Chapter 19 The Way of St James… and Crowning Glory

As its name suggests, the Way was created specifically for pilgrims, together with a host of stonemasons, craftsmen, administrators, churchmen, engineers, merchants, peddlers, hangers-on and functionaries of every kind. All these diverse bands of travellers on the road contributed in one way or another to building and servicing what was in effect a new city, Santiago de Compostela, St James’s city. It had a new population drawn from all over northern Spain and beyond, new housing, new urban facilities, and a vast and ambitious new cathedral set at its very heart. Without the shrine of the apostle the city would never have existed.

In Spain the Way is known as the camino; and today’s pilgrims trekking towards Santiago may justifiably feel it to be their Way of St James. By contrast, the pilgrim roads north of the Pyrenees were mostly former Roman road long used for transporting armies to and from Spain, and later as busy trade routes. Building the new road, then servicing it for the benefit of pilgrims in their thousands, was always going to be a Herculean task for those on whose shoulders it fell. Until the late 10th century, much of this 400-mile stretch of northern Spain was intermittently under Saracen rule; and even when the beleaguered Christian rulers of the region managed to regain a degree of control of their lands it still remained a lawless area. Besides, there were numerous rivers to cross, and few bridges over them — which is why the Queen’s bridge at Puente la Reina was such an heroic achievement in the early days of the camino.

In the late 11th century a great transformation took place. A distinctive road was established, hospices and inns set up, churches and priories founded. Cart tracks became roads. Bridges replaced fords. Villages grew into towns. By the end of that era there would be a place for pilgrims to rest and be fed within a day’s walk along the entire length of the camino, with lodgings of some description no more than 20 miles apart, most provided by the new monasteries.

In such an unsafe and unstable world, the monasteries were crucial for all travellers. They were havens of safety, and of physical and spiritual comfort. And at this time when a nation was being rebuilt after centuries of Saracen dominance, it was the monastic orders north of the Pyrenees that made the largest contribution to that rebuilding. Here lay the building skills, the craftsmanship, the organisation and the wealth needed to undertake so massive a task.

Successive rulers in northern Spain gave every encouragement to these foreigners. French masons and stone-carvers brought invaluable skills south of the Pyrenees. To a lesser extent this traffic in skills also worked the other way round, with Saracen craftsmen invited by their new Christian masters to employ their special carving skills on abbey portals and cloisters in southern France, such as Moissac. But in Spain the influx of skilled artisans from the north amounted to immigration on a widespread scale, encouraged by tempting offers of tax exemptions and other privileges if foreign craftsmen agreed to settle there. In the Navarre capital of Pamplona in the 11th century it was reckoned that there were more French settlers than natives.

It was a similar story at Estella, the first town of any size along the camino after Puente la Reina. The Saracens had wrecked much of it in the 10th century, but now its reconstruction was to a large extent the work of French settlers — builders, craftsmen, merchants and traders — who enjoyed the same privileges as those given to foreigners in Pamplona, in addition to the unlimited opportunity for practising their skills (which the burgeoning city welcomed). The area round what is today the Plaza San Martín was virtually a French colony, and it was here that pilgrims naturally gravitated. The local church was even dedicated to a French saint, St Martin de Tours.

Estella retains the look of a pilgrimage town. It bristles with Romanesque churches, and these bear evidence of immigrant craftsmen from north of the Pyrenees as well as from the Muslim south. From the Plaza San Martín a long flight of steps leads to San Pedro de la Ra, one of the finest pilgrim churches on the camino. The magnificent portal is clearly to a large extent the work of Saracen stone-carvers, while the most elegant of cloisters possesses carvings whose spiritual home is western France, Poitou and the land of those jewel-box churches of the Saintonge which pilgrims had visited on the Paris road.

Echoes of pilgrimage are everywhere in Estella. In the church of the Holy Sepulchre there is an exceptionally fine carving of St James dressed as a pilgrim to his own shrine. The church of San Miguel Archangel possesses a carved portal whose sculpted figures would have reminded any traveller who had taken the road from Burgundy of those powerful, elongated figures on the abbey churches of Vézelay, Cluny and Autun: evidence of yet another travelling workshop. And on the side of the 12th-century palace of the kings of Navarre, in the heart of the pilgrims’ quarter, stands a carved stone capital depicting Roland killing a giant Saracen with his lance — one more instance of the Charlemagne legend being hitched to the Santiago cult.

