The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

disciple Athanasius first bishop there and ordained priest his other disciple, Theodore. Thus the Mozarabes of that church in Saragossa, being poor and humble, were allowed to practise their cult in peace. The tradition of antiquity of the cult of the Pillar is proved by the Mozarabic Mass, which in ancient times was sung in the chapel of the Pillar, and by a Latin codex in thirteenth-century lettering which is preserved in the archives of the church of El Pilar in Saragossa. 3
    The Apostle continued on his way to Palestine, but the tiny flame of faith which h&had kindled in Spain burnt on steadfastly throughout the years of persecutions, and Prudentius was able a little later to sing of Christ’s triumph even when the Moors ruled the banks of the Ebro.

ST. JAMES SLEEPS EIGHT CENTURIES

    At the time of the burial of St. James, Spain was still the richest province of Rome and shortly before the dissolution of the Empire, Roman Spain in its cultural development formed a unity similar in its distribution of forces and values to what modern Spain became at another Imperial moment—namely, during the sixteenth century and the golden age of its literature. Its precise material significance was described in the first universal history compiled by a Christian, Paulus Orosius, the Galician, disciple of St. Augustine. He possessed to a special degree the sense of patriotism; Spain in his eyes was still a province of the Empire, within which Divine Providence had unified the world, but nevertheless the Province of Spain rises proudly affirming its own historical destiny within the Empire. Immediately after Orosius the Roman Empire of the West was dismembered into various Germanic Kingdoms, and Spain was pacified by the Visigoths, who were the most romanized of the Germans and convinced of the necessity of Roman unity. The idea of a united Roman-Gothic Spain which was so nobly portrayed by Orosius and so eloquently exalted by St. Isidore, ‘the Egregious Doctor’, as he was called, never ceased to be present in the spirits of men during the following centuries, for both those authors were widely read all through the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, Spain fell upon evil days: the Gothic Kingdom split up in an anarchical contest between warring parties and national sentiment declined. One of the parties called to its help the Moslems across the straits and when these turned from allies to invaders all unity in the face of material danger faded away.
    The characteristic Iberian disunity broke out everywhere like a plague, which, when strength diminishes, invades the whole body. There was but one centre of resistance, in North Spain, which resolved to organize its resistance against the invader—namely, Asturias—but it fought on in lonely isolation. A long period of disintegration had begun with the invasion of the Moors, for many new states arose on the ruins of the Visigothic Kingdom. 5
    While St. James lay buried in his long sleep in Galicia the invading Moors consolidated their power and the great Abderrahman I founded the mosque in Córdoba on the site of a Visigothic church, which had itself been built on the ruins of a Roman temple dedicated to Janus. To this house he gave the name of Zeca or House of Purification, and he resolved that it should rival Mecca, and become the sacred city of the Western Mohammedan world. In the course of the centuries it was to become, after the Kaaba, the largest and most beautiful building of Islam, with its nineteen gateways of bronze, its four thousand seven hundred lamps of perfumed oil, its roof supported by twelve hundred columns of porphyry, jasper and many-coloured marbles. 6 But what drew the attention of the world towards the mosque was not its artistic splendours but the realization that the shrine contained some of the bones of the Prophet Mahomet himself. These relics became the envy and the obsession of all Spain. Pilgrims came from all over Europe to pray at the Holy of Holies, and in the wake of the pilgrims came architects, builders and artists, with the result that Córdoba became the most civilized city in the world. Palace after palace arose, and later on in the days of Abderrahman III, in the suburbs, amid the earthly paradise of fig trees, almonds and pomegranates rose Medina Azahara, a palace of the Arabian nights, whose beauty we may still recapture in the nostalgic verse and prose of Ibn Hazm’s El Collar de la Paloma. 7
    Already in the days of the first Abderrahman