"My Lord's native land" (1): mapping the Christian holy land.

Smith, Julie Ann

In the fourth and early fifth centuries Christians laid claim to the land of Palestine. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the investment of the land of Palestine and its places with Christian historical and cultural meanings, and to trace its remapping as the "holy land." (2) This map was not a figurative representation of geographical and cultural features; as with all maps, it was an idea. The Christian "holy land" is also an idea, one which did not exist at the beginning of the fourth century, but which, by the mid-fifth century, was a place constructed of a rich texture of places, beliefs, actions, and texts, based in the notion that the landscape provided evidence of biblical truths. When Constantine became a Christian, there was no "holy land"; however, over the succeeding one hundred and thirty years Christians marked and identified many of their holy places in Palestine. The mapmakers in this transformation were emperors, bishops, monastics, holy women, and pilgrims who claimed the holy places for Christianity, constructing the land as topographically Christian and mediating this view of their world through their pilgrim paths, buildings, liturgies, and texts. The idea of mapping is used here as an aid to understanding the formation of cultural viewpoints and the validation of ideas and actions that informed the construction of the "holy land."

A map is a means of accessing aspects of the mapmaker's world. It fulfills a variety of functions: denoting spatial and geographical relations, guiding travelers, explaining cultural worlds, or representing lived experience. A map anchors event to place and aids historical knowledge. It is a narrative constructed through places, roads, events, and journeys, and thus can be representational (through written texts or the visual language of images) or physical (that is, as place), constructing a shared, imagined landscape. As contributors to "dialogue in a socially constructed world" maps constitute a system of signs that can be rhetorical and persuasive. (3) A map may perform these various functions physically, narratively, metaphorically, or figuratively. In these terms a map is not necessarily a two-dimensional drawing; rather it is anything that represents understandings of spatial constructs--it is shaped by both landscapes and mindscapes. (4) By representing particular places on a map, the mapmaker implies a unity of meaning. The early Christian mapmakers marked out their holy places transforming the disparate historic places of the Bible and of Jewish and Roman Palestine into the Christian "holy land." This process was both notional and physical as they inscribed onto the land scriptural locations and their own buildings and paths. Physically, the map was the land of Palestine, its landscapes the parchment upon which the pilgrims located the holy places and charted the footsteps of Jesus and of the scriptural and Christian holy women and men. The cartographers did not draw the map on a blank parchment; they used a palimpsest map upon which pagans, Jews, and Christians had already charted and occupied places--a spiritual cartography overlaying the physical realities of existing towns, roads, and natural landscape with Christian markers.

The analogy of mapmaking for the construction of the Christian Holy Land is not unprecedented in the scholarship of late antique Palestine. In his chapter entitled "To Replace," Jonathan Z. Smith explained the resacralizing of Jewish Jerusalem through Christian architectural and liturgical development; the Christian "holy land," he states, was "laid palimpsest-like over the old." (5) Sabine MacCormack has explored the "formation of a sacred topography of the Holy Land" focusing on the shared scriptural history of Jews and Christians. (6) The investment of the landscape of Palestine with Christian meaning has been the focus of two important essays by Blake Leyerle. (7) The landscape of Palestine was not blank, but its rich Jewish and Roman geography was treated as if it were. The land could not achieve status as a Christian place until Christians had identified it with Christian understandings of their history. Accounts of pilgrims such as the Bordeaux Pilgrim, Egeria, Jerome, and the Piacenza Pilgrim reveal stages in the investment of the landscape with Christian meaning and expand Christian claims to the land as holy. (8) A number of scholars have evaluated the appropriation of the history and geography of Palestine in the service of a newly defined Christian imperium. According to Joan E. Taylor, Constantine absorbed pagan and Jewish notions of holy places and pilgrimage into his new imperial religion, thus making Palestine a focal point for Christians of the empire. (9) Jas Elsner focuses on the Itinerarium Burdigalense and the ways in which the Pilgrim redefines and relocates Jerusalem and its salvific potential as fundamental to Constantine's Christianized empire. (10) Andrew S. Jacobs likewise focuses on the means by which Christian emperors, pilgrims, and monastic settlers molded the "contours of a sacred landscape into the site of Christian dominance," and upon the "sacred and potent Jewish remnant" that formed the basis for Christian imperium. (11) Most recently, Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony, in a monograph that explores the concerns of Christian theologians for the development of the ideas of holiness of place and pilgrimage, points out the contribution of the manipulation of landscape as sacred geography to the development of Christian identity. (12) An important study of the liturgy of Jerusalem that informs the present survey is John F. Baldovin's Urban Character of Christian Worship in which he surveys the liturgical exploitation of the geography of the city in the fourth and fifth centuries. (13) Annabel Jane Wharton likewise emphasizes the significance of liturgy in the legitimation of the site of the Holy Sepulchre, and for the "sacralization of the topography of Jerusalem." (14) Jan Willem Drijvers's works on Cyril, Bishop of Jerusalem (ca. 350-ca. 386) emphasize the bishop's endeavors to promote Jerusalem both as sacred place and as episcopal center. (15) Cyril's emphasis on the Cross as evidence for the faith helped to relocate Jerusalem from the periphery of the Christian world to its center.

These studies have focused on particular issues, usually illustrating arguments through limited sets of textual and architectural evidence. The present paper draws upon and expands this scholarship and a range of other secondary works, and focuses on a broader range of late antique texts, liturgy, and architecture. A comprehensive analysis of the means by which a Christian map of Palestine was drawn will demonstrate the detailed complexity of the spiritual topography of the "holy land" that was created in the fourth and early fifth centuries.

The mapping of the "holy land" was a complex series of processes and practices. (16) The initial process consisted of identifying places associated with biblical events and the lives of the saints. Sites might be recognized from biblical descriptions or historical location, and where historical evidence was not available, the physical landscape was overlain with an imaginative geography gleaned from biblical revelation and exegesis. The idea of holiness of place was premised on the belief that a place that had witnessed holy events was itself proof of the holy, the historic event ever present at the actual site. Once Christians identified a holy place, they could then appropriate it to Christian beliefs and purposes through physical demarcation and enclosure. Christians built churches, basilicas, martyria, monasteries, hospices, anchoring the holy places in the increasingly Christian landscape and intensifying their sacredness through the construction of ritual spaces. This establishment of buildings and communities colonized Jewish and Roman sites and spaces and constructed a Christian topography with networks of Roman roads and monastic paths linking holy places, monasteries, and towns. Holy place was thus an intricate amalgam of historical and physical location, point of divine contact, ritual site, and monastic colonization. Progressively, liturgy located people in their biblical world as they ritually and communally traced holy footsteps and recreated holy events. Pilgrimage was a ritualized part of each of these processes, (17) and pilgrims participated in the spiritual and physical invention of the "holy land." These complex processes and practices form the structural basis for the present essay.

Meanings of terms such as place, landscape, pilgrim, pilgrimage, and sacred space as used here are not necessarily self-evident, and the following senses of these terms inform the ensuing discussion. "Place," in addition to the basic meanings as geographical location or locus of event, can also convey the sense of a (physical or imagined) point on a map. Landscape has a rather more complex set of cultural meanings, and, for present purposes, a definition drawn from a set of formulations identified by Bruno David and Meredith Wilson is appropriate. "Landscape" is culturally constructed; it exists through human signification, through the "bodily and cognitive experience" of "human actors who engage with [it] and imbue [it] with meaning." (18) The processes of constructing landscapes may involve claiming or legitimating histories and their spatial inscriptions. "Pilgrim" and "pilgrimage" must be understood both in contemporary terms and in relation to the period under study. In late antiquity, peregrinus was not used as a term for traveler or pilgrim; it "implied having foreign customs or accent, or an unfavourable legal status in contrast with that of a citizen." (19) Basically, a pilgrim was a foreigner, someone who was not in her/his patria, who was away from home. In late antique pilgrimage accounts, the journeys that are here understood as pilgrimages are described in general terms such as "travel for the purpose of prayer" (20) or "to see the holy places." (21) For the purposes of simplicity "pilgrim" is used here to mean "one who journeyed to the holy places for spiritual purposes," and "pilgrimage" for the journey of a pilgrim.

For Palestine to undergo processes through which it became the "holy land" required negotiations of the notion of holiness of place. For the Jews, the very land of Palestine was holy, and in reaction to this idea early Christians had rejected the notion that a place could be intrinsically holy. (22) Instead, the historical associations of particular spots with holy events and people were quickly absorbed into Christian ritual and ritual spaces. (23) Christians located martyria at burial sites of saints, and from the second century Christians were traveling to Palestine to visit biblical sites. Constantine's recognition and honoring of the holy places ushered in an exciting period of recovery and construction at holy sites in Palestine. Once Christianity was permitted to venerate its historical sites, pilgrims journeyed in increasing numbers to see and touch the places sanctified by Christ and his saints.

But simply acknowledging and venerating sacred sites was not enough; the holiness of these places required that they be marked as such and be differentiated from profane space. According to Jonathan Smith, sacred place is created through space, ritual, and text, and these categories were clearly in operation in the sacralization of the holy places in the Christian "holy land." (24) Spaces that had been sanctified by holy persons or events, as testified in their histories, were sacralized through physical marking and enclosure within churches and shrines. Within these buildings, and in the spaces that linked them, further sacrality was inculcated through liturgical reenactments and celebrations of the original sanctifying events. By the processes of identification, demarcation, and liturgy outlined here, the pilgrims and monastics of Palestine in the fourth and fifth centuries invested not simply the historic places but the landscapes and pathways in between with sacrality substantiated through the belief that the redeeming actions and presence of God had created a "holy land." A variety of written texts (itineraries, eulogies, letters, saints' vitae, histories, and sermons) recount the processes of claiming the holy places and landscape of Palestine, and chart the resulting maps. Indeed, these texts were themselves elements of the mapping processes. The authors of these texts used a variety of sources for their identifications: the Old and New Testaments, the scriptural exegeses of the Fathers, and sites believed to have historical or traditional associations.

