Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

THE ROAD TO SANTIAGO

By the same author

JACINTO BENAVENTE (Oxford University Press, 1924)

RAGGLE-TAGGLE (1933)

SPANISH RAGGLE-TAGGLE (1934)

DON GYPSY (1936)

LUIGI PIRANDELLO (1937)

THE WAVELESS PLAIN (1938)

GRAND INQUISITOR (Hodder and Stoughton, 1940)

IN SARA’S TENTS (1953)

Works edited or translated

TIGER JUAN (Translation of TIGRE JUAN) and EL CURANDERO DE SU HONRA by Ramon Perez y Ayala, with a critical study of his works (Jonathan Cape, 1933)

Introduction to George Borrow’s THE ROMANY RYE (Cresset Press, 1948)

THE SPANIARDS AND THEIR HISTORY. Translation of the Essay by Ramon Menéndez Pidal, with a critical study of his works (Hollis and Carter, 1950) DON QUIXOTE OF LA MANCHA by Miguel Cervantes Saavadra. An abridged version. Translated and edited with a biographical prelude (Macmillan & Co Ltd, 1953)

WALTER STARKTE

THE ROAD TO

SANTIAGO

Pilgrims of St. James

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley and Los Angeles

1965

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley and Los Angeles

© 1957 by Walter Starkie

All Rights Reserved

Printed in Great Britain

TO

MY DEAR WIFE AND COMPANION

CONTENTS

CONTENTS

INTROIT

Part One EARLY PILGRIMS

CHAPTER 1 THE LIFE OF ST. JAMES

THE SAINT’S JOURNEY AFTER DEATH

ST. JAMES SLEEPS EIGHT CENTURIES

THE DISCOVERY OF THE RELICS OF ST. JAMES

THE MOOR-SLAYER

SANTIAGO AND ALMANZOR

SANTIAGO MATAMOROS AGAIN

ALFONSO VI AND CLUNY

REVIVAL OF THE MYTHS OF CHARLEMAGNE AND ROLAND

THE BOOK OF ST. JAMES

THE KNIGHTS OF ST. JAMES

ST. JAMES GOES OVERSEAS

ST. JAMES REACHES THE APOGEE

A STRIKING PARALLEL: ST. THOMAS OF CANTERBURY

ERASMUS AND ST. JAMES

QUEVEDO BREAKS A LANCE FOR SANTIAGO

THE REDISCOVERY OF ST. JAMES

CHAPTER 2

PILGRIMS

RELICS AND SHELLS

Part Two A MODERN PILGRIM

CHAPTER 3 THE FOUR FRENCH ROADS OF ST. JAMES

THE ELYSIAN FIELDS

ALBIGENSIAN OR CRUSADER

ST. GILLES AND HIS PILGRIMAGE

THE PRIEST-WORKERS

CARCASSONNE AND UNCLE TOBY

TOULOUSE AND ST. SERNIN

A VISIT TO LOURDES

CROSSING THE FRONTIER

CHAPTER 4 THE CRADLE OF THE KINGDOM OF ARAGON

THE HISTORY OF THE HOLY GRAIL

THE LAND OF THE JOTA

CHAPTER 5 GYPSY PILGRIMS ON THE ROAD OF ST. JAMES

CHAPTER 6 ON THE ROAD

PAMPLONA, THE FORGOTTEN LEGION AND ST. FERMIN

Basque Witches

CHAPTER 7 PUENTE LA REINA AND LENTEN CAROUSAL

ESTELLA TO LOGROÑO AND NÁJERA

THE HORSE OF ST. JAMES

CHAPTER 8 ST. MILLÁN OF THE COWL AND HIS MINSTREL112

THE MYSTERY OF THE COCK AND HEN

ST. JOHN OF THE NETTLES AND THE WHITE BEES

CHAPTER 9 BURGOS

SANTOYO AND THE HARVESTERS

SANTA MARÍA LA BLANCA DE VILLASIRGA

THE OLD PILGRIM

MUMMERS AGAIN AND A GHOST STORY

PULCHRA LEONINA

CHAPTER 10 THE ASTURIAN DEVIATION

THE CÁMARA SANTA

MUROS, GEORGE BORROW, XANAS AND SIRENS

THE HIDDEN TOWN

THE GHOST ROAD

CHAPTER 11 THE ROAD THROUGH THE BIERZO AND GALICIA

THE HONOURABLE PASSAGE OF ARMS AND THE ANCESTOR OF DON QUIXOTE

THE CASTLE OF THE TEMPLARS

THE HIGHLANDS OF THE BIERZO

THE GALICIAN BAGPIPER

THE VICAR OF PORTOMARÍN

THE KNIFE-GRINDER

MOUNTJOY

CHAPTER 12 THE STAR-PAVED CITY

THE DAY OF SANTIAGO

INDEX

INTROIT

A REFLECTIVE pilgrim on the road to Santiago always makes a double journey when he tries to collect his memories—the backward journey through Time and the forward journey through Space. Every step the pilgrim makes today along the road through France and northern Spain evokes memories of those who passed that way century after century ever since the discovery of the sarcophagus of the Apostle in the ninth century. Churches, hospitals and marts grew up along the road, and in time they became large and prosperous cities, but here and there we find lonely hermitages and shrines which tell the story of footsore pilgrims, who once rested there before continuing their journey. Kings and bishops passed with their cavalcades of courtiers, soldiers, stone-masons, artisans, and minstrels sang their epic poems consecrating the warrior heroes of their countries to the Apostle and to Jesus Christ. Saint James the Apostle from being a fisherman became Santiago Matamoros or ‘Moor-slayer’, mounted on his white charger, riding through the clouds above the battle.

