in huius vite fluctuantis adversis merita propria non sufficiunt sanctorum meritis et intercessionibus invitantur. Quia vero ex virorum fide dignorum assercione certa relatione cognovimus plurimorum sanctorum reliquias in ecclesia Beate Marie fratrum Milicie Templi Ierusalem London’ contineri. Omnibus qui ad eundem locum ob veneracionem memoratarum reliquiarum die ad hoc solempniter constituto accesserint confessis et vere penitentibus de Dei misericordia confisi ego Eugenius Ardmachan’ archiepiscopus xxxiiii dies et ego A. Daren’ xx dies et ego Albinus Farden’ episcopi xx dies relaxacionis indulgemus volentes eos et concedentes in omni oracione et beneficio tanquam vere participes per archiepiscopatum et episcopatus nostros admitti. Quod ne ab universitatis vestre noticia futuris temporibus elabatur presentis scripti testimonio sigillorum nostrorum appositione muniti duximus roborandum.

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Dated between the restoration of the temporalities of Archbishop Eugene and his death. Ailbe was bishop of Ferns between 1186 and 1223, and Cornelius was bishop of Kildare between 1206 and 1223. The initial ‘A’ here for the bishop of Kildare must be an error. (9) William, bishop of Leighlin (Dublin Province, Ireland), grants twenty days’ indulgence. 1246 MS, ff. 24v–25r. Universis Christi fidelibus Willelmus Dei gratia Lechlin’ episcopus salutem in Domino sempiternam. Quia reverencia que matri Domini defertur illi eciam qui eam talem fecit quod mater Dei esset salubriter exhibetur oportet nos eam revereri in terris ut ipsius patrociniis adiuti cum filio suo conregnemus in celis. Nos igitur super premissis fiduciam talem habentes de Dei misericordia et meritis ipsius Beate Virginis plenius confisi omnibus were penitentibus quorum diocesani hanc nostram indulgenciam ratam habuerint qui capellam Beate Virginis supradicte infra septa Templi Ierosolimit’ London’ sitam orandi causa humiliter intraverint ac devote vel de suis elemosinis ad luminaria ipsius ibidem accendenda aliquod beneficium contulerint de iniuncta sibi penitencia viginti dies relaxamus. Actum anno gratie millesimo ducentesimo quadragesimo sexto pontificatus nostri octodecim. Valete. (10) Hugh, bishop of Ely, grants twenty days’ indulgence. London, April 1246 MS, f. 25r. Omnibus Christi fidelibus presentes litteras inspecturis H. Dei gratia Elien’ episcopus salutem in Domino. De Dei misericordia gloriose genitricis eius Marie ac omnium sanctorum meritis plenius confidentes omnibus de nostra diocese et aliis quorum diocesani id ratum habuerint qui ad honorem Dei et Beate Marie Virginis capellam gloriosissime celi regine visitaverint infra septa curie Novi Templi London’ sitam vel de bonis suis ad sustentacionem cerei et luminarie dicte capelle aliquid contulerint si de peccatis suis were contrici fuerint et confessi viginti dies de iniuncta sibi penitencia misericorditer relaxamus. Datum London’ mense anno gratie millesimo ducentesimo quadragesimo sexto.

JERUSALEM IN LONDON: THE NEW TEMPLE CHURCH

(11) Stephen, bishop of Waterford (Cashel Province, Ireland), grants thirteen days’ indulgence. London, 1247 MS, f. 25r. Universis Christi fidelibus ad quos presens scriptum pervenerit Stephanus Dei gratia Waterford’ episcopus salutem in Domino sepiternam [sic]. De Dei misericordia et Beate Virginis Marie genitricis eius omnium sanctorum meritis confidentes omnibus Christianis corde contritis et vere confessis qui pie devocionis affectu capellam Beate Marie ad hostium aule Novi Templi London’ sitam devote visitaverint vel aliquid de bonis a Deo sibi collatis ibidem errogaverint [sic] quo luminare eiusdem capelle uberius et honorificencius sustentetur tresdecim dies de iniumcta Sibi penitencia misericorditer relaxamus, Valete. Datum apud London’ anno Domini millesimo ducentesimo quadragesimo septimo. (12) Geoffrey, bishop of Ossory (Dublin Province), grants fifteen days’ indulgence. London, 24 June or 29 August 1250 MS, f. 25r. Universis Christi fidelibus G. permissione divina Ossoren’ episcopus salutem in Domino sempiternam. Quia reverencia que matri domini defertur illi eciam qui eam talem fecit quod mater Dei esset salubriter exhibetur oportet nos eam revereri in terris ut ipsius patrociniis adiuti cum filio suo conregnemus in celis. Nos igitur super premissis fiduciam talem habentes de Dei misericordia et meritis ipsius Beate Virginis plenius confisi omnibus were penitentibus quorum diocesani hanc nostram indulgenciam ratam habuerint qui capellam Beate Virginis supradicte infra septa Novi Templi sitam orandi causa humiliter intraverint ac devote vel de suis elemosinis ad luminaria ipsius ibidem accendenda aliquod beneficium contulerint de iniuncta sibi penitencia quindecim dies misericorditer relaxamus. Actum London’ anno gratie millesimo ducentesimo quinquagesimo die Sancti Iohannis Baptiste. (13) Geoffrey, bishop of Ossory, grants twenty days’ indulgence. London, 24 June or 29 August 1250 MS, f. 25r. Universis Christi fidelibus G. permissione divina Ossoren’ episcopus

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salutem in Domino sempiternam. Quia reverencia que matri Domini differtur illi eciam qui eam talem fecit quod mater Dei esset salubriter exhebetur [sic] oportet nos eam revereri in terris ut ipsius patrociniis adiuti cum filio suo comregnemus in celis, Nos igitur super premissis fiduciam talem habentes de Dei misericordia et meritis ipsius Beate Virginis plenius confisi omnibus were penitentibus quorum diocesani hanc nostram indulgenciam ratam habuerint qui novam capellam Beate Virginis supradicte infra septa Novi Templi London’ sitam orandi causa humiliter ac devote intraverint de iniuncta sibi penitencia viginti dies misericorditer relaxamus. Actum London’ anno gratie millesimo ducentesimo quinquagesimo die sancti Iohannis Baptiste. (14) Pope Innocent IV grants forty days’ indulgence. Lyons, France, 8 March 1251 MS, f. 24r. Innocencius episcopus servus servorum Dei dilectis filiis preceptori et fratribus domus Milicie Templi in Anglia salutem et apostolicam benediccionem. Licet is de cuius munere venit ut sibi a fidelibus suis digne ac laudabiliter serviatur ex habundancia pietatis sue que merita supplicum excedit et vota bene servientibus multo maiora retribuat quam valeant promereri. Nichilominus tum desiderantes reddere Domino populum acceptabilem fideles Christi ad complacendum ei quasi quibusdam illectivis muneribus indulgenciis scilicet et remissionibus invitamus ut exinde reddantur divine gracie aptiones cupientes igitur ut vestra ecclesia constituta in honore beate Marie virginis apud Londoniam congruis honoribus frequentetur omnibus were penitentibus et confessis qui ad ecclesiam ipsam in festo assumptionis eiusdem Virginis cum debita veneracione singulis annis accesserint de omnipotentis Dei misericordia et beatorum Petri et Pauli apostolorum eius auctoritate confisi quadraginta dies de iniuncta sibi penitencia misericorditer relaxamus. Datum Lugdun’ viii idus marcii pontificatus nostril anno octavo. (15) Brendan, bishop of Ardagh (Armagh Province, Ireland), grants thirty days’ indulgence. London, 4 June 1251 MS, f. 25r. Universis Christi fidelibus Brandanus Dei gratia Ardachaden’ episcopus salutem in Domino sempiternam. Quia reverencia que matri domini defertur illi eciam qui eam talem fecit quod mater Dei esset salubriter

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exhibetur oportet nos eam revereri in terris ut ipsius patrociniis adiuti cum filio suo conregnemus in celis. Nos igitur super premissis fiduciam talem habentes de Dei misericordia et meritis ipsius Beate Virginis plenius confisi omnibus were penitentibus quorum diocesani hanc nostram indulgenciam ratam habuerint qui ecclesiam Beate Virginis supradicte infra septa Novi Templi London’ sitam orandi causa humiliter ac devote intraverint de iniuncta sibi penitencia triginta dies misericorditer relaxamus. Actum London’ anno gratie millesimo ducentesimo quinquagesimo primo in festo Pentecostes. (16) Gerald, archbishop of Bordeaux (France), grants forty days’ indulgence. London, 21 May 1252 MS, f. 25v. Omnibus Christi fidelibus Geraldus Dei gratia Burdegalen’ archiepiscopus salutem in Domino sempiternam. Quia reverencia que matri Domini defertur illi qui eam talem fecit quod mater Dei esset salubriter exhibetur oportet nos eam revereri in terris ut ipsius patrociniis adiuti cum filio suo conregnemus in celis. Nos igitur super premissis fiduciam talem habentes de Dei misericordia et ipsius meritis Beate Virginis plenius confisi omnibus were penitentibus quorum diocesani hanc nostram indulgenciam ratam habuerint qui ecclesiam Beate Virginis supradicte infra septa Novi Templi London’ sitam orandi causa humiliter ac devote intraverint et oblaciones seu alias quaslibet elemosinas de bonis sibi a Deo concessis pie contulerint eidem de iniuncta sibi penitencia quadraginta dies misericorditer relaxamus. Actum London’ duodecimo kalendis iunii anno gratie millesimo ducentesimo quinquagesimo secundo. (17) Dionysius, bishop of Achonry (Tuam Province, Ireland), grants forty days’ indulgence. London, 22 May 1260 MS, f. 25v. Dionisius Dei gratia Akaden’ episcopus universis Sancte Matris ecclesie filiis salutem gratiam et benedictionem. Sancta quidem et salubris est cogitacio sanctorum suffragiis adherere ut hii quibus in huius vite fluctuantis adversis merita propria non sufficiunt sanctorum meritis et intercessionibus invitantur. Quia ex virorum fide dignorum assercione certa religione cognovimus plurimorum sanctorum reliquias in ecclesia Beate Marie fratrum Milicie Templi Ierosolimit’ London’ contineri. Omnibus qui ad eundem locum ob veneracionem memoratarum

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reliquiarum die ad hoc solemniter constituto accesserint et eciam in dedicacione eiusdem confessis et vere penitentibus de Dei misericordia confisi de iniuncta sibi penitencia quadraginta dies relaxamus. Quod ne ab universitatis vestre noticia futuris temporibus elabatur presentis scripti testimonio sigilli nostri appositione muniti duximus roborando. Datum apud London’ undecimo kalendis iunii anno ab incarnacione Domini miliesimo ducentesimo sexagesimo. (18) Thomas, bishop of Elphin (Tuam Province, Ireland), grants forty days’ indulgence. London, 1261 MS, f. 25v. Omnibus Christi fidelibus ad quorum audienciam littere presentes pervenerint ffrater (sic) Thomas miseracione divina Elfinen’ episcopus eternam in Domino salutem. De omnipotentis Dei misericordia et gloriose Marie Virginis matris eius ac beatorum apostolorum Petri et Pauli et omnium sanctorum meritis confidentes omnibus were penitentibus et confessis qui capellam Beate Marie Virginis Novi Templi London’ causa oracionis sive devocionis in festis Annunciacionis Assumpcionis Nativitatis Purificacionis Beate Virginis et in festo commemoracionis omnium sanctorum cum eorum octabis annuatim accesserint quadraginta dies de iniuncta sibi penitencia misericorditer relaxamus. Omnibus qui cum devocione misse Beate Marie Virginis inter fuerint et qui oracionem dominicam cum salutacione Beate Virginis quibuscumque diebus et horis coram eodem altari pie decantaverint supradictam indulgenciam concedimus inperpetuum. Datum London’ anno gratie millesimo ducentesimo sexagesimo primo. (19) Thomas, bishop of Elphin (Tuam Province, Ireland), grants ten days’ indulgence. London, 1262 MS, f. 25v. Universis in Christo fidelibus ad quos littere presentes pervenerint Thomas miseracione divina Elfinen’ episcopus salutem in Domino sempiternam. Noverit universitas vestra nos de Dei misericordia et gloriose Virginis Marie matris eius omniumque sanctorum meritis confidentes omnibus were penitentibus qui ad tumilum domini Galfridi de Gramund in ecclesia fratrum Milicie Londonie accesserint et pro anima eiusdem domini Galfridi de Gramund aliorum que in eadem ecclesia sepultorum

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omnium que fidelium defunctorum oracionem dominicam quinquies cum totidem salutacionibus Beate Virginis totidem que genuflectionibus ibidem dixerint decem dies de iniuncta sibi penitencia pie relaxamus. In cuius rei testimonium presentibus litteris sigillum nostrum apposuimus. Datum London’ anno gratie miliesimo ducentesimo sexagesimo secundo. (20) Lawrence, bishop of Rochester, grants thirteen days’ indulgence. Lambeth, 7 June 1269 MS, f. 25v. Universis presentes litteras inspecturis Laurencius miseracione divina Roffen’ ecclesie minister humilis salutem in Domino sempiternam. Laudabilis est et pia devocio Christi fidelium que pro defunctis fidelibus ut a suis peccatis misericorditer absolvantur fideliter exhibetur ideo que universitatem vestram requirimus et rogamus in Domino ac hortamur attente quatinus accedentes ad ecclesiam Milicie Novi Templi London’ pro animabus clare memorie comitum marescallorum et domini Hugonis Bigod quorum corpora inibi requiescunt et pro animabus omnium aliorum in Christo ibidem et alibi quiescencium pia oracionum suffragia patri misericordiarum gratanter porrigere ac libenter offerre curetis ut per hec et alia bona que Domino inspirante feceritis ad eterna possitis gaudia pervenire scientes quod qui orare letantur pro aliis exinde premia retribucionis eterne persencient cumulacius in se ipsis. Nos siquidem de omnipotentis Dei misericordia et Sanctorum Pauli et Petri atque Andree apostolorum eius auctoritate ac Virginis gloriose omniumque sanctorum intercessione confisi omnibus subditis nostris et aliis quorum diocesani hanc indulgenciam nostram ratam habuerint were penitentibus et confessis qui pias oraciones Domino Iesu Christo pro animabus prenominatorum et omnium fidelium defunctorum prout superius est expressum effuderint tresdecim dies de iniunctis sibi penitenciis misericorditer relaxamus. Datum apud Lamhethe septimo idus iunii anno Domini millesimo ducentesimo sexagesimo nono. Valeat universitas vestra semper in Domino Iesu Christo. (21) Walter, archbishop of York, grants thirty days’ indulgence. Bernes [sic] near London, 11 May 1275 MS, ff. 25v–26r. Universis Christi fidelibus ad quos presentes littere pervenerint Walterus permissione divina Eborum Archiepiscopus Anglie primas salutem in domino sempiternam. Quia sanctum est et salubre pro defunctis

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exorare et pro eis precipue qui in hoc seculo tales se meritis et beneficiis exhibuerunt ut eorum memoria recitacione digna inveniatur posteris de Dei omnipotentis misericordia et gloriose Virginis Marie beatorum apostolorum Petri et Pauli atque Andree omniumque sanctorum meritis confidentes omnibus parochianis nostris et aliis quorum diocesani hanc indulgenciam nostram ratam habuerint et acceptam de peccatis suis contritis penitentibus et confessis qui ecclesiam Novi Templi London’ adierint et pro anima bone memorie Johannis de Muchegros et pro cunctorum fidelium requie defunctorum oracionem dominicam cum salutacione Beate Virginis dixerint mente fida triginta dies de iniuncta sibi penitencia misericorditer relaxamus. In cuius rei testimonium sigillum nostrum presentibus est appensum. Datum apud Bernes iuxta London’ quinto idus maii anno millesimo ducentesimo septuagesimo quinto.

COMMEMORATING THE ROTUNDA IN THE ROUND: THE MEDIEVAL LATIN LITURGY OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE IN JERUSALEM AND ITS PERFORMANCE IN THE WEST * SEBASTIÁN SALVADÓ

C

hristian pilgrims to the Holy Land aspire to see the places of Christ’s birth, death and resurrection. The many round churches erected in Western Christendom during the Middle Ages stress the prominent role that visual signs played in evoking the experience of Jerusalem and of pilgrimage. Seeing, however, is only one facet of pilgrimage. Round churches in the West were not just symbols of Jerusalem; they were also settings for the re-enactment of the spiritual drama that pilgrimage to the East made possible. Ritual was an integral component of pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and its performance made accessible the spiritual target

I would like to thank Robin Griffith-Jones for his many insightful observations and extensive work on this contribution. I would also like to thank Cecilia Gaposchkin and Iris Shagrir for sharing their comments. I will make frequent reference to S. Salvadó, ‘Liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre and the Templar Rite: Edition and Analysis of the Jerusalem Ordinal (Rome, Bib. Vat., Barb. Lat. 659) with a Comparative Analysis of the Acre Breviary (Paris, Bib. Nat., Ms. Latin 10478)’ [Ph.D. thesis, Stanford, 2011]; hereafter ‘Liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre’. I refer throughout to the liturgical manuscript in Rome, Bib. Apost. Vat., Barberini, MS Lat. 659, hereafter MS 659. *

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of redemption;1 only after experiencing the anamnesis of Mass were indulgences obtainable for those pilgrims who reached the shrines of the Holy Land. Participation in the transformative powers of liturgical ceremony articulated medieval experiences of Jerusalem. From the very act of taking up the cross, the crusades called for performance. No less than pilgrims, crusaders physically enacted their faith. While scholars have for many decades discussed the meanings that conspicuously circular churches communicated in the West, their ritual functions remain poorly understood;2 and these functions were as integral to the buildings as their form. In London the Hospitallers were based at Clerkenwell, the Templars first in Holborn and then at the New Temple between the river and Fleet Street. All three sites were distinguished by their round churches. Taking these churches as a point of departure, this chapter adumbrates the performative role that these distinctive rotundas might have played in bringing the ritual experience of Jerusalem to the West.

LITURGY IN THE TEMPLE CHURCH All Hospitaller commanderies uniformly celebrated the medieval Latin rite of the Holy Sepulchre.3 The brothers at Clerkenwell will every day have recreated the services concurrently held in Jerusalem. It is probable that the Templar priests in London were celebrating the same; from the moment of the Templars’ official recognition in 1129, brothers were instructed to observe in their churches the liturgy of the canons of the Holy Sepulchre.4 (In Jerusalem the links between the Sepulchre and the Templars were very close: the earliest extant ordinal of the Latin patriarchate was made c. 1175 for the Templars’ central convent.) In practice, we must for the Templars qualify this general rule.5 Extant manuscript sources 1 J. F. Baldovin, The Urban Character of Christian Worship: The Origins, Development, and Meaning of Stational Liturgy, Rome, 1987; C. Vogel, ‘Le pèlerinage pénitential’, in Pellegrinaggi e culto dei santi in Europa fino alla 1. Crociata [8–11 October 1961], Todi, 1963, 37–94. 2 Krautheimer, ‘Introduction’; Morris, Sepulchre. 3 C. Dondi, ‘Hospitaller Liturgical Manuscripts and Early Printed Books’, Revue Mabillon 14 (2003), 225–56. However, like the Templars in the Latin East, it is unclear if the Hospitallers actually celebrated the 15 July Liberation of Jerusalem liturgy in their central commandery churches in Jerusalem, or if they participated in the patriarchate’s celebration. Given the patriarch’s central role in the feast, the latter scenario is the more likely. 4 Chapter 9 of the Primitive Templar Rule (c. 1129) notes that knights are to follow the liturgy of the Canons of the Holy Sepulchre; J. M. Upton-Ward (ed. and trans.), The Rule of the Templars: The French Text of the Rule of the Order of the Knights Templar, Woodbridge, 1992, 21–2. 5 There are no identified twelfth or thirteenth-century liturgical sources originating from the Temple Church. A.-M. Legras and J.-L. LeMaître, ‘La pratique liturgique des Templiers et des Hospitaliers de Saint-Jean de Jerusalem’, L’écrit dans la société médiévale: divers aspects de sa pratique du XIe siècle au XVe siècle, textes en hommage à Lucie Fossier, Paris, 1991, 77–131.

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from Templar commanderies in the Latin East confirm that there they celebrated the liturgy of the canons of the Holy Sepulchre. Other liturgical manuscripts, however, belonging to western continental commanderies, reveal how Templars observed the liturgy of local dioceses, and not that of Jerusalem.6 The Templars’ continental liturgy is increasingly revealing itself as an integral part of the Order’s negotiation of its relationship to local communities.7 The Templars’ subscription to local liturgies suggests a different approach to recruiting from, and engaging with, such communities than that of the Hospitallers.8 It remains difficult, then, to generalise over the Templars’ western usage. Only a few continental liturgical sources survive to testify to local diocesan practice. None of them originates from round churches, nor from any of the Order’s major commanderies such as Paris. The 1187 loss of Jerusalem further complicates any seemingly simple dichotomy between the Templars’ eastern and western liturgical traditions. The transfer of the Templars’ central commandery from Jerusalem to Acre had a palpable impact on the Order’s devotional customs in the Latin East: the Templars’ central commandery in Acre introduced liturgical changes differentiating their rite from that of the Holy Sepulchre canons in small, but important, ways.9 The Order of the Holy Sepulchre merits our attention here. The canons of the Order held communities in Iberia, Italy, France, eastern Europe and England.10 While only a small number of their churches were circular (among them the round church in Cambridge), what distinguished them from their continental Augustinian counterparts was their liturgy. This Order of regular canons originated in the Latin patriarchate of Jerusalem 6 Salvadó, ‘Liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre’; C. Dondi, The Liturgy of the Canons Regular of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem: A Study and a Catalogue of the Manuscript Sources, Turnhout, 2004; S. Salvadó, ‘Templar Liturgy and Devotion in the Crown of Aragon’, in H. J. Nicholson (ed.), On the Margins of Crusading: The Military Orders, the Papacy and the Christian World, Farnham, 2011, 31–44; C. Dondi, ‘Manoscritti liturgici dei templari e degli ospitalieri: le nuove prospettive aperte dal sacramentario templare di Modena’, I Templari, la guerra e la santità, Rimini, 2000, 85–133. 7 M. Peixoto, ‘Maintaining the Past, Securing the Future in the Obituary of the Temple of Reims’, Viator 45/3 (2015), 211–35. 8 Cf. J. Schenk, Templar Families: Landowning Families and the Order of the Temple in France, c. 1120–1307, Cambridge, 2012, 75–125. 9 S. Salvadó, ‘Reflections of Conflict in Two Fragments of the Liturgical Observances from the Primitive Rule of the Knights Templar’, in J. Schenk and M. Carr (eds), The Military Orders 6.1: Culture and Conflict, Farnham, 2017, ch. 2; Salvadó, ‘Liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre’, 260–452. 10 For a general overview, see N. Jaspert, ‘Die Ritterorden und der Orden vom Heiligen Grab auf der Iberischen Halbinsel’, in K. Elm and C. D. Fonseca (eds), Militia Sancti Sepulcri. Idea e istituzioni, Vatican, 1998, 381–410; K. Elm, ‘Fratres et sorores Sanctissimi Sepulchri: Beiträge zu fraternitas, familia und weiblichem Regiliosentum im Umkreis des Kapitels vom Hlg. Grab’, Frühmittelalterliche Studien 9 (1975), 287–333. Also, G. BrescBautier, ‘Le possessions des églises de Terre-Saint en Italie du Sud (Pouille, Calabre, Sicilie)’, in Roberto il Guiscardo e il suo tempo [Relazioni e comunicazioni nelle prime giornate normanno-sveve (Bari, May 1973)], Rome, 1975, 13–39.

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and was entrusted in all its houses with the liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre.11 Their celebration of this distinctive rite far away from Jerusalem most strongly manifests their devotional and corporate identity in Europe. Their liturgy will have expressed both the spiritual potency of their mother church in Jerusalem and the piety of their cohesive community;12 this will surely have been a factor in the Order’s persistence on the continent. With our eyes on London, two considerations suggest that the Templars’ priests would have used the liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre. First: the proximity of the Knights Hospitaller at Clerkenwell. Comparisons would inevitably be drawn between the usages of these round churches, both designed to evoke the Sepulchre. The Hospitallers were celebrating the Sepulchre’s liturgy. Their rotunda guaranteed for the devout both the Sepulchre’s physical representation and the re-enactment of its services; the form and the provision of the Clerkenwell rotunda were perfectly matched with each other and with Jerusalem. The Templars were no less astute in their development of close relations with local communities. It seems improbable that they risked disadvantage from an unfavourable comparison with the usage of their neighbours in Clerkenwell. For one day in particular the point can be more sharply made. The Hospitallers’ and Templars’ London churches were both consecrated by Heraclius, patriarch of Jerusalem (1180–90/1), during his diplomatic visit to London in February and March 1185.13 As patriarch, and by consequence the head of the Templars’ religious community in Jerusalem, Heraclius surely celebrated both consecrations with the Sepulchre’s own liturgy. The indulgence offered to those visiting the Temple Church after this consecration is also telling. We would expect the indulgence to reflect the sanctity of the Sepulchre in Jerusalem; the transfer of that sanctity and its present power in the Temple Church will have been all the more compelling if the visitor found there an all-inclusive space recreating in both its shape and liturgy the holiest shrine of Christendom.14 The 11 See the early fourteenth-century ordinal (Wroclaw, Biblioteka Uniwersytecka I.Q.175) written for the canons of the Holy Sepulchre resident in Neisse, Poland; cf. A. Schönfelder, ‘Die Prozessionen der Lateiner in Jerusalem zur Zeit der Kreuzzüge’, Historisches Jahrbuch 32 (1911), 578–97. 12 Regarding the importance of liturgical continuity between an order and its perceived liturgical centre, see for example the Cistercians’ revision of their liturgy: C. Waddell, The Twelfth-Century Cistercian Hymnal, Kalamazoo, 1992; idem, ‘The Origin and Early Evolution of the Cistercian Antiphonary: Reflections on Two Cistercian Chant Reforms’, in M. B. Pennington (ed.), The Cistercian Spirit, Spencer, 1973, 190–223. 13 Both churches had already been in use for several years; we should probably speak of a reconsecration in 1185. See C. Wilson, ‘Gothic Architecture Transplanted: The Nave of the Temple Church in London’, in Temple Church, 20. 14 For those entering the Temple Church once a year, an indulgence of sixty days was granted; Wilson, ‘Gothic Architecture Transplanted’ [n. 13 above], 20. According to the Pardouns de Acre, visits to the central commandery of the Templars in Acre received indulgences totaling eight years and 120 days. Those who visited the Hospitaller commandery in Acre also received eight years. However, an additional total of 280 days was granted to those pilgrims who participated in the Hospitallers’ Sunday processions (240 days granted)

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church transported the devout to Jerusalem, and Jerusalem to London. The Sepulchre’s liturgies will have formed the catalyst that completed the London building’s intended purpose. The Jerusalem liturgy will have re-enacted – and thereby brought to people in London – the very fabric of the Augustinian ideal and of its spiritual life embodied in the Holy Sepulchre. We need not force the point. Our interest is in the liturgical recreation of Jerusalem in its architectural evocations in the West. For the Hospitallers in Clerkenwell, the position is clear; for the Templars, the position is likely but not certain.

