After St Gilles the pilgrim road continues to skirt the Camargue marshlands before reaching what later became the important Protestant city of Montpellier. The mediaeval road then headed briefly northwards into the rugged hill country known as the Garrigue. This bleak and rocky landscape had an irresistible appeal for early Christian leaders in search of an ascetic life far from the madding crowd, where they could contemplate their god in peace without the distraction of earthly pleasures. Two places close to one another came to prominence as early as the 8th century and exemplify this Christian yearning for solitude and self-deprivation. As their fame became widespread and the pilgrimage movement gained momentum over the following centuries, both places became key shrines along the most southerly of the French pilgrim roads to Spain. Reaching them required a short meander into the wilds of the Garrigue.
Both shrines have direct connections to the Emperor Charlemagne. The first of them, Aniane, only a short distance from Montpellier, subsequently fell victim to the fury of the French wars of religion between Protestants and Catholics in the late 16th century; today there is nothing in Aniane to remind the traveller of how important an historical landmark this place once was. For mediaeval pilgrims Aniane may have been their first resting place after St Gilles; and if there were any among them with some knowledge of monastic history, then here was a place demanding the deepest respect.
The story of Aniane can be read as a parable of the early days of Christianity. The man who became known as St Benedict of Aniane (c. 747-821) was called ‘the second St Benedict’, the first being the founder of the order. He spent his early years as a member of the court of Charlemagne, and subsequently rose to be one of the emperor’s most successful field commanders during his campaigns against barbarian insurgents in northern Italy. Benedict then abandoned the military life and became a monk, and in about the year 780 he founded a small monastic community on his own estate here in the foothills, a location suitably remote from any town or village. The community was modelled on the isolated cells of Christian monks established in the 3rd and 4th centuries in the Egyptian desert, during the final decades of the Roman Empire.
Within a few years the eastern model was replaced by a new, highly disciplined monastery at Aniane whose monks strictly followed the Rule set down by Benedict’s illustrious namesake St Benedict of Nursia at Monte Cassino in southern Italy 200 years earlier. The new monastery flourished, attracting donations from wealthy benefactors and ever-increasing numbers of pilgrims.
The success of Benedict’s venture at Aniane rested on the widespread reforms in monastic life which he instigated, first here in Languedoc and later in abbeys and priories throughout the Christian world. The significance of his work can only be fully grasped by understanding just how crucial monasteries were to the fragile structure of early Christian society. Monasteries were not only houses of God and guardians of the true faith, they were virtually the only seats of learning and literacy: they represented moral order, social stability, and the rule of law and justice. Outside their secure walls lay disorder and disruption. Anarchy was forever threatening. Accordingly, when those monastic pillars of society were seen to be crumbling, social order itself was at risk. Benedict saw around him a monastic world in which rules of worship and moral codes were being widely flouted. Abbots, as well as the monks below them, were often living openly with their wives and mistresses, enjoying a life of comfort and privilege given them by their status as supposed men of God and by the lands and worldly goods the monasteries had acquired from bequests and donations. Many monks had become parasites rather than servants of God.
Benedict did much to rectify this common state of affairs. Having been Charlemagne’s ideal soldier, he became his ideal reformer. He helped create the orderly Christian institutions that the emperor believed to be vital in an unstable world. When Charlemagne was crowned in Rome on Christmas Day in the year 800, the event perfectly symbolised the emperor’s ambition to recreate a coherent Christian empire as it had been under the first Roman Christian emperor Constantine five centuries earlier. Charlemagne’s vision was to re-establish a Christian world in which the former Roman Empire was reborn within the embrace of the Frankish dynasty he had founded (a vision realised to this day in the name of the principal territory he ruled, France.)
After Charlemagne’s death 14 years later it was left to his son and heir, Louis the Pious, to put into practice many of the monastic reforms he had urged. And it was under Emperor Louis that Benedict of Aniane was placed in charge of all the monasteries throughout the empire. Benedict proved to be a zealous and uncompromising reformer; yet his successes turned out to be largely short-lived. With the breakup of the Carolingian empire shortly afterwards and the resulting anarchy of the 9th century many of the religious houses whose practices and rituals Benedict had reformed slipped back into their old ways, while many others suffered irreparably from the Saracen, Magyar and Viking invasions from north, east and south which wrecked so much of France throughout that darkest of centuries.
