Journeys to the Holy Land and the East

In his later years Sava made two great pilgrimages to the Christian East — to Jerusalem and the Holy Land, to Sinai, to the monastic centers of Egypt and Palestine, and through Constantinople, Nicaea, and the Byzantine and Near Eastern courts. These journeys were at once acts of monastic devotion and missions of high diplomacy: the archbishop venerated the holy places, secured rights and properties for Serbian and Athonite monasticism, and represented the Serbian church and crown to the patriarchs, emperors, and sultans of the East. The monk was also the first great diplomat of the Serbian state.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox

Pilgrimage as Vocation

Sava had begun his life by fleeing to a holy place, and he ended it among the holy places. The Lives present his two pilgrimages to the East, undertaken in the 1220s and 1230s, as the crown of his monastic life — the archbishop, his great institutional work accomplished, returning to the sources of the faith at Jerusalem and the desert (Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4; Domentijan and Teodosije, Lives). He visited, the tradition records, Jerusalem and the holy sites of Palestine, Bethlehem, the Jordan, the monastery of St. Sabbas the Sanctified (the Mar Saba lavra — the house of his own patron saint), Mount Sinai, and the monastic and ecclesiastical centers of Egypt (Alexandria) and the wider East (Serbian hagiographical tradition; Saint Sava, English Wikipedia, on the pilgrimages “to Palestine, Jordan, Bethlehem… collecting holy relics”). He brought back relics and ikons for the Serbian church, and at Mar Saba — so the tradition holds — received tokens of honor connecting the Serbian Sava to the great Palestinian founder whose name he bore.

The Monk as Diplomat

These journeys were never merely devotional. As archbishop and brother of kings, Sava traveled as a representative of the Serbian church and state, and his pilgrimages doubled as diplomatic missions of the first importance (Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4):

At Nicaea and Constantinople. Sava dealt repeatedly with the Ecumenical Patriarch and the Byzantine court — at Nicaea for the autocephaly (1219) and later, after the Byzantine recovery of Constantinople was in prospect, on the affairs of the Serbian church and the Athonite monasteries.
In the Holy Land and Egypt. Sava negotiated with the rulers of the East — including, the tradition holds, the Ayyubid Sultan in Egypt and the authorities of Mamluk and Crusader Palestine — to secure access to and rights over the holy places and to obtain protections and properties for Orthodox and Serbian monasticism in the East. He is credited with founding or endowing Serbian hospices and monastic establishments in the Holy Land.
In Bulgaria. Sava maintained close relations with the Bulgarian church and the Tsar at Tărnovo, the relationship that would frame his death (see Death at Tărnovo 1236).

In all this the pilgrim and the statesman were the same man. Sava used the prestige of the Serbian crown and his own standing as an Athonite archbishop to advance the interests of his church across the Orthodox and Near Eastern world, knitting Serbia into the wider commonwealth of Eastern Christendom. Obolensky’s portrait makes precisely this point: Sava was a figure of the whole Byzantine cultural commonwealth, moving with equal authority among Serbs, Greeks, Bulgarians, and the Christians and Muslims of the East (Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, Introduction and ch. 4).

[Disputed: The detailed itineraries of Sava’s two journeys, and the specific negotiations attributed to him (the audience with the Egyptian sultan, particular grants in the Holy Land), rest largely on the later Lives and cannot all be independently confirmed; the Lives elaborate the pilgrimages with miracle and incident. That Sava made two major journeys to the Christian East, venerated the holy places, and acted diplomatically on them is well attested; the particulars are hagiographically transmitted (Domentijan and Teodosije, Lives; Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4; pinned per METHODOLOGY §3.5).]

The Pattern of a Life

The pilgrimages close the circle of Sava’s life. The boy who had fled a princely appanage for the Holy Mountain, who had refounded a monastery, won a church its independence, given a nation its law, and made a dynasty holy, returned at the end to the holy places themselves — to Jerusalem, to Sinai, to the lavra of his patron Sabbas. And it was on the way home from the second of these journeys, at the Bulgarian capital of Tărnovo, that he died — a monk and a pilgrim to the last (see Death at Tărnovo 1236).

