Santiago de Compostela
Part 3. Europe was born out of the pilgrimage to Santiago...
‘What his mind grasps, he may possess.
Thus let him travel all his earthy day:
Though spirits haunt him, let him walk his way,
Let both his pain and joy be in his forward stride -
Each moment leave him still unsatisfied!’1
For those who read Goethe’s Faust the supposed quote: ‘Europe was born out of the pilgrimage (to Santiago) and Christianity is its mother tongue’, is somewhat off. I was not able to find an actual reference, and came across writings by people with much more time and resources who didn’t either.2
This post is the continuation of: Santiago de Compostela. Part 2. The original path.
But looking at the map it was certainly something that helped unite Europe through its feeder trails stretching from as far away as Canterbury, Paris, Oslo, Gdansk, Moscow, Budapest, the Balkans, and Rome. Being recognized under The Cultural Itineraries of the Council of Europe for its ‘cultural property belonging to Europe’ and promoting ‘a spirit of peace between Europeans through awareness of their shared history’ confirms this.3
Christianity certainly became dominant ‘language’ in (re)writing history and overwriting /replacing /subverting /usurping previous cultures. We saw it at work earlier in the origins of the path. The birth of Christ was literally ‘year 0’: the idea that all culture and traditions within a society must be completely destroyed or discarded and that a new revolutionary culture must replace it starting from scratch.
In much of Europe conveniently the period of Roman domination, a shared experience with the biblical new testament. With the introduction of writing (or replacing earlier forms of script), everything before became pagan, primitive and/or irrelevant. And interest in the period became suspect in the eyes of the church.4 I hope to explore this further in a future post on changing perceptions of Celtic history.
Here I would like to touch on two legends connected to the path of St James, that shaped modern European culture. The Myth of St James and the Chanson de Roland.
Myth of St James
‘St James, called the Major, is presented to us in two very different characters, each being important and full of interest’ reads the entry to Legendary and Mythological Art (1876).5 This long quote sums up pretty much all that is known for sure about St James.
‘First, in Gospels as the brother of (John) the Evangelist, and a near kinsman and favorite disciple of our Lord. He was much with Jesus, and present at many of the most important events in his life, such as his transfiguration and the agony of the Garden. Still, after the Saviour’s ascension nothing is told of him, save that he was slain by Herod (in 44AD).’
As remarked earlier, before the year 813 there was no mention of St James, in Spain nor elsewhere. His supposed missionary work in Spain, resulting in a meager nine disciples, was long forgotten. Until an ancient crypt, a Roman-style mausoleum from the first century of Christianity, was discovered. The legends surrounding the remains of James are far more wonderful than any of his actual life.
First, how does the body, slain in Jerusalem, end up on the furthest end of the European continent? Well, his disciples supposedly recovered his slain body but did not dare to bury it, so put it on a ship. Many versions exist of this miraculous vessel, it had no rudder, some say it was made of marble. But all agree that it was conducted by angles to Galicia in seven days. The angles carried the body on shore and laid it on a large stone, which became like wax and received the body into itself. This was interpreted as a sign that the saint desired to remain there.
The remains became the son of Zebedee, the cousin of Christ, and began its second life. In a country, ruled by a wicked queen, who demanded the stone to be placed on a cart and had wild bulls attached to it. Against expectation, the oxen (without anyone steering) carried the body to the middle of the queen's palace. When she saw this, she was greatly amazed: she believed in Jesus Christ and became a Christian, and ordered a burial. After this nothing seems to happen for about 800 years.
Meanwhile, Christianity reinvents relics; remains endowed with supernatural powers. From the 4th and 5th centuries onward, almost every day brought a new 'invention', that is the discovery of some prestigious remains. But the miraculous discovery of the entire body of an apostle, that must have shocked the West. It was the beginning of a unique collection kept in Compostela till this day. Pilgrims started flocking in, and miracles got recorded. Somehow, despite his remains being encased besides the alter, St James is said to have appeared in person to head the Spanish armies on thirty-eight different occasions.
He became the patron saint of Spain, most notably, in 939, leading the Spanish army when King Ramirez was determined not to submit to the annual tribute of one hundred virgins to be paid to the Moors. St James became the symbol of the Reconquista, a fitful series of sporadic regional conflicts (rather than a single fully conceived campaign), stretching over 400 years. He is still present in many old Spanish depictions as Santiago Matamaros (‘moor killer’) with a sword, on horseback, surrounded by the severed heads of dark-skinned, frizzy-haired enemies of Christianity.
Although the first phase of the Reconquista seemed more motivated by local power and social order. The Almoravids, a fundamentalist reform sect within western Islam, believed that the Christian advances resulted from the failure of Muslims to adhere rigidly enough to Islamic law. Stricter posture towards non-Muslim added to the urgency of the Christian reconquest, thus taking on more explicitly religious overtones. After the Almohads, an even stricter Islamic group, took over they imposed even more radical suppression of Christians and Jews. This raised the Reconquista to the status of a crusade.6
Today ‘the crusades’ are often exclusively associated to Jerusalem and the holy-land, but there were many crusades. Against Muslims in Spain, the pagans in the Baltic, the Albigensian heretics in southwest France, and became a papal weapon in Europe against political opponents.7
Chanson de Roland
It is against the backdrop of the path of St James and the Reconquista, a celebrated skirmish gave birth to what was to become one of France’s canonical epic tales, the Chanson de Roland. A work destined to become a center piece of the European cult of chivalric values.
This will be explored in the post: Santiago de Compostela Part 4. The Chanson de Roland.
Goethe W.J., 2008 (1832). Faust, Part Two. Oxford University Press, Oxford World’s Classics. ISBN 978-0-19-953620-7 verses 11448 – 11452
Greenia, G., 2016. Santiago de Compostela. Europe: A Literary History of Europe, 1348-1418 (pp. 94-101). Oxford University Press. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/asbookchapters/67
Van der Woud A., 1998. De Bataafse hut, Denken over het oudste Nederland (1750 – 1850) (≈The Batavian hut, Thinking about the oldest Netherlands). Contact. ISBN 90 254 1395
Clement C. E., 1994 (1876). Legendary and Mythological Art. Bracken Books, Studio Editions Ltd. ISBN 1 85891 135 4
Backman C.R., 2003. The Worlds of Medieval Europe. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-512169-8
Burrow J., 2009 (2007). A History of Histories, Epics, Chonicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century. Allen Lane, Penguin Books. ISBN 978 0 140 28379 2