I. "ENQUIRING ABOUT THE WONDROUS LAND": IDENTIFICATION OF HOLY SITES

The basis for mapping a Christian landscape was identifying its places. Prior to the early pilgrimages of the fourth century, the places mentioned in the Gospels had not been incorporated into the liturgical or spiritual practice of the Church. (25) Jerusalem and Palestine bore no Christian markers of Christ's life or the lives of his saints: (26) Hadrian had entirely rebuilt the Jerusalem of the early first century as Aelia Capitolina. While physical evidence for Christ's life in the form of houses or objects had been erased, the evidence of the biblical accounts testified that he had been there, had marked the land with his footsteps and Jerusalem with his blood. By the time the earliest surviving texts about pilgrims were being written, many sites had already been identified. The methods of identification (which we can glean from some of the texts) relied upon continued habitation of scriptural towns and villages, historical associations of sites, tracing the footsteps of Jesus and the biblical saints through the Scriptures, and, where these failed, a recovered geography that relied upon the faith and imaginations of the identifiers. These early mapmakers were contouring the landscape of Roman and Jewish Palestine in accordance with Scripture, and once mapmakers located the sites, they became proofs of the historical presence of Jesus and his saints.

There is some evidence that Christians were visiting sites associated with scriptural events prior to 325. What is not clear is how these visitors understood the spiritual nature of these sites. According to Eusebius, Melito of Sardis visited Palestine "where the messages of the Bible were preached and done" in the late second century, though elsewhere Melito made clear that Jerusalem, as the place of Christ's death, had no spiritual value. (27) Eusebius also relates that Alexander of Cappadocia journeyed to Jerusalem in the third century "because of prayer and for the sake of information." (28) Jerome comments that early travelers in Palestine sought "to better understand the Bible" and "to regard Scripture more lucidly." (29) While these sources may indeed relate actual visits to biblical places, their representations of the reasons for such journeys may simply reflect the authors' understandings of them. On the other hand, Eusebius also mentions in his Demonstration of the Gospel that Christians had been honoring Bethlehem and meeting for prayer on the Mt. of Olives prior to 315, that is, during his own lifetime. He writes of the truth of the Ascension, "which it is possible for us to see literally ... since believers in Christ all congregate from all parts of the world ... that they may learn about the city ... and that they may worship at the Mt. of Olives opposite the city, whither the glory of the Lord migrated when it left the former city. There stood in truth according to the common and received account the feet of our Lord and Saviour." (30) This is one of the earliest surviving statements regarding the holy places as evidence for scriptural events* Eusebius also produced an early textual map of the holy places: the Onomasticon (written ca. 300 (31)) cross-lists biblical place-names with the contemporary Byzantine names. (32) He explains what there is for Christians to see and what is shown at the biblical sites. (33) He describes the site identified as Gethsemane, "where Christ prayed before the passion. It is adjacent to the Mt. of Olives on which even now the faithful earnestly offer prayers." (34) On evidence included in its preface it seems that the Onomasticon originally included a (now lost) "map of ancient Judaea" and a "representation of their ancient, famous, mother-city, I mean of course Jerusalem, including in this the plan of the Temple, after comparison with the existing remains of the sites." (35) While Onomasticon was intended as an aid to biblical study and not a pilgrim guide, Eusebius's site identifications located biblical events in the landscape of Palestine and ushered in a prolific period during which the Bible was used to identify a great many more holy places, in spite of the fact that it actually provides very few physical descriptions of the sites. (36)

The most significant site identification of all, that of Christ's death, burial, and Resurrection, was associated with the first Christian emperor, Constantine, and the visit to Jerusalem of his mother, Helena, in 327. Up to this time Jerusalem had remained largely unclaimed for Christianity and almost unmarked by Christian monuments. (37) While Hadrian had banned Jews and Jewish Christians from the city in 135, by the early fourth century there was a Christian community that met on Mt. Sion, possibly in a house church, at what was believed to have been the site of Pentecost and where the episcopal throne of St. James was preserved. (38) The site of the Ascension had also been historically identified and was locally venerated. (39) There is no surviving evidence for any local or traditional knowledge of the site of the death or burial of Christ prior to 325. The earliest account of the identification of the Sepulchre is in Eusebius's Life of Constantine, which relates that after the Council of Nicaea (325) Constantine had written to Bishop Macarius of Jerusalem ordering him to demolish the pagan temple built over the site of Christ's burial and remove the "filthy rubbish" that had "consigned it to oblivion." (40) Eusebius asserts that the tomb had been intentionally hidden and goes on to describe the miraculous identification and dramatic unearthing of the "testimony [martyrion] of the Saviour's resurrection," and the building of the beautiful basilica on the site. (41) The construction of the Church of the Sepulchre invented the "New Jerusalem," (42) reconfiguring the historical landscape, creating a new spiritual center for the Church, and charting a new, Christian map for the city. Eusebius assigns the recovery of the Sepulchre and the construction of the basilica to Constantine who "erected the victory of the Saviour over death." (43) In Constantine's letter, Macarius, Bishop of Jerusalem, and the prefect Dracillianus were to perform the actual work of clearing the site and building the church. (44) Whilst this work was underway, the emperor's mother, Helena, made her journey to the East and Jerusalem.

While the Augusta's journey was clearly an imperial progress designed to assist in the implementation of her son's Christianizing policies, she was also, according to Eusebius, journeying to the holy places to accord "suitable adoration to the footsteps of the Saviour." (45) Her journey combined personal piety and politics as she enquired "about the wondrous land" and inspected "with imperial concern the eastern provinces with their communities and peoples." (46) She carried an imperial purse from which she drew lavishly for gifts to bestow on towns, churches, soldiers, and the poor, (47) and she oversaw the imperial building program (discussed in detail below). Subsequent accounts of Helena's pilgrimage written over the following century show a shifting textual tradition in which the identification of the Sepulchre and the building of the church became associated with the idea of her discovery of the True Cross. (48) There is no evidence surviving for the presence of the Cross in Jerusalem from before 348 when a sermon by Bishop Cyril of Jerusalem first mentions its position in the Holy Sepulchre Church. (49) In a later letter to Constantius, Cyril refers to the finding of the Cross during Constantine's lifetime but does not provide any details of when or by whom it was found. (50)

Whether the Augusta did find the Cross is not important here; what is significant is the invention of a legend that attributed the identification of the most significant of all Christian relics to the archetypal, female pilgrim. By the time Paulinus of Nola was writing to his friend Severus in around 402, the Helena legend had reached fruition. In Paulinus's version of the legend Constantine's fame was partly based in the faith of his mother who had been "inspired by God's plan when she set eyes on Jerusalem." (51) Indeed, she had "asked her son to give her a free hand in clearing all the sites there on which our Lord's feet had trod, and which were stamped with remembrances of God's works for us. She sought to cleanse them of all the infection of profane wickednesses by pulling down temples and statues, and to restore them to their rightful allegiance so that the Church might at last be famed in the land of its beginnings." (52)

Helena had known which sites required her intervention because of the faith she had gained through "devoted listening and reading," and she had arrived in Jerusalem with the intention of discovering the Cross. (53) She questioned local Christians and Jews about the possible location and "(undoubtedly under the impulse of a revelation she had experienced) she ordered digging operations.... To the general astonishment, but precisely as the queen alone had believed, deep digging opened up cavities in the earth and revealed the secret of the hidden cross." (54) The Helena legend constructed her as superimposing the sites of her faith onto the physical contours of Jerusalem and Bethlehem, a rightful mapping that restored to them the places that had been made sacred by the "saving secrets" of the Redeemer's love. Her journey and her identifications of the holy places and the Cross had recovered Jerusalem and placed it at the center of the Christian world, and made her the first of a number of elite women pilgrims who would invest vast fortunes in the structural definition of Palestine.

By 333 the anonymous Bordeaux Pilgrim could visit twenty-one sites associated with the New Testament and thirty-two known for their Old Testament significance. Christians were appropriating the Old Testament places into the historical construction of their faith. (55) The Bordeaux Pilgrim left her/his own textual map in the form of an itinerary for the journey from Bordeaux to Palestine and for visiting such biblical places as had been identified. (56) She/he lists places and the distances between them, and laconically describes sites she/he associates with biblical events and people. Only in Jerusalem does she/he provide any spatial or physical detail for the holy places: on Sion is "the house of the priest Caiaphas ... and a column where Christ was beaten," or "as you walk toward the gate of Neapolis, ... on the left is the little hill of Golgotha where the Lord was crucified. About a stone's throw from there is a grotto where his body was laid and rose again on the third day," and on the Mt. of Olives "is a stone where Judas Iscariot betrayed Christ." (57) The Pilgrim does not mention the Constantinian church, which was well under construction by the time of her/his visit, making clear that her/his focus was on places that had been made holy by historical events. The Pilgrim did not contribute to the identification of biblical sites and was notably uninterested in places for which there were no biblical associations or for which no Christian claims had been made. (58) The Pilgrim wrote the itinerary with the purposes of locating biblical truths in visible, geographical reality, and of enabling readers either to replicate this journey or at least to know of the physical authenticity of the holy places.