THE ROTUNDA AND THE LITURGY OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE In London, both the Temple Church and the Hospitallers’ Clerkenwell Priory church took the shape of a main rotunda with a chancel extending towards the east. This mimics the architecture of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre after its restructuring by crusaders in the first half of the twelfth century. The following pages show how the rite of the Holy Sepulchre exploited this distinctive new shape in Jerusalem. Examining all the principal processions of the canons of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem allows us to reimagine both the experience of pilgrims in Jerusalem and the liturgy’s reproduction in Western churches. Processions were a particular feature of the Sepulchre’s Latin liturgy, and possibly the most salient for lay worshippers. While the fact of the Sepulchre’s rotunda partially predetermined the morphology of processions, it did not dictate any one specific processional route; and the Latins’ addition of a choir to the Constantinian rotunda changed and expanded the original spatial relationships of the church. The inclusion of this space to the east of the aedicule highlights the Latins’ decision not simply to adopt a posteriori the church’s pre-existent Byzantine liturgical praxes.15 The inscription commissioned by Patriarch Fulcher of Angoulême (1146–57), then, should be taken with caution: above the Calvary chapel in 1149, Fulcher claimed that the new building was a humble enclosure to the prior sacredness of the site.16 On the contrary, the choir’s inclusion discloses a broader, more and visited the Hospitallers’ hospital (forty days granted). See the discussion of indulgences in Acre in Salvadó, ‘Liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre’, 415–52; F. Romanini and B. Saletti, I ‘Pelrinages communes’, i ‘Pardouns de Acre’ e la crisi del regno crociato. Storia e testi / The ‘Pelrinages communes’, the ‘Pardouns de Acre’ and the Crisis in the Crusader Kingdom. History and Texts, intr. Franco Cardini, Padova, 2012. The Temple Church’s dedication to the Virgin Mary (not to St Sepulchre or to the Holy Cross) does need to be taken into account. 15 Some processions, such as the Miracle of the Holy Fire or processions in the city, were indeed taken over from Byzantine communities. 16 Pringle, Churches, III, 68: ‘This place is holy, consecrated by the blood of Christ. By our consecration we add nothing to this sanctuary. But the house built over and around

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complex and bolder restructuring of the building. This reconfiguration was meant to serve, among other needs, the requirements of the Augustinian community who now had the care of the Sepulchre. The new choir firmly established the symbolic seat of the Latin patriarch and was itself symbolic of the Augustinian way of life. The adoption of the Augustinian rule in 1114 was intended by the patriarchate to revolutionize the spiritual care of the Holy Sepulchre, change the clergy’s spirituality, and improve the canons’ care for their community (including pilgrims) in the Latin East.17 The choir made it possible to realise the structure of the apostolic life envisioned by the Augustinian rule. From the choir the bishop tended his canons, and there the communal public performance of the divinum officium took place.18 From this perspective, the processional choreography from the east-end choir towards the rotunda of the resurrection was not only a statement of the Latin clergy’s primacy at the shrine. It also represented a dialogue between the Augustinian apostolic ideal and the holiest Christian shrine, where the apostolic continuity from Christ’s grave to the Latin church was physically and ritually substantiated. The liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre as performed in Jerusalem mediated between processional ceremonies inside and outside its premises. We cannot consider here the processions extra ecclesiam in Jerusalem, which involved visits to the Temple Mount, the Church of the Nativity and other biblical sites.19 Parallel and in dialogue with those outer activities were the interior processions which were central to the celebration of Easter; and Easter in turn was the devotional fulcrum around which all other seasonal liturgies turned. Movement between the canons’ choir and the rotunda and its aedicule created a spatial dialogue between pre- and post-Easter processions; and conversely, there was a seasonal polarity in the movement between the choir in the east and the rotunda in the west. The processions’ choreography inscribed onto the Sepulchre’s space the imprint of liturgical time. Processional stations at the aedicule, the aedicule’s circumambulation without a station, or complete avoidance of the aedicule: all these articulated the dialogue between the choir, the rotunda and the liturgical seasons in Jerusalem’s liturgy. This was a dialogue wholly transferable to the Western rotundas.

this holy place was consecrated on 15 July by Patriarch Fulcher with the other fathers. […].’ The inscription was destroyed after 1808. 17 G. Bresc-Bautier (ed.), Le cartulaire du chapitre du Saint-Sépulcre de Jérusalem, Paris, 1984, doc. 20, 75–6; Salvadó, ‘Liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre’, 24–6. 18 J. E. Jung, The Gothic Screen: Space, Sculpture, and Community in the Cathedrals of France and Germany, ca. 1200–1400, Cambridge, 2012. 19 Due to the quantity of yearly processions, I discuss here only a small selection. For other studies on the processions: Schönfelder, ‘Die Prozessionen’ [n. 11 above]; Salvadó, ‘Liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre’, 218–59; I. Shagrir, ‘Adventus in Jerusalem: The Palm Sunday Celebration in Latin Jerusalem’, Journal of Medieval History 41 (2015), 1–20.

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PROCESSIONS IN JERUSALEM We begin fittingly with the start of the liturgical year in the Sepulchre’s liturgy, on the Saturday evening before the Sunday preceding the first Sunday in Advent. On this Sunday before Advent some continental rites commemorated the Trinity. The canons of the Holy Sepulchre, by contrast, celebrated the resurrection as at Easter.20 On that Saturday evening was the first procession of the year.21 After the liturgy of Vespers, canons moved in procession from the choir westwards towards the rotunda and round the aedicule while singing the Easter responsory, Dum transisset.22 The responsory accompanied a station at the altar on the western side of the aedicule.23 Once there, canons continued Vespers and sang the Easter Octave hymn, Chorus nove Iherusalem. After this liturgy, canons returned to the choir in silence. On the next day, the Sunday preceding Advent Sunday, canons sang a uniquely expanded Easter liturgy consisting of a full nine-lesson Matins office.24 During the singing of the Lauds’ Benedictus antiphon Sedit angelus, canons moved in procession from the choir to the aedicule.25 Again they made a station at the aedicule’s west-end altar, and finished Lauds by performing the rest of the office there. The processions’ physical relationship with the rotunda and its empty tomb mirrored the passing liturgical seasons. From Advent to the vigil of Easter Sunday, no processions made a station at the aedicule itself. Lent brought careful elaborations. Ash Wednesday’s ceremony of ashes began after the office of Sext. Once these rites had concluded, canons performed a procession encircling the aedicule inside the rotunda.26 Rubrics prescribed 20 MS 659, f. 18r: ‘In anno quo commemoratio ressurecionis dominice evenerit XII kalendas diciembris [20 November], scilicet illa dominica ante adventum Domini que alii fatiunt de Trinitate, nos autem in ecclesia Dominici Sepulcri ob gloriose ressurectionis eius Domini reverentiam in ipsa Dominica eandem gloriosam sollempnitatem sicut in die Pasche recolimus.’ Salvadó, ‘Liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre’, 143, 488. 21 The placement of the commemoration before the rubrics for Advent at the beginning of the liturgy of the ordinal further underscores this celebration as marking the beginning of the liturgical year. 22 Cantusdatabase.org [hereafter CANTUS; accessed 01/08/2014], ID: 006565. Dum transisset sabbatum Maria Magdalena et Maria Jacobi et Salome emerunt aromata ut venientes ungerent Jesum alleluia alleluia. 23 This is one of two altars. This altar is located on the west side of the aedicule, and rests directly on its outer wall. This is in contradistinction to the second altar, which is approached from the eastern side and rests inside the aedicule. 24 The Easter Day liturgy of Matins has only one Nocturn; on the commemoration of Easter on the Sunday before Advent-Sunday, Matins is expanded to a full three-Nocturn office. Cf. MS 659, ff. 18v–19r. 25 CANTUS, ID: 004858. Sedit angelus ad sepulcrum Domini stola claritatis coopertus videntes eum mulieres nimio terrore perterritae astiterunt a longe tunc locutus est angelus et dixit eis nolite metuere dico vobis quia illum quem quaeritis mortuum jam vivit et vita hominum cum eo surrexit alleluia. 26 MS 659, f. 57r: ‘Processione parata, ibunt circa ecclesiam vel per claustrum cantando letaniam, vel secundum pristinam institutionem Ant. Ecce nunc cum predictis antiphonas et Resp. Paradisi portas Resp. Scindite corda vera Non fit statio usque in choro. Capitulum Domine non secundum, Oratio Parce domine parce, Oratio Preces populi Si dicta non

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singing the litany or (according to the earlier custom) chants from the same morning’s Matins. Throughout the singing of the litany or antiphons, no stations were made and, after circumambulating the aedicule, canons returned to the choir. From then on through Lent until Palm Sunday two weekly processions took place. First: on the following Friday and on Lent’s subsequent Fridays a similar procession occurred. After Sext, canons moved from the choir towards the rotunda and round the aedicule. Rubrics stipulated that, after this procession, canons make a station at the Calvary chapel, and thereafter return to the choir singing the litany.27 And secondly: the subsequent Wednesdays of Lent orchestrated a novel amplification of the processions for Ash Wednesday. Rubrics instructed canons to move outward from the stalls, circumambulate the outside of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and return to the choir.28 The institution of these two processions illustrates the dialogue orchestrated between the sanctity of the entire church premises and of the rotunda. After Ash Wednesday, Wednesday’s Lenten processions encircled the whole church; then on Fridays the rogation activity intensified, with the procession closing back in on the locus sanctus by moving inside the rotunda and round the aedicule. The Fridays’ station at Calvary emphasised the penitential function of the ritual and the forthcoming crucifixion. The circuit’s path underscored the devotional function played by stations during procession.29 Calvary became a point of stational focus from Ash Wednesday onwards. Yet the penitential litany adorning Fridays’ movement around the empty sepulchre, the place of Christ’s resurrection and triumph over death, communicated an unfinished supplicatory processional narrative. The prayers at Calvary fuerint.’ ‘[C]irca ecclesiam’ refers to the Constantinian rotunda encircling the aedicule. Previous rubrics stipulate that Ash Wednesday is to repeat the procession of Fridays in Lent, see MS 659, f. 17v: ‘In capite ieiuniorum scilicet feria IIII, similiter [i.e., as on Fridays] circa predicti Sepulcri ecclesiam [i.e., the rotunda], sed non ascendit in Montem Calvarie, nec intrat claustrum.’ See further rubrics below. 27 MS 659, f. 17v: ‘Feria VI circa sancti Sepulcri ecclesiam [i.e., the rotunda], et vadit in Monte Calvarie.’ MS 659, f. 59r: ‘Feria autem VI in Montem Calvarie. Finitis ibi precibus, revertitur processio cantando letaniam.’ 28 MS 659, f. 17v: ‘In XL autem facimus processionem feria IIII extra ecclesiam.’ MS 659, f. 59r: ‘Feria IIII [in capite ieiunorum] Ab hac feria usque in passionem Domini incipimus facere processionem in IIII feria extra ecclesiam ad locum destinatum, sed non cantatur ibi missa.’ The ‘locum destinatum’ appears to be the choir, especially in light of Ash Wednesday’s special celebration of Mass after Sext, when the procession returned to the choir. Rubrics imply that this Ash Wednesday Mass is not to be carried out on subsequent Wednesdays, especially since the day’s Major Mass is normally celebrated after Terce. The technicalities associated with circumambulating the church of the Holy Sepulchre in the civic topography of Jerusalem need further attention. 29 W. P. Mahrt, ‘The Role of Old Sarum in the Processions of Salisbury Cathedral’, in G. H. Brown and L. E. Voigts (eds), The Study of Medieval Manuscripts of England [FS R. W. Pfaff], Turnhout, 2010, 129–41; R. Tekippe, ‘Pilgrimage and Procession: Correlations of Meaning, Practice and Effects’, in S. Blick and R. Tekippe (eds), Art and Architecture of Late Medieval Pilgrimage in Northern Europe and the British Isles, Leiden and Boston, 2005, 693–751.

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came after the aedicule was passed without a station. Stational absence translated into processional presence. Taking up the litany again for the return towards the choir made clear that Calvary was not an end, but part of a larger supplicatory act that juxtaposed the aedicule’s omission with the inclusion of Calvary. Easter itself finally clarified the spatial hierarchy established between these gestures. Holy Week most strongly manifested the parallel between liturgical seasons and stational liturgy at the aedicule. The extensive use of Jerusalem’s larger sacred topography during Holy Week must be left out of this brief discussion. Holy Week processions involved movement to the Temple Mount on Palm Sunday; Maundy Thursday celebrations found their performance in the Church of Mary on Mount Sion; and Friday saw a solemn procession in which the cross was placed on the Calvary chapel. We focus here on the processions inside the Sepulchre. From Advent to the end of Lent, no station was made at the aedicule. This stark physical omission was dramatically overturned on Easter Eve. The performance of the miracle of the Holy Fire turned processional activity towards the stations that thereafter were consistently kept at the aedicule.30 Easter Eve set off the first full ceremonial use of the rotunda since the pre-Advent commemoration of the resurrection. After concluding the twelfth reading of Holy Saturday’s liturgy, clergy and pilgrims moved to the choir to participate in a highly emotive supplicatory procession round the aedicule.31 Canons sang the litany, and the procession moved barefooted round the rotunda carrying the True Cross. After sufficient show of piety (rubrics stipulated sorrowful sobbing and tears), clergy and pilgrims held a station in front of the entrance to the aedicule. The litany was sung until reaching a point of maximum expectation, when a chosen member of the congregation entered the tomb with an unlit candle.32 When he came out of the aedicule with the miraculously lighted candle, the patriarch began to sing the Te deum laudamus. Then he blessed the candle with the pronouncement of the Exultet iam angelica. Canons then moved in procession towards the font while singing the litany, whereupon the patriarch and clergy baptised the children. The processional ritual 30 MS 659, ff. 73v–75r; C. Kohler, ‘Un rituel et un bréviere du Saint-Sépulcre de Jérusalem (XIIe–XIIIe siècle)’, Revue de l’Orient Latin 8 (1900–01), 421–2. A. Jotischky, ‘Holy Fire and Holy Sepulchre: Ritual and Space in Jerusalem from the Ninth to the Fourteenth Centuries’, in F. Andrews (ed.), Ritual and Space in the Middle Ages [Proceedings of the 2009 Harlaxton Symposium], Donington, 2011, 44–60; O. B. Hardison, Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages: Essays in the Origin and Early History of Modern Drama, Baltimore, 1965; A. J. McGregor, Fire and Light in the Western Triduum: Their Use at Tenebrae and at the Paschal Vigil, Minnesota, 1992. 31 The current work of Iris Shagrir underscores the continued presence and participation of Byzantine clergy. 32 Rubrics stipulate that a group of three to four devout members of the congregation take the True Cross in procession. One of these should be the one to enter the aedicule with the unlit candle. Cf. MS 659, ff. 74r–74v.

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concluded with canons moving back towards the choir, singing the litany again. The miracle of Holy Fire performed, with an impact unparalleled all year, the processional rupture between the pre-Easter season and Easter [Colour Pl. IVb]. This miraculous event prepared the rest of the year’s liturgical activity to focus on the rotunda and stations at the aedicule. So we reach Easter Day. On the morning of Easter Sunday, canons remained in the choir after the traditional single Nocturn of Matins to experience the liturgical drama of the Quem queritis.33 Rubrics described three youths dressed in the manner of women moving westward from the choir towards the sepulchral aedicule. Waiting for them and standing in front of the aedicule were two additional youths, holding candles and with cloth covering their heads. After the dialogue between the ‘women’ and ‘saints’, the three ‘Marys’ recited a prayer and returned eastward to the middle of the choir. Once there, they sang the antiphon Alleluia, resurrexit dominus.34 Thereafter the patriarch, who had remained in the choir, intoned the Te deum laudamus and the office of Lauds began. The Quem queritis dialogue did not represent a procession. The liturgy following the celebration of the morning Mass underscored the significance of the patriarch’s presence in the choir. Only after Prime and the morrow Mass (i.e., low Mass), the canons and the congregation present in the church prepared a procession to the rotunda. Once all the clergy and people found their proper place, the patriarch blessed water and the cantor commenced the verse Salve festa dies.35 The procession moved out from the choir towards the aedicule and, once there, four canons sang the antiphon Christus resurgens ex mortuis with the verse Dicant nunc Iudei.36 After this liturgy the clergy recited the verse Surrexit dominus with a collect, and the procession returned eastwards to the choir singing either Salve festa dies again or the chant Ego sum alpha et omega.37 33 I. Shagrir, ‘The Visitatio Sepulchri in the Latin Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem’, Al-Masāq 22 (2010), 57–77. 34 CANTUS, ID: 0001352. Alleluia resurrexit Dominus alleluia sicut dixit vobis alleluia alleluia. 35 More research into this action needs to be undertaken. Rubrics do not state the normal blessing of fonts on Easter Vigil. However, the fonts are indeed used as per Roman practice, on the Vigil. See R. E. Messenger, ‘Salve Festa Dies’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 78 (1947), 208–22. 36 CANTUS, ID: 001796. Christus resurgens ex mortuis jam non moritur mors illi ultra non dominabitur quod enim vivit vivit deo alleluia. Verse, CANTUS, ID: 007742a. Surrexit Dominus de sepulcro qui pro nobis pependit in ligno. 37 MS 659, f. 76r: ‘In die sancte Resurrectionis mane post prima omnes congregationes ecclesiarum canonicorum regularium et ceteri clerici processionibus suis ordinatis ad gloriam et honorem Dominice Resurrectionis ad gloriosum sepulcrum conveniunt. Cum candelabris et crucibus turibulis, textis, cappis sericis [sic]. Factaque oratione et adorato sepulchro expectant donec patriarcha et ceteri episcopi sint parati. Et post quam omnia parata et ordinata erint: aqua quoque benedicta erit facta. Cantor incipit Vers. Salve festa dies. Tunc exeuntes omnes per ordinem quantum ambitus ecclesie et claustri permittit. Versus predictos cantando. Ut autem ad ingressum ecclesie qui est ex alia parte veniunt preter missis versibus cantor. Incipitur Ant. Christus resurgens ex mortuis et ordinata

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The rubrics stipulating the presence of the congregations from all of Jerusalem’s churches highlighted the symbolic procession of the patriarch and his bishops to Christ’s empty sepulchre on Easter Day. They moved to a ritualized meeting with the tomb. The dramaturgy of the previous evening’s liturgy and miracle of the Holy Fire had represented the divine presence at the tomb, and the accompanying liturgy had been an expression of joy. Its theatricality, with non-clerical participation at its core, positioned the ritual of the Holy Fire at the limits of ecclesiastical processional activity. However, only with the Quem queritis dialogue did the efficacy of the resurrection become patent. The solemnity of the procession after the morrow Mass, where the custodians of Jerusalem moved in orderly progression to meet the aedicule, reflected the qualitatively transformed nature of the empty grave. We can now see how nuanced was the use of the communal procession to the aedicule: the canons had not encircled the rotunda during the Quem queritis play. After second Vespers on Easter Sunday there was a third processional visit to the Sepulchre, to the altar located opposite the aedicule’s entrance. This procession took place every day during the Octave of Easter. After the Magnificat and prayers of second Vespers, canons moved from the choir south to the baptismal font singing the Sunday Vesper Psalms 112 (Laudate pueri Dominum) and 113 (In exitu Israel). Once at the destination, canons sang more liturgy and a prayer.38 The Easter chant Christus resurgens set the procession in motion towards the rotunda, and a station was made on the outer western altar of the aedicule. There, canons sang the verses Dicant nunc Iudei and Surrexit Dominus with the concluding prayers of second Vespers. Rubrics instructed canons to return to the choir in silence. From the Saturday before the Octave and onwards, canons omitted any movement to the font, and concluded second Vespers with a procession making a station at the aedicule’s outer western altar. This procession then took place every Saturday evening throughout the remainder of the year, until the Sunday commemoration of the resurrection preceding Advent Sunday.39 statione ante sepulchrum finitur ibi Ant. et versus. Vers. Dicant nunc Iudei Cantatur Ant. [a] quator vel a quinque canonicis. Quibus finitis. Dicto versiculo Vers. Surrexit dominus de Collecta Deus qui hodierna die Reiteratur vers. Salve festa dies vel Ego sum alpha et omega cantatur donec in choro ingrediantur et ordinentur.’ 38 This is evocative of contemporary Roman custom at the Lateran, cf. A. J. Chupungco, ‘Liturgical Time and Space,’ in Handbook for Liturgical Studies, V: Liturgical Time and Space, Collegeville, Minnesota, 2000, xxv. 39 MS 659, ff. 76v–77r: ‘Sic fiunt processiones ad fontes et ad sepulchrum per totam ebdomadam usque ad sabbatum. In sabbato hec [sic], et in omnibus sabbatis usque ad dominicam ante Adventum Domini post vesperas: fit processio ad sepulchrum. Si non ad fontes, excepto sabbato Pentecostes [sic] licet eodem sabbato vadunt ad fontes et non ad sepulchrum. De eo ordine quo prescripte sunt.’ This and the subsequent two processions discussed do not take place on Pentecost Sunday. Rubrics, MS 659, ff. 76v, 78v. See MS 659, ff. 92v–93r: ‘Ad processionem Resp. Per tuam crucem Vers. Miserere Vers. Adoramus te Christe Oratio Deus qui crucem Ant. Christus resurgens Vers. Dicant nunc Iudei Ant.

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On the Octave of Easter, canons similarly performed two processions to the aedicule that again took place thereafter every Sunday until the commemoration of the resurrection on the Sunday before Advent. The first procession of Octave-Sunday involved finishing Lauds with movement from the choir to the rotunda and performing a station with liturgy at the aedicule’s outer western altar. The processional antiphon Sedit angelus with the verses Crucifixum in carne and Surrexit Dominus de hoc sepulcro adorned the procession and station at the aedicule.40 Lauds concluded at the sepulchre with a prayer. The liturgy of this procession changed after Pentecost to include Marian chants.41 The second procession took place after the office of Prime and the morrow Mass. The standard Sunday morning procession for the blessing of altars was extended to encompass the Sepulchre’s communal areas.42 Where previously only a station below the Calvary chapel had taken place before the return to the choir, on the Sundays of and after the Octave of Easter the procession moved to the refectory and Calvary and finished at the aedicule’s western-end altar. After Trinity Sunday (Octave of Pentecost) the procession changed again. Rubrics noted how Patriarch Fulcher instituted another processional enlargement from this Sunday until the Sunday before Advent: Fulcher instructed canons to alter the procession and visit the dormitories, refectory, cellar and kitchen before performing a station at Calvary.43 While the varied ambulation through the Sepulchre’s conventual sites does not necessarily reflect processional movement in other churches following their use, the constant visits to the sepulchral aedicule merit special consideration. The pre- and post-Easter processional visits to the rotunda and its aedicule all illustrate the close interrelation between liturgical season and architecture in the Sepulchre’s liturgy. From Advent to Lent, no processions visited the rotunda or aedicule. From the beginning of Lent, processional movement gradually enclosed the Sepulchre’s locus sanctus. The Wednesday processions round the outside of the church were in dialogue with the Vespere autem sabbati Ps. Magnificat Oratio Presta quesumus omnipotens deus ut qui gratiam per Christum dominum Ant. Beata Dei genetrix vel Alleluia Vers. Post partum virgo Oratio Famulorum tuorum Sicut sit. Processio Sabbatis omnibus: usque ad adventum Domini.’ 40 CANTUS, ID: 004858. Sedit angelus ad sepulcrum Domini stola claritatis coopertus videntes eum mulieres nimio terrore perterritae astiterunt a longe tunc locutus est angelus et dixit eis: nolite metuere dico vobis quia illum quem quaeritis mortuum jam vivit et vita hominum cum eo surrexit alleluia; CANTUS, ID: 004858a. Crucifixum in carne laudate et sepultum propter vos glorificate resurgentemque de morte adorate nolite [sic]. CANTUS, ID: 007742a. Surrexit Dominus de hoc sepulcro qui pro nobis pependit in ligno. Rubrics note to sing the second verse, Surrexit Dominus, after repeating the processional antiphon from the point where the angel speaks at Nolite metuere dico; MS 659, f. 87v: ‘parata processione ibunt retro sepulchro hanc cantando Ant. Sedit angelus Vers. Crucifixum in carne cantabunt archichori et duo alii Resp. igitur, Nolite metuere, Vers. Surrexit dominus de hoc’. 41 Chants added to the station of the aedicule are the following: MS 659, f. 93v: Ant. O gloriosa genitrix vel Alleluia Vers. Post partum virgo Oratio Adiuvet nos. 42 Rubrics stipulate processions in Advent (MS 659, f. 28v) and after Easter (MS 659, ff. 92r, 93v); none is given for the season after Christmas or for Lent. 43 MS 659, f. 93v; Kohler, ‘Un rituel et un bréviere’ [n. 30 above], 426.

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Friday circumambulations of the aedicule. On the Saturday of Easter Eve, the absence of stations at the aedicule changed for the rest of the year. The miracle of the Holy Fire dramatically altered the physical relationship between the processions and the aedicule. The processions of Easter Sunday itself reflected the transformative event occurring in the aedicule. From this day onwards, clergy consistently visited the tomb. On Sundays after Easter, processions visited the aedicule three times: the Saturday second Vespers’ procession (formally part of Sunday first Vespers), the post-Lauds and post-morrow Mass Sunday processions all finished at the aedicule altar. Processions performed the devotional polarity between the seasons before and after Easter through physical movement between the choir and rotunda. The symbolism of these post-Easter stations at the aedicule three times each Sunday, and their relation to the choir and to the other areas of Augustinian communal life, testify to the conscientious liturgical creativity latent in the liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre.