There is no mention of St Benedict of Aniane in the Pilgrim’s Guide even though the pioneering monastery he founded lay directly on the pilgrim road between St Gilles and Toulouse. Both are accorded effusive praise by the author, as is St Guilhem-le-Désert, the celebrated shrine that pilgrims would soon be visiting barely a few miles beyond Aniane. We can only speculate on what would seem a surprising omission. Perhaps Aimery Picaud, whom we assume to have been the author, was unaware of the place, and indeed of its founder who also receives no mention in the Guide’s catalogue of saints.
Or maybe the omission was quite deliberate, on the grounds that a fulsome tribute to St Benedict of Aniane and his monastic reforms would have detracted from the glory of Cluny, the abbey that had sponsored the Pilgrim’s Guide and where, according to the final words of the text, it was mainly written. As we have seen on so many occasions, the Santiago pilgrimage was Cluny’s show, and not one to be easily shared.
Nonetheless, what remains true is that mediaeval travellers who benefitted from the charity of monks as they made their way from abbey to abbey, hospice to hospice, along the pilgrim roads were welcomed into religious houses run on disciplined lines that owed much to the rigorous reforms first imposed by Benedict of Aniane. Weary after a long day on the open road they would have found themselves drawn into in an atmosphere of calm and serenity, perhaps invited to participate in an elaborate church service that was rich in music and chanting. This too was a debt to Benedict, who had laid such emphasis on liturgy and prayer in the daily life of a monk.
In many respects Benedict’s reforms in monastic life foreshadowed those instituted by those indefatigable abbots of Cluny several centuries later. The mood and resolve of Christian Europe would be altogether more buoyant: in the celebrated words of the Cluniac monk Raoul Glaber, ‘it was as if the world itself was casting aside its old age and clothing itself anew in a white mantle of churches.’
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From Aniane the pilgrim road heads for the ‘desert’, as the region is still described. The rough hills ahead are split by a gorge down which the River Hérault plunges towards the plains of Languedoc. The first intimation that here is a place of history is a bridge known as the Pont du Diable, the Devil’s Bridge. It dates from the 11th century, and was built by monks from the nearby abbey of St Guilhem, appropriately known as St Guilhem-le-Désert.
We are again following in the footsteps of Charlemagne. The Pilgrim’s Guide makes clear that like St Benedict of Aniane, St Guilhem (d. 812) was one of the emperor’s most successful generals. ‘The most saintly Guilhem was an eminent standard-bearer of King Charles the Great, a most valiant soldier and a great expert in war. It was he who by his valour, as it is told, brought under Christian rule the cities of Nîmes, Orange and many others.’ Guilhem was an aristocrat, a cousin and close friend of the emperor, and was brought up in the imperial court. The victories quoted in the Pilgrim’s Guide were against Saracen insurgents from Spain, whom he seems to have been responsible for expelling from much of Languedoc, at least temporarily.
On one of these campaigns his beloved wife died, and her death prompted him to abandon the life of a soldier in favour of the solitude of the barren hills to the north of Montpellier. Here, in the year 804, Guilhem built a monastery a short distance from where Benedict had established his monastic community at Aniane almost a quarter of a century earlier. In recognition of Guilhem’s services, and of his commitment to the monastic life, Charlemagne presented him with the most precious Christian relic in his possession, a fragment of the Holy Cross.
Unlike Benedict’s community at Aniane, Guilhem’s monastery survives today — at least part of it, namely the abbey church and fragments of the cloister. An enchanting village clusters round it, taking its name from the abbey’s founder.
St-Guilhem-le-Désert is a jewel in the desert. The saint himself died in the year 812, just 2 years before the death of the emperor he had served. Processions and special services in the village still honour his saint’s day (May 3rd), when the reliquary containing the fragment of the Holy Cross presented to him by Charlemagne is solemnly carried through the village to the church. Those taking part in the procession traditionally carry snails’ shells as oil lamps through the narrow streets. Folklore has preserved touches of the Middle Ages in St-Guilhem, and everything about the immediate setting and the embracing hills around it contribute to making a visit here a journey into a past era re-enacted before our eyes.
The church itself dates from the 11th century, around 250 years after Guilhem’s death. As so often with early church leaders their fame, and the cults that grew up around them, blossomed long after their lifetime in response to a radically different social and political climate. St Guilhem’s fame became widespread throughout Europe. This was due largely to a new spirit of religious fervour in the 11th and 12th centuries which expressed itself as a cult of the saints and their shrines, and in the resulting popular urge to go on pilgrimages to visit those shrines.
