A Traveler's Highway to Heaven
by William Bonville

EXCERPT

INTRODUCTION
A Traveler’s Highway to Heaven

Our destination is set in Northern Spain. There we travel a very special route: the historic pilgrimage road, El Camino de Santiago, The Way of St. James.

For the faithful it is a Highway to Heaven. For anyone else it is a fascinating junket through a region awesome not only in its extremes of topography and climate, but also for its people. Their history and its physical record is the mirror of their land. Awesome.

Yes, the land and its people.

Northern Spain is turned sparkling green by moist Atlantic air currents that leave its mountains awash in violent storms. Down between the stolid, gray peaks are a host of narrow, intimate valleys made lush and fertile from the runoff. The tallest mounts rise above 3000 meters. Their verdant timbered flanks and towering crags sustain a wild remoteness, replete with packs of wolves and companion wild things that most of Europe has not seen since the Middle Ages.

This rugged, unforgiving land has been home since pre-history for clans of tough, independent-minded Celts, Iberians and Vascons (Basques). These feisty peoples and their mountains made Northern Spain the last frontier for every alien civilization that came to invade and dominate the Iberian Peninsula, whether Carthaginian, Greek, Roman, Vandal, Goth or Arab. Only the Romans were able to conquer and marginally pacify these mountain folk.

Although the Romans ruled Spain for half a millennium, the region never was more than superficially Romanized. Even today the region retains its frontier flavor and in the hinterlands its people maintain traditions and ways of life that predate the coming of the Caesars. Nor have their sentiments for independent thinking been dulled. Northern Spain remains a perennial thorn in the side of the central government in Madrid.

The history of these people is even more interesting than their mountains. After more than a thousand years fending off invasions from Southern Spain, these northern peoples burst down from their mountain strongholds and turned history upside down. They conquered the south during a centuries-long duel with the armies of Islam. More than achieving mere victory, they created a nation, Spain, where none had been before. They carried down from their mountains the core of a new culture and the seeds for a new language, plus a brooding, fatalistic, aggressive spirit that became forever imprinted upon the Spanish national character.

That psychic gift to generations of Spaniards is what Jung called a collective unconscious, though here it assumes a narrower, almost tribal character. History buffs will remember that for a while during later centuries, that dour, doggedly aggressive psychic heritage made the Spanish nation the Western superpower, dominating Europe and the world. What else could explain the victories of Cortez in Mexico, Pizarro in Peru, and Alfonso in Italy?

These are the Spanish roots. They spring from a psychic character born of endless battle against the adversities of a harsh environment and centuries of life or death defense of their beleaguered mountain retreats, fending off a succession of foreign invaders. For these mountain folk it was a millennium-long experience of "enslave or be enslaved, kill or be killed, destroy or be destroyed." Cruelty was as natural as loving kindness and all was fair in war against stubborn adversaries who possessed every advantage given by superior numbers, wealth and armaments.

Spain for Travelers

The birth of modern Spain thus was midwifed in the violence of pitched battle high amongst the gray cliffs and jagged peaks of Asturias. It came of age as the mountain folk fought their way down into the fertile valley of the Ebro and onto the high plateau -the dry Meseta of bieges and browns that is the dominant geographical feature of central Spain. There, at the expense of the Muslims, the mountain people hacked out the kingdoms of Navarra and León and the turbulent County of Castile. Full maturity as a nation came only after seven centuries of virtually constant warfare, a bitter struggle the Spaniards call the Reconquista, the reconquest of Spain from the Arabs and their Moorish minions. For only after that bloody, centuries-long campaign could Isabella -in whose veins still flowed the blood of the hill peoples of the north- join with Ferdinand of Aragon to expel the last Muslim kings and unify Spain under one flag, one religion, and one civilization, all three of which looked to these northern mountains for their origins.

No matter all that, a traveler's visit to Northern Spain need be nothing more than a pleasant holiday spent browsing through this colorful, historic region, meeting the people and enjoying their mountainous countryside. The experience is especially attractive because it escapes the beaten and crowded paths most tourists follow. For hardly any tourists pass this way except to visit the few major cities. They congregate in Pamplona in July for the world-famous fiesta and running of the bulls. In season the tour buses trundle through Santiago and Burgos to visit their world-renowned cathedrals and landmarks recalling the legendary escapades of Santiago Matamoros and El Cid. But such a visit, whether by a traveler or tourist, pleasing though it may be, misses one of the most remarkable experiences that one may enjoy in a lifetime of travel.

