Travels with my Donkey

As their paths converged and their numbers grew, so recognised routes were first trodden bare, then developed. The main route from northern Europe wound through western France and nipped over the Pyrenees just past the town of St Jean Pied-de-Port; gradually joined by other paths from the Mediterranean side, it proceeded ever westwards as the Camino Frances, the French Way, largely following roads laid down by the Romans.
    Dropping coins on inn table and collection plate, all pilgrims left a thin trail of gold behind them, and some laid down a fat seam of it. Driven by piety and PR, medieval notables from St Francis of Assisi to El Cid walked to Santiago and most made conspicuous donations. Particularly the procession of monarchs, who arrived in such profusion that the Camino Frances became also known as the Camino Real, the Royal Way. Prince Sigurd of Norway, Louis IX of France, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain: all keen to display their credo credentials, perhaps keener still to promote the fight against the forces of anti-Catholicism. (Our own Edward I copped out by sending a proxy, and Henry II, having sworn to the Pope that he'd pay personal homage to St James, later quietly switched to the less onerous Canterbury option.) If local entrepreneurship provided the inns and taverns that catered for a pilgrim's physical needs, then the spiritual infrastructure, the gilded, jewelled shrines that sustained their faith along the way, was built by the wealth of kings and their noble henchmen. So too the network of fortified monasteries and churches that offered a haven from the Moors, and the castles dispatching the soldiery that provided protection in its more proactive form.
    In 997 Moorish raiders turned Santiago over and nicked its hallowed bells: they were put to contemptuous use as olive-oil containers in the southern city of Cordoba until the Christians nicked them back 240 years later. Yet by the twelfth century the northern road to Compostela — the Way of St James, the Camino Real, the Camino de Santiago — was largely secure from heathen attack, and prospered not just as a holy procession but as a trade route. The grain and wool merchants of Navarre and Castille were now able to export their produce in confidence: wealth begat wealth, and in gratitude they too funded the cathedrals.
    With the Moorish menace receding over the southern horizon, the hard-nosed religio-political rationale that had underpinned every cobble along the camino was now itself eroded. More and more would-be pilgrims were opting for a sort of no-win, no-fee approach: they would beseech St James from the comfort of their own homes, and if the leprosy cleared up, or it started raining, then it was off to Santiago in cheerful gratitude. With the urgent zeal diluted, penitential piety degenerated into tourist loutism: scuffles began breaking out at the Santiago altar, sometimes over queue-jumping at the apostle's tomb, sometimes on crude racial lines, sometimes so bloody that more than once the cathedral had to close for reconsecration. Papal intervention was required to clamp down on stalls flogging 'spurious' scallop shells and other dubious souvenirs in the cathedral square. Professional beggars and quack doctors were beginning to ply their ignoble trade along the route in growing numbers,- Louis XIV forbade his subjects from walking to Santiago because of the number of pickpockets, false priests and harlots. 'Go a pilgrim, return a whore,' declared an arresting adage. The golden age was at an end.
    For the first time Christian Europeans began to think the unthinkable, and even to write the unwritable. 'There is not one haire nor one bone of Saint James in Spayne in Compostell,' carped sixteenth-century British traveller Andrew Borde — and that was while he was on his way there as a pilgrim. The Reformation, and the resultant establishment of Protestantism across much of northern Europe, turned the pilgrim tap down from a multinational flood to a steady stream of Frenchmen and Italians. The religious scepticism fostered by science and the philosophical Enlightenment in the eighteenth century reduced the stream to a trickle,- the infrastructure of Church-run pilgrim sanctuaries, the refugios and hospitals where walkers found succour in all its forms, collapsed in 1835 after the Spanish state seized and sold almost all property and land from the major religious orders.
    Hidden in 1588 lest Sir Francis Drake follow up his routing of the