Towns like Estella were key places for pilgrims to assemble after days on the road, and to feel at home in what was in effect a French colony. Yet on the bare stretches of road between such towns it was very different; and here it was the monasteries that came into their own. For the traveller they were oases in the desert — a desert, what is more, that all too recently had been patrolled by Saracen armies, and were still a hunting ground for bandits taking advantage of the vacuum left by the departing Muslim soldiers. A short distance to the southeast stands the monastery of San Juan de la Peña, built in the 9th century at the base of a protective cliff — which proved to be no protection at all, as the monastery was plundered by the Saracens soon afterwards. The monastery limped on for a further century until, early in the 11th century, it was colonised and rebuilt by monks from Cluny at the invitation of King Sancho, the ruler of Navarre. This was about the time when the king’s consort, Queen Doña Mayor, was sponsoring the construction of the great bridge at Puente la Reina. These twin ventures — the pilgrim’s bridge and the rebuilt monastery a short distance away — are among the first tangible achievements of that remarkable partnership between successive abbots of Cluny and the rulers of northern Spain. Bridge and abbey: they were the foundation stones upon which the great enterprise of the Santiago pilgrim road came to be built.

It was the most powerful of the Christian rulers of northern Spain who made the most valuable contribution to the camino. He was King Alfonso VI, ruler of Aragon, Navarre, Castile, León and Galicia. His relationship with Abbot Hugh of Cluny led to lavish gifts to the abbey, included a chain of monasteries and priories in his own kingdom, most of them on the Spanish pilgrim road. These religious houses acted as service stations for pilgrims heading for Santiago as well as greatly strengthening the church’s grip on territories only recently in Saracen hands.

By far the most important of these monasteries was the abbey of Sahagún, midway between two of the major cities along the pilgrim road, Burgos and León. Today Sahagún is a hollow shell: little remains of the former abbey complex except a semi-ruined chapel that was once attached to the monastery. Yet in the 11th and 12th centuries at least 50 dependent priories were under the authority of its abbot. To have acquired Sahagún represented a huge expansion of the Cluniac monastic empire.

Today the impact of Cluny on the region is greatly reduced, since so many of its most important monasteries have long been destroyed— Sahagún. Nájera and Carrion de los Condes among them. The network of smaller religious houses along the pilgrim road remains the brightest legacy of Cluny. The modern traveller on the camino frequently comes face to face with small, elegant Romanesque churches that look as if they had been transplanted from north of the Pyrenees.

These echoes of Burgundy, and of Poitou and Languedoc, are among the small gems of the camino. They feel particularly precious because they date from the earliest days of the Santiago pilgrimage, a time when the Saracens had only recently been driven from northern Spain and travelling the pilgrim road was still a hazardous undertaking. The church of San Martín at Frómista, to the west of León, was one of the very first churches to be built along the camino, later drawn into the Cluniac empire. Its carvings tell of those travelling workshops from western France — Aimery Picaud’s beloved Poitou. Even more French, with another portal indebted to Poitou, is the little pilgrim’s chapel dedicated to St James at Villafranca on the edge of the Bierzo mountains which form the final land barrier before Galicia and Santiago itself.

In Spain as in most of Western Europe, by the 13th century the Gothic style of church building had superseded Romanesque; this included the regions spanned by the camino. Accordingly the story of the Santiago pilgrimage, and what was created around it, is multi-layered, its early chapters often concealed beneath the grandeur that followed. The two key cities of Burgos and León exemplify this transformation from humble beginnings to splendour. Both cities are dominated by magnificent Gothic cathedrals which are among the glories of the Spanish pilgrim road. The great Gothic cathedral of Burgos has a mixed inheritance. The basic design was modelled on that of the French cathedral at Bourges. Its present spectacular appearance, bristling with spires and pinnacles, is more Germanic, derived from the Gothic cathedrals of the Rhineland, especially that of Cologne, where its architect came from, known as Juan de Cologna.

León, too, possesses one of the loveliest cathedrals in Spain — a jewel of the pilgrim road. Purely Gallic in style, it has the look of having been transported from northern France where it would have kept company with the early Gothic cathedrals of Reims and Amiens. Once inside, however, the colours of Spain and the burnished sierras take over. León cathedral possesses the finest stained glass south of the Pyrenees. Generations of pilgrims on their way to Santiago have stood in the gloom of this nave, gazing up to marvel at how the sunlight seems to strike these windows with a burst of fire, transforming the expanse of glass into a revelation of light.