For a thousand years the principal reason outsiders ventured into Northern Spain was to obtain the spiritual benefits of a sacred pilgrimage. They came from all corners of Christendom. Their destination was the sepulcher of an Apostle of Jesus, known in New Testament history as James the Greater. In Faith, they trod what they believed to be a sure route to Heaven. That was the promise of the pilgrimage. It remains so today.

El Camino de Santiago, the Way of St. James, is the ancient route of the pilgrims. Originating in France, in Spain the pilgrim Way extends some eight hundred kilometers from Roncesvalles, high in the Pyrenees, to the holy city of Santiago de Compostela, a few steps from land's end at the Atlantic Ocean. It followed old Roman roads that snaked through the mountains and drove straight across the hot, dull boredom of the Meseta. Pilgrims still course the route by thousands every year. In centuries past they came by the tens and hundreds of thousands.

As travelers we follow the pilgrim Way because a full millennium of pilgrimage produced an astonishing wealth of historic and cultural artifacts. Add the evidences of earlier Roman, Visigoth and Arab conquests, coupled with the Christian Reconquista, and one discovers a fascinating physical record of the birth of modern Spain. Clearly chronicled in the art, architecture and artifacts of the region is a battered, isolated civilization overwhelmed by invaders and reduced to ruins. Over a span of centuries we see it recovering, finding new cultural sharings with friends and enemies alike, and flourishing anew.

The cultural agonies and achievements of that history are preserved in imposing landmarks as well as fabulous artistic shapes and forms reflecting the experience of a birthing civilization rising Phoenix-like out of the ashes of its past. We trace it from initial destruction and cultural isolation to the cosmopolitan sharings that evolved into a new expression of Western civilization during the violent storms of the Reconquista.

This new-born Spain erupted like an angry spirit out of primitive mountain shelters and caves where the nascent Christian Reconquista found safe sanctuary. That spirit appears only half soothed when, along the Way of St. James, it created a host of world-famous cultural treasures celebrating the victories of Christ, His warrior saints and the kings of the Reconquista.

An exaggeration? Consult Arthur K. Porter’s, Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads, published some seventy years ago. Note that Porter dealt only with Romanesque sculpture, pointedly ignoring Gothic, Mozarabic, Mudéjar, Baroque and all the rest, not to speak of the architectural gems with which each style is associated, and the priceless documents and other artifacts that come down to us from those tumultuous times. Nevertheless, despite the narrow limits of his topic, Porter required ten stout volumes to report his study. Admittedly, Porter wrote in fine detail for specialists in the arts and their history, yet the scope of his work implies the richness of the cultural heritage a traveler encounters along the road between Roncesvalles and Santiago de Compostela.

Preceding Porter's work by eight hundred years, a French priest, Aymery Picaud, in 1140 wrote a guidebook for pilgrims who dared face the deadly perils of the journey. His motives were purely religious as he described both the hazards and the spiritual pleasures he himself found along the pilgrim's route to the shrine of St. James when he came this way in 1130.

Mention of Picaud's guidebook suggests that a modern traveler might indeed consider this junket through Northern Spain to be something more than a pleasant holiday. Please observe: With a slight change of mind set, you might become a pilgrim. The fact remains that our path does follow El Camino de Santiago -with a few side trips to special places such as the sacred cave where the Reconquista was born. Thus with little further ado you also may opt to win the spiritual advantages that accrue from a pilgrimage. More about that in a moment. For now the place and its peoples remain at the heart of what this book is about.

Geographically, Northern Spain is dominated by the Pyrenees and the Cantabrian Cordillera. The one is a massive range of high mountains that effectively block off the Iberian Peninsula from the remainder of Europe. The other, the Cantabrian westward extension of those peaks, separates the stormy Atlantic from the high, dry central plateau of the Iberian interior, the Meseta. These mountains dominated and totally shaped the destiny of the peoples of Northern Spain throughout history. The high passes are easily defended by a few determined fighters. This meant that conquest from the outside was rarely worth the price. Only the methodical Romans with the resources of a world empire were able to accomplish the feat.

With conquerors generally excluded except for punitive raids or hit-and-run plundering expeditions, the ancient cultures of these peoples tended to be change resistant. Old ways persisted with extraordinarily little outside influence even into modern times. Meanwhile, the tiny valleys and high meadows could never support the population explosion when throngs of flatlanders fled to the mountains to escape the eighth century Arab invasion. In consequence, the ethnic sentiments motivating the Reconquista were reinforced by burgeoning highland populations that inevitably had to drive down out of the mountains in search of living room, taken at the expense of their Muslim neighbors.

