The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

three queens.
    For me as a humble pilgrim of today the vision of the Sangüesa portal was a profoundly moving experience, for it enabled me to understand the universal significance possessed by the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in those early centuries. Here, not more than one day’s foot-slogging from the royal capital, Jaca (Aymery Picaud includes Jaca and Sangüesa in one day’s journey), at Sangüesa, which was then as it is still today, a tiny town and a mere station on the pilgrim road, the wandering builders and craftsmen halted and enriched the wayside shrine with art forms they had brought, not only from Moissac and Chartres, but from Lombardy and even from the East of Europe, as we can see from little stray ornaments, like the interlaced knot, which Miss King believes came from Constantinople and the Black Sea. We modern pilgrims, artists, painters, architects, plod our way along the Road of St. James, but our names are written in water, whereas those anonymous masons and stone-cutters of eight hundred years ago, when they tarried in this narrow street where I linger today, left as a token of their passing some tiny individualized figure or ornament, which, in a flash, illustrates the universal significance of the pilgrimage.
    The interior of the church is harmonious, especially the great arch over the high altar. The baptismal font is very large and is on the ground for it was used for total immersion. As the season of Easter was approaching, the church was a hum of activity, and there were many women dressed in black awaiting their turn for confession. A vivacious note came from the little boys, who, as usual in Spain, were completely insuppressible and darted here and there like quicksilver. The nave is narrowed by the two huge massive columns on which the whole weight of the edifice rests.
    The parish priest welcomed me hospitably as a pilgrim and told me many anecdotes about Sangüesa. He said that there was great poverty in the town and too many people wished to ‘chupar del bote’—to get relief without having to work for it. “They are mostly a thriftless crowd here,” he said, “and if you want to find energetic workers you have to go to Pamplona.”
    The church of Santiago in Sangüesa is an ancient foundation and goes back, according to documents to the twelfth century, but the building is of the thirteenth, and we see the emblems of the Saint, the shells, the staff and the gourd in the Presbytery and on the façade. Over the church door is the statue of St. James in brown habit with his pilgrim hat on the back of his head, his staff and his scrip in one hand and a book in the other. The book is the Epistle, which Spain has ascribed to him, and which was known in the Middle Ages as Pro-tevangel of St. James. This curious representation of St. James is also to be seen over the central door of León Cathedral. Here in Sangüesa St. James stands upon a huge scallop shell and has two conchas on his chest and one on his hat. There are two pilgrims, one on each side of the saint, kneeling in prayer. They have long thin staffs, their water botde, box for food and bundles on their backs. On the ground before them lies a staff that is sprouting into leaves, a reminder of the legend of Tannhäuser, the pilgrim, whose staff sprouted when he reached the end of his pilgrimage to Rome.
    On my way from Sangüesa to Pamplona I halted at a number of places; first of all at Rocaforte, in honour of St. Francis, the saint of my particular devotion. Rocaforte, which was the original Sangüesa, was the first place at which St. Francis stayed in Spain, when he made the pilgrimage to Compostella. The Saint, according to the experts, retired to a little chapel dedicated to St. Bartholomew, where il Poverello built a convent and planted a mulberry bush in the little Franciscan garden. Furthermore, the Saint, when he continued his journey along the pilgrim road, left Bernardo Quintavalle behind at Rocaforte to tend a sick pilgrim whom he had met on the way. *
    After Rocaforte a kind farmer gave me a lift in his mule cart as far as the monastery of Xavier, the birth-place of the ‘Apostle of the Indies’. St. Francis Xavier had been in my thoughts before my pilgrimage, for I had made a journey by plane from Rome to Madrid in which his arm travelled. The relic, enclosed within a long thin iron case, was entrusted to the pilot of the plane and travelled in his cabin. I reflected that the glorious relic of the