By the mid-fourth century the biblical associations of places in Jerusalem, and their immanent truths, had been absorbed into the structural and textual geography of the holy city. Around 348 Cyril of Jerusalem wrote a series of catechetical lectures for non-Christians who were preparing for baptism. These lectures reveal both the developments in understandings of New Testament sites in and around Jerusalem, and the ways in which these understandings might be deployed as proofs of biblical events. In a number of his lectures, which were delivered in the Constantinian basilica of the Sepulchre church, Cyril directs the attention of his audience to their physical surroundings: "If anyone does not believe what I say, let them believe the very power of what now lies before their eyes." (59) Christians have so many proofs for their faith: "the holy wood of the Cross, still to be seen among us today, bears witness; ... Holy Golgotha, which rises above us here, bears witness. The Holy Sepulchre and the stone still lying there bear witness." (60) For Cyril biblical history was physically present by virtue of the places he and his congregations lived amongst and might daily touch and see. He points to actual places "here," tracing a biblical map onto the surroundings of his audience.

The account of the pilgrimage of Egeria through Palestine, Egypt, and Asia Minor reveals both her understandings of the holy places as evidence for the biblical truths, and the ways in which she charted these truths both textually and onto the landscape. (61) Egeria intended the account of her extensive journeys around the holy places to provide a textual map, as well as a means of seeing these places through her eyes for her sisters back home. Egeria consistently makes clear how she knows she is seeing biblical sites. Throughout her journeying she explains that she has been guided by monks, clergy, and bishops who pointed out sites of importance, and gave advice on places of interest and safe routes, as well as leading prayers and offering blessings. (62) In her journeys in Egypt Egeria followed paths that she had been told by the local monks were taken by the ancient Israelites, and participated in site-specific liturgies (discussed below). She makes clear in her account that her intention was to locate the texts of the Bible onto the geography of Egypt and Palestine. As she and her companions journeyed, they sought out holy men who could "show us every place written about in the Bible." (63) At Mount Sinai a priest read to them the account of the lawgiving from the Book of Moses "at the very spot." (64) She recounts that in every important site she visited, it was customary to have a reading relevant to the place from the Bible. (65) While the monks and clergy seem to have been very active in constructing the pilgrim experience of the holy places, pilgrims like Egeria clearly traveled with biblical texts at hand or memorized, ready to locate the contents onto the landscape and to break down the temporal bounds between the scriptural past and their present. (66) After Egeria had traced the Bible onto the landscape, she verbally charted her physical and spiritual experiences of the holy places for her sisters. Her diary describes roads, paths, and sites with the intention of aiding their visualization by her audience. At the end of her long description of the places she visited around Sinai, she points out that now, "while reading the Books of Moses, my dears, you [can] see accurately everything that happened here." (67) Her sisters could make the journey spiritually, walking the paths and seeing the spots, because they had the Bible and the supplementary descriptions provided by Egeria's textual map.

There are two texts associated with the pilgrimage and monastic life of the Roman matron, Paula, that chart the links between Bible and place in the "holy land." One is a letter written in the name of Paula and her daughter Eustochium (in 386, shortly after their arrival in Bethlehem) to their friend Marcella in Rome encouraging her to join them in Palestine. (68) The second is part of a eulogistic letter addressed by Jerome to Eustochium after her mother's death in 404, in which he recounts Paula's pilgrimage around the holy places. (69) These texts, like Egeria's diary, provide maps of the holy places that are both textual and geographically realized truths of the Bible. The mapping processes in Paula's letter are twofold. She begins with a recollection of God's injunction to Abraham to leave his own country and go to a promised land, (70) the very land in which Paula and her companions now live. Her letter is a catalog of scriptural events and places that justify her decision to live there in spite of the fact that the land had been stained by the blood of the Lord. She is responding to Marcella's concerns that the land is cursed. Paula points out that if the places that witnessed the deaths of so many martyrs might be honored, how much more should the place that had absorbed Christ's blood be venerated. She represents to Marcella a land that has been mapped by the historical events of the Old and New Testaments, and by the presence of the saints who have come to Jerusalem to adore "Christ in that place from which the Gospel first flashed from the gallows." (71) For Paula, the holy places have been appropriated for Christianity by virtue, not simply of the footsteps of Christ, but through the ongoing presence of holy pilgrims. This land is neither foreign nor cursed; rather "those who are first in the whole world are gathered here equally." (72) People come from all nations to the land they know only through the Scriptures in order to live the life of prayer and Christian virtue; there may be many languages, but they worship as one. In an interesting aside she complicates the mapping process by locating Jerusalem in the pagan intellectual tradition: "can we think our studies are worthy without visiting our Athens?" (73) Here she draws on another set of cultural ideas and superimposes on the now Christianized map of Palestine classical intellectual associations. In the final chapter of this letter, Paula draws a different type of map. Here she lays before her friend the itinerary they will follow together if she will come to Palestine, an emotional map of places where they can weep and pray together. Paula's "holy land" is multilayered. Its Old Testament places have been remapped for Christianity, and the places of Christ's passion have been marked and hallowed by his blood. Overlaying this is the community of all nations, of exiles assembled for Christ. And it is a personal map through which Paula and her friend can engage emotionally with the physical holy places.

Jerome's eulogy for Paula includes a long description of the pilgrimage she made between leaving Rome and settling in Bethlehem. For the most part, this account consists of lists of the saint's virtues, and of the holy men and scriptural places she visited. Jerome enhances the scriptural significance of some places by linking their names with the spiritual geography. Not far from Bethlehem, "she descended to the tower of Ader, that is, 'of the flock" [Genesis 35:21] near which Jacob had pastured his flocks, and the shepherds watching by night heard, 'Glory to God in the Highest' [Luke 2:14]." (74) Jerome recounts Paula's itinerary, fulfilling one of the purposes of such a text, which was to enable the audience to accompany her along her journey. The audience might become mental pilgrims assisted, as Egeria's sisters had been, to follow in spirit the verbal maps and see the places as Paula had seen them. There are, however, a few more personal moments that enrich the map already traced in the earlier letter. Paula's mystical experiences in the Church of the Sepulchre and the Cave of the Nativity reinforced the reality of the primary events there. As she prostrated herself before the Cross, it was "as if she could perceive the Lord hanging there." (75) At Bethlehem when she entered the cave, "she swore in my hearing that she could see with the eyes of faith the infant wrapped in cloths, the Lord crying in a manger, the wise men adoring him, the star shining from above, the virgin mother." (76) While the sites had been identified before Paula arrived in Palestine, her mystical witnessing of these two most holy events reinforced the places as touched by Christ, as having been authentically identified and located onto the landscape.

Jerome's attitude towards the holy places and the benefits of pilgrimages has raised some scholarly concerns. In the letter just discussed he seems to share Paula's excitement for the value of experiencing at first hand the environment of the holy places. Nevertheless, in a letter to Paulinus of Nola, Jerome emphatically discourages his friend from making a projected pilgrimage to Palestine. (77) The city of Jerusalem, Jerome asserts, is an inappropriate environment for a monk, and Paulinus should stay safely at home. However, it has been shown that Jerome's concern in writing this letter was that Paulinus might journey to Jerusalem rather than Bethlehem and stay with Jerome's opponents in the Origenist dispute. (78) There are more moments of praise for the benefits and beauties of the holy places in Jerome's extensive oeuvre than criticisms. Indeed in a letter to Dardanus he claims, "This land, which has now through Christ's passion and resurrection become our Promised Land, is believed by the Jews--so the Jews may contend--to have belonged to the Jewish people after their return from Egypt." (79) Here Jerome continues the process of remapping Palestine for Christianity by laying claim to the title that had originally made the land sacred to Judaism.

Christians began to travel to Palestine in significant numbers after the recognition of the key sites associated with the life of Christ. The first recovered sites were the Sepulchre and Calvary, but whether these were the actual sites of the historical events is not important here. What is significant is that sites were chosen and given topographical specificity; they were marked onto the topography of Jerusalem and Palestine, and written into the textual history of the land and the Church. Christians had retained few links to Palestine prior to Helena's journey. This crucial recognition of a holy site and its physical demarcation with sacred buildings began an ongoing physical claiming of the holy places by monks, clergy, and pilgrims. The Scriptures provided few topographical descriptions of sites, yet the Bible became the vade mecum for pilgrims from the fourth century. The towns and countryside of Palestine became as a blank page for them to chart the places visited by Jesus and his saints, or as a concrete text through which to comprehend and touch the salvific mysteries of Christ's life. The accounts of the journeys of Egeria and Paula convey the reality of the biblical landscape and spatially reconstruct biblical events. The works of Eusebius and Cyril gave geographical specificity to the historical places of the faith, and those of the Bordeaux Pilgrim, Egeria, Paula, and Jerome were written deliberately as verbal maps allowing their audiences to make, in spirit, the journeys that the writers had made and to envision the holy places they had witnessed.

II. "LET Us BUILD HERE": DEMARCATION OF HOLY SITES

Prior to Constantine's conversion Christians had had few public ritual or cultic sites. (80) The churches built under his mother's oversight and patronage in Jerusalem and Bethlehem seem to have provided an impetus for the recognition and demarcation of other biblical sites. After Christians identified holy places, they often physically enclosed them with churches and shrines "raised like standards to the Lord's victories," (81) a set of ecclesiastical markers that, in turn, became part of what made the landscape holy. In most cases, Christians established monasteries in conjunction with these churches, and established many more away from the holy places, scattering lauras, coenobia and, in time, the burial places of their saints over the deserts of Palestine. The placement of monasteries on the landscape and in conjunction with holy monuments was, by the presence of their holy women and men, laying claim to the spaces in between the sacralized holy places for Christianity. On the map that Christians constructed onto the landscape of Palestine, the scattered religious communities and cells provided a cartographic shading that represented it as Christian.