Then came the day when Pope Gregory VII (the Cluniac monk Hildebrand) launched his reform of the liturgy through the Order of Cluny, whose strength waś that they stood for the Universal Church and Roman centralism. The Cluniac reforms came at a significant moment of history when the approach of the end of the Christian Millennium filled die people of the West with gloom and apprehension, and the preachers continually made reference to the end of the world. And in the twelfth century Cluny, which had built its abbeys along the Jacobean road and peopled them with French clerics, advanced a step further by producing the mysterious compilation known as the ‘Book of Saint James’ and fathering it upon Pope Calixtus II, whence it was called the Codex Calixtinus. When the work appeared in 1130 the pilgrimage had become of world-wide significance, for the basilica had been built, the hostels for pilgrims abounded and the road to Santiago was thronged. Through this book edited by the Pope’s chancellor, Aymery de Picaud, a cleric from Parthenay le Vieux, near Poitiers, wider significance was given to the cult of the Apostle. For

Charlemagne through his faithful prelate, Archbishop Turpin (created by the authors of the work for their purpose), here became the first pilgrim of Saint James, and his knights, who in the Chanson de Roland had died as martyrs on the return from a crusade, now in the pseudoArchbishop Turpin’s account died on the return from the pilgrimage to Santiago, and their relics were distributed among the shrines along the Jacobean road as ever-watchful guardians of the Apostle’s cult. And Aymery Picaud, editor and pilgrim, in the fifth book of the Codex Calixtinus introduced the golden age of the cult for he described in detail the journey to the shrine of Compostella in the days when the Bishop of Santiago was Don Diego de Gelmirez, greatest of all Jacobean prelates, of whom the proverb said that he was a Bishop of Santiago with crozier and cross-bow.

The Road to Santiago, even as a journey through Time, is a minstrel journey also, for in the Middle Ages, after Romanesque architecture and Gregorian music had entered Spain with the clerics of Cluny, there had also arisen another music and poetry, outside the Church, in the feudal castle, among the Troubadours, an artificial and aristocratic growth, in contrast to the primitive performance of the wandering singers, who were called Jongleurs in France and Juglares in Spain. Nevertheless these raggle-taggle wanderers were the minstrels of the. humble masses, and for this reason Saint Francis of Assisi, who met them on his pilgrimage to Santiago, became their friend. He looked upon music as the spiritual aid to prayer, and he would often compare himself to the minstrel, saying that he and his brothers were Joculatores Domini, minstrels of the Lord, who wandered from village to village uniting the people in love and friendship by their greeting, "Buongiorno, buona gente9.

Pilgrimages in the Middle Ages encouraged the brotherhood of man and tolerance, as we discover in the thirteenth-century miniatures of the ‘Canticles of Our Lady’ by Alfonso the Wise, which might be called illustrations of the pilgrimage to Compostella. In one of them, for instance, we see two minstrels playing their stringed instruments. Between them stands a table with a jar of wine upon it. One of the minstrels is a Moor in turban, the other is a Christian, but both take part in a friendly consort of viols. Such a picture illustrates the tolerant humanism of King Alfonso X, ‘the Wise’, who was the first European monarch interested in secularizing culture, and consulted Moorish and Jewish as well as Christian sources when expressing his vast knowledge in the Romance tongue.

