The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

Navarre, San Salvador de Leyre, which for a thousand years was a great centre of sanctity and learning and was, at times, the seat of a diocese now included in Pamplona. In the history of Navarre, Leyre has signified what St. Denis means to French, and Westminster to English, history. St. Eulogius visited it in 851 and it was not burned until 1835. Its wealthy possessions remained intact until after the seventeenth century, * but today all that we see is the shell of the eighteenth-century monastery which they are beginning to repair. It dominates the plain. In the eleventh century it was one of the beacons of the Cluniac reform and spread its influence far and wide.
    During my short stay in Tiermas I walked a short portion of the original pilgrim road which can be clearly seen near Yesa. Lacarra, the indefatigable student of the ancient highway, points out that the pilgrims of the twelfth century at Yesa made a slight deviation, for they crossed the ruined bridge over the River Aragon, in order to make a halt at Sangüesa, which was being repopulated at the time when Aymery Picaud wrote his Guide. * A hospital of the Knights of St.John of Jerusalem was established there in 1131 by Alfonso I and a new town grew around the Romanesque church of Santa María la Real, which is a noble example of Romanesque of the late twelfth century with an octagonal dome of the fourteenth century and a magnificent portal. Indeed, so fascinated was I by that Romanesque portal that I stayed three full days in Sangüesa. The bus conductor recommended me to put up at the local inn called Hotel Mercantil in the long narrow main street of the town, nearly opposite the portal of Santa María la Real. To my astonishment, the hotel was a nobly proportioned palace of the seventeenth century, baroque in its ornate style, with dark passages and huge empty reception rooms. My bedroom was palatial, with a canopied double bed, a gigantic press that would have held all the palace linen of a duchess, and a fascinating bargueño of exquisite workmanship. The façade of the palace was adorned with coats of arms and Salomonic pillars. The hotel was the rendezvous of the whole town, the centre of gossiping tertulias, where the young men of the locality played billiards and dominoes in the evenings. As Sangüesa is the centre of a wheat and wine producing region, the food was plentiful and the wine resembled Cariñena.
    Most of my time I spent in the church of Santa María la Real. The portal has puzzled the experts; some, like Bertaux, think it was built all at once in the thirteenth century: * Lampérez believes that the original church, built by Alfonso I, survives in the east end, namely, the head, the plan, and the portal up to the fronted arches and the outer walls, which are of the thirteenth century. * The windows, the-vaults of the apse and the jambs of the door resemble Spanish architecture of the early twelfth century. The portal makes a fascinating study for a pilgrim today, as it expresses vividly mediaeval life as seen by the wandering stone-cutters in their trek from East to West, for in those far off days the business of craftsmen and builders was a nomadic one.
    Here at Sangüesa these wandering artists halted long enough to carve some of those unperishable figures on the portal that excite us today. Thus we find rows of scaly monsters, dragons and sphinxes, freaks of nature created at the whim and fancy of the craftsman: on the left hand side of the door two grotesque figures represent Hell: then there is a juglar with Ins viol and bow, a man with a naked woman sitting with her arms around his neck and her hands clutching at his head; another woman whose breasts are sucked by a cobra, and a third who is suckling a child with one breast and a snake with the other. After them comes a forlorn woman, whose sad expression signifies that she is one of the virtuous and has been admitted among the elect. It is surprising that the twelfth and thirteenth-century artists when they portrayed Hell’s torments made the damned look more lively and more pleased with themselves than the chosen, who are entering eternal bliss, and I am again and again reminded of the invocation in the French mediaeval cantefable, Aucassin et Nicolette, where the poet says ‘only the lame and decrepit go to Paradise, and those that day and night cringe before altars and lurk under vaults; thither go the threadbare and the ragged: those who go on that pilgrimage are naked,