A further accompaniment and stimulus to the pilgrimage movement was the emergence of stories and songs — the chansons de geste — which dramatized the feats of Christian heroes of the past, and filled the ears and imaginations of pilgrims as they made their way to some chosen shrine. Again we have the example of Chaucer’s band of pilgrims setting out for Canterbury and entertaining each other with tales and music to while away the time on the lonely road. They were making their way through the fertile garden of England rather than the ‘desert’ of Languedoc, yet there is no reason to suppose they would have entertained each other in a different way, as manuscripts of the era clearly show.
The song recounting the exploits of Guilhem was among the most popular of these chansons de geste, largely on account of its bloodcurdling account of the hero’s slaughter of Saracens invaders. Its bellicose theme would have found particular favour with the sponsors of the Santiago pilgrimage (notably Cluny), for whom the cult of St James and the Christian Reconquest of Spain were inextricably linked. Notoriety brought wealth to St-Guilhem, chiefly through donations by well-to-do pilgrims. As a result, a new and much-enlarged abbey church was built in the late 11th and 12th centuries, and which today stands handsomely in the heart of the village. A finely carved west door opens out on to a gracious square where a tangle of narrow alleys converges.
The abbey church survived the desecrations of the religious war and the French Revolution by becoming the local parish church, which it still is. The abbey itself was less fortunate, and nothing of it remains. The cloister suffered only marginally less. In the 12th century it was rebuilt as a two-storey cloister, which only the wealthiest religious houses tended to permit themselves, with Corinthian columns bearing traditional acanthus-leaf capitals combined with mediaeval imagery of flowers and vines. Here at St-Guilhem sadly little remains of what would have been one of the glories of Romanesque church architecture, though much of it has recently been recreated. After the Revolution in the late-18th century, the cloister was transformed into a veritable shopping precinct, including a tannery. The entire abbey complex was then sold off as a stonemason’s yard (a fate shared by the great abbey church of Cluny). Much of the present village of St-Guilhem is built of it, and there is scarcely a farmhouse or inn within an hour’s journey of the place that does not owe its limestone walls to the abbey founded by Charlemagne’s legendary standard bearer.
Late in the 19th century many of the carved columns from the cloister were discovered supporting a vine arbour belonging to a lawyer in nearby Aniane. A far-sighted American benefactor acquired the columns, and today the finest record of St-Guilhem’s majestic cloister graces the Cloisters Museum in New York City.
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It may seem a curious coincidence that two monasteries within a very short distance of one another, at Aniane and St-Guilhem, should each have been founded by a leading soldier serving under the Emperor Charlemagne, both of whom then abandoned a military career in favour of the solitary life of a hermit in the wilderness. Yet a closer look reveals a certain shared significance — in when the two monasteries were founded, and in the location that was chosen. Wars and revolution have taken a heavy toll on both places, and today a great deal of reconstruction in the mind’s eye is required to bring them to life. Yet pilgrims arriving here in the 12th century on this the most southerly road to Spain would have found themselves in a setting rich with echoes of the very beginnings of Christian monastic life. And the strongest of those echoes was the call of the wild — a belief in the healing power of the wilderness.
The appeal of the desert originated in the example of Christ himself, who had spent 40 days and 40 nights in the wilderness battling with Satan and overcoming him. For fervent believers, here lay the only route to spiritual maturity: removing themselves from the marketplace of the world to live as hermits. Where Christ had led, others must follow. Hence, when persecution and social alienation contributed to driving early Christianity underground, it surfaced in places as far removed as possible from that busy world, in remote place reminiscent of Christ’s wilderness, the chief of them being the Egyptian desert. It was here that the most uncompromising believers chose to remove themselves, convinced that only a life of solitude and the harshest asceticism could permit a profound understanding of God. The ancient Greek philosophers had taken quite the opposite view: civilisation could be found only within the city walls. Life outside the gates was a Bacchanalian chaos, and if you lived there you were an outcast. But for the Desert Fathers, towns and cities were ‘Babylon’, the natural consequence of mankind after the Fall.
One of the most eminent of modern mediaevalists, Christopher Brooke, has aptly put the question: ‘How can one begin to characterise a movement of the human spirit so distant and so strange?’ Yet, however distant it may seem, the hermitage ethic, and the extreme asceticism that accompanied it, lie at the very roots of western monasticism, and therefore inevitably form part of the bloodstream of the mediaeval pilgrimage movement which sprang from it.
