The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

of the Sea-borne Marys and St. Sara, the Saint of ‘les Manouches’ as they call the Romanichals. When I reached St. Gilles I went first of all to the cathedral where all Jacobean pilgrims halt to make their devotions to one of the most lovable saints in all the calendar. Here in the ancient Roman Vallis Flaviana, which in its turn was built on the ruins of the Graeco-Phoenician town of Heracles, St. Gilles founded the great Abbey in the eighth century on land ceded to him by the Visigothic King Wamba. Around the Abbey a large city grew up later under the patronage of the last Counts of Toulouse, who came originally from St. Gilles, and it reached the zenith of its power in the twelfth century, when the Knights Templar and Hospitallers were still in their hey-day, and its port carried on a flourishing trade in the Mediterranean. The Abbey, which belonged to the Order of Cluny, had received privileges from the Pope, giving it quasi-independence, and its fame was universal owing to the pilgrimage from all over Europe to the tomb of St. Gilles in the crypt of the cathedral.
    The central portal, the experts say, is of 1180 and is Provençal in style, but the two other portals are of the thirteenth century and show influences from northern France. The porch of St. Gilles which rivals that of St. Trophyme is one of the most beautiful examples of Romanesque art in France, and in its detail it is a stylicized reminiscence of the ancient world, created at a moment when a fresh sympathy with the heritage of Rome had arisen in the twelfth century.
    ' As my main interest in visiting St. Gilles was to see the celebrated crypt I went in search of the sacristan, a friend of many years’ standing. Soon he arrived carrying his mammoth keys and he led me to the sarcophagus of the saint, which dates from the eleventh century (St. Gilles had died in 721), and has the following inscription on it: In hoc tumulo quiescit corpus bead Aegidii. The sacristan loved to hear himself talk and he gave me the whole story of St. Gilles, who, like St. James, St. Millán, St. Isidore and many others, had given rise to a great number of legends concerning his miracles.
    “He was born working miracles,” said the sacristan, “and it was owing to his miracles and the legends about him that St. Gilles rose to be a city of thirty thousand inhabitants and the Pilgrimage of St. Gilles was at one time as famous as that of Santiago, for people came even from Norway and Denmark as well as the southern countries to pray at his tomb, and, indeed, his miraculous cures were greater in number than those of the son of Zebedee himself. The story of St. Gilles is characteristically Greek, but it has details that remind us of the Oriental stories of the life and wanderings of Josafat or Buddha. He was born in Greece and his family came of royal stock. When he was a schoolboy he was brought for the first time into contact with sickness, poverty and death. Like St. Martin of Tours, he gave his cloak to the starving invalid and performed his first miracle, for the sick man rose from his pallet cured. After Gilles’s parents died he became dissatisfied with his life in the world, so one day he gave a great festival in his palace, to which he invited all his friends. When the guests had departed and his equerries had undressed him for bed, they fell into a deep slumber, for their master had drugged the wine they had drunk and thus they could not keep watch, with the result that he escaped and went through the world begging his bread. When he reached Arles he disappeared into the forests of Provence, where he lived on cress and wild plants. His only companion was a gazelle, who after roving the forest would return at nightfall and sleep at his feet. One day the King of Gascony and Toulouse, the vassal of Charlemagne to whom he paid tribute, went on a hunting expedition in the forest and wounded the gazelle with one of his arrows. She managed to escape, however, and join her master, who washed and bandaged her wound. Day after day the King hunted the gazelle, but she always escaped until at last the King followed her to her lair and discovered Gilles lying wounded by one of his arrows. The King was so impressed by the holiness of Gilles that he begged him to found a great abbey and church, and the fame of the Saint reached the ears of the Emperor Charlemagne, who called the holy men to his court and listened to the story of his life. And next day, after Mass, the