Pilgrim in the context of "Sacred site"

The Canterbury Tales (Middle English: Tales of Caunterbury) are an anthology of twenty-four short stories written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer between 1387 and 1400. They are mostly in verse, and are presented as part of a fictional storytelling contest held by a group of pilgrims travelling from London to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral.

The Tales are widely regarded as Chaucer's magnum opus. They had a major effect upon English literature and may have been responsible for the popularisation of the English vernacular in mainstream literature, as opposed to French or Latin. English had, however, been used as a literary language centuries before Chaucer's time, and several of Chaucer's contemporaries—John Gower, William Langland, the Gawain Poet, and Julian of Norwich—also wrote major literary works in English. It is unclear to what extent Chaucer was seminal in this evolution of literary preference.

A military order (Latin: Ordo militaris) is a Latin Catholic religious order of knights. The original military orders were the Knights Templar, the Knights Hospitaller, the Order of the Holy Sepulchre, the Order of Saint James, the Order of Calatrava, and the Teutonic Knights. They arose in the Middle Ages in association with the Crusades – the Crusader states (mainly the Kingdom of Jerusalem in the Holy Land), the Baltics, and the Iberian peninsula; their members being initially dedicated to the protection of Christian pilgrims, and eventually to the defence of the Crusader states and the conquest of non-Christian or even non-Catholic lands. They are the predecessors of chivalric orders.

Most members of military orders were laymen who took religious vows, such as of poverty, chastity, and obedience, according to monastic ideals. The orders owned houses called commanderies all across Europe and had a hierarchical structure of leadership with the grand master at the top.

A spiritual practice or spiritual discipline (often including spiritual exercises) is the regular or full-time performance of actions and activities undertaken for the purpose of inducing spiritual experiences and cultivating spiritual development. A common metaphor used in the spiritual traditions of the world's great religions is that of walking a path. Therefore, a spiritual practice moves a person along a path towards a goal. The goal is variously referred to as salvation, liberation or union (with God). A person who walks such a path is sometimes referred to as a wayfarer or a pilgrim.

Mecca Province (Arabic: مِنْطَقَة مَكَّة, romanized: Minṭaqat Makka, Arabic pronunciation: [ˈmin.tˤa.qat ˈmak.ka]), officially Makkah Province, is one of the 13 provinces of Saudi Arabia. It is the third-largest province by area at 153,128 km (59,123 sq mi) and the second most populous with 7,769,994 inhabitants as of 2022. It is located in the historic Hejaz region, and has an extended coastline on the Red Sea. Its capital is Mecca, the holiest city in Islam, and its largest city is Jeddah, which is Saudi Arabia's main port city. The province accounts for 26.29% of the population of Saudi Arabia and is named after the Islamic holy city of Mecca.

Historically, the area was inhabited by the Quraysh, the Banu Kinanah and the Thaqif, among other tribes. Part of the Hejaz region, the province has seen several exchanges of power between many Islamic realms within a short period of time. The province gains its significance as it contains the city of Mecca, the birthplace of Muhammad, and several other historic Islamic sites, such as the village of Hudaybiyyah, where the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah is said to have been agreed upon. More recently, the province was modernized under the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia after the oil boom.Most of the population is concentrated in three cities: Jeddah, Mecca and Taif. Jeddah is the largest city in the province and the second-largest in Saudi Arabia with an estimated population of 2,867,446 as of 2020. Mecca is the second-largest city in the province and third-largest in the kingdom at 1,323,624. After the city of Ta'if at third place, Rabigh, Shafa, Turbah and Jumum are other populous cities and towns in the region. The region receives Muslim pilgrims of the Umrah and the Hajj around the year and its population increases by up to 2 million during the Hajj. It has approximately 700 kilometres (430 mi) of coastline on the Red Sea and hosts oil refineries in Rabigh, port and oil export facilities in Jeddah, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology and the King Abdullah Economic City. The province also hosts part of the Haramain High Speed Railway line, which is Saudi Arabia's first and only high-speed railway line.