Thietmar

Also known as Magister Thietmarus, Thietmar the Pilgrim

German pilgrim of unknown background whose Peregrinatio of 1217 is one of the few western accounts of an unauthorised journey through Ayyubid territory in the years just before the Fifth Crusade.

Thietmar — known only by his first name and the description Magister — was a learned German cleric who travelled overland through the Ayyubid sultanate to Sinai and the holy mountain of St Catherine in 1217, in the months before the Fifth Crusade arrived at Acre.

His Peregrinatio is a vivid pilgrim's narrative, distinguished from most western itineraries of the period by the fact that he travelled without official Frankish escort and crossed the inland frontier into Muslim territory. He records the Greek monastery of Mar Sabas in the Judean wilderness, the deserts south of the Dead Sea, the long and exhausting passage through Sinai to the monastery of St Catherine, the small Christian-Bedouin guides who took him from oasis to oasis, and the practicalities of pilgrimage at the very edge of Frankish reach.

His text is short, vivid, and for many of the places he describes the only surviving thirteenth-century western description — particularly for the Sinai monasteries and the Bedouin route from Hebron to Mount Sinai. Like Burchard of Mount Sion a generation later, Thietmar shows us a Holy Land much wider than the Frankish coastal kingdom.

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