The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

the moonlit patios of Córdoba had echoed the songs of Ishaq or his pupil Ziryab ‘the black bird of sweet song’, as he was called in Andalusia, who after being minstrels of Harun ar Rashid the Caliph of Bagdad, had taken up their abode in the city of the Zeca. Thus Córdoba and Seville became the two great centres of culture in the Western world and there was a saying of Averroes that when a wise man died his books were sold in Córdoba; if he was a musician his instruments went to Seville.
    Meanwhile in North-Western Spain the refugees of Gothic, Roman and Iberian stock grouped themselves under the leadership of Pelayo, the semi-legendary hero from whom the monarchs of Spain derive their ancestry, in the days when the Kingdom of Asturias included Galicia and León. Pelayo and his band were despised by the Moors who thought of them as a handful of rebels perched on a rock outside the Cave of Covadonga. Their only food was the honey which they gathered in the crevices of the cave wherein they dwelt like so many bees. But in the narrow passes of the mountains, near the cave of Covadonga, Pelayo, ‘the contemptible Goth’ won the Marathon of Spain in the year 718, and the Moors were driven back with terrible slaughter. So runs the legend which the minstrels sang and whose significance they exaggerated as was their wont.
    Pelayo, however, is the symbol of the spirit of independence, which maintained itself intact in the mountains of Asturias, and was transmitted to Alfonso II, sumamed ‘the Chaste’, who reigned from 791 to 842. It was in his reign that the body of St. James the Great was discovered. Those were the days when Charlemagne had established, on the confines of his kingdom, districts under the military control of counts of the march, or margraves, whose business it was to prevent hostile incursions into the interior of the kingdom. In 777 Charlemagne was visited by disaffected Moslems, who had revolted against the Emir of Córdoba, and offered to become his faithful subjects if he would come to their aid. The result was his first expedition to Spain, where after some years of war the district of the Ebro was conquered and Charlemagne established the Spanish march. In this way began the gradual expulsion of the Mohammedans from the peninsula which was to be carried on by slowly extending conquests until 1492, when Granada, the last Mohammedan stronghold fell. The true consecration of Charlemagne as the Defender of the Faith came in 800 when on Christmas Day in St. Peter’s he was crowned by the Pope as ‘Emperor of the Romans’.
    It should be remembered that Roman civilization was so deeply rooted in South Spain that even after the fall of the Empire, and the invasions of the Visigoths (who were Romanized before they entered Spain) and the Moors, it did not disappear. The ancient Spanish liturgy which had been introduced by the Visigoths with its Arrian and Byzantine elements had been revised by St. Isidore of Seville and SS. Ildefonso, Eugenius and Leander and adopted by all the churches. The Moors after the invasion treated those who submitted to their rule with tolerance in religious matters, and allowed them to practice their rites freely. Those who were willing to submit to Moorish power were called Mostarabuna or Arabizants, and their liturgy soon received the name of Mixt-Arabic or Mozarabic. These Mozarabs, as time went on became corrupted by Moorish influence. In the eleventh century, in the reign of Alfonso VI the conqueror of Toledo, this was to lead to the struggle between the Mozarabic and the Roman Bite.

THE DISCOVERY OF THE RELICS OF ST. JAMES

    In the days of Alfonso II, at the beginning of the ninth century, the diocese of Iria Flavia in the wilds of Galicia was inhabited by a number of hermits who spent their days in prayer and meditation. Most of them were cave-dwellers and mortified their flesh, refusing all food but what they could get from tilling the land or gathering honey from the wild bees. Among those hermits was Pelayo, who was famed among the rest for his godliness.
    One night Pelayo, during his meditations, was astonished to see a big star burning low over a thickly wooded hill near the River Sar. He told his brother hermits and the shepherds who watched, and they, too, saw the great star and many little flickering stars among the bushes on the hill.
    As they drew nearer they heard distant music as though choirs of angels were singing before an altar. When they told