Producing the Route of St. James: The Camino de Santiago in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Situated on the western coast of Galicia, Santiago de Compostela claims to hold the tomb of St. James the Apostle. According to tradition, James was martyred in Palestine in 44 CE; his body was then miraculously transferred by boat to the Galician coast and buried there, as James was reputed to have evangelized the Iberian Peninsula. Veneration of the relics of St. James began in the ninth century, and by the twelfth century, Compostela was the end-point of an elaborate network of pilgrimage routes—the Camino de Santiago—originating all over Western Europe. Since the Middle Ages, the historiography of the city of Santiago de Compostela has been overshadowed by the Camino de Santiago. The modern revival of pilgrimage along the Camino in the nineteenth century constructed a political ideology that in turn acquired considerable cultural capital in the twentieth century. A look at Santiago de Compostela under Diego Gelmírez (1093–1140), the twelfth-century administrator, bishop, and archbishop-count of the cathedral,¹ allows us to consider what is overlooked and who is excluded in the rich historiography of the cult of St. James of Compostela, a historiography that has often obscured the intensive efforts at production of the cult in the first place.

Compostela in the Twelfth Century

Tension and violence in medieval towns were recorded by local clergy who addressed distinctly different audiences in their texts. On the one hand, the clergy recorded glowing accounts of their saints, the miracles of provision, and penitent labor on the part of the highest ranks of society for the building of their churches. They also assembled cartularies to document possessions and privileges, and to appeal to wealthy donors; these cartularies selectively recorded and responded to all manner of disputes, deficits, and insolvencies.² Clergy occasionally wrote lengthy attacks on their enemies in response to violent challenges to the clergy’s sweeping privileges. The documentary sources produced at Santiago de Compostela under the supervision of Diego Gelmírez are excellent examples of texts aimed at distinct constituencies.

The principal textual sources for Santiago at the height of medieval pilgrimage were produced under the direction of Diego Gelmírez: Tumbo A, a cartulary assembled by the cathedral treasurer Bernard around 1129 to encourage Alfonso VII to emulate his royal predecessors’ donations to St. James, lavishly decorated with their portraits;³ the Historia Compostelana, a mixed chronicle and cartulary intermittently written under Gelmírez’s supervision from 1109 until shortly after his death in 1140;⁴ and the Liber Sancti Jacobi (Book of Saint James). The cathedral’s earliest extant copy of the Liber Sancti Jacobi, falsely attributed to and named for Pope Calixtus II, and known as the Codex Calixtinus,⁵ is an assemblage of disparate texts united by their celebration of St. James, his miracles, and his cult. The concluding fifth book of this text, known as the Pilgrim’s Guide, is a sometimes outrageous and salacious itinerary of routes, regions, churches, and shrines, ending with a lengthy description of the church of St. James. Long considered an outsider’s account—albeit a reliable documentary source for the Compostelan pilgrimage and its itineraries through the French kingdom and across the northern Iberian Peninsula—the Codex Calixtinus was actually produced at Santiago, cleverly posing as a French work, as Manuel Díaz y Díaz has shown.⁶ Based on the figurative style and foliage initials, art historians suggest a date around 1140 or slightly later with Gelmírez as the likely patron,⁷ which accords with the pattern of his activities recorded in the Historia.

The costly political and artistic projects undertaken by Gelmírez to expand the apostolic cult of St. James—with the aim of elevating Gelmírez’s diocesan rank and extending his lordship in Galicia—prompted two communal rebellions.⁸ The pilgrims Gelmírez was able to attract in large numbers to the far northwest of the Iberian Peninsula consequently provided an alternative audience to his enemies: a hostile faction of cathedral canons angered by unequal prebends and [End Page 52...