Pilgrimage in the Thirteenth-Century East

To grasp what Sava’s journeys cost and meant, one must reckon with the condition of the Christian East in his lifetime. The Holy Land he sought was no quiet sanctuary but a contested frontier. The First Crusade had taken Jerusalem in 1099; Saladin had retaken it in 1187; and in the early thirteenth century the holy places lay under the Ayyubid sultanate, the dynasty Saladin had founded, while the rump Crusader kingdom clung to the coast around Acre (Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans; Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4). For most of Sava’s adult life Jerusalem itself was in Muslim hands; only in 1229, by the treaty between the Emperor Frederick II and the Ayyubid sultan al-Kamil, was the city briefly restored to Christian control — a settlement that held, precariously, into the 1240s. A Christian pilgrim of the 1220s and 1230s therefore travelled across shifting political ground, dependent on the goodwill of Muslim rulers for access to the very shrines he had come so far to venerate.

The journey was long, costly, and dangerous, and precisely for that reason it carried immense prestige. To reach Jerusalem from the Balkans meant crossing the Aegean, the eastern Mediterranean, and the deserts of Palestine and Egypt, exposed to storm, brigandage, plague, and the caprice of frontier authorities. Few Western or Eastern churchmen of the highest rank undertook it; that an archbishop and the brother of a king should make the pilgrimage not once but twice, in old age, was an extraordinary act, and the Lives present it as such (Domentijan and Teodosije, Lives; Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4). The pilgrimage was at once the humblest and the most exalted of acts: the prince who had abandoned rank for the monastic life now spent the prestige of his office and the resources of the Serbian crown to walk where Christ had walked.

The Holy Places and Their Meaning

The Lives pin Sava’s devotion to a constellation of sites, each charged with significance for an Orthodox pilgrim (Serbian hagiographical tradition; Saint Sava, English Wikipedia, on the sites “to Palestine, Jordan, Bethlehem”). Foremost was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, raised over the rock of Golgotha and the empty tomb — the geographical heart of the faith, the place of the Resurrection, and for centuries the supreme goal of Christian pilgrimage. At the River Jordan, where Christ had been baptized by John, pilgrims immersed themselves in imitation of the Lord’s baptism; for Sava, who had taken the monastic name and the baptismal identity of the new life seriously from his youth, the Jordan held a particular resonance. At Bethlehem he venerated the place of the Nativity; across Palestine the tradition follows him among the shrines of the Gospel.

Of all the sites, none meant more to Sava than the Great Lavra of St. Sabbas the Sanctified — Mar Saba — in the wilderness of the Kidron between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea. This was the desert house founded in the fifth century by St. Sabbas, the great Palestinian monastic legislator whose Typikon shaped the liturgical and disciplinary order of Eastern monasticism, and whose name Sava himself bore (Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4; Domentijan and Teodosije, Lives). To arrive at Mar Saba was, for the Serbian Sava, to come home to his own patron and namesake, to the fountainhead of the monastic typika he had drawn upon at Hilandar and Studenica. The Lives make much of this encounter, and the tradition holds that the lavra received him with special honor and bestowed on him tokens connecting the two Savvas across eight centuries — among them, by later report, the pastoral staff and certain ikons of the founder (Serbian hagiographical tradition; pinned per METHODOLOGY §3.5).

The pilgrimages reached further still. The tradition carries Sava to Mount Sinai, to the Monastery of St. Catherine at the foot of the mountain of the Lawgiving — the ancient Justinianic foundation guarding the site of the Burning Bush — and into Egypt, to Alexandria, the see of one of the ancient patriarchates and a great center of Eastern monastic memory (Saint Sava, English Wikipedia; Domentijan and Teodosije, Lives). To traverse Sinai and the Egyptian desert was to retrace the route of the Exodus and to touch the deep roots of the monastic movement in the cells of the Egyptian fathers. The breadth of the itinerary, as the Lives transmit it, is itself a statement: Sava sought not one shrine but the whole sacred geography of the Christian East.

