lauras, hermitages and coenobia in the desert of Judea, among other places, and many fervent followers came in their wake from all over the Christian world, either to stay with them for a short while before returning home, or establish their own monasteries and communities - which in turn drew other pilgrims. Hundreds of monasteries dotted the Judean Desert terrain about 1400 years ago, and many desert retreats were established as well, not unlike the settlement of the Essenes at Qumran, where John the Baptist grew to manhood, and which Jesus frequented. Today, no more than five are active: St. George, in Wadi Kelt; Qarantal, on the Mount of Temptation; St. Gerasimos, in the Jordan-Jericho Wadi; Mar Saba, on the banks of the Kidron Valley; St. Theodorus, on the Bethlehem- Dead Sea road. All offer the visitor fortunate enough to see them, an intriguing blend of starkly exotic terrain, ascetic piety and biblical holiness. From All Christendom Pagan Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in the fourth century AD and entrusted Empress Helena, his mother, with a mission to visit the Holy Land and locate the holy sites. In 326 AD, guided by her dreams, Helena discovered what she believed was the tomb of Jesus in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, one of the holiest shrines for the majority of Christian believers today. If, as some scholars believe, there is a grain of truth to claims that the Empress found the true
cross in Jerusalem, together with the nails used in the crucifixion, then Helena can even be said to be the first archeologist in the Holy Land, along with being one of its most prominent early pilgrim visitors).
Decade after decade, in the centuries following Empress Helena, the trend for pilgrimage travel kept growing, and reports exist of pilgrimage visits from all over the Christian world at the time. By the 10th and 11th centuries, the great age of pilgrimage had arrived, stimulated, it may be argued, by the significant increase in the construction of Christian buildings in the Holy Land from abound 950 A.D., when millennium panic began to set in, and continuing as acts of gratitude afterwards, when the world did not come to an end. Christians from all over the world sought out the Holy Land, until about the mid-15th century, when the surge in pilgrim travel began to subside. Historians say the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453, and the backlash against church indulgences that led the 16th-century Protestant Reformation, may be some of the reasons for the dampened enthusiasm and for pilgrims becoming the object of satire and ridicule, as can be seen in works of popular literature of the time.
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