The pilgrim road now crosses a region that is ‘well-managed, excellent and full of all blessings’; so the Pilgrim’s Guide assured the mediaeval traveller. Such effusive praise is not surprising: this was the author’s homeland of Poitou, and not a word was to be said against it, least of all against its inhabitants who were so ‘prodigal in the hospitality they offer.’ Aimery Picaud was never to be so kind again when describing those who lived in other regions. In his eyes the people of Poitou enjoyed a monopoly of all human virtues.
Today a motorway runs parallel to the old Roman road the early pilgrims would have taken. The tributary road running east from Aimery Picaud’s Parthenay joins it a little to the north of the regional capital, the city of Poitiers. To the mediaeval traveller this was the city of St Hilary (St-Hilaire), and his shrine was the most important for the pilgrim to venerate after that of St Martin of Tours on the banks of the Loire. Hilaire had in fact been St Martin’s mentor, a bishop and doctor in Roman Gaul during the 4th century. The saint’s principal achievement, according to the Pilgrim’s Guide, was to have ‘vanquished the Arian heresy’, that famous theological quibble over the precise meaning of the Holy Trinity. One dissident by the name of Leo, so the Guide goes on, was most horribly punished for the error of his ways, ‘dying abominably in the latrines.’ The saint himself enjoyed an altogether more peaceful end, after which his tomb was ‘decorated with a quantity of gold, silver, and amazing precious stones’, while the large and splendid basilica erected round it became venerated by virtue of the many miracles performed there.’
The ‘large and splendid’ church of St-Hilaire-le-Grand had been built in the mid-11th century, apparently by an English architect by the name of Coorland — a reminder of England’s powerful influence in this whole area of Western France known as Aquitaine, long before the region finally came under English rule in the mid-12th century. St Hilaire’s church still stands, more or less in its original form, in a southern suburb of Poitiers. Grand in name and grand in concept, St-Hilaire-le-Grand is vast. Without entirely conforming to the pattern of pilgrim churches that were modelled on St-Martin-de-Tours, it was nonetheless designed to accommodate pilgrims in extremely large numbers.
Mediaeval Poitiers enjoyed an explosion of church-building during the years of religious fervour that followed the peaceful passing of the Millennium, when people began to believe that the world was not about to come to end after all — at least not just yet. Most of these mediaeval churches in Poitiers have survived. For pilgrims there was even a second saint to venerate. She was a lady by the name of Radegonde (c. 520-586), who founded an abbey here in the 6th century. The 11th- and 12th-century church dedicated to her stands tucked among old houses at the eastern edge of the city close to the river. Its splendid Gothic portal, intricately carved, evokes a later era when fears of the imminent ending of the world were long past:
In contrast to the flamboyant portal of Ste-Radegonde is a modest little box of a building a mere hundred yards away. This is a baptistery dating from the very first century of Christianity in Roman Gaul, the 4th century; it can claim to be the earliest example of Christian architecture in the whole of France. It is a sombre thought that this place of worship was already eight centuries old when Aimery Picaud was setting off on his pilgrimage. A more poignant question is: would he have known the greatest of all the mediaeval churches of Poitiers, Notre-Dame-la-Grande, which was almost certainly being built during his lifetime? This former collegiate church had no specific connection with the Santiago pilgrimage; yet no pilgrim passing through the city from north to south could have failed to notice it, and to wonder at it. Today’s traveller may feel the same, because here is one of the glories of church building in France.
Notre-Dame-la-Grande stands in the very centre of Poitiers, on the site of what was once the Roman forum. As a fervent advocate of Poitou, Aimery Picaud would have been especially proud of the twin pinecone turrets that so handsomely flank the west front of the building, and were a particular feature of mediaeval churches in this region. But it is the west front itself that remains among the highest achievements of Romanesque architecture. If there are more than a few square centimetres of stone left uncarved it would be a surprise. Here is a sermon in stone, spelt out in images across the entire face of the church. Arch above arch, frieze above frieze, are decorated with fantastic creatures inspired as ever by the biblical Apocalypse. They lash and snap at each another, and devour their own tails, while in between these zoomorphic nightmares are rows of gentle saints and apostles, all bound together by entwining images of flora and fauna, and by intricate geometrical patterns that lead the eye a dance across the face of this extraordinary church. We are gazing at a morality play carved in stone.
