Medievalists.net has an interesting article that links a prominent late medieval Swiss knight, or his son, to a surviving graffito in Jerusalem.
Adrian von Bubenberg, of whom there is an account on Wikipedia at Adrian von Bubenberg, went on pilgrimage to the Holy City in 1466 and it is thought that he left a charcoal inscription at the Tomb of David. If it was not him then the writer was presumably his son who also made the pilgrimage in later years.
The illustrated article can be seen at Graffiti from 15th-century Swiss hero discovered in Jerusalem
The survival of so fragile an inscription that can be linked to an historical figure is fascinating. Bubenberg was a principal player in the maintenance of that fearsome Swiss military tradition which defeated Duke Charles of Burgundy and made the Alpinr cantons a source of fearsome fighting men.
The Jerusalem pilgrimage was extremely popular to a wide selection of intrepid travellers and offered a sea voyage from Venice through the Adriatic and the eastern Mediterranean, and supervised visits to Jerusalem. Amongst those who made the journey were the formidable St Bridget of Sweden in the fourteenth century, and, amongst English pilgrims in these years, there were the future King Henry IV, his rival Thomas Mowbray Duke of Norfolk, the King’s half-brother the future Cardinal Beaufort, that incorrigible pious traveller the King’s Lynn businesswoman and housewife Margery Kempe, and John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester ( who may have learned from the Turks and the Hospitalers en route the potential delights of impalement as a means of punishment …. )
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