Walking the Camino

by Tony Kevin

  The idea of religious journey is even more strongly embedded in the Abrahamic religions, with their emphasis on humanity’s active quest for revelation and salvation. Moses wandered fruitlessly for forty years in the Sinai desert in search of the Promised Land of Israel, and Jews in exile yearned to return to their holy places, praying for ‘next year in Jerusalem’. It is still the religious duty of all devout Muslims who can afford the trip to make the pilgrimage to the holy sites of Mecca before they die.

  For Christians in the Middle Ages, visiting pilgrimage sites was a central part of their religious experience, as natural as attending church on Sundays. These sites sprang up like mushrooms wherever there were credible stories of miracles or apparitions or saintly events, or simply the claimed discovery of sacred Christian relics such as fragments of the true cross, Jesus’s shroud, or the bones of saints or martyrs. It took little to start a story of miracle cures or holy relics, and once such stories began they quickly gained a credibility and surrounding theology of their own. In the end, it mattered little whether the original story was true or imagined. The site became holy and religiously significant simply because so many believed that it was, rather in the manner of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sometimes the institutional church tried vainly to put the genie back in the bottle, to get some sort of order and discipline and ‘consumer protection’ into verifying these stories of relics and miracles. They were usually too late, for the people had already decided what they wanted to believe.

  From a huge array of local or national pilgrimage sites that came and went out of fashion (local sites close to home, like Canterbury in Britain, or Vezelay and Le Puy in France, could be most easily accessed by people from the same nation and language group) there emerged three favourite destinations for long-distance European pilgrimage: Jerusalem, Rome, and Santiago de Compostela. Some of the local sites then acquired new functions as starting points or way-stations for these longer pilgrimage routes (for example, Cologne, Paris, Vezelay, Le Puy), thereby ensuring their own longer-term popularity and prosperity.

  But why Santiago of all places, tucked away in the remote northwest of Spain? How did the fame of this pilgrimage destination come to rival for hundreds of years the appeal of Rome or Jerusalem itself? There were practical reasons of accessibility and security, but there was also a uniquely powerful Christian foundation legend that raised Santiago to the level of Rome or Jerusalem. Santiago became known as ‘the Jerusalem of the West’, and certainly at its height its resident clergy thought of it in that way.

  As a practical matter, Jerusalem in the Middle Ages was expensive to reach, and was for long periods dangerous to access, and insecure and culturally frightening even when one got there. The land route across the Balkans and Anatolia became increasingly perilous for pilgrims after the Arab occupation of Syria and Palestine in the seventh century, and impossible after the Seljuk Turks occupied much of Asia Minor following their crucial victory over the Byzantine Christians at the battle of Manzikert in 1068. The sea route to the Holy Land, on Venetian or Genoese trading ships, was safer but prohibitively expensive for all but the very rich. In the Holy Land itself, pilgrims were barely tolerated under the unsure and grudging protection of Muslim caliphs who had bitter memories of Christian perfidy and cruelty during the eleventh-century Crusades. Rome was difficult and dangerous to access through an unruly Italy of endemically warring and anarchical city-states, and the papal city and territories were often corrupt and insecure.

  The road to Santiago, by contrast, offered an appealing combination: remoteness and hard walking, but with a reassuring degree of organisation and security. It was a satisfyingly long distance away from home, but still within the west European cultural space, and it passed through fairly well-governed Christian regions that became safer as the Christian–Muslim frontier zone in Spain moved further south. It is interesting that Chaucer’s Wife of Bath — not a lady, I would think, to seek out too much danger or hardship on pilgrimage — had made a pilgrimage to Santiago.

  From the eighth to the fifteenth centuries, and in particular under the wise guidance and sponsorship of the Benedictine monks of Cluny in France, led by their great abbot Peter of Cluny (1092–1156), who understood the unique importance and value of the Santiago pilgrimage as an educational tool to broaden Europe’s cultural horizons, an impressive infrastructure of cathedrals, colleges, and hostels developed in the now-thriving city of Santiago and along the routes to it. Huge numbers of pilgrims travelled each year along the Vía Frances through Roncesvalles, then as now the most popular route. So many walked the Way that their footsteps wore down stone steps along its route.

