WHERE WAS THE HOLY LAND?

efore the late eleventh century, the idea that the sacred sites in the East could be damaged in some way by the presence of those who belonged to different religious groups was not widespread. Pilgrims made transitory use of the space and do not appear to have felt that adherents of other faiths who also visited the site somehow harmed its spiritual function. However, the advent of the crusading age was accompanied by a change in the way in which Western Christendom thought about holy places. Suddenly, the use of such sites by Jews and Muslims was no longer appropriate. A new image of the East emerged in the imagination of the West, one in which the sacred sites had always, by divine right, belonged to Christendom. In line with this novel concept of the Holy Land, shared use of such spaces was increasingly regarded as harmful to their religious potential. We see, for instance, that in four