Constantine instigated the Christian architectural development of Jerusalem and the holy places. The church on Mt. Sion, which seems to have served the small Christian community of Jerusalem, is the only Christian structure for which we have any evidence prior to Helena's pilgrimage. All this would change after Constantine's conversion and his decision to reconfigure Palestine as the Christian "holy land." Eusebius does not make clear how Constantine became aware of the locations of Golgotha and the Sepulchre; he simply narrates the emperor's determination to uncover the holy sites and build a "New Jerusalem" on a hill facing "the Jerusalem of old," that is, the Temple Mount with its ruins, (82) thus commencing the Christian remapping of the holy city. In his Tricennial Orations for Constantine (in 336), Eusebius emphasized the imperial mapping of the site of Calvary and the Sepulchre when he commented on the newly finished basilica that "this you have put round the Sepulchre that bears witness to the immortal life, impressing on the heavenly logos of God the imperial seal." (83) Eusebius makes clear that Constantine built the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, though it is less clear from his account of the building of two other Constantinian churches (one at the site of the Nativity in Bethlehem, and another on the Mt. of Olives at the site of the cave called the Eleona, where Jesus preached concerning the eschaton (84)) who was actually responsible for these churches. Constantine "took in hand" the two sites and adorned them with "treasures of silver and gold and embroidered curtains," yet Helena embellished the sacred cave of the Nativity and erected "the monument to the journey into Heaven of the Saviour of the Universe." (85) While Constantine may have been Eusebius's hero, it was Helena he portrayed as visiting the holy places and overseeing the building of churches there. The aging Augusta may have acted on behalf of her son, but it was she who stood where her God had stood and raised shrines "to the Saviour who chose to spend his time on that spot." (86)

Constantine's Holy Sepulchre Church was consecrated in 335 and consisted of a Martyrium (three-aisled basilica, atrium, and portico) and the Anastasis (the tomb monument, rock of Calvary, and atrium). (87) Later (possibly by the time Cyril was writing his lectures) a shrine was added to Calvary and a small chapel behind it, and a rotunda was built to cover the Anastasis complex. (88) On the Mt. of Olives, in addition to the Eleona church, the "place from which the Lord ascended to Heaven" was venerated (Egeria called it the Imbomon (89)) though it seems that no building marked the spot till the Roman pilgrim, Poemenia, built a circular church ca. 392, (90) and there was a "fine church" at Gethsemane by the time Egeria visited Jerusalem. (91) The Lazarium, a three-aisled basilica, was linked to the cave of Lazarus at Bethany also by Egeria's time. (92) Restorations were commenced on the church on Mt. Sion in the 340s, and Bishop John of Jerusalem renovated it again towards the end of the fourth century. (93) The relics of the protomartyr St. Stephen were placed there after their discovery in 415. (94) These churches marked Christianity's most important places and became the spiritual and liturgical focuses of the Jerusalem ecclesia.

Not intended as part of the broader life of the Jerusalem church were the churches and shrines the wealthy Roman matron and ascetic, Melania the Younger, founded in the 430s. Her first church was a martyrion attached to the monastery she had established for women on the Mt. of Olives in 432. (95) Gerontius, her hagiographer, recounts her desire to have an oratory built for the sisters of her community so they might not need to leave its safe confines. (96) In the oratory Melania installed relics of St. Stephen, the prophet Zechariah, the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste, and others. (97) Next she built an "Aposteleion" that, while it was not specifically located on a biblical spot (being built to house the remains of her husband Pinian), was possibly linked to her monastery for women that was close to the grotto of the Eleona. (98) In 436 she built a martyrion near the site of the Ascension, to which she attached a community of monks, saying, "This is the place on which the feet of the Lord stood. Let us build here an oratory." (99) Melania's foundations seem to have covered considerable space on the Mt. of Olives, which appears to have been colonized quite densely during the fourth and fifth centuries. (100)

Melania chose locations for her monastic communities and their churches as close as possible to two significant scriptural sites, and she also acquired relics of St. Stephen for her foundations. Her acquisition of portions of these relics for her own use underlines her status in the Jerusalem ecclesia, which is likewise emphasized by the attendance of the empress Eudocia at the deposition of the relics in Melania's new martyrion. (101) Melania had chosen the sites of her churches for their proximity to places where the Lord had stood, thus marking and enclosing them. In the cases of both her monastic churches she then enhanced the holiness of the sites and of their architectural markers by the enshrinement of the relics of the first man to die as witness to the reality of Christ's presence in the holy places. Melania's works on the Mt. of Olives augmented the sacredness of its holy places and enriched its physical markers. Gerontius's account of her building program constituted a textual marking as he located for his readers the places marked and made holier by the holy woman.

Gerontius links Melania the Younger's building program with that of her spiritual daughter, the Augusta Eudocia. (102) During .her first pilgrimage to Jerusalem, ca. 439, according to Gerontius, the Augusta was present at the installation of the relics of St. Stephen in the martyrium of Melania's monastery for women. (103) He does not mention any building works by Eudocia, who is included in his hagiography purely to substantiate the holiness of the life and works of his saint. (104) Elsewhere, there is evidence that Eudocia's visit had been rather more productive than Gerontius records. According to John Rufus, Eudocia had built a martyrium on the site of the saint's martyrdom to house his relics, and she asked Cyril of Alexandria to inter the relics "and to consecrate the beautiful temple which she had built outside the northern gate of the city." (105) On the day after the translation of relics to Eudocia's church, Cyril installed further relics of St. Stephen in Melania's church. (106) E. D. Hunt has shown that Bishop Juvenal of Jerusalem was instrumental in securing Eudocia's patronage and was perhaps responsible for building the new shrine. (107) John Rufus goes on to explain that Peter the Iberian had brought the relics of the martyrs of Persia and the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste with him to Jerusalem and that Cyril of Alexandria had "acceded to the requests of the holy Melania to celebrate the interment of [those martyrs] in the smaller temple on the Mt. of Olives, which had been splendidly restored by the Empress Eudocia, as is commemorated by an inscription on one of the walls there." (108) These complex accounts of the various installations of the relics of St. Stephen do not need to be teased out here; the point is that the relics of the earliest Christian saint were being deployed to mark the landscape as both Christian and holy. (109)

Within two or three years after her first pilgrimage, Eudocia made a second journey to Jerusalem where she lived for the remainder of her life. She had left the court in Constantinople in disgrace but retained her imperial prestige and purse. In his account of her death Cyril of Scythopolis was unable to count the number of foundations she made between her return ca. 442 and her death in 460. (110) She transformed Jerusalem and its environs, enlarging the city walls and building churches, monasteries, and hospices, and provided land and funding for numerous desert communities. (111) Eudocia's most significant foundation was the great church of St. Stephen. While it was not clear how involved she had been in the building of the original shrine, during her residence in Jerusalem she funded an extensive rebuilding program, erecting a complex that was to rival that of the Holy Sepulchre. (112) Eudocia's building program does not appear to have been focused on specific biblical sites. Her many churches dotted about Jerusalem and its environs helped create Christian places as part of a larger process of Christianizing the land.

There were also a number of churches built by other patrons in the environs of Jerusalem after 325. Some of these foundations are only mentioned in passing: a woman named Icelia built a shrine at the site identified as the resting place of Mary on the road to Bethlehem; (113) a "virtuous lady" named Flavia founded a church dedicated to the martyr Julian. (114) There was a small church at the site of the feeding of the multitude by the end of the fourth century that a larger church with a mosaic floor replaced in the fifth century. (115) The Patriarch Juvenal built a church of the Tomb of the Virgin in the mid-fifth century. (116) It is not clear if there were monasteries in the holy places prior to Helena's pilgrimage, but a variety of communities and cells began to appear very soon after. (117) There were monks and virgins among the congregations listening to Cyril of Jerusalem's Catechetical Lectures in the 350S. (118) A group of virgins traveled from Alexandria to Jerusalem and Bethlehem in the mid-fourth century, and during their time in the holy places they stayed with "sister virgins." (119) The earliest named founder on the Mt. of Olives was Innocentius, who established a shrine for the relics of John the Baptist with an oratory. (120) He attracted followers including Palladius in the 370s. (121) Also in the 370s, Melania the Elder "built a monastery in Jerusalem and lived there twenty-seven years heading a company of fifty virgins," and her friend Rufinus led a linked community of monks. (122) These two communities, located on the Mt. of Olives, would have consisted of a complex of buildings for housing the nuns and monks, for accommodating their many illustrious visitors, and for the many servants who would have been necessary to allow such an institution to function properly. Posidonius had established a monastery at the Field of Shepherds by 380 when John Cassian and Germanus stayed there. (123) In the late fourth to early fifth centuries there was another women's community on the Mt. of Olives headed by a woman named Euphemia; the actress-saint Pelagia lived there in a private cell. (124) Melania the Younger's foundations on the Mt. of Olives were monastic, and the churches she established were intended to serve her private devotions and those of her communities. Around 454 the Roman matron Flavia founded a monastery at Gethsemane. (125) On Mt. Sion, Passarion established a monastery ca. 400 for monks who would serve the Sion church. In the area around the Tower of David, Peter the Iberian established a monastery with hospices for pilgrims and the poor, and Bassa founded a shrine to St. Menas, with two attached monasteries (male and female). (126) There were also many cells and monasteries scattered on Mt. Sion, and their monks and priests provided services to churches and pilgrims. (127) Jerome describes the elaborate complex of buildings of Paula's community at Bethlehem, which provided for three companies of virgins, his own monastery for men, areas for work an oratory, guesthouses, and cells. (128) It is not clear if there was a church within the community; Jerome does not mention one, but Paula describes the simple church she attends, which cannot have been the basilica of the Nativity. (129) During the fourth and early fifth centuries monastics and pilgrims colonized the areas around the holy sites that had been identified and sacralized with churches, shrines, and relics.