And high above this tussle for people’s souls on the facade of Notre-Dame-la-Grande stands the figure of Christ in Majesty in his oval-shaped mandorla like a seal of office. Here was the promise of ultimate authority, and the reassurance that the struggle with the forces of evil was all worthwhile. Then, in the midst of all this heavy moralising we come across an endearing touch — a panel depicting the child Jesus being given his first bath, with Joseph looking awkwardly out of place and keeping a safe distance. Ordinary human sentiments did sometimes find their place amid the rhetoric.
The term ‘Romanesque’ was only coined in the 19th century. But it is used to describe a style of architecture that came into being in Western Europe from about the middle of the 10th century in response to an upsurge of religious fervour and self-confidence following centuries of anarchy and insurgence. Now the demand was for more spacious churches to accommodate swelling congregations. To satisfy these needs architects turned for inspiration to the most substantial buildings to have survived the long centuries of chaos and disruption. These were the monumental civic buildings that had been created during the Roman Empire as long as a thousand years earlier — temples, amphitheatres, bridges, aqueducts. Nothing so impressive or so enduring had been created in the dark centuries since. So, the new churches were constructed in emulation of them, with architects and stone masons learning afresh those engineering skills at which the Romans had excelled. Doors and windows were no longer narrow slots but broad rounded arches supported by solid columns on either side, while roofs were vaulted so that the weight of a stone roof could be borne on massive piers set on either side of a wide central nave. The result was more space, more light, and in particular more opportunity for decoration.
For these reasons, especially the last, the Romanesque style of church-building became ideally suited to the kind of pictorial sermonising which is such a dominant feature of Notre-Dame-la-Grande, as it is of hundreds of other churches in this region and along the pilgrim roads in general. Every arch and every space offered invitations for stone-carvers to create a corpus of imagery designed to deliver the Christian message. The facades of these churches are like large-scale illustrated books, each chapter telling some aspect of the Bible story for the benefit of a largely illiterate population, each story pressing home the perils of a sinful life and the rewards of a godly one.
It is these elaborately decorated churches which seem to set the tone of daily life at a time in European history when no other sources of teaching were available to most people. Churches held the key to all knowledge and all wisdom.
No modern historian has offered a sharper insight into what it was like to be an ordinary citizen in mediaeval Europe than the Dutch scholar Johan Huizinga. ‘So violent and motley was life, that it bore the mixed smell of blood and of roses. The men of that time always oscillate between the fear of hell and the most naive joy, between cruelty and tenderness, between harsh asceticism and insane attachment to the delights of this world, between hatred and goodness, always running to extremes.’ (7) With Huizinga’s words in mind, as we gaze up at the facade of one of these Romanesque churches along the pilgrim roads, it is as if we are reading an open book of the mediaeval mind.
These new churches, more spacious and elegant than the cramped little boxes that preceded them, owed their design and craftsmanship to northern Italy. And as so often happened in these early years of revitalised Christendom, the incentive for establishing them here in France came from the monasteries — chiefly from leaders of the Benedictine Order, and in particular from those formidable aristocrats who were the successive abbots of Cluny, in southern Burgundy. It was in the year 987 that Abbot Mayeul of Cluny persuaded one of the most remarkable churchmen of his day to come to Burgundy. He was William (or Guglielmo) of Volpiano (962-1031), at that time a monk in the Piedmont region of northwest Italy. William was not only a monk: he was an aristocrat (like Mayeul) with social connections to just about everybody who mattered in Europe. In addition he was a highly gifted designer and architect — which was principally why Abbot Mayeul invited him.
