“as it is certain that you will come to death” In this accompanying letter, particular emphasis is placed on the ‘authenticity’ of the pilgrim, who is in no way travelling for the sake of leisure, but solely for religious motives. The addressees of the letter were very diverse and any recipient was advised to take in the pilgrim for God’s wages and to provide him with what he needed. On the one hand, the number of pilgrims in the middle of the 7th century must already have been very large to make such a formula seem necessary at all; on the other hand, the letter testifies to a form of abuse, namely vagrancy. Furthermore, anyone who undertook a “difficult and painful journey” to Rome had to confront the possibility of dying on the way, which is why the writing of a last will probably seemed advisable. From the rich Abbey Archives of St Gall several documents have survived in which the arrangements for such a journey are described. The most famous example is that of a certain Beata, who, around the year 740, withdrew together with her mother to a house monastery endowed on the small island of Lützelau in Lake Zurich. After endowing the small church of St Mary with rich property and serfs, Beata, with the consent of her husband Lantolt, quite abruptly sold almost everything, including the island of Lützelau, to the founding Abbot Otmar of St Gall, in order Roman apostolic see, and all the apostolic lords and fathers, or abbots and [women] dedicated to God living in monasteries, and illustrious men, patricii, dukes, counts and all those following the Christian religion in the divine cult, I, A, the lowliest sinner of all, presume to send my salutation under God. Since the present bearer B, inflamed by divine rays, [and] desiring to go to the threshold of the holy apostles, the lords Peter and Paul, so as to flourish through [his] prayer, not, as is the habit for most people, in order to be idle, but for the name of God, [and] counting for little the difficult and painful journey, asked my littleness to recommend him by this little letter to your kindness and industriousness, by which I, the lowliest of all, presume to beg you, as if prostrated at the feet of each of you, to agree to pray for me, the smallest [of all], and to receive him, whom I recommend, on his way there and, if God allows it, on his way back, with [your] accustomed piety and for the name of God, and to give him as much as he needs, so that you may deserve to receive added mercy for Him who said that whatever one was seen to spend for His paupers was [also] paid to Him.” 132 From the area of Lake Constance to Rome
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