The symbolism is timeless. At heart all pilgrimages are about travelling from a place of darkness in search of light. At the end of the camino, as legend has it, that point of light had been a star — Compostela, the Place of the Star. And the road leading to it has been under a canopy of stars, the Milky Way, La Voie Lactée, as French-speaking pilgrims have known it. What was created there, in that Place of the Star, is the subject of the final section of this book.

‘Finally Compostela, the most excellent city of the Apostle… the happiest and most spiritual of all the cities of Spain.’ Thus ends Chapter 3 of the Pilgrim’s Guide.

The first Santiago cathedral had been a modest affair, built in the 9th century only decades after the apostle’s tomb was claimed to have been found. This early building was severely damaged in the year 997 by the notorious Saracen warlord Al-Mansur. A century later the experience of seeing that church, still bearing the scars of Saracen assault, would have been deeply etched in the mind of a young man who was soon to become responsible for much of the cathedral that replaced it. He was Diego Gelmirez (c. 1069-1149), a key figure in the story of Santiago and the pilgrimage, and later the city’s first archbishop. It was during his lengthy period in charge of operations — almost 40 years — that a glorious phoenix rose from the ashes.

Work on the new cathedral began some time between 1075 and 1078. According to the Pilgrim’s Guide, ‘From the year the first stone was laid until the final one was in place 44 years passed.’ The claim that the entire cathedral was constructed in under half a century is only partly true: much work remained to be done, particularly at the west end, which was not completed finally until late in the 12th century. And the ultimate bravura touch of the twin Baroque towers overlooking the Obradoiro Square was not added until the 18th century. Nonetheless the main body of the basilica — the nave, the north and south portals, the choir and apsidal chapels were indeed finished, or nearly finished, in those 44 years — a truly remarkable achievement.

While Diego Gelmirez deservedly receives the credit for overseeing the bulk of the work, it was one of his predecessors who was responsible for commissioning the original design of the cathedral in the 1070s and supervising the earliest building work. He was Diego Peláez, bishop of nearby Iria Flavia (today Padrón), Santiago not yet being a bishopric. Bishop Paláez recognised the need for a cathedral able to accommodate the ever-growing numbers of pilgrims who were arriving here now that the camino was relatively safe, with new bridges to facilitate travel and new monasteries and hospices to provide food and accommodation along the way.

By the year 1088 a great deal of the basic work on the east end of Santiago cathedral was completed. It would have been an extraordinary sight — this huge stone edifice towering high above the clusters of timber-built houses and shacks that are all that the city would have been at this time.

Then, in that year a power struggle led to the deposition of Bishop Peláez. A long period of political unrest and insurrection overtook Santiago and Galicia as a whole, bringing building work on the cathedral to a halt for a number of years. The partly built cathedral remained an empty shell.

The deadlock was eventually broken in 1094 by the appointment of a monk from Cluny by the name of Dalmatius as the first bishop of Santiago, now replacing Iria Flavia as the seat of the local bishop. The authoritative hand of Cluny was once again controlling events at the very heart of the Santiago pilgrimage.

At much the same time, and probably with the connivance of Cluny, Count Raymond of Burgundy came to Spain to marry the daughter and heir of King Alfonso VI, the eight-year-old Urraca, whose mother, Queen Constance, was Abbot Hugh’s niece. On marrying Urraca Raymond received the title of Count of Galicia from King Alfonso, so becoming the administrator of the entire region, which included Santiago. Altogether it had been a multiple Burgundian triumph.

It was also a turning point in the fortunes of Santiago and its empty shell of a cathedral. In about the year 1092 the new man in charge of Galicia, Count Raymond of Burgundy, appointed Diego Gelmirez to be his secretary responsible for all building operations relating to the cathedral. An ambitious young man, able and industrious, Gelmirez immediately saw to it that construction work was resumed, now under the supervision of a new master mason known to us only as Stephen.

Before long Gelmirez became doubly in charge since Bishop Dalmatius had died only a year after taking office. There followed a hiatus of several years until 1100, when Gelmirez was elected Santiago’s second bishop. Over the next quarter of a century, under his sharp eye, the bulk of the new cathedral was completed. And it was during this period, probably during the 1120s, that the description of the cathedral incorporated into the Pilgrim’s Guide would have been recorded. ‘It is true to say’, the author claims, that ‘you cannot find one single crack or defect in it. The basilica is wonderfully built, spacious, bathed in light, of excellent dimensions and proportions in width, length and height, and altogether of the most marvellous workmanship.’ The account, which goes on at great length, was evidently designed to be a tribute to Bishop Gelmirez, who in all probability commissioned it.

