The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

has not a good word to say about it. ‘A desolate land lacking bread, wine, meat, fish: three days’ weary tramping, sometimes with sand up to one’s knees, and in the summer a plague of wasps and horse-flies.’ Then Gascony to whose inhabitants he applies the following epithets: ‘empty-headed, verbose, cynical, lecherous, drunken, gluttonous and down at heel’, though he admits that they have warlike qualities and are charitable to the poor. The Gascon ferrymen he accuses of extortionate charges and of capsizing their boats in order to drown the pilgrims and rob them of their money and possessions. He reserves, however, his choicest vituperations for the mountaineers of the Pyrenees, whether Aragonese or Basques. The inhabitants, he says, live secluded in their mountain valleys and woods and speak a barbarous tongue, and there is no food in their country but apples, cider and milk. The luckless pilgrims have, in addition, to face the thieving toll-keepers, who make them pay the toll, which should only be exacted from merchants. Hence the ful-minations of the so-called Pope Calixtus II (in reality, Aymery Picaud) against the King of Aragon and his ministers for permitting such abuses.
    After trekking the eight miles up through the Pyrenees to the summit and the eight miles down, Aymery describes the land of Navarre, but has no kinder words for its inhabitants than he had for the Basques. They are, he says, darker in complexion than the Basques and wear dark garments which reach only to their knees and resemble the kilts of the Scots. They wrap themselves in their dark plaids, which reach to their elbows, and their feet are shod in rough sandals of untanned hides.
    ‘If you saw them at their food’, he adds, ‘you would think they were dogs or pigs guzzling: their speech resembles the barking of dogs.’ He considers them a savage people, unlike any other in the world, dark in face and full of malice. Not only are they primitive in their ferocity, but also perverse, quarrelsome and well schooled in villainy.
    Aymery Picaud’s account of the Navarrese is, however, contradictory, for after accusing them of bestiality and sexual perversions of all kinds he yet praises their valour in war and their punctual payment of their tithes, and gives them credit for the scrupulous regularity with which they make their offerings of bread, wine or wheat to the church. They, like the Basques, are superstitious and wear a horn suspended from their neck, and when they approach or leave their houses they whistle like a kite. And when they are in hiding, on account of some rascality or other and wish to gather their associates together, they utter a cry like the ill-boding owl or howl like a wolf. * Aymery says that in his day it was believed that they were descended from the Scots, who were sent by Julius Caesar with Nubians and Cornubiani to fight against the Spanish peoples. The Castilians, however, defeated them and drove them back into the mountains between Nájera, Pamplona and Bayonne, and into the land of Biscay and Alava, where they built many forts. There they put all the males to death whose wives they had raped, and thus they begot the people who were afterwards called Navarri—namely, non veri, for they were not of legitimate stock. Then came the blessed apostle * Matthew and converted them by his preaching to Christianity. So severe are Aymery’s accusations against Basques and Navarrese that we must conclude that he had suffered severely from their lawless depredations during his journeys through the Pyrenees to and from Santiago.
    Probably Aymery’s prejudices led him to exaggerate the barbarity of the Pyreneans, for already in the eleventh century, that is to say a hundred years before his Guide of 1150, the Kings of Aragon, Navarre and Castile-León had done much to make the Road of St. James safe for pilgrims. The initiative came largely from Alfonso VI, who went as pilgrim to San Salvador in Oviedo in 1075. Fie had the bridges repaired and the road efficiently protected from Logroño to Compostella. In Navarre and Aragon King Sancho Ramirez built hostels and hospitals at Jaca, Pamplona, Estella and Puente la Reina, and he decreed that no tolls should be exacted from pilgrims (de romero non prendant ullam causam). So greatly had communications improved that when, in 1121, Ali-ben-Yussef, the Almorávide, sent a deputation to Doña Urraca, the legates were amazed at the crowds of pilgrims who thronged the