Pilgrimages are journeys of the heart. More than a thousand years separate the modern traveller and pilgrim from those who first trekked across the length and breadth of France, then southwards over the Pyrenees into Spain. Here they followed the pale arm of the Milky Way to guide them to their goal close to the Atlantic Ocean and — for all they knew in those centuries before Christopher Columbus — the very edge of the world. It was an awesome journey, and not one for the faint-hearted.
The goal they sought was a tomb believed to be that of St James, cousin of Christ and the first of his 12 apostles to be martyred, decapitated by a Roman sword in the year 44 AD. The city that grew up around that tomb came to be named after him: in Spanish St Iago, hence Santiago or, in full, Santiago de Compostela, meaning St James of the Field of the Star; a star had led to the tomb’s discovery, so the legend goes.
Since that time so great has been the cult of the saint that over the succeeding centuries the roads leading to his city became flagged by some of the finest monuments of our Christian civilisation — cathedrals and churches, abbeys and castles, masterpieces of sculpture and painting, bridges and shrines. In addition there are countless witnesses to the slog and hardship of foot-travel in mediaeval Europe — hospices and primitive shelters, stepping stones across turbulent rivers, stretches of ancient road in the midst of nowhere, a wayside cross marking a death or a thanksgiving, graffiti of a horseshoe on the wall of an inn scratched by some pilgrim grateful to have made it thus far.
For these and so many other reasons, taking the roads across France and into Spain to Santiago can be one of the most uplifting journeys anywhere in the world. In France it is a journey that can be made along a broad network of pilgrim roads — four principal ones, the chemins de St Jacques — all converging in a single route across northern Spain known universally as the camino, or traditionally as the camino francés, the ‘road of the French’, so-called because pilgrims, wherever they came from in Northern Europe, inevitably had to cross France to reach Spain.
There were other reasons for the name, and its French connection. Not only did France provide the greatest number of pilgrims to Santiago, it was in France where the impetus for the pilgrimage arose and gathered strength. The church in France, supported by its feudal aristocracy, largely facilitated the whole pilgrimage movement — by building churches, priories and hospices along the way, and by giving support to the beleaguered Spanish rulers in safeguarding the route across northern Spain against the Saracens, the Muslim invaders from North Africa who now controlled much of the country.
Here lies perhaps the most powerful reason that the Santiago pilgrimage captured the imagination of the whole of Christian Europe. There were other important pilgrimages at the time, notably to Jerusalem, and to Rome as the city of the martyrs St Peter and St Paul. But Jerusalem was far-distant and in the hands of the Saracens. Rome had its obvious appeal, yet to get there involved crossing the Alps: furthermore it lacked a key element which Santiago possessed — a passionately-held cause. Doubtless most Santiago pilgrims undertook the journey primarily for personal or spiritual reasons, and with little understanding of politics. But for those who sponsored and serviced the pilgrimage there was always a wider perspective: a determination to re-establish Christian authority in the Spanish peninsula. St James was seen as having reappeared in Spain’s darkest hour. Christianity had found its champion, and the road to his shrine was like a journey to the Promised Land. And piety and politics went hand in hand.
So, where to begin?
One monument has the strongest claim to be the starting-point. The city is Paris, and the monument bears the name of the saint himself. This is the Tour St-Jacques — the Tower of St James. It stands in the centre of a public garden on the Right Bank, gaunt and lofty, with spiky gargoyles high above craning against the sky. Originally this was the bell tower of a church called St-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie, so named because it stood near the Paris meat market. The church itself became a victim of anti-clerical passions during the French Revolution. In the orgy of destruction, however, the mob also obliterated a milestone which the original architect, a certain Michel de Felins, had placed meaningfully at the base of his great tower. The milestone was inscribed, quite simply, ‘Zero.’ In other words, for pilgrims this was the point of departure: the beginning of the journey of a lifetime. Santiago de Compostela, in northwest Spain, was more than 700 miles away.
A few well-to-do pilgrims would be making their pilgrimage the easy way: on horseback, perhaps with a retinue of servants. But for the vast majority this was a journey on foot — with the aid of a staff, a broad-brimmed hat against the sun and rain, a flask of some sort for water, the stoutest of boots, a few modest worldly possessions, and bountiful hope that charity and the hand of God would guide them safely there and back again six months later. They would depart in the spring, and return — all being well — before winter set in.
