The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

refused to comply and war was declared. In the first engagement near Albelda the Christians were defeated and took refuge on Mount Clavijo, and on the eve of the battle the Apostle appeared in a dream to King Ramiro and promised him victory. Next morning, trusting the word of the Saint, the King attacked with all his forces, and suddenly, they saw the Apostle descend from the sky mounted on a white charger, having in one hand a snow-white banner on which was displayed a blood red cross, and in the other a flashing sword. Terrible slaughter ensued and, according to tradition, St. James single-handed slew sixty thousand Moors, and the remnant were routed with appalling losses.
    The victors, in gratitude to God for the divine aid, vowed to Santiago, under whose leadership the victory had been obtained, that all Spain would henceforth be tributary to the church at Compostella, and that every acre of ploughed land and vineyard would pay each year a bushel of corn or wine to that church. Furthermore, that when any booty was divided among the Christian troops, St. James was to receive the share reserved for a knight. By what appears to us today a miracle this tribute continued to be paid regularly every year until the Cortes of Cadiz in 1812, when it was abolished. *
    Modern historians believe that possibly the ancient chroniclers attributed to the Battle of Clavijo the events that took place a hundred years later, when Ramiro II of León defeated another Caliph of Córdoba, on this occasion Abderrahman III at the Battle of Simancas. * On this occasion there was no confusion, for all contemporaries refer to it as the most famous battle of the age, and it was celebrated in the plays of the German nun Roswitha, in the annals of St. Gall and in the Aghar Machmua of Ibn Khaldun. The Caliph attacked Ramiro with an army of a hundred thousand men and the King of León despairingly sought for help from the Count Fernán González of Castile and the warlike Queen Tota of Navarre. The battle was fought at Simancas in 939 and the Moorish troops were routed, and so great was the butchery that only the Caliph and a handful of his followers made their escape. At this battle St. James appeared riding through the clouds, but this time he carried mitre and crozier as well as his sword, and he was accompanied by St. Millán. The two together, ‘the white horsemen that ride on white horses, the knights of God’, were described by the first known poet of Spanish literature, Gonzalo de Berceo, who had been brought up as a child in the monastery founded by the San Millán de la Cogolla, which is now known as the Escorial of La Rioja. And it was as the result of the victory at Simancas that the Count Fernán González instituted the Vow of San Millán in the same terms as the vow of Santiago after the legendary Battle of Clavijo.
    By the time of Ramiro II the idea of a Holy War in defence of Christian territories had become a reality, mainly owing to the unifying efforts of Alfonso III, ‘The Great’ (866-910), who, when writing the first history of the small kingdom of Oviedo, calls it the history of the Goths, proclaiming by this title the uninterrupted continuity of the Gothic monarchy, and declaring that the Kingdom of Pelayo was salus Hispaniae, the salvation of Spain, and that the Spaniards would not cease to fight day and night until, in accordance with divine predestination, the Saracens were expelled root and branch.

REVIVAL OF THE MYTHS
OF CHARLEMAGNE AND ROLAND

    Raoul le Glabre, in the Prologue of his Chronicles, recalls how Charlemagne and his son Louis restored the Orbis Romanus: ‘quasi una domus famulatur suis imperatoribus Orbis Romanus’. And again: ‘Charlemagne exalted the Kingdom of the Franks; he ruled from Mount Gargano to Córdoba, and though engaged in wars in Gaul, in Germany and in Lombardy, he went to the assistance of the Christians who bore the cruel hordes of the Saracens.’ The Charlemagne who appears before us in the Chanson de Roland is a baron, but still more a saint and still more the leader of the people chosen by God; he reigns over the Franks of France like Saul over Israel, and his twelve peers like the Twelve Apostles around Jesus. His knights are men in the flower of their age, and he after two hundred years still leads them as he led their ancestors in endless wars which are always Holy wars. His army, like that of the Crusaders, is full of priests, and he himself is a priest as David and Moses