On my 50^th birthday I set out on a two-week bicycle ride on the Camino de Santiago. Ever hear of the Camino de Santiago? Until a few years ago, as a fairly average American with a little exposure to the language and culture of the Hispanic world, I knew only that camino means, roughly, “highway” and that Santiago is the capital of Chilé. But this highway crosses northern Spain and it predates the existence of Chilé. Thus, it predates automobiles and bicycles and is not a highway in the modern sense of a paved multi-lane road. This highway dates back a thousand years to the time when traveling on foot was the only option open to most people in the continent of many small kingdoms that we now call Western Europe. The Camino de Santiago was the route followed by pilgrims on their way to the holy city of Santiago de Compostela, which happens to be in the northwest corner of the Iberian peninsula.

Could you name a sacred site in Spain? In my fragmentary schooling about European history I learned that during the ill-defined period known as the Middle Ages (roughly 1000 to 1400 A.D. - I had to refresh my memory) pilgrims flocked in large numbers to the holy cities of Jerusalem and Rome. Thanks to Chaucer I also knew that English pilgrims might go to Canterbury. But somehow I was given no clue that the third most popular destination for medieval Christian pilgrims (after Jerusalem and Rome) was Santiago de Compostela. What was there of interest to people of the Christian faith so far removed from the Holy Land?

The answer to that question goes back another thousand years and requires a bit of etymology to decipher. Santiago is a contraction of “Sant’ Iago,” which is early Spanish for St. James. (The Compostela in the name, by the way, probably derives from the Latin Compostum, “burial ground,” because the site was a cemetery dating back to Roman times.) The name Santiago refers to the apostle James, who was the brother of John and the cousin of Jesus. There is fragmentary evidence, not corroborated by anything in the Bible, that after the death of Jesus, James actually spent some time spreading the gospel in what is now Spain. It was then part of the Roman empire, and it is plausible that he could have ventured there. However, it is clear to modern scholars that this fiction was propagated by a scholarly Spanish monk writing in the 8^th century (St. Beatus) who accepted as gospel truth a list of the apostles mission fields (the Breviarium Apostolorum, if you must know). Unfortunately this list had been translated from Greek to Latin and recopied by various scribes. St. James probably preached in Hierosolyman (Jerusalem), but somewhere along the way this apparently was transposed to Hispaniam (Spain). Unfortunate for the sake of truth, but quite convenient for the building of a legend. From such a minor misstroke of the pen – like the flap of a butterfly wing – rose a major wave of Spanish history.

The next fragment of the story is complete legend with no written history to back it up. James was one of the original saints, who earned their status by being martyred for the cause. He was beheaded by King Herod – this much is supported by the biblical account. But legend goes on to tell us that his remains were placed in a boat and set adrift in the Mediterranean. Guided by mystical forces (no one seems to suggest it was the hand of God), the boat made its way out through the Strait of Gibraltar, up the west coast of the Iberian peninsula, and ran ashore in Galicia. His remains were presumably found and buried, but pretty much forgotten about by Christians for centuries.

After a long interlude the story picks up around 813 A.D. A Christian hermit named Pelayo, who was holed up in the area, saw bright lights in the sky one night that seemed to touch down in the underbrush. A search led to a cave that concealed ancient bones and documents on parchment;  a local bishop authenticated these as being the remains of the apostle. A movement was born: the cult of St. James. In that era every Christian relic, no matter how fragmentary, was worthy of being enshrined. The complete remains of one of the original disciples would ultimately deserve a large cathedral.

In addition to mere veneration, the presence in Spain of one of Christianity’s father figures served another function. In the 9^th century the Christians were fighting to retain their last toehold in Spain against domination by Muslims from northern Africa. And here came a candidate to carry the banner of Christian soldiers into battle against the Moorish hordes. In the year 852 at the battle at Clavijo, near Logroño in northeastern Spain, legend has it that St. James came back to life as a warrior and led his forces to a bloody victory over the Muslims. The character of Santiago Matamoros (“Moor-slayer”) was born, eight centuries after the death of the original man (who, we presume, was rather nonviolent in life). This would remain a potent myth, depicted on religious statuary many times over the ensuing 800 years – the length of time it took for the Christians to drive the Muslims out of Spain.

