This dissertation examines how pilgrim-travellers between 1347 and 1697 made Jerusalem intelligible when on-site experience did not align with prior expectations. Christian pilgrimage has been widely studied, yet medieval and early modern pilgrims are rarely examined in comparison. By placing four pilgrimage accounts into dialogue—Niccolò da Poggibonsi (c. 1350), Felix Fabri (1480s), Leonhard Rauwolf (1582), and Henry Maundrell (1697)—the study investigates how pilgrims interpreted Jerusalem’s sacred sites and landscapes. 

Situated within cultural history and informed by microhistorical attention to individual experience, the dissertation adopts a hermeneutic approach to interpretation. It compares the accounts across conventional medieval–early modern period boundaries through two analytical coordinates: temporality and materiality. Pilgrim-travellers understood the landscape within a biblical temporality stretching from Creation to the Last Judgement while engaging with trees, dust, ruins, bodies, and, at times, measurements as meaningful elements within a sacred landscape. The analysis focuses on moments when interpretation faltered, when sites appeared too small, too barren, or too unstable. At such points, the cultural frameworks shaping observation become particularly visible.

Three cases drawn from Jerusalem’s surrounding valleys structure the analysis. The Kidron and Hinnom valleys appear as landscapes where expectation encountered resistance. Pilgrims anticipated a fertile biblical land, yet often described it as barren.

The Valley of Jehoshaphat forms a second focus, where geography and eschatology intersect. Medieval pilgrims rendered the valley as a site where sacred past and anticipated Judgement coexisted, even when its modest scale raised doubts about how it could contain ‘all nations.’ Practices such as leaving stones functioned as future-oriented acts that placed the pilgrim within an expected divine future.

The final case examines Aceldama, the Field of Blood, a burial structure associated with reports of unusual bodily decay. Travellers described striking phenomena: bodies said to dissolve within days, the presence or absence of putrefactive odours, and remains observed in varying conditions within the vault. These reports formed part of a developing narrative surrounding the site that spread widely in pilgrimage literature. The chapter examines how pilgrims described what they believed they witnessed while also considering how the burial structure’s environmental conditions may have shaped these observations.

Taken together, these cases show that Jerusalem did not become progressively clearer to those who travelled there. Pilgrims encountered a persistent interpretive tension: expectations shaped by Scripture, tradition, and prior accounts met material conditions that often resisted them. Over the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries, travellers responded by explaining, qualifying, and reinterpreting what they observed using the resources available to them, including Scripture, scholarly authority, and personal observation. Historical change, therefore, appears less as the disappearance of sacred interpretation than as the accumulation of interpretive strategies and norms. Jerusalem thus emerges as a landscape that continually required interpretive effort from those who sought to understand it.