  The powerful founding myth centred around the life and death of St James the Apostle played a crucial role. St James (Santiago in Spanish, a compression of Santo Diego), was one of the three brothers commanded by Christ to leave their fishing nets on Lake Galilee and follow Him. He was said to be buried in Santiago. After a lifetime spent preaching the gospel in Spain, so the legend goes, James returned to the Eastern Mediterranean, where he was martyred. His headless body was then brought back to Spain in a stone ship, and buried secretly near the site of Santiago. There, several centuries later, in a legendary battle at Clavijo in 844 A.D. between Christian and Muslim armies, St James appeared in a vision to the despairing Christian fighters, inspiring them to victory. His bones were then discovered nearby, and a pilgrimage shrine established, which became the city of Santiago.

  St James has two religious personae: Santiago Matamoros, ‘The Moorslayer’, portrayed in armour on horseback, energetically killing Moors; and Santiago Peregrino, the gentle, Christ-like pilgrim with scallop-shell, staff, water bottle, waist-purse, and robe. The image of Santiago Matamoros is the cruel face of the Crusades, Christianity’s holy wars. To kill Muslims in the name of Christ was not a sin, but a sacred duty. I cannot warm to Santiago Matamoros — his imagery in Spanish churches as a mounted knight with sword in hand, slashing at helpless Muslims crushed beneath his horse’s feet, chills my blood — but the reality of the historic duality in Christianity between peaceful pilgrimage and warlike crusade cannot be ignored. Santiago expresses that duality.

  To better comprehend the Crusades and the complex Christian–Muslim–Jewish cultural dynamics they involved, I turned to a great work of medieval history: Sir Steven Runciman’s History of the Crusades (1951–54). The Crusades were first inspired by the same pilgrimage ideal — the desire to be able to travel freely and safely all the way from Christian western Europe to the holy places of the Bible, through Christian-ruled lands without let or hindrance. The same motivations were there for crusading as for pilgrimage — redemption, healing, expiation of sins, adventure, escape from a dull or dreary life at home — but there was a crucial difference.

  Crusaders went a-pilgriming with sword in hand, armed with the dispensation to kill Muslims or Jews (or even Eastern Rite Christians) in the name of Christ. So, together with the excitement of leaving behind a poor, cold, and primitive western Europe still trapped in the ignorance and discomfort of the Dark Ages, and entering the warm, sunlit world of the higher post-Roman civilisations of the eastern Mediterranean, these military pilgrimages offered the adrenalin rush of righteous war, conquest, and booty.

  All this is brilliantly captured in Ridley Scott’s moodily atmospheric 2005 film about the Crusades, Kingdom of Heaven. The lead character, Balian the Blacksmith, in deep despair at the death of his beloved wife, desperately (and unlawfully) flees from his bleak and lonely home village, departing by sea from southern Italy to Palestine with monks intoning the ritual blessing, ‘To kill a Muslim is no sin’. To Balian’s wonder and delight, he sails to the glowing sunshine and luxury of the short-lived Christian kingdom of Palestine, where he comes to love and respect Muslim chivalry and culture.

  Meanwhile, at the other end of the Mediterranean, in what is now Spain, the small and embattled remnant Christian kingdoms in León-Castile and the A
sturias had no role in the Holy Land Crusades, because their hands were full with their own national crusade at home: to fight to win the peninsula back from Moorish rule. These little kingdoms on the northern periphery of rich, Muslim-ruled Spain were situated in territory too mountainous and forested for the Moorish cavalry to subdue easily — and they were never worth the trouble to conquer. These states were, in every way (economically, culturally, militarily), weaker than the powerful Muslim-ruled state of al–Andalus that dominated Spain for over 300 years from its magnificent southern capital at Córdoba.

  Yet these little Christian kingdoms gradually consolidated as the spearhead of the Christian reconquest of the Spanish peninsula. Over three centuries, with frequent reverses and temporary accommodations, the frontier of Christian state power moved southwards. Even before the idea of Spain had any real meaning, a martial Christian crusader culture had developed in the north of the Iberian peninsula, with Santiago Matamoros as its central symbolic inspiration.

