Free Bible and Sword by Barbara W. Tuchman Page B

my mayster and mayster Pryor of Gysborne were sore seke” and being unable to go on foot to Jerusalem were forced to procure “Camellys with grete dyffyculte and outragyous coste.” The party managed to reach Jerusalem, but there both Sir Richard and the Prior died of their illness.
    A few years later Sir Richard Torkyngton, Rector of Mulberton in Norfolk, made a pilgrimage. He also complains of maltreatment by the Mamelukes, who put his party “in great fear which were too long to write.” At Jaffa he found that “now there standeth never an house but only two towers and certain caves under the ground,” but Jerusalem was still “a fair eminent place for it standeth upon such a grounde that from whence so ever a man cometh, there he must needs ascend,” and from there one can see “all Arabie.” He describes how the city gets its water by conduits in great plenty from Hebron and Bethlehem, so that the cisterns are all filled “and much water runneth now to waste.”
    On his return journey down from Jerusalem Torkyngton, joined for greater safety with two other English pilgrims,Robert Crosse, a pewterer of London, and Sir Thomas Toppe, “a priest of the west country.” These are among the last names we can group with the devotional pilgrims of the Middle Ages, for within a few years England embraced the Reformation, and the practice of pilgrimage, because of its association with the buying of indulgences and the worship of saints and relics, was sternly disapproved by the reformers. The new tone is typified by Erasmus, who in his satirical dialogues mocks the vanities of pilgrims, “all covered with cockle shells, laden on every side with images of lead and tynne.” Wyclif, early herald of the Reformation, had long ago voiced a pronounced distaste for pilgrimages and with some effect for when one of his followers was forced to abjure Lollardy he had to take an oath promising that “I shal neuermore despyse pylgrim-age.” The road to Jerusalem lies in the heart, the reformers taught. There it was to remain for some time, while the physical Palestine was left to the merchants and diplomats of competing powers.

CHAPTER IV

THE CRUSADES
    To be “the sewer of Christendom and drain all the discords out of it” was the primary function of the Crusades, the Reverend Tom Fuller said in his
History of the Holy Warre
, written in 1639. Admittedly a partisan Protestant view, Fuller’s dictum can still stand without serious challenge. At the outset the Crusades were set in motion by a thirst for gain, for glory, and for revenge upon the infidel in the name of religion. Exulting in bloodshed, ruthless in cruelty, innocent of geography, strategy, or supply, the first Crusaders plunged headlong eastward with no other plan of campaign than to fall upon Jerusalem and wrest it from the Turks. This in some mad fashion they accomplished only because the enemy was divided against himself. Thereafter mutual dissension defeated them too; even the most elementary loyalty among allies that ought to have been dictated by a sense of self-preservation was lacking. For the next two hundred years the trail of their forked pennons across the heart of the Middle Ages was but a series of vain endeavors to recapture the victories of the first expedition.
    Failure seems to have taught them nothing. Like human lemmings each generation of Crusaders flung themselves into the fatal footsteps of their fathers. Palestine itself, the battleground and the prize, became a second country if not a graveyard for half the families of Europe. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who preached the Second Crusade, boasted that he left but one man in Europe to console everyseven widows. But what made the distant land so familiar was not the numbers who went at any one time so much as the fact that they kept on going over and over again to the same place for nearly two centuries, so that often two, three, or four generations in the same family had fought or settled or