If you detect a mood of violence and a fundamental theme of cultural conflict in what is related here, you have gained a intellectual close encounter with the history of Northern Spain. Not only the Christian Reconquista set its roots into these mountains. The same was true of the Carlist revolts of the nineteenth century, the Nationalist victory in the civil war of the twentieth, and the Basque and Cantabrian moves for autonomy that seem presaged for the twenty first.

Spain for Pilgrims

In one sense the pilgrimages of a thousand years had little to do with the people and their mountains that we have just described. Pilgrims came in spite of those bellicose mountain folk. Indeed, early chroniclers railed against the rude mannered bandits who preyed on defenseless pilgrims. Robbing pilgrims, extortion of money for unhindered passage, or even ransom for the very rich, became a sort of cottage industry during the early years of the pilgrimages.

In another sense, the pilgrimage road had everything to do with the history of Northern Spain during the past millennium. In the early Reconquest, once the kings of Asturias and Navarra had moved down from the mountains and made secure what became the Way of St. James, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims came each year from the French side of the Pyrenees. Because of them the Way of St. James became known as the “French Road."

At the peak of the vogue of pilgrimage, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Pilgrims came in astonishing numbers, at times more than a million strong in a single year. This occurred during a period when the entire population of Western Europe probably was comprised of less than fifty million souls. That massive influx of travelers from across Europe poured tremendous wealth into the region, wealth that found its way into royal treasuries and helped finance the centuries-long campaign of castle building and warfare that expelled the Moors from the peninsula.

Much of that pilgrim wealthalso found its way directly into the hands of the Church. It was invested in great cathedrals and humble parish churches, hospices for tired and needy pilgrims, shrines to honor the saints, hospitals for the sick, plus funerary chapels and consecrated ground for the unfortunates who failed to survive the rigors of the journey.

Most of those creations were built to last. Many survive more or less intact, including a pair of cathedrals that easily make everyone's list of the top twenty in the Western world. So much is preserved that at times along the pilgrim trail you need little imagination to feel a sense of that yesterday when the Way overflowed with long files of plodding pilgrims stoically embarked on their search for eternal salvation. There was no doubt in their minds: This was their highway to heaven.

Many of those pilgrims decided to resettle along the Way, finding new earthly lives as well as spiritual rejuvenation. Landless knights from Germany, France and Normandy offered the service of their swords to Spanish lords and kings. They were granted honors and fiefs in exchange for their prowess at arms during the interminable wars against the Moors. Merchants and craftsmen discovered economic opportunities and stayed to ply their trades and conduct commerce along the pilgrim's path. Whole new districts of existing cities were created to house these newcomers. Elsewhere, entire towns were created and settled by these mostly Frankish immigrants.

Others arrived who were not on pilgrimage. They were recruited by agents of the Spanish kings, promised land and opportunity simply to help repopulate a territory swept nearly barren of human inhabitants during centuries of Moorish conquest and occupation. The names given those places settled by the immigrants, known as Villa Franca this or that in recognition of their French origins, persist to this day, no matter how completely the descendants of those immigrants have been absorbed into the cultural melting pot. The family name of Francisco Franco himself betrays his ties to the medieval migrations of Frenchmen into the region where the Caudillo was born a thousand years later.

The Christian kings of Castile, León and Navarra in the eleventh century also cooperated to improve the Way of St. James so that immigration as well as passage of pilgrims would be less daunting. With the assistance of local monks, hermits and townsmen, bridges were erected over rivers, causeways built across swamps and bogs, and the road refurbished to a condition that it had not seen since the glory days of Rome. The kings also encouraged the work of Augustinian, Cistercian and Benedictine monastic orders, who constructed hospitals and hostels as adjuncts to their monasteries along the route.

Physical security also was addressed by both civil and church authorities. Beginning late in the eleventh century, military orders of monks were established to cope with brigands who harassed pilgrims along the Way. By the twelfth century these fighting monks included well-organized commanderies of Knights Templars, the Hospitallers of St. John and the Order of St. James, replete with their own castles, hospitals and hostels for protection and care of pilgrims.

To comprehend the centuries of pilgrimage, one must understand the world out of which the practice sprang. It was a world in which God was in complete charge of everything, except that the Devil was everywhere, in many guises, setting his evil snares to trap men's souls for eternal damnation.

The saints were regarded as potent allies in the battle against evil. Their relics were cherished as reminders of the saints' personal victories over the powers of the Devil, as often as not won by martyrdom. More than that, prayer had the power to gain intercession by the saints in favor of the supplicant. Such was the position of the Church.