The identification of holy places had provided proofs of Christian history and had made available those holy places as objects of devotion. In constructing their churches and martyria in the holy places and on the very sites of holy events the pilgrims and monastics were anchoring the Bible to the landscape, reinforcing its truths. The places of Palestine that had witnessed holy events had themselves been hallowed. The construction of churches on those sites marked them and separated them from profane space. The enclosure and addition of relics enhanced the holiness of such places and, by extension, of the land itself. Melania's martyria marked the ground made holy by the feet of Christ, and her churches imposed an added holiness through the overlaying of the bones of saints. The expanding cluster of buildings on the Mt. of Olives during the fourth and fifth centuries marked out clearly for the eyes of visitors and residents one of the most important sites for Christian faith. Eudocia built her churches not to mark particular scriptural spots but as part of a broader claim on the landscape itself. Her monuments, positioned at places to which the faithful would travel, communicated signs of place in the same way as a map articulates place.

While churches encompassed the most holy ground of Christianity and housed its relics, the structural definition of the "holy land" was also achieved through the building of monasteries and hospices. Morris has described the monastic settlement of Palestine as a process of colonization, a process that does not simply claim a land but (re)defines it politically, economically, and spiritually. (130) In addition to the sites historically and architecturally identified with scriptural events, holy men began to establish monastic laurae and coenobia in the deserts surrounding biblical towns. (131) As early as the 330s there were monasteries in the Judean desert, and in the early years of the fifth century, Euthymius (377-473) founded his monasteries (with some financial help from Eudocia). (132) Patrich comments that Judean desert monasticism only began to flourish under Sabas (439-532), and counts six laurae and eight coenobia by ca. 480 with approximately 1000-1500 monks and anchorites. (133)

There were also monastic settlements scattered in other parts of Palestine and Sinai. Coenobia with churches and pilgrim accommodations were founded at sites such as Kathisma (where the Holy Family had stopped on the journey to Egypt), in the Jericho valley, and on the Jordan (dedicated to John the Baptist). (134) Abbot Romanus founded a "great and beautiful monastery" at Eleutheropolis in the 450s on land provided by Eudocia. (135) Egeria was impressed by the many monastic communities scattered around the towns and holy places she visited. In the Sinai, monks had settled around sites identified with the "Books of holy Moses." (136) At Edessa Egeria saw "many martyria" of local saints with attached monks' cells while other monks lived in seclusion outside the city. (137) The festival of the (otherwise unknown) martyr, Helpidius, celebrated at Charra (south of Edessa) drew "all the monks of Mesopotamia" to the town where they also visited the house of Abraham. (138) At Jacob's Well (near Carrae) there was a church with attached monks' cells. (139) Later in her journey she visited St. Thecla's shrine in Seleucia where "innumerable cells for men and women" surrounded the church. (140) Egeria's association of monastic settlements with the holy places witnesses the roles of monks in overlaying biblical and Christian history onto the landscape of Palestine. The desert monks themselves had come to Palestine as pilgrims. They identified the holy places and consecrated the landscape, marking them with churches, monasteries, and the shrines of their own holy dead. In these places the monastics also acted as human markers of the holy on the landscape as they clustered about the shrines, at the same time adding to the sacrality of the land through their saintly lives and burials. As part of this process the monks themselves became objects of pilgrimage. (141)

Part of any process of claiming and defining a land is mapping its places, overlaying any existing markings with new cultural and topographical signs. In addition to the institutional claiming of the land, the Christian pilgrims also bound together their many holy places through the roads and paths they traveled. (142) In their journeys to, from, and between the holy places they used the existing road systems, recharting them as pilgrim roads. Paths between the monasteries and their outlying cells likewise became part of a filigreed map drawn onto the land.

III. RITUAL CARTOGRAPHY: THE LITURGY OF THE HOLY PLACES

The legalisation of Christianity had enabled its public liturgical expression. The liturgy of Jerusalem and some of the holy sites in other parts of Palestine was based in the originating historical events that had made them holy. The historical reality of an event was evoked through bringing it into the present and ritually articulating it. In many cases events were not simply memorialized or reenacted; rather, an event was perceived to take place afresh by virtue of its ritualization--every Good Friday the Crucifixion took place at Golgotha. Jonathan Z. Smith most clearly explains these processes: the "locative specificity" of Jerusalem gave rise to its liturgy, the events having sacralized the places that the churches then marked and enclosed; the liturgical cycle added a "temporal dimension to the locative experience." (143) Liturgy can be place-specific (that is, take place at a mapped holy place) or processional (that is, follow a mapped route between holy places, moving within and between shrines and churches). Processions were, in effect, liturgical pilgrimages that retraced biblical events and journeys. The basilica-style churches built in many of the holy places were necessary both to accommodate large congregations and the crowds of pilgrims, and to allow for the congregations to process as the liturgy required. A number of texts relate for us some of these understandings of the liturgy and the ways in which it was used to map the holy places.

During the episcopate of Cyril of Jerusalem, a significant moment in the liturgical development of the Jerusalem church took place. (144) Cyril drew upon the "locative specificity" of Jerusalem both as proof of the truths of the faith and as foundational for the liturgy. In his Catechetical Lectures he points to the physical places of Golgotha and the Sepulchre as evidence. The presence of Christ and the key moments of his salvific life had taken place in Jerusalem and hence made the city the most significant place in the "holy land." (145) While the liturgy of the Jerusalem churches was probably a fusion of elements brought to the city by pilgrim visitors and settlers, (146) it was at a considerably advanced stage by Cyril's death and, given his intense focus on the centrality of the Holy Sepulchre Church to the faith and the liturgy, his contribution must have been significant. (147) The ritual worship developed in Jerusalem was stational, that is, it took place at sites linked historically to Christ's life and passion. (148) On a daily basis Christians in Jerusalem ritually reenacted those events, charting them onto the streets and places of the city. Cyril's Lectures do not describe the liturgy, but they do give some insights into ritual practice. He delivered his lectures in the basilica of the Holy Sepulchre Church to a mixed audience of catechumens and baptized Christians. Catechumens could not enter the Anastasis and probably could not see the Sepulchre or Golgotha chapel from the basilica. (149) It seems likely that worshippers entered the Anastasis at the same place as they do today and that catechumens and pagans were not prevented from entering. Rather, the exclusion of catechumens from the Anastasis was a ritual separation that emphasized both the sacrality of the holy places and the cultural significance of baptism. Likewise, most of the liturgy was public in the form of processions, and of prayers, blessings, and vigils at holy sites and in the churches; however, the eucharistic element of the liturgy (performed in the Anastasis in the case of the Sepulchre church) was not open to the unbaptized. The ritual claiming of the holy places overlaid their existing historical meanings, sacralized the ground, and charted a hierarchy of ritual spaces with the most holy sites and most sacred liturgical moments open only to baptized Christians.

The principal evidence for the liturgy of Jerusalem during the fourth and fifth centuries comes from two main sources: the first is the final section of Egeria's account, and the second is the Armenian Lectionary (which provides evidence for developments in the liturgy from the mid-fifth to mid-eleventh centuries). (150) Through his study of these sources Baldovin observes that the Jerusalem liturgy of the period flowed geographically around and between the bishop and the holy places. This underlines Cyril's promotion of the liturgical prominence of Jerusalem and suggests that the bishop's successors continued the ritual emphasis of the city and its sacred geography.

We have considerable knowledge of the liturgy of Jerusalem and the holy places in the late fourth century through Egeria's legacy. She relates two different types of ritualization at the holy places: the prayers, readings, and psalms that marked pilgrims' experiences at the biblical sites, and the elaborate stational liturgy of Jerusalem. In the first part of what survives of Egeria's text, she repeatedly explains that when she arrived at a site that had been identified as biblical, the local monks or clergy would read a passage from the Bible relevant to the place and lead the pilgrims in prayers and psalms "as was customary to do in the holy places." (151) Though the sites had been identified and often marked with churches or shrines prior to the arrival of the pilgrims, the continual repetition and reaffirmation of the original events repeated and sustained the mapping processes. Rather more detailed is Egeria's description of the Jerusalem liturgy, at which she marvels for, among other things, its "locative specificity." Several times she comments on readings and prayers that are "suitable to this day and to the place." (152) As with her descriptions of the biblical sites, Egeria's representation of the liturgy has an immediacy that allows her audience to follow her as she traces the ritual map of the holy city. In Egeria's day, while Christians had identified many major sites in Jerusalem, they had not architecturally marked and enclosed all of them; for example, there was no church at the site of the Ascension until later in the fourth century. The liturgy that Egeria describes for the Great Week (Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday) was exhaustive and demanding. Largely centered on the Anastasis, the services also took place in the Sion church on the other side of the city, at the Eleona and the Imbomon on the Mt. of Olives, in the Gethsemane church, and at the Lazarium in Bethany. This complex liturgy required the congregations to journey across and around the city each day of the week as they traced the last days of Jesus' life, his death, and Resurrection. On Palm Sunday, after the suitable hymns, prayers, and readings at the Eleona and Imbomon, the congregation walked down the hill to the Gethsemane church: "Everyone is holding branches, some of palms and others of olives, and they go along with the bishop in emulation of those who once followed the Lord." (153) During Holy Thursday evening they congregate at the Eleona and hear Gospel readings concerning Jesus' teachings in "the very cave on the very same day. (154) While the ritual recognition and recreation of sacred events was implicit in the liturgy of the holy places, because the nature of the events in Jerusalem was at the heart of Christian belief, the liturgy of the holy city had a greater potential to evoke the sacred. The liturgy of Jerusalem followed a temporal order of events with apparently little concern for the number of liturgical locations or the distances the participants would cover. Congregations expressed faith and piety but, more importantly here, they participated in the sacralization of the whole city as they processed around the holy places and back and forth across the city tracing the salvific footsteps of Christ and consolidating the Christian map of the "holy land."