The invitation proved to be an historic moment in the history of church building in Europe. William accepted, and duly arrived in the Duchy of Burgundy, never returning to live in his native Italy. In the course of his time here, and elsewhere in France, William became to a large extent responsible for establishing the first truly international style of church architecture in Western Europe. He was the father — or more appropriately the godfather — of Romanesque, which was to remain the predominant style of church building for more than two hundred years until the evolution of Gothic late in the 12th century.
But churches on the scale that William planned required builders and craftsmen with skills far beyond those that existed anywhere in Burgundy — or indeed, in the whole of France. William was aware, however, that those skills did exist in the region of northern Italy where his own powerful family held sway. This was in Lombardy, the region immediately to the south of the Alps and the Italian lakes. No doubt using the influence of his social position, William succeeded in bringing a body of these Lombard craftsmen to Burgundy for the express purpose of carrying out the work of church-building that Abbot Mayeul was proposing. Two immensely powerful men were now working together.
As a result Burgundy became the cradle of what has become known as ‘the First Romanesque style’ of church architecture. By the end of the 11th century a number of monasteries, priories and parish churches, most of them within a short radius of Cluny, all bore the unmistakeable hallmark of these Lombard craftsmen — tall slender bell-towers, decorative blind arches set into the walls, saw-edged moulding round the roofline of the apse. The Lombard masons and craftsmen operated within a system of itinerant workshops that were part of an extended mobile community that would have included wives, families, servants and domestic animals. The community established itself ‘on site’, wherever the work was, remaining there until the job was completed, before moving on to the next. They were like a nomadic tribe with no permanent home, generation after generation. The Lombards possessed a store of specialist skills that kept them in constant demand over a long period, so that within the next hundred years their influence had spread far beyond Burgundy. Today the churches that bear their unmistakeable signature stand proudly in the European landscape as far afield as Germany, Sweden, the Pyrenees, Dalmatia and Hungary. They remain among the unsung heroes and pioneers of European architecture.
The Lombards were in the forefront of what has been described as a spiritual Renaissance in Europe, of which the pilgrimage movement was a vital manifestation. Right across the continent there arose an urge to build, to give thanks, and to celebrate. People had come out of the darkness to seek a new light. A monk from Cluny by the name of Raoul Glaber (985-1047) was keeping a chronicle at exactly the time when the Lombards were building their tall, handsome churches right across Burgundy. And he made a memorable observation about the prevailing mood of the time:
A little after the year one thousand there was a sudden rush to rebuild churches all over the world…. One would have said that the world itself was casting aside its old age and clothing itself anew in a white mantle of churches…. A veritable contest drove each Christian community to build a more sumptuous church than its neighbours…. Even the little churches in the villages were reconstructed by the faithful more beautiful than before.’ (8)
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The old Roman road continues southwest across the low-lying pastures and vineyards of Poitou towards the Atlantic and the broad estuary of the Gironde, and ultimately to Bordeaux. If the mediaeval pilgrim imagined after the churches of Poitiers he might be free of didactic sermons in stone, he was in for a shock. Within little more than a day’s journey he was confronted — right beside the road — by the church of St Pierre at Aulnay.
This was always chiefly for pilgrims. And if the Poitiers churches had been an illustrated book, Aulnay was an illustrated encyclopaedia. It is hard to imagine what the foot-weary traveller would have made of it. Everywhere we look a face looks back at us, a face designed to inspire terror or hope: birds, horses, mermaids, four-legged creatures with wings and beaks, couples entwined by their tails, beasts bound by vine tendrils, elephants, grimacing giants, moustachioed owls; and then saints, apostles, angels, knights, maidens. The grotesque and the serene live side by side: the light and the dark. The south portal of the church is the most intensely carved — one of the most glorious ensembles of Romanesque sculpture in Europe, with four semi-circular bands of massed figures curved above the door, one above the other. Four knights crush demons beneath their shields and spears. Below the knights, along the inner band, is a frieze of beasts caught within the tendrils of a climbing plant. The next tier depicts the 12 apostles and the 12 prophets of the Apocalypse bearing crowns of gold and musical instruments, and vials filled with odours, after the account given in the fourth chapter of the Book of Revelations:
…and, behold, a throne.
