Of the four principal pilgrim roads in France the one from Le Puy-en-Velay is the least documented geographically. A few key churches and abbeys along the route are recommended in the 12th-century Pilgrim’s Guide, but they are far apart from each other. There is no Aimery Picaud to fill in the gaps and indicate which precise route travellers should take in order to reach them; neither are there any abrasive comments on the delights and horrors that pilgrims could expect on their journey. Wayside chapels and former hospices now provide invaluable markers of the likely route. As a result the road from Le Puy has now become easily the most popular of the four roads for the traveller on foot, especially now that backpacking has become almost an industry. In the words of Robert Louis Stevenson, who famously travelled not far from here, in the Cevennes, with his donkey (in 1879), ‘I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.’ Today the track clearly marked GR65 has become generally identified as the original pilgrim road. And its popularity is understandable: the countryside of the Velay region, on the southern slopes of the Auvergne mountains, is wild and glorious; and as the traveller continues southwest several of the artistic gems of the pilgrimage are welcome staging-posts. We are travelling through a landscape of history.
Volcanoes formed much of the countryside of the Velay, and geographically this has given Le Puy an eccentric appearance. It is a city of sudden hills and surprising pinnacles of rock rising out of the plain, like gnarled fingers pointing to the sky. This natural environment has always lent itself to myth-making, and Le Puy is known to have been a sacred place long before its association with the Santiago pilgrimage — and indeed long before the conversion of Roman Gaul in the 4th century. The Emperor Charlemagne celebrated mass here on at least two occasions, in 772 and 800. And 150 years later, in 950, the local bishop by the name of Godescalc made a pilgrimage to the shrine of St James at Santiago. This was a little over a century after the first reports of the discovery of the apostle’s tomb, and we know from a visiting traveller’s report that a sizeable pilgrimage from far and wide had grown up in the intervening years. Nonetheless Godescalc’s journey seems to have been the first ‘official’ visit to the shrine by a senior churchman, and it is widely credited as a historic landmark in the story of the Santiago pilgrimage.
In 951 Bishop Godescalc commemorated his return to Le Puy by building a chapel on a tall pinnacle of rock within the city, and dedicated it to the Archangel Michael. It is unclear why his pilgrimage to Santiago should have prompted him to undertake such a thing, but in consequence the Chapelle St-Michel d’Aiguille became one of the earliest of the ‘pinnacle’ churches in Europe. In the centuries to follow, a number of others would be raised on similar isolated hilltops. Not being an earthly being, and therefore having no relics to be enshrined, St Michael became traditionally venerated in chapels loftily perched and pointing to the heavens: Mont St-Michel in Normandy and St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall are the most celebrated examples. Disciples of mystical geometry have found deep significance in the fact that shrines to the archangel are in a straight line from Cornwall and Normandy in the north, Le Puy in central France, and finally to his earliest-known shrine on the slopes of Monte Gargano in southern Italy.
In Le Puy pilgrims to the chapel of St-Michel d’Aiguilhe faced a formidable ascent of 267 steps. Worshippers in large numbers were clearly undaunted by this challenge, eager to express their devotion the hard way, and the chapel rapidly became a popular pilgrimage site. For several centuries it matched the appeal of the cathedral on a neighbouring hill only a short distance away.
The Cathédrale Notre-Dame dates from the late-11th and 12th centuries. Today’s travellers, familiar with the glow and lightness of Chartres and Bourges cathedrals, may find it oppressively gloomy, being roofed by an almost windowless dome that seems to smother the daylight. The whole building has a distinctly oriental flavour, owing a great deal to the early churches of Byzantium, which are invariably dark. It was evidently inspired by crusaders returning from the Holy Land and in particular Constantinople. What they wanted back in their own homeland was a place of worship which took them back spiritually to the Bible lands which they had recently helped to ‘liberate.’
At the same time there are equally powerful influences of that other crusading arena, Spain and the campaign of the Reconquest. The interior of the cathedral, and particularly the ribbed vaulting, carries strong echoes of that masterpiece of Muslim architecture in southern Spain, the Great Mosque in Córdoba. And here there may seem to be a startling contradiction: an important place of Christian worship inspired on the one hand by churches in the Holy Land that had been built in defiance of Islam, and yet inspired equally by one of the finest of all places of Islamic worship.
This enigma illustrates perfectly the ambivalent relationship that existed between Christian Europe and Muslim Spain during these early centuries before the might of Christian arms eventually expelled Islam from the Spanish peninsula. Until that moment Islamic Spain was the enemy that Christian leaders — at least the more enlightened among them — could not fail to admire, even envy. On the public level the appeal of a Holy War was irresistible to European leaders: the early military campaigns of the Reconquest and the burgeoning pilgrimage movement to Santiago carried huge political and emotional weight throughout the continent, boosting the morale of Europe and lifting Christian spirits so long battered by continual Saracen raids right across France.