Emile Mâle, who discovered, to his astonishment, architectural devices in the Mosque of Cordoba, which coincided with certain traits he had observed in the Romanesque monuments in France, eventually came to the conclusion that at all the principal stages on the roads of Saint James expressions could be found of Moslem art which the Christians were unable to forget. And he adds that although Arab Spain had not given to Romanesque art more than a number of ornamental patterns, it was due to them that the great epic of the pilgrimage to Santiago is written on the façades of those ancient churches along the Spanish road: it is written on the transept of Cluny, on the bell-tower of the church of Charite-sur-Loire, and on the façade of Notre Dame de Paris. 1

Professor Kingsley Porter, in his great work states that the pilgrimage united the art of all Europe and even Asia, but that the most important contribution to mediaeval art was the group of sculptures produced in the twelfth century along the lower portion of the road to Santiago. 2

Even more vivid are the memories of the Jacobean pilgrimages that have descended to us in epic poems, chronicles, hymns, lyric poems, songs and tales of adventure written by those who plodded the road to far off Galicia and, on their return to their country, wrote their story in quaint language which today makes fascinating reading, for each writer describes his own personal experiences on the road ‘on which millions of shoes were worn out, and infinities of feet were blistered’, or like Master William Wey of Eton College, who went by sea to Galicia, in 1456, advising future pilgrims to equip themselves before starting out with a barrel of water for their cabin, ‘a lytel cawdron and fryying pan, dyshes, cuppys and such nessaryes’, and adding on the fly-leaf of his manuscript the following Latin tag as a parting piece of advice: Si fere vis sapiens sex serva quae tibi mando; Quid loqueris et ubi, de quo, cui, quomado, quando, which has been translated:

If your life would keep from slips, Five things observe with care: Of whom you speak, to whom you speak, And how, and when, and where.

Salutary advice indeed and no less pertinent today than in the fifteenth century.

Many of the mediaeval stories concern the lives of kings, for most of the monarchs of Christendom at some time or other in their lives, travelled the Jacobean road. For example Jaime de Aragón, sumamed ‘the Conqueror’ after his conquest of the Balearic Elands: at birth his mother resolved to name him after an Apostle. Accordingly she obtained twelve candles of equal size and called each one after one of the Twelve Disciples. She then Ht all the candles at the same time, but the candle bearing the name of Saint James outlasted all the others ‘by a good three finger’s breadth’. So she called the little prince Jaime, and all his life he was a devotee of the Son of Zebedee.

In the Middle Ages there were pilgrims like St. Godric of Norfolk, who gave np piracy after his visit to the Holy Sepulchre, and on his way back to England called in at Compostella. His singularity as a pilgrim was that he brought his mother on his journeys, and he was wont to bear her on his shoulders, but when she left London on the pilgrimage she took off her shoes and walked bare-foot all the way. And according to Reginald of Durham, who wrote the life of Saint Godric, mother and son met a strange woman of ‘wondrous beauty’ on their journey, who every night would wash their feet, and Godric discovered that their companion was none other than the Blessed Virgin herself to whom he prayed for consolation in his privations and from whom he learnt songs and hymns.

In those days kings and warriors as well as saints believed that Saint James lying in his tomb at Compostella was still a Uving personality whom they would address at the moment of battle, as did the heroic Scottish warrior Lord James Douglas:

The Good Sir James, the dreadful Douglas, That in his dayes so wise and worthie was, Wha here, and on the infidels in Spain, Such honour, praise and triumphs did obtain.

Robert I, ‘the Bruce’, King of Scotland, before his death begged Sir James Douglas to carry his heart to Palestine in accomphshment of his unfulfilled vow to visit the Holy Sepulchre, and Douglas carrying the embalmed heart in a silver casket went by way of Compostella because ‘the Bruce’ had such great devotion to Santiago. And when in the following year 1330 the Black Douglas fell fighting the Moors, the heart of Bruce, recovered by Sir William Keith in 1332, was taken back to Scotland and buried in Melrose Abbey.³

Much of English as well as French history, is connected with the Jacobean road and the shrine of the Apostle, and we have only to turn over the pages of the Paston Letters with their vivid account of life in Norfolk during the fifteenth century to meet many a noble Jacobean pilgrim, for in those days so passionately devoted were the people of England to Saint James that representations of his shrine would be erected in the streets and churches, in order that those who could not make the long pilgrimage should perform on July 25 their devotions before the Saint’s shrine in their own parish. This custom lasted for hundreds of years, for children used on the day of the Apostle to prepare a little grotto, light it up with a candle and ask for a contribution, just as their ancestors did in times past for the larger shrines that were erected in the streets and in the churches. These grottoes or piles were built by the children of oyster-shells cast out of the taverns or fish shops, and passers-by were bidden: ‘pray remember the grotto’. With the pennies they received the children bought the candles and kept them burning at night in celebration of the Saint.

