The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

like the Aragonese, who may not make any law without common consent and have place and power to say what they think best in respect of the ruling of the realm that there may not be any King greater than the King who rules such Kings and lords as the men of Aragon be.’
    There are no foreign influences in the Cathedral of Jaca, which had to rely entirely on its own resources and efforts in the days when Jaca was the mountain capital and the plain still lay in the power of the Hagarenes.
    To enter the Cathedral from the sunlit streets is to be transported back eight centuries in time and to live for a moment in the period when the hope of Christendom centred on two little kingdoms: that of Sobrarbe, namely Aragon, and that of Asturias further to the west. The interior has but little changed since those far off days and the austere grey stones of the lofty nave with its great shadowy expanses encourages meditation. The transepts and the apses belong to the eleventh, the aisles and the nave to the twelfth, the rib-vaulting of the nave to the fifteenth, centuries, and in the eighteenth the whole Cathedral was overhauled generally.
    One of the impressive portions of the building is the portico on the south, which belongs to the most perfect period of Romanesque. The Cathedral of Jaca was consecrated in 1063 by Ramiro I, whose father Sancho the Great of Navarre (1000-35) had for the first time united the kingdoms of North Spain, had brought the Benedictines to the Peninsula and had begun the spiritual invasion which ended by making Spain a vast province of Cluny. Nevertheless when Ramiro’s son Sancho Ramirez introduced the Cluniac reforms into the neighbouring Abbey of San Juan de la Peña, there is no evidence that builders were brought from there to Jaca and relations were strained between the haughty Abbot of San Juan and the equally proud bishop of Jaca, Don Garcia, Prince of Aragon.
    My commercial traveller friend, whose name was Anselmo, devoted himself to me during my stay in Jaca. He was anxious that I should visit San Juan de la Peña ‘the cradle of our Kingdom of Aragon’, as he called it. Some pilgrims would consider San Juan de la Peña a deviation from the Road, but I followed the example of Miss King who included it in her pilgrimage. With its Visigothic-Mozarabic influences, it is indirectly connected with the pilgrimage to Compo-stella. Another reason that prompted me to turn aside in the mountains was the tomb of Queen Sancha, the wife of King Ramiro I, which I saw in Jaca. It so fascinated me that I resolved to visit, not only San Juan de la Peña, but also the neighbouring royal convent of Santa Cruz de la Seros, where Doña Sancha and her two royal sisters had been cloistered.
    Anselmo, with careful forethought, had borrowed two mules for the journey, so oif we set one morning at seven o’clock to ride through the mountains to the monasteries. It was an entrancing journey. Most of the time we rode under the trees in pleasant shade with birds carolling above our heads amidst the sprouting foliage. It was the easiest journey of all my pilgrimage, for we sat our mules like patriarchs and I had taken the precaution of filling my pig-skin to the brim with red wine from Cariñena and my knapsack with four mammoth sandwiches, which in Spain they call pepes, not forgetting a hunk of strong cheese from Roncal in Navarra. Then, in a defile at the foot of the mountain of San Juan de la Peña, we saw the convent, which, Anselmo told me, was the most ancient cenobium of nuns in Aragon. “But,” said Anselmo, “Santa Cruz de la Seros was the place chosen by the three daughters of King Ramiro I to be their dwelling-place for eternity; Doña Urraca, the notorious Queen, second wife of Alfonso I, El Batallador, and mother of Alfonso VII, who lived here when a child; Doña Teresa, Countess of Provence; and Doña Sancha, the widow of Raymond Count of Toulouse. The convent had originally been endowed in the tenth century by King Sancho Garcés II and his wife Doña Urraca Fernandez, according to the Gothic Book of San Juan de la Peña, and was called later Santa Cruz de la Seros.” Incidentally, the word Seros, which is a corruption of sorores or ‘sisters’, was applied to the community of nuns.
    The convent has fallen into ruin, but the church still remains with an octagonal cupola. What impressed me most was the portal, which consisted of four semicircular arches with prominent archivolt adorned with