As for the pilgrimage, it took a few decades to get things rolling. Historical records show that there was a solid pilgrim tradition by about 950 A.D. In 997 an early cathedral built to house Santiago’s remains was destroyed in one of many successful raids by the Muslim commander Almanzor (a nickname that is a corruption of the Arabic for “victorious through Allah”). The Romanesque cathedral that stands today was constructed during the late 11^th and early 12^th centuries, and its impressively sculpted entryway, the Portico de la Gloria, was completed in 1188. These centuries marked the peak in the flow of pilgrims to Santiago; it is estimated that half a million came every year, paying their respects to the saintly remains and praying to the saint for relief from their worldly woes. To meet the material needs of the tide of pilgrims flowing westward across Spain, hospices or refugios were founded. To serve their spiritual needs, churches and cathedrals were built. At night they would have a place to sleep and a bit of food to eat. When they attended mass they were likely to see, among the carvings on the portals, columns and altarpieces of the places of worship, the benign image of St. James as Santiago Peregrino, a pilgrim like themselves, wearing a long robe and holding a walking stick. En route, his face urged them toward their destination. At the portal of the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, his face finally welcomed them to their goal.

What really would motivate so many people to leave their homes and spend months on the road on a strenuous and perilous journey? To answer that question we need a bit of context on the Catholic religion and on the lives of people in the Middle Ages. I quote from an excellent modern guidebook to the Camino, The Pilgrimage Road to Santiago: The Complete Cultural Handbook (Gitlitz and Davidson, 2000). (In future citations I’ll abbreviate this book as CCH.)

Many pilgrims undertook the journey to earn forgiveness for their sins. . . . Each indulgence annulled a certain number of sins, or lessened by some number of days the time a sinner would have to spend in purgatory. Medieval pilgrims collected these treasures avidly, keeping tabs for themselves and their loved ones, and seeking out places and activities that would grant the most substantial pardons. Compostela was a prime source.

In addition to being a sort of traffic school for moral offenses or even a “Get Out of Hell Free” card, there may be many other things that motivated the pilgrims:

Some were moved by spirit. Some by politics. Some came to enrich themselves on the pilgrim trade. Some came to be healed in the body. Some were sentenced to walk to Compostela in lieu of serving time in prison. Some had their expenses underwritten by their villages to go to pray for rain or relief from plague. Since the Middle Ages did not recognize the legitimacy of tourism or vacations, but did endorse pilgrimage, some came for the pleasure of travel, or to get away from the wife or the farm, or for the mere adventure of it. Often pilgrims left home for one set of reasons and discovered quite another set along the Road.

The tradition of pilgrimage slacked off somewhat during the Renaissance and Enlightenment and fell far out of favor in subsequent centuries. But the Camino never died out completely, even in modern times. In the introduction to the CCH the authors say that when they first walked it in 1974 they did not encounter one other pilgrim, and that they found the trail very hard to follow in some places. But during the 1980s an interest in this pilgrimage resurfaced. Walking again in 1987 they found the route well marked and met hundreds of other pilgrims. In 1996 Spanish records show more than 100,000 pilgrims. What accounts for the resurgence? Not so much religious dedication I suspect, but perhaps a modern interest in fitness and outdoor physical activity, coupled with an interest in the cultural history. To some degree the same pleasure and adventure of travel that these authors attribute to medieval pilgrims.

The Camino de Santiago left a legacy of sites that survives to this day. The route that I followed (or, more accurately, meandered around, since I was traveling by road instead of footpath) is called the Camino Francés and was only one final tributary of dozens of known walking routes leading to Santiago from all over Western Europe). The Camino Francés stretches over 900 km (540 miles) from Roncesvalles in the foothills of the Pyrenees to Santiago de Compostela. All along this route at distances of about a day’s walk (20-30 km / 12-18 miles) are the towns where a pilgrim could find one or more refugios that would him or her for a night and provide a bit of food (perhaps no more than food and water). Surprisingly, a large number of them still operate today, financed by the Spanish government to promote pilgrimage as a form of tourism. An office in Roncesvalles registers you as a pilgrim (peregrino in Spanish) and issues you a Credencial del Peregrino, a passport to be validated with a rubber stamp when you stop along the way at hospices, tourist offices, churches and even bars. A compact route map on the back of the passport lists 33 stops along the Camino Francés with one or more refugios para perigrinos. Some of these are sizeable cities with large cathedrals: Pamplona, Burgos, León. Some of these are small- to mid-sized towns (Puente La Reina, Belorado, Santo Domingo de la Calzada, Carrión de los Condes, Astorga, Sahagún, Portomarin) and some are small villages in the middle of the plains or on a ridgetop with little more than a hospice and a few
services to support pilgrims (San Juan de Ortega, El Burgo Ranero, O Cebreiro).