Travels with my Donkey

ascension to paradise. Or so it was first thought. It is impossible not to admire the lateral, out-of-the-box brilliance that inspired the Nappy of Christ, uncritically worshipped throughout Bohemia, or the little statue containing his umbilical cord that still embellishes De Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam. And how I'd love to have been there when, with a eureka shriek, some canny monk grasped the crucial implication of the Son of God's Jewish upbringing: of all the shrines in Chartres cathedral, few were more venerated than that of Le Saint Prepuce, home to the Christly foreskin.
    Early medieval popes canonised new saints with reckless abandon to meet the burgeoning demand for venerable body parts, but soon even that wasn't enough. A lot of creative thinking went into such extolled marvels as the feather shed from Gabriel's wing in the excitement of the Annunciation; a brazen Canterbury cleric declared the brown pebble in his hand as the leftover clay God chucked out after sculpting Adam. Deft theological gymnastics justified the theft of relics, on the grounds that such potent objects could only be stolen if their saintly owner wished it so. On one level this authorised those tomb-robbing Crusades into the Holy Land; on another, it inspired the Portuguese woman who in 1544 covertly bit off St Francisco Xavier's big toe as she kissed his foot, and the unknown Hungarian who relieved a mummified St Elizabeth of her nipples. Unable to resist the ultimate show-and-tell souvenir, Henry V slipped Le Saint Prepuce in his pocket on the way home from Agincourt. It was subsequently lost — it's tempting to imagine some lady-in-waiting's face light up over the cabinet of curios with an inner cheer of 'Mmmm: Hula Hoops!' — but not to worry: fourteen rival foreskins adorn church crypts around the world.
    Housed in gilded, bejewelled shrines, relics were the most sumptuous expression of the Church's phenomenal wealth. Throughout its medieval pomp, the Augustine monastery of Roncesvalles owned land from Scotland to Portugal; it was said that a pilgrim from Germany could walk all the way to Santiago across fields in its possession. The pan-European decline in gullibility heralded by the Renaissance more or less did for the relic industry, and so for an era of dumbfounding ecclesiastical extravagance. In 1630, with the pilgrimage half a millennium past its peak, the monks of Roncesvalles were still welcoming over 25,000 holy travellers a year. Yet when a blizzard tore all the roofs off that winter, they couldn't afford to have them put back on.
    Many of today's pilgrimages begin at Roncesvalles, and emotionally mine was one of them. Leading Shinto through the gates and up to the great arched entrance of the Real Colegiata I felt a humbling affinity with the millions who had walked in before, through snow or fog or the hazeless heat of a thousand mountain summers. Before I'd just been on a silly walk, but now here I was at the ministry.
    I lashed my steed to a doorside column just inside the main porch, then walked through the adjacent entrance into a cavernous hall. Here was pilgrim reception, where you paid up front for your bed and an evening meal (13 euros all in, I noted with an inner beam) and procured the vital credencial, the pilgrim's passport that gave access to the seventy-odd Church- or council-run hostels along the way, the refugios, and once stamped at each would procure a compostela — the ecclesiastical certificate awarded to pilgrims at Santiago. The smiling young lady responsible for their dispensation was evidently no Madame Debril, her fearsome (though now deceased) equivalent at St Jean, a woman known to turn away pilgrims on a vindictive whim. 'I see you are with burro,' she said, smiling at Shinto's distant hindquarters as she transcribed my dictated details into the concertina-folded document. 'Not many peregrinos with burro. Now... your reason for peregrenación? She christened my credencial with a magnificent Latin-bordered stamp fulsomely decorated with croziers and fleurs-de-lys, then handed me a list with tickable boxes: religious, spiritual, cultural, sporting. 'Can I put more than one?' I asked, my pen hovering between the middle two. 'Pliz of course,' she replied, just as a heavy, moist slap echoed ominously up from the doorway. I peeked over my shoulder to see a tail being lowered, ticked the first box and with a forestalling display of effusive thanks swept up my credencial and strode out.
    A rarity he