A Grand Route of Christendom : Old Spanish Pilgrimage Survives

For centuries during the Middle Ages and beyond, hundreds of thousands of Christian pilgrims, often barefoot, moving in groups to strengthen their resolve, wearing their uniform of a coarse cloak and a wide-brimmed hat adorned with scallop shells, would trek across the Pyrenees Mountains and through some of the harshest land of northern Spain to reach the tomb of St. James the Apostle in Santiago de Compostela.

The way to Santiago became one of the grand routes of Christendom. A pilgrimage to Santiago in those days ranked in holiness with a march to Rome or Jerusalem. In their act of penance, the pilgrims were celebrating the divide between Christianity and Islam, making their way to the awesome land where Christians had finally stopped the onslaught of the Moors.

The romance of the old pilgrimage lingers on. In Holy Week this year, the Don Bosco School of Nice, a Catholic vocational school for boys with learning problems, sponsored a group of 90 students, friends, teachers and parents on a modern pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. They left Nice on the southern coast of France in cars, but each one of them ran on the road for about three miles every day, passing a baton to the next runner before getting back into a car.

Not a Uniform of Old

The Don Bosco pilgrims, like those of medieval times, wore a uniform, but it did not resemble the old one. Instead, they sported gold-colored jackets with the legend “Nice-Compostela 1,702 kilometers.”

They covered the 1,702 kilometers (1,058 miles) in six days. Jean Eugene Chabaudie, a Nice fireman with a son in the school, was ecstatic after their arrival in Santiago. “The weather did not matter,” he said. “If it rained, and it did rain, we ran anyway. What is our aim? We want to do something together, something in the outdoors, something that is physical. But, of course, it is a religious experience. Our baton contains a message from the archbishop of Monaco. Last year, we made a pilgrimage to Rome and were received by the Pope. In two years, we are going to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.”

There are more echoes here from the past. In the 13th and 14th centuries, courts sometimes punished criminals by sending them on pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela. The condemned prisoner from France, Belgium or the Netherlands would walk barefoot to Santiago, permitted to eat only vegetables, bread and water except on Sundays and holy days, allowed to stop no more than one night in any town. Murderers would have to lug a huge hoop attached to their neck, arm or waist, the hoop made of metal melted from the murder weapon.

In 1982, the medieval practice of sentencing offenders to make the pilgrimage was suddenly revived. Two 17-year-old Belgian delinquents and their guard showed up in Santiago after walking almost 2,000 miles in four months. A court in Ghent had sentenced them to nine months in a Belgian reformatory but suspended the sentence on condition that they make the pilgrimage. For one delinquent, identified only as Marcuise, the pilgrimage proven a religious experience. But the other, identified as Marc, told a local newspaper, “The pilgrimage interested me by showing me so many different landscapes, but I did not like all the churches and cathedrals.”

More Pilgrimages Ordered

Their guard said the pilgrimage “did far more to develop and rehabilitate them than a stay in prison.” The judges in Ghent evidently agreed. In 1983, the Belgian court sentenced four more young delinquents to a pilgrimage to Santiago. In 1984, the court sentenced eight others to a pilgrimage. More are expected this year.

None of this means that the great treks of the Middle Ages are being repeated. Tens of thousands of tourists do come to Santiago de Compostela every year. Spain, after all, brimming with magnificent art, often basking in sun, charging little for sumptuous hotels and long meals, is one of the great tourist attractions of Europe. But, according to Jose Maria Ballesteros Rua, the director of tourism in Santiago, only 200 to 400 visitors a year can be described as pilgrims.

“We count visitors as pilgrims only if they come by foot, by bicycle, or by horse,” he said. “A pilgrim must arrive with effort. Of course, when a pilgrim comes by horse, the real pilgrim is the horse. Not every one who shows up is a Catholic. Even Anglicans come as pilgrims. Some people make the trip for historical reasons rather than religious reasons. And we have even had those like the Belgian youths who come here as a form of civil punishment.”

The pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela came out of legend. According to Spanish tradition, James, a disciple described in the New Testament as the son of Zebedee, came to Spain for seven years and converted many to Christianity before returning to Judea. (St. James is known in Spanish as Santo Iago or Santiago, from “Iakovos,” the Greek New Testament rendering of the Jewish name “Jacob.”) There, he was beheaded on the orders of Herod Agrippa I, according to the brief account in the Book of Acts. Legend then says his followers carried off the body, its head miraculously intact, and fled to Spain, burying him in a village now known as Santiago de Compostela.

