The pilgrim roads were rivers of humanity flowing inexorably west and south; and like all rivers they were fed by tributaries from far and wide, swelling their size and strength as they headed towards Spain and the far Atlantic. Besides the four principal pilgrim roads listed in the 12th-century Pilgrim’s Guide there were many others spread across the country like a giant spider’s web, leading to innumerable local shrines. Pilgrims setting off for Santiago would make a point of visiting some of these local shrines along the way. They served as welcome diversions on a long journey, a pause for a prayer and a blessing to sustain their spirits on the road ahead — not altogether unlike the modern traveller making a diversion to take in Siena and Assisi on the way to Rome. As today, there was always an element of spiritual tourism about pilgrimages: celebrated and beautiful places had a natural allure.
By the 12th century the number of shrines in France attracting pilgrims was beyond count as the cult of holy relics reached fever pitch. We can even talk of a ‘relics industry’ as churches and monasteries vied with each other to possess and display the most prestigious objects for pilgrims to venerate. Donations by grateful travellers whose prayers had been answered became a major source of income for religious houses fortunate enough to own such items. Relics were ‘realisable assets’, as Professor Christopher Brooke has succinctly put it.
Not surprisingly, with such intense competition there were soon simply not enough saints to go round. And as demand outstripped supply, so theft, and faking of holy relics, became widespread. Christian principles all too often gave way to greed and opportunism, and many a priest preserved his self-respect by conveniently turning a blind eye to unwelcome evidence of trickery.
In the midst of this relics ‘fever’ the crusades made a welcome and important contribution. Crusading knights, many of them adventurers in disguise, began to bring back as trophies whatever fragments of the bible lands they could lay their hands on, together with colourful tales of what these objects were supposed to be and where they were supposed to have come from. A gullible Christian world eagerly awaited them, and for the returning crusader it became a profitable trade. This new source of holy relics was particularly exploited as a result of the 4th Crusade of 1204 in which the flower of European chivalry, having taken the cross and set out with heroic ambitions, proceeded to sack and loot Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Church. One outcome was that relics began to reach France and elsewhere in Western Europe in a veritable flood; and the number of churches and priories claiming to possess sacred objects from the Holy Lands increased proportionately. Sceptics calculated how many sailing vessels could be constructed out of the many supposed fragments of the holy cross. Chaucer’s pardoner carried with him a fragment of the sail which St Peter had ‘whan that he wente upon the see.’
Of the numerous tributaries feeding the pilgrim ‘rivers’ to Santiago one of the most important ran south from the spectacular island shrine and abbey of Mont St-Michel, off the coast of the English Channel on the western borders of Normandy. Here — unusually — there was no holy relic to be revered. The popularity of the site as a place of pilgrimage was due to a mystical combination of geography and legend. According to local tradition early in the 8th century — a time when most of what is now Normandy was in the hands of Viking pirates — the Archangel Michael appeared to a beleaguered local bishop, instructing him to build a church on a rocky islet a short distance offshore. Before long a cult of St Michael grew up on the site. After the eventual Christianisation of Normandy in the 10th century, successive Norman dukes undertook to finance the building of a magnificent abbey on the sacred island.
The man responsible for designing the abbey and its church was that remarkable architect-monk from Lombardy, in northern Italy, by the name of William of Volpiano (discussed in Chapter 4). In the late 10th century William had been invited to Burgundy by the abbot of Cluny for the express purpose of rebuilding abbeys and churches which had been desecrated during the centuries of ‘barbarian’ invasions, principally by the Vikings. Together with his team of masons and craftsmen from Lombardy, William established in Burgundy what has become known as the ‘first Romanesque style’ of church architecture. His reputation soon drew the attention of the rulers of Normandy, now an independent dukedom whose rulers, in the fervour of their new faith, were engaged in making Normandy the heart of Christian culture and monastic life.
Hence, early in the 11th century William of Volpiano was given the challenging task of building an abbey on the bare rock of Mont St-Michel. William’s courageous response was to place the transept crossing of the abbey church at the very peak of the rock, necessitating the construction of underground crypts and chapels in the rock below to bear the weight of the new church.