The inscription ‘Zero’ was as much a memorial as a milestone, because pilgrims had been setting out from here for at least 400 years before the Tour St-Jacques was built early in the 16th century. The church of St-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie itself, where they assembled for their last mass before departure, was also a replacement for a much earlier pilgrim church. Here, where the Tour St-Jacques now stands, was the great gathering-place. Pilgrims from northern France, northern Germany and the Low Countries would make their way to this church or its predecessor, arriving by way of what is now the Rue St Martin, and once here they would join up with travellers from the east and west of the city, all preparing to head south together on the long journey to Spain. Before departure, at the climax of the celebratory mass their pilgrim staffs would be ceremonially blessed by the priest: this would be followed by emotional scenes as families and well-wishers cheered them on their way, maybe accompanying them a short distance as they crossed the River Seine. At this point in the early Middle Ages, pilgrims would have passed a colossal building site where gantries and wooden scaffolding enclosed a building far taller than everything around it, topped by soaring twin towers and at ground level a triple portal of huge proportions swarming with builders and stonemasons hauling on ropes to assemble row upon row of carved figures around and above each of the three doors. The cathedral of Notre Dame was nearing completion.
Then, once on the Left Bank of the river pilgrims would take the straight corridor of a road which is still called the Rue St Jacques, making their way through the heart of the old city, past the recently-built church of St Julien-le-Pauvre, then on up the slow hill past the celebrated university, the Sorbonne, until finally they reached the southern walls of the city. Passing through the Porte St-Jacques and over a drawbridge they set out on the open road southwards. For all of them it was the beginning of a trek into the unknown.
Not that they were likely to be on their own. ‘Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages’: so wrote the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer in the 14th century in his Prologue to the best-loved of all accounts of a pilgrimage, The Canterbury Tales, his account of a spicy hotchpotch of pilgrims setting out from London to the shrine of Thomas à Becket, the murdered Archbishop of Canterbury. As Chaucer makes clear, mediaeval pilgrimages could be colourful and convivial occasions. Pilgrims generally chose to travel in bands, for company and for safety. The Italian poet Dante, a century before Chaucer, wrote in The Divine Comedy that people would describe the ‘Way of St James’ as the Milky Way on account of the huge number of people who travelled to the saint’s city, estimated at around half a million a year — this at a time when the total population of the region we now know as France was barely more than twelve million. And even if not all of them were bona fide pilgrims, but merchants and itinerant craftsmen, or merely adventurers and vagabonds, this is still an astonishing volume of humankind to be on the road to a remote corner of Spain, far away under the mists and Atlantic skies.
*
The legend upon which it all rests is this.
James the Apostle (sometimes known as James the Greater, not to be confused with James the Lesser who was the half-brother of Jesus) was a fisherman on the Sea of Galilee. His father was Zebedee; his mother was Salome, believed to have been the sister of the Virgin Mary. James therefore seems to have been Christ’s first cousin. He was recruited by Jesus as one of his 12 apostles, then after the Crucifixion he responded to Christ’s last command that his disciples fan out across the earth to spread the gospel far and wide. Accordingly he voyaged to Spain, where he spent a couple of years. Then he returned to Jerusalem, where a Roman sword wielded by King Herod Agrippa beheaded him.
Had the story ended at this point there would have been no pilgrimage to Santiago, indeed no Santiago at all. Everything relating to the legend of St James rests on the events that immediately followed his martyrdom. His body (including the head) was first carried by disciples to Jaffa on the coast of Palestine, then borne by stout ship down the length of the Mediterranean and up the Atlantic coast to the Bay of Padrón in northwest Spain, the voyage being accomplished in a mere week — proof of its miraculous nature. The party arrived there only to encounter Roman authorities once again. The Romans imprisoned them until in due course they were released by the intercession of an angel. The queen of the district, Lupa, ordered the body of James to be buried on a remote hillside where a celebrated snake would be sure to polish off the disciples as well as the body of the saint. But the snake it was that died — on seeing the sign of the cross — whereupon Queen Lupa became converted to the Christian faith, and at last the body of the apostle was allowed to be given a decent burial, in a large stone coffin where his disciples were themselves later buried.