From the Paston Letters we learn of the pilgrimage of the noble and puissant lord, Anthony, Earl Rivers, brother of Elizabeth Woodville, the wife of Edward IV, who was patron and associate of William Caxton. On his voyage of pilgrimage to Galicia he beguiled the time on board by reading in French the Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, which he translated, and it was published in 1477 by Caxton—the first book printed in England.

The Capture of Granada and the fall of Moorish power in Spain marks the apogee of Saint James’s influence, for at that time greater numbers than ever before flocked to Compostella, and Ferdinand and Isabella devoted funds, raised on the occasion of the capture of Granada, to the erection of the Royal Hospital close to the Cathedral of Santiago, where pilgrims might find shelter and the sick be nursed.

Saint James the Moor-slayer, after inspiring the Spaniards to fulfil the national dream of eight centuries of struggles against the Moors, now crosses the ocean, riding in the clouds above the Spanish galleons of the Conquistadores. The war cry ‘Santiago y a ellos9 resounds in the battles against the Indians and Bernal Diaz the chronicler, in his description of the Battle of Otumba, describes how the Apostle was seen in the battle on horseback driving back the enemy.

Even when the cult of Saint James began, under the attacks of Erasmus and Luther, to decline, many striking personalities enriched world literature by their memories of the pilgrimage. The charm of their accounts Ues in their truthfulness and integrity as travellers.

Some, like the Bohemian Baron Rozmital, journeyed with large suites, like wealthy globe-trotters making the ‘Grand Tour’, and declared that they were only interested in tournaments, jousting and meeting the great; others, like the Jeronimo Münzer from Nuremberg, went to Compostella solely in order to verify the miraculous transformation of Spain under the Catholic monarchs, and when he attended a funeral in the Basilica of the Apostle was shocked at the superstitious details in the ceremony, the money-grabbing of the clerics and the hubbub in the Cathedral, which was so great that he would have believed himself at a fair.

Prince of all travellers in those years, however, was the inimitable Andrew Boorde, who certainly deserves the nickname of ‘Merry Andrew’, for never has there existed a more characteristic English traveller or a more charming companion. He is the ‘beau ideal’ of travellers, for he knew when to be an ascetic and when to enjoy the good things of life. He drank water three days a week, wore constantly a hair-shirt next his skin, hung his shroud or burial sheet at the head of his bed, and yet recommended pilgrims to have a good strong drink of wine at the end of their long day’s tramping, before going to bed. ‘If they be Englishmen’, he adds, ‘ale should be their drink, for ale is a natural drink for an Englishman, even as beer is a natural drink for a Dutchman. As to wine, it doth actuate and doth quicken a man’s wits, it doth comfort the heart, it doth scour the liver’. Not even Merry Andrew’s contemporary, FalstafF, has said nobler words in praise of sherris-sack which makes ‘the brain apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery and delectable shapes’, nor has George Borrow paid a greater tribute to the national drink of England than his fellow Romany Rye of the sixteenth century, who was the first to give us specimens of English Romani and the lure of Gypsy life. But Master Andrew condemned all excess, saying that ‘Intemperance is a great vice, for it doth set everything out of order, and where there is no order there is horror’. His twenty years as a Carthusian, in the

Introit

strictest of all Orders, followed by his riotous living among the medical students of Montpellier, not only made him an excellent doctor, but gave him a philosophical outlook on life and developed the kindly qualities in his nature, which were shown in his good-natured behaviour to the nine English-Scottish pilgrims whom he accompanied to Compostella and back.

In the second part of this double journey I have given memories from my diaries of 1954, the Holy Year, including incidents from the three former pilgrimages I made during the years 1924 to 1952.

During my pilgrimage in 19541 followed closely the route travelled by the elusive clerk, Aymery Picaud, the earliest known travel-writer on Spain and one of the most lively. Aymery, the Poitevin, by his chauvinism and his prejudices, reminds me, too, of George Borrow, but he also recalls Richard Ford by his ebullience of spirit and his practical recommendations to travellers. He passed the torch to a number of kindred spirits whose descriptions of the Jacobean pilgrimage still enchant us; not only Andrew Boorde, but also Laffi the Italian clerical pilgrim, Manier, the eighteenth-century peasant from Picardy, and a host of simple travellers, many of whom, if asked why they were setting out on their pilgrimage, would have answered in the words of the great Montaigne: ‘I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of.’