And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine stone:
and there was a rainbow about the throne, in sight like an emerald.
And round about the throne were four and twenty seats: and upon
the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting, clothed in white
raiment; and they had on their heads crowns of gold.
The outer band of carving on the Aulnay south portal is the most extraordinary. Here is an illustration of the mediaeval mind at its most nightmarish: an evocation of chaos, of life without God, a world without love, made up of hideous creatures who do nothing but howl and grimace and chatter like the occupants of an imaginary madhouse. It is yet another dark sermon in stone, designed as ever to assault weary pilgrims making their way into the church to celebrate Mass, only to endure an actual sermon delivered most likely on the very same theme. One begins to feel sorry for them. As if months of foot-slogging across unknown lands were not testing enough, to be reminded of hellfire at every place of prayer would seem an undue extra burden. Today’s traveller may enjoy the privilege of appreciating these apocalyptic nightmares as works of art. The mediaeval pilgrim would have possessed no such sophisticated detachment: the very concept of ‘art’ as we understand it would have been quite unknown to him. It is we who, in a sense, have become ‘illiterate’: ignorant of the meaning of these images, insensitive to mediaeval pilgrims’ terrors and anxieties, and by and large unlikely to be sharing the naked simplicity of their faith.
The south portal at Aulnay was carved about the year 1130, around the time St Bernard was drawing packed congregations to his sermons and converting the elderly Duke of Aquitaine at Parthenay — perhaps, too, at about the time when Aimery Picaud was gathering material for the Pilgrim’s Guide in his monastery at Parthenay-le-Vieux, as well as preparing to set off on his own pilgrimage to Santiago. It was a time of fervent energy in all matters of faith, especially in church-building. Within the next 50 years there would scarcely be a village within a short radius of Aulnay that did not have a new church decorated, to a great or lesser extent, by the same didactic school of stone-carvers.
A short distance further south and pilgrims once again found themselves being given firm guidance by the Guide as to where they should go next. ‘It is vital to visit the venerable head of the St John the Baptist, brought by Christians from the region of Jerusalem to a place entitled Angély for safekeeping in the land of Poitou.’ This instruction comes from the chapter devoted to saints who should be revered along the route, and it immediately follows Aimery Picaud’s chapter, already quoted, on ‘The Quality of the Lands and the People along the Road.’ While there is no proof that Picaud may have been responsible for this chapter as well, the pride with which the writer claims the head of John the Baptist to be in the safekeeping of Poitou suggests that the two authors may be one and the same. Where else, he seems to be suggesting, would so holy a relic have found so safe a haven?
Today the small town of St-Jean-d’Angély retains its connection with John the Baptist, though only in name. The head is actually believed to have been brought not from Jerusalem but from Alexandria, where it was given in the 9th century to the Benedictines, who proceeded to build a great abbey to receive it, and where it was placed on display for flocks of pilgrims to venerate, ‘worshipped day and night by a body of one hundred monks’, so the Guide continues. Even at the time there was clearly some question as to its authenticity since the author felt the need to claim numerous miracles as ‘the reason why one believes this one to be the true head of the saint.’ His implied doubts were well founded. Several other claims to possess the Baptist’s head began to dent the abbey’s special prestige. Worse was to follow. St-Jean-d’Angély became a Protestant town during the 16th-century religious wars, and the Reformers duly burnt down the abbey along with the abbey church and — we must assume — the sacred head.
