Succeeding years witnessed similar astonishing pilgrimages—in 1489, to the
“black Mother of God” in Altötting; in 1492, to the “Holy Blood” at
Sternberg; in the same year, to the “pitiful Bone” at Dornach; in 1499, to
the picture of the Blessed Virgin at Grimmenthal; in 1500, to the head of
St. Anna at Düren; and in 1519, to the “Beautiful Mary” at Regensburg.
Apart altogether from these sporadic movements, the last decades of the
fifteenth century were pre-eminently a time of pilgrimages. German princes
and wealthy merchants made pilgrimages to the Holy Land, visited the
sacred places there, and returned with numerous relics, which they stored
in favourite churches. Frederick the Wise, the Elector of Saxony, to be
known afterwards as the protector of Luther, made such a pilgrimage, and
placed the relics he had acquired in the Castle Church (the Church of All
Saints) in Wittenberg. He became an assiduous collector of relics, and had
commissioners on the Rhine, in the Netherlands, and at Venice, with orders
to procure him any sacred novelties they met with for sale.(80) He
procured from the Pope an Indulgence for all who visited the collection
and took part in the services of the church on All Saints’ Day; for it is
one of the ironies of history that the church on whose door Luther nailed
his theses against Indulgences was one of the sacred edifices on which an
Indulgence had been bestowed, and that the day selected by Luther was the
yearly anniversary, which drew crowds to benefit by it.(81)
A pilgrimage to the Holy Land was too costly and dangerous to be indulged
in by many. The richer Germans made pilgrimages to Rome, and the great
pilgrimage place for the middle-class or poorer Germans was Compostella in
Spain. Einsiedeln, in Switzerland, also attracted yearly swarms of
pilgrims.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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