The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

I who had made a pilgrimage to Compostella to beg his aid in the crusade against the Moslems.
    After the incorporation of León with Castile in 1037, Burgos under Ferdinand I became the capital of a great kingdom, and through the influence of successive kings such impulse was given to foreign trade that pilgrims and merchants began to arrive in their thousands, and the primitive city of the eleventh century nestling beneath the castle began to expand on both banks of the River Arlanzon. Then in 1221, under Ferdinand III the Saint and the most learned Bishop Maurice (who according to Burgos tradition was an Englishman), was laid the foundation stone of the stately Cathedral which was to take the place of the small Romanesque basilica.
    At the eastern entrance to the city a little bridge leads over the moat beneath the ancient walls to the place where the first hospital for Jacobean pilgrims was established under the patronage of St. John the Evangelist. To strengthen the influence of Cluny, Constance, the Burgundian wife of Alfonso VI, persuaded him to call in 1091 the saindy Benedictine monk, St. Adelelmo (called St. Lesmes in Castile) from France to be abbot of the Chapel of St. John with its adjoining hospital. The chapel changed its name to St. Lesmes, and at the end of the sixteenth century was rebuilt beside the principal gate leading into the city so that pilgrims might step aside from the street to pray there, without interrupting their progress through the city. * Of the Benedictine monastery all that remains today is the cloister and the chapterhouse, both of which date from the sixteenth century. The second hospital founded by Alfonso VI was called ‘The Emperor’ to distinguish it from that founded by Alfonso VIII, which is still known as the King’s Hospital. After the thirteenth century the former declined and the kings bestowed greater favours upon the Hospital del Rey, which still stands amidst pleasant trees about a mile outside the city on the pilgrim road.
    On my arrival at Burgos, after visiting the chapel of St. Lesmes, I followed the traditional pilgrim street of St. John to the Cathedral of Santa María. It was noon and the streets were hot, and I was glad to take refuge in the cool. At this hour the sun shining through the beautiful fourteenth-century stained glass of the great rose-window creates a mass of dazzling jewels mingled with an all-pervading amber glow. The sunbeams create capricious rhythmic patterns here and there upon the grey granite walls and bring to life statues and carved reliefs hidden away in their dark corners. It is at the mystic hour of noon that the silence deepens, eyes become gifted with clearer vision and minds, too: we penetrate into the secrets that the centuries have hitherto concealed from us, and we enter into communion with the figures of the past. One by one the tombs deliver up their dead to us, and in the distance we see a ghostly band of prelates and lords in coat of mail; their crosses and weapons gleam as they pass from shadow into sunlight for a brief moment and disappear in a grey haze.
    At this hour there is only a sprinkling of people praying in the immense edifice, but their voices echo through the nave.
    There was one visit in the cathedral which no pilgrim to Santiago from the early centuries up to today would omit and that was the visit to the Santo Cristo of Burgos. The pilgrims of the past refer to that crucifix in their diaries and it arouses as great devotion today as it did in the fifteenth century. Its chapel was, as usual, packed with worshippers and among them I noticed a number of pilgrims. The Santo Cristo, according to the people of Burgos, performs miracles, and they pray to it whenever they are in trouble. Certainly no more terrifying representation of the Passion of Christ could be imagined. The figure on the Cross, which is nearly life size, is said to be covered with human skin and to possess real hair and nails, and real thorns in the crown on its head. The bleeding wounds have been so well imitated by the artist that it is believed that the statue bleeds and the flesh sweats, and there was even a tradition mentioned by Manier in the eighteenth century that it needed to be shaved every eight days. 38 In the light of the candles the eyes move, the leather skin shines and the whole body seems to quiver in agony on the Cross. The embroidered petticoat, in which the figure is draped, by its ridiculous incongruity, increases the