From the time of his election as bishop, Gelmirez’s greatest ambition was to expand both the importance of his own office and the prestige of his city as the principal focus of pilgrimage in Christian Europe. Essential to these twin ambitions was the need to cement relationships with both the papacy and with Cluny.

Accordingly, early in his time as bishop he visited Rome twice (in 1100 and 1106), on both occasions travelling with his retinue along the pilgrim roads in France, visiting the monasteries of Toulouse, Moissac and possibly Conques, as well as spending time at the abbey of Cluny where he was able to meet the now-aged Abbot Hugh, his spiritual mentor and for so long a primary sponsor of the pilgrimage movement.

Not long after sealing his relationship with Cluny, Gelmirez lost the man who had first promoted him by making him his secretary and church administrator. Raymond of Burgundy, Count of Galicia, died in 1107. Two years later King Alfonso and Abbot Hugh also died. Within a short time three men who had done more than any others to further the cause of the Santiago pilgrimage were dead. Furthermore Gelmirez now found himself dealing with a new ruler in the form of Alfonso’s tempestuous daughter Queen Urraca, who was also Raymond’s widow.

Despite civil unrest and the insurrections that broke out in Santiago during Urraca’s troubled reign, soon the stars began to shine brightly on Gelmirez and the fortunes of his city. In 1119 the late Count Raymond’s brother, Guy of Burgundy, was elected pope as Calixtus II, the ceremony taking place at Cluny where the previous pope had died. Calixtus, a Burgundian aristocrat with strong links to Cluny, was the very pope who is credited with the authorship (or co-authorship) of several chapters of the Pilgrim’s Guide, as well as being quoted as ‘one of the names of those who restored the pilgrim road.’

Gelmirez himself became a leading beneficiary of these recent events. A year after the new pope was elected at Cluny, Santiago was elevated to the status of an archbishopric. And in the following year Pope Calixtus appointed Gelmirez as the city’s first archbishop. In the same year, 1120, as if in celebration of this great moment, the nave of Santiago’s cathedral was completed. Meanwhile, in Rome Pope Calixtus chose this time to canonise the late Abbot Hugh, the progenitor — together with his predecessor Odilo — of the Santiago pilgrimage movement.

There followed golden days. Elevation to the status of an archbishopric led to unheard-of prosperity for the city. Added to the flood of humble pilgrims arriving on foot Santiago was now attracting ever-growing numbers of wealthy benefactors keen to be associated with what Archbishop Gelmirez was keen to promote as ‘the new Rome.’ To facilitate matters further the network of Cluniac abbeys and priories along the camino made it possible for quantities of bullion to be transported to the city to pay for lavish new building works around the cathedral, monasteries being ‘safe houses’ in more senses than one.

These years of triumph arrived too late to be recorded in the Pilgrim’s Guide. Gelmirez lived on until the middle of the century, by which time the Romanesque cathedral he had supervised for 40 years was complete in every detail except for the huge west portal. This remained in its partly-restored state for at least 20 years after the archbishop’s death, finally being replaced during the second half of the 12th century by the present Pórtico da Gloria, set within the narthex of this most noble of cathedral entrances. The massive carved Pórtico is the most elaborate and probably the most celebrated of all the church portals along the pilgrim roads in France and Spain, matched only by that of the abbey church of Vézelay in Burgundy, to which in purely formal terms it bears some similarity. It is a stupendous achievement by a sculptor and master mason known simply as Maestro Mateo, or in his native France as Maître Mathieu, and about whom we know tantalisingly little beyond the fact that he and his team worked on this great portal for at least two decades.

In this late and magnificent flowering of Romanesque sculpture St James is appropriately centre-stage, high up on his commanding central pier, a figure at once modest and majestic. In his hand a scroll bears the Latin text Misit me Dominus — the Lord sent me. The apostle wears an expression of inscrutable serenity as he seems to be surveying the vast cathedral square below him where pilgrims from all over the world have been gathering in his honour for almost a thousand years. For travellers of all persuasions and interests, coming to the end of this long journey in which four roads finally merged into one, Santiago’s Pórtico da Gloria presents itself to us as the final jewel in the crown.

Now, as then, it is journey's end: a journey created by a legend so powerful that it inspired a network of roads across the continent of Europe that are flagged by some of the brightest achievements of our civilisation.