The Diplomatic Dimension

Because Sava travelled as an archbishop and a king’s brother, his devotions were inseparable from affairs of state, and the Lives and modern scholarship alike present the pilgrimages as missions of consequence (Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4). With the Patriarchate of Jerusalem and the other Eastern patriarchates he transacted the business of the Serbian church — securing recognition, settling the standing of Serbian and Athonite monks in the holy places, and acquiring relics by lawful gift rather than by the dubious means of the Western relic trade. The tradition further holds that Sava dealt directly with the Ayyubid authorities in Egypt and Palestine — in the political world dominated by al-Kamil, the sultan who had treated with Frederick II — to obtain safe access to the shrines and protections for Orthodox monasticism under Muslim rule (Domentijan and Teodosije, Lives; Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4). He is credited with founding or endowing Serbian and Orthodox hospices and establishments in the East, planting the Serbian church’s presence at the holy places themselves.

This diplomacy was of a piece with the work of Sava’s whole career. At Nicaea, the seat of the exiled Byzantine empire and the Ecumenical Patriarchate after 1204, he had won the autocephaly of the Serbian church in 1219; on his later journeys he continued to manage the relations of Serbia with the patriarch and emperor in exile, and to safeguard the standing of Hilandar and the other Athonite houses on which Serbian monasticism depended (Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4). He moved, with equal facility, among the Greek hierarchs of Nicaea, the Bulgarian court at Tărnovo, the Latin authorities of Crusader Palestine, and the Muslim rulers of Egypt — a single envoy at home across the religious and political fault-lines of the eastern Mediterranean.

The Two Journeys and What He Brought Home

The Lives transmit two great pilgrimages, and the tradition places the first about 1229 and the second about 1234–35, the latter being the journey from which Sava was returning when he died at Tărnovo (Domentijan and Teodosije, Lives; Saint Sava, English Wikipedia; and see Death at Tărnovo 1236). The chronology must be held with appropriate caution: the Lives are hagiographies, not itineraries, and they elaborate the journeys with miracle and edifying incident rather than with the precise dates and routes a historian would wish. That Sava made two major journeys to the Christian East is well attested; the exact sequence, timing, and content of each rest on the hagiographical record and cannot all be independently confirmed (Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4; pinned per METHODOLOGY §3.5).

What Sava carried home mattered as much as where he had been. The tradition is consistent that he returned laden with relics and ikons for the Serbian church — fragments of the saints, portions of the True Cross, and images received from the great houses of the East — enriching the shrines of Studenica, Žiča, and the new autocephalous church with the sanctity of the holy places (Saint Sava, English Wikipedia; Domentijan and Teodosije, Lives). No less important was what he brought back in his mind: a renewed and first-hand knowledge of the liturgical and monastic order of Jerusalem, Sinai, and the Sabbaite lavra — the typika, the offices, the disciplines of the desert fathers — which he could carry into the worship and rule of the church he had founded. The pilgrim returned not only with treasures but with learning, the living tradition of the East transplanted into Serbian soil.

A Figure of the Byzantine Commonwealth

It is Obolensky who has given Sava’s journeys their most searching modern frame. In Six Byzantine Portraits Sava appears as one of the exemplary figures of what Obolensky called the Byzantine Commonwealth — that family of Orthodox peoples, Greek and Slav, bound together by a shared faith, liturgy, law, and high culture radiating from Constantinople (Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, Introduction and ch. 4). Sava’s pilgrimages display him precisely as a man of that whole commonwealth: equally at ease at Nicaea and at Mar Saba, at Tărnovo and at Sinai, drawing the resources of Greek, Palestinian, and Egyptian Christianity into the service of a young Serbian church and knitting Serbia firmly into the wider body of Eastern Christendom. The cosmopolitanism was not incidental to his sanctity but expressive of it: the Serbian national saint was, in Obolensky’s reading, a thoroughly international figure, and his nation’s church was born not in isolation but in deep communion with the whole Orthodox East (Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, Introduction and ch. 4).

References

Obolensky, Dimitri. Six Byzantine Portraits. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, Introduction and chapter 4. On Sava as a figure of the Byzantine commonwealth and on his journeys and diplomacy.
Fine, John V. A., Jr. The Late Medieval Balkans. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987. On the political condition of the thirteenth-century East — the Ayyubid sultanate, the Crusader states, and the wider Balkan and Near Eastern setting.
Domentijan and Teodosije. Lives of Saint Sava, 1253/54 and c. 1290–1320. The narratives of the pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Sinai, Egypt, and the East.
Saint Sava. English Wikipedia (used to locate the pilgrimage destinations — Palestine, Jordan, Bethlehem, Sinai — and the gathering of relics).