It was a daring and triumphant achievement, and it heralded the emergence of Mont St-Michel as among the most revered centres of pilgrimage in Europe. Its importance soon extended to England, and to English pilgrims setting out for Santiago, largely as a result of the Norman invasion and conquest of England by William the Conqueror in 1066. As a reward for its support for the invasion Duke William — now also King of England! — the abbey of Mont St-Michel was awarded lands on the English side of the Channel, among them a small islet off the coast of Cornwall which was a match for the abbey-island across the water. A Benedictine priory was duly built on the Cornish islet, which took the name of the mother-abbey, becoming St Michael’s Mount. Soon English pilgrims, before embarking from Plymouth further along the coast, would begin their journey by offering prayers to the Archangel Michael here in Cornwall, then repeat their prayers to the same saint on arriving at the far side of the Channel, at Mont St-Michel. Prayers for a safe crossing were thus matched by prayers offered in thanksgiving for having arrived safely across the sea.
From here in Normandy English pilgrims then headed south, some towards Chartres and Orléans, others keeping further west and finally joining travellers on the principal pilgrim road from Paris and Tours somewhere in the region of Poitiers, and before long linking up with the scores of other English pilgrims who had sailed from Bristol towards Bordeaux on those trading vessels soon to return home with a less pious cargo — wine.
Doubtless most pilgrims beginning their long journey with a visit to Mont St-Michel would have understood than an archangel had no earthly presence and hence no earthly remains. Nonetheless there are accounts of devout travellers arriving on the island fully expecting to be able to venerate the body of St Michael. By way of compensation there grew up a popular custom among pilgrims to the abbey of gathering rocks and pebbles from the seashore at low tide as mementos, much as children on a seaside holiday today will collect shells and coloured pebbles to take home.
An even more famous site attracting pilgrims on their way to Santiago was the cathedral of Chartres, some 50 miles southwest of Paris. Chartres is not situated on one of the main pilgrim routes, and it is not known when the cult of St James first became attached to the cathedral. But by the early 13th century it was well-enough established for the most beautiful assembly of stained glass in the world to include two windows that relate specifically to the apostle and to the discovery of his tomb in Spain. The first window is devoted to the life of St James, made up of 30 panels, one of which depicts Jesus giving James his mission to preach in Spain, the sequence ending with the apostle’s martyrdom at the hands of King Herod.
But it is the second window, in the choir of the cathedral, which is more directly related to the Santiago pilgrimage, and known as the Charlemagne Window. One of the 24 panels shows St James appearing to the emperor in a dream, urging him to return to Spain to defeat the Saracens. Another panel depicts Charlemagne departing for Spain, and in a third he is gazing up at the Milky Way, which will lead him to the tomb of St James. Together the three scenes illustrate the popular variation of the Song of Roland in which Charlemagne’s visitor in his dream is not the archangel Gabriel but St James himself. In other words, the Chartres window faithfully follows the version of the Song of Roland, which was almost certainly conceived as a deliberate boost to the cause of the Santiago pilgrimage, probably on the initiative of the abbey of Cluny (as described more fully in Chapter 5).
That this version of the tale should have become enshrined in France’s greatest cathedral nearly two centuries after it was composed is a testimony to how successfully the Charlemagne story had been adapted for public consumption. The mediaeval imagination lent itself to reinventing legend and presenting it as reality: it was a gift which supplies a key to the creative genius of the age — a gift manifest in its painting, its sculpture and, as here, in the magnificence of its stained glass.
Chartres had already enjoyed a long tradition of pilgrimage dating back at least to the early Christian era. The principal focus of veneration is made clear by the most celebrated of all the mediaeval windows at Chartres, one that would probably get the popular vote as the most beautiful example of stained-glass in the world. This is the Virgin window with an incomparable intensity of lapis-lazuli blue. The cathedral itself is dedicated to the Virgin Mary (as is Notre-Dame in Paris), and it became a centre of the Marian cult as a result of possessing the most revered of all the supposed relics of the Virgin, known as the Sancta Camisa, or Sacred Veil. This consists of about five metres of cloth (today preserved in a reliquary in an apsidal chapel), believed to have been worn by Mary at the birth of Jesus. The origin of the garment is as obscure as that of most holy relics, though it was probably stolen from a Jewish community in Jerusalem and brought to Constantinople, where it was offered as a gift to the Emperor Charlemagne by the Byzantine emperor of the Eastern Church. Charlemagne’s grandson, Charles II, then presented it to the bishop of Chartres in about the year 876. In the succeeding centuries it became an object of fervent adulation by pilgrims, especially by women in the widely-held belief that prayers offered here would ease the pains of pregnancy.
