The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

power in Spain marks the apogee of St. James’s influence, for at that time the number of pilgrims who flocked to Compostella was greater than ever before; so great in fact that Ferdinand and Isabel, knowing how poor was the accommodation provided for pilgrims in Compostella, devoted funds raised on the occasion of the capture of Granada to the erection of a Royal Hospital close to the Cathedral, where pious pilgrims might find shelter and the sick be nursed. This was a scheme particularly dear to Isabel, who had followed her army into battle, spurring on the soldiers, raising the courage of those who were faint from long exposure and tending the sick and wounded. She had been the first to establish military hospitals at the front, and we might look upon her as the Florence Nightingale of her time. It was thus natural that she and Ferdinand should manifest their gratitude for the conquest of Granada by attributing the success of their enterprise to the national hero-saint, St. James, and by exacting as other monarchs had done from time to time, the tribute of a bushel of grain on every pair of oxen, horses, mules and asses used in agriculture throughout Spain. This tribute was to be devoted to the erection of the Royal Hospital at Compostella and the repair of the Cathedral.
    The foundations of the Royal Hospital were laid in 1501 and it was ready to receive pilgrims in 1511. Not only was their building with its beautiful sculptures and sublime decorations one of the noblest structures of the Renaissance in all Spain, but its fame as a hospital was celebrated in glowing words even as later as 1675 by Luis de Molina in his Descripción del Reino de Galicia. ‘I believe’, he says, ‘that this hospital is so well known in every part of the world that all I can say about it will be readily credited. In the three large wards there are few days when there are less than two hundred sick people, and the number is much larger in jubilee year. Yet every patient is treated with as much care as if the hospital had been erected for his particular benefit. The hospital is one of the great things of the earth. Apart from its sumptuousness and the regal grandeur of its architecture it is a marvellous thing to feel its size, the multitudes of its officials, the diligence and zeal of the attendants, the cleanliness of the linen, the care taken about the cooking, the perfect order of the routine, the assiduity of the doctors. One may indeed regard it as a crowning glory of Christendom.’
    Nevertheless, the capture of Granada and the discovery of America marks the coming of an age which would witness a sad decline in the prestige and influence of St. James, the Patron of Spain.
    1501, the year of the foundation of the Hospital, was a fateful date. In that summer Catherine, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabel, set out for England on what was to be her long Via Crucis, culminating in the dissolution of her marriage to Henry VIII and England’s decision to break with her mediaeval past. The decline of St. James was but one of the many changes due to the dying out of one age and the dawning of another.
    The cult of St. James had not worn itself out, but its continuance depended largely upon foreign sympathy and support. Most of the pilgrims came from abroad, from Germany, Scandinavia, England, France and Italy, and as the sixteenth century advanced the motive for pilgrimage weakened and passed away. Even when commercial enterprise increased traders soon found that they could carry on business without the guide of religion. *

A STRIKING PARALLEL:
ST. THOMAS OF CANTERBURY

    We can best illustrate the great change that took place in men’s beliefs if we consider the parallel case of the English pilgrimage to the tomb of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury. For three centuries after that grim evening of December 29, 1170, when England’s Primate fell a martyr at the hands of the knights of Henry II Plantagenet, Canterbury was the scene of a long succession of pilgrimages, which gave it a place among the great centres of Christendom and which, through Chaucer’s poem, have given it a lasting hold on the memory of Englishmen. * Pilgrims came from France and the east of Europe and disembarked at Sandwich, from which busy port they advanced along the banks of the Stour to Canterbury. Another line of approach from the west was along the old British track still called the Pilgrim’s Way across the Surrey downs from Southampton. The most