Legend of James in Battle

In the 8th Century, the legend goes on, St. James reappeared in a battle during the Spanish Christian struggle to drive the Moors out of Spain. Wearing the armor of a knight and carrying a white standard with a red cross that is now known as the Cross of Santiago, he stormed into the battle upon his horse, killing thousands of Moors. After that battle, the Apostle became the patron saint of Spain in the centuries-long Christian reconquest of Spain from the Arabs. His tomb was discovered in the 9th Century and soon became the center of a cult and then of the pilgrimages.

Biblical scholars and modern historians discount the legend. New Testament writings never indicate that James traveled outside Judea. In addition, there is no evidence that anyone in Spain ever believed that James had preached or been buried in Spain until stories about that came to the surface in the 7th Century.

Two centuries later, King Alfonso III of the region of Asturias and a Catholic bishop, taking advantage of the growing stories about James’ preaching and burial in Spain and of a cult that had developed in Campostela around the tomb of some holy man, encouraged a cult of their own around James. They assumed that the holy man’s tomb was that of James and built a church over it. The new cult helped Alfonso III consolidate his control over Galicia, the region around Santiago de Compostela.

The cult was kept up by the kings who succeeded Alfonso. Royalty has a way of spreading fashions, and it soon became fashionable throughout Spain and then throughout Europe to make a pilgrimage to the tomb of James.

A modern visitor to Santiago can travel with an antique guidebook. Aymeri Picaud, a French monk, wrote a manual for pilgrims in the 12th Century, describing the terrors and joys of the journey. The book has been translated from the original Latin to French, and it helps a modern-day visitor understand the difficulties of the pilgrimage in the past.

Few Bridges Over Rivers

The numerous rivers of Spain were a fearful barrier, for there were few bridges in the Middle Ages and many unsavory boatmen waiting to take pilgrims across.

“The accursed boatmen!” wrote Picaud. “Even when the rivers are very narrow, these guys exact a piece of coin from every man who goes to the other bank, whether rich or poor. For a horse, they rudely rob you of four coins. . . . Many times, after receiving the money, the boatmen make so many pilgrims come aboard that the boat overturns, drowning the passengers. And then the boatmen rejoice shamelessly after taking the belongings of the dead.”

Picaud also warned that some Spaniards would encourage pilgrims to let their horses drink the poisonous water of some foul rivers. Then, as soon as the horses died, the Spaniards would skin them and take away the hides. On top of this, the monk warned, highwaymen would waylay pilgrims, demand tribute, and beat them with sticks if they did not pay.

The French monk distrusted many Spaniards and warned pilgrims against them. Lumping them together, he described Basques and the residents of Navarra as people who spoke “a completely barbarian” language and “dressed poorly and ate and drank poorly.”

“They are a barbarous people,” he wrote, “different from all other people by their customs and their race, full of nastiness, of black complexion, ugly faced, debauched, perverse, treacherous, disloyal, corrupt, pleasure-seeking, drunk, expert in all kinds of violence, ferocious and wild, dishonest and false, impious and rude, cruel and quarrelsome, unable to have any good sentiments, acquainted with all vices and evils. . . . For a sou, the Navarran or the Basque will kill a Frenchman.”

An Easy Road Today

The road to Santiago is easy to follow these days. Driving through the lonely, cold and spectacular Roncesvalles mountain pass in the Pyrenees, the pass where Charlemagne’s lieutenant, Roland, died in defeat in 778, a pass where snow-capped mountains lose their melt in powerful waterfalls, a modern visitor senses quickly why pilgrims found the journey long and hazardous, why Spain seemed so distant and forbidding.

A visitor can follow the medieval route on often-narrow, but always-adequate, asphalt roads that go across the hilly farm lands of Old Castile and Leon with fortified towns built on outcrops. The roads take the visitor into the grudging and rocky land of the mountains of Galicia with its inward, suspicious people living in rock shacks on the final 100 miles to Santiago.

By all accounts, the Roman Catholic Church has lost much of its power in Spain, but this is hard to sense on the road to Santiago. The road takes a modern visitor through the most religious and conservative provinces of the country, where Holy Week is celebrated with awesome intensity, with a burning focus on the crucifixion of Jesus on Good Friday rather than on the Resurrection of Easter Sunday.

The Holy Week processions of almost every town can shock a visitor who has not seen them before. They are invariably dark, troubling ceremonies with penitents in hoods pulling huge wooden crosses, their bare feet dragging chains. Some penitents bend under the weight of carrying enormous stands with wooden Christ figures that twist and bleed in agony.