The beliefs of ordinary people went beyond the devotional limits of the abstract religious ideas fostered by the Church. The common folk believed the saint was spiritually present with his physical relics. This led inevitably to veneration of those relics, which lay people believed to hold miraculous powers, such as healing the sick and granting special favors. All the supplicant needed to do was to gain the attention and approval of the saint by means of prayers and devotions that would move the saint to intercede in one's behalf.

Nothing demonstrated deservedness more than a long, tedious and even dangerous pilgrimage to the relics of a powerful saint. None was more powerful than St. James the Greater, Apostle of Christ, Champion of the Reconquista, whose remains were said by legend and Church authority to be enshrined at Santiago de Compostela.

At best the effort of a pilgrimage could work major miracles. At least it would win favors freeing the penitent from suffering punishment in the afterlife. For while the Sacrament of Confession certainly gained absolution for one's sins, a sinner didn't get off scot free. There was still time to be served in Purgatory. But with the saint's intercession a pilgrim could gain a plenary indulgence. It granted no less than remission, that is, pardon for past sins, and thus one might escape the awful consequence of Purgatorial suffering. In effect, the reward of this pilgrimage is a guarantee of salvation from all that, an immediate ticket into Heaven. El Camino de Santiago is, in short, a highway leading directly to the Pearly Gates, which are seen by the pilgrim at Santiago as the Pórtico de la Gloria, presided over by St. James himself.

Yet when the truth be known, there was more than eternal salvation motivating many pilgrims. For some it was simply an excuse to travel and get away from the affairs of ordinary life. For others the pilgrimage was ordered either by church or civil authorities as a penance for some terrible wrong or simply as a means to rehabilitate a life wasted on evil. And for anyone filled with the fear of God's wrath, but still with no stomach for having his local confessor discover his most private sins, pilgrimage was an excuse to find a foreign priest and unload sins he could never admit to his personal confessor -and escape Purgatory besides.

By the thirteenth century the dress of the pilgrim achieved virtually the character of a uniform: a heavy, flowing tunic that reached down to the ankles as protection from the weather and the chill of nights spent in the open along the way; a walking staff; a broad-brimmed hat turned up in front where a scallop shell was pinned as the badge of the pilgrim; plus a pouch (scrip, or wallet) secured at the waist for carrying a few personal belongings and the all-important tokens obtained at various shrines along the way. For those tokens were proof-positive of his journey.

The pilgrim of centuries past went afoot for the eight hundred kilometers of the Way of St. James between the French border and Santiago de Compostela. A gentleman of means, or a knight, made his way on horseback. There are purists who insist that those ancient means of transport are still the only acceptable modes of travel for a pilgrim. But times change.

Walkers by the thousands still plod each year along the ancient route to Santiago. Yet if one holds that the spirit of pilgrimage rather than the method of transport is the crucial factor deciding the issue, then a bicycle, motorcycle, jeep or even public transport is allowed. Even the Church accepts this point of view. Yet Church authorities still expect modern pilgrims to course at least a hundred kilometers of the Way afoot, and to prove their pilgrimage by visits to the shrines along the Way, just as their predecessors have done for a thousand years.

Our approach to the Way of St. James, even as a pilgrim, thus may involve modern transportation. We used a rental car. As for the hundred kilometers afoot, the walks we describe following the Way through the towns, villages and cities along the Camino qualify for much of it. Keep notes on the kilometers you walk and where, add selected walks such as from the pass down to Roncesvalles where you begin the pilgrimage in the Pyrenees, or from the Mount of Joy to the cathedral of Santiago at the end. Those notes, plus your stamped pilgrim's "passport," will be proof enough for the churchmen.

To gain official recognition as a pilgrim, obtain the "passport" at the monastic church at Roncesvalles. Then, at shrines and churches along the way, obtain the required rubber stamp imprints on the passport to validate your personal record of pilgrimage. To have gained those stamps it is assumed that one has experienced the special spirituality of each of those shrines, and meditated for a moment on the model life, or the acts, of the saints honored at those holy places. Finally, at Santiago de Compostela, with the last stamp in place, the Cathedral Secretariat awards the badge of the cockle shell (most call it a scallop shell) and the certificate- the Compostellana -that announce to one and all the pilgrim's achievement of special favor in the eye of St. James.

The certificate also gains a pilgrim the traditional free repast across the square at the Hostal de los Reyes Católicos -but do not expect to order from the regular menu or to dine cheek by jowl with the paying guests. That grand and gracious hostelry -an architectural wonder in its own right- was built at the order of Ferdinand and Isabella in the fifteenth century. For centuries thereafter it was a refuge for pilgrims. Now it is a five-star parador operated by the Spanish government for pilgrims and travelers with deep pockets.

Back to Order Page

fiction writers writing software