Solitary though these Desert Fathers initially were, many of them began to attract followers; soon small communities were established in the desert. Hence Christian monasticism was born. The man generally acknowledged as the founding father of these desert cells was St Anthony, who was born about the year 251 and spent some 20 years in the Egyptian desert until his death in 356 at the age of over 100. (If true, this says a great deal for the rewards of an ascetic life.) His lifespan took in several of the most historic events in the early history of Christianity, two in particular: the final and most severe persecutions of the Christians under the Roman Emperor Diocletian at the very beginning of the 4th century and the sudden Roman conversion to Christianity under his successor, the Emperor Constantine, barely ten years later.
To have experienced two of the most cataclysmic events in Christian history clearly had a volcanic effect of St Anthony’s life and outlook: he became a passionate believer in the holy nature of martyrdom, allied with a corresponding horror at all emotions of joy and celebration, especially pleasures of the flesh. In doing so, he and those who followed him (such as St Jerome) supplied the early church with an ideal of extreme asceticism as the perfect way of serving and understanding God.
This combination of a cult of suffering with a loathing of all physical pleasures, born of these remote communities in the Egyptian desert, set the tone for much of the religious thought and teaching of early fathers of the church, as well as providing a field day for painters and sculptors required to illustrate the most lurid scene of carnal temptation. And though the extreme asceticism preached by St Anthony became softened in the writings of St Augustine and in particular St Benedict, founder of the Benedictine order, it was nonetheless never far away from the ambitions of those zealots who gave up their worldly careers in order to found the earliest monasteries in Europe — men such as St Guilhem, who chose as his ideal setting a ‘desert’ as close in spirit to the Egyptian desert as France could offer, as well as being safely removed from all distractions and temptations of human society. The spirit of St Anthony was never far from the Languedoc hills.
The dark legacy of the desert fathers led to a host of contradictions for the monasteries of Western Europe which grew out of that eastern tradition, principally because mediaeval monasteries flourished in a very different world. And inevitably these contradictions were shared by the pilgrimage movement, which depended to a large extent on those monasteries: without them there would have been no pilgrimages. So, we may wonder, was the mediaeval pilgrim making his way to a shrine in ‘the desert’ here in Languedoc imagining that he was shunning the corrupt world of ‘Babylon’? Probably not; yet the monastery he was visiting had been founded in precisely that spirit.
This conflict of purpose illuminates a key question that has been asked ever since the beginning of Christianity: is the good Christian life compatible with earthly joys and pleasures? Or does that life in its truest form demand asceticism and a renunciation of those pleasures? St Anthony would have had no problem answering ‘Yes’ to the second question, even though Christ himself would probably not have agreed, having been happy to turn water into wine to aid festivities at the wedding in Cana. It would seem to be in the nature of human zeal that those who most vigorously point the way to God tend to be more disapproving of earthly pleasures than God’s own son would have been. If we read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, or look at mediaeval manuscripts illustrating scenes of pilgrims singing and dancing on their way to Santiago, we see little of St Anthony’s bleak certainty. The spirit of pilgrimage was a rare fusion of a renunciation of worldly comforts and a joyful embrace of the physical world through which the pilgrim boldly made his way.
At the same time, the world he encountered on his long journey through Western Europe was never free of that long-standing Christian conflict between body and spirit. Both in France and Spain the pilgrim roads led to hermitage after hermitage, many of them established by men who had built roads and bridges to aid travellers, and who were bravely dedicated to safeguarding their region against bandits, thieves and, of course, Saracens. As hermits they may have shunned the busy world, yet by their tireless exertions they still contrived to make it a better place. The hermit’s life exemplifies one of the major contradictions that coloured mediaeval Christianity — between the ideal of renunciation of the material world, and the equally powerful determination to improve it.
In short, one of the most compelling aspects of the mediaeval pilgrimage movement is how the long and winding road that pilgrims were compelled to take manage to draw together so many of the diverse religious impulses that drove mediaeval Christians to lead the life they chose. The pilgrim roads, today as yesterday, lead the traveller through an illustrated history of Christianity, from its darkest moments to its triumphant hours, from martyrs to heroes, masterpieces of art and architecture to personal messages scratched on the door of an inn. All life is there — even in the ‘desert’ of Languedoc from where the next stage of this road takes the traveller westwards to the great city which gave this road its name, the Via Tolosana. That city is Toulouse.