Their accounts fascinate us because after trudging all the way to Compostella and back and hanging up their tattered shoes in their local church like old Tom Coryate, and giving their scallop shells to their grandchildren as relics, they conclude that they are best off in their respective countries. Aymery with his friend Lady Gebirga returned with relief to their native Poitou where the wine is good and the people do not speak a foul patois. Doctor Andrew Boorde, like his fellow- traveller Borrow, discovered that the beer of old England tastes better than the wines of the Rioja and that the sight of a juicy sirloin whets the appetite more than the finest Spanish cocido.

Such travellers’ tales and diaries from the twelfth to the nineteenth century are the antithesis to the modern guide-books, for the latter belong to a category which might be labelled ‘Travelling without Tears’, because they are designed to give the globe-trotter of today a fine supply of labels which he may stick on his mind and administer just the right dose of potted knowledge, enabling him to hustle and skim over frontier after frontier and return unscathed to his native land, comforting himself with the thought that he has not wasted a moment of his time and has been mercifully spared all adventure.

In the age of Aymery de Picaud and Andrew Boorde every day was full of adventure, for Life was fierce in tooth and claw, and a pilgrim had to fight for his daily bread as well as pray for it, and though he mumbled to himself the Christian adage, ‘the Lord will provide’, he needed to be forewarned of the dangers lurking ahead.

Today few have the time or the leisure to tramp to Santiago from the Rue St. Jacques in Paris to the Puerta Francigena in Compostella, and pilgrims arrive by train, by motor bus, even by aeroplane, thus emulating the feat of Saint James himself, when on one occasion he picked up a charitable pilgrim in the Pyrenees, who had stayed behind to tend his dying companion, and carried him on his flying charger in the twinkling of an eye and set him down on the hill in sight of the towers of Compostella. But the advances made by science, though they have modified our lives and imposed an outer veneer or mask upon us, cannot entirely shut our eyes to all the sights and ghostly visions witnessed by the traditional pilgrim in his tattered cloak plodding along the endless Jacobean road, nor can we deafen our ears entirely to the hymns and songs and rhythms that echo and re-echo in the mountains and in the woods at nightfall, like tantalizing fairy music recalling the minstrels who wandered over the hills and far away.

The peculiar fascination of the road to Santiago for the pilgrim today is that, in addition to its religious and historical significance, it seems also a continual reminder of the further ghostly journey towards Ultima Thule, the undiscovered land from which no traveller returns. It is a pilgrimage towards the other world, in the summer months under a star-studded sky, with the luminous track of the Milky Way to guide the wanderer westward to Compostella. A ghost-accompanied pilgrimage, moreover, for even after death myriads of souls make their way to the shrine of Saint James, as we are told in a lovely Asturian folk-legend, which describes how one gloomy night, when not a star was shining, a forlorn pilgrim soul lost its way. Then a knight came to the window and said: If thou art the devil I conjure thee to depart: if thou be of this world tell me what thou dost need. The soul then answered:

I am a sinful soul journeying to Compostella, but there is a deep river in front me and I cannot pass.

Trust to the rosaries thou didst say in thy life, answers the other.

Alas, woe is me, I said none.

Trust to the fasts or to the aims thou didst give.

Alas, I gave none.

But the knight was charitable and he pitied the soul, so he Ut the sacred candles at the window, and the soul crossed the river and went on. That same night the soul returned from the holy pilgrimage singing: Blessed be the Knight who by saving my soul saved his own as well.

1 E. Mâle, ‘L’Espagne Arabe et L’Art Roman’, Revue des Deux Mondes (Paris, 1923).

2 Kingsley Porter, The Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrim Roads (Boston, 1923), Vol. I, p. 196.

3 Rev. J. S. Stone, The Cult of Santiago (London, 1927), pp. 299-300.

Part One

EARLY PILGRIMS

CHAPTER 1

THE LIFE OF ST. JAMES

THE Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles tell us all that is known about St. James. He was the elder of the two sons of Zebedee, a fisherman living on the banks of Lake Galilee and his mother’s name was Salome.

According to St. Jerome, the family was of noble origin and there is a tradition that they came originally from Jaffa, where their house is still shown. They were partners in the fishing business with Simon called Peter and Andrew, the sons of Jonas, and they were all closely connected with the Holy Family; in fact some authorities have maintained that Jesus was cousin of the Sons of Zebedee.