At the same time there were other less demonstrative currents that flowed between the Islamic and Christian powers. From early in the 10th century the Caliphate of al-Andalus (modern Andalusia) in southern Spain, with its capital the city of Córdoba, became the wealthiest and most sophisticated political state in Europe, far outstripping the attainments of Christian civilisations in all the practical sciences, in mathematics, in philosophy and other intellectual pursuits. The library in Córdoba, with its Arabic treatises on medicine and the sciences, and its wealth of translations of Greek, Latin and Hebrew texts, was richer and far broader in scope than any library in the Christian world. As a result, even while armies in northern Spain were battling for territorial gain there existed a great deal of diplomatic and intellectual contact between the two regions of Spain, and even more so between the Muslim south and Christian scholars and church leaders throughout Western Europe. Córdoba was something of an international city, open to foreigners, and many Christian visitors returned from their travels with glowing accounts of what they had encountered. Islam might be the enemy in matters of faith and on the battlefield, but it possessed a priceless jewel — learning.
Then, at just the time when the present cathedral of Le Puy was being built, access to that Islamic world of learning was dramatically increased by one of the key events in the Christian Reconquest of Spain: the capture of the city of Toledo in 1085. Here was a city second in importance in Muslim Spain only to Córdoba, and it possessed a library equally rich. Now, with Toledo in Christian hands that library was open to scholars from all over Europe, and free access became available to that rich store of learning and scholarship that travellers had hitherto only glimpsed in Córdoba.
There began a veritable fever to explore the new fields of knowledge that had been opened up. Muslim scholars with an understanding of Latin became in great demand as translators of Arabic texts on a variety of subjects from mathematics to medicine. One of the most enlightened churchman and theologians of the day became an enthusiast for Islamic writings. He was Peter the Venerable, the last of the great abbots of Cluny and a brave defender of Peter Abelard. He made a special visit to Spain in the year 1142 to seek out translators. The abbot had a particular ambition, remarkable for that time, to commission a translation of the Koran. His primary motive was hardly ecumenical in spirit: it was in order that he could refute it. Unlike so many of his contemporaries in the church he believed in the power of reasoned argument. Alas, he never had the chance to fulfil his ambition.
The cathedral of Le Puy is an embodiment of these contrasting influences — Byzantine churches on the one hand, Muslim mosques on the other. And it is far from being a lone example: other churches along the pilgrim roads, this road in particular, give out similar echoes of diverse cultures. In every case the result is magically harmonised, and it seems appropriate to speculate that a shared desire to create an environment designed for worship may transcend even the most profound religious differences. Indeed, maybe all places of prayer possess a key element in common, regardless of faith. If true, that is true ecumenicalism.
There are other gods, too, whose presence can be felt in Le Puy. For those preparing to climb the broad flight of 60 steps to the striking facade of the cathedral with its alternate bands of white limestone and black volcanic rock, a charming story should be told to them before they set off. It concerns a priest by the name of Voisy who was to become the first bishop of this cathedral late in the 4th century, and who made this same climb, at that time up the slope of what was a bare hillside. It was a midsummer day, yet to the priest’s astonishment he found the crest of the hill blanketed in snow. Furthermore, on the snow-covered ground rose a solitary standing-stone, a menhir, which had been raised to some pagan god long before. Voisy then noticed that encircling the menhir at a certain distance were the tracks of a deer. It was instantly clear to the priest that the deer had been a divine messenger, and that its footprints were meant to trace the outline of the church to be built on the site. And so, the legend goes, the first cathedral of Le Puy was erected here, and dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The menhir became Christianised in the process, and was given a place of honour in the sanctuary of the new cathedral, becoming known as the Throne of Mary. Hence Le Puy became the earliest shrine to the Virgin Mary in France (together with Chartres).
By the 9th century the cathedral authorities had grown more purist, uncomfortable with this association of Christ’s mother with pagan gods. They broke up the menhir, incorporating the fragments into an area of the cathedral floor. Christian Europe had become increasingly under threat by this time — from Norman invaders and Magyars sweeping across France from the north and east, and the mounting Saracen threat from the new Muslim territories in Spain. Other gods were no longer to be tolerated by the church. And the menhir had to go. But the older gods were not to be disposed of that easily, and the mystique of the menhir remained. The section of the church containing fragments of the ancient stone came to be known unofficially as ‘the Angel’s Room’, and miracles continued to be reported. When the present cathedral was constructed during the 11th and 12th centuries — a great deal larger in order to accommodate increasing numbers of pilgrims — it became part of the new narthex.
Thus Le Puy’s long history of honouring many gods persisted willy-nilly across the centuries.