The far-fetched superstitions attached to sacred relics like the Sancta Camisa may be deeply alienating to rational minds today, as is the gullibility of the mediaeval pilgrim; yet the modern traveller might prefer to reflect that without the deep passions and huge popular support generated by such holy shrines, a great many of the places we now throng to visit and admire would simply not exist.
Chartres itself is a case in point. The era of the great cathedrals had a quite different feel about it from that of the monasteries that preceded it. Cathedrals themselves performed a largely different role within a community. Monasteries were created to be isolated from the social world: the monastic ideal had emerged at a time when Christianity could survive only in sealed pockets within a largely alien environment — or at least an environment that had no need of them, and to which they did not belong. They were the product of a siege mentality. But by the time the great cathedrals were being created, in the 12th and 13th centuries, Christianity had won. The world was no longer alien.
Hence cathedrals were built in the very heart of a community, and for the needs of that community. They were the most important buildings in a town, and accordingly played a substantially different role in people’s social and spiritual life from that of an abbey. Townspeople used them for a variety of purposes other than religious services and private prayers. Because of its sheer size and dominant position, a cathedral became the natural venue for such events as local markets, each of its huge carved entrances becoming the focus of a wide range of commercial activities. In Chartres, four annual fairs were held in the area around the cathedral. These coincided with the four feast days in honour of the Virgin — the Presentation, the Annunciation, the Assumption and the Nativity. Pilgrimages were a key entity on such occasions: the commercial success of the fairs was assured by the presence of large numbers of pilgrims who had come to venerate one of the most revered holy relics in Europe. While the majority of pilgrims may have been poor, there was invariably a minority with money to spend.
As the new cathedrals became ‘people’s palaces’ it was natural that ordinary people should wish to play their part in maintaining them — particularly after the disastrous outbreaks of fire which were a perennial hazard in mediaeval churches, where naked candles and torches provided the only artificial light, and roofs were often still of timber. Chartres suffered a sequence of devastating fires, necessitating constant rebuilding between the 9th and the 13th centuries.
It was precisely in response to such disasters that the widespread public affection for the local cathedral became demonstrated in spectacular fashion in what has become known as the ‘building crusades.’ In the year 1145 more than 1000 pilgrims arrived at Chartres dragging carts filled with building materials along with provisions for those who had lost everything when one of the fires spread through the town. It was recorded that for months, men and women hauled heavy wagons of stones up the slope to the cathedral site.
This degree of public involvement in the construction and life of a cathedral had the effect of altering to some extent the very nature of pilgrimages. Now that cathedrals had become corporate institutions, so too were the pilgrimages they attracted. The notion of a pilgrimage being one person’s private journey in search of salvation was being replaced by an essentially collective exercise whose benefits might be described in today’s jargon as a form of group therapy. Jonathan Sumption has described this change in the following words: ‘Building crusades reflected the view that pilgrimages performed en masse were more meritorious than those performed alone. We find the pilgrim-builders forming themselves into sects, or brotherhoods, performing their penitential rituals in common, and solemnly expelling those members who showed signs of returning to their old ways.’
So, a note of self-righteous intolerance creeps in at the same time. But it is the image of the wandering band of travellers, cheerful and high-spirited, which springs to mind most readily when we think of mediaeval pilgrims on the way to some distant shrine: a journey that has freed them from the toil and drudgery of daily life, and where penitence may count rather less than the enjoyment of good company and the pleasures of the open road. Chaucer may be partly responsible, with his motley crew setting out for Canterbury from the Tabard Inn, where many of them had no doubt spent a thoroughly jolly evening, then entertaining each other with robust stories along the way. A similarly colourful picture of the collective pilgrimage gazes out at us from illuminated manuscripts of the same era as Chaucer’s great poem. Among the most delightful is contained in a 14th-century Burgundian Book of Hours now in the Musée Condé at Chantilly. It shows a band of pilgrims returning from Santiago with all the time in the world to enjoy themselves, laughing and joking and playing games as they make their easy-going way through the pleasant country. In this bucolic scene we could hardly be further from the image of the solitary sinner plodding grimly to some holy shrine in the hope of being spared eternal damnation. It seems most unlikely that any of the pilgrims represented in the Burgundian Book of Hours had considered for one moment the possibility of hellfire.