One day when they were mending their nets by the lake Jesus passed by and spoke to them of His mission, and they forsook their nets and followed the Master. Henceforth they would be fishers of men. And, knowing their strength of spirit, Christ surnamed them ‘Boanerges’, which is, the Sons of Thunder. These two men and Peter, more than any other of the twelve Apostles, Jesus took into His confidence, for they surpassed in devotion that of other men. They went with him to the raising of Jairus’s daughter, and they witnessed also the Transfiguration on the Mount, and there they knew Him as the Master of Death and as the King of Glory. To them He gave His apocalyptic prophecy foretelling the destruction of Jerusalem and the tribulations and wars to come. And St. Matthew tells the story of Salomé, the mother of Zebedee’s sons, coming to Jesus and desiring of Him that her two sons James and John should sit, one on His right hand and the other on His left, in His Kingdom. But Jesus answered: Ye know not what ye ask. Are ye able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of, and to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with? They say unto him, We are able. And he saith unto them, Ye shall drink indeed of my cup, and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with: but to sit on my right hand, and on my left, is not mine to give, but it shall be given to them for whom it is prepared of my Father.¹

Salome, whom we meet with the Family of Bethany in the Church of the Sea-borne Marys in the Camargue and who follows her eldest son to Compostella, becomes thus the prototype of the ambitious matron, mother of noble sons, and we find her in the Gospels urging her sons on, much to the displeasure of the other disciples, for, as St. Matthew says: ‘When the ten heard it, they were moved with indignation against the two brethren.’ Jesus, however, did not so readily censure the mother who ministered to Him and whose love remained steadfast even to the end. He knew that the two brothers were inspired by exultant faith, and their answer to His question showed that they would go through any suffering for Him, and so He accepted their sacrifice. With Peter they would witness His agony in the Garden of Gethsemane.

After the Crucifixion, the Resurrection and the Ascension there is a period of twelve or fourteen years about which the Holy Books say nothing. In the Golden Legend we are told that James the Apostle, son of Zebedee, preached in the Jewry and Samaria, and afterwards he was sent into Spain to sow the word of Jesus Christ. He profited but little in Spain, for he converted unto Christ’s law but nine disciples, of whom he left two there to preach the word of God.

Such is the most ancient Spanish tradition as repeated in the Golden Legend, but other historians maintain that the Apostle made many converts and founded dioceses. It was said that he landed in Andalusia and from there followed the Roman road which linked Italy with Merida and passed through Coimbra and Braga to the harbour of the river at Iria in Galicia. Iria, which later was known as Padron after the Apostle, deserves to be visited no less than Santiago, if we believe the proverbial saying so often quoted by pilgrims:

Quien vay a Santiago e non va al Padrón, O faz romaria, ò non.

Many of the local legends in Galicia describe the adventures of the wandering Apostle. He is said to have preached at the wind-swept hamlet of Mugía on a narrow isthmus near the cliff of Finisterre, where the inhabitants still proudly show a large, flat stone that was the keel of the stone boat in which Our Lady sailed from Jerusalem to ¹ St. Matthew 20,21-22.

Spain. She appeared to comfort the Saint when he was preaching and the prints of her feet are still shown in the stone. At certain times, according to the fishermen, the keel of that stone boat appears to sway slightly, but this is probably the imaginations of the natives who inhabit this ghostly shore with its roaring sea and moaning wind. The fisherwomen who chant the old folk song of Our Lady of the Ship still believe in the rocking-stone:

Veño d’a Virxe d’a Barca

Veño d’abaná-la pedra Tamén veño de vos ver Santo Cristo de Finis terra!

In Caldas de Reyes a curious relief was discovered which shows the body of St. James in a boat drawn by a swan maiden who, though like a siren, is winged and web-footed like Lohengrin’s magic pilot.²

An ancient tradition tells us that the Saint, after leaving one of his disciples, Pedro Rates, as bishop in Braga, and other anonymous followers in Lugo and Astorga, wended his way along the Roman road, through Osma and Numantia to Caesaraugusta or Saragossa; though other historians, such as Fray Lamberto de Zaragoza, maintain that he disembarked at Cartagena or Tortosa. The tradition holds that during his stay in Saragossa the Saint was depressed in spirit, for the sight of the enslaved population and its miseries made him feel that his mission had been in vain. Was it not useless to preach the Sermon of the Mount to the deaf ears of those who gloried in their pagan feasts? Again Our Lady came to him in his affliction.

