Charlemagne's Paladins - roleplaying in the 8th century

[Agemegos]

Here's a map of the routes the early crusades took: https://d1zqayhc1yz6oo.cloudfront.ne...32d2f8c490.gif

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Anders

I'm not so sure about traveling the Danube. Remember, the Slavs and Avars are pagans and may not take kindly to Christian pilgrims.

I think that's a misunderstanding. Pagans never hated Christians. Some pagans, by which I mean our ancestors, had the means and the opportunity to treat Christians like prey, the same way a wolf treats sheep as prey. So they did. But that wasn't because of hatred. It was about "hey, he has some silver which I could take from him, or hey, he has this cage-like structure filled with nubile chicks, which I could abduct and sell!"

Pilgrims who look like easy victims will be victimized by non-Abrahamics, when travelling through their lands. But pilgrims who travel in large groups, well armed or with well armed guards, and who are prepared to pay with silver for hospitality, will indeed get hospitality.

Another option is to not look particularly victimizable, and travel alone or in very small groups, and try to get hospitality for free, or pay with stories or a few hours of labour when you can't get it for free. But that requires knowing the local languages. You only risk getting enslaved if you're thought valuable as a slave (and mostly men are not worth enslaving at random - women, on the other hand, have intrinsic market value, for reasons that I hope are obvious).

Generally, though, my assumption would be that you want to reach the Mediterranean, by foot or by river, and then travel by ship to Jerusalem or at least some place where Moslems rule, because some of those might respect Christian pilgrims, and their lands will generally have more law & order than pagan lands. If at all possible you'd want to skip those.

[The Colonel]

Do we have any records kicking about of places which particularly served as travel hubs for pilgrims? I would expect there to have been some places along the pilgrim trail that were particularly used to them and had specific infrastructure ... although that might be a later period thing.

[Peter Knutsen]

How much of a thing was pilgrimage actually, in the 8th century, among Catholics?

[Anders]

There was apparently a refuge built for pilgrims to Rome so it can't have been that rare.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by The Colonel

Do we have any records kicking about of places which particularly served as travel hubs for pilgrims?

Yes, at least in later periods. For example, there was a hospice for visiting pilgrims in Jerusalem: probably several, but the one I'm thinking of was established by merchants from Amalfi in 1054. The Knights Hospitallers ran "hospitals" along the major pilgrim routes to shelter pilgrims. There were facilities at the pilgrim embarkation ports after the pilgrimage routes took to the sea.

I think I remember an account of some sort of accommodation for pilgrims being built in the Fourth Century by some pious Empress, but Im not sure it was still operating after the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem in the Seventh Century.