Pilgrim's Road

needed something to counter such military zeal. It came in 844, at the Battle of Clavijo, in the Rioja. Thirty years after the discovery of the tomb of St James, the patron saint was seen clad in shining armour, mounted on a white charger at the head of the Christian army, holding aloft a white banner emblazoned with a blood-red cross. In his right hand he gripped a great sword, and the severed Muslim heads were falling before his onslaught like grain in a wheat field. And though there was never any mention of the Battle of Clavijo until the end of the twelfth century, by that time St James was long established in his dual role, and was depicted accordingly in statues and illustrations. He was Santiago Peregrino , the gentle and archetypal pilgrim to his own shrine, and also Santiago Matamoros — St James the Slayer of Moors, defender of his shrine and of all those who journeyed there. Islam was no longer the only side with the zeal of religious conviction. God, or at least his ‘Saint of Battle’ was fighting on the side of the Christians.
    Nonetheless, the St James pilgrimage must have been a real journey of courage in those early days, with the ever-present threat of death or capture by the Moors to add to the other perils and hardships. Even a century and a half after the debatable Battle of Clavijo, the shrine itself was not safe from attack. In 997, the little town of Santiago which had grown up around the Field of the Star, was sacked by the war lord Al-Mansur and the bells of the church were removed to Cordoba.
    The idea of militant Christianity had taken a permanent hold, however, and nothing was going to shift it now. Deus Vult — God wills it, preached Urban II in this forgotten little town of Bazas, urging all able-bodied men in Christendom to carry the battle into Muslim lands. At the time it might well have seemed that God did indeed will it. For by 1095 much had changed in the balance of power between Muslim and Christian. In Spain the Reconquest was well under way, and Christianity had gained an entirely new image; one learnt, it would seem, from its greatest rival. The wonder is that in between all this fighting for territorial control, the Gospel of Peace preached by Jesus of Nazareth survived at all.
    In front of Bazas’s cathedral which, like the square in which it stands, is enormous for the size of the town, I met a despondent American. ‘Don’t they ever open their churches around here?’ he asked. ‘Seems tourism doesn’t count for much with the French.’ I could only offer heartfelt sympathy, and add that pilgrimage didn’t count for much either. Later I discovered the presbytery, had my record stamped, and gained admittance to the interior of the church; by which time the American had departed in disgust. Had I met him again I could have told him he had already seen the best, for the interior was nothing compared with the west front, before which we had voiced our complaints.
    This architectural gem is all that is left of the medieval church. Like everything around these parts, it suffered badly in the Wars of Religion, but nonetheless, this fragment is still magnificent if only for its amazing sense of antiquity. It is like a great stone triptych, with three evenly spaced doors, and above each a superb tympanum heavily encrusted with carvings, one to the Virgin, one to St Peter and one of the Last Judgement. Like so much medieval carving it possesses a deeply devotional quality, like a call to prayer. I thought of Urban II, the head of the Christian Church, with his back to this great statement of faith, preaching death and destruction to the Muslim infidels — a message so at odds with the work behind him.
    Thinking of the events that had begun at Bazas was to realise how the Church, with the Pope at its head, was right at the forefront of world power at this time. Nor was it difficult to see the purely practical, some might even say cynical, reasons for the Church to promote the Santiago pilgrimage. What was less easy to understand was how the pilgrims themselves fitted into this highly political scene, motivated as most of them must have been at this time by true piety and devotion. It would take another two hundred years and the establishment of comfortable inns along the way for Chaucer’s more tourist-minded pilgrims to emerge. And anyway, the type of pilgrim who was attracted by the holiday aspect of pilgrimage tended to go on the shorter journeys to local shrines like