Pilgrim's Road

finding how little you really needed.
    As we parted company I realised that the day no longer seemed bleak. Meeting Harrie had blown away the cobwebs far more effectively than any cold upland wind. In spite of his determinedly secular approach and his impatience with labels like ‘pilgrim’, much of what he had said could have come straight from Bunyan; except that it was expressed in his own unequivocal terms which served to cloak their underlying spirituality. I would have loved to be present at the evening conversations with his companions.
    I was still inwardly chuckling at the thought of the tourists’ surprise over Harrie’s indignant refusals to pose for photographs when I rode into Sahagún, a town whose air of dusty crumbling decay came as a shock. I had been expecting something rather grand and certainly less alien. Once again I had the distinct impression of being back in Asia, only this time it was the streets and buildings that evoked the memory rather than the landscape.
    Sahagún had been the site of the most powerful monastery in Spain, at the very centre of Christian expansion and the Reconquest. It had risen to this position in the eleventh century when Alfonso VI decided to subject the earlier foundation to Cluniac reform. Alfonso’s confessor, the Benedictine Bernard of Aquitaine, was chosen to bring about the new order, and so well did he succeed that Sahagún soon had over fifty abbeys and priories dependent upon it and was exercising something of the political and religious power and influence that Cluny itself wielded in the Christian world. When Toledo was captured from the Moors in 1086, it was Bernard who became bishop there.
    By the time Aimery Picaud was making his pilgrimage in the following century, trade from every corner of Europe had built up a ‘prosperous town’ around the monastery, one of the high spots of the Camino Francés. Sahagún’s river also gained Picaud’s approval, and his guide reminds pilgrims of the town’s connection with Charlemagne and the battle fought there against the Moors when some of his knights’ lances were found to have taken root in the ground during the night before the battle and had put forth leaves. This was afterwards said to be a foreshadowing of the palms of martyrdom bestowed upon those warriors who were to be killed in the battle. Poplars growing beside the river are still pointed out as the descendants of those flowering lances.
    Trees in a water meadow and a few strange and very beautiful brick churches towering above the mean buildings of a run-down town are all that is left of Sahagún’s glory. The foreign feeling of the place was due as much to this extraordinary contrast of decayed grandeur and mean poverty as to the unique architecture of the battered ancient churches. They are in a style known as Mudéjar, having been built by Muslim craftsmen from Islamic Spain. Because there is no stone in these parts, brick was used exclusively in their construction, and the result was more exotic than anything else I had seen so far on the Camino. Of the powerful monastery of Sahagún, nothing remains except a few formless lumps, a great arch and a half-ruined chapel, and only four of the nine famous churches seem still to be standing. The small church of San Tirso, standing in an incongruous littered square behind the ruined monastery, has been extensively restored, which enables one to see just how lovely and perfectly balanced the Mudéjar style could be; and how intricate and varied too, in spite of the limitations of working in the single brick medium. Another of the remaining churches, San Lorenzo, with its onion-shaped arches and great square bell tower had not yet been subjected to the restorers, and its general air of dilapidation was somehow more satisfying, as though there was still something of its inner spirit left. But it was the derelict church of La Peregrina on a hill to the west of the city that made the deepest impact. The dedication alone — the portrayal of the Virgin as a pilgrim — was a moving one, with its echoes of the Flight into Egypt, and of the earlier journey, heavy with child, to Bethlehem and the birth of the Son of God in a stable. I had grown used to seeing St James portrayed as a pilgrim journeying to his own tomb. I had even seen Jesus himself depicted as a pilgrim on the Road to Emmaus, but this was the first time I had come across his mother in the role. I found on this journey I was forced