There were saints galore to venerate in this region. A further short journey south along the Roman road took pilgrims to a town actually called Saintes. It took its name in honour of a 3rd-century Christian martyr, St Eutrope, about whom the Pilgrim’s Guide had an enormous amount to say. He is described as coming from a noble Persian family, and having converted to Christianity; then he travelled widely preaching the gospel, arriving eventually at ‘a city called Saintes’ (presumably still known by some other name), which was ‘rich in all manner of goods and provisions… with handsome squares and streets, and beautiful in so many ways.’ Again we can detect the familiar note of pride in Picaud’s native region. Yet Eutrope and his Christianity were not welcomed here. He was driven out, and returned to Rome to lick his wounds. Later he returned and settled himself in a hut outside the town walls, where he was befriended by a beautiful girl who became his devoted disciple, until a jealous father recruited a hostile mob that came to the hut and ‘stoned the holy man of God’ and finally ‘killed him by beating his head to pieces with hatchets and axes.’
The Guide’s richly-flavoured account of St Eutrope’s life and death occupies more than twice the space of any other entry in the chapter on saints to be venerated along the pilgrim roads. Besides the story’s central theme of a spiritual crusade in the face of barbarism and ignorance, a number of other threads are intertwined — a taste for adventure and exotic lands, the importance of myth and legend, belief in the power of miracles, and nostalgia for home and home comforts. Along with these threads is a strong sense of romance, even of romantic and impossible love, reminding us that this was the era of the courtly troubadour poets, and that the local duke at this time, William IX of Aquitaine (1071-1126), has been described as the first troubadour poet. (9)
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St Eutrope’s tomb still rests in the crypt of the priory church in Saintes, which the monks of Cluny built in his honour during the 11th century. The crypt is all that remains of the original church, which must have been enormous, certainly as large as St Hilaire’s pilgrim church in Poitiers, and was designed for precisely the same purpose: in order to accommodate huge congregations, many of them pilgrims on their way to Spain and Santiago de Compostela.
As the Guide makes clear, the fame and popularity of the saint’s shrine was due to a great extent to the healing powers it was believed to possess. ‘The lame can stand, the blind can see again, hearing is restored to the deaf, and the possessed are made free.’ A belief in miracles was central to mediaeval religious thought. Priests who were attached to a church fortunate enough to have obtained a relic with such powers would compile lists and detailed accounts of the miracles performed, which would then be circulated, thereby recruiting more sufferers eager to be cured, along with all manner of other hangers-on. As Jonathan Sumption has put it, ‘Every major shrine was perpetually besieged by a motley crowd of pilgrims, hawkers, musicians, beggars and idlers whose appetite for new wonders was insatiable.’ (6) Shrines, and the miracles performed there, could promote a veritable industry of healing, and a highly profitable one, most of all for the church or abbey concerned, for whom donations made in gratitude for miraculous cures became its principal source of income. A holy relic that was stolen, lost or somehow discredited could bring financial ruin to a church or abbey.
The old town of Saintes remains overloaded with mediaeval churches. But across the River Charente lies a particular treasure of Romanesque architecture. Among the earliest and most splendid in the region, the Eglise Ste-Marie was attached to an abbey that would certainly have been visited by passing pilgrims, though only by a special minority of them: women. This is the Abbaye aux Dames, an immaculately blue-blooded institution headed by an abbess who was always chosen from one of the noblest families in France, and who also supervised a ladies’ college that was likewise for the daughters of the rich. What the young ladies actually learnt is not on record.
The abbey church itself, Ste-Marie, was built early in the 12th century, and it offers one of the earliest examples of those sculpted bands of figures, arranged in tight ranks above the principal door in a series of semi-circles — six of them, all densely and intricately carved, the figures radiating outwards from the hand of God in the very centre. Apart from images of angels, suffering martyrs and symbols of the four evangelists, the number of crowned elders from the Apocalypse has now grown far beyond the 31 at Aulnay to a veritable orchestra of 54, all arranged intimately in pairs who face one another with an air of cheerful piety as they play their musical instruments. It is a delightful human touch.