Such records of pilgrimage as an enjoyable enterprise, whether from Chaucer of from illuminated Books of Hours, are both from the later Middle Ages. And inevitably they feel much closer to the spirit of the present-day cultural tourist than to that of the early centuries of pilgrimage when the journey to Santiago was still fraught with dangers and few physical comforts were to be found along the way.
It is tempting to make a further comparison with the modern traveller, and speculate on how much mediaeval pilgrims would have been struck by the beauty and sheer magnificence of the places they visited. Most pilgrims were from small communities where the only buildings of any size and grandeur would have been the church and perhaps the castle of the local lord. Few pilgrims would ever have travelled far from home. Suddenly a great abbey, or a soaring cathedral, even a bustling town with tall mansions and cobbled streets, would have been quite unfamiliar. More bewildering still would have been the gold and glittering jewels decorating the shrines they had come to venerate. It is impossible not to believe that a sense of wonder and awe would have overwhelmed pilgrims, sustaining them on their journey, and remaining with them as a collection of golden memories for the rest of their lives.
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After Chartres, the second of the magnificent Gothic cathedrals of France to honour St James was Bourges, further to the south and situated on the principal pilgrim road we have been taking from Vézelay. The two cathedrals, Bourges and Chartres, are more or less contemporary, the main structure as it exists today having been started in the final decade of the 12th century.
With its five elaborately carved portals, soaring nave and flamboyant flying buttresses, Bourges cathedral must have been another awesome sight for pilgrims. They would have made their way down from Normandy, perhaps taking in Chartres, then crossing the Loire at Orléans before heading south into the dukedom of Berry, of which Bourges was the regional capital. And at this point they joined with other travellers who had been heading south from Vézelay.
Unlike Chartres, Bourges offers no open propaganda for the Santiago pilgrimage itself: in its stained glass windows there is no retelling of the Song of Roland with St James beckoning the Emperor Charlemagne in a dream to follow the Milky Way into northwest Spain in order to discover the apostle’s tomb and become the very first Santiago pilgrim. In Bourges the tributes to St James are more low-keyed: he is just one apostle among others. A 13th-century window in one of the chapels relates the customary legend of his life, concluding with his decapitation by Herod. In another chapel he appears as a bystander witnessing the Annunciation. And in a tall window on the south side of the cathedral, high up, those of St Philip and St Thomas flank his full-length figure. Nowhere in the cathedral is there a call to pilgrims to set off for his shrine in Spain. But by this time, in the later Middle Ages, perhaps the urgency of the Santiago pilgrimage had already become a little blunted. The Saracens had long been reduced to a small pocket in southern Spain; and there was no longer any need for a rousing call to arms.
Pilgrims joining the road from Vézelay at Bourges would have missed out on the drama and hysteria surrounding the worship of Mary Magdalene described in the previous chapter. They would have missed, too, the impact of that peerless abbey church — the great church on the hill — with its uplifting valediction for pilgrims who were setting off into the unknown, in the form of the carved tympanum over the main entrance extending the rays of God’s blessing to all corners of the earth.
Historic roads often display fragments of their past, like mementos pinned here and there along the way. Today’s travellers heading south from Vézelay are everywhere reminded of the history of the road they are taking. Modern highways tend to cut corners, whereas the original pilgrim road still threads its way more peacefully at walking pace from village to village. To follow it here in Burgundy is to make a journey into the past — a journey signposted with names that speak of distant times, like the village of La Maison Dieu, named after a long-vanished pilgrims’ hospice. Or another village, Asquins, close to Vézelay, with its little church of St Jacques, where there was once a 9th-century priory until it was sacked (along with other religious houses in the area) by Viking marauders, so causing the local count to found a new abbey more securely on a nearby hill — which became Vézelay.
Echo follows echo along the old pilgrim road as it meanders from village to village, through forests that have never changed and over streams that have always flowed. The traveller may notice a half-buried church on a hill, or stone slabs that are the remains of an ancient ford now replaced by a bridge. One village is called Metz-le-Comte, the comte being a descendent of the very count who built Vézelay back in the 10th century. So, the echoes resound.
