The planning of some pilgrimage churches in Crusader Palestine

Abstract

Abstract Work began in 1979 on the compilation of a new corpus of all church buildings in the former Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. This paper takes one class of these, the pilgrimage church, and investigates the effect of site and function on the planning of buildings required to meet the needs both of visiting pilgrims and of resident religious communities unwilling to suffer disruption of their rituals. The biblical associations of the holy places, frequently with natural features of the landscape, ensured a variety peculiar to the region. Accordingly, the pilgrimage churches of Crusader Palestine exhibit much greater differences than those in the West, where funeral monuments and movable relics were the customary objects of veneration.