One night when his disciples were sleeping and he was kneeling in prayer he heard in the distance the voices of angels singing Ave Maria, gratia plena, as though they were beginning Matins. And he saw a multitude of angels bringing Our Lady on a throne from Jerusalem in great glory, and by her a wooden image of her, and a column of jasper. The celestial harmony continued to the Benedicamus Domino which ends the Matins, and the Apostle then heard Our Lady call him gently by name, bidding him build her a temple on that spot, for said she, this place is to be my house, and this image and column shall be the title and Altar of the temple that you shall build. ¹

St. James straightway began to build there a church to which he gave the name, Our Lady of the Pillar, and, according to the ancient Latin manuscript preserved in the archives of El Pilar, this was the first church in the world to be consecrated by the hands of an apostle to the glory of the Blessed Virgin. Before he left Saragossa on his way back to Jerusalem and to his martyrdom the Saint named his disciple Athanasius first bishop there and ordained priest his other disciple, Theodore. Thus the Mozárabes of that church in Saragossa, being poor and humble, were allowed to practise their cult in peace. The tradition of antiquity of the cult of the Pillar is proved by the Mozarabic Mass, which in ancient times was sung in the chapel of the Pillar, and by a Latin codex in thirteenth-century lettering which is preserved in the archives of the church of El Pilar in Saragossa. 2

The Apostle continued on his way to Palestine, but the tiny flame of faith which he had kindled in Spain burnt on steadfastly throughout the years of persecutions, and Prudentius was able a little later to sing of Christ’s triumph even when the Moors ruled the banks of the Ebro.

THE SAINT’S JOURNEY AFTER DEATH

When St. James had been killed with the sword by the Jews, the disciples took his body away from Jerusalem by night and brought it to the seashore, where by divine dispensation a ship was moored. They boarded the ship without sail or rudder, and by the guidance of the angel of our Lord they arrived in seven days in Galicia in the country of Queen Lupa. 3

As soon as the disciples reached the shores at Iria they took out the body of the Saint and laid it on a great stone. Immediately the stone received the body into itself as if it had been soft wax, and became like a sepulchre to the body. The disciples then went to Queen Lupa and said to her: "Our Lord Jesus Christ hath sent to thee the body of His disciple, so that him thou wouldst not receive alive thou shalt receive

The Saint’s Journey after Death

dead," and they described the miracle of their arrival and asked for a place suitable for his holy burial. Whereupon the Queen sent them, ‘by treachery and by guile to a cruel man’, as Master Beleth said, ‘and some even say it was to the King of Spain’, who put them in prison. But when he was at dinner, the angel of the Lord opened the prison and let them escape. In fury he instantly sent knights after them but as the knights tried to cross a bridge, the bridge collapsed and they fell in the water and were drowned. Then he repented and sent after them, begging them to return; and they returned and converted the people of the city to the faith of God.

Even that miracle did not soften the heart of Queen Lupa, and when the disciples returned and told her of the agreement of the King, she answered: Take the oxen that I have in yonder mountain, and yoke them to my cart, and bring there the body of your Master and build for him such a place as ye will, knowing that there were no oxen in the mountain but only wild bulls who would destroy them. Ignorant of the evil intentions of the Queen, they went up the mountain, where they met first of all a dragon that spat fire and ran at them. But they made the sign of the cross and he broke in two pieces. When the bulls rushed at them they likewise made the sign of the cross, and in a moment the wild animals became as meek as lambs. They then yoked them to the cart, and put the body of St. James, with the stone in which they had laid it, on the cart, and the wild bulls of their own will, without a driver drew it down the mountain and into the middle of the palace of the Queen Lupa. When she saw this she believed and was christened. Then she gave them all they required and turned her palace into a church, richly endowing it and ended her life in good works.⁴

Before the disciples left the mountain they baptized it with the name Pico Sacro or Sacred Mount. On their return they allowed the bulls to lead them, and after three leagues the animals halted in a field which Queen Lupa gave to them in free gift, so that they might build a mausoleum. This spot, where in coming centuries the cathedral and the city of Santiago de Compostela were to rise, was called Liberum

Donum or Libre-don in memory of the gift. The disciples then laid the relics of the Apostle in a marble sarcophagus, perhaps one they may have found there at hand, and over it they built an altar and a small chapel. After that all traces of the two disciples¹ and the mausoleum, disappear for eight hundred years.