The public liturgy of Egeria's experience was quite different from the liturgical observances of the monastic communities, and we receive occasional brief glimpses into their ritual lives. In her letter to Marcella, Paula assures her that, in the Church of the Nativity, there are only psalms and silence, and explains that every nation represented amongst the religious in the town has its own choir. (155) In their communal devotions in the Bethlehem cave, they would "sing perpetually, weep often, pray ceaselessly." While the pilgrimage Paula hoped they would make together would have traced devotedly the holy places, their communal life would focus on the one place and mark it ceaselessly with their prayers and tears. Jerome provides a little more detail concerning the liturgical life of Paula's community. They met to chant the psalms and pray six times each day, and on Sundays they went together to the church alongside their convent. (156)

While Paula had established her foundations at the place of Jesus entry to the world, Melania's communities were on the Mt. of Olives, near to the place where he had last stood. According to Gerontius, Melania had founded three separate communities. In her convent for women, members of the community chanted the psalms at the monastic hours, celebrated the Eucharist twice a week, and on Sundays and feast days they gave "themselves to uninterrupted psalmody." (157) She established the monastery for men so that the monks might perform the laus perennis "at the place of the Ascension of the Lord and in the grotto where the Saviour talked with his holy disciples about the end of time." (158) She established a third community so that it could perform the unceasing psalmody in a small martyrion she built in the "place in which the feet of the Lord stood." (159) Melania built her communities on holy ground, and gave the nuns and monks the task of marking and honoring those places with continual prayers and psalmody. The Life of Peter the Iberian reveals a rare moment in the monastic ritual of Melania's communities: John Rufus mentions that Peter received his monastic habit from Melania and Gerontius in the Anastasis, which suggests that the consecration of a monk was an important event that also ritually linked the monasteries on the Mt. of Olives with the central church of the city. (160) The liturgies of Jerusalem and the holy places functioned to acknowledge their identifications, taking place within and around the architectural markers and enhancing their sacrality. Processions were pilgrimages that followed holy footsteps and repeatedly (re)mapped holy events onto the landscape.

IV. CONCLUSION

During the fourth and fifth centuries, great numbers of pilgrims journeyed to the places believed to have been "where the Lord's feet once stood" and which bore evidence of "the still fresh traces of His birth, His cross, and His passion." (161) In all the holy places they saw those sites and traces, and, increasingly, they found markers of Christian appropriation and habitation. This paper has examined the processes through which Christians laid claim to the holy places of Palestine in this period. Pilgrims, clerics, and religious utilized Old and New Testament history to reconstruct the land as topographically Christian, manipulating knowledge of the physical and historical geography of the land and rhetorically mediating their view of the world through their texts and buildings. Early pilgrims had found Palestine almost unmarked by any physical Christian signs and un-inscribed with Christian history. The locations of biblical events and the contours of the biblical landscape existed in people's minds before they were transplanted onto the physical geography of Palestine. While faith, the evidence of history, and the Bible constructed the holy places in the landscape of the "holy land," the most striking change made to the physical sites was the establishment of Christian settlements and buildings. Churches, shrines, monasteries, and accommodations for pilgrims clustered about places that were believed to have been touched by the divine or the saints.

Pilgrim accounts, saints" vitae, liturgy, and, most importantly, the Bible formed part of the sacralization process of the holy places as pilgrims and monks constructed an empirical reality of their history. A series of specific cultural discourses invented the sacredness of the holy places, and the imagined world of the Bible shaped the physical places that were believed to have been inhabited by Jesus, the prophets, and the saints who had acted out their witness to the faith. The holy places were readily marked as such by the building of churches and shrines that became a tangible part of the reality of the sacredness of the ground upon which they stood, the sacred consecrating its physical surrounds. Monasteries and hospices further extended the spatial definition of the holy places, and by virtue of their contiguity with the holy and of the burials of their saints acquired holy status. The Christian maps of the "holy land" of the fourth and fifth centuries were mental, textual, architectural, and ritual. The physical markers on the landscape were shrines, basilicas, and monasteries that encompassed the holy sites with stone and enclosed spaces, which, by virtue of their contiguity with the holy, became themselves holy.

The networks and building programs of the Christian monks and pilgrims of the fourth and fifth centuries invented the sacred geography of the "holy land." Christians from before the time of St. Helena revealed and mapped the places that had been in contact with the holy. They discovered the physical sites touched by Jesus and his Apostles and anchored them in Christian textual exegesis as well as in the soil of the "holy land," not simply building churches and monastic settlements but collecting relics and amplifying the holiness of the sites by overlaying them with holy bones. While the ground was perceived to have been made holy by divine contact, it was the perceptions of the fourth--and fifth-century Christians that conferred sacrality on their holy places. Helena and the pilgrims who followed her example created sacred places through their pilgrim paths and the construction of ritual spaces. The building of shrines, churches, and monasteries was undertaken by many pious donors and pilgrims who contributed substantially to the spatial demarcation of the holy sites and the invention of the "holy land."

(1.) Jerome Epistle 108.10, in Patrologia Cursus Completus Series Latina, vol. 22 (hereafter PL), ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris: Garnier, 1844-93).

(2.) According to Colin Morris, The Sepulchre of Christ and the Medieval West, from the Beginning to 1600 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 50, the term Holy Land was current by the mid-fifth century. In this essay "holy land" is used to denote the idea as well as the physical geography of Palestine of the fourth and fifth centuries.

(3.) J. B. Harley, "Maps, Knowledge and Power," in The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments, ed. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 278.

(4.) R. J. Zvi Werblowski, "Introduction: Mindscape and Landscape," in Sacred Space: Shrine, City, Land, ed. Benjamin Z. Kedar and R. J. Zvi Werblowski (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 10: "on our mental as well as physical pilgrimages we traverse territory transformed into maps."

(5.) To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 79.

(6.) "Loca Sancta: The Organisation of Sacred Topography in late Antiquity," in The Blessings of Pilgrimage, ed. Robert Ousterhout (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 20.

(7.) "Landscape as Cartography in Early Christian Pilgrim Narratives," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64:1 (1996): 119-43; "Pilgrims to the Land: Early Pilgrim Perceptions of the Galilee," in Galilee through the Centuries: Confluence of Cultures (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1999), 345-57.

(8.) Leyerle, "Pilgrims to the Land," 346-53.

(9.) Christians and the Holy Places: The Myth of Jewish-Christian Origins (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 308-9.

(10.) "The Itinerarium Burdigalense, Politics and Salvation in the Geography of Constantine's Empire," Journal of Roman Studies 90 (2000): 181-95.

(11.) Remains of the Jews: The Holy Land and Christian Empire in Late Antiquity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 138 and 26. Jacobs, 36, also explains Eusebius's "textual mapping of contemporary Jews" as a means of absorbing Jewish history into Christian knowledge and identity. See also Jacobs, "The Remains of the Jew: Imperial Christian Identity in the Late Antique Holy Land," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33 (2003): 23-45.

(12.) Encountering the Sacred: The Debate on Christian Pilgrimage in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

(13.) The Urban Character of Christian Worship: The Origins, Development, and Meaning of Stational Liturgy (Rome: Pont. Institutum Studiorum Orientalium, 1987).

(14.) "The Baptistery of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and the Politics of Sacred Landscape," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 46 (1992): 323.

(15.) "Promoting Jerusalem: Cyril and the True Cross," in Portraits of Spiritual Authority: Religious Power in Early Christianity, Byzantium, and the Christian Orient, ed. Jan Willem Drijvers and John W. Watt (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 79-95; Drijvers, Cyril of Jerusalem: Bishop and City (Leiden: Brill, 2004).

(16.) For a detailed discussion of these processes, see Robert L. Wilken, The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought (Newhaven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), chap. 5, 6, 8. See also Jacobs, Remains of the Jews.

(17.) See David Frankfurter, "Introduction: Approaches to Coptic Pilgrimage," in Pilgrimage and Holy Space in Late Antique Egypt (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 13-18, for a general discussion of geographical movement as ritual process.

(18.) Bruno David and Meredith Wilson, ed., Inscribed Landscapes: Marking and Making Place (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002), 5-6.

(19.) Morris, Sepulchre of Christ, 39.

(20.) A. Franceschini and R. Weber, ed., Itinerarium Egeriae, in Itineraria et Alia Geographica, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina (Turnholt: Brepols, 1965), 17.1 and 17.2: orationis gratia me tenderam.

(21.) Jerome Epistle to Eustochium 108.7, in PL: sancta loca videre.

(22.) Wilken, Land Called Holy, 91-93.

(23.) MacCormack, "Loca Sancta," 18.

(24.) To Take Place, 89.