Then, back on the modern road, we encounter another ancient forest. And suddenly an isolated chapel comes into view dedicated to a saint widely venerated in these parts, St Lazare — in other words Lazarus, the friend of Jesus whom he brought back from the dead, and who according to legend accompanied his sister Mary Magdalene on the open raft which brought them to the shores of Provence. This was a legend so closely interwoven with the Santiago pilgrimage that the worship of St James throughout this area of France cannot be separated from it — as we have already seen at Vézelay, and as we shall see again in the next chapter.
The pilgrim road continues southwest through more wooded countryside towards the western border of Burgundy. The boundary here is defined by the Loire, the longest river in France, soon to flow northwards past St Benoit and Orléans, from where it will accompany pilgrims on the Paris road towards Tours (as described in Chapter 2).
On this upper stretch of the river pilgrims had their first direct encounter with the religious house whose invisible presence had been felt all along the pilgrim roads so far. This was the great Burgundian abbey of Cluny. The monastery itself lay some distance away to the southwest; yet here on an island in the river was a priory that had come to be described as the ‘eldest daughter of Cluny.’ The priory was La Charité-sur-Loire. As pilgrims made their way south it was one of the major landmarks along this stretch of the road — a handsome cluster of buildings that included a magnificent church capable of holding a congregation of at least 5000. The priory was surrounded by well-tended gardens, orchards and vineyards, as well as numerous houses, workshops and outbuildings. To pilgrims weary from the long road it would have seemed a paradise island.
La Charité was the first monastery to be established as a dependency of Cluny — the first of what was to become an expanding empire of dependent abbeys and priories throughout Europe And as Cluny’s ‘eldest daughter’, in the eyes of the mother house La Charité seems to have remained also her best-loved daughter. It was the greatest of Cluny’s abbot, Hugh of Semur (St Hugh), who in 1059 founded the priory here on what was then an island. Within a century it had grown massively, both in size and influence. Donors included King Henry 1 of England (1068-1135), son of William the Conqueror. While remaining under the authority of Cluny the priory also acquired at least 70 dependencies of her own, including religious houses in Chartres, Paris, and even in England.
As a key halt on the road from Vézelay La Charité naturally attracted an abundance of pilgrims, and not entirely for spiritual reasons. The generous hand of Cluny ensured that hospitality matched the appeal of the place itself. It was a reputation for providing the best food and wine that pilgrims were likely to enjoy on the entire journey that earned the priory its name — which has stuck ever since.
Today La Charité remains one of the gems of Burgundy — a gem that has been painstakingly repaired and polished. Historical events did not always treat it as ‘charitably’ as it treated travellers. Fire caused massive destruction of the whole complex in the 16th century, followed by further damage during the French wars of religion when it became — ironically — a Protestant stronghold, and suffered for it. Finally in the 19th century the local authorities delivered the coup de grâce by proposing to drive a road right through what remained of the priory church. In the nick of time help arrived in the shape of that angel of mercy, Prosper Merimée (1803-1870), the French government’s inspector of ancient monuments. Merimée not only put a stop to the road scheme, he set in motion a restoration programme for the church, his greatest triumph being to save the superb Romanesque tympanum belonging to the original west facade, which he discovered set into the wall of a local private house, and which subsequently found a new home in a surviving area of the church, where it remains today to the admiration of all.
The riverside town on its graceful sweep of the Loire has been lovingly restored along with much of the ancient priory. The whole town, which grew up round the priory, is still dominated by the proud Romanesque tower which has been a beacon guiding pilgrims on the road from Vézelay for more than eight centuries. The noble church towers of this region are among the glories of Burgundy. Rising elegantly from the centre of so many towns and villages, they are a testimony to those incomparable stonemasons from Lombardy who brought their Christian vision and their building skills from northern Italy to this part of France in the early years of religious revival. The towers remain symbols of resurgent faith and hope after the dark centuries of anarchy and insurrection. They stand tall across this Burgundian countryside as if God had planted his own standard across a newly won land.
The greatest of these Burgundian towers were those that crowned the vast abbey church of Cluny. This was Abbot Hugh’s ultimate dream, only realised after his death, and sadly no more than one of the lesser towers remains. Political events and human rapacity struck at Cluny even more cruelly than at La Charité. Yet if all too little of Cluny survives today, its contribution to the cause of St James, and to the vast enterprise of the Santiago pilgrimage, remains inviolate, beyond the reach of vandals. Cluny is the great ghost that haunts the pilgrimage movement. And so, leaving the ‘eldest daughter’, this is an appropriate moment to visit the mother-house herself.