Christian notions about the holiness of Jerusalem differ from Jewish views regarding the intrinsic sanctity of the city on the larger grid of Eretz Israel. The specific Christian holiness of the city lies in the existence of a network of holy places associated with Jesus. These holy sites are lodged first in local historical memory and then in the consciousness of Christians everywhere by their formal identification with Christianity and their expensive public enshrinement and incorporation into a stational liturgy, that is, a series of cult acts tied—like the Muslims’ hajj—to a specific time and place. The outcome was Christian pilgrimage.

This progression of events was interrupted by Jerusalem’s and Palestine’s passage under Muslim sovereignty, a religious society that was, at best, competitive and, at worst, hostile, with its own views of holiness and Jerusalem. A change of sovereignty at times led to confrontation but more often to uneasy accommodation.

One form of Christian accommodation was the transfer of the merits of pilgrimage to Jerusalem to analogous sites in Europe and elsewhere. This, together with the growing hostility of the local Muslim population, might have led to the final deterioration of Christian pilgrimage to Palestine, save for the introduction of the similar, but quite secular, notion of tourism, which since the early nineteenth century sought to transform, and revivify Christian pilgrimage to Jerusalem.