On Pilgrimage in an Age of Violence
Ever really ponder what life was like before the Age of Machines? For one thing, people walked! The majority of people in the 8th and 9th centuries, the Era of the great King Charlemagne, walked everywhere they went. Most couldn’t even afford a donkey to ride, let alone a horse. Horses were for the one percent, the nobility – and the warrior who worked and fought for the nobility. They cost an arm and a leg. In fact, that’s why the king, the count, or the landed nobleman gave a grant of land to good fighters, including all its fields and forests, and even its people! Some peasants in that era were freemen, but most of them were serfs or even slaves. The grant enabled a warrior to live and equip himself for war. If you read history or historical fiction, you no doubt know that the Era of Charlemagne was full of war and conquest. The king saw himself as the Protector of the Faith in his growing European kingdom, and he felt strongly that he had a duty to wipe out the scourge of paganism. So he went off every spring with his noblemen and their warriors to “do battle against the devil and his minions.” That meant a lot of killing, and of course, a lot of grim stuff that goes along with killing: rape, kidnapping, the burning of villages and towns – things that warrior do in the heat of combat. In fact, that is what they were bred for; warriors were meant to “kill people and destroy things.” Of course, warriors in that era were assured that it was OK to murder pagans because they were already possessed by the devil. So one was justified and even glorified as a good Christian if he went about knocking over pagans whenever he could. Still, we seem to forget that the Early Middle Ages were also, ironically, a time of great faith. People really believed in God. Death was a close acquaintance. The average age of peasant folk was about 40 years. Women were especially vulnerable giving birth, and the majority of babies never became children, let alone adults. So people were close to God. They prayed. They knew that only God could save them from life’s perils and bring them to a blessed afterlife. The Christian Church accrued great power because it was generally recognized as the pathway out of meager human existence into the comforting arms of the Creator. But…there was always the specter of Sin, everybody sinned, peasants as well as noblemen and warriors – especially noblemen and warriors who had so much blood on their hands. So a way had to be found to atone for all those sins. The answer was often pilgrimage. A great tradition of walking on pilgrimage grew up around the concept of atonement. Pilgrim roads stretched throughout England and Charlemagne’s Francia to the holy places of Christianity: to Rome, to Jerusalem, and to Santiago de Compostela beyond the Spanish mountains, where all believed the bones of the Apostle James lay. Such pilgrimages are depicted in both of the first two novels of the Sebastian Chronicles. Sebastian took a path to another great pilgrim destination: Tours in the western part of Francia, now a large city in France. It is the site where the bones of Saint Martin, the patron saint of the Franks, and later of France, are buried. In Book I of Sebastian’s Way: The Pathfinder, Sebastian makes the hazardous trek with his blind mentor Heimdal from his manor in Fernshanz to Tours. He is moved to make the pilgrimage because of his grief at the loss of his great love Adela. Upon reaching Tours, he nearly dies of an unknown illness, but during his slow recovery makes peace with his loss and vows to return to Fernshanz with new resolve to continue his life of service to the king. In Book II: The Paladin, Sebastian undergoes a second pilgrimage, this time coincidental to his service as an envoy for Charlemagne to Byzantium, Jerusalem and Baghdad. Again, the long journey and the constant pressure of being a paladin causes Sebastian once again to lose heart even to the point of fearing for the loss of his soul. In Jerusalem, however, he finds a pilgrim’s peace with the help of the mystic healer Magdala. Pilgrimages were so common in this tumultuous era that many men, great and small, were moved to make them, even at great risk. Many died in the effort, but their struggle to find God amid the chaos of life remains one of the most salient realities of the medieval world. Read the full article