ABSTRACT
The Holy Land is a necropolis in which hardly a step can be taken without coming across significant memorials of death. And death must anyway have been in the minds of many Latin pilgrims to Jerusalem, whose poor medical condition could well have been aggravated by the penances imposed on them by their confessors or undertaken by them voluntarily. They had not come to seek relief from sickness, since Jerusalem was a penitential, not a healing, shrine, and among them were those, elderly and unwell even before they had left Europe, who wanted to end their days in the city, because its special position in the Christian geography of providence meant that it was a place in which the devout wanted their bodies to rest until the General Resurrection. 1 Every pilgrim would have wanted a decent burial in the event of death. For Latin Christians this would have meant washing and preparing a corpse for interment, before removing it to a church from where, after a funeral Mass had been said or sung, it would be taken in procession to a grave for burial. 2 The dying would have hoped to be accorded a number of Requiem Masses and prayers, but they knew that all the dead would be commemorated once a year on All Souls' Day. which by this time was universally observed on 2 November. 3