  Protecting the pilgrim route of the Vía Frances from the Pyrenees to Santiago was an integral part of the Christian reconquest project. Periodically, Moorish mounted raiding parties, swiftly crossing the no-mans-land of the high unpopulated meseta (tableland) from their great fortress cities such as Zamora and Salamanca, would fall on bands of pilgrims, seeking booty and ransom money. In self-defence, military orders of armed monks (Spain’s own Knights of Santiago, as well as the Templars who were also very active in Spain in this era) built strong castles from which they defended the camino routes and made their own raiding sorties into the Muslim-ruled south.

  But the southern frontier was rarely an impermeable military or cultural barrier in these years. The Santiago pilgrimage not only nourished the dream of a united Christian Spain, it also stimulated a rich trading and cultural interchange between Christian Europe and the higher civilisation of Muslim al-Andalus. Spanish Christian pilgrims from the southern region — because there was freedom of religion there — and seaborne pilgrims from Italy, disembarking in the seaports of Cádiz or Seville, came up along the ancient Vía de la Plata, the old Roman ‘Silver Road’ linking the south and north of the peninsula. They brought with them ideas and knowledge from the East, sharing them with Christian pilgrims from northern Europe.

  What an exciting melting-pot of knowledge and ideas Santiago must have been in those years; what mind-expanding conversations must have taken place in its inns and libraries and plazas. From the Vía Frances grew up safe and well-marked routes south through Muslim lands to cities like Toledo, then a brilliant centre of Muslim–Jewish–Christian scholarship. Peter of Cluny went to this region and met scholars from Toledo in 1142, an event that was momentous in the cultural history of Europe.

  Finally, I think, Santiago always had another unique asset: the unspoken attraction of the older pre-Christian civilisation of this region, the haunting aura of the times when this was a place of Celtic magic and runes and druids. Santiago and Finisterre, indeed all of Galicia, still give off a mystical, pagan Celtic spirituality, and it must have been even more pronounced then.

  Both the Crusades and the pilgrimage to Santiago — at opposite ends of the Mediterranean world — became powerful vehicles for the transmission of higher learning and culture from the post-Roman east into western Europe, finally ending the long night of the Dark Ages, laying the foundations for the European renaissance that began in the twelfth century. The classical Graeco–Roman achievements in art, science, and philosophy — this precious repository of knowledge and culture that was mostly lost in western Europe during the disruptive barbarian invasions of the western Roman empire — had been cherished and preserved (and expanded) in the libraries of the old eastern Roman empire maintained by the Arab invaders, in Egypt and Syria in particular.

  Through the pilgrimage to Santiago, Christian western Europe was able to connect with the classical learning and high culture of al-Andalus and its successor states. European Christians readily acknowledged in those centuries that Moorish Spain was the most advanced and enlightened culture in the western Mediterranean. Much of the great body of classical Graeco–Roman learning reached western Europe and England by this circuitous indirect route through Moorish Spain. Texts that were first translated from the original Greek or Latin into Arabic by Greek and Muslim scholars in the eastern Mediterranean areas were retranslated on the Spanish peninsula into the declining language of medieval Latin or increasingly into the young, developing Romance languages of Europe and thence finally into English. This circuitous process took many centuries. Much of this learning was still fresh and exciting, even as late as Shakespeare’s time in England. We can sense this excitement in Shakespeare’s and Marlowe’s plays.

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  I was fascinated to learn more about how, for some 500 years between 850 and 1350 A.D., as the pilgrimage to Santiago grew in fame and cultural importance, the rich societies of Moorish Spain — being al-Andalus, based on its capital city of Córdoba, and its smaller successor city-states — had nurtured an advanced culture of knowledge, urban civility, and religious freedom.

