JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.At first sight, pilgrimage in Asia Minor seems to decline drastically after the early seventh century. In terms of abundance and variety of evidence, medieval Byzantine sources have far less to offer than those of earlier centuries. No texts of the seventh through fourteenth centuries can compare with the rich detail of the miracles of St. Thekla or the lives of St. Theodore of Sykeon or St. Nicholas of Myra. Those allow a whole environment to be reconstructed, featuring the lives of holy men in a rural society or the vibrant activity of a major shrine that drew people from a wide area. In addition, longdistance travelers, whether from Byzantium or the West, reveal a whole network of famous late antique shrines and their activities.' For the following centuries, the evidence is quite different and far more limited. Lives of saints or scattered mentions of shrines in historical texts offer inconsistent though sometimes detailed information-much of it concentrated in one period, the ninth century-but accounts of long-distance travelers are few and uninformative. The detailed life of an eleventh-century saint, Lazaros of Mount Galesion, provides a valuable exception.2 Likewise, the archaeological evidence is much scarcer: the Isaurian shrines of St. Thekla and Alahan (which appears to have been a pilgrimage site) were abandoned, and only Ephesos presents continuing evidence for pilgrimage. Clay ampullae, used for the sacred oil gathered at some shrines, also appear to date only to late antiquity.3The circumstances of the early Middle Ages, of course, were not very propitious for pilgrimage. The Arab invasions of the seventh to ninth centuries would have impeded long-distance travel, while the decline of cities and general reduction of the population SFor all this, see the excellent survey of P. Maraval, Lieux saints et pilerinages d'orient (Paris, 1985), esp. 353-58, 363-89 for Asia Minor. 2 See R. Greenfield, The Life ofLazaros ofMt. Galesion (Washington, D.C., 2000), with comprehensive introduction and notes. S For ampullae from Ephesos, see M. Duncan-Flowers, "A Pilgrim's Ampulla from the Shrine of St. John the Evangelist at Ephesus," in R. Ousterhout, ed., The Blessings of Pilgrimage (Urbana, 1990), 125-39. On the other hand, lead ampullae were being made at Salonica in the 12th-15th centuries (C. Bakirtzis, "Byzantine Ampullae from Thessaloniki," ibid., 140-49), and lead and pewter ampullae from the Holy Land, normally dated to the 6th century, have now been assigned on convincing grounds to the 11 lth-13th centuries: D. Buckton, ed., Byzantium, Treasures of Byzantine Art and Culture from British Collections (London, 1994), 187f. The whole question of dating ampullae from Asia Mi...
