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Nothing like this ardour could be found among the Catholics or Protestants, for whom the Holy Places were objects of historical interest and romantic sentiment rather than religious devotion. The travel writer and historian Alexander Kinglake thought that ‘the closest likeness of a pilgrim which the Latin Church could supply was often a mere French tourist with a journal and a theory and a plan of writing a book’. European tourists were repelled by the intense passion of the Orthodox pilgrims, whose strange rituals struck them as ‘barbaric’ and as ‘degrading superstitions’. Martineau refused to go to the Holy Sepulchre to see the washing of the pilgrims’ feet on Good Friday. ‘I could not go to witness mummeries done in the name of Christianity,’ she wrote, ‘compared with which the lowest fetishism on the banks of an African river would have been inoffensive.’ For the same reason, she would not go to the ceremony of the Holy Fire on Easter Saturday, when thousands of Orthodox worshippers squeezed into the Holy Sepulchre to light their torches from the miraculous flames that appeared from the tomb of Christ. Rival groups of Orthodox-Greeks, Bulgarians, Moldavians, Serbians and Russians – would jostle with each other to light their candles first; fights would start; and sometimes worshippers were crushed to death or suffocated in the smoke. Baron Curzon, who witnessed one such scene in 1834, described the ceremony as a ‘scene of disorder and profanation’ in which the pilgrims, ‘almost in a state of nudity, danced about with frantic gestures, yelling and screaming as if they were possessed’.⁵

It is hardly surprising that a Unitarian such as Martineau or an Anglican like Curzon should have been so hostile to such rituals: demonstrations of religious emotion had long been effaced from the Protestant Church. Like many tourists in the Holy Land, they sensed that they had less in common with the Orthodox pilgrims, whose wild behaviour seemed barely Christian at all, than with the relatively secular Muslims, whose strict reserve and dignity were more in sympathy with their own private forms of quiet prayer. Attitudes like theirs were to influence the formation of Western policies towards Russia in the diplomatic disputes about the Holy Land which would eventually lead to the Crimean War.

Unaware of and indifferent to the importance of the Holy Lands to Russia’s spiritual identity, European commentators saw only a growing Russian menace to the interests of the Western Churches there. In the early 1840s, Young, now the British consul, sent regular reports to the Foreign Office about the steady build-up of ‘Russian agents’ in Jerusalem – their aim being, in his view, to prepare a ‘Russian conquest of the Holy Lands’ through sponsored pilgrimage and purchases of land for Orthodox churches and monasteries. This was certainly a time when the Russian ecclesiastical mission was exerting its influence on the Greek, Armenian and Arab Orthodox communities by financing churches, schools and hostels in Palestine and Syria (an activism resisted by the Foreign Ministry in St Petersburg, which rightly feared that such activities might antagonize the Western powers). Young’s reports about Russia’s conquest plans were increasingly hysterical. ‘The pilgrims of Russia have been heard to speak openly of the period being at hand when this country will be under the Russian government,’ he wrote to Palmerston in 1840. ‘The Russians could in one night during Easter arm 10,000 pilgrims within the walls of Jerusalem. The convents in the city are spacious and, at a trifling expense, might be converted into fortresses.’ British fears of this ‘Russian plan’ accelerated Anglican initiatives, eventually leading to the foundation of the first Anglican church in Jerusalem in 1845.⁶

But it was the French who were most alarmed by the growing Russian presence in the Holy Lands. According to French Catholics, France had a long historical connection to Palestine going back to the Crusades. In French Catholic opinion, this conferred on France, Europe’s ‘first Catholic nation’, a special mission to protect the faith in the Holy Lands, despite the marked decline of Latin pilgrimage in recent years. ‘We have a heritage to conserve there, an interest to defend,’ declared the Catholic provincial press. ‘Centuries will pass before the Russians shed a fraction of the blood that the French spilled in the Crusades for the Holy Places. The Russians took no part in the Crusades … . The primacy of France among the Christian nations is so well established in the Orient that the Turks call Christian Europe Frankistan, the country of the French.’⁷