Skilled craftsmanship in stone, which is such a feature of the churches along this stretch of the pilgrim road, was clearly in high demand, particularly at this time when it was thought vital by religious leaders that the message of Christianity be broadcast on the face every new place of worship. The church was expanding greatly. A missionary spirit was abroad, and sculptors and stonemasons had become essential agents in a vast proselytising campaign. They became part of another travelling workshop in the manner of the Lombards in Burgundy a century earlier. Along with pilgrims they travelled the same roads. Hence the design of church facades in this region of France, typified by those of Aulnay and Saintes, was carried by craftsmen over the Pyrenees and into Spain, where a number of churches along the camino, even as far as Santiago itself, display the unmistakeable ‘signature’ of these skilled carvers and masons.
‘Then we come to the country of Saintonge’, explains the Pilgrim’s Guide. This was the region close to the Atlantic, with Saintes as its capital and administrative centre. The pilgrim road runs through the very centre of it, beckoning the traveller to larger objectives — Bordeaux, the Pyrenees and Spain. Yet in this rural backwater it is as though the dynamic of the Santiago pilgrimage spread out across this region like a ripple of the nearby ocean, depositing churches as exquisite as jewels in every village. The Saintonge remains one of the great treasuries of Romanesque architecture in France, with more than 100 churches dating at least in part from the 12th century, a great many of them magnificently decorated.
Making a selection is inevitably personal, so wide is the choice. One gem is the church at Corme-Royal, a short distance off the main road from Saintes towards the oyster beds of Marennes. Here the west door, protected from the eroding sea winds by a high wall, is a scaled-down version of the portals at Aulnay and Saintes. The carved images tell familiar stories, the parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, figures representing Virtue and Vice, various saints and apostles including one who can only be St James, represented as a pilgrim and carrying a staff — as he frequently is in church paintings and illuminated manuscripts: the apostle as a pilgrim travelling to his own shrine. A few miles away is Rioux, one of the most perfect churches in the Saintonge. Now the decoration across the entire face of the church is geometrical: diamond patterns, shell shapes, floral motifs, zigzags, criss-crosses, curlicues, chevrons, dogs-teeth, stylised foliage twisting and entwining on and on, as well as numerous other motifs spread everywhere. Scarcely a block of stone is left bare. If a church could be embroidered, it is Rioux. Then, unexpectedly amid all this geometry, set into the central arch above the west door, is a carving of a smiling Madonna and Child so touching it would grace any museum in the world.
Then, after Rioux — Marignac, its facade weathered by the Atlantic gales, its three-lobed apse commanding a landscape of vines and crumbling stone barns. Further east lies Chadenac, with its elegant figures of archangels whose robes ripple and billow like those of a Botticelli Venus. A short distance further, Echebrune, tucked into the woods with another facade of geometrical tracery, and whose lower columns display crude graffiti of a procession of pilgrims recognisable by their hats and staves. And Perignac, fringed today by Cognac vineyards, with its wonderful mandorla, or oval-shaped panel, of Christ flanked by two archangels with flowing robes, and an extraordinary band of horses’ heads high above the west window.
The Saintonge offers a banquet of the Romanesque. And Romanesque is quintessentially the architecture of the pilgrim roads. When the monk of Cluny, Raoul Glaber, wrote that ‘even the little churches in the villages were reconstructed by the faithful more beautiful than before’ he would have been thinking mostly of his native Burgundy, and at a time at least a century before these little churches of the Saintonge were created. Had he lived in the 12th rather than in the 11th century Glaber would certainly have warmed just as enthusiastically to these little jewel-boxes on the far side of France. And his celebrated observation about the world ‘casting aside its old age and clothing itself anew in a whiter mantle of churches’ would have applied just as vividly here near the windswept shores of the Atlantic as in the sheltered plains of Burgundy.