PROCESSIONS IN THE ROUND The many processional routes performed each year in the Sepulchre found their re-enactment in other, often very different, ecclesiastical settings. A vivid example is offered in the existence of the twelfth-century ordinal of the Holy Sepulchre:44 the manuscript provided the rite of the Holy Sepulchre, yet was written for the Templars’ church, in or next to the Templum / Palatium Salomonis, on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount.45 The practice of liturgical uniformity among all dependent churches of a diocese (or in this instance of a patriarchate) is commonplace after the Augustinian reform.46 Other churches in the patriarchate of Jerusalem confronted the same questions as the priests of London’s Hospitallers and Templars: how were they to implement the processions of the Holy Sepulchre in their architecturally different churches? London’s rotundas ensured that their priests were not hindered in this by any formal architectural impediment. The problems of adapting diocesan liturgies for a large number of dependent churches are illustrated in Salisbury’s Sarum rite.47 The use of Sarum came to dominate the English church from the thirteenth century onwards. In spite of architectural differences associated with their individual Rome, Bib. Ap. Vat., Barb. MS 659. Pringle, Churches, III, 417–34. The Palatium / Templum Salomonis (the Aqsa Mosque) was largely a residence, for the king and from 1120 for the Templars, who were in 1172 ‘constructing on one side of the outer court a new church of wonderful size and workmanship’ (ibid., 422). 46 This liturgical uniformity commences with the Mother-Daughter relationships of postreform Benedictine communities. 47 R. W. Pfaff, ‘Prescription and Reality in the Rubrics of Sarum Rite Service Books’, in L. J. Smith and B. Ward (eds), The Intellectual Life in the Middle Ages [FS M. Gibson], London, 1992, 197–205; Mahrt, ‘The Role of Old Sarum’ [n. 29 above], 132. 44 45

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shrines, clergy continued to celebrate the Sarum rite. While their liturgy apart from processions was faithfully replicated (often with a changed date for the dedication of the church), clergy adapted processions to the design of their particular church. Most striking of all, the processional activity of Old Sarum cathedral was retained unchanged at the site of Salisbury’s own new cathedral, in spite of the very different architectural surroundings.48 The persistence and wide diffusion of the Sarum rite, celebrated even in small single-nave parish churches, underscores the significance that liturgical identity held for those churches. For liturgical practice united dependent churches with the rite’s source, and constituted an important part of the broader devotional identity of churches and their associated communities. The construction of London’s round churches by the Knights Templar and Hospitallers bears witness to their active articulation of visual media. These rotundas suggest that both Orders were emulating the original physicality of their ecclesiastical mother-structures with the intent, at least in part, of perpetuating their corporate identity in London, far away from their place of origin.49 The performance of Jerusalem’s processions and associated liturgy, substantiating the devotional character of these churches’ architectural form, will have completed the gesture. The many extra-ecclesiam processions of the Sepulchre’s clergy, such as those at the Purification or in Holy Week, could be performed in such churches’ premises only by ad hoc procedures. Clergy could, however, reproduce without major modification and in their entirety the processions that were most central to the Sepulchre’s identity and that involved the rotunda and choir. The Orders’ architectural setting in London and in their other rotundas made it possible for the priests to realise the core processional activity of the Jerusalem rite, while the knights listened, watched, and recited their required pater noster’s.50 On major feast days, such as Easter, the whole community would have participated in processions. We have necessarily focused narrowly here: on the processions in Lent and Eastertide in the Hospitallers’ and Templars’ rotundas. But our results lead us on to a broader inquiry: into the rest of the Orders’ 48 The processional was finally adjusted in the latter half of the fourteenth century; Mahrt, ‘The Role of Old Sarum’, 132. 49 For the perpetuation of Augustinian identity via architecture in post-Norman England, see J. A. Franklin, ‘Augustinian and Other Canons’ Churches in Romanesque Europe: The Significance of the Aisleless Cruciform Plan’, in J. A. Franklin, T. A. Heslop and C. Stevenson (eds), Architecture and Interpretation [FS Eric Fernie], Woodbridge, 2012, 78–98; T. O’Keeffe, ‘Augustinian Regular Canons in Twelfth- and ThirteenthCentury Ireland: History, Architecture, Identity’, in J. Burton and K. Stöber (eds), The Regular Canons in the Medieval British Isles, Turnhout, 2011, 469–84. 50 The Templar Knights’ involvement in the actual practice of liturgical services is comparable to that of a monastery’s conversi or terciaries, see Salvadó, ‘Templar Liturgy’ [n. 6 above].

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Easter liturgy; and into the processions at other rotundas (and indeed at aedicules and sepulchres built without reference to a rotunda). We cannot know how many rotundas in the West had in their centre a permanent or removable aedicule.51 Few medieval aedicules survive; three of them were once (and two still are) at the centre of a rotunda. The aedicule at Konstanz is still at the centre of the round chapel of St Maurice annexed to the cathedral; the original aedicule was built c. 960 on the initiative of Bishop Conrad of Konstanz (c. 900–75) on his return from a second pilgrimage to the Holy Land; it was wholly rebuilt, c. 1260, in Gothic style. The Capuchin church of Eichstätt in southern Germany preserves a large-scale aedicule; it is likely to have been housed (before being moved to its present place in 1623) at the centre of the round church built in a monastery just outside the city’s walls between 1149 and its consecration in 1194 in honour of the Holy Cross and Holy Sepulchre.52 The aedicule’s nearly exact volumetric reproduction shows the significance that not only figural, but precise representations of the Holy Sepulchre came to play in the West.53 These can do no more than hint at the possible appearance of any aedicules in London. The Hospitallers, whose adherence to the Sepulchre’s rite is incontestable, will have needed a setting for its performance at Easter; at Clerkenwell they will surely have recreated the aedicule. It must remain a tantalising possibility that the Templars in their own rotundas did the same.

51 Martin Biddle has argued that there was such a copy in the chapel at Aachen (Robin Griffith-Jones, ‘Three Riddles’, 310 above) and, in an unpublished lecture, that the Temple Church housed one, too. 52 D. Ó Riain, ‘An Irish Jerusalem in Franconia: The Abbey of the Holy Cross and Holy Sepulchre at Eichstätt’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 112 (2012), 219–70. 53 We can do no more here than introduce some examples in the West. For the aedicule at S. Stefano, Bologna, R. Ousterhout, ‘The Church of Santo Stefano: A “Jerusalem” in Bologna’, Gesta 20 (1981), 311–21; Morris, Sepulchre, 235–9. It combines a memorial of Calvary (above) and of the tomb in the tomb of St Petronius (below); it was drastically restored in the nineteenth century [Fig. 16.3, p. 333 above]. For the round sepulchre at Aquileia (c. 1050), which probably combined the commemoration of the aedicule and of the Holy Sepulchre’s rotunda as a whole, see Morris, Sepulchre, 159. The sixteen-sided chapel of Otto and Editha in Magdeburg Cathedral (c. 1240) is clearly related to the slightly later structure in Konstanz; it too was probably designed as an aedicule. The complex in Görlitz (started after Georg Emerich’s trip to the Holy Land, 1465; completed by 1504) included an aedicule and a two-storey Gothic Calvary that both survive; the contrast in their styles of representation is striking, Morris, Sepulchre, 354–6. Sixteenth-century aedicules survive at Augsburg (1507–08) and Valdesa (c. 1509); Biddle, Tomb, 28–34, 41. This is not the place to explore the relationship between such aedicules and the sepulchre-chapels that were built to evoke and even to make present but not (even on a nuanced definition indebted to Krautheimer) to copy Christ’s tomb: at Gernrode (c. 1120), for instance; and at Winchester (c. 1180); and, recently rediscovered, in S. Marco, Venice, T. E. A. Dale, ‘Inventing a Sacred Past: Pictorial Narratives of St Mark the Evangelist in Aquileia and Venice, c. 1000–1300’, DOP 48 (1994), 72. For a survey of these and of other sepulchre-structures, including readily mobile chests, J. E. A. Kroesen, The Sepulchrum Domini through the Ages, Leuven, 1975.

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PERFORMING JERUSALEM IN THE WEST The nexus between liturgical performance and architectural setting was integral to the worshippers’ religious experience. The rotunda and aedicule represented Jerusalem vividly in the West. For the many such churches not celebrating the Sepulchre’s liturgy, their architectonic evocations of its structure will still have helped recreate the experience of Jerusalem; in such a setting the Quem queritis play both brought Jerusalem vibrantly to life and transported the devout to the biblical past. The most startling of miracles witnessed yearly in Jerusalem, that of the Holy Fire, was long practised in the West with the non-miraculous yet highly symbolic ritual of the lighting of the fire on Easter Eve.54 The miracle itself is sitespecific; and, after its condemnation by Pope Gregory IX in 1238, was not permissible.55 And yet the ancient ceremony of lighting the lamp on Easter Eve, whether or not at a representation of the aedicule, confirms the devotional instinct to recreate the physicality of Jerusalem. It was in order to foster a religious experience associated with Jerusalem that institutions in the West repeatedly built churches on the model of the Holy Sepulchre. Among them, the Hospitallers and Templars were conspicuous for their direct and fundamental links with Jerusalem: in their origins, their role in guarding Christendom’s holiest shrines, and their corporate ties to the canons of the Holy Sepulchre. It was in their rotundas that these connections were most vividly to be seen; and in the liturgy informing those rotundas that the connections were most perfectly realized. Our discussion has revealed how the Hospitallers’ and Templars’ London churches, as artefacts, represent only a portion of a gesture that is now irreparably incomplete. The broader purpose behind the buildings was the active continuation and representation of the Orders’ spiritual identity. To perform – or, for non-priestly members, to witness – the liturgy constituted the core daily task of the brothers. Modern historiography often neglects the centrality of their religious vows. Liturgical praxis was the performance of their identity, realised in the devotional experience of Jerusalem in the West.

54 McGregor, Fire and Light [n. 30 above]; Jotischky, ‘Holy Fire and Holy Sepulchre’ [n. 30 above]. See now A. Lidov, ‘The Holy Fire and Visual Constructs of Jerusalem, East and West’, in Kühnel (ed.), Visual Constructs, 241–52. 55 Pope Gregory IX condemned the payment extracted from pilgrims who wanted to view the miracle in Jerusalem, and possibly the rite, cf. Les Registres de Grégoire IX, ed. L. Auvray, II, Paris, 1907, no. 4151: Intellecto quod canonici sepulchri Jerosolimitani, ignem in idem sepulchrum de celo in vigilia Pasche descendere et Redemptorem nostrum Dominum Jhesum Christum inibi incarceratum fuisse dicentes, locum conficti carceris sub certo pretio, non sine ignominia divini nominis, venalem exponent, mandat quatenus tales praesumptiones de cetero prohibeat; Jotischky, ‘Holy Fire and Holy Sepulchre’, 53.

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I

t is a commonplace that twelfth-century devotion became more vividly and immediately linked with the pathos of Jesus’ life and death on earth. This may have been fostered by – and was certainly consonant with – the accessibility of the holy sites in Jerusalem. In this chapter we turn to the more particular circumstances of the Templars and of their Marian rotunda in London. What difference and how much did it make to whom that the Templars’ nave in London was round? Within the first decades of its use (to go no further) it will have been seen by the London Templars, their priests, sergeants and servitors, some of whom will have been to Jerusalem, others not; by royal, diplomatic and political visitors, and Templars from other English and continental houses; by clients of the Templars’ banking services; by pilgrims to the church and to its tombs; by members of crafts and trades doing business in and around the Temple and using its access to the river; by the Temple’s own tenants, doing business with their landlords; and by local lay people using the church – to make and witness oaths, for instance – as they used other churches.1 Pilgrimvisitors could win an indulgence from being there.2 Nicole Hamonic,

1 ‘The charters suggest that some Templar communities must at times have been buzzing with guests’, J. Schenk, Templar Families: Landowning Families and the Order of the Temple in France, c. 1120–1307, Cambridge, 2012, 73; cf. H. J. Nicholson, ‘Relations between Houses of the Order of the Temple in Britain and their Local Communities, as Indicated during the Trial of the Templars, 1307–12’, in N. Housley (ed.), Knighthoods of Christ [FS Barber], Aldershot, 2007, 195–208. This matches Michael Gervers’ emphasis in his chapter, ‘The Use and Meaning of the Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Round Churches of England’, 376–86 above: the Temple Church was used as other churches were. 2 According to an inscription over the rotunda’s door two bays to the south of the west door, Heraclius granted an indulgence of sixty days to those who visited each year (annatim). For the inscription, R. Griffith-Jones, ‘An Enrichment of Cherubims’, Appendix I, Temple Church, 170.

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in the present volume, brings back to light the indulgences recorded in Cotton Nero E VI, which show no clear link to the Holy Land.3 In its direct architectural links with Jerusalem, the Temple was not alone in London. Catherine Hundley evokes in her chapter other recollections of the Sepulchre in and around the city: at the Old Temple; at the Hospitallers’ rotunda in Clerkenwell; and at the parish church – with a large parish – of St Sepulchre.4 London did not generate – as Winchester did – an ordered constellation of churches recalling the sites and layout of Jerusalem;5 but Jerusalem, the Holy Land and their guardians were a pervasive presence. After the disastrous Second Crusade (1145–49), donations to the Order were falling.6 The Templars needed a bold statement to impress dignitaries living in or visiting London, to confirm the Order’s standing and to attract further benefactions. London’s Templars moved south from the Old Temple in Holborn in time to be using their new church in 1163. The rotunda’s grandeur, its prominent setting on the river and its homage to Jerusalem met their need [Colour Pl. XL; cf. Fig. 17.1, p. 344 above]. In 1185 the Temple Church, already more than twenty years in use, was consecrated by Patriarch Heraclius of Jerusalem on his diplomatic visit to London. By then the Latin kingdom was once more in disarray. Two years later, its army and the Templars themselves would suffer disastrous losses at Hattin; Saladin captured Jerusalem. Over the following decades the Holy Land was a particular object of intercession; we can summarise the edicts here without presuming that they were consistently obeyed. After Hattin, Pope Gregory (in Audita tremendi) instituted a Lenten Fast and a special Mass on the Fridays of Advent; and ordered regular prayers for the liberation of the Holy Land. The next year his successor, Clement III, ordered special prayers to be said at Mass for the recapture of Jerusalem. Roger of Hovendon records the intercessions offered in London in 1188 in two closely related versions, apparently one at Westminster Abbey and the other at St Paul’s.7 In 1213 and again in the crises of the 1240s, processions were to be held once a month, in which everyone was to take part ‘with humble demeanour’: a dragon led the way, pursued by cross and banners; reliquaries were carried; in order the clergy processed first, followed by monks, nuns, widows and laity; men and women alike were to fast on Lenten foods and N. Hamonic, ‘Jerusalem in London: The New Temple Church’, 387–412 above. C. E. Hundley, ‘The English Round Church Movement’, 352–75 above. 5 D. Keene, ‘Early Medieval Winchester: Symbolic Landscapes’, in H. B. Clarke and A. Simms (eds), Lords and Towns in Medieval Europe: The European Historic Towns Atlas, Farnham, 2015, 419–45. 6 M. Gervers, ‘Donations to the Hospitallers in the Wake of the Second Crusade’, in M. Gervers (ed.), The Second Crusade and the Cistercians, New York, 1992, 155–61. 7 I am grateful to Cecilia Gaposchkin for pre-publication access to material now in her book Invisible Weapons: Liturgy and the Making of Crusade Ideology, Cornell, 2017. For the London intercessions, 1188: Roger of Hovendon, Chronica (ed. W. Stubbs), London, 1868–71, II, 359–60. 3

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be dressed in penitential clothing, and to forego work so that they could be present.8 At the daily Mass the people were to prostrate themselves after the kiss of peace, while clergy sang two psalms and the priest said a special prayer. From 1240 it was customary to toll bells during daily Mass at the time when prayers for crusade were said, so that those at home or at work could say a prayer. The grandeur and sanctity of the Templars’ Round, and its evocation of Jerusalem’s still greater sanctity and splendour, were already by the time of the Round’s consecration the grandeur of an endangered but relentlessly remembered cause.9 It would take a well-trained ear to hear the variations in such devotion, through the crises of the century that led up to and beyond Jerusalem’s loss in 1187. The Orders judiciously emphasised both their international links and their local service. The Hospitallers’ second building campaign at Clerkenwell, completed in time for the consecration in 1185, accentuated its debts to the Holy Sepulchre; it also created more space for chantries and tomb-monuments, and so for the burial of England’s elite.10 In the 1280s, before the fall of Acre, the Hospitallers demolished their rotunda; it may have become an unmistakeable and unwelcome reminder of their role in the Holy Land’s collapsing kingdom.11 ‘To the sepulchre of Christ!’ The recruitment-cry for the crusades’ iter sepulchri will have made the Templars’ rotunda an emblem of the crusades. The Temple’s Round is generally envisioned as an imitation of the Sepulchre’s rotunda as a whole; Christopher Wilson draws attention, however, to the porch on the Sepulchre’s aedicule, and suggests that the Round as a whole, with a comparable porch, recalled not the whole rotunda in Jerusalem, but just the aedicule, its central element.12 The sculptural decoration of the west door is now badly worn; among the small figures, two may have represented (on the left) Henry II and (on the right, with the buttoned tunic) a Saracen.13 In her chapter, Catherine Hundley points out the nineteenth-century record of burials in the centre of the Round that must have been dug during its construction; the layout of the Holy Sepulchre was clearly in mind. (We are bound to wonder who secured, so early, such a privileged place of interment.) 8 C. Gaposchkin, ‘Processions, Collective Expiation and the Expansion of Lay Involvement’, see n. 7 above. 9 Details from C. T. Maier, ‘Crisis, Liturgy and the Crusade in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries’, JEH 48 (1997), 628–57. 10 B. Sloane and G. Malcolm, Excavations at the Priory of the Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem, Clerkenwell, London, London, 2004, 57, 69; and for discussion of the Orders’ evolving roles in England, L. J. Whatley, ‘Localizing the Holy Land: The Visual Culture of Crusade in England, c. 1140–1307’ [D.Ph. thesis, Illinois, 2010], 4–60. 11 R. Gilchrist, ‘Knight Clubs: An Archaeology of the Military Orders’, in Pre-Printed Papers of the ‘Medieval Europe York 1992’ Conference: 6, Religion and Belief, York, 1992, 65–70 [66]. 12 C. Wilson, ‘Gothic Architecture Transplanted’, in Temple Church, 40. 13 G. Zarnecki, ‘The West Doorway of the Temple Church in London’, Beiträge zur Kunst des Mittelalters [FS Wentzel], Berlin, 1975, 246–53.

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There is a wider theological and liturgical development also at issue, inescapably linked with Anselm’s transfer of emphasis from the empty tomb to the cross. Anselm prayed in his Prayer to Christ to be given an appropriate fervour of love, and then worked within the prayer to escape the torpor which impedes the soul and to excite – in himself and in his readers – such fervour. In terms evocative of the Easter Plays, he longed to have been present at Christ’s life, death and resurrection: Would that I with happy Joseph might have taken down my Lord from the cross, wrapped him with spiced grave-clothes and laid him in the tomb; or even followed after so that such a burial might not have been without my mourning. Would that with the blessed band of women I might have trembled at the vision of angels and have heard the news of the Lord’s resurrection, news of my consolation, so much looked for, so much desired. Would that I might have heard from the angel’s mouth, ‘Fear not, Jesus who was crucified, whom you are seeking, is not here; he is risen.’

Anselm adopts the persona of the beloved in the Song of Songs who had lost her lover (5.2–8): What shall I say? What shall I do? Whither shall I go? Where shall I seek him? Where and when shall I find him? Whom shall I ask? Who will tell me of my beloved? ‘for I am sick with love.’14

We might tentatively envision the Temple Church, in the late twelfth century, with a rood-beam or rood-screen dividing the Round from the chancel, and a Holy Cross altar at its west, in the Round.15 In Anglo14 Anselm, ‘Prayer to Christ’, 109–23, 143–6, trans. B. Ward, The Prayers and Meditations of St Anselm, London, 1973, 96–7. Text: F. S. Schmitt, Sancti Anselmi Cantuarensis Archiepiscopi Opera Omnia, 6 vols, Nelson, 1938–61, III, 3, 7. 15 See further D. Park, ‘Medieval Burials and Monuments’, in Temple Church, 78–9. How solid was any screen in the Temple Church – and how fully, if at all, it closed off the Round from the chancel – is not known. The Rule restricted access to Templars’ chancels, during the office, to the priests alone, J. M. Upton-Ward (trans.), The Rule of the Templars, Woodbridge, 1992, 100 [363]; the stipulation may of course reveal the practice it was designed to prevent. For screens, B. Raw, Anglo-Saxon Crucifixion Iconography, Cambridge, 1990, 43–52; J. Munns, Cross and Culture in Anglo-Norman England, Woodbridge, 2016, 131 and refs. The monks of Canterbury had to pray at the altar to the west of Lanfranc’s screen for five years after the fire of 1174, in aula ecclesiae muro parvulo

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Saxon churches Barbara Raw saw within the movement from west to east, from nave-altar to high-altar, a movement in emphasis from crucifixion to resurrection, from Calvary to the Sepulchre; a dynamic that changed in the twelfth century as the high-altar, now with an altar-cross, came to be associated more directly with Christ’s suffering and death.16 Munns has refined the argument: Anglo-Saxon rood-sculptures were as frequently associated with the high- as with the nave-altar, and were part of an ensemble that embraced death, resurrection and judgement; altarcrosses are evidenced earlier than Raw emphasised; and where there were solid screens, they interrupted the view and the imaginative movement eastwards past the nave-altar. ‘Throughout the twelfth century, the twin aspects of the mystery of Christ’s redemption – death and resurrection, humanity and divinity, passion and glory – remain. In each case the former is increasingly portrayed as the agent of the latter, where previously the rationale had worked the other way round, but a fundamental balance is maintained nonetheless … The chancel rood becomes an increasingly familiar waymark to the heavenly banquet beyond.’17 Each altar celebrated both death and resurrection; a church’s different altars amplified the story, all of whose parts were represented at each altar and at every celebration of Mass. Perhaps we might, nonetheless, ask if there was a distinction in tone between the Temple’s Round and chancel. Through its recollection of the empty tomb, the Round evoked both Christ’s death and his triumph over death, Good Friday and Easter. It offered a patent – and potent – intersection of life, death and life beyond. And thereby it recalled events on earth, the once-only sacrifice of Christ on Calvary. Eastwards beyond the screen, in the chancel reserved for the priests, was space for a different emphasis: on Christ’s eternal self-offering in heaven. The distinction is not a contrast; rather, an antiphon.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF SPIRITUAL WARFARE? William Purkis has distinguished carefully between the most familiar motifs in crusading propaganda and those favoured by Bernard of Clairvaux when writing for or about the Templars themselves.18 In general preaching, one saying of Christ summed up the crusaders’ calling: ‘If any man will follow me, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow a populo segregati, Raw 51; the solidity of any screen in the Temple Church will have been determined in part by the expected occupancy of the Round. For Holy Cross altars, following the Decreta Lanfranci (c. 1077), Munns 127. 16 Raw, Iconography [n. 15 above], passim. 17 Munns, Cross and Culture [n. 15 above], 44, 126–54. I am grateful to Dr Munns for a helpful conversation about the Temple Church. 18 W. J. Purkis, Crusading Spirituality in the Holy Land and Iberia, c. 1095 – c. 1187, Woodbridge, 2008, 86–119.

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me’ (Matt. 16.24). For the Templars, Bernard urged another: ‘Greater love no-one has than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’ (John 15.13). Bernard emphasised the lifelong spiritual service of the brothers. The theme endured. Here is Peter the Venerable, writing to the third Master of the Temple some twenty years after Bernard had been supporting the Order: Who will not exult that you have not just gone forth to a single battle, but to a double one, just as the apostle says, in which you fight against spiritual wickedness [Eph. 6.12] with the virtues of the heart, and against physical enemies with the strength of your bodies … You are monks by your virtues and knights by your deeds, filling one role spiritually and exercising the other physically.19

London’s Temple was not an emblem just of Jerusalem, or of those who undertook to fight there or to give resources towards the fighting. If anything of Bernard’s and Peter’s distinctions survived and spread, the Temple’s whole curtilage was a site of distinctive, sacrificial dedication, of warriors who were conspicuously engaged on spiritual and physical warfare alike. The campaign of 1099 inspired at least some crusaders to hear in it an echo of battles recorded or foretold in scripture. On 8 July the crusading army marched round Jerusalem as Joshua had led his army round Jericho; the final assault on 13 July began with a blast of trumpets, once more in emulation of Joshua and his victory (Joshua 6.1–21).20 Jerusalem fell on a Friday, at the ninth hour: the day of the Fall, and the day and hour at which Christ died.21 In Solomon’s Temple and forecourt at the city’s capture, according to Raymond d’Aguilers, the blood rose to the horses’ bridles, as the blood will flow when the angel reaps the vintage of the whole earth (Rev. 14.20).22 The crusaders who went to the Sepulchre with blood on their feet and hands may well have seen themselves as ‘the upright [who] will bathe his feet in the blood of the wicked, but he himself has a reward’ (Ps. 57.11), for ‘I will wash my hands in innocence and join the procession round your altar, O Lord’ (Ps. 25.6). An open question remains: did the crusaders and their chroniclers read post festum the comparison with Revelation into the city’s capture, or did an eschatological fervour prompt them to fulfil such prophecies?23 If the crusaders in 1099 believed that 19 Peter the Venerable, Ep. 172; G. Constable (ed.), The Letters of Peter the Venerable, Cambridge, Mass., 1967, I, 408. 20 Eracles 8.11, P. Paris (ed.), Guillaume de Tyr et ses continuateurs, Paris, 1879, 279. 21 William of Tyre, Chronicon, ed. R. B. C. Huygens, CCCM 63, Turnhout, 1986, I, 410; Eracles 8.18. 22 Raymond d’Aguilers, Historia Francorum qui ceperunt Iherusalem [Recueil des historiens des croisades: Documents occidentaux], Paris, 1844–95, III, 300, trans. J. H. and L. L. Hill, Philadelphia, 1968, 128. 23 The slaughter as historical: B. Kedar, ‘The Jerusalem Massacre of 1099 in the

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with the angels they were harvesting the vintage of the earth, then the Holy Sepulchres of the West will in the following years have carried a heavy freight of conviction, hope and expectation. Jerusalem had been the setting for God’s own eschatological action through his agents, the Franks; any Western Jerusalem of the military orders, themselves charged with the next stages of that work, will have been a sign of God’s own progress towards his final revelation of the New Jerusalem on the new earth.

MAPS P. D. A. Harvey has analysed the maps of the Holy Land made during the crusades.24 We need to engage here with just two families of such maps showing a circular Jerusalem. For the city’s topography compare Fig. 22.1. First, the family whose earliest members are connected with St-Bertin [Colour Pl. XXXVIIIa] and, in the Liber Floridus, with St-Omer [Colour Pl. XXXVIIIb].25 Their circular Jerusalems vary, and thereby alert us to the cartographers’ differing priorities and aims. Aesthetic decisions reflected and reinforced distinctive historical and theological emphases, it seems, with care and nuance. We will not bundle together two such different forms as buildings and maps of buildings, the history of imitation in each, and the knowledge of their patrons and users; but we will naturally ask if similarly nuanced decisions were being made by patrons, realised by workmen and noticed by worshippers in the design and decoration of round churches. The following paragraphs explore the details possible in maps in order to ask what sensibilities were likely to have been engaged Historiography of the Crusades’, Crusades 3 (2004), 15–75. As prompted by eschatology: P. Buc, ‘La vengeance de Dieu: de l’exégèse patristique à la réforme ecclésiastique et à la première croisade’, in D. Barthélemy, F. Bougard and R. Le Jean (eds), La vengeance, 400–1200, Rome, 2006, 471–86; J. Rubenstein, Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse, New York, 2011, 284–92. 24 P. D. A. Harvey, Medieval Maps of the Holy Land, London, 2012. For a background in earlier maps based on Jerome, Liber locorum, M. Levy-Rubin, ‘From Eusebius to the Crusader Maps: The Origin of the Holy Land Maps’, in Kühnel, Visual Constructs, 253–63. For the maps associated with Peter of Poitiers, Compendium, A. Worm, ‘“Ista est Jerusalem”: Intertextuality and Visual Exegesis in Peter of Poitiers’ Compendium historiae in genealogia Christi’, in L. Donkin and H. Vorholt (eds), Imagining Jerusalem in the Medieval West [Proceedings of the British Academy 175], Oxford, 2012, 123–61. 25 The St-Bertin map, Bibliothèque d’agglomeration de St-Omer, MS 776, f. 50v, was ‘perhaps the earliest circular map of Jerusalem’, in a text of Gesta Francorum, J. Rubenstein, ‘Heavenly and Earthly Jerusalem: The View from Twelfth-Century Flanders’, in Kühnel, Visual Constructs, 265–76 [268], cf. B. Delmaire, ‘Jerusalem au XII siècle d’après le plan du MS 776’, Tsafon 38 (1999–2000), 26–44. There is just one line of text at the top of the page: Magdalene cetereque mulieres lamentate sunt in morte Salvatoris. The copy of the St-Bertin map by Lambert of St-Omer, abridging Gesta Francorum in his Liber Floridus, is lost but is copied in Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek, MS Lat. Vossianus 31, f. 85r (with the tomb of Christ on f. 84v). For Lambert’s chronology of the world and Godfrey’s role in the Last Times, J. Rubenstein, ‘Lambert of St-Omer and the Apocalyptic First Crusade’, in N. Paul and S. Yeager, Remembering the Crusades: Myth, Image and Identity, Baltimore, 2012, 69–95.

