A piece of gold was exacted for permission to enter the Holy City; and at that time, when the value of the precious metals was infinitely higher than in the present day, few, if any, of the pilgrims on their arrival possessed sufficient to pay the cruel demand.
Thus, after having suffered toils unheard of--hunger, thirst, the parching influence of a burning sky, sickness, danger, and often robbery, and wounds; when the weary wanderer arrived at the very entrance of the city, with the bourn of all his long pilgrimage before him, the enthusiastic object of all his hopes in sight, the place of refuge and repose for which he had longed and prayed within his reach--unless he could pay the stipulated sum, he was driven by the barbarians from the gates, and was forced to tread back all his heavy way unfurnished with any means, and unsupported by any hope, or to die by the roadside of want, weariness, and despair.
The pilgrimages nevertheless continued with unremitting zeal; and the number of devotees increased greatly in the tenth and eleventh centuries. In the tenth, indeed, the custom of pilgrimage became almost universal, from a misinterpretation[80] of a prophecy in the Apocalypse. A general belief prevailed that at the end of the tenth century, the thousand years being concluded, the world was to be judged; and crowds of men and women, in the frantic hope of expiating their sins by the long and painful journey to the Holy Land, flocked from all parts of Europe towards Jerusalem.
Many of the more clear-sighted and sensible of the Christian prelates had from time to time attempted to dissuade the people from these dangerous and fatal pilgrimages; but the principle of bodily infliction being received as a mark of internal penitence and a means of obtaining absolution, had been so long inculcated by the church of Rome, that the current of popular opinion had received its impulse, and it was no longer possible to turn it from its course. No penance could be more painful or more consistent with the prejudices of the multitude, than a pilgrimage to the Holy Land; and thus the priests continued often to enforce the act, while the heads of the church themselves, as religion became corrupted, learned to see this sort of penitence in the same light as the people, and encouraged its execution. They found the great efficacy of external excitements in stimulating the populace to that superstitious obedience on which they were fast building up the authority of the Roman church, and probably also were not without a share in the bigoted enthusiasm which they taught. Thus in the tenth century the pilgrimages which fear lest the day of judgment should be approaching induced many to undertake in expiation of their sins, met but little opposition; while various meteoric phenomena, of a somewhat awful nature, earthquakes, hurricanes, &c., contributed to increase the general alarm.