It is the next chapter of the story which begins to anchor legend to historical fact — and dramatically so. But first there is a gap of six centuries in which there is no evidence that anyone knew of the existence or whereabouts of the saint’s grave, or even that James had ever been in Spain at all, dead or alive. Church literature, from the Acts of the Apostles onwards, is entirely silent on the subject. Then, early in the 7th century, copies began to appear in Western Europe of a Latin translation of a Greek religious text that became known as the Breviarum Apostolorum. The text attracted attention because it stated that Christ had awarded his apostles specific ‘mission fields’, whereas in the New Testament Jesus had merely instructed his apostles to make disciples of all nations (St Matthew 28: 19-20). More intriguing still, this Latin version included interpolations, or additions, confirming that James’ mission had been to preach in Spain. Here, as far as we know, was the first written evidence of any connection between St James and Spain.
However, it was one thing to claim that the apostle had preached the gospel in Spain after the death of Christ; it was quite another to maintain that he was brought back to Spain and buried here after his own martyrdom. Here two historical events proved crucial in creating the framework of the St James legend as it has remained in the public’s imagination ever since. The first of these events, early in the 8th century, was the invasion by Saracen forces from North Africa who in a very short time occupied and controlled most of the Spanish peninsula. Only the northwest corner remained unconquered — the Kingdom of the Asturias, as it was known, a lone island of Christianity in a sea of Islam.
The second historical event was the appearance of one of the most influential religious texts of this era and of many centuries to follow. This was the Commentaries on the Apocalypse, the work of a Spanish monk and theologian known as St Beatus of Liébana (c. 730-800 AD). Beatus was born at about the time of the Saracen invasions, and therefore spent his youth and manhood under the shadow of Islam, which gives a special poignancy to his writings. The district of Liébana where he settled lay in the Cantabrian mountains in northern Spain within that Christian pocket not under Saracen control. Nonetheless, to a devout monk and scholar such as Beatus it would have seemed to be an area under siege, and the dream of re-establishing Christianity would have been constantly present in his mind. Christian Spain desperately needed a saviour to realise that dream, and it was Beatus who made a key contribution towards finding one. In his celebrated Commentaries, which began to be circulated in the third quarter of the 8th century, he became the first to claim in writing that St James had not only evangelised in Spain but was ultimately buried here. It was a giant step towards establishing the legend surrounding the saint.
It seems unlikely that Beatus would simply have invented the story about the return of the saint’s body to the country where he had evangelised. He is much more likely to have been voicing a conviction that was rooted in some long-standing local tradition that the body of St James had indeed been brought here. The effect of Beatus’ pronouncement was dynamic. In the context of a continuing Saracen threat, Beatus’s statement would have created a mood of high excitement and expectation that was the ideal breeding ground for what was to follow. And it did not take long.
*
The first written evidence of the discovery of the saint’s grave comes from a list of Christian martyrs that was being compiled by a monk named Florus de Lyon. Referring to this area of northwest Spain in the year 838, he noted an ‘extraordinary devotion being paid by the local inhabitants’ to the bones of the apostle St James. Six years later comes the first record of a pilgrim actually visiting the site: ironically he was an Arab traveller, Ibn Dihya. What is clear, though, is that even before the middle of the 9th century the shrine was well enough known to be attracting pilgrims from far and wide. The word had got around with remarkable speed.
The story of the actual discovery of the supposed grave has an air of romantic improbability about it, not least because the earliest written account dates from two centuries later in a letter purporting — falsely — to be by the hand of Pope Leo III (c. 730-816). The account begins with the tale of a hermit by the name of Pelagius informing the local bishop, Theodomir, of a vision in which a star had revealed to him the whereabouts of the saint’s tomb. The seat of Bishop Theodomir was at Iria Flavia (today Padrón), situated at the head of a deep bay opening out on to the Atlantic Ocean. It was in a deserted spot some 12 miles from here that the hermit’s vision led to the discovery of a stone tomb containing the remains of three bodies. The bishop immediately pronounced these to be the bodies of St James and the two disciples who had brought his body from the Holy Land. The king of the Asturias, Alfonso II (ruled 791-842), then hastened to the tomb. He promptly declared that St James was henceforward to be worshipped as the protector and patron saint of Spain. He had a small church erected over the tomb, and a monastery close by.
