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frame of mind to satisfy the writer, for he admonishes prospective pilgrims “that it is as easy to find the way to Heaven in Britain as in Jerusalem.”
    Who they were we do not know, but how they went we can be sure. They walked. From Edinburgh in the north, Roman roads stretched across Europe, the Balkans, and Asia Minor to Judaea. A pilgrim from Britain could follow them to Dover, cross the straits to Calais, and follow in the legions’ footsteps across Gaul, over the Alps, and down into Italy, where he might sail from Brundisium over the Adriatic to Macedonia, plod on across Thrace to Byzantium, and so down through Antioch and Damascus to Jerusalem. Or he might sail from Messina in Sicily across to Carthage and follow the Roman road along the Mediterranean coast to Alexandria, through Egypt and the Sinai desert to his destination.
    Perhaps the earliest Britons to go may have been inspired by a sense of kinship with the popularizers of the Holy Land, Helena and Constantine, who had special associations for Britain. According to legend widely believed in the later Middle Ages Helena was of British birth, the daughter of a Welsh king, but whether this was believed by Britons in her lifetime it is impossible to say. Constantine’s father, for a fact, was killed at York while leading a Roman campaign against the dreaded Picts and Scots who periodically swooped down on Britain. There Constantine, acclaimed Caesar by his legions, embarked on the career that was to have such great consequences for the world of his time.
    From the evidence of St. Jerome it is clear that withintwo generations after Constantine’s conversion the pilgrimage to Jerusalem had become an established custom; indeed, too much so to suit Jerome, who took a rather jaundiced view of overenthusiastic pilgrims. He complained that “Jerusalem is now made a place of resort from all parts of the world, and there is such a throng of pilgrims of both sexes that all temptation, which in some degree you might avoid elsewhere, is here collected together.” Jerome was disapproving by nature, a stern celibate who was forever urging the Roman ladies to abjure baths, second husbands, and other worldly pleasures. His letters, however, and those of his enthusiastic disciple, the Roman matron Paula, show the position Palestine held in the world of his time: “the first of all the nations,” as it is called. A man would not choose to learn Greek anywhere but in Athens or Latin anywhere but in Rome, Paula writes; likewise “can we suppose a Christian’s education complete who has not visited the Christian Athens?… Those who stand first throughout the world are here gathered side by side.”
    But Jerusalem was gradually yielding to Rome, until, with the definitive establishment of a papal throne under Gregory the Great in 590, the seat of Christian authority was finally transferred to Europe. Jerusalem remained the spiritual home, “the Mother of us all,” as the Prior in Ivanhoe put it, and still a goal of pilgrimage. But its temporal history is severed from that of the Roman Empire by the Moslem conquest in 637 A.D. From then on, except for the unedifying episode of the Crusaders’ Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, Palestine remained under one form or another of Moslem rule, through a bewildering succession of Abbasid and Fatimite caliphates, Seljuk and Ottoman Turks, until 1918.
    Jerusalem was now adopted as a Holy Place by the Mohammedans. So far it had figured in the new religion only for that fraction of a second between the fall of a cup from Mahomet’s bedside table and the catching of it before itreached the ground. It was during this interval that the Prophet had his famous dream of a miraculous midnight journey to Jerusalem astride the winged white steed Alborak and his ascent thence to heaven. Now, however, Mahomet’s followers, late comers to monotheism, were in physical possession of the city that was holy to the two older religions and were able to