TO THE BEST of my knowledge, the earliest surviving record of anyone riding a live donkey in a Palm Sunday procession comes from Udine, in northeast Italy, in the early fifteenth century. The rider was probably an altar boy. The chapter accounts of Udine cathedral record payment of “twelve soldi [pence],” on Palm Sunday, 1424, “to the boy who went on the ass in place of Christ” (puero qui fuit super asellum loco Christi). A similar payment of “fourteen soldi” was made in 1461 “to the young boy who rides the ass with the bell-ringer who leads the colt” (al puto chel chavalca l’aseno col campanaro che mena l’asenello). According to Guiseppe Vale, subsequent payments were recorded “almost every year.” Since the Aquileian rite used in Udine differed from the standard Roman rite, it may be that the live donkey was also exceptional.

An argument from a thousand years of silence is not conclusive, but a carefully documented silence can still be persuasive. In this chapter, I trace the long absence of donkeys from the records of Palm Sunday processions in Jerusalem. Although such processions began there some two centuries earlier than in Europe, the first reliable record of a live donkey taking part occurs fifty years later than in Udine. The father superior of the Franciscan community in Jerusalem was the rider. The silence from which I argue is thus longer in Jerusalem than it is elsewhere. In Chapter 12, I supplement documentation with explanation, offering a more detailed account of why live donkeys should have been so long excluded from Palm Sunday processions even as the surrounding liturgies freely acknowledged that Christ himself rode a donkey. In Chapter 13, I welcome the more recent proliferation of live donkeys onto the processional stage of Palm Sunday.

I noted earlier the absence of donkeys from Palm Sunday processions in Jerusalem between Egeria's visit to the city around 384 and its capture by Muslim forces in 638. My return to Jerusalem allows me both to document the ongoing absence of donkeys and to expose a few misguided rumours of their presence.