It was the beginning of what was to become the city and cathedral of Santiago. A town grew up around the new church and monastery during the course of the 9th century, and this became known as Campo de la Estella, or Campo Stellae, the Field of the Star, later to be shortened to Compostela. Here, in these reported events of the 9th century, lie the foundations of the St James legend. And from those foundations grew one of the phenomena of the Middle Ages.
History and legend part company over several aspects of this story. There is no doubt that a grave, or several graves, came to light about this time. Recent archaeological excavations beneath the present cathedral revealed an ancient tomb inscribed with the name of the bishop mentioned as the one led to the site of the grave by the hermit Pelagius. The long-buried tomb beneath the cathedral reads, very clearly: Theodomir. Traces of further graves were detected, believed to date from the Roman or early Christian period, and the prevailing view among scholars today is that there was an ancient cemetery here: hence the word Compostela is less likely to derive from the Latin noun for a star than from the verb componere, to bury.
Nonetheless, discrepancies between fact and fairy tale in the St James story are of trivial importance compared to its impact on 9th-century Spain. This was an era described by Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper as ‘the darkest age of Europe’ (1). At some indefinable moment early in the 9th century it became widely believed among Christians that in their hour of greatest need, one of Christ’s closest disciples was present in their midst. From that moment it was as if a climatic change took place in the hearts and minds of European Christians. The contribution of the St James story began to make itself felt in so many areas of human activities — in an outpouring of religious fervour, in a widespread resurgence of the human spirit, in artistic achievements and church-building on an unprecedented scale, in the field of politics, in the expansion of trade and commerce, and, by no means least, on the field of battle.
And it was on the battlefield — not surprisingly — that St James first made his mark, taking up arms in the cause of beleaguered Christianity. In the year 844, barely a few decades after the discovery of his tomb, the saint is said to have made his first appearance as a knight in shining armour at the side of a Christian army led by Ramiro I, king of the Asturias (ruled 842-850), which was facing an overwhelmingly superior Saracen force. The battle supposedly took place at a mountainous site known as Clavijo overlooking the fertile plains of northern Castile; and here St James is credited with riding to the king’s rescue on horseback and personally slaughtering 70,000 of the enemy. Thereafter the saint became popularly known as Santiago Matamoris — St James the Moor-Slayer. And it is in this guise that he appears on so many surviving churches along the Spanish camino. After Clavijo the triumphant campaign continued, in all at least 40 appearances in battle by the 17th century. No Christian Spaniard, from the 9th century onwards, would have believed that his country could have been liberated from the Saracens without the flashing sword of their patron saint.
*
Today a brace of motorways heads south from Paris. The traditional pilgrim road bisects the two, carrying quieter traffic, much of it local, as well as a regular procession of summer pilgrims on the first leg of their journey. For the mediaeval traveller this would have been a gentle introduction to life on the road, since this first stretch out of Paris is as flat as the famous local cheese, which is Brie. For at least 30 miles it is hard to imagine any distraction, either now or a thousand years ago. But then suddenly the old road passes the battered remains of an ancient fort before leading into a narrow strip of a town. This is Étampes; and here the modern traveller and the mediaeval pilgrim are on common ground. At either end of the town rise two churches, Notre-Dame-du-Fort and St-Martin, the former with its handsome tower and spire, both churches dominating the town only a little less than they would have done in the 12th century when pilgrims paused here to refresh themselves from the local well and prayed in one of these churches, then in the process of completion.
Heading on south, less than a day’s journey brought pilgrims to another narrow passageway of a town, then a mere hamlet. This was Toury, today somewhat larger than in the Middle Ages, but still centred on a chunk of mediaeval church with a stone colonnade extending from end to end, facing the town square. From here it was only a short distance to the next objective. This was Orléans, already a focus of pilgrimage more than 300 years before Joan of Arc brought glory to the city by driving out the English army. A more symbolic objective was the great river that runs past Orléans. The Loire is the longest river in France, 634 miles of it, and from here it flows westwards across central France towards the Atlantic, guiding Santiago pilgrims — as it has done for a thousand years — along the next stretch of their journey.