The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

nothing remains of its former greatness but the church and the tomb to remind the world of St. John of the Nettles.”

CHAPTER 9

burgos

    M ANY a Jacobean pilgrim through the centuries must have sighed with relief and said a prayer to the Apostle when he saw from the top of a hill the lace-work spires of Burgos Cathedral, peering above a green slope in the distance. Those spires made King Philip II exclaim, “It is the work of angels!” and to the weary, footsore pilgrim they betokened rest, food and the relief from anxiety. In the Pyrenees, in Navarre and Rioja his ears had been filled with tales of attacks by bands of malefactors lying in wait for the unwary. Henceforth, between Burgos and León, the two great cities of the Jacobean road, he would travel without fear of molestation.
    Burgos had for me a deep significance, and my memories stretched back to 1921, when my wife and I had spent three months of our honeymoon there and we had taken part in the celebrations in honour of the seventh century of the cathedral and had witnessed the remains of the national hero of Spain laid to rest beneath a red marble slab before the high altar in the presence of the King of Spain and a vast concourse of nobles. * Burgos in succeeding years after 1921 had been always a haven of rest in the intervals of many expeditions on foot over Castile and León. And when I visited Spain during the Civil War, Burgos, like Salamanca, Valladolid and Saragossa, had become a great military base supplying the armies, but even in those tragic years there was always nearby the monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos which became a posada del alma or ‘inn of the soul’ with its Romanesque cloister to remind one of life’s pilgrimage.
    Burgos possesses two histories that run parallel to one another, a political history and a pilgrim history. The city was built at the end of the ninth century and peopled by the retainers of Count Diego de Porcelos, whose name, derived from the Latin porcelli or little pigs, according to tradition commemorated his own birth, for his mother bore him and his six brothers in her womb, just as pigs bear a litter of seven. After his successor, Fernán González, the city became the centre of the epic poems of the Cid Campeador and his quarrel with King Alfonso VI, and no more fitting symbol of the city could have been chosen than the magnificent figure of Spain’s national hero mounted on his charger, Babieca, by the modern sculptor Juan Cristóbal, which was unveiled in 1953 in the square beside the cathedral. My thoughts turn to the Cid as I walk through the streets near the cathedral, the square and out on to the crowded Espolón with its trees and flowers skirting the river. I think of him not as Roland, who was godlike in his magnificence and could always call upon the supernatural to aid him in the fight, for Spain’s national hero, unlike Roland, did not belong to the highest aristocracy but to the squire class and derived his income from his mills on the River Ubierna. Instead of an arrogant hero we find a tender husband and father driven into exile by an ungrateful monarch, and one of the most pathetic passages in all the epic poem is the description given of the hero riding with his men sadly through the streets of Burgos on the first night of his exile. No one will open his door or receive him for fear of the King’s wrath, but he meets a child of nine years who consoles him and wishes him godspeed; and he turns Babieca round and rides down to St. Mary’s to say a prayer before camping with his loyal kinsmen outside the city gates in the dry river-bed of the Arlanzón, where Martin Antolinez El Burgalés conplido brings him bread and wine.
    In spite of the great political events that took place in Burgos in those early centuries, the city from the ninth century onwards was one of the principal stages on the pilgrim road to Santiago de Compostela and was thronged with pilgrims, because it was at the junction of the two great routes, the Aragonese road by Puente la Reina, Logroño and Nájera, along which I had travelled, and the upper road by Bayonne, Miranda de Ebro and Pancorbo. But although the pilgrim history of Burgos stands apart from its political history, the Cid was from early youth a devotee of Santiago Matamoros and is even represented wearing at his belt the scallop shell for he had been among the warriors at the Siege of Coimbra in 1064, when the Apostle came to the rescue of King Ferdinand