(25.) Pierre Maraval, "The Earliest Phase of Christian Pilgrimage in the Near East (before the 7th century)," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 56 (2002): 64.

(26.) R. A. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 140-41.

(27.) Eusebius of Caesarea, Eusebius: The Church History, Paul L. Maier (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Kregel, 1999), 4.26; and Taylor, Christians and the Holy Places, 310-11.

(28.) Maier, Eusebius: The Church History, 6.11.2; and see Taylor, Christians and the Holy Places, 310-12.

(29.) Praef in lib. Paralip., quoted in Taylor, Christians and the Holy Places, 311.

(30.) Demonstration of the Gospel 6.18.22, trans. W. J. Ferrar, http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/eusebius_de_08_book6.htm, visited June 11, 2006. It is not clear if the people who performed devotions in these places were pilgrims or locals; Maraval, "Earliest Phase," 66.

(31.) Maraval, "Earliest Phase," comments that it "can perhaps be dated from as early as the 290s and in any case before 311": 66.

(32.) Elsner, "The Itinerarium Burdigalense," 191. Hagith S. Sivan, "Pilgrimage, Monasticism, and the Emergence of Christian Palestine in the 4th Century," in Ousterhout, Blessings of Pilgrimage, 57.

(33.) E. D. Hunt, "Were There Christian Pilgrims before Constantine?," in Pilgrimage Explored, ed. J. Stopford (York, U.K.: York Medieval, 1999), 34; Joan E. Taylor, ed., The Onomasticon by Eusebius of Caesarea, trans. G. S. P. Freeman-Grenville (Jerusalem: Carta, 2003).

(34.) Ibid., 74.16-18.

(35.) Ibid., Preface.

(36.) D. E. Groh, "The Onomasticon of Eusebius and the Rise of Christian Palestine," Studia Patristica 18:1 (1989): 23-31; Elsner, "The Itinerarium Burdigalense," 191.

(37.) Maraval, "Earliest Phase," 66.

(38.) Maier, Eusebius: The Church History, 7.19. The Christians were probably not of Jewish origins.

(39.) Annabel Jane Wharton, Refiguring the Post Classical City: Dura Europos, Jerash, Jerusalem and Ravenna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 183, n. 82.

(40.) Averil Cameron and Stuart G. Hall, trans., Eusebius' Life of Constantine (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), 3.26.

(41.) Ibid., 3.28.

(42.) Ibid., 3.33.

(43.) Ibid. While many scholars regard Constantine as the instigator of the recovery of the holy places and the revisioning of the topography of Jerusalem (see, for example, Maraval, "Earliest Phase," 66-67; Taylor, Christians and the Holy Places, 329-30), Bitton-Ashkelony, Encountering the Sacred, 23-24, reminds us that Christian consciousness of holy places sprang from rather more complex processes than are made evident in Eusebius's tribute to the emperor's achievements.

(44.) Letter of Constantine to Macarius, in Life of Constantine, trans. Cameron and Hall, 3.30-31.

(45.) Cameron and Hall, trans., Life of Constantine, 3.42. See Jan Willem Drijvers, Helena Augusta: The Mother of Constantine the Great and the Legend of Her Finding of the True Cross (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 55-72; See E. D. Hunt, Holy Land Pilgrimage in the Later Roman Empire, AD 312-460 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982, reprint 1998), 28-49, for important analyses of Helena's pilgrimage and the subsequent legends.

(46.) Cameron and Hall, trans., Life of Constantine, 3.42.

(47.) Ibid., 3.44-45.

(48.) Many fine works cover the complex textual construction of the inventio crucis: see among others Smith, To Take Place, 82; Drijvers, Helena Augusta; Hunt, Holy Land Pilgrimage.

(49.) Hunt, Holy Land Pilgrimage, 38-39; Edward Yarnold, trans., Cyril of Jerusalem (London: Routledge, 2000), Catechesis 10.19.

(50.) "Letter to Constantius," in Yarnold, Cyril of Jerusalem, chap. 3.

(51.) P. G. Walsh, trans., Letters of St. Paulinus of Nola (London: Longmans, Green, 1967), Letter 31.4.

(52.) Paulinus Letter 31.4.

(53.) Ibid., 31.5.

(54.) Ibid.

(55.) Pierre Maraval, "The Bible as a Guide for Early Christian Pilgrims to the Holy Land," in The Bible in Greek Christian Antiquity, ed. Paul M. Blowers (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 375-88; Wilkinson, "Jewish Holy Places and the Origin of Christian Pilgrimage," in Ousterhout, Blessings of Pilgrimage, 49-50; Gunter Stemberger, Jews and Christians in the Holy Land: Palestine in the Fourth Century (Edinburgh: T and T Clark, 2000), 94.

(56.) P. Geyer and O. Cuntz, ed., Itinerarium Burdigalense, in Itineraria et Alia Geographica, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina (Turnhout: Brepols, 1965), 175:1-26. Blake Leyerle, "Landscape as Cartography," 123, points out that itineraries such as this one bear close relationships with medieval and early modern strip maps. See Laurie Douglass, "A New Look at the Itinerarium Burdigalense," Journal of Early Christian Studies 4:3 (1996): 313-33; and Susan Weingarton, "Was the Pilgrim from Bordeaux a Woman? A Reply to Laurie Douglass," Journal of Early Christian Studies 7:2 (1999): 291-97, for discussion concerning the gender of the Pilgrim.

(57.) Itinerarium Burdigalense, chap. 594.1, and 594.7.

(58.) See Leyerle, "Landscape as Cartography," 125-26; and Jacobs, Remains of the Jews, 109-17 for varying interpretations of the Pilgrim's "silences."

(59.) Catechesis 4.13.

(60.) Yarnold, Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechesis 10.19.

(61.) Franceschini and Weber, ed., Itinerarium Egeriae, 175.37-90. Egeria, a (possibly) Spanish (possibly) religious woman, made an extended pilgrimage around the biblical places in 381-84 (dates according to John Wilkinson, Egeria's Travels, 3rd ed. (Warminster, U.K.: Aris and Phillips, 1999), 170-71; and P. Devos, "La Date du Voyage d'Egerie," Analecta Bollandiana 85 (1967): 178. See Hagith Sivan, "Who was Egeria? Piety and Pilgrimage in the Age of Gratian," The Harvard Theological Review 81:1 (1988): 59-72. Egeria's account survives in a single, fragmentary document that covers the last months of her travels and part of her description of the liturgy of Jerusalem.

(62.) Sivan, "Pilgrimage, Monasticism," emphasizes the work of local monks in allocating geographical specificity to biblical events.

(63.) Franceschini and Weber, ed., Itinerarium Egeriae 2.3.

(64.) Ibid., 2.2.

(65.) Ibid., 10.7.

(66.) Ibid., 5.12 and 7.2: "the clergy and monks showed us every place related to the Scriptures as I always requested." See Maraval, "The Bible as Guide." Groh, "The Onomasticon of Eusebius," 23, has suggested that Egeria may have carried a Latin translation of the Onomasticon though no evidence is cited to support this, while Jacobs, Remains of the Jews, 74, n. 70, mentions that Jerome did not translate the Onomasticon into Latin till after 385.

(67.) Franceschini and Weber, ed., Itinerarium Egeriae 5.8.

(68.) Paula Epistle to Marcella 46.1-12, in PL. The authorship of this letter is unclear. Most scholars accept that the letter was written by Jerome while some consider that it was indeed written by Paula (as the manuscript tradition suggests). See Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua (+203) to Margeurite Porete (+1310) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 17, and 286, n. 70, for a strong argument in favor of Paula's authorship. Also see Mary Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400-1600 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), 17; and Stemberger, Jews and Christians, 101. The style of parts of this letter does resemble the exegetical style of Jerome, though as Paula worked with Jerome in his Vulgate translation, she may have been quite capable of such exegesis. Scholarly opinion has accepted the letters assigned to Marcella in the manuscript tradition as having been produced by her, and it seems equally possible that Paula might also have written the letters. There are also elements of Epistle 46 written in an emotive style and promising mystical experience that do not resemble Jerome's usual laconic references to his own pilgrimage experiences. It seems therefore that there are very good reasons for accepting that Paula wrote the letter.

(69.) Jerome Epistle to Eustochium 108.7-14. Paula wrote her letter shortly after they settled in Bethlehem, and hence the events in Jerome's account predated it. Paula was writing from the vantage point of her recent experiences of the holy places (ca. 385), whilst Jerome was writing many years after the events he recounts. Paula died in 404 and Jerome wrote this second letter shortly after.

(70.) Paula Epistle to Marcella 46.3, in PL.

(71.) Ibid., 46.9.

(72.) Ibid., 46.10.

(73.) Ibid., 46.9.

(74.) Jerome Epistle to Eustochium 108.10. See Ora Limor, "Reading Sacred Space: Egeria, Paula, and the Christian Holy Land," in De Sion exibit lex et verbum domini de Hierusalem, ed. Yitzhak Hen (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), 1-15.

(75.) Jerome Epistle to Eustochium 108.9.

(76.) Ibid., 108.10.

(77.) Jerome Epistle to Paulinus 58.2-5, in PL.

(78.) Hillel Isaac Newman, "Between Jerusalem and Bethlehem: Jerome and the Holy Palestine," in Sanctity of Time and Space in Tradition and Modernity, ed. A. Houtman and others (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 215-27; Bitton-Ashkelony, Encountering the Sacred, 85-97.

(79.) Jerome Epistle to Dardanus 129.4, quoted in Jerusalem Pilgrims before the Crusade, ed. and trans. John Wilkinson (Warminster, U.K.: Aris and Phillips, 2002), 96.