  Al-Andalus was a powerful and dynamic Moorish state with its capital at Córdoba, founded in 755 A.D. by Abd al-Rahman, a brave and brilliant young refugee prince from Damascus, the last survivor of his massacred Umayyad line — why has Hollywood never made a film about his epic life? His new state of al–Andalus, nominally owing allegiance to the far-away Baghdad caliphate, but effectively independent, soon conquered most of the Iberian peninsula from weak Visigothic states, beginning a golden age of stability and prosperity that lasted for three hundred years. Then, in 1031 A.D., dynastic failure led to the dissolution of al-Andalus into a confused jumble of smaller warring city-states, some ruled by Christian and some by Muslim princes. But this very political instability, as in Renaissance Italy, stimulated a rich and fruitful interchange of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic trade and scholarship. Wandering merchants and scholars carried knowledge and culture throughout the peninsula and beyond into Europe proper.

  This inspiring story, and much more, is told in the book that became my third major reference-point in preparing for my pilgrimage walk from Granada to Santiago — María Rosa Menocal’s brilliant work of cultural history, whose title speaks for itself: The Ornament of the World: how Muslims, Jews and Christians created a culture of tolerance in medieval Spain (Little, Brown, 2002).

  I chose to begin my walk in Granada, passing through Córdoba, the magnificent capital built by Abd al-Rahman, because I wanted to try to get some insights into this great multicultural civilisation. I hoped to get some hints of what it had been like here at its height, before the dark night of religious intolerance and persecution descended on Spain after 1492; to explore what traces it had left in Andalucia, and how much it had influenced the rest of Spain and, through Spain, western Europe. I was as much seeking to explore Spain’s glorious Muslim past as its more recent Christian past.

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  Sumption emphasises how seriously and literally medieval European Christians took their religion: they were a superstitious and credulous lot. Once an idea took hold that certain places were especially holy, and that to go there would bring real spiritual and physical benefits, there was no stopping the mass movement of pilgrims swarming in from all directions. Pilgrimage (like crusading) released huge and powerful latent energies in ordinary people. It took them away from the drudgery of growing food and staying alive in cold, wet climates; away from harsh and boring village lives that, for most people, still hovered just above a bare subsistence level. It also released their yearnings for travel and adventure. It was an impulse that the church welcomed for spiritual reasons, at the same time knowing how hard it was to safely channel and control.

  Church leaders like Peter of Cluny gave priority to promoting and building safe travel infrastructure, establishing well-marked and well-resourced routes to stop people straying all over the countryside and becoming pr
ey to local brigands, or themselves stealing food and disrupting local populations. So the church encouraged the formation of military monastic orders like the Knights of Santiago, tasked to protect and succour and organise the huge numbers of pilgrims, to build chains of protective pilgrim refuges on the way, to bridge dangerous rivers, and to erect strong forts and castles to guard insecure sections of the route. In these ways, a separate pilgrimage culture and economic infrastructure developed around the camino to Santiago, a phenomenon standing alongside but in some ways separate from the general European political and cultural experience in those years.

  For pilgrims, to go to Santiago was an extraordinary adventure of a lifetime. Pilgrimage soon developed its own liturgies and traditions. Its romantic imagery entered into the languages of Europe. England’s first great extended literary work, The Canterbury Tales, is the story of a group of English pilgrims to Canterbury — the great cathedral where the martyred relics of Thomas á Becket were enshrined — who entertained each other with nightly tales after each day’s walking. Shakespeare’s plays, and Elizabethan-age literature generally, are full of the exciting imagery of pilgrimage: of travel to faraway places, of shipwreck, losing one’s way, meeting strange foreigners, coping with foreign laws and customs, exile, loneliness, and homecoming. All these themes represent the medieval pilgrim experience.

  Even centuries later, when the great medieval pilgrimage routes of Europe had lost relevance and were crumbling into disuse and decay, pilgrimage as a metaphor, an ideal, could still inspire John Bunyan’s wildly popular allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress. The seventeenth-century Puritan religious refugees who colonised New England in the ‘Mayflower’ were happy be known as the ‘Pilgrim Fathers’. Protestant England’s most inspiring hymns are filled with the language, metaphors, and imagery of pilgrimage. I still remember as a schoolboy lustily bellowing out the stirring anthem inspired by Bunyan’s words: