Pilgrim's Road

far as Mongolia, and could be said to be still active nine hundred years later in territories like the former Yugoslavia. It was also an extraordinary doctrinal departure in the name of a religion that stood primarily for peace and which preached the virtues of loving one’s enemies and of turning the other cheek. True, the Emperor Constantine had changed Christianity for ever when he had adopted it as the state religion more than seven hundred years earlier. But it could be argued that while he had fought under the banner of Christianity (although no Christian himself), it had been in order to defend his rightful territories, to secure the peace of his empire. A ‘Holy War’ to conquer fresh territory was, strictly speaking, a Muslim concept — Jihad — the natural expression of a religion which believed with a burning conviction that it was ‘Better dead than not a Muslim’ and sought to impose Islam wherever human life existed.
    Within little more than a hundred years of the Prophet Mohammed’s death, the unquenchable religious zeal of Islam had won, in the name of Allah, a vast empire, stretching from the Bedouin Arabian homelands, right through the Levant, across North Africa and taking in all of Spain, except for a narrow strip along the northern coast. Nor had it stopped at the Pyrenees. Very soon Muslim forces were ransacking French towns like Autun and Narbonne, laying siege to Toulouse and marching on towards Paris and the English Channel. All of Europe was potentially under threat. It was the nightmare of the eighth century, and a dread that was to continue unabated for several hundred years. As the historian Edward Gibbon was to write of the period, it really was touch and go that Britain along with Europe did not become part of the great Islamic Empire. And it is against the background of that dread that the age has to be seen. Islam was effectively the ‘Anti-Christ’.
    The first great headlong onslaught of Islam had been halted three hundred and fifty years before Urban II made his impassioned call to arms at Bazas. According to Gibbon the one man responsible for preserving Europe, and by extension Britain, for Christianity was Charles Martel, grandfather of the more famous Charlemagne, and founder of the Carolingian dynasty in France. Charles Martel subjected the Muslims to their first defeat in pitched battle at Poitiers in 732 AD. More importantly, perhaps, he was able to establish an efficient feudal system in his realms, enabling him to raise and maintain an army that could be an effective counter to the continuing Islamic threat. Muslim forces continued to cross the Pyrenees during the next hundred years, sometimes pushing deeply into French lands, but on each occasion they were defeated.
    In Spain, however, the Moorish culture became firmly established, flourishing in all branches of learning and the arts. Indeed, so great was the flowering that for a short time, during the Caliphate of Cordoba, Spain rather than Baghdad was the centre of the Islamic world, and the thin strip of Christian-held land along the northern edge of the peninsula was under constant threat of invasion, particularly after Santiago de Compostela became a focus for Christian pilgrimage.
    It was in 814 AD, at a point towards the western end of that Christian-held, sea-bordered strip, that a monk named Pelayo had a vision which was to prove so far reaching in its effect as to reverse the tide of Islamic conquest in Spain. Pelayo dreamt that a star would lead him to a field where the body of St James the Great, son of Zebedee, brother of John, and one of the principal disciples of Jesus lay buried. He told his local bishop of his vision; the spot was excavated and a sarcophagus containing three sets of bones was unearthed. These were triumphantly hailed as the remains of St James and his two disciples, a claim which was almost immediately endorsed by the Pope. St James was proclaimed patron saint of Spain, a church was built over the site, and what must have been the most convenient discovery ever of a major relic launched one of the world’s major pilgrimages. It was also to be of prime importance in the ‘Reconquest’ of Spain.
    As had long been noted, the great force and power of Islam came from the religious fanaticism of its warriors. Pilgrimage to Mecca, which was the goal of every pious Muslim, added to death in battle against the infidel, brought instant translation to Paradise. Christianity desperately