(80.) Drijvers, Helena Augusta, 66, n. 51; Maraval, "Earliest Phase," 66; John F. Baldovin, The Urban Character of Christian Worship, 46.

(81.) Paula Epistle to Marcella 46.12.

(82.) Cameron and Hall, trans., Life of Constantine, 3.33.1.

(83.) "On Christ's Sepulchre," In Praise of Constantine: A Historical Study and New Translation of Eusebius" Tricennial Orations, trans. H. A. Drake (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 127.

(84.) Maraval, "Earliest Phase," 67, points to the links between the key moments of Christ's earthly life (his birth, death and Resurrection) as recently formulated in the Nicene Creed and the Constantinian churches that marked those events.

(85.) Cameron and Hall, trans., Life of Constantine, 3.41.1, and 3.43.1-3. Eusebius located the Ascension at the Eleona. By the time Egeria arrived in Jerusalem, a separate site further up the Mt. of Olives had been identified as the place of the Ascension. Baldovin, Urban Character, 51.

(86.) Cameron and Hall, trans., Life of Constantine, 3.43.3.

(87.) Baldovin, Urban Character, 47.

(88.) Ibid, 48.

(89.) Franceschini and Weber, ed., Itinerarium Egeriae 35.4.

(90.) Baldovin, Urban Character, 52. Gregory T. Armstrong, "Imperial Church Building in the Holy Land in the Fourth Century," The Biblical Archaeologist 30 (1967): 100, suggests ca. 370 for this foundation, but, as Egeria does not mention a church at the Imbomon, Baldovin posits a date after her departure.

(91.) Franceschini and Weber, ed., Itinerarium Egeriae 36.1.

(92.) Baldovin, Urban Character, 50.

(93.) Maraval, "Earliest Phase," 67.

(94.) Baldovin, Urban Character, 49; P. W. L. Walker, Holy City, Holy Places? Christian Attitudes to Jerusalem and the Holy Land in the Fourth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 289. St. Stephen had been a deacon of the early Sion church (Acts 6:1).

(95.) Gerontius, The Life of Melania the Younger, trans. Elizabeth A. Clark (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edward Mellen, 1984), chap. 41.

(96.) Ibid., chap. 48.

(97.) Ibid.

(98.) Gerontius, Life of Melania the Younger, chap. 49, and 222, n. 25.

(99.) Ibid., chap. 57.

(100.) According to John Rufus the bishops of Jerusalem had encouraged settlement by offering land free to anyone who wished to build churches and monasteries in the city. From a paraphrase of The Life of Peter the Iberian by D. M. Lang, at http://www.angelfire.com/ga.Georgian/iber.html, visited September 10, 2003.

(101.) Gerontius, Life of Melania the Younger, chap. 58.

(102.) In the Life of Melania the Younger, chap. 58, Gerontius quotes Eudocia as calling Melania her "mother."

(103.) Ibid., chap. 58-59.

(104.) Ibid.

(105.) Rufus, The Life of Peter the Iberian. Eudocia's pilgrimages are discussed in detail in Hunt, Holy Land Pilgrimage, 228-48; and Kenneth G. Holum, Theodosian Empresses: Women and Imperial Dominion in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), chap. 6.

(106.) A. Kofsky, "Peter the Iberian: Pilgrimage, Monasticism and Ecclesiastical Politics in Byzantine Palestine," Liber Annuus 47 (1997): 212.

(107.) Hunt, Holy Land Pilgrimage, 231-32.

(108.) Rufus, Life of Peter the Iberian.

(109.) See Elizabeth A. Clark, "Claims on the Bones of Saint Stephen: The Partisans of Melania and Eudocia," in Ascetic Piety and Women's Faith: Essays on Late Ancient Christianity, ed. Elizabeth A. Clark (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edward Mellen, 1986), 97-111.

(110.) Cyril of Scythopolis, "Life of Our Father St Euthymius," in Lives of the Monks of Palestine, trans. R. M. Price (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian, 1991), 53.5.

(111.) See Hunt, Holy Land Pilgrimage, 238-43; and Derwas Chitty, The Desert a City (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966), chap. 5, for appraisals of Eudocia's works in the holy places.

(112.) Hunt, Holy Land Pilgrimage, 242.

(113.) Ibid., 241.

(114.) Cyril of Scythopolis, "Life of Our Father Theognius the Bishop," in Lives of the Monks of Palestine, 241.20.

(115.) Stemberger, Jews and Christians, 69.

(116.) Avi-Yonah, "The Economy of Byzantine Palestine," Israel Exploration Quarterly 8 (1958): 50.

(117.) Rufinus later claimed that she had associated with consecrated virgins, and E. D. Hunt comments that this was "not implausible": "The Itinerary of Egeria: Reliving the Bible in Fourth-century Palestine," in The Holy Land, Holy Lands, and Christian History, ed. R. N. Swanson (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell, 2000), 45, and n. 35.

(118.) Yarnold, Cyril of Jerusalem, Catecheses 4.24 and 12.33.

(119.) Athanasius of Alexandria, Second Letter to Virgins, chap. 1, in David Brakke, Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 292.

(120.) Joseph Patrich, Sabas, Leader of Palestinian Monasticism (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1995), 4.

(121.) Robert T. Meyer, trans., Palladius: The Lausiac History (London: Longmans, Green, 1965), 44.4; Chitty, Desert a City, 48-49.

(122.) Meyer, trans., Palladius, 46.5.

(123.) Stemberger, Jews and Christians, 116.

(124.) "Commentary," in Gerontius, Life of Melania the Younger, 116.

(125.) Patrich, Sabas, 5.

(126.) Cyril of Scythopolis, "Life of Euthymius," in Lives of the Monks of Palestine, 49.20. Patrich, Sabas, 5; Chitty, Desert a City, 87.

(127.) Patrich, Sabas, 5; Eucherius of Lyons, "Letter to Faustus," in Jerusalem Pilgrims, ed. Wilkinson, 94.

(128.) Jerome Epistle to Eustochium 108.14. Paula lived in Bethlehem for three years before she built her community. John Cassian was living in a monastery in Bethlehem in the early 380s though there is no evidence for any contacts between the two communities: Chitty, Desert a City, 52.

(129.) Paula Epistle to Marcella 46.11.

(130.) Morris, Sepulchre of Christ, 51; see also Jacobs, Remains of the Jews.

(131.) Morris, Sepulchre of Christ; Chitty, Desert a City; Patrich, Sabas; Yizhar Hirschfeld, The Judean Desert Monasteries in the Byzantine Period (New Haven, Corm.: Yale University Press, 1992).

(132.) Patrich, Sabas, 3; Hirschfeld, Judean Desert Monasteries, 12-13.

(133.) Patrich, Sabas, 8-10. See also Hirschfeld, Judean Desert Monasteries, chap.1, for survey of monastic building in the period.

(134.) Hirschfeld, Judean Desert Monasteries, 56.

(135.) Chitty, Desert a City, 92.

(136.) Franceschini and Weber, ed., Itinerarium Egeriae 1.1-5.10. Hunt, "The Itinerary of Egeria: Reliving the Bible in Fourth-century Palestine," in The Holy Land, ed. R. N. Swanson, 50, has commented that biblical sites were often "identified" in places with water sources and cultivable ground, that is, they were suitable for settlement.

(137.) Franceschini and Weber, ed., Itinerarium Egeriae 19.4.

(138.) Ibid., 20.5-6.

(139.) Ibid., 21.1-4.

(140.) Ibid., 23.2-6.

(141.) See Georgia Frank The Memory of the Eyes: Pilgrims to Living Saints in Christian Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Hirschfeld, Judean Desert Monasteries, 236.

(142.) John Binns, Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ: the Monasteries of Palestine, 314-631 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 81.

(143.) Smith, To Take Place, 86-90.

(144.) Drijvers, "Promoting Jerusalem," 79-80.

(145.) Cyril's political interest in promoting the see of Jerusalem was partly behind these claims; see Bitton-Ashkelony, Encountering the Sacred, 57-62; and see Drijvers, Cyril of Jerusalem, for detailed study of his career.

(146.) Ibid., 73.

(147.) Ibid., 73-74.

(148.) The stational liturgy is surveyed in Baldovin, Urban Character, chap. 1.

(149.) Georgia Frank, "'Taste and See': The Eucharist and the Eyes of Faith in the Fourth Century," Church History 70:4 (2001): 622-24. Eucherius of Lyons, "Letter to Faustus," writes that "beside [the basilica] and to the west one visits the sites of Golgotha and the Anastasis," in Jerusalem Pilgrims, ed. Wilkinson, 94. Wharton, Refiguring the Post Classical City, points out that it is not clear from archaeological evidence if there was direct access between the basilica and the Anastasis, 96.

(150.) Baldovin, Urban Character, 64-65.

(151.) See among others Franceschini and Weber, ed., Itinerarium Egeriae 3.6, 4.3, 19.2.

(152.) For example, ibid., 25.5, 43.5, 47.5.

(153.) Ibid., 31.4.

(154.) Ibid., 35.3.

(155.) Paula Epistle to Marcella 108.12, and 10.

(156.) Jerome Epistle to Eustochium 108.19. Jerome does not specify if this was the Church of the Nativity.

(157.) Gerontius, Life of Melania the Younger, chap. 47.

(158.) Ibid., chap. 49.

(159.) Ibid., chap. 57.

(160.) Kofsky, "Peter the Iberian," 211-12.

(161.) Jerome Epistle to Desiderius 47.2, in PL.

Julie Ann Smith is lecturer in History at the University of Sydney.