*
The four principal pilgrim roads listed in the 12th-century Pilgrim’s Guide all had points of departure which were traditionally centres of pilgrimage in their own right before the cult of St James took hold in France. It is easy to see why they were selected. All of them had already catered for pilgrims: hence they acted as ideal platforms from which those preparing to undertake their long journey to Santiago could be launched.
From the earliest days in the twilight of the Roman Empire the saint widely venerated at Le Puy was the Virgin Mary. It was to her that the first bishop, Voisy, had dedicated his church after the revelation of the deer’s footprints in the snow. The subject of the Marian cult in the mediaeval church is a contentious one, which lies safely beyond the scope of this book. It is relevant here largely because it came to contribute greatly to the popularity of Le Puy as one of the main starting points for the Santiago pilgrimage. In the year 1254 the French king Louis IX, later canonised as St Louis, returned from the Seventh Crusade, on which he had been one of the leaders, bringing with him a number of sacred objects he had obtained in Palestine. One of these was a statue of the Virgin Mary, believed to have been of Egyptian origin and carved in dark cedar-wood (probably from Lebanon), or more likely in ebony (from Africa). The king duly presented the statue to Le Puy, appropriately so since the cathedral was dedicated to the Virgin.
The carving was soon known as the Black Virgin of Le Puy. Dressed in gold brocade and set on the high altar, it immediately became the focus of intense devotion by pilgrims from far and wide. As so often with mediaeval shrines the cult of one saint became merged with another: pilgrims gathering at Le Puy in preparation for their long trek to Santiago would naturally attend their final mass in the cathedral here, and find themselves offering their prayers not in the presence of a statue of St James but of this hypnotic black figure in gold on the high altar. Not surprisingly, so powerful an image remained with them on their journey, and the aura of the Black Virgin was carried by Santiago pilgrims westwards from Le Puy along the mountain route towards the Pyrenees, until the road became studded with wayside churches and chapels dedicated to Notre-Dame du Puy. In the minds of pilgrims the image of the saint was carried as a blessing on their journey, in much the same way as the blessing of Mary Magdalene was carried by pilgrims on the road from Vézelay.
The original statue of the Black Virgin was destroyed — like so many sacred objects throughout the country — during the French Revolution, and was replaced in the cathedral by a copy. The original statue seems to have been naturally black, or very dark, due to of the nature of the wood. Yet it came to be associated with other effigies of the Virgin, which were deliberately painted black.
These ‘blackened’ effigies represent a puzzling variation of the Marian cult, one that attracted a wide following throughout the Middle Ages. It has been calculated that at least 500 such statues of a Black Madonna existed in mediaeval Europe, nearly 200 of them in France. The most celebrated was the Black Virgin of Rocamadour, to the west of Le Puy in central France. This statue still exists, and is still widely venerated. In the Middle Ages it was the focus of one of the most popular pilgrimages in Christendom, King Henry II of England and St Bernard of Clairvaux being among those who journeyed specially to kneel before it.
The statue was first mentioned in chronicles as a place of popular pilgrimage in the year 1235, just 19 years before the French king’s gift to Le Puy, though the Rocamadour statue is many centuries earlier, and the cult surrounding it was already long established. The Pilgrim’s Guide makes no mention of it, presumably because Rocamadour was not on one of the four recommended roads. Yet the fame of the place, and its proximity to the route from Le Puy, must have beckoned many a traveller to make the necessary detour in the days ahead — and in a later chapter we shall follow them.
How the cult of the Black Madonna came about in the first place has exercised the imagination of theologians and historians for many centuries, giving birth to a variety of explanations of varying credibility. One favoured view is that she was a pre-Christian goddess, probably Isis the Egyptian goddess of rebirth, with whom the early Christians, especially the desert fathers, would have been familiar. And since the Le Puy statue is supposed to have originated in Egypt, the link is even closer. Another line of pursuit has led to the Old Testament, which has been widely quoted in order to identify her with the enigmatic figure in the Song of Solomon — ‘I am black and beautiful, O daughter of Jerusalem.’ More prosaic explanations include the view that the figure was black, or at least dark, since this would have been Mary’s natural skin colour in that part of the world. More prosaic still is the verdict that these Black Madonnas had merely become darkened over the years by exposure to candle smoke in dimly lit churches.
Whatever the truth of her origin and identity, the Black Virgin of Le Puy hugely enhanced the popularity of the city as a place of pilgrimage. It also enhanced the wealth of scores of innkeepers, merchants, craftsmen and tradesmen who profited from the annual flood of pilgrims here to venerate the celebrated Madonna, as well as to equip themselves for the long trek across the hills of the southern Auvergne and the plateau of the Velay. And as travellers do today, they left the city of pinnacles and many gods through the mediaeval town along the cobbles of the old pilgrim road now appropriately named the Rue St Jacques. Some of the most uplifting landscape in France lay ahead of them.