ABSTRACT
Burchard of Mount Sion’s Descriptio Terrae Sanctae is a text of extraordinary importance. It has been recently described as the most detailed account of the Holy Land to have come down to us from the thirteenth century, and as belonging to a class of its own among the many medieval descriptions of the Holy Land.1 Furthermore, over a hundred surviving manuscripts and around twenty printed editions dating to before 1746 testify to the Descriptio’s immense popularity in
medieval and early modern times.2 And yet, many questions concerning the author and the text remain unresolved to this day. It is usually proposed that Burchard was a Dominican, but that identification has hitherto been based only on rubrics and colophons.3 It had sometimes been suggested, but remained questionable up to now, that Burchard served as a diplomatic envoy or a member of a formal embassy.4 The dating of his travels has also been very difficult to establish and, in the most recent attempt to solve this problem, Pringle concluded that the text was written between 1274 and 1285 “even though Burchard could have begun his travels before that.”5 Even the scope of the original work remains a complicated matter. In some versions Burchard’s text ends with a section which describes a journey in Egypt. It has not been established, however, whether this was really an authentic part of the Descriptio or a later addition.6