ST. JAMES SLEEPS EIGHT CENTURIES

At the time of the burial of St. James, Spain was still the richest province of Rome and shortly before the dissolution of the Empire, Roman Spain in its cultural development formed a unity similar in its distribution of forces and values to what modern Spain became at another Imperial moment—namely, during the sixteenth century and the golden age of its literature. Its precise material significance was described in the first universal history compiled by a Christian, Paulus Orosius, the Galician, disciple of St. Augustine. He possessed to a special degree the sense of patriotism; Spain in his eyes was still a province of the Empire, within which Divine Providence had unified the world, but nevertheless the Province of Spain rises proudly affirming its own historical destiny within the Empire. Immediately after Orosius the Roman Empire of the West was dismembered into various Germanic Kingdoms, and Spain was pacified by the Visigoths, who were the most romanized of the Germans and convinced of the necessity of Roman unity. The idea of a united Roman-Gothic Spain which was so nobly portrayed by Orosius and so eloquently exalted by St. Isidore, ‘the Egregious Doctor’, as he was called, never ceased to be present in the spirits of men during the following centuries, for both those authors were widely read all through the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, Spain fell upon evil days: the Gothic Kingdom split up in an anarchical contest between warring parties and national sentiment declined. One of the parties called to its help the Moslems across the straits and when these turned from allies to invaders all unity in the face of material danger faded away.

The characteristic Iberian disunity broke out everywhere like a plague, which, when strength diminishes, invades the whole body. There was but one centre of resistance, in North Spain, which resolved to organize its resistance against the invader—namely, Asturias—but it ¹ Athanasius and Theodore, according to tradition.

St. James Sleeps Eight Centuries

fought on in lonely isolation. A long period of disintegration had begun with the invasion of the Moors, for many new states arose on the ruins of the Visigothic Kingdom.⁵

While St. James lay buried in his long sleep in Galicia the invading Moors consolidated their power and the great Abderrahman I founded the mosque in Cordoba on the site of a Visigothic church, which had itself been built on the ruins of a Roman temple dedicated to Janus. To this house he gave the name of Zeca or House of Purification, and he resolved that it should rival Mecca, and become the sacred city of the Western Mohammedan world. In the course of the centuries it was to become, after the Kaaba, the largest and most beautiful building of Islam, with its nineteen gateways of bronze, its four thousand seven hundred lamps of perfumed oil, its roof supported by twelve hundred columns of porphyry, jasper and many-coloured marbles.⁶ But what drew the attention of the world towards the mosque was not its artistic splendours but the realization that the shrine contained some of the bones of the Prophet Mahomet himself. These relics became the envy and the obsession of all Spain. Pilgrims came from all over Europe to pray at the Holy of Holies, and in the wake of the pilgrims came architects, builders and artists, with the result that Cordoba became the most civilized city in the world. Palace after palace arose, and later on in the days of Abderrahman III, in the suburbs, amid the earthly paradise of fig trees, almonds and pomegranates rose Medina Azahara, a palace of the Arabian nights, whose beauty we may still recapture in the nostalgic verse and prose of Ibn Hazm’s El Collar de la Paloma.¹⁰

Already in the days of the first Abderrahman the moonlit patios of Cordoba had echoed the songs of Ishaq or his pupil Ziryab ‘the black bird of sweet song’, as he was called in Andalusia, who after being minstrels of Harun ar Rashid the Caliph of Bagdad, had taken up their abode in the city of the Zeca. Thus Cordoba and Seville became the two great centres of culture in the Western world and there was a saying of Averroes that when a wise man died his books were sold in Cordoba; if he was a musician his instruments went to Seville.

Meanwhile in North-Western Spain the refugees of Gothic, Roman and Iberian stock grouped themselves under the leadership of Pelayo, the semi-legendary hero from whom the monarchs of Spain derive their ancestry, in the days when the Kingdom of Asturias included Galicia and León. Pelayo and his band were despised by the Moors who thought of them as a handful of rebels perched on a rock outside the Cave of Covadonga. Their only food was the honey which they gathered in the crevices of the cave wherein they dwelt like so many bees. But in the narrow passes of the mountains, near the cave of Covadonga, Pelayo, ‘the contemptible Goth’ won the Marathon of Spain in the year 718, and the Moors were driven back with terrible slaughter. So runs the legend which the minstrels sang and whose significance they exaggerated as was their wont.

Pelayo, however, is the symbol of the spirit of independence, which maintained itself intact in the mountains of Asturias, and was transmitted to Alfonso II, sumamed ‘the Chaste’, who reigned from 791 to 842. It was in his reign that the body of St. James the Great was discovered. Those were the days when Charlemagne had established, on the confines of his kingdom, districts under the military control of counts of the march, or margraves, whose business it was to prevent hostile incursions into the interior of the kingdom. In 777 Charlemagne was visited by disaffected Moslems, who had revolted against the Emir of Cordoba, and offered to become his faithful subjects if he would come to their aid. The result was his first expedition to Spain, where after some years of war the district of the Ebro was conquered and Charlemagne established the Spanish march. In this way began the gradual expulsion of the Mohammedans from the peninsula which