This study examines writing about the Holy Land by Observant Franciscan authors from the late fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth century. Ritsema van Eck identifies Paul Walter von Guglingen's relatively unknown treatise on the Holy Land, begun when he was a resident at the order's Jerusalem convent in 1482–3, as the initiating work in this genre. The hallmarks of his and later texts included the expression of a reform-minded, apocalyptic piety that revered the Holy Land for its connections to the life of St Francis and as the site where history would soon reach its dramatic conclusion. The author avoids intertextual explanations for this genre's flowering within the Observant Franciscans. Subsequent authors were often unaware of the two late fifteenth-century treatises by Guglingen and Francesco Suriano that had initiated this tradition. Yet commonalities of interpretation, grounded in Franciscan piety, the order's trusteeship of Jerusalem sacred sites, and in the theology of St Bonaventure concerning the sacred, were common themes. Jerusalem remained the centre of this Franciscan vision of history, and St Francis was the clarion who had re-kindled Christendom's memory of its marvels and spiritual riches. The Order of Friars Minor was thus charged with a special historical role. Protestant influence on the latter texts cannot be denied, since as pilgrimage came to be questioned in the sixteenth century, new treatises appeared to defend the Holy Land pilgrimage. Seventeenth-century texts continued to evoke the nexus between the region's sacrality and the special historical mission of the Franciscans as its caretakers. That they did so before an increasingly diverse religious constituency constituted of many Protestants as well as Catholics points up the enduring appeal of the Holy Land pilgrimage, even in a reformed religion often antipathetic to sacred times and places. This handsome volume is also enhanced by sixteen colour plates drawn from the manuscripts examined.