The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

defenders, but assault after assault they repelled with the aid of boiling oil and melted lead. At last Viscount Trencavel surrendered the place and was imprisoned in one of the towers of the castle, where he died of dysentery (many suspected poison). The leader of the crusaders, Simon de Montfort, was nominated Viscount of Beziers and Carcassonne. Simon was the second son of Simon III of Montfort and Amicia, daughter of Robert Beaumont, Earl of Leicester, and the Earldom had passed to the former in 1203. But Simon’s family had very ancient connections, for he descended from Rollo the Norman and he took his name from a small estate he held in the lie de France. He was one of the dominant personalities of the thirteenth century. The chroniclers describe him as tall, blond, broad-shouldered, with regular features and long hair; he was courageous, ambitious and possessed of military talents of no mean order. Sismondi describes him as follows: ‘an able warrior, austere in his personal habits, fanatical in religion, implacable, cruel and treacherous, he combined all the qualities calculated to win the approval of a monk.’ Even today in Carcassonne his fanatical personality pursues us as we trudge up and down the steep narrow streets of the mediaeval walled city.
    I began my visit to the fortifications with the castle which was built about 1125 by Bernard Aton Trencavel. The tour of the ramparts with their towers takes a full hour, and is a fascinating journey back into the military history of the Middle Ages, especially the thirteenth century, with its memories of the Albigensian crusade and the days of St. Louis and King Philippe le Hardi.
    The Basilica of St. Nazaire and St. Celse, which was a cathedral up to 1801, is of two epochs; the nave is Romanesque in style; but the transept and the choir are Gothic. The Romanesque church was begun in 1096 and finished in 1150, but when Carcassonne became French in the thirteenth century, the choir and transept were begun in 1269 and were finished in 1321. The builders, who evidently came from the north of France, prolonged the ancient Romanesque nave and constructed a Gothic Church in the style of those in Paris, for the two façades, north and south, are an imitation of the transept of Notre Dame, which had been finished in 1268, and the choir with its quantities of stained glass imitates the St. Chapelle, which was built by St. Louis in the mid-thirteenth century. The stained-glass windows of the choir and the transept date from the end of the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth centuries. The two most beautiful windows in the south of France are those in the two chapels of the transept next to the choir. The window of the chapel on the left represents the tree of Jesse: the window in the chapel on the right is also a Tree of Life, but, according to one of the theological experts, it is the illustration of a mystical work of St. Bonaventura inspired by the Apocalypse.
    I was fortunate enough to meet two Jacobean pilgrims in the Church of St. Nazaire: a father and his son. The father was a man of about sixty years of age, bearded and patriarchial; the son was a wounded ex-serviceman and hobbled with a stick. They had come from Avignon on foot and were footing it all the way to Compostella. “C’est une promesse,” said the father, “but we are not in a hurry: time is of no object to us.”
    The father then drew me over to one of the small chapels, called the chapelle de Pierre Rodier, to show me a fragment of a bas-relief of the thirteenth century. According to the old man, the scene represented the death of Simon de Montfort in the battle under the walls of Toulouse in 1218. It is a vivid scene of fierce fighting with many figures crowded together in cramped space, yet every one of them is hacking away at his adversary in grim earnest.
    In the neighbouring chapel of Guillaume Radulphe there is a remarkable sarcophagus of Bishop Radulph, who died on October i, 1266. The prelate lies on his deathbed and is surrounded by his canons and clergy. Above them angels wait in Heaven to welcome his soul. The French pilgrim pointed out to me the scallop shell of St. James on the tomb, saying “Vous voyez: nous les pèlerins nous sommes sur le bon chemin. From the highest tower of the Castle on a clear day one can see the topmost snow-covered peaks of the Pyrenees ninety kilometres away. We shall go up there presently to see them as it makes Spain seem nearer to us who