Abbot Daniel and Other Medieval Pilgrims

As occurred from western Europe, many medieval and early modern Pol­ish and Ukrainian travellers visited the Middle East. The very first were unnamed pilgrims to Palestine from “the Land of Rus'.” (The Slavonic Rus’ becomes in medieval Greek sources Rosia [later “Russia”], and “Ruthenia,” later Ukraine, in medieval Latin.) These pilgrims appear briefly about 1022 in the old Life of Saint Theodosius of Kyiv, about three decades after the formal conversion of Kyivan Rus' to eastern, or Byzantine (Greek) Chris­tianity in 987.

The first pilgrim whose name we know was St Varlaam of the Kyiv Lavra (monastery), who went to the Holy Land about 1062. But the first who left a record of his journey was the Igumen (or Abbot) Daniel of Chernihiv, who went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the early twelfth century, c. 1104-8 - shortly after the formal break between the Latin and Greek churches in 1054 (called in the West the “Eastern Schism”) and between the First Crusade (1096-99) and the Second Crusade (1147-50) to the Holy Land.

The Igumen Daniel visited Constantinople, Cyprus, and what is today Lebanon on his way to the Crusader states, which then controlled the Holy Land, and he left a detailed account - Puteshestvie igumena Daniila (Pilgrimage of Igumen Daniel) - about the Holy Land itself. He writes much about the religious shrines and places that he visited, but his work is notable for its lack of hostility towards his Latin Christian brethren. He seems to have been especially impressed by his hospitable reception by (the Crusader) King Baldwin of Jerusalem, who was trying to mend relations between eastern and western Christianity. The distinguished British Byzantinist Steven Runciman used Daniel's “very instructive” journal to support his theory that, even after the “Eastern Schism,” relations between the Latin (Catholic) west and the Greek (Orthodox) east really soured only after the Fourth Crusade (1202-4) and the Latin conquest and sack of Constantinople in 1204: “He was made equally welcome at Greek and Latin monasteries.

Modern Russian scholars stress King Baldwin's reception of Daniel, whom they see as a kind of semi-official representative of “the entire Rus­sian land,” not just of the Kyivan region or principality. They also often ignore his magnanimity towards the Latins, and emphasize his “patriotic” Russian sentiments. By contrast, historians of Ukrainian literature point out how Daniel's written Slavonic resembles modern Ukrainian, rather than Russian, and they interpret his “Land of Rus'” as primarily the cen­tral or original Rus' lands, predecessor of modern Ukraine. Moreover, they never refer to Kyivan Rus' as “Russia,” implying a separate polity and even culture from that later state and empire. And so, both Ukrainian and Rus­sian scholars claim Daniel, although he wrote in a Kyivan form of Slavonic.⁵

Among Ukrainian historians, for example, the assessment of Daniel's writings by Mykhailo Hrushevsky (1866-1934) is crucial. He mentions Daniel's work several times in the third volume of his great History of Ukraine-Rus’, which series has still not lost its scholarly value, and he de­votes several pages to it in the second volume of his Istoriia ukrainskoi Iiteratury (History of Ukrainian Literature). He notes that Daniel's journal is the only surviving pilgrim's account from early Kyivan Rus' literature and has proved extremely popular, surviving in numerous manuscripts, and was especially rich in descriptions of the Holy Places and apocryphal tales about Christ, the Virgin Mary, and other biblical topics. And so, he concludes, Daniel's writings were neither geographical nor historical, but primarily literary. This was clearest, he says, in Daniel's emotional descrip­tion of his first sight of Jerusalem and in his stirring accounts of baptisms in the Jordan River, the ceremony of the Holy Fire in Jerusalem, and his meetings with King Baldwin.⁶

Nevertheless, Daniel's pilgrim journal, which, more recent histori­ans agree, is very much a literary work,⁷ influenced later writers on and travellers to the Middle East, and even artistic depictions of that region.

Moreover, one pilgrim, probably a Kyivan, wrote a very vivid account of the capture of the Byzantine capital, preserved in an older version of the Novgorod Chronicle. This piece suggests how those tragic events were viewed in Kyivan Rus' and is of use to historians of the Byzantine Empire. Indeed, one Soviet scholar concluded that it formed an invaluable source for those events, together with the Old French account by Geoffrey of Villehardouin and the Greek chronicle of Niketas Choniates.⁹

Among Roman Catholic Poles, pilgrimages to the Holy Land began about 1200, although the earliest pilgrims left no surviving memoirs. The late medieval Polish historian Jan Dlugosz (1415-1480) claimed that in 1147 the prince of Mazovia, Boleslaw K^dzierzawy (the curly-haired), helped the German King Conrad III en route to the Second Crusade, although this may be much more legend than history. Dlugosz, who defended Polish rights on the Baltic against the claims of the Teutonic Order, also reported that in 1154 Henryk, prince of Sandomir, organized a pilgrimage or Crusade to the Holy Land, visited the Holy Sepulchre, and helped King Baldwin militarily, and there seems to be independent evidence for this. Indeed, shortly before that, plans had even been laid for the great preacher of the Second Crusade, Bernard of Clairvaux, to visit Poland and preach there.¹⁰ Thereafter, brief notices of other pilgrims appear in the sources, although throughout the Crusading period little is known about them, for in gen­eral Poles seem to have paid more attention to crusades against pagans in the Baltic area than those to the Holy Land. Later, however, one Mykola the Ruthenian of Cracow went east in 1330, and the pilgrim Jan Winko, in 1446 when he reached Jerusalem, seemingly converted to Islam. Winko remained in the Holy Land, but never completely broke off relations with Christians, in particular the Franciscans, who called him “the Turk.”¹¹