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FIG. 22.1.  PLAN OF JERUSALEM DURING THE CRUSADES

in the design and experience, on a far grander scale, of buildings. The fluid relationship between the Sepulchre and the Temple of the Lord in the crusaders’ Jerusalem will loom large in our treatment of the maps; as it will again, when we turn to the Temple Church. Lambert of St-Omer [Colour Pl. XXXVIIIb] tightened up the symmetries of the St-Bertin map. Mons gaudii, place of pilgrims’ first sight of the city, is again prominent, lower left. The Dome of the Rock and Sepulchre now match each other in design and colour, and mimic in miniature (with four doors rather than five) the city as a whole. The Templum Domini has its lapis (rock) included; the Sepulcrum Domini, to match it, the open tomb, with the lapis scissus above the rotunda. The Temple of Solomon and Sepulchre each has its own claustrum. The lapis scissus (broken stone) and Golgotha have no natural parallels on the Temple Mount, and still float free. The inscriptions speak of chronology: the length of Saul’s, David’s and Solomon’s reigns; the years from Solomon’s building of the Temple to its rebuilding and then (with reference to Daniel) to Christ; the years from Adam to Solomon, Solomon to Christ, Christ to Godfrey’s capture of the city. The city’s continuity is realised

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in the symmetries between the map’s upper, eastern part showing the Temple and the lower, western area of the Sepulchre. Among the loveliest members of this family is the map now in the Hague, c. 1190–1200 [Colour Pl. XXXVIIIc].26 The Sepulchre is sharply distinguished from the Dome of the Rock; only the Tower of David (lower right within the city) is another self-contained rotunda. The Sepulchre’s rotunda dominates the city. An open coffin with three portholes is surmounted by an angular lid of gold; the cross surmounts the rotunda, as Christ rules over the orb of the earth. The painted surface here has been rubbed, surely by the fingers of the devout, who were in touch with the Sepulchre by touching its representation.27 The lapis scissus in morte domini is prominent but moved to one side to leave the Sepulchre’s symmetry intact. The map-maker has evoked the continuity of Jerusalem’s history both in his uniformly stylised buildings and in the details of scenes and inscriptions. Among the settings of Jesus’ infancy and passion, Jesus’ entry through the Golden Gate is described, with the gate – generally blocked – ‘blocked’ out in gold;28 Stephen is martyred on the left, outside his own gate; the procession round the city (Processio Sepulcri) before its capture in 1099 is recalled in an inscription just outside the lower-right walls. This is presented as a city for which Christ and his followers have struggled for over a thousand years. The page was moved (nineteenth century) from the end of the book to its present place at the start (f. 1r). It should follow the illustrations of the Last Judgement and of the dead rising into heaven and hell (ff. 44r, 45r), Rev. 19–20; and so it would disclose the eschatological significance of the battle shown under our map. Saints George and Demetrius are here in pursuit of the fleeing Muslim cavalry at this last battle for the city’s possession, the forces of heaven marshalled on white horses and in white linen as in Rev. 19.14; the saints were said to have appeared in the Christian camp at the battle for Antioch, captured on 28 June 1098.29 On f. 45r, as the dead rise for judgement (Rev. 20.12), an inscription reminds the viewer that God has provided for those who love him what eye has not seen nor ear heard (1 Cor. 2.9). The rising dead do not see or hear it yet; and on the following map (our f. 1r) we paradoxically see – instead of the new heaven, new earth 26 Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Hague, MS 76 F 5, f. 1r, most recently repr. Jerusalem, 1000-1400: Every People under Heaven, eds B. D. Boehm and M. Holomb [Exh. Cat.], Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2016, cat. 103. 207; H. Brandhorst, ‘The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek MS 76 F 5: A Psalter Fragment?’, in Visual Resources 19 (2003), 15–25; E. van der Vlist, ‘A Medieval Picture Book’, in D. G. Dolera (ed.), Biblia ilustrada de La Haya (KB 76 F 5): libro de estudios, Madrid, 2015. 27 The Uppsala map, Uppsala Universitetsbibliothek MS C.691, f. 39 has a similar abrasion at the Sepulchre’s rotunda, with (it seems) further rubbing at the two gates nearest to Mons Gaudii and at the city’s central crossroads. 28 Theodoric 11, trans. Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrimage, 276: of the city’s seven gates, ‘the seventh is blocked with a wall and only on the Day of Palms and at the Exaltation of the Holy Cross is it opened’. 29 A leader in the battle was Bohemond I of Antioch, probably central to the creation of the Gesta Francorum. He visited St-Omer in 1106.

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and their New Jerusalem from Rev. 21 – the present Jerusalem, embattled but divinely rescued. The juxtaposition of promise and deferral is intense. Beneath the image are two couplets: ‘He who hopes for joys while you live strives well on the way, Jerusalem, who is learning to be your citizen. This city of Jerusalem does not last for long, but is a figure of that which will last through all ages.’30 This family of maps shows Jerusalem with east at the top, as an O internally articulated by a T; this T is formed of the ancient (horizontal) cardo, met from below by the (vertical) decumanus. So they seem purposely to evoke the T-O world maps in which the world’s sphere, sometimes set at the centre of the heavens’ concentric circles, is drawn as a circle with the east at the top, Asia occupying the upper half (above the Don/Tanais and Nile), Europe and Africa (separated by the vertical Mediterranean) the lower [Fig. 22.2].31 We have seen in the Liber Floridus the circular Holy Sepulchre (and here also the Dome of the Rock) modelled on the circle and gates of Jerusalem as a whole. There were cartographers, then, who encapsulated the whole T-O world in the T-O Jerusalem; and others who encapsulated Jerusalem in the Sepulchre’s rotunda. Here is a two-stage reduction: of the world to Jerusalem; and of Jerusalem to the Sepulchre. It suggests a parallel amplification: of the round Sepulchre to represent the whole world for whose salvation Christ was buried there. We will then wonder whether this summary of Christ’s cosmic role was similarly sensed in the Sepulchre’s circular imitations.32 In a second family of Holy Land maps, which might better be thought of as schematic plans, we glance more briefly at BL Harley MS 658 f. 39v [Colour Pl. XXXVIIId]. The relevant section was made in England in the first half of the thirteenth century. Hannah Vorholt has made the observations which we need here.33 The plan almost immediately follows Peter of Poitiers’ Compendium, a ‘diagrammatical chronicle’ of Christ’s ancestry, and is followed by diagrams mapping the virtues and vices, the muses, the soul, etc.34 The plan of the Holy Land, designed as circles 30 Gaudia cum vivis sperans obiter bene sudet, Ierusalem civis qui tuus esse studet. Hec urbs Iherusalem non multo tempore durat, sed duraturam per secula cuncta figurat. 31 On this putative link between the T-O world maps and the maps of a circular Jerusalem, R. Ousterhout, ‘Flexible Geography and Transportable Topography’, in Kühnel, Real and Ideal Jerusalem, 393–404 [393]; cf. B. Kühnel, ‘Geography and Geometry of Jerusalem’, in N. Rosovsky (ed.), City of the Great King; Jerusalem from David to the Present, Cambridge, Mass., 1996, 288–332 [317]. In the T-O maps of the world, paradise is in the furthest east, at the top; Europe lower left; these are matched in the Jerusalem maps by the Temple at the top, the Sepulchre lower left. 32 For an earlier and comparable use of circles, see R. Griffith-Jones, ‘Arculf ’s Circles, Aachen’s Octagon, Germigny’s Cube: Three Riddles from Northern Europe’, 302–3 above. 33 For this small family, H. Vorholt, ‘Studying with Maps: Jerusalem and the Holy Land in Two Thirteenth-Century Manuscripts’, in Donkin and Vorholt (eds), Imagining Jerusalem [n. 24 above], 163–99. 34 F. 37r includes one of the Jerusalem maps characteristic of the Compendium. For Fig. 22.3, in a copy of the Compendium: Eton College MS 96 f.7v (cf. Numbers 2, Ezek. 40–48).

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FIG. 22.2.  COSMIC MAP WITH T-O IN CENTRE OF CIRCLES, LIBER FLORIDUS

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FIG. 22.3.  JERUSALEM AS A ROTUNDA, PETER OF POITIERS, COMPENDIUM (ENLARGED)

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linked by coloured bands, matches in style the diagrams of the folios before and after it: a systematic and on occasion stemmatic structure of circles, clearly designed to make memorable their information. Jerusalem is a circular wall with gates at the cardinal points. Within the walls is, on the left, a triangle, inscribed at its base Sepulcrum and at its apex Mons calvariae. On the triangle’s right-hand side is ascensus, written to be read ‘upwards’; on the left, descensus, to be read downwards. A vertical band to the right rises to two circles, templum domini and templum Salomonis; the band is a pale brown, the colour of the bands tracing Jesus’ own stemma in the manuscript’s preceding Compendium. This simple diagram invited the viewer to make two connections between the city’s topographical and spiritual features: the ascent to Calvary was to be envisioned as and to stimulate a spiritual ascent; and the street from the Templum Domini to the Sepulchre’s area was to retrace the stemma – of wisdom and Davidic

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kingship – from Solomon to Jesus. This suggests a Christian sensibility acutely attuned to small visual and verbal clues; and we will ask throughout this chapter what such sensibility would see in the grand, architectural representation of the Sepulchre. A further plan of Jerusalem, this time directly connected to Peter of Poitiers’ Compendium, may prepare us, as we close this section, for our return to round churches in a few pages’ time. The city is shown as if it were a vast six-columned rotunda with six gates and with inscriptions in the rotunda’s inscribed inner circles: at the centre, habitatio sacerdotum; then, habitatio nobilium prophetarum; and in the outer ring, habitatio volgi [Fig. 22.3]. Here the city is not just round, it is a rotunda. We will surely wonder how readily and vividly, in the Temple’s distinctive setting, its own rotunda evoked the city.

BERNARD’S DESCRIPTION OF JERUSALEM Bernard of Clairvaux spoke up for the Templars at the Council of Troyes, helped to write their Rule and composed De Laude Novae Militiae (In Praise of the New Knighthood) to extol them.35 He was writing in De Laude as much for readers who had never been and would never go to Jerusalem as for those Templars or pilgrims who had seen the Holy Land. De Laude’s second part evokes Jerusalem. Without assuming that De Laude’s approach to Jerusalem either matched or informed the Templars’, we will not want to ignore the likely authority, both within and beyond the Order, of such a tract by Bernard. Bernard wrote of pilgrims reaching the Holy Sepulchre after the great weariness of a long journey, after so many dangers of land and sea, and resting where the Lord had rested. ‘The death of Christ is the death of my death.’ Bernard draws on Paul’s account of baptism, and finds in the pilgrims’ weariness the process of their own necessary ‘dying’: for, as Paul said, ‘we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we should walk in newness of life. For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, so we shall be also in the likeness of the resurrection [Rom. 6.4–5].’36 A long tradition of exegesis had read layers of meaning in the bible’s ‘Jerusalem’. The account by John Cassian (360–435) of scripture’s four senses, vindicated by his own allegorical reading of Prov. 22.20 and 31.21

35 Bernard, ‘Liber ad Milites Templi: de laude novae militiae’, in J. LeClercq and H. M. Rochais (eds), S. Bernardi Opera, III, Rome, 1963, 310–39; trans. M. C. Greenia, In Praise of the New Knighthood, Collegeville, 2000 [1977]. 36 Bernard’s account of the Sepulchre suggests there was some suspicion of the newly rebuilt church (De Laude, 11.29): nec casu vel subito, aut veluti lubrica propopularis favoris opinione, id tam celebre nomen sepulcrum nactum esse putetur. The Church is novum quidem intuenti, sed legenti antiquum; here is jucunditas de novitate, de vestustate auctoritas.

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Vg, has become the best known of such expositions; and thanks to Paul in Gal. 4.21–31, Cassian could make Jerusalem the prime example of his method’s application: Jerusalem in scripture should be read ‘historically as the city of the Jews; allegorically as the church of Christ; anagogically as that heavenly city of God, which is the mother of us all; tropologically as the soul of man’.37 At issue for Bernard was literary Jerusalem. Bernard reads the Holy Land itself like a book. He applies to the place and to its parts – and not least for readers who would never go there – the multiple significance seen for centuries in its biblical role; and so he sums up the Templars’ whole life in terms of the place they were called to protect. Bernard has already deployed the biblical promises of Jerusalem’s victorious prosperity; and has warned his readers (De Laude 3.6) not to let the text’s literal meaning blind them to the spiritual. Then he turns to the topography of the Holy Land. After an opening praise of the Temple and of the Templars who occupy it, he loosely follows the chronology of Christ’s own life. Bethlehem, ‘house of bread’, was the town where the living bread was first manifest. The ox and ass ate their food at the manger; we must discern there, by contrast, our spiritual food, and not chomp vainly at the Word’s ‘literal’ nourishment. The full-grown Christian will speak the wisdom of God when with spiritual persons; when with children of the beasts of the herd, he will adjust himself to their capacity, and speak only of Christ and him crucified (1 Cor. 2.2). Next comes Nazareth, ‘flower’: Bernard reminds us of those who were misled by the odour of flowers into missing the fruit. He is using these first two sites, well outside Jerusalem, to give instruction on the deep reading not just of scripture but of the Holy Land. Now he comes back towards the city. Among the sites are some that offer, quite precisely, the different meanings offered by scripture to its reader. Jerusalem, the sacred city whose history and nature is revealed in scripture, now performs for the imagined visitor – who is reading Bernard’s own script – as scripture does when it is properly and richly read, here to promote the priorities of the Templars and the principles of a Christian life bound to obedience.38 Bernard leads his readers down from the Templars’ headquarters on the Temple Mount, across the Valley of Josaphat and up the Mount of Olives opposite: this was an allegory for the dread of God’s judgment and our joy at receiving his mercy. He deals briefly with the Jordan that joyfully embraces Christians; Calvary reminds us of the shame borne for us by Christ. And in the Holy Sepulchre the knight should be raised up anagogically to thoughts of Christ’s death and of the freedom from death that it had won for his people. Bernard ends with Bethphage, ‘the village of priests which symbolizes both the sacrament of confession and the Cassian, Collationes 23 (PL 49.963–4). Bernard admits at the end that he had almost passed over Bethphage and, although pressed, ought not to omit Bethany. 37

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mystery of priestly ministry’; and at Bethany which with the house of Martha, Mary and Lazarus offers a moral: the virtue of obedience and the fruits of penance. Bernard inscribes Jerusalem, the focus of the Templars’ calling, onto the life of the Order and of the pilgrims it served. It will be significant, towards the end of this chapter, that Bernard links the Sepulchre and Christ himself with the Solomon whose supposed palace was the Templars’ headquarters in Jerusalem: the Templars are the picked troops of God, whom he has recruited from the ends of the earth; the valiant men of Israel chosen to guard well and faithfully that tomb which is the bed of true Solomon, each man sword in hand and superbly trained to war.39

We must bear in mind the possibility that the Temple Church was read by its own Order as a ‘chapter’ in this topographical text, the culmination of their own imagined journey through the holy city and scripture alike.

THE TEMPLE CHURCH AND THE ENGLISH STATE The English Templars had far more business to conduct than the manning, funding and direction of the crusades. Irina Gatti has surveyed in depth their relationship to the kings of England.40 I follow here just one thread of their statecraft, which affected the London Temple and its church. The Templars remained loyal to King John. He borrowed from Brother Aymeric, Master of the Knights Templar in England, the mark that he offered on his absolution in 1213. The Temple was John’s headquarters in western London from 1214 to 1215; between November 1214 and May 1215 the king paid several visits to the Temple, issued charters there to appease potential rebels, and at Epiphany 1215 faced the barons’ demand that he acknowledge his own fealty to a charter. At each Epiphany the king presented gifts to the Christ-child as the Magi had before him, and so asserted his own kingship; John clearly thought the Temple a fitting place in 1215 for this affirmation of own authority. Similarly, before Runnymede he recovered from the Temple the imperial regalia of his grandmother; he would appear before the barons, every inch the king. Central to these months’ negotiations was William Marshal, earl of Pembroke.41 Bernard, De Laude 4.8, as Bernard turns from the knights’ undertakings to their role (in chapters 5–13) in the Holy Land. 40 I. Gatti, ‘The Knights Templar and the Kings of England and France’ [Ph.D. thesis, Reading, 2005]. 41 The crusades obtruded into the crisis. On 4 March 1215 the king took the cross at the Tower of London; so he won remission from obligations that he had every wish to evade. In 1216, as the crisis deepened further, sermon materials were issued for a crusade, Philip of Oxford, Ordinatio de predicatione S. Crucis in Anglia, 1216, in R. Rohricht (ed.), Quinti belli sacri scriptores minores, Geneva, 1879, 1–26. In 1217 the fight against the invading 39

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In 1219 William Marshal was buried ‘in front of the cross’ in the Temple Church: that is, in the rotunda, to the west of the rood-screen and its cross.42 He was buried next to Brother Aymery, whose fellowship he said he had enjoyed in this world and hoped to enjoy in heaven. William’s own links to the Holy Land were long-standing. He had served Henry the Young King, who vowed to go on crusade. The prince died in 1183; William then spent two years in the Holy Land to discharge the prince’s vow. While there he gave his body to the Templars, ‘in whatever place I happen to die’; he brought back silks from the Holy Land to cover him at his death and to bedeck his bier. On his deathbed he became a Templar and had his almoner Geoffrey (a Templar) bring in the Templar cloak that had been made for him a year before. William’s eldest son, William, second earl of Pembroke, married the sister of Henry III. In two generations the family had risen from the role of minor functionaries to be among the most powerful dynasties in the land. The younger William died in 1231, deeply mourned by the king. This William was buried next to his father; his younger brother Gilbert, who died in 1241, was buried beside his father and brother. The effigies identified as the Marshals’ are still in the rotunda.43 They have been moved at least twice since the thirteenth century, and it remains uncertain where they originally lay. Richardson in 1840 exhumed an uneven row of nine coffins lying across the central vessel, just to the west of centre. These would answer to the medieval accounts of the Marshals’ burials.44 The Templars celebrated Mass regularly for the soul of King John. In July 1231 the king granted to the Templars the funds for three chaplains, to celebrate Mass three times daily in the Temple Church: for the king himself; for Christian people; and for the faithful departed.45 Later that month he bequeathed his body to the Templars; Queen Eleanor confirmed the same disposition for herself on her marriage in 1236.46 The Templars replaced their small chancel with the early English chancel, three bays wide and five long, which still stands. Its windows included heraldic glass with the king’s arms.47 The rotunda still evoked Jerusalem. So did the new chancel’s side-chapels, dedicated to St Nicholas and St John: in the Holy Sepulchre there were chapels of Mary and of John the Evangelist immediately to the Louis of France was declared to be a crusade, S. Lloyd, ‘Political Crusades in England, c. 1215–17 and c. 1263–65’, in P. Edbury (ed.), Crusade and Settlement, Cardiff, 1985, 113–20. 42 For details, Park, ‘Burials and Monuments’ [n. 15 above], 76–7. P. Meyer (ed.), L’histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal, Paris, 1891–1901, II, 295–6, lines 18233–43, now trans. N. Bryant, The History of William Marshal, Woodbridge, 2016, here 217. 43 Park, ‘Burials and Monuments’, 82–3. 44 Reproduced in Temple Church, pl. VI. See further, 457–78 below. 45 Whatley, ‘Localizing’ [n. 10 above], 59, 53. 46 V. Jansen, ‘Light and Pure: The Templars’ New Choir’, in Temple Church, 64–5; Park, ‘Burials and Monuments’, 83–4. The king was in the event buried in Westminster Abbey, the queen in Amesbury. 47 Park, ‘Burials and Monuments’, 84.

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north and south of the rotunda; and one of the small radiating chapels from the rotunda was to St Nicholas. But London’s Temple Church as a whole was now – as much as a representation of Jerusalem – a shrine to the Marshals and their royal connections. The sheriffs’ inventory of 1308 hints at the splendour of the church’s furnishings.48 In the vestry were various relics and their containers, and ‘one sword with which the blessed Thomas of Canterbury was killed, as it is said, the price of which they are ignorant’; ‘two crosses with the wood on which Christ was crucified, the price of which they are ignorant’; and ‘a silver vessel in which is placed the blood of Christ, price of the vessel, 1 mark’. The consecrated area of the Temple included to the south a cloister and a chapel of Thomas Becket.49 Becket’s killers, led by William de Tracy, all submitted to judgement by Pope Alexander III, who imposed fourteen years’ penitential military service in the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, where they died soon afterwards, perhaps as early as 1174. Later reports say that they were buried outside the entrance to the Temple in Jerusalem, where all who entered could walk over their graves.50 The London Temple would have been a suitable place to deposit the instrument of Becket’s martyrdom before the knights’ departure on military penance in the Holy Land. The Masters of the London Temple were familiars of Henry II’s court;51 they certainly knew Thomas and may also have known the murderers.52 Within a few years of Becket’s martyrdom, Londoners were spreading his cult; 53 London now had, in the Londoner Becket, its own martyr. As Becket’s death imitated Christ’s – and ever more closely in the chroniclers’ accounts – so he inspired a crusading Christomimesis in others.54 The sword and chapel will have given the Temple an added prestige. T. H. Baylis, The Temple Church, London, 1900, 131–46. J. B. Williamson, The History of the Temple, London, London, 1924, 70–1: Sunt eciam ibidem Claustrum capella sancti Thomae et quedam placea terre eidem capella annexa cum una aula et camera super edificata que sunt loca sancta et Deo dedicata et dicte ecclesie annexa (Exch. LTR Roll No. 109 m. 28 [Communia Hilary Term, 11 Ed III, Records iijd]. Perhaps the upper storey of the chapel, attached to the rotunda’s south side, whose lower storey was dedicated to St Ann, W. H. Godfrey, ‘Recent Discoveries at the Temple, London, and Notes on the Topography of the Site’, Archaeologia 95 (1953), 123–40 [129–30]. See now the chapters by Catherine Hundley and Nicole Hamonic in the present volume, 352–75 and 387–412 above. 50 N. Vincent, ‘The Murderers of Thomas Becket’, in N. Fryde and D. Reitz (eds), Bischofsmord im Mittelalter / Murder of Bishops, Göttingen, 2003, 211–72. Brito sliced off the crown of Becket’s head as he lay on the pavement, striking so fiercely that the tip of his sword broke off and became one of the relics displayed to pilgrims above the altar of the broken sword, in the north transept where Becket was murdered. 51 E. Amt, The Accession of Henry II in England: Royal Government Restored, 1149–1156, Woodbridge, 1993, 104–7. I am grateful to Professor Anne Duggan for her guidance over Thomas Becket and the sword. 52 Osto of St Omer, Master until c. 1155 and active at court for another twenty years, and his successor Richard of Hastings both opposed Becket at the council of Clarendon in 1164 and may have followed the king in making some reparation by encouraging the cult and acquiring a suitable relic. 53 C. Tyerman, England and the Crusades, Chicago and London, 1988, 73. 54 On Becket’s Christomimesis, P. Binski, Becket’s Crown: Art and Imagination in Gothic 48 49

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Helen Nicholson has written fully on the Templars’ liturgies.55 In the present volume Sebastian Salvadó outlines the westwards processions of the canons in the Holy Sepulchre itself, from the rectangular choir and sanctuary to the rotunda and Christ’s tomb.56 These processions varied in their route over Lent, Holy Week and Eastertide, to honour the course of Christ’s own passion and resurrection. Salvadó suggests that the Templars and Hospitallers in their European rotundas recreated these processional liturgies; and Martin Biddle has wondered whether such Rounds would once have housed internal wooden chapels modelled on the aedicule over Christ’s tomb in Jerusalem. The effect of such churches’ double focus – on the Round, and on the high altar – is hard to assess. The Rule keeps the brothers at a distance from the chaplains ‘when they perform the office of Our Lord’, to avoid distraction. Salvadó has shown that in Aragon the brothers themselves were in large measure observers at the daily offices, which were actually said by the chaplain(s).57 In London there was by 1307 an altar in the Round. It remains unclear where the brothers, well away from the celebrants, were to stand for the daily Mass, whether on low days or festivals. As a nave, the Round had a special sanctity of its own. The heavenly chancel at the east end was in counterpoint to the world’s round cosmos at the west, redeemed and sanctified by Christ’s resurrection commemorated in the Round. The knights, seemingly restricted to the place of their principal calling on earth, were brought there into startling intimacy with the sacrifice and triumph that they saw through the roodscreen, re-presented in the chancel at the Mass. The Templars had their eyes on Jerusalem. We might expect the Temple’s pier on the Thames to have been a favoured mooring from which to set off for the Holy Land. London as a whole, with the southern ports, provided a high proportion of crusaders.58 There is, however, no record of England, 1170–1300, New Haven, 2004, 3–12; J. O’Reilly, ‘Candidus et rubicundus: An Image of Martyrdom in the Lives of Thomas Becket’, Analecta Bollandiana 99 (1981), 303–14. Munns points out that, in Bede’s description of the Holy Sepulchre, ‘the colour of the tomb and the sepulchre are a mingled white and red’ (Ecclesiastical History, trans. L. Sherley-Price, London, 1965, 296); he suggests a visual echo in the red and white marble columns demarcating Becket’s shrine at Canterbury, J. Munns, ‘The Vision of the Cross and the Crusades in England before 1189’, in E. Lapina et al. (eds), The Crusades and Visual Culture, Farnham, 2015, 57–73 [58]. 55 H. J. Nicholson, The Knights Templar: A New History, Stroud, 2001, 137–9. 56 S. Salvadó, ‘Commemorating the Rotunda in the Round: The Medieval Latin Liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and its Performance in the West’, 413–28 above. 57 Upton-Ward, Rule of the Templars [n. 15 above], 100 [363]. S. Salvadó, ‘Templar Liturgy and Devotion in the Crown of Aragon’, in H. J. Nicholson (ed.), On the Margins of Crusading: The Military Orders, the Papacy and the Christian World, Farnham, 2011, 31–44. On daily attendance at Mass, H. J. Nicholson, ‘At the Heart of Medieval London’, in Temple Church, 3. For the Hospitallers, Sloane and Malcolm, Excavations [n. 10 above], 33; R. Gilchrist, Contemplation and Action: The Other Monasticism, London, 1995, 71; Whatley, ‘Localizing’ [n. 10 above], 40. Biddle: at a lecture in the Temple Church, 12. Nov. 2008. 58 Tyerman, England and the Crusades [n. 53 above], 20.

