Contacts and Connections between Jerusalem and Upper Nile: Pilgrims’ Routes, Narratives, Exchanges (6th–12th Centuries)

The presence in Jerusalem of Nubian Christians performing their liturgies and welcoming pilgrims to the Holy Sepulchre is confirmed several times in written travel sources from the 10th century onwards. These references multiply in the Latin texts of the Crusader era, both before and after the conquest of the city by Saladin (AD 1187). The small African community praying in the Place of the Resurrection and living in the surrounding buildings became a pole of attraction, manifesting a precise identity and marking a presence among different national and confessional groups sharing the same urban space. Its strength was nourished by continuous relationship with the motherland, which established cultural and diplomatic relations in the microcosm of Jerusalem. The origins of this community, described in devotional and hagiographic tales, go back to an undetermined time whereas its end dates to the middle of the 15th century: the presence of a community of Nubians in Jerusalem seems to have died out a few decades after the fall of Dongola’s reign. Its secular history, mostly reconstructed indirectly, through the testimonies in the sources generated by other religious groups (Christian and not), refers to a set of travels, diplomatic and missionary merchant activities that extended from the area of the Cataracts of the Nile to the Mediterranean, the Near East and Mesopotamia. The Jerusalem community connected also with the networks of monasteries and with the exchanges that took place within them (involving monks, missionaries, manuscripts, liturgies, hagiographic stories, devotions). The Red Sea ports played a key role: the Nubian area, through the passages across the Horn of Africa, connected with the sea routes and then with caravan tracks that crossed the deserts of the Near East. Thus, Byzantium and Baghdad could also be reached via Jerusalem, an ideal and real point of reference for African Christians. The story of the small community of Nubians who prayed stably at the Tomb of Christ testifies to the vivacity of the cross-cultural medieval context of the area of the Cataracts in which Christianity was an element of openness to the outside and a catalyst for cultural exchanges.