There are many reminders of the past along the way. At Puente la Reina in Navarra, for example, a Spanish queen had a curving stone bridge constructed over the Arga River in the 11th Century so that pilgrims might have a place to cross safely. The queen’s work was looked on as a great act of piety, for a bridge was a rare thing in those days. Even in the 14th Century, the great city of Paris only had two over its Seine River. The narrow bridge at Puente la Reina is still used by pedestrians, still wondrous.

Remains of the Past

The churches and monasteries along the way, of course, are the surest remains of the past, for many were built just for the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims and still serve the communities that have grown along the road. Some of these churches, like the Romanesque Church of Santiago in Villa franca del Bierzo, have a simple, stark beauty.

A visitor can find a motif of scallop shells somewhere in the decoration of almost every religious building along the way. According to a miraculous legend, St. James heeded the prayers of an anguished bride and brought her drowned bridegroom back to life, powering him to rise from the sea strewn with scallop shells.

These shells later became the symbol of St. James, proclaiming the identity of the pilgrims, marking the churches that showed the way to Santiago.

To the foreign travelers centuries ago, Spanish food and accommodations always seemed a problem. Medieval pilgrims, in fact, sang a song of woe: “You who go Santiago, I beg of you, don’t be afraid to make your own dinner. The innkeepers are crafty. They serve you nothing. He who makes his own meals will eat well.”

Picaud wrote in his 12th-Century guide, “All the fish and beef and pork of Spain and Galicia make foreigners ill.” Pilgrims complained that, even after paying for a room, the innkeepers would make them bid against other pilgrims for the best rooms.

Sojourn of John Adams

Even as late as 1779, President John Adams, then serving as one of the Continental Congress’ commissioners to France, complained about the accommodations while he traveled through this area of Spain. He described the houses of Villafranca del Bierzo as “smoky, filthy holes” and he wrote in his diary that he could hardly find a hotel in Spain with “clean beds and no fleas.”

There is no similar problem now. In the last 20 years or so, in fact, the government has transformed some of the traditional medieval hostels along the way into extraordinary and sometimes magnificent hotels. The Hostal de San Marcos in Leon, for example, was a 16th-Century monastery used as a hostel for medieval pilgrims. Now, it is a 195-room luxurious hotel with four cloisters, a chapel, and a Romanesque museum inside its walls. Some travelers believe that it is one of the four or five most sumptuous hotels in Europe.

Once in Santiago de Compostela, a visitor finds a city that has kept a good deal of its antique character. The Spanish government has dedicated the entire old town as an historic monument, and no one can transform any facade or build anything new without government approval.

There are some recent worries about Santiago. It is subject to a good deal of rain, and this has encouraged greenery to sprout in many of the old walls. Some experts fear that biologic growth within the stones will destroy some of the old structures.

On top of this, Santiago has recently been designated capital of the new semiautonomous region of Galicia. Some conservationists fear that the regional government will take over more and more buildings in the old town, forcing many residents to move elsewhere. This could turn Santiago from a living, antique town into a town of lifeless, government offices.

Attracted to Cathedral

Most visitors, whether classified as pilgrims or tourists, come to see the medieval cathedral that has been built over the Romanesque church that, in turn, was built over what is regarded as James’ tomb. A portico known as the Door of Glory, with magnificent sculptures by a 12th-Century artist known as the Master Mateo, leads down the nave. The Mateo sculptures are probably the only artistic work in Santiago that match some of the great art of Spanish cities like Toledo and Granada.

In a traditional ritual, visitors pass behind the ornate altar and either rest their hand gently on the jeweled, metal mantle of the 13th-Century statue of St. James or kiss it.

For many centuries, there was a good deal of controversy over the tomb of St. James. Many Spaniards, especially those in Catalonia, doubted the claims of the priests in Compostela. But prominent nobles and clergymen endorsed the legend by taking pilgrimages themselves. The controversy came to an end, for all practical purposes, when Pope Urbano VII consecrated St. James as the only patron saint of Spain.

By then, the great waves of pilgrimage were beginning to diminish. In 1589, Sir Francis Drake threatened to attack the city, prompting priests to hide the bones of James. Drake did not attack, but the bones remained hidden. In 1681, King Louis XIV of France decreed that no Frenchman could make the trip because the road to Santiago had become lined with so many thieves, pickpockets and robber priests. The idea of pilgrimage was dying out.

For 300 years, the remains of James seemed lost. But priests announced their rediscovery of his grave in 1879. The Vatican authenticated the discovery and decreed that the pilgrimages begin again. Not too many pilgrims have taken the way to Santiago de Compostela since then. But there have been enough to add romance to an old, old story.