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any such departures. We hear just once of knights’ grand departure from Clerkenwell, to reinforce the Holy Land after a defeat at Darbsak in 1237. It was clearly a scene of memorable splendour; perhaps because it was rare. Matthew Paris reports: Hearing these things, the Templars and Hospitallers living in the West girded themselves manfully, wishing to revenge the blood of their brothers which was shed for Christ. The Hospitallers sent their prior Brother Terricus, of the German nation, a most elegant knight, with salaried knights and servants and no small treasure, to help the Holy Land. Having made the necessary arrangements, they elegantly set out from Clerkenwell, their house, with around thirty covered shields, spears raised and standard going before them, towards the bridge, in order to obtain the blessing of all who saw them. While the brothers, bowing their heads, from here and there laying back their hoods, commended themselves to the prayers of all.59

The Hospitallers appear to have crossed the bridge and ridden south, perhaps to Dover.

TOMB AND TEMPLE For those who knew Jerusalem, there was a rich harmony of associations between the city’s sacred buildings.60 We will wonder for whom this polyphony was audible, and in even more concentrated form, in the single, highly evocative space of the London Temple’s rotunda. On the crusaders’ capture of Jerusalem in 1099, the Christian revival of the Temple Mount was instant. The Sepulchre had been the place of Christ’s victory, the Temple Mount the place of the crusaders’. The Aqsa Mosque was identified as the Palace of Solomon and became a palace of Solomon’s successors, the Frankish kings. The mosque faced and was aligned with the Dome of the Rock. The Dome was identified as being (or being a recollection of) the Temple of the Lord (Templum Domini); the Virgin Mary had been dedicated to the Temple as a child, and the infant Jesus was presented there to the Lord by his mother and Joseph forty days after his birth.61 By 1120 the Templars were given the Aqsa Mosque to be 59 Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, ed. H. R. Luard, London, 1876, III, 406, trans. H. J. Nicholson. I am grateful to Professor Nicholson for referring me to this passage. Terricus de Nussa: French, Thierry; German, probably Theodoric. 60 For the transfer of artefacts and myths from the Temple to the Sepulchre, e.g. B. Kühnel, ‘Jewish Symbolism of the Temple and the Tabernacle and Christian Symbolism of the Holy Sepulchre and the Heavenly Tabernacle’, Jewish Art 12–13 (1986–87), 147–68 [150–2]. 61 The Dome of the Rock: Pringle, Churches, III, no. 367; Al-Aqsa and the Templars’ church, nos 368–9.

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their headquarters by the king, when he moved near the Tower of David. (The Dome was by 1112 under the Austin canons. Colour Pl. Va.) 62 On 15 July 1099 the crusaders processed to the Sepulchre and thence to the Temple of the Lord; there were similar processions on 10 August when armies had left to confront the Egyptians at Ascalon, on Easter Day 1101 when the Easter Fire failed to appear, and on 7 July 1124 when news of the victory at Tyre reached Jerusalem. An annual procession that included the Dome on 15 July celebrated the city’s capture in 1099 and the rededication of the Holy Sepulchre in 1149. The discovery of sacred sites became competitive. The calendar of the crusades was punctuated by Marian feasts: the first was the launch of the First Crusade on 15 August 1096, the feast of the Assumption.63 The crusades remained vividly under Marian patronage and protection. All the more reason for the foundation of Marian shrines throughout Jerusalem:64 on the Temple Mount a pilgrim would now be shown the School of the Virgin and the Church of the Bath where the Virgin spent the night before the Purification; Saewulf saw the cradle of Christ and Mary’s bed. John of Würzburg saw as well the house of Simeon; John describes the inscriptions locating the places of the Virgin’s own presentation at the age of three, and of Christ’s. Theodoric (alone) says that the Temple and its altar were dedicated to the Virgin. The Purification was celebrated on 2 February with a procession from the Sepulchre to the Temple of the Lord. The Dome of the Rock and the Holy Sepulchre represented the beginning and the end of Jesus’ earthly life. The start of Christ’s earthly life was celebrated in the Sepulchre too: the mosaics included the boy Jesus between Gabriel and his mother, with Gabriel’s words in Latin and Greek around the boy.65 The second, smaller, dome of the Sepulchre was over the world’s omphalos where the Latin kings were crowned.66 This second dome was designed to make the Sepulchre match the two domes on the Temple Mount, the larger on the Dome of the Rock and the smaller on the Aqsa Mosque; the coronation procession from the Sepulchre to the Templum Domini to the Palatium Solomonis took in all three.67 The double doors to the Sepulchre were modelled on the double portals of the Golden Gate to 62 The canons gave the Templars some of their land on the Mount. For the layout and the Templars’ buildings (in Theodoric), M. Barber, The New Knighthood, Cambridge, 1994, 7, 90–2. 63 S. Runciman, A History of the Crusades, Cambridge, 1953, I, 106–9; Urban II had launched his preaching campaign at Le Puy prior to the Assumption in August 1095. 64 For the following, S. Schein, ‘Between Mount Moriah and the Holy Sepulchre: The Changing Traditions of the Temple Mount in the Central Middle Ages’, Traditio 40 (1984), 175–95; idem, Gateway to the Heavenly City: Crusader Jerusalem and the Catholic West (1099–1187), Aldershot, 2005, 86–90; Pringle, Churches, III, nos 339 [311–12] and 367 [402–4]. 65 Schein, Gateway [n. 64 above], 104; Pringle, Churches, III, no. 283 [25]. 66 For varying traditions over the navel of the world, Schein, Gateway, 141–4. 67 N. Kenaan-Kedar, ‘Symbolic Meaning in Crusader Architecture: The Twelfth-Century Dome of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem’, Cahiers Archéologiques (34), 1986, 109–17.

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the Temple Mount: the acclamation at Christ’s entry into Jerusalem was recalled by the acclamation of the Frankish kings outside the Sepulchre. Such royal ceremonial invested the kings with the centrality of Christ and the wisdom of Solomon. We may then wonder if an apparently happy coincidence at the Temple Church is more than it seems.68 In 1184 to 1185 Heraclius, the Latin patriarch, travelled Europe to win support for the kingdom and in particular to find a king to succeed the dying Baldwin IV.69 He and his companions reached Canterbury on 29 January 1185. On 2 or 10 February, on or near the feast of Candlemas, he consecrated the Temple Church in honour of the Virgin Mary.70 On 6 March he consecrated the Hospitallers’ Church at Clerkenwell in honour of John the Baptist, to which a long aisled choir had recently been added. The Templars’ and Hospitallers’ churches had both been in use for several years; the Orders were making good use of the patriarch’s presence in London.71 It was at least a serendipity – and perhaps far more – that in this visit of six weeks, he was at the Temple at Candlemas, the feast of the Lord’s Presentation in the Temple. For the building in Jerusalem most directly linked with this feast is not the Sepulchre, but Templum Domini, the Dome of the Rock. Might London’s rotunda have assumed more of the Dome’s associations than we have yet seen?72 R. W. Eyton, Court, Household and Itinerary of Henry II, London, 1878, 261. The Holy Sepulchre Chapel at Winchester can be dated within a few years of Heraclius’ visit, although it is unlikely to be an artistic record of such a diplomatic failure, D. Park, ‘The Wall-Paintings of the Holy Sepulchre Chapel’, in T. A. Heslop and V. Sekules (eds), Medieval Art and Architecture at Winchester Cathedral, Leeds, 1983, 38–62. Christ’s body descends from the deposition in the upper register, through the entombment in the lower, and so to the Eucharistic elements on the altar below; see now Munns, Cross and Culture [n. 15 above], 201–5. 70 For the date and inscription that gives it, R Griffith-Jones, ‘An Enrichment of Cherubims’, Appendix 1, in Temple Church, 170. 71 On this whole episode, Tyerman, England and the Crusades [n. 53 above], 50–4; B. F. Hamilton, The Leper King and his Heirs: Baldwin IV and the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, Cambridge, 2000, 211–16. Heraclius was in conference with the king at Clerkenwell on 18 March. Clerkenwell was a perfect setting for the plea that the patriarch must make for help. He had with him the keys to the Holy Sepulchre and to the Tower of David, and a banner of the Holy Cross. He had already visited the pope, the emperor and the king of France. He was certainly seeking protection for the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, and may have been offering its crown (which was not his to offer). To no avail he reminded the king of Becket’s death and of the king’s own vow, still undischarged, to take the cross in penance. On the gifts brought to Charlemagne from Jerusalem in 800, see R. Griffith-Jones, 309 above. 72 We might expect to find a clear emphasis on one building or the other in the Templars’ seals, and so to diagnose the focus of their attention and loyalty. (The Hospitallers’ seals consistently show a recumbent figure – the dead Christ, or a patient of the Hospitallers who had died – before a tabernacle incorporating a censer suspended beneath a dome, with an external dome above flanked by small domes or roofs; a second censer swings over the body’s feet.) Legends on the Templars’ bullae emphasise the Temple: on the common bulla used in the East, CHRISTI DE TEMPLO or TEMPLI XPI; on Bertrand de Blancafort’s double-sided bulla, obv. +SIGILLUM MILITUM XRISTI, 68 69

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THE THRONE OF WISDOM Let us follow the surmise that London’s Marian Round did indeed evoke, for the Templars, both the Dome of the Rock and the Sepulchre. Then we would expect various associations to have been triggered in and by the Round: associations with the wisdom of Solomon; with the infancy of Jesus; and with the interplay between the beginning and the end of Jesus’ life on earth. Simeon had told the Virgin in Templum Domini that a sword would pierce her soul (Luke 2.35); and finally it did, at the site of his death. Pictorial, sculptural and homiletic traditions might here illumine links obscure to our eyes but familiar in the late Middle Ages. We will be concerned in particular with the Virgin Mary. The Templars remained closely linked with the Cistercians, and maintained the Cistercians’ strong Marian devotion.73 (The Virgin’s immaculate conception was energetically debated in England in the 1120s; the papal legate decided in favour of its observance in London in 1129.) We are concerned here with a style of looking rather different from that which has occupied us so far. Significance now resides less in the history than in the completeness and perfection of the Round’s rotonditas and of its elements. The six columns of the Round’s central vessel, eight windows, eight spokes in the rose window and twelve attached column-clusters on the ambulatory wall now matter: the old creation, new creation and apostles are all signified here. The darkly shining Purbeck columns will have been as mysterious here as in Lincoln Cathedral: ‘looked at closely this stone can suspend our minds, doubtful [ambiguas] whether it be jasper or marble’; jasper was a gemstone used architecturally only in the Heavenly Jerusalem (Rev. 21.18).74 The ductus of circumambulation and of circular seating informs the relationship of brothers to the space and to each other. The prototypes and their histories are now fuel for the sensibilities and discipline of a prayerful, meditative sight, made famous by Mary Carruthers.75 Carruthers has demonstrated how central to meditation was the disciplined imagination of buildings and of their components – above all, of the Temple and of the ark within it – and of a journey through such buildings. Our concern here is with an actual and present building visited by London’s Templars for Mass rev. +CRISTI DE TEMPLO; on the earliest French seal, of Geoffrey Fulcher, +MIL. TEMPLI SAL. The building shown, however, has been read (as e.g. by Nicholson, Knights [n. 55 above], 116) as a clear depiction of the Sepulchre. For a full treatment, Whatley, ‘Localizing’ [n. 10 above], who explores (85, 89) a possibly deliberate ambiguity. 73 Purkis, Crusading Spirituality [n. 18 above]; but we have not done justice to the Templars’ devotional life until we can confidently interpret, for example, the frescoes at Montsaunès and Perugia (S. Bevignate), G. Curzi, La pittura dei Templari, Milan, 2002, 30–9, 39–51. 74 Henri d’Avranches, Metrical Life of St Hugh of Lincoln (ed. C. Garton), Lincoln, 1986, 879–80; M. Carruthers, The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages, Oxford, 2013, 192. 75 M. Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric and the Making of Images, 400–1200, Cambridge, 1998; idem, ‘The Concept of Ductus, or Journeying through a Work of Art’, in M. Carruthers (ed.), Rhetoric Beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in the Arts of the Middle Ages, Cambridge, 2010, 190–203.

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(to which we have attended briefly above), the offices and chapter; and with its recollection for meditative ductus both by current and by past residents.76 The Round becomes, thanks to its links with the Dome and the Sepulchre, a place precisely engineered for meditation on the Virgin and the Incarnation, and in that meditation for the ascent of heart and mind. In bare outline I adduce two familiar traditions; nothing in the paragraphs that follow, linking these traditions with the London Temple’s rotunda, can be more than tentative. Both the principal buildings on the Temple Mount were, for the crusaders, linked with Solomon: the Dome of the Rock, as built on the site of the Solomonic Temple; the Aqsa Mosque, as the Temple, palace or house of Solomon.77 The Temple had been unable, in the Holy of Holies, to contain God (1 Kings 8.27–30); the Virgin had, in her womb, contained the uncontainable. She was herself the ark, or the templum Domini / Trinitatis that housed it.78 She had also, independently and from the eighth century onwards, been ever more closely associated in the West with Wisdom. Sapiential readings marked her festivals: Ecclesiasticus 24.11–13 and 15–20, in which Wisdom speaks, was read at Corbie and Murbach on her nativity and her Assumption. The missing verse, Ecclesiasticus 24.14, apparently making a claim too high for the Virgin, later became the best known of all Marian readings, heard at the weekly votive Mass for the Virgin: ‘From the beginning, before the ages I was created, and until the age to come I shall not cease to be; and in his holy habitation I ministered before him.’ By the early eleventh century the classic Christological speech of Wisdom (Prov. 8.22–35) had been adopted as a Marian reading: ‘The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his ways … When he laid the foundations of the earth I was with him, fashioning all things.’ To Rupert of Deutz (d. 1129) she was magistra magistrorum; Abbot Odo of Battle Abbey (d. 1200) urged his brothers to ‘philosophise in the name of Mary’ in order to attain true wisdom.79 To make a general claim: a space whose rotunditas evoked the perfections of God’s cosmic sphere was well suited to evoke this Virgin, ever more nearly God’s handmaid when that sphere was designed and made.80 76 P. Crossley, ‘Ductus and Memoria in Chartres Cathedral’, in Carruthers (ed.), Rhetoric, 214–49, applies Carruthers’ insights to Chartres and, through the Ars Memorativa, 1523, of Laurent Fries, to Strasbourg Cathedral; cf. J. M. Massing, ‘Laurent Fries et son “Ars Memorativa”: la cathédrale de Strasbourg comme éspace mnémonique’, in idem, Studies in Imagery, London, 2004, I, 251–74. 77 Pringle, Churches, III, 400–1, 419. 78 For the Virgin as the ark, E. Revel-Neher, La signe de la rencontre: l’arche d’alliance dans l’art juif et chrétien du second au dixième siècles, Paris, 1984, 53–7. 79 For these and further references, B. Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry and Belief in the Middle Ages, Philadelphia, 2003, 197–205; cf. I. H. Forsyth, The Throne of Wisdom, Princeton, 1972, 22–30. For Odo, Sermon for the Assumption, ed. J. Leclercq, Mélanges des sciences religieuses 13 (1956), 103–6. 80 This is a claim for the propriety, not the origins (for instance, in the Pantheon) of Marian rotundas.

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Such Wisdom turns us from mother back to son, and to his ancestry. From a sermon by Peter Damian on Mary’s nativity: Today she is born through whom we are all born again, whose honour the Almighty greatly desired, and in whom God established his throne [Ps. 44]. She herself is that glorious throne concerning which in the Book of Kings it is written in these words, ‘King Solomon made a great throne of ivory and overlaid it with the best gold beyond measure’ … Our Solomon, not only wise but indeed the Wisdom of the Father, not only peace-making but indeed our peace, has prepared a throne, manifestly the womb of the chaste Virgin, in which sat that Majesty which shakes the world with a nod.81

Wisdom sits or stands on Mary’s lap; and Mary can herself be shown on the throne of Solomon. Francis Wormald has analysed a spectacular example, in a Verger de Soulas [Colour Pl. XXXIXc].82 Pamela Tudor-Craig has expounded the Marian Wisdom presiding over ‘Genesis’ in BL Add Ms 18856 f. 3r (c. 1415):83 the order of creation and the order of wise counsel are together represented by a gathering in an octagon around a winged spirit of wisdom, a woman in cerulean blue, above the words of wisdom [Colour Pl. XXXIXd]. The octagon, evoking the perfection of the eighth day, is a shape as perfect as the circle. It expresses the Wisdom of God that informs creation and inspires wisdom in his servants gathered there. Herrad of Hohenbourg, Hortus Deliciarum (c. 1170), f. 32r, showed the seven liberal arts as handmaids of philosophy, one in each of seven Romanesque arches forming a rotunda [Colour Pl. XXXIXb]. Inscribed banderoles sanctify the scene: Omnis sapientia a Domino Deo est; Spiritus sanctus inventor est septem liberalium artium.84 Abbot David of St Augustine’s, Bristol, wrote to the Dean of Wells, 1218–20, to ask for the loan of the master-mason at Wells, ‘to hew out the seven pillars of wisdom’s house, meaning of course our Chapel of 81 Peter Damian (d. 1072), Sermon on Mary’s nativity (PL 144.736–40), trans. M. Fassler, Gothic Song: Victorine Sequences and Augustinian Reform in Twelfth-Century Paris, Cambridge, 2011 [1993], 22–30 [25]. For the deployment of the Song of Songs 3.9–10 and the seat of Solomon as the Virgin’s womb in William of Newburgh, R. Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200, New York, 2002, 453. 82 BNF Fr 9220 f. 2r; F. Wormald, ‘The Throne of Solomon and St Edward’s Chair’, in M. Meiss (ed.), De Artibus Opuscula XL [FS Panofsky], New York, 1961, 532–9; cf. I. Ragusa, ‘Terror Demonum and Terror Inimicorum: The Two Lions of the Throne of Solomon and the Open Door of Paradise’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 40 (1977), 93–114 . 83 P. Tudor-Craig, ‘The Iconography of Wisdom and the Frontispiece to the Bible Historiale, British Library Add Ms 18856’, in C. M. Barron and J. Stratford (eds), The Church and Learning in Later Medieval Society [FS Dobson; Proceedings of the 1999 Harlaxton Symposium], Donington, 2002, 110–27. 84 Reconstructed by R. Green, M. Evans et al., Hortus Deliciarum, 2 vols, Oxford and London, 1979, I, 104–6; II, pl. 18.

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the blessed Virgin’.85 It is no wonder that some chapter-houses, places of wisdom, were centrally planned. We hear of Lincoln Cathedral: ‘beside the church stands the chapter-house … within, its space is round, vying with Solomon’s temple in material and craftsmanship’.86 The Temple’s Round will have been used for the chapter-meetings of the house; and until 1244 English provincial chapters were held at the New Temple.87 Illustrations of Pentecost bring such sensibilities to life, as in the St Albans Psalter (c. 1120–45): in a locked, castellated rotunda open to the sky, the Virgin flanked by the apostles [Colour Pl. XXXIXa]. The gift of the Spirit is particularly apt (and important) in the chapter-house, which, according to the capitularies of both Westminster and Canterbury: can fittingly be called the capitulum or caput litium [head of strifes] since in it are ended strifes and whatever discords and dissensions there might be between brothers. The chapter house is, therefore, the workshop of the Holy Spirit [officina Spiritus Sancti], in which the sons of God gather to be reconciled to him.88

This invites a careful definition of the relationship between the Virgin and the Temple’s Round. Wisdom sat on the Virgin’s lap; and thanks to the Round’s links with Solomon and the Presentation of the infant Christ, the Virgin’s role as sedes sapientiae is more vividly and immediately apparent there than in most rotundas. We are now very close to a second and greater mystery: not of the Virgin’s lap on which Christ sat, but of the womb in which he was contained. (This suggests an analogy with the later Middle Ages’ most vivid images of the Virgin’s containment of the uncontainable Christ. The Vierges ouvrantes show the 85 Now the Elder Lady Chapel, Bristol Cathedral. L. S. Colchester and J. H. Harvey, ‘Wells Cathedral’, Archaeological Journal 131 (1974), 200–14 [203 and nn. 27, 28]. Wisdom’s seven pillars, Prov. 9.1, were identified as the three theological and four cardinal virtues. 86 J. F. Dimock (ed.), Metrical Life of St Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, Lincoln, 1860, lines 833–965. 87 Surmised by Nicholson, ‘At the Heart of Medieval London’ [n. 57 above], 4–6, in accordance with Templar practice: most of their houses had no specially-built chapter house, and chapter meetings were held in the church. 88 E. M. Thompson (ed.), Customary of the Benedictine Monasteries of Saint Augustine, Canterbury, and Saint Peter, Westminster, London, Henry Bradshaw Society 23 (1902), 224, and 28 (1904), 183–4. William Gardner, ‘The Role of Central Planning in the English Romanesque Chapter House Design’ [Ph.D. thesis, Princeton, 1976], 225, nn. 12–13, warns against any assumption of equality. In secular cathedrals all canons holding prebends were guaranteed a seat and an equal vote in chapter; but Benedict’s rule and custom ensured a strict hierarchy in monastic chapters, in which – alongside the authority of abbot, prior and sub-priors – various obedientiaries were to issue proclamations against negligent brothers in chapter: P. Schmitz, Histoire de l’ordre de St Benoît, Maredesous, 1941, 251–91, with promotions and demotions in seating, 181. The Templars’ Order specifies that he who was holding the chapter should respond to delinquents as the majority agreed, Rule 390; some impression of the dynamics involved in such a communal process is given in Rules 391–412, 481–9, Upton-Ward, Rule of the Templars [n. 15 above], 106–11, 126–8. The St Albans Psalter: Hildesheim, Dombibliothek, MS St Godehard 1.

453

454

FIG. 22.4.  VIERGE OUVRANTE (METROPOLITAN MUSEUM, NEW YORK)

ROBIN GRIFFITH-JONES

crucified Christ as the second person of the Trinity within the womb of Mary. I illustrate [Fig. 22.4] the most famous, in New York.89) By the fourth century the connection had been made between the womb of the Virgin and the tomb of Christ. To be in the Round was to be in the presence of – or rather to be in – an enduring mystery: the second and last container of the uncontainable. And this was clearly linked with the first such container, the Virgin’s womb: ‘Then the creator of all things instructed me and spoke to me, and he who created me rested in my tabernacle’ (Sir. 24.12).90 The Easter hymn Rex sempiterne, attributed to Ambrose, distils the pairing into a single stanza: ‘You, who were once born from a virgin, are born now from the grave; and you command us, who were buried, to rise from the dead.’91 The motif was readily elaborated: neither Mary’s womb nor Jesus’ grave had ever borne a person before, nor ever would again;92 Jesus had been conceived through the closed gate 89 Metropolitan Museum Acc. 17.190.185. For the Vierges ouvrantes, E. Gertsman, Worlds Within: Opening the Medieval Shrine Madonna, Pennsylvania, 2015, here 70–1, 173–5. The throne of mercy had been a motif since the early twelfth century, as in the Cambrai Missal (Gertsman, 73). 90 Tunc praecepit et dixit mihi creator omnium et qui creavit me requievit in tabernaculo meo, Vg. 91 Qui natus olim ex virgine / Nunc e sepulcro nasceris, / Tecumque nos a mortuis / Jubes sepultos surgere (PL 17.1207). 92 Aug. Tract. in Joh. 28.3 (PL 35.1623; John 7.1); Tract. in Joh. 120.5 (PL 35.1954; John 19.41); Trin. 4.5.9 (PL 42.893; Jesus was conceived and died on 25 March), cf. Quaest. in Hept. 2.90 (PL 34.629; Ex. 23.19). Jerome, Adv. Jovinianum 1.31 (PL 23.254; Song of Songs 4.12, hortus conclusus).

THE TEMPLE CHURCH IN THE CRUSADES

(Ezek. 44.2) and rose from the closed tomb.93 The theme is expanded in a sermon by Maximus of Turin in the early fifth century. No less honour is due to the tomb which raised the Lord than to the womb of Mary which brought him forth: The sepulchre of Christ is like a womb; from there he is born more glorious than he was from his mother … Blessed is the body of our Lord Jesus Christ: when born from the womb of a virgin he is brought to birth; when he leaves the tomb of a just man, he is valued. Clearly blessed is the body to which virginity gave birth and which justice guarded. For the grave of Joseph guarded it without corruption, just as the womb of Mary preserved it unimpaired. For just as there it is not touched by pollution, so it is not harmed by the corruption of death. Everywhere sanctity is conferred on the blessed body, and everywhere virginity. A new womb conceived it, a new grave enclosed it. Therefore the womb that bore the Lord is virgin, and virgin is his sepulture. Or rather, I will have said that the sepulture itself is a womb. For the likeness is close. For just as the Lord emerged alive from his mother’s womb, so he rose alive from Joseph’s tomb … Except, that this second nativity is more glorious than the first. The first brought forth a mortal body, the second an immortal. After the first he descends to hell, after the second he returns to heaven.94

There is, in the Round, an almost unsettling immediacy to the connection: to be there is once more to be in the presence of or in the mystery of both those containers. There was of course an anagogical point to be made. Chrysologus emphasises that the stone was rolled away to show to the world that the Lord had risen; the Lord himself had left the sealed tomb as he had left his mother’s sealed womb. ‘Pray, brothers, that an angel might now descend and roll away the whole hardness of our heart, open the seal of our senses, bear witness that Christ has risen from our minds; for just as that heart is heaven, in which Christ lives and reigns, so is that chest a tomb, in which Christ is still held dead and buried.’95 We asked in an earlier chapter how such rotundas may have offered an invitation to imaginative ascent.96 The Round, separated from the chancel by the screen and within Bede Hom. 2.1 (In Vig. Pasch., PL 94.136). Bede emphasises that the stone was rolled from the mouth of the tomb to bear witness to Christ’s resurrection, not to allow for his departure. 94 Formerly ascribed to Augustine, Serm. 248 (De Sep. Dom., PL 39.2204–5); see P. Glorieux, Pour revaloriser Migne, Lille, 1952, 25, and Maximi Episcopi Taurinensis Sermones, ed. A. Mutzenbecher, Turnhout, 1962 (CCSL 23), Serm. 38.4 (150). Further examples, from Aelfric and Haymo, in Raw, Iconography [n. 15 above], 181. 95 Chrysologus, Serm. 75 (PL 52.413). 96 R. Griffith-Jones, ‘Public, Private and Political Devotion: Re-presenting the Sepulchre, 93

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a few decades the home to a central north-south row of effigies, invited circumambulation; its arcade provided circular seating. There is no straight movement, of body or mind, from west to east; the body is taken in a circular and circuitous movement, the mind in a movement upwards into the dome and beyond. Once more Peter Damian, this time in a sermon on the Annunciation, pictures Christ’s ascent from the altar of the Virgin’s womb. In that womb: the majesty of the Most High emptied itself [Phil. 2.8], sending good measure, pressed down and shaken, into our lap [Luke 6.38]. Ascending from this altar to the altar of the cross [de hoc altari ad aram crucis ascendens] he bound together the whole body of the world’s machine with a greater bond [totum corpus machinae mundialis largiori ligamine copulavit].97

The Round was designed to be the workshop of the Holy Spirit: in its form a microcosm of the whole world’s machine; through its prototypes encapsulating the gestation, infancy, death and rising of Christ; with its altar and rood-screen expressing the bond that ties all creation together. More specifically, in this Marian Round the worshippers were simultaneously present at or in the two – the only two – vessels that had contained the uncontainable at the start and at the end of his incarnation. There are presuppositions beneath these suggestions which we cannot explore here. We are implicitly distinguishing between (i) the rotundas of the Templars, who were directly associated with the Temple Mount, Solomon and the Dome of the Rock, and (ii) those of the Hospitallers, who were not; between (iii) rotundas that were linked with the Sepulchre, and (iv) those that were not; between (v) those that were dedicated to the Virgin and (vi) those that were not. We are identifying a particular (and seemingly fortuitous) constellation of notes that together form a remarkable harmony. If the Temple’s rotunda did sound such a harmony for Templars or their associates, for their visitors or for London’s residents, only a careful and nuanced study will reconstruct the orchestration. Krautheimer urged, in the appraisal of copies, the importance not just of the copies’ shape but of their content. Such content extends far beyond their dedication and liturgical function. It becomes an important methodological question, what mix of architectural and cultural history, of discipline and sensibility can bring back to light the wider associations particular to these emblematic churches.

