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The land to which the Crusaders voyaged was an outrageous combination of fantastic dreams  and cruel reality.

Take the road to the Holy Sepulchre, rescue that  land from a dreadful race and rule over it yourselves, for that land that, as Scripture says, floweth with milk and honey, was given by God as a possession to the children of Israel.
Jerusalem is the navel of the world, a land fruitful above all others, like a second paradise of delights. The Redeemer of the human race made it famous by His birth, embellished  it by His life, sanctified it be His passion, redeemed it by His death, left His seal upon it by His burial.
This royal city, placed at the centre of the world....1

The fantasy was that Jerusalem was in the most real sense the centre of the medieval universe, that it stood at the portals of heaven, and that it contained magical, mystical qualities.
The twelfth century mystic Hildegard of Bingen addressed the city as:

O Jerusalem, City of Gold,
adorned with  royal purple...

As the literal centre of Creation, Jerusalem became also the symbolic heart of the spiritual universe. And so the city of Gold was much more than a physical location. It became the prime motivator of peoples' thoughts and dreams during the twelfth century.
The Holy City could in theory confer all kinds of benefits on those pilgrims lucky enough to find their way to the  centre of the medieval universe.
Yet miraculous cures on earth and eternal life in bliss were merely some  of its remarkable quantities.
It was, after all, the birthplace of humankind and of Man's saviour, Jesus Christ. The garden of Eden was where Adam was created from dust, and his woman Eve from his rib. Here in the garden, Eve had tempted Adam, at the promptings of the serpent Lucifer, to partake of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, to be God like himself. The rest was Biblical history: woman's pride and man's blinding to her faults led to the fall of humans from their state of Grace. Several thousand years of misery - recorded in the Bible - ensued, until the son of God was born at Bethlehem, a humble village near the capital of the region, Jerusalem.
In triumph and despair, the Son was crucified by the Jews, on the very spot and on the self same Tree that had produced the fruit of knowledge. He died to purge humanity of its sin, and to proffer the gift of eternal life which had been sacrificed by Adam, at the temptation of Woman. Most miraculously, Christ rose from his tomb, at the foot of the Cross where He died, and ascended to be in Heaven with His Father, and later, His earthly mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary, chief amongst the saints.

At every turning of the road, place names reminded the Franks of this Biblical vision of the world, from Bethlehem to the Holy Sepulchre to the River Jordan and beyond to Tarsus and Antioch, each rock and crumbling wall seemed to have an association with the life of Christ and His Mother, the Virgin Mary.

The mundanity of this supernaturally charged region was nearly as remarkable as the fantasy.

Geographically, the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean is diverse yet compact.
To the east and south are  inhospitable deserts and tangled mountain ranges. To the north, the plateaus and ridges of Armenia, equally inhospitable for much of the year. The Holy Land itself is a relatively narrow strip of coastal plain, moderately fertile, adequately watered, hot in summer, cold and wet in winter, strung in a thin strip from the ancient city of Antioch at the gates of Armenia to the increasingly hostile landscape that borders modern day Israel and Egypt in the south.
In less than a day, a rider could travel east from the fertile shore of the Mediterranean  to mountainous desert impassable to all but the hardiest.
This was not a country where a living was to be made easily: even with modern technology, it is a marginal economic region.
Except that its location set it at the hub of the world, the heart of the medieval universe, literally as well as religiously.
To enter Europe, Africans and eastern Asians had to pass through Outremer, unless they were to travel by sea - and vice versa.
It was the logical limit of westward marches by nomadic armies from the wilderness of Central Asia. It was a stepping off point from Mediterranean traders seeking to establish links with the riches of China and the Indies.
  As a consequence, in this region there had existed since time immemorial a babel of tongues, cultures, races and religions.
  Three major ideologies had jostled for pride of place amongst its holy sites for nearly a

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