17–47 above.The surprisingly grotesque heads in the arcading of the Temple’s Round are nineteenth-century pastiches of earlier and similarly cartoonish heads. In their present form they are hardly ‘grinning for gladness’, as are the corbel-heads in St Faith’s, Westminster Abbey, P. Binski, Becket’s Crown [n. 54 above], 247. On the Round’s vertical axis this lowest level is arguably mundane, impure and a suitable setting for such figures, above whose degradation those who gathered in the Round were called to rise. 97 Peter Damian, Sermo 11 (PL 144.557).

THE TEMPLE CHURCH IN THE CRUSADES

APPENDIX: THE KNIGHTS’ EFFIGIES IN THE TEMPLE CHURCH: NEWLY DISCOVERED DRAWINGS BY JOHN GUILLIM, c. 1610 Robin Griffith-Jones and Philip J. Lankester THE DRAWINGS OF JOHN GUILLIM (1560-1621), FOLGER SHAKESPEARE LIBRARY, V.A.447, FF. 39-44 Robin Griffith-Jones Dr Nigel Ramsay has recently discovered in the Folger Library, Washington DC, a set of eleven drawings by John Guillim (1560–1621) of the Temple Church effigies and gravestones.98 These drawings predate by many decades both the repositioning of the effigies in 1695 and the earliest representations previously known to survive, commissioned by Smart Lethieullier by 1736/7.99 The drawings require further detailed study. This preliminary account examines the evidence the drawings offer on the effigies’ layout, c. 1610, and in particular on a grave-slab that has since been lost. Philip Lankester (471–78 below) outlines the importance of these drawings for our knowledge of the effigies. We will focus on just one sheet [Fig. 22.5] with two drawings: of the effigy identified since the 1840s as of William Marshal II; and of a gravestone, now lost, with a lion rampant and an inscription round part of its border, ‘Miles eram Martis’.100

98 Folger Library, V.a.447, ff. 39–44. The pages can be viewed on the Folger Library website. Further manuscripts, c. 1605, with drawings by Guillim or one of his assistants: BL MS Harley 1386 and 6067, and Bodleian MS Rawlinson B 102. 99 Now in the British Library, Add. MS 27348, ff. 90–1, in a set of three volumes compiled by Lethieullier, Add. MS 27348–50, P. J. Lankester, ‘The Thirteenth-Century Military Effigies in the Temple Church’, in Temple Church, 101 and Pls 85–6. 100 Oliver Harris has traced the early antiquaries’ interest in cross-legged effigies, O. D. Harris, ‘Antiquarian Attitudes: Crossed Legs, Crusaders and the Evolution of an Idea’, The Antiquaries Journal 90 (2010), 401–40. From the 1550s, crossed legs were taken as a sign of great antiquity; Paul Hentzner, a Silesian tourist, was told in 1598 that the Temple’s effigies commemorated the Danish kings of England. The Temple Church itself is likely to have encouraged both the conviction (known to Camden [n. 101 below], credited by Stow [n. 106 below]) that the Temple’s crossed legs indicated crusaders, and the slightly later refinement (in Munday’s edition of Stow, 1618, and Weever [n. 114 below]) that such knights were Templars. The church was well known to the antiquaries. A presentation drawing of three windows in the Chapter House of Westminster Abbey is prominently inscribed, ‘Yt is a round place like the Temple / Church’, a comparison of greatest interest to those who knew the Temple Church at least as well as the Chapter House. The drawing is prefixed to a collection of copies of records relating to the County of Pembroke, temp. Edward I and II, made in the company of Arthur Agarde, 1606–10, and with the help of Agarde’s Abbreviatio Placitorum: Bodleian, MS Rawlinson C.704, drawing at f. ii. Agarde was a leading member of the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries, M. Yax, ‘Arthur Agarde, Elizabethan Archivist: His Contributions to the Evolution of Archival Practice’, The American Archivist 61 (1998), 56–69.

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Camden, in the third edition of Britannia (1594), identified three of the Temple Church effigies as of the Marshals and added a marginal note: In altero horum tumulo lit[t]eris fugientibus legi, Comes Penbrochiae, & in latere, Miles eram Martis Mars multos vicerat armis.101

That is: Camden read the hexameter in faded letters ‘on another tomb of these [Pembrokes]’, or perhaps ‘on the other tomb of these [Pembrokes]’, or (to paraphrase) ‘on one of these tombs [of the Pembrokes]’. Philémon Holland’s translation of Camden, in the 1637 edition, renders the note: ‘Upon William the Elder, his Tombe, I have some yeares since read in the upper part Comes Penbrochiae’.102 This is more precise than Camden’s own account; as we will see, the ascription resurfaces at the end of the seventeenth century, in Dingley. William Dugdale wrote of the effigies (1666): Within a spacious grate of Iron, in the midst of the round walk, under the Steeple, do ly eight Statues in military Habits; each of them having large and deep Shields on their left Armes. Of which five are cross legg’d. There are also three other Gravestones lying about five inches above the level ground; on one of which is a large Escocheon with a Lion rampant graven thereon.103

Dingley, writing in or after 1684, knew of the inscription and of the knight’s identity; we are back to the tradition in Holland’s translation of Camden. The effigies included: Wm Marshall ye Elder a Great Man, Wm and Gilbert his Sons Marshals of England & Erls of Pembroke Upon ye Elder whereof ’s Tomb was discernible of late yeers on the upper part Comes Pembrochie and on his side this verse – Miles eram Martis Mars multos vicerat armis.104

No trace of the inscription seen by Camden survives; nor the gravestone with the lion rampant. It has long been surmised that the inscription was around an effigy, and that its incisions, indent or attachments were cut away at one of the effigies’ movements or restorations. Ramsay’s discovery brings this gravestone back to light. Camden, Dugdale and Dingley all described it well. John Guillim began writing his only published book, A Display of Heraldrie, at the age of forty-four in 1595. In 1604 he was created 101 W. Camden, Britannia, London, 1594, 321. The authoritative account on the Temple Church effigies is now two papers in Temple Church: Park, ‘Burials and Monuments’ [n. 15 above], 67–92; and Lankester, ‘Effigies’ [n. 99 above], 93–134. 102 Lankester, ‘Effigies’, 113, n. 86. 103 W. Dugdale, Origines Juridiciales, London, 1666, 173. 104 T. Dingley, History from Marble (now in the Bodleian, MS printed in facsimile by the Camden Society, 94 and 97, 1867–68), pl. 2, p. 453.

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Portsmouth pursuivant-extraordinary. Display was published in 1611. In 1613 Guillim was created Rouge Croix Pursuivant. ‘Guillim’s Display of Heraldrie, of which there were further posthumous enlarged editions, was to remain the standard textbook on English heraldry until the second half of the eighteenth century, and it is still regularly used by working heralds in the twenty-first century.’105 Folger V.a.447, 53 leaves, 8o, with ‘John Gwyllym’ f. 36, includes (alongside some further drawings) orders of precedence and of processions at various royal events between 1603 and 1604, further processional orders and styles of address, the duties of a king of arms and (charmingly) recipes for the colours and gums needed by a heraldic painter. The drawings of the Temple Church effigies are on successive sheets (ff. 39–44r) of the booklet [Figs 22.5–22.10]. They are numbered 1–11. I list them here with the RCHM numbers, for ease of reference to Philip Lankester’s catalogue of the effigies. Folio: Guillim No.: RCHM No.:

39 1 9

2

40 3 3

4 6

41 5 11

6

42 7 10

8 5

44 9 4

10 8

43 11 7

Guillim 2, 5 and 6 are gravestones. Guillim 2 is the subject of the present note; Guillim 5 survives and now lies in the northern ambulatory of the Round. Guillim 9 and 10 are on f. 44, following Guillim’s own 11 on f. 43.106 (In the identifications that have survived since Richardson in the 1840s, Guillim 1 is the figure now known as William Marshal II, Guillim 7 as William Marshal I, Guillim 10 as Gilbert Marshal, Guillim 4 as Geoffrey de Mandeville.) We are concerned here with Guillim 1 and 2 [Fig. 22.5]. Dugdale would later see eight effigies and three gravestones, apparently all in a single row at or near the centre of the Round’s central vessel. Stow appears to indicate one point in their order: ‘the first of the crosse legged was W. Marshall the elder Earle of Pembroke, who dyed 1219’.107 This would naturally refer to his placing, at the southern end of the row, and so seen from the east as both its first and its pre-eminent knight. It reminds us that the effigies’ earliest description has William Marshal I cross-legged; Guillim I fits the description as Richardson’s Marshal does not. Stow continues: Wil. Marshall his sonne Earle of Pembroke was the second, he died 1231 and Gilbert Marshall his brother, Earle of Pembroke, 105 T. Woodcock, ODNB. The arms of William Marshall are not included in the ancient arms illustrated on Display’s final pages. 106 Guillim 11 shares the page with the figure of a woman In Eccl[es]ia Goldington prope Bedforde. 107 J. Stow, Survey of London, London, 1598, 327; repeated by John Strype in his enlarged edition of Stow, Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster, London, 1720.

FIG. 22.5.  J. GUILLIM, DRAWING OF EFFIGY AND GRAVESTONE IN THE TEMPLE CHURCH, NUMBERED 1 AND 2, THE FOLGER SHAKESPEARE LIBRARY, WASHINGTON DC, V.A.447, F. 39

FIG. 22.6.  J. GUILLIM, DRAWING OF TWO EFFIGIES IN THE TEMPLE CHURCH, NUMBERED 3 AND 4, THE FOLGER SHAKESPEARE LIBRARY, WASHINGTON DC, V.A.447, F. 40

FIG. 22.8.  J. GUILLIM, DRAWING OF TWO EFFIGIES IN THE TEMPLE CHURCH, NUMBERED 7 AND 8, THE FOLGER SHAKESPEARE LIBRARY, WASHINGTON DC, V.A.447, F. 42

FIG. 22.7.  J. GUILLIM, DRAWING OF TWO GRAVE SLABS IN THE TEMPLE CHURCH,

NUMBERED 5 AND 6, THE FOLGER SHAKESPEARE LIBRARY, WASHINGTON DC,

V.A.447, F. 41

FIG. 22.10.  J. GUILLIM, DRAWING OF TWO EFFIGIES IN THE TEMPLE CHURCH, NUMBERED 9 AND 10, THE FOLGER SHAKESPEARE LIBRARY, WASHINGTON DC, V.A.447, F. 44

FIG. 22.9.  J. GUILLIM, DRAWING OF TWO EFFIGIES, THE LEFT IN THE TEMPLE

CHURCH AND NUMBERED 11, THE FOLGER SHAKESPEARE LIBRARY, WASHINGTON

DC, V.A.447, F. 43

464



GUILLIM 1

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2

3

4

5

FIG. 22.11.  THE EFFIGIES’ LAYOUT IN THE TEMPLE CHURCH, c. 1610 AND AFTER 1695. TOP: THE LAYOUT OF THE EFFIGIES, c. 1610, AS INDICATED BY GUILLIM. BOTTOM: THE LAYOUT OF THE EFFIGIES AFTER THE REDISPOSITION OF 1695, FROM THE PHOTOGRAPHS BY BEDFORD LEMERE, c. 1885, THE PRINT OF WILLIAM DE ROS (?) BY RICHARDSON, 1843, AND THE DRAWING OF GUILLIM 5 BY GUILLIM. IN THIS LATER LAYOUT TWO GRAVE-SLABS, GUILLIM



GUILLIM 4

1

[ROS]

3

5

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6

7

8

9

10

11

2 AND 6, HAVE DISAPPEARED. GUILLIM 4 HAS BEEN MOVED TO THE SOUTHERN END OF THE SOUTHERN ROW; DE ROS HAS ARRIVED FROM YORKSHIRE AND BEEN INSERTED AT THE CENTRE OF THE SOUTHERN ROW. (BY THE TIME LEMERE PHOTOGRAPHED THE EFFIGIES, THEY HAD BEEN REARRANGED ONCE MORE, INTO THEIR PRESENT DISPOSITION.)

7

8

9

10

11

466

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slayne in a Turnement at Hertford, beside Ware, in the yeare  1241.

The list is easily read as an account of the first three cross-legged effigies, Guillim 1, 3 and 4, the trio on the southern side of the Round separated from the northern quintet by the gravestones, Guillim 5 and 6. In 1682 a final effigy was introduced to the church, of William de Ros.108 In 1695 the effigies were divided into two groups, to the north and the south of the Round’s central vessel, and an aisle created between them that led directly from the west door to the doorway in the newly built screen through to the chancel to the east. There are two valuable records of their new grouping: in the two drawings made for Smart Lethieullier; and in two engravings in Gough’s Sepulchral Monuments (1786–96).109 I have created here a collage of images to show the effigies’ layout (i) in Guillim’s day and (ii) in the time of Lethieullier and Gough [Fig. 22.11]. On the upper row are Guillim 1–11 in order, as drawn and numbered by Guillim. On the lower are the eight effigies that still lie today in the Round’s central vessel, as photographed there by Bedford Lemere, c. 1885; the Ros effigy as engraved by Richardson, 1843; and Guillim’s drawing of the gravestone Guillim 5. Lethieullier and Gough show de Ros included in the set; two of Guillim’s gravestones, Guillim 2 and 6, have been omitted. Among other records of the new arrangement is Hatton’s, in A New View of London (1708): In the middle of the Area [of the Round] lie the Marble Figures of 9 of the Knights Templers, some of them 7 Foot and a half in length, they are represented in the Habit before described, cumbant in full Proportion, 5 in one Rank inclosed with Iron Rails, of which 3 are not cross legged; and 4 in another Rank all cross legged, and inclosed with Iron Rails Sd [= southward] from the last.110

We can now collate Guillim’s and Gough’s orderings. Here is (A), Guillim’s numbering; (B), the effigies as laid out from 1695, (i) in Guillim’s numbering; and (ii) in Gough’s numbering from 1 to 5 and implied numbering from 6 to 10. In this chart, * indicates crossed legs, † a gravestone.

108 Park, ‘Burials and Monuments’ [n. 15 above], 80–1, 88; Lankester, ‘Effigies’ [n. 99 above], 113–15; R. Griffith-Jones, ‘An Enrichment of Cherubims’, Appendix II, Temple Church, 171–3. 109 R. Gough, Sepulchral Monuments in Great Britain …, London, 1786–96, I, 1, Pls V and XIX; Temple Church, Pls 85–8. As editor of this section of Temple Church, I owe readers an apology for the inverted captions to Pls 85–6, and to Pls 87–8. 110 E. Hatton, A New View of London, 2 vols, London, 1708, II, 563–75 [574]. Strype’s Stow [n. 107 above], by contrast, does not mention the recently arrived de Ros; Strype seems not to have checked the church at first hand. Two images: Emmett’s engraving of 1702, Temple Church, Pl. 82; and the advertisement for Penn and Lloyd, stationers in the west porch, Temple Church, Pl. 68.

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West A. Guillim’s numbering, as seen c. 1605: 1* 2† 3* 4* 5† 6† 7 8 B (i): As seen 1695 onwards, in Guillim’s numbering:

9

10*

11*

4* 1 * [Ros]* 3* 5† 7 8 B (ii): As seen 1695 onwards, in Gough’s numbering:

9

10*

11*

1*

2* 3 [Ros]*

4*

5†

East

[6]

[7]

[8]

[9]* [10]*

The omission of the gravestone, Guillim 6, is not surprising: its removal started to open up the central aisle. The insertion of de Ros is natural enough; more surprising is the decision to remove the gravestone, Guillim 2, to make room for it; Guillim 2 was clearly well-known, and Guillim 5 might have seemed more easily dispensed with. There is no trace of the re-use of Guillim 2 elsewhere. Why, finally, was Guillim 4 moved to the left-hand end of the southern row? Gough was apparently the first to see it as the effigy of Geoffrey de Mandeville, earlier by a generation than William Marshal I. A heraldic link between the effigy’s shield and Mandeville’s coat of arms may perhaps have been made by the end of the sixteenth century;111 but none of those writing nearer the time of the effigies’ new disposition had made the connection. FOLGER V.a.447, f. 39 The sheet is briefly inscribed top and bottom, and at length along its right hand side. At the top, the monuments’ location is given: In Circuitu Ubi intratur in Ecclesiam Medii Templi London. A similar heading is on each of ff. 40–44. On the border of the gravestone, top and right, is inscribed in pencil: MILES ERAM MARTIS. Below the gravestone, again in pencil: Nota inscript.112 Along the right hand side are extracts from and references to Matthew Paris (Historia Anglorum, London, 1571), whose pagination is awry: pages 930–1 are followed by pages 912–13. Matthew Paris is here telling the story Lankester, ‘Effigies’ [n. 99 above], 117, n. 107. A further pencil note near the bottom of the page is hard to read. I am grateful to the curators of the Folger Library for suggesting: ‘See the … Midlesex for these’. Guillim’s reference may be to J. Norden, Speculum Britanniae: The First Parte: An Historicall, & Chorographicall Discription of Middlesex, 1593: ‘There are in this Temple, many very auncient monuments of famous men, shaped in Marble armed, their legges crosse, whose names are not to be gathered, by any inscription, for that, time hath worne it out.’ Norden, then, saw or knew of such an inscription, but could not read it. Guillim had good reason to draw attention to ‘Miles eram Martis’, and perhaps to leave it in (faint) pencil. He knew – and thought he had overcome – Norden’s failure to decipher the inscription. 111

112

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of the curse on William Marshal’s heirs by the bishop of Ferns.113 The first four lines are elegantly arranged: Epitaphium Will[iel]mi magni Marescalli Senioris Comitis Pembrochiæ Sum quem Saturnum sibi sensit Hybernia, Solem Anglia, Mercurium Normannia, Gallia Martem.114

Guillim has inserted tidy references in a smaller hand to left and right. On the left: Hos versus composuit Gervasius de Melkeleia ut Matthaeus Westmonaster: pag. 931. And on the right: Obiit Anno dn¯i 1219… Anno 4to Henr 3ii. Math. Paris pag. 406. Guillim seems then to have decided on more detail, and to have crowded this area of the page. He records the disappearance of the Marshal’s male line within one generation: all his five sons died without issue.115 Memoratus Will[iel]mus utpote bellicosus et strenuus, dictus Marescallus, quasi Martis senescallus [with a reference to Matthew Paris p. 931] … De isto Will[iel]mo quidam ep[iscopu]s dixit, In generatione una delebitur nomen eius, et filii eius exortes erunt illius dominici [sic] benedictionis, Crescite et multiplicamini. Morienturque [?][...] aliqui morte lamentabili et hæreditas eorum dissipabitur. Math. Par. pag. [904] 912. Guillim 2 is a most welcome discovery: it brings back to light the monument described by Camden and Dugdale. Miles eram Martis was on a gravestone, not an effigy; and the lion rampant was on the same stone. Camden had indeed meant that the inscription was ‘on another tomb of these [Pembrokes]’. The stone’s disappearance is surprising: it was known to be a Marshall tomb, was handsomely heraldic and was more clearly prestigious than Guillim 5. Whose gravestone was it? Miles eram Martis was more appropriate to William Marshal I than to his sons; this may have encouraged Philémon Holland – and so Dingley – to narrow Camden’s more general ascription to the Pembrokes. It may be natural, but is not inevitable, to associate Guillim’s notes with the tomb nearest on the page: that is, with the gravestone (Guillim 2) rather than with the effigy (Guillim 1). But Guillim 1 was in the seventeenth century believed to show the great earl; and Guillim himself may not have felt able to distinguish confidently between the knight(s) commemorated on the gravestone and on the effigy. We may hope to look forward to a fuller account and explanation of Guillim’s whole set from Nigel Ramsay, to whom we owe its discovery, and

Park, ‘Burials and Monuments’ [n. 15 above], 82–3. J. Weever translates it neatly: ‘Whom Ireland once a Saturn found, England a Sunne to be, / Whom Normandy a Mercury and France Mars, I am he’, Ancient Funerall Monuments, London, 1631, 442. 115 For the curse of the bishop of Ferns, Park, ‘Burials and Monuments’ [n. 15 above], 82; and N. Hamonic, ‘Jerusalem in London: The New Temple Church’, at 398–9 above. 113

114

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from Philip Lankester, whose knowledge of the Temple Church effigies is unsurpassed.116 The Effigies: Colouring? Richardson recorded in 1842/3 the remains of colour on the knight that he identified as William Marshal II: More colour was found on this than on any of the other figures. Traces of a delicate flesh colour remained on the face. The embattled tower had some red left on it; the mouldings some light green. In the two longitudinal recesses on the sides of the cushion fragments of blue or violet glass remained. Traces of gilding appeared on the ring-mail throughout, excepting the rings which passed over the narrow bands at the coif and wrists, which, with the band at the coif, appeared to have been blue. The buckles, spurs, and squirrel had also been gilt. There were some traces of red on the field of the shield, but none remained on the lion. The outer surface of the surcoat had upon it considerable remains of crimson lake; the under side, of light blue. There remained on the edges of the belts some red, and some orange on the plinth near the feet.117

The arms borne by the Marshals were a red lion on a gold and green field. Lankester points out that the red found by Richardson on the field either conflicts with the Marshals’ arms or was part of a ground for gilding.118 Two sets of plaster-casts were taken of the effigies in the mid nineteenth century: casts of four effigies for Lewis Nockalls Cottingham, 1841; and casts taken by Edward Richardson in 1853 (for the Crystal Palace, 1854) of the four effigies that he had placed on the south side and of de Ros.119 This second set is in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. On the re-ordering of the Museum’s Cast Courts, the museum kindly agreed to lend to the Temple Church the casts of William Marshal I and II.120 116 The figure identified since Richardson as William Marshal I looks conspicuously old, and already did (before Richardson’s restoration) in Lethieullier’s drawing, Temple Church, Pl. 85. This has helped to endorse Richardson’s identification, Park, ‘Burials and Monuments’ [n. 15 above], 79. Gough was already alert to the apparent age at which the Pembrokes were shown. ‘In the present state of the monuments it is almost impossible to ascertain the property of more than one of the Mareschall family. If it be objected, that the figure assigned to the father may rather, on account of its youthful appearance, belong to one of the sons, I shall not contend for so controvertible an opinion’, Monuments [n. 109 above], I, 1, 51. 117 E. Richardson, The Monumental Effigies of the Temple Church, with an Account of their Restoration in the Year 1842, London, 1843, 25. Knight conferred with Richardson before writing his own account: ‘The effigy of William Pembroke the younger, was richly coloured throughout, having a surcoat of crimson, armour of gold, and a cushion or pillow enamelled with glass’, C. Knight, London, V, 1843, 20–1. 118 Lankester, ‘Effigies’ [n. 99 above], 116. 119 Lankester, ‘Effigies’, 102–3. 120 The museum’s casts of the effigies of King John and of Henry III are also (2017) in

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(For this paragraph I accept the current identification of the effigies.) In preparation for the loan, Dr Lucia Burgio investigated the paint-layers on the two Marshals’ effigies. 1. The cast of William Marshal I. Dr Burgio investigated nine samples. Only one, on the tunic’s interior between the knight’s legs, showed a neutral colour scheme. By contrast, the drapery on the right leg showed, in particular, traces of a blue layer and of multiple red-brown layers. The left ear of the creature (at the knight’s feet) contained a thick layer with significant amounts of a red pigment; the creature was probably brown at first. Most samples show that a further brown intermediate layer is present; the right leg’s drapery again showed most clearly this uniform, neutral tint that was chosen to paint the effigy when the original polychromy was covered.121 The effigy has since been painted gloss black. 2. The cast of William Marshal II. Here there is no indication of a polychrome finish. Dr Burgio reports that ‘the appearance of these layers in the cross-sections discussed in this report suggests that the overall colour of the effigy was probably dark grey or black, although it could have looked like dark stone as well’. We look forward, during the period of the loan, to further investigation of the casts’ history.

the Temple Church, as part of the exhibition that in 2015 celebrated the octocentenary of Magna Carta and that from 2016 onwards has chronicled more generally the evolution of civil rights and due process. The Temple Church has since 1608 been in the care of the two legal colleges, Inner and Middle Temple, and has a particular care for the connections between law and religion. 121 Dr Burgio warns that on the drapery a thin black varnished layer may be the original finish, later replaced by colour.

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THE ACCURACY OF GUILLIM’S DRAWINGS; AND THE LOST CROSS-SLAB GRAVE-COVER (GUILLIM 2) Philip J. Lankester The Accuracy of Guillim’s Drawings Guillim’s drawings, which still require further detailed study, are remarkably accurate for their date. It is unsurprising that Guillim, so early, shows no minor damage to the effigies, though in reality it is unlikely that none had occurred by his time. Details such as the chapes at the ends of the sword scabbards and the shapes of the cross-guards of the swords should be treated with great caution, and the large rowel spurs shown by Guillim on all but one of the effigies could never have existed, because rowels of that size were not introduced until sometime after the end of the thirteenth century when the effigies were made.122 Despite these provisos, Guillim’s drawings are in quite a different league of accuracy to drawings of monuments by some other heralds in the same period: for example, those by Robert Cooke, Clarenceux King of Arms, in 1569; by William Smith, Rouge Dragon Pursuivant, in 1597; and by John Philipot, Somerset Herald, between about 1613 and 1632.123 Guillim avoided those other heralds’ tendency to add fictitious beards and/or moustaches to the figures they drew.124 Among surviving drawings by the heralds, Guillim’s degree of accuracy is probably not found again until the drawings done in 1640 and 1641 by William Sedgwick for William Dugdale, then Rouge Croix and later Garter King of Arms. Most of these drawings are now to be found in the manuscript known as ‘Dugdale’s Book of Monuments’ or ‘Book of Draughts’.125 Like Dugdale, Guillim’s interest was not limited to monuments which included heraldry or inscriptions and it is important to note that, with the exception of RCHM no. 9 (Guillim no. 1) on which the same lion rampant arms recorded by Guillim are still visible today, he drew no heraldry on any of the other shields and confirmed this by writing on the shields ‘Vacat’ (it is empty). Guillim recorded not only the attitude of the effigies, but also many of the differences in the armour and even in the decoration of the guiges (shoulder straps supporting the shields) and sword belts, so there is no difficulty matching all the individual effigy drawings with the surviving effigies, though in some cases it is necessary to refer to the photographs taken before the 1941 bomb damage. Nevertheless, there are some 122 See B. M. A. Ellis, ‘Spurs and Spur Fittings’, in J. Clark (ed.), The Medieval Horse and its Equipment, London, 1985, 124–56, esp. 127–30. 123 For references see P. J. Lankester, ‘Two Lost Effigial Monuments in Yorkshire and the Evidence of Church Notes’, Church Monuments 8 (1993), 25–44 [39, n. 2]. 124 See O. D. Harris, ‘Beards: True and False’, Church Monuments 28 (2013), 124–32. 125 British Library MS Add. 71474. See P. Whittemore, ‘Sir William Dugdale’s “Book of Draughts”’, Church Monuments 18 (2003), 23–52.

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differences which require more extensive investigation than space here will allow. For example, Guillim has omitted the padded ring around the brow of RCHM no. 3 (Guillim 3, Fig. 22.6).126 This feature is visible in the drawings made for Smart Lethieullier in 1736/7,127 and seems unlikely to have been added after the Guillim drawings were made, so this is probably an omission by Guillim. On the same effigy, Guillim shows the waist belt as being the same width and decorated in the same manner as the guige and sword belt, whereas the 1736/7 drawing shows a much thinner, plain belt, which agrees with drawings by Thomas Kerrich (d. 1828)128 and the appearance of the waist belt after Richardson’s restoration. Also, Guillim shows the guige and belts of this effigy decorated with transverse bars alternating with cinquefoils, whereas Kerrich’s drawing shows the guige decorated alternately with transverse bars and quatrefoils and the sword belt with transverse bars alternating with diamonds, and this much more closely accords with the effigy as it was left after Richardson’s restoration. These differences are almost certainly mistakes by Guillim, though they are minor ones in a drawing of such an early date. On the other hand, Guillim’s drawing of RCHM no. 8 (Guillim 10, Fig. 22.10) faithfully reproduces the decoration of the guige as it was left after Richardson’s restoration, with alternating transverse bars and shields, whereas Kerrich’s drawing appears to show diamonds in place of the shields.129 In this case the evidence of Guillim is (rather unexpectedly) to be preferred over that of the usually highly accurate Kerrich. Furthermore, without knowledge of the Guillim drawing there was some reason to doubt the authenticity of the lobated sword pommel on the same effigy, as it was left by Richardson,130 but Guillim’s drawing confirms that it was of lobated form, even if his rendering of it differs slightly from how Richardson left it. The lost Cross-Slab Grave-Cover: Guillim 2 The date of the now lost cross-slab grave-cover (Guillim 2; Fig. 22.5) is hard to determine because the design is highly unusual and parallels are hard to find.131 Any analysis of the slab’s design has to assume that Guillim’s drawing is an accurate record. We cannot be sure of this, but the apparent accuracy of his drawings of the effigies, which is remarkable

For further discussion see Lankester, ‘Effigies’ [n. 99 above], 121. R. Sweet, ‘“A neat structure with pillars”: Changing Perceptions of the Temple Church in the Long Eighteenth Century’, in Temple Church, Pl. 86. 128 Lankester, ‘Effigies’, Pl. 60A. 129 Lankester, ‘Effigies’, Pl. 62A. 130 Lankester, ‘Effigies’, 108–9. 131 The author of this section has benefited from generous help contributed by Sally Badham, Brian and Moira Gittos, and Fr Jerome Bertram, though the author takes full responsibility for the views expressed. 126 127

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at such an early date, argues strongly in favour of the drawing of the lost slab being similarly faithful to the original. Much of value has been published on cross-slabs and other grave markers in the last fifty years, beginning with pioneering work by the late Lawrence Butler, concentrating on the East Midlands, and continued by Peter Ryder, Brian and Moira Gittos and Aleksandra McClain in regional studies of several northern counties.132 The Gittoses have also collected extensive information on Purbeck marble cross-slabs throughout the country, but the analysis of the results has not yet been fully published.133 Cross-slabs of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are difficult to date, because inscriptions are rare and few of the surviving examples enable identification of the person commemorated.134 Dating largely depends on certain features of the design and their relevant date ranges, which can only be approximately and often uncertainly defined and can vary across different regions and centres of production. As will be seen, the analysis of the lost Temple Church cross-slab is particularly problematic because the date ranges for certain of its features do not correspond. The following features of the slab invite consideration: (1) its tapered shape (viewed in plan); (2) the single chamfer around the edges, especially if it was hollow, as possibly implied by the pencil shading; (3) the letter form of the partial inscription on the chamfered edge; (4) the shield supported on (and apparently springing out of) the cross shaft; (5) the cross-head apparently not being joined to the shaft; (6) the form of the cross-head with fleurs de lys sprouting from the ends of the cross arms; (7) the small cross in the centre of the cross-head; and (8) the stepped ‘Calvary’ base of the shaft. Tapered grave covers and slabs are unlikely to date much beyond the mid fourteenth century, but a date of before about 1325 is more probable.135 The pencil shading in the single chamfer round the edges of the slab could 132 L. A. S. Butler, ‘Minor Medieval Monumental Sculpture in the East Midlands’, Archaeological Journal 121 (1964), 111–53 (some of Butler’s suggested date ranges have since been revised); P. Ryder, The Medieval Cross Slab Grave Covers in Cumbria, Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, extra series, 32 (2005) – references to the same author’s surveys of Durham and Northumberland are listed in the bibliography; P. Ryder, Medieval Cross Slab Grave Covers in West Yorkshire, Wakefield, 1991; P. F. Ryder, Medieval Cross Slabs of Derbyshire, n.p. [2017]; B. and M. Gittos, ‘A Survey of East Riding Sepulchral Monuments before 1500’, in C. Wilson (ed.), Medieval Art and Architecture in the East Riding of Yorkshire, British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions 9, for 1983 (1989), 91–108; A. McClain, ‘Cross Slab Monuments in the Late Middle Ages: Patronage, Production, and Locality in Northern England,’ in S. Badham and S. Oosterwijk (eds), Monumental Industry: The Production of Tomb Monuments in England and Wales in the Long Fourteenth Century, Donington, 2010, 37–65.  133 S. Badham, B. and M. Gittos, and P. Lankester, ‘Survey of Purbeck Marble CoffinShaped Slabs’, Church Monuments Society Newsletter, 16 parts, 10.1 (1994) – 19.2 (2003/4). 134 For some of the earlier Purbeck marble grave covers with inscriptions that assist with dating, see S. Badham and M. Norris, Early Incised Slabs and Brasses from the London Marblers, London, 1999, 24–5. 135 For tapered slabs dating to the 1330s see J. Coales (ed.), The Earliest English Brasses:

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FIG. 22.12.  (CLOCKWISE, FROM TOP LEFT) A.  A CROSS-SLAB PUBLISHED IN 1751 AS ‘LATELY DUG UP’ AT BOLNEY, NEAR HENLEY-ON-THAMES, OXFORDSHIRE, LATE THIRTEENTH TO EARLY FOURTEENTH CENTURY; NOW LOST. B.  BRASS AT CASSINGTON, OXFORDSHIRE, c. 1415 C.  A PURBECK MARBLE CROSS-SLAB AT EAST DEAN, EAST SUSSEX, LATE THIRTEENTH TO EARLY FOURTEENTH CENTURY D.  BISHOPSTONE, WILTSHIRE, CROSS-SLAB, MID-FOURTEENTH CENTURY

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indicate that it was a hollow (concave) chamfer, which might argue for an early date, especially if the slab was in Purbeck marble. Similar pencil shading occurs on the chamfered edges of two more grave covers drawn by Guillim [f. 41, Fig. 22.7]. One of these survives and the chamfer is slightly concave.136 However, the ink shading on the shield and on the steps of the ‘Calvary’ base of the slab being considered here is unlikely to indicate either concave or convex surfaces, so the chamfer on the edges just might have been plain. Like the shading on the chamfered edge, the partial inscription, ‘MILES ERAM MARTIS’, is in pencil. Whether it is contemporary with Guillim’s drawing or added later is not known, though Robin Griffith-Jones makes a good case for it being by Guillim.137 It is the first half of the inscription recorded by Camden in the third edition of his Britannia, published in 1594.138 If it was accurately drawn from the actual slab, the letter forms may assist with the date. As drawn, the impression is of an inscription in which some of the letters were of the type of majuscule commonly called Lombardic, but others are of Roman form. Although the first and third letters ‘M’ are of Lombardic form, other letters are less certainly so, and the ‘A’ is definitely of Roman form. If correctly recorded, the mixture of letter forms could indicate a date up to the very early fourteenth century, though a date before 1300 is more likely.139 Similar in overall design is a tapered Purbeck marble slab at East Dean, Sussex [Fig. 22.12c].140 The central shield above the shaft is similar to the Temple Church slab, but unfortunately damage obscures the junction of the shaft with the base of the shield and also the form of the ends of the cross arms, though they might have been of the heraldic bottony form. Damage also makes it impossible to know if the cross-head was joined to the shaft or separate from it, as on the drawing of the Temple Church slab. The East Dean slab seems most likely to date to the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, but the person commemorated has not been identified. The arms on the shield appear be semy of crosses [the variety of cross is uncertain, possibly pommy] three cinquefoils [?] impaling a Patronage, Style and Workshops 1270–1350, London, 1987, 127, fig. 134; 158, fig. 187; 159, fig. 189. 136 Park, ‘Burials and Monuments’ [n. 15 above], 74–5 and Pl. 44. 137 Griffith-Jones, 467 above. 138 Griffith-Jones, 458 above. 139 Pers. comm. Sally Badham. See also S. Badham, ‘The Contribution of Epigraphy to the Typological Classification of Medieval English Brasses and Incised Slabs’, in J. Higgitt, K. Forsyth and D. N. Parsons (eds), Roman, Runes and Ogham: Medieval Inscriptions in the Insular World and on the Continent, Donington, 2001, 202–10, at 205, where it is stated that the combination of Lombardic and Roman letter-forms is rarely found in inscriptions formed of individual inlaid brass letters, being limited to lesser workshops, particularly those based in the provinces. 140 I am grateful to Jerome Bertram for drawing this example to my attention and for kindly allowing the reproduction of his photograph. See also K. E. Styan, A Short History of Sepulchral Cross-Slabs, London, 1902, 42–3 and Pl. LIX.

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lion rampant, possibly within a border. Single lion rampant arms were so common at this time that it is unwise to place much weight on identifications in the absence of tinctures or other supporting evidence. If the main charges in the dexter half are cinquefoils, the arms cannot presently certainly be identified with any of the few families known or likely to have held the manor in the Middle Ages.141 Another similar slab, though not in Purbeck marble and not tapered, is at Bishopstone, Wiltshire [Fig. 22.12d]. It sits beneath a mid-fourteenthcentury arch below a window with reticulated tracery and is probably in situ.142 Here the shield, with a base of conventional shape, interrupts the cross-shaft and is joined to it above and below. The arms – per pall reversed, in chief the letters I and A and in base a mullet of eight points pierced – which may not have been truly heraldic, have not yet been identified.143 Possibly the most closely similar slab to the drawing of the lost Temple Church slab so far identified is also now lost, but a drawing [Fig. 22.12a] and a note of its discovery were published in the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1751.144 The slab, which is shown as tapered, had been ‘lately dug up’ on the site of the chapel of the lost medieval village of Bolney, near Henley on Thames, Oxfordshire, and, when found, it formed the lid of a stone coffin containing an ‘almost entire’ skeleton ‘of small size’. After recording, it was reburied. The inscription was reported to be ‘plain and legible, except in those places, which are dotted [in the drawing], and which were defaced by the workman’s pick-axe’. Despite the assertion of legibility, very little of the inscription as represented makes sense and Jerome Bertram was only able certainly to identify the French words ‘NOSTRE DAME’ and ‘LA MERE’, from which he suggested that it commemorated a lady of the manor and mother of the then lord.145 The shaft rises from an animal (probably a dragon) and, like the Temple Church slab, it widens into a shield, in this case with fretty arms, supported from above by two human arms. The 141 Bardolf is a possibility (see T. Woodcock and S. Flower, Dictionary of British Arms: Medieval Ordinary, IV, London, 2004, 79–80), but further research is required. Nigel Ramsay has commented (pers. comm.) that this early example of impaled (or possibly dimidiated) arms on a monument may indicate that the slab commemorates a woman. 142 Pers. comm. Brian and Moira Gittos, to whom I owe my knowledge of this slab. 143 Woodcock and Flower, Dictionary of British Arms [n. 138 above], 199. By the early thirteenth century the land that now forms the parish of Bishopstone was divided between several manors, probably all originally forming part of the bishop of Winchester’s estate. Bishopstone manor passed with the bishopric of Winchester until 1551; see ‘Bishopstone’, in A. P. Baggs, J. Freeman and J. H. Stevenson, A History of the County of Wiltshire: XII, Ramsbury and Selkley Hundreds; The Borough of Marlborough, ed. D. A. Crowley, London, 1983, 3–12, available at British History Online: http://www.britishhistory.ac.uk/vch/wilts/vol12 [accessed 2 June 2017]. 144 Gentleman’s Magazine 21 (1751), Supplement, 602–3. The note is unsigned and may therefore be by the editor, Mr Urban [John Nichols]. I am grateful to Sally Badham for drawing this slab to my attention. 145 J. Bertram, Minor Mediaeval Monuments in Oxfordshire: Cross-Slabs, Grave Markers and Churchyard Tombs, Oxford, 2014, ix–x, including a suggested complete transcription of the inscription from the published drawing.

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cross bottony above the shield has what appear to be four sunbursts in the angles.146 As on the Temple Church slab, no cross-shaft is shown between the cross and the top of the shield below. We have no evidence on which to assess the accuracy of the drawing of the Bolney slab, but its resemblance in several respects to the Temple Church slab, including what was almost certainly a single chamfered border, is worthy of note. Jerome Bertram suggested the Bolney slab dated to the late thirteenth century,147 but it might perhaps be a little later, say into the early fourteenth century. The ogee shape to the bottom of the shield (if accurately drawn) would favour a date into the fourteenth century, but the dragon at the foot of the cross would favour a thirteenth-century date. Although garbled, the inscription lettering is clearly in Lombardic script, which appeared in England in the third quarter of the thirteenth century and was predominant until the middle of the fourteenth century.148Although inscriptions entirely in Lombardic script are occasionally found later, on memorial slabs, at least in England, they are unlikely to be much after about 1360.149 The cross-arms of the lost Temple Church slab terminate in fleurs de lys which sprout from the straight ends, corresponding to the form in heraldry described as floretty. This feature is seen on incised slabs in Rufford, Notts (a tapered slab), apparently recording a date of death of 1329, and at Exton, Rutland (a rectangular slab), of about 1380.150 Similar crosses are found on three brasses, all early fifteenth century and which all have noticeably longer cross-arms than the Temple Church slab. These are at Reading (St Mary), Berkshire (date of death 1416),151 Cassington, Oxfordshire (c. 1415) [Fig. 22.12b]152 and Beddington, Surrey (date of death 1425).153 Within the cross-head is another, smaller cross with balls on the ends of the arms (resembling the heraldic cross pommy). The solid black shading suggests that this cross may have been deeply incised. No close parallel 146 Brian and Moira Gittos (pers. comm.) suggest the sunbursts, with their crescentshaped bases, may have been ‘bracelets’ in the angles of the cross which were misunderstood by the artist. 147 Bertram, Minor Mediaeval Monuments, x. 148 J. Bertram, ‘Medieval Inscriptions in Oxfordshire’, Oxoniensia 68 (2003), 27–53, at 29. 149 With the exception of Lombardic majuscule letters in otherwise textura lettering, which continues until the late fourteenth century (pers. comm. Sally Badham). 150 Butler, ‘Minor Medieval Monumental Sculpture’ [n. 132 above], 148, resp. figs 11B and 11A. Butler’s drawing shows the inscriptions on both slabs in upper and lower case italic, by which he almost certainly intended to indicate textura, for the lower case letters at least. 1328 would be quite early, but not impossibly early, for textura lettering (see P. J. Lankester, ‘A Note on the Semi-Effigial Monument at Staunton-in-the-Vale (Nottinghamshire)’, Church Monuments 26 (2011), 17–22, 24–6, at 18) but, taken as a whole, the design of the slab looks unlikely before about 1350 at the earliest. 151 W. Lack, M. Stuchfield and P. Whittemore, The Monumental Brasses of Berkshire, London, 1993, 112–13. 152 (Rev.) Charles Boutell, Christian Monuments in England and Wales, London, 1854, 41, 103. 153 M. Stephenson, A List of Monumental Brasses in Surrey, Bath, 1970 (first published in book form 1921), 26–7; Boutell, Christian Monuments, 40–1.

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has been found for this feature, though small straight-armed crosses or fleurons are sometimes seen in this position when the arms of the main cross are joined by quarter circles, or linked or formed by complete or broken circles (the so-called bracelet head).154 The last feature to be considered is the ‘Calvary’ base formed of four distinct steps. Bases of differing numbers of steps (usually two or three) are found on slabs from at least the late twelfth century,155 but the steps are normally only shown in profile, i.e. horizontal lines representing the top of each step are not shown as extending across to the opposite step, as in Guillim’s drawing. Distinct steps in this manner are unlikely before the fourteenth century. The brass at Cassington, Oxfordshire, and the incised slab at Exton, Rutland (already mentioned), have bases of this type, respectively, of four and five steps. The lines representing the top of each step extend for its full width and at Exton the individual masonry blocks are also indicated. In conclusion, the lost Temple Church cross-slab exhibits features that suggest different dates in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. However, if the cross-head and stepped base are accurately represented, a date much before about 1350 seems unlikely. One possibility is that the slab represents work of more than one period. It might originally have been quite plain and have received some or all of its decoration later. This might have been done to embellish the monument of the person originally commemorated or because the slab has been reused, a practice which occurred surprisingly frequently in the Middle Ages and beyond.

154 For example, on three slabs at Dewsbury, West Yorkshire: Ryder, Medieval Cross Slab Grave Covers [n. 132 above], 20–1. 155 For examples, Ryder, Medieval Cross Slab Grave Covers, 20–1, 55.

EPILOGUE ROBIN GRIFFITH-JONES

Paula fell down and worshipped before the cross as if she could see the Lord hanging on it. On entering the tomb of the resurrection she kissed the stone which the angel removed from the Sepulchre door; and then like a thirsty man who has waited long, and at last come to water, she faithfully kissed the very shelf on which the Lord’s body had lain. Her tears and lamentations are known to all Jerusalem – or rather to the Lord himself to whom she was praying. – Jerome, Letter 108.9.2–31

In this book we have viewed, first and foremost, the Christian monuments themselves, with secondary reference to those who imagined them from afar, who travelled dangerously to them, who worshipped or served in them. It is time, in closing, to repopulate Jerusalem with its pilgrims. We recall the Ethiopian community perhaps already established in the sixth century; St Davit Garejeli for whom the city was too holy to enter; and the Western pilgrims from Jerome’s Paula to Felix Fabri who spent a day gathering pebbles and thorn-twigs between Mount Zion and the Mount of Olives. Thanks to Robert Hillenbrand’s chapter, we can envision too the sensory experience, in Muslim devotion, of the Dome of the Rock. Jerome’s account of Paula (who travelled with him in 386 CE) is an 1 Jerome, Ep. 108.9.2, trans. Wilkinson, Pilgrims, 83. Jerome himself shared the sense of such immediacy, Ep. 46.5: ‘Whenever we enter [the tomb] we see the saviour lying in the shroud. And lingering a little we see again the angel sitting at his feet and the handkerchief wound up at his head.’ The scene was changing, as Jerome reimagined the story’s progression.

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obituary, and focuses more than most pilgrim accounts and guide-books on emotions.2 There was a continuity across space and time that might be alien to our more atomised and disenchanted age. Great visitors of the past could inform the experience of their successors, and inspire those who never got to Jerusalem themselves. Rituals and experiences were taken home from Jerusalem, nurtured as local traditions and then brought back to Jerusalem in hope and expectation by later generations. Memory of Jerusalem was a memory of the past, the present and the promised future, all defined and animated at home by local liturgies and processions, churches’ design and decoration, relics and guide-books. Jerome’s account of Paula had an abiding influence. Amalarius (775– 850) compared his own Good Friday veneration to the reaction of Paula when, with Jerome, she saw the cross. She was ‘“prostrate before the cross as if she saw the Lord hanging there”; I, lying before the cross, have Christ’s suffering for me written on my heart [2 Cor. 3.3].’3 The memory of Paula in Jerusalem brings Amalarius closer to Jerusalem, his cross to the cross she saw on Calvary. But his distance from Jerusalem gives him an unexpected advantage: even more important to him than the imagination and images of spiritual sight is the effect of understanding – of an intellectual sight – upon his will. Again: Goscelin compared St Edith (961–84), her mother St Wulfthryth and Benna of Trier, formerly Edith’s tutor, to Paula, Paula’s daughter Eustochium and Jerome.4 Goscelin describes Benna painting a cycle of wall-paintings in Edith’s church at Wilton, reminders of the passion (monumenta passionis) ‘as Edith had pictured them in her heart’. At first sight Edith is the patron as Paula had been, Benna the teacher as Jerome had been; but in the paintings Benna, according to Goscelin, was like a bee feeding on the thoughts of the virginal, flower-bearing Edith. We have assumed in those who were in Jerusalem an intensity of focus and of gaze, whether our imagined pilgrims were at any one moment alone or among their fellow-travellers, at a service, in a procession or in 2 In Bethlehem, Paula ‘solemnly declared in my own hearing that with the eye of faith she saw a child wrapped in swaddling clothes, weeping in the Lord’s manger, the Magi worshipping, the star shining above, the virgin mother, the attentive foster-father, the shepherds coming by night to see this word which had come to pass, already, even then, able to speak the words which open John’s gospel, In the beginning was the Word and The Word was made flesh,’ Jerome, Ep. 108.10.2, trans. Wilkinson, Pilgrims, 84. 3 Amalarius, Liber Officialis, 1.14.7–8 (Hanssens II, 101). Cf. 13 above. 4 Goscelin, De Sancta Editha 1.7.20, ed. A. Wilmart, ‘La légende de Ste Édith en prose et vers par le moine Goscelin’, Analecta Bollandiana 56 (1938), 5–101, 265–307 [73, 86–7], trans. and ed. S. Hollis, Writing the Wilton Women: Goscelin’s Legend of Edith and Liber Confortatorius, Turnhout, 2004, 53. Described in the fifteenth century: ‘the passion of God was welle peynted there / And the sepulchre of gode was peyntede there also, and the ymage of seynt Denys wt other yfere, / wt golde and asere and mony other coloures mo’, C. Horstmann, S. Editha sive Chronicon Vilodunense im Wiltshire Dialekt, Heilbronn, 1883, 40, lines 1182–5; Wilmart, 87 n. 2. Goscelin also compares Wulfthryth to Constantine’s mother Helena. Edith made an alb on which, at the base, she embroidered Jesus, seated with his disciples around him, and herself in the person of Mary Magdalen kissing his footprints (Hollis, 48). The present was porous to all parts of the sacred past.

EPILOGUE

the Sepulchre’s pressing crowds. But visitors could be rumbustious too. Among the guide-books to the crusaders’ city, John of Würzburg’s (c. 1170) is thorough, perceptive, sceptical and crabby. He sets out his aim in a prefatory letter to his ‘dear colleague and member of [his] household’, Dietrich, to whom he sends ‘greeting and a vision of the heavenly Jerusalem, for you have a share in it’. John designs the book to be of practical help to Dietrich if the latter does ever come to Jerusalem and its monuments himself; ‘but if you happen not to go there and you are not going physically to see them, you will still have a greater love of them and their holiness by reading this book and thinking about it.’5 John was (with good reason) confused by the stories, all linked with Mary Magdalen, of a woman anointing the feet or head of Jesus on up to three occasions; ‘if anyone wishes to know more about these things, let him come himself, and ask the most intelligent subjects of this land the sequence and truth of this history. As for me, I have not found quite enough in any of the scriptures.’ He doubts Jesus would have clung to a rock – and thereby gouged out five holes in the stone – to avoid arrest. He discredits the story that a skull depicted at the foot of the cross, in Jerusalem or anywhere, represents the baptism in Christ’s blood of the Adam who was buried not there but in Hebron. He is uncertain whether to believe the story of the Virgin’s assumption. He is very impressed by the Hospitallers and their care for two thousand people a day, and far less by the Templars who, for all their wealth, do (he says) less than a tenth for the poor and are suspected of perjury. He breaks into his account to lambast the French for claiming all the credit for the city’s capture and for an inscription praising the Franks. He inserts a rival set of verses in praise of the German troops, also from Franconia but not from France; and explains that, had the German forces not gone home, the Christian Holy Land would have stretched north beyond Damascus and south beyond the Nile.6 John warns us against any absorption of individuals, their histories, loyalties and traits into an undifferentiated ‘pilgrim’. We leave Jerusalem with a final sight of pilgrims at the Holy Sepulchre, in the drama played out by a single group who had brought to Jerusalem the memories and fervour of their Easter liturgies at home and who recreated for themselves and each other the characters, excitement and 5 John of Würzburg, 109, trans. Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrimage, 244; and in the rest of this paragraph, 131–4 (252–3), 138 (256), 143–4 (259), 159 (266), 130 (251), 154–6 (264–5), 169 (271). 6 We may well want to enrich our study with theories of ritual, community, belonging and identity. Here we bear Jan Elsner’s warning in mind: that readings of pilgrimage by widely divergent schools of social anthropology have converged on depictions of communal cohesion and reinforcement that are belied by the evidence; J. Elsner, ‘Piety and Passion: Contest and Consensus in the Audiences for Early Christian Pilgrimage’, in J. Elsner and I. Rutherford (eds), Pilgrimage in Graeco-Roman and Early Christian Antiquity: Seeing the Gods, Oxford, 2005, 411–34.

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intensity of an Easter play.7 Riccoldo da Monte di Croce (c.  1243–1320, a Tuscan Dominican) was in the Holy Land in 1288. Riccoldo was inspired by Christ’s pilgrimage to earth to undertake a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, so that he might bodily see those places which Christ had bodily visited, and in particular the place where Christ had died so that Riccoldo might live (Preface, 3). He tells the story of his pilgrimage sparely: he lists the succession of places, the story attached to each and the distances between them; and he records the reading of the relevant gospel-pericope and subsequent prayers. Just occasionally his story comes to life. In the Upper Room he and his companions gathered, groaning and weeping in supposed fear of death from the Saracens (4.13). At the Jordan at Epiphany he found ten thousand people gathered for baptism, took part in baptisms himself and imagined, when the crowd cried out Kyrie eleison, that the angels themselves had descended to join the supplication (4.32–7). In Bethlehem, immediately after Mass, ‘we found in the crib a most beautiful infant, the son of a poor Christian woman who lived next to the church. We took great joy in this, and adored the Christ child, and like the Magi we gave gifts to the little boy and gave him back to his mother’ (5.5–6). (The mother had surely discovered a lucrative and recurrent trade.) He and his companions sat weeping and trembling in the Valley of Jehosaphat, ‘waiting for the judgment’, and in a ritual with stones marked and accepted a place on the right hand of God (5.28–30). He and his companions would later, on the road to Emmaus, speak together about Christ (as the two disciples had, Luke 24.14–15) ‘so that he himself might approach and go with us’ – ut ipse approprinquans iret nobiscum (Riccoldo 6.21) – as on Easter Day at dusk, ipse Jesus appropinquans ibat cum illis (Luke 24.15). In the Sepulchre, Riccoldo saw first the mosaic of Christ crucified, the Virgin and John. He was overtaken with such compassion for Virgin and Jesus alike that he could have died from grief and joy at the contemplation of such love. We might wonder at the imagination that fired the next part of his account; having seen the mosaic, what next was he hoping or expecting to see? Into his spare narrative, Riccoldo has inserted a tour de force of imagined presence at the tomb on the first Easter day. Looking round eagerly, in case I could see my Lord with my bodily eyes, I saw the place of the crucifixion and the broken stone and part of the column at which the Lord was scourged and the place where they laid the body. … From there we wanted to go to the Sepulchre to seek our Lord whom we had not found at Calvary, for they had already taken him down, 7 Robert Ousterhout has brought to prominence this story and its dependence on Easter plays familiar in the West, R. Ousterhout, ‘“Sweetly refreshed in Imagination”: Remembering Jerusalem in Words and Images,’ Gesta 48 (2009), 153–68 [160]. Text: Riccoldo di Monte Croce, Peregrination en Sainte Terre et au Proche Orient, ed. and trans. R. Kappler, Paris, 1997, 68. Riccoldo mentions the place of Paula’s death (5.13).

EPILOGUE

and I, unhappy man, coming too late, said, ‘Let’s go and look for him at the grave where they have put him [ubi posuerunt eum]!’8

So Mary Magdalen asked the ‘gardener’, Dicito mihi ubi posuisti eum (John 20.15). For us, Riccoldo was too late by 1,400 years; for himself, by a matter of minutes or days. He next encouraged the other pilgrims in the Sepulchre to join him in a fusion of ancient and modern drama; he was recreating a form of the Easter plays that had travelled from the Sepulchre’s own liturgy, pervaded Western Europe and was now, in the devotional habits of these pilgrims, returning to its source.9 And gathering together the Christians, who then numbered there more than a hundred, I organised a procession, and we started out from the column which they say is the centre of the world [under the church’s eastern dome]. And we went up the way the Marys had gone with the spices, and we were going forward and asking each other, ‘Who will roll back the rock for us?’ [Mark 16.3]. Then as we approached we sang out repeated verses of Victimae paschali laudes, etc., one of us intoning a verse at every step, and the others responding. And encircling the Sepulchre, going round and round,10 we eagerly sought for the Lord but did not find him, when one of us cried out, ‘Surrexit Christus! My hope, he goes before his followers into Galilee!’ [Mark 16.6] – and with such a loud voice that the sound of it and the shouting could be heard outside the whole temple by the Saracens. Going into the tomb we found there a great stone at the entry to the tomb, but it was already rolled back to the entry’s side. And we went out, since we did not find the Lord, and they showed us the garden and the place where he had first appeared to Mary Magdalen.11

We may find such sensibility hard to recreate, even in a sympathetic historical imagination. In the Western academy – and even in most Western devotion – time is more relentlessly linear now, space more tightly topographical, human history less porous to the divine. Historians rarely seek to re-present their subjects to their readers, and can look only from a distance on any such subjects who sought, in their own place and time, Riccoldo 6.8–11. K. Young, ‘Home of the Easter Play’, Speculum 1 (1926), 71–86. It is commonly argued that the plays in the Sepulchre itself had been banned, c. 1160. MS Vat. Cod. Barberini lat. 65 does not, however, make clear that the whole play was stopped. Quod dum cantatur, sint parati tres Clerici iuvenes in modum mulierum retro altare, iuxta consuetudinem antiquorum. Quod non facimus modo propter adstsantium peregrinorum multitudinem. Interim finite scilicet responsorio, procedunt … [and from then on into future indicative]. 10 For processions round the Sepulchre and aedicule, see S. Salvadó, ‘Commemorating the Rotunda in the Round: The Medieval Latin Liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre and its Performance in the West’, 413–28 above. 11 Riccoldo 6.11–15. 8

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to re-present some still more distant sanctity. In the body of this book we have analysed some of the loveliest monuments that engineered such presence. In this envoi we make way for the traffic of pilgrims and their rituals, feelings, devotions and designs which took that presence across three continents and could then, after hundreds of years, take it back – however self-consciously – to its home in the Sepulchre. We too have our forebears. We are, after 850 years, the heirs of John of Würzburg (without, we hope, his chagrin): we hope that this book will be of practical help to any readers who visit for themselves the monuments we have described; and that all our readers will, thanks to this book, come to a greater love of these buildings to which we have gladly invited them, as John of Würzburg invited his readers, to make their own imaginative journey. We do not claim too clear or complete a continuity, in any consequent encounter. Much in the West has changed; but the buildings survive, and perhaps with them – even in a time of dry disenchantment – some recoverable sense of the awe they were built to inspire and of the ages they were built to inform. A world ends when its metaphor has died. An age becomes an age, all else beside, When sensuous poets in their pride invent Emblems for the soul’s consent That speak the meanings men will never know But man-imagined images can show: It perishes when those images, though seen, No longer mean. Archibald MacLeish, Hypocrite Auteur, 2

INDEX Colour plate numbers are in boldface type, pages with figures in italics Aachen, Palace Chapel XXXIV, 306–19 Abba Garima Gospels 258–60, 259 Acre 415, 431 Adomnán XXXII, 301–6, 349–51 aedicules 426–27, 446; see also Jerusalem, Holy Sepulchre Aelia Capitolina: 53–60; see also Jerusalem Aghtamar 218 Aksum 257, 258, 260–62 alms: see charters al-Muqaddasi 144, 145 al-Ramli 128–131 Amalarius of Metz 13, 482 Ambrogio Lorenzetti 174 Ambrose 151, 454. ampullae 19, 31, 32 Anastasis: see Jerusalem, Holy Sepulchre Anglo-Saxon: see England Anicia Juliana 154, 189, 190 Anselm 432 Antioch 437 Aragon 446 arch, pointed 99 Arculf XXXII, 301–6, 350, 351 ark 320–27 Armenia 217–18 Aslackby 360, 369, 372, 379 Augustine 1, 4, 323 Augustinian order 415–18, 448

Baptisteries and the Holy Sepulchre 330–31 Barthélemy d’Eyck 112–117 Bebenhausen, Cistercian monastery, 19, 33, 34 Bede 166, 298, 302, 322, 323, 350–51 Bernard of Clairvaux 26, 433–34, 441–43 Bethany 443; tomb 53, 54 Bethlehem 27, 442; Church of the Nativity 380 Bezalel 7, 10 baptism 20, 21 Bishopstone, cross-slab 474, 476 Bolney, cross slab 474, 476–77 Bolnisi, Sioni Church 226, 227 Bologna: Santo Sepolcro: 35; Santo Stefano 148, 332, 333 Botticelli 167–168 brasses: 479 Brescia, cathedral 334 Bristol, Holy Cross 363–65, 365, 372, 379 burial: see tomb Byzantine architecture 81, 95, 98, 99, 103, 104, 146–158, 206, 207, 224, 248 Cambrai, Holy Sepulchre 19, 35–37 Cambridge, Holy Sepulchre 348, 358, 372, 376, 415

486 INDEX Canterbury 367; archbishops 388–90, 395 Capharnaum, synagogue 160 Cassington, brass 474 Caucasus 3; see also Armenia and Georgia chapter house 453 Charlemagne 306–19, 311 Charles the Bald, sacramentary of XXXVIIa, 321 charters, indulgences and alms 387–412, 416 Chichester, round church 353, 358–59, 369, 372 Christ: measures of 33–35; tomb 10, 12 chronology of ancient nations IX Chrysologus 455 Cistercians 377, 450 Clonmacnoise 303, 304, 305 Coins 73, 311 Compiègne, Ste-Marie 20, 44–45 Constantine iv, 52, 53–75, 76, 80–93, 188–90 Constantinople, city 19, 29, 69, 194–210 Balabanağa Mescidi 208, 209 Chalkoprateia 195, 197, 198, 204–5, 209–10 Chapel of St James 200 Chora (Kariye Camii) 156 H. Karpos and Papylos 207, 208 H. Polyeuktos 154, 189–91, 193 H. Sergios and Bacchos XXXVa, 318 Hagia Sophia XVIII, 84, 153–58, 187, 190–93 Pantokrator monastery 206 Pharos, Chapel of the Virgin 207; reliquary box XVI, XVII, 19; stone relic 29–31 St James’s Chapel 197, 199, 200, 203–4 Corvey, Westwerk 4 crusades 377, 413, 429–56 first 354–55, 434, 448 second 377, 430 Pisan 40–52 Crucifixion, cross 53, 66–75

Dabra Warq, church XXXc Daniel the Abbot 1 Dayr Abu Sayfayn/Seifein, church XXXd, XXXIc dedications 5 Denkendorf 89 Dijon, St-Bénigne 20, 45 Dongola, cruciform church 288–92, 289, 291 Dover, Bradden Chapel, 340–41, 365–68, 366, 372, 379 Duccio 173 Dunwich, round church 379 East Dean, cross-slab 474, 475–76 Echmiadzin: cathedral 217 St Hripsime 219–22, 222, 223, 224, 225 topography XIX Edessa 388 Edward II 364 Egerton Hours XI, 112–126 Eichstätt, Capuchin church 427 England: bishops 388–91 churches, round 352–75, 353; Anglo-Saxon 355, 432–33; post–1100 352–75, 353, 376–86 Eusebius 9, 10, 55, 56, 60, 64, 66–75, 149, 188, 194, 196, 206 Ethiopia 255–66, 267–93; round churches 267–93 Fouquet 159 Fra Angelico 168 Franks 354; kings 447, 449 Frederick II 376 Fulda, St Michael 20, 45–47, 331 Fulk of Anjou 96 Garway, St Michael’s 358, 364, 373 Georgia 211–17, 229–31 church plans 221 crosses 212 steles 230–31 Germigny-des-Prés, Theodulf ’s Chapel XXXVI, 298, 320–28, 327

INDEX

Giotto 171 Godfrey de Bouillon 96 Godric of Finchale 297–98 Gregory of Tours 190 Gregory of Nyssa 193 Gregory the Great 11–12 Gregory the Illuminator 217, 224 Grigory Shimayev, iconostasis 249–51, 250, 251 Guillim, John 457–70, 460–5

Jerome 56, 57, 481 Jerusalem, city 21–25, 429–56; and: as a rotunda 440 Constantinople 194–210, 211–32 Ethiopia 255–66, 276–86 Georgia and Armenia 211–32 Russia 233–54 western rule 1229–44 352 Aqsa Mosque 39, 99, 447–49, 451 Calvary 421, 442 Dome of the Chain (St James’s Hadrian 54–59 Chapel) 195, 201–3, 202, 210 Harley Gospels 314 Dome of the Rock V, VI, VIII, XI, Hattin, battle of 430 39, 99, 125–145, 194–95, Henry I 355, 373, 377 331 n.11, 355, 436, 438, 447, Henry II 383–84, 393 449, 451, 456 Henry III 383, 393–95, 444–45 Golden Gate 99, 448–49 Heraclius: see patriarchs Golgotha 9, 51, 55, 59 Hereford, St Giles 341, 369 373 Holy Land, maps XXXIIIc, 435–443 Hadrian’s Capitolium 58–9, 379 Haram al-Sharif 99, 136 Holy Sepulchres, plans 332 Holy Sepulchre: Homilies of James Kokkinobaphos the building: IVa, XI, 17–47, XX, XXI, 195, 205–6 51–119, 85–88, 112, 438 Honorius Augustodunensis 13 aedicule XXV, iv, 303, 418–19, Hortus Deliciarum XXXIXb, 452 421–27, 431; see also Hospitallers: 39, 40, 91, 339–51, 391, aedicules 396, 447, 456, 483 Arculf/Adomnan plan XXXII, Cartulary 381 141, 350 England 352–75, 376–86 chapels: Calvary 417, 420–21, liturgy 414–16, 425, 427 424 Hrabanus Maurus XXXVIIc, 12, 46, Holy Trinity 82 331 St Helena 83 St John 444–45 Ibn al-Jauzic 124, 129–135, 141–143 St Nicholas 445 Ignatios of Antioch 153 Virgin 445 indulgences: see charters copies of 195, 207–8, 329–38, Iona 303 435; England 339–51, Ireland, bishops 391–92, 397–400 352–75 Istanbul: see Constantinople Holy Fire IVb, 83 421–23, 428 Istra: models XXVI, 61–62, 310–312 Cathedral of the Resurrection, model XXVI, 246–49, 247, rib vaults 92 south transept II, III, 100–108, 248 100, 102, 115, 119; see also New Jerusalem monastery 249 Santiago Ivan the Terrible 241–42 stages: Jamal al-Din al-Maqdisi 123, 128, 142, before the rotunda 64 4th century 65 144

487

488 INDEX Jerusalem (continued) 11th century 78, 79, 350, 351 early 12th century 76–94, 77, 80 12th century 84–93, 85, 86, 87, 88 wall, Roman 58 and: Aachen Palace Chapel 306–19 Arculf 301–6 Constantinople 207 England 352–75, 376–86, 387–412 Ethiopia 255–66, 282–86 Georgia and Armenia 230–31 liturgy 413–28 military orders 339–51 Order of 415–16 Russia 234, 244, 246 Hospitallers’ hospital 377 maps: BL Harley 658 438–41 crusades 436 Hague map XXXVIII Leiden map XXXVIIII Madaba map I, 55, 56, 226 St-Bertin map XXXVIIIa, b, 435–36 T-O map 438 Mount Moriah VII Mount of Olives 27, 235, 442 Mount Sion 5, 27, 225–26, 421 Nea Church 157 New Jerusalem 1, 5, 22, 24, 190, 234, 303, 315–16, 437–38 Palace of Solomon 447 St Anne’s 99 St James’s Chapel: see Dome of the Chain Templar’s headquarters 443 Temple 7–11, 123–70, 146–58, 149, 187–92, 201, 234, 244, 320, 421, 425, 434, 436 symbolism 10 Temple Mount 8, 442–43 Tomb of David 448 Jerusalem, kings of 84–92 John Cassian 441–42

John Guillim 457–80, 460–467 John the Evangelist 11, 12 John, king 393, 443–44 John of Würzburg 91, 92, 196–97, 203, 448, 481, 484 John Scotus Eriugena 44–45 Justinian 154, 187–92 Jvari: see Mtskheta Khaluy, shrine 236 Lake Tāna, Abuna Batra Māryām church XXXa, b, XXXIa Lalibela, Lālibalā, city: see Roha Lalibela, Lālibalā, king 265–66 Lazio, San Carlo a Cave 161 Liber Floridus, cosmic map 438, 439 Lietbert, bishop of Cambrai 19 Lincoln, cathedral 450, 453 Little Maplestead, St John 352 n.3, 364, 367, 369, 373, 376–77, 379, 385–86 liturgy 12–14, 24, 75, 221, 226, 267–93, 317–18, 358 n.18, 413–28, 432–33 Advent 419 altar 432–33 Easter 418–27, 432, 454 Hospitallers 446 processions 418–20, 424–27, 430 Sarum rite 425–26 Templars 446 and architecture 221, 225, 426, 428 London: St John’s Clerkenwell 340–42, 346, 248, 358, 364, 373–74, 378, 383–85, 414–17, 431, 447, 449; liturgy 426–28 Old Temple Church 340–46, 344, 358, 369, 374, 378, 388 St Paul’s Cathedral 430 Temple Church XL, 148, 343–46, 362–64, 367, 374, 378, 381–86, 429–56 as the aedicule 431; Dome of the Rock 449–50 chapels: St Ann 394

489

INDEX

St John 444 St Nicholas 444 Thomas Becket 445 charters, indulgences and alms 387–412 effigies 456, 457–78, 460–466 liturgy 413–28 number symbolism 449 Westminster Abbey 383, 395, 430 Ludlow, castle chapel 358, 360, 368–69, 374 Macarius 61, 62 magnates’ chapels 336, 336 n.20 Makāna Śellāsē, church 274 Manglisi, church 223 maps: see Holy Land and Jerusalem Marian Wisdom enthroned XXXIXd Marshal, earls 397–400; monuments, 457–58, 469–72 Mary Magdalene 11, 101, 358, 360, 371, 374 Matthew Paris 399, 447, 469–70 Matilda, queen 365 Melisende 96–98 Metz Gospels XXXVIIb military orders England: administration 383–84 charters, bequests and alms 380–83 see also Hospitallers and Templars Moscow 238: Kremlin 241, 243 Place of the Skull 244, 245 plan 244, 252 Red Square 245 St Basil’s XXIV, XXV, 240, 241 Moses 7, 188, 191–93, 321–23 Mount Nebo, chapel of the Theotokos 151, 152 Mount Sinai, St Catherine’s 105, 107 Mtskheta, city 213–17; map 216 Jvari church 213, 219–22, 222, 224–26 Svetitskhovali Cathedral 213, 214, 215, 226, 229

Muhammad 126–128, 136–138; Book of the Ascension X Muhammad al-Idrisi 91 Narbonne, model: see Jerusalem, Holy Sepulchre, models Neuvy-Saint-Sépulchre 347, 348 Nicholas Mesarites 30 Noblac, abbey of St Leonard 107, 108 Northampton, Holy Sepulchre 348, 358, 374–75 Nubia 5, 185, 256, 260, 261, 288, 290–92 Orphir, rotunda 335, 336, 348 Otkhta Eklesia: see Tao-Klarjeti Paderborn, Holy Sepulchre 36–37 Palekh 235; crucifixion XXVII, 254 Palermo, Cappella Palatina 160 Paris: Ste Chapelle, reliquary box XVI, XVII Temple Church 344, 414 patriarchs: Amalric 91 Fulcher 91, 417, 424 Heraclius 378, 389, 416, 421–23, 449 Latin 418 Paul of Aleppo 234, 235, 242 Paul the Silentiary 150 Paula 479–80 Paulinus of Nola 56, 57 Paulinus of Tyre 9, 10, 61, 149, 194 Perugia, Sant’ Angelo 179 Perugino 176, 178 Peter Damian 452, 456 Peter of Poitiers 438, 440–41 Peter the Great 234, 240, 242, 250–53 Peter the Venerable 434 Piacenza, Holy Sepulchre 36 pilgrimage 105–108, 367, 377 Pintoricchio 177 Pisa, city 37–41 baptistery 19, 37–42, 38, 331 cathedral, griffin 41 Santo Sepolcro 39, 40

490 INDEX planets XXXIIIb Pokrov, Church of the Intercession XXII, 238 Poland, apsed rotundas 336, 337 popes: Alexander III 445 Celestine II 388 Celestine III 390, 393 Clement III 430 Eugene III 388 Gregory VII 430 Gregory IX 428 Innocent III 390–92 Innocent IV 395 Prato, cathedral 167, 175 Procopius 150, 151, 188 Psalms 151

Santa Pudenziana XII, 18, 21–25 St Peter’s, spiral columns 160, 161 Runnymede 443 Russia 233–54

Saewulf 203, 448 St-Bertin 435–36 Saladin 430 Salisbury, cathedral 426 Salona, sarcophagus 163 Santiago, cathedral: and the Holy Sepulchre 95–108, 116, 117 south transept 106 Siena, cathedral 172 Simeon 196, 199, 201, 448, 450 Solomon 159, 161, 187–93, 194, 306–7, 313, 316, 443, 450–51; throne 452 Qal’at Siman, baptistery 331 Split, tomb of Diocletian 379 Quarismi 91 Stephen, king 355, 383–84 St Albans Psalter XXXIXa, 453 Ramla, Cistern of Helena 99 St Emmeran Codex Aureus XXXVc Raphael 159, 165, 180 St James 195–96, 205, 210 Rathbarna 304 St Petersburg, 250–53, 252 Ravenna: Orthodox Baptistery XIII, 18, 20, 21 Suzdal, Pokrov monastery 242 Svetitskhovali: see Mtskheta Sant’Apollinare Nuovo 23 symbolism 10, 12, 42–45, 146–58, San Vitale XXXVb 286–87, 379, 382, 449, 450 Tomb of Theodoric 379 relics: 25–35, 66–75, 395–96 Taddeo Gaddi 170 Riccoldo da Monte di Croce 482–83 Tabernacle 7, 191, 321–22 Richard I 353, 390 Tao-Klarjeti: Otkhta Eklesia 228; Roha: Parkhali church 228 aerial XXVIII Bēta Giyorgis XXIXc, 287–88, 291 Templars 201, 339–51, 429–56 England 352–75, 376–86, 387–412, Bēta Golegotā, Chapel 284 443 Beta Madhane Alem church XXIXa liturgy 414–15, 425, 428 263 Temple Bruer Perceptory 340–41, 360, churches 262–66 375, 379 Recumbent Christ 284 Theoderic 91, 92, 203, 448 Tomb of Adam XXIXb, 264, 266 Theodore of Mopsuestia 12 Romanesque architecture and Theodulf of Orléans 320–28 sculpture 98, 100–108 Thessalonike, tomb of Galerius 379 Rome: Thomas Becket 367, 395, 445 Pantheon 43, 45, 315, 379–80 tomb 53–54, 264, 266, 362–64, 379, Sancta Sanctorum XIV, XV, 19, 431 25–29 Tomb of Christ 10–12 Santa Costanza 379

491

INDEX

Tours, St-Martin 107 Très Riches Heures 169 Trinity 419, 454 True Cross 421 Tyre, Paulinus’s church 9, 10, 149, 188, 194; victory 448 Urbino, Palazzo Ducale 166 Utrecht, Lebuinus chalice 311 Valenciennes Apocalypse XXXIII, 302, 305 Van 218, 226 Venus 59, 61, 62 Verger de Soulas XXXIXc Virgin Mary 197, 201, 204, 210, 447, 450–56 dedications to 394–95

statuette 454 Vladimir 237–38, 253 Church of the Intercession, on the Nerl 237–38 St Demetrius XXIII, 239 Werā Kidāna, mehrat 269 West Thurrock, church 341, 353, 359–60, 375, 379 William Langford, knight 381–83 William of Tyre 89, 346 Winchester 430; New Minster 45 Woodstock, palace chapel 360, 369, 375 York, archbishops 388–89 Zacharias 196, 199, 201

ALREADY PUBLISHED The Art of Anglo-Saxon England Catherine E. Karkov English Medieval Misericords: The Margins of Meaning Paul Hardwick English Medieval Shrines John Crook Thresholds of Medieval Visual Culture: Liminal Spaces Edited by Elina Gertsman and Jill Stevenson The Marvellous and the Monstrous in the Sculpture of Twelfth-Century Europe Kirk Ambrose Early Medieval Stone Monuments: Materiality, Biography, Landscape Edited by Howard Williams, Joanne Kirton and Meggen Gondek The Royal Abbey of Reading Ron Baxter Education in Twelfth-Century Art and Architecture: Images of Learning in Europe, c.1100–1220 Laura Cleaver The Art and Science of the Church Screen in Medieval Europe: Making, Meaning, Preserving Edited by Spike Bucklow, Richard Marks and Lucy Wrapson Motherhood and Meaning in Medieval Sculpture: Representations from France, c.1100–1500 Marian Bleeke Graphic Devices and the Early Decorated Book Edited by Michelle P. Brown, Ildar H. Garipzanov and Benjamin C. Tilghman Church Monuments in South Wales, c.1200–1547 Rhianydd Biebrach

ROBIN GRIFFITH-JONES is Master of the Temple at the Temple Church in London and Senior Lecturer (Theology and Religious Studies) at King’s College London. He co-edited The Temple Church in London with David Park (2010). ERIC FERNIE is Director Emeritus of The Courtauld Institute of Art, London. CONTRIBUTORS: Alan Borg, Antony Eastmond, David Ekserdjian, Eric Fernie, Jaroslav Folda, Emmanuel Fritsch, Michael Gervers, Robin Griffith-Jones, Nicole Hamonic, Cecily Hennessy, Robert Hillenbrand, Catherine E. Hundley, Philip J. Lankester, Robin Milner-Gulland, Robert Ousterhout, David W. Phillipson, Denys Pringle, Sebastian Salvadó.

Re-imagining the Sacred Buildings of Jerusalem

COVER DESIGN: www.stay-creative.co.uk

Re-imagining the Sacred Buildings of Jerusalem

Boydell Studies in Medieval Art and Architecture COVER IMAGE: ‘The Temple Church, London, as Restored’, engraved by J. Carter, 1828, after T. H. Shepherd. Photo: London Metropolitan Archives, City of London.

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Jerusalem has informed the Christian imagination from the time of Jesus himself… A pilgrimage to Jerusalem distilled into a single voyage the course of two journeys: the journey of an individual’s Christian life towards death and the final home after death; and the course of all history towards its consummation in the descent of the new Jerusalem and the end of death. In this book we describe the city’s two great buildings, the Holy Sepulchre and the Dome of the Rock; and the devices by which Christians in Western Europe, Byzantium, Russia, the Caucasus and Ethiopia have, over the course of 1,500 years, realised in their own churches and lives, far from Jerusalem, the city’s manifold sanctity.

EDITED BY ROBIN GRIFFITHJONES AND ERIC FERNIE

EDITED BY ROBIN GRIFFITH-JONES AND ERIC FERNIE

erusalem – earthly and heavenly, past, present and future – has always informed the Christian imagination: it is the intersection of the divine and human worlds, of time and eternity. Since the fourth century, it has been the site of the round Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built over the empty tomb acknowledged by Constantine as the tomb of Christ. Nearly four hundred years later, the Sepulchre’s rotunda was rivalled by the octagon of the Dome of the Rock. The city itself and these two glorious buildings within it remain, to this day, the focus of pilgrimage and of intense devotion. Jerusalem and its numinous buildings have been distinctively re-imagined and re-presented in the design, topography, decoration and dedications of some very striking and beautiful churches and cities in Western Europe, Russia, the Caucasus and Ethiopia. Some are famous, others are in the West almost unknown. The essays In this richly illustrated book combine to do justice to these evocative buildings’ architecture, roles and history. The volume begins with an introduction to the Sepulchre itself, from its construction under Constantine to the Crusaders’ rebuilding which survives to this day. Chapters follow on the Dome of the Rock and on the later depiction and significance of the Jewish Temple. The essays then move further afield, uncovering the links between Jerusalem and Byzantium, the Caucasus, Russia and Ethiopia. Northern Europe comes finally into focus, with chapters on Charlemagne’s chapel at Aachen, the role of the military orders in spreading the form of the Sepulchre, a gazetteer of English rounds, and studies of London’s Temple Church.