By Virginio Corsi
In 2027, the feast of Saint James the Apostle, celebrated on July 25, will fall on a Sunday. Santiago de Compostela will therefore observe another Jacobean Holy Year, and the roads leading across Europe and northern Spain will once again fill with pilgrims. The event belongs to a tradition that reaches deep into the Middle Ages. According to Jacobean tradition, Pope Alexander III confirmed the privileges of Santiago in 1179 through the bull Regis aeterni, granting a plenary indulgence during the years in which the feast of Saint James fell on a Sunday. This was more than a century before Pope Boniface VIII proclaimed the first universal Jubilee in Rome in 1300. It was also a more frequent celebration. The Roman Jubilee was originally conceived at intervals of a century, although its rhythm was later shortened. The Jacobean Holy Year, governed by the calendar, returns in a sequence of six, five, six and eleven years, normally occurring fourteen times in every century. The Holy Year gave special importance to a pilgrimage that was already attracting men and women from distant parts of the Christian world. By the twelfth century, Santiago had become one of the three great destinations of western pilgrimage, together with Jerusalem and Rome. Yet Compostela occupied a special place in the medieval imagination. Jerusalem was the sacred centre of Christianity and Rome the seat of the papacy. Santiago stood at the far western edge of the known world, close to the Atlantic coast that medieval geography associated with the limits of the earth. To reach it was to travel towards the most distant horizon.
The discovery of Saint James and the rise of Compostela
The origins of the pilgrimage lie in the early ninth century, when a tomb discovered in Galicia was identified as that of the Apostle James the Greater. A sanctuary developed around the burial place, supported by the kings of Asturias and León, and the settlement that grew beside it gradually became the city of Santiago de Compostela. The discovery had profound religious and political importance. The Christian kingdoms of northern Iberia possessed a new apostolic shrine at a time when much of the peninsula was governed by Muslim powers. Santiago became a centre of devotion, but also a symbol around which rulers, bishops and communities could express religious authority and political identity. The cult of Saint James grew as the Christian kingdoms expanded southwards. Over the centuries, the Apostle was transformed in the collective imagination. He was revered as a disciple of Christ, honoured as a pilgrim and, in later traditions connected with the Reconquista, presented as a heavenly protector of Christian armies. The political history of medieval Iberia was far more complex than the simple opposition suggested by later legends. Christian and Muslim rulers fought, negotiated, traded and formed alliances across religious boundaries. Nevertheless, the sanctuary of Santiago gave the northern kingdoms an extraordinary source of prestige and connected them more closely with France, Rome and the rest of Latin Christendom. The road to Compostela became a religious route, a political artery and a channel of communication with Europe.
A moving population across medieval Spain
The number of medieval pilgrims cannot be calculated with modern statistical precision. The surviving records are incomplete and no institution counted arrivals as the Pilgrim Office does today. Even so, the evidence of their presence is overwhelming. Pilgrims appear in chronicles, wills, legal documents, miracle collections, songs and accounts of journeys. Scallop shells and devotional badges associated with Santiago have been discovered across Europe. Hospitals, monasteries, churches and charitable foundations were established along the routes specifically to assist travellers. The Liber Sancti Jacobi, compiled in the twelfth century and preserved in the manuscript commonly known as the Codex Calixtinus, offers one of the most remarkable testimonies to this world. Its famous fifth book describes roads across France and Spain, mountain passes, rivers, towns, shrines, customs, dangers and places where pilgrims might find assistance. It describes not an isolated local devotion, but an international system of movement. People reached Compostela from the Italian peninsula, France, the German lands, the British Isles, Scandinavia and central Europe. Others came from every part of the Iberian kingdoms. Among them were aristocrats and peasants, clergy and artisans, merchants and soldiers, healthy travellers and sick people seeking a miracle. Some travelled voluntarily as an expression of devotion. Others fulfilled a vow made during illness or danger. A pilgrimage might be imposed as an act of penance or by a court as punishment for a crime. Some walked on behalf of another person. There were even individuals who made journeys professionally for those unable or unwilling to leave home. Their motives were different, but they shared the same road.
The Camino changes the land
The movement of so many people had lasting consequences for the territory through which they passed. Roads had to be maintained. Rivers had to be crossed. Travellers required food, shelter, protection and places of worship. Kings, bishops, monasteries, military orders and private benefactors financed bridges, fountains, churches and institutions of assistance. Old settlements expanded and new communities appeared along the route. Jaca, Pamplona, Estella, Logroño, Burgos, Carrión de los Condes, León, Astorga and many smaller towns became important centres of pilgrimage, commerce and hospitality. Foreign settlers, frequently identified in medieval documents as francos, established themselves in towns along the Camino. They brought commercial connections, specialist trades, legal customs and artistic influences from beyond the Pyrenees. The pilgrimage stimulated markets and supported innkeepers, bakers, craftsmen, guides, muleteers, money changers and merchants. It also encouraged the circulation of architectural knowledge. Romanesque forms travelled along the road in the design of churches, monasteries and sculpture. Techniques of bridge building, stonework and urban organisation moved with the people who possessed them. The result was not simply a road across an existing landscape. The pilgrimage helped create the landscape through which it passed. Even the word hospital preserves the memory of this transformation. It derives from the Latin world of hospes and hospitalitas, the guest, the host and the duty of hospitality. A medieval hospital was not necessarily a medical institution in the modern sense. It was a place where strangers, pilgrims, poor travellers and the sick could receive shelter, food, warmth and care. Hospitality became one of the essential structures of the Camino because the pilgrim was, by definition, someone far from home.
Before the pilgrim was religious
The history of the word pilgrim reveals the deeper meaning of the journey. Its ancestor is the Latin peregrinus. Originally, the word did not identify a person travelling to a sanctuary. It described someone outside his or her own territory, a stranger, a foreigner or simply a traveller away from home. The word is traditionally associated with the idea of moving per ager, across the fields and beyond the familiar boundaries of one’s community. The peregrinus was therefore a person who had left the protected and ordered world of home. In the Middle Ages, however, the word acquired a more precise religious meaning. No writer expresses this transformation more clearly than Dante Alighieri. In the Vita Nuova, Dante explains that the people who travelled in the service of God were known by different names. Those who went to Jerusalem were called palmieri, because they could return carrying palms from the Holy Land. Those who went to Rome were called romei. Those who travelled to the shrine of Saint James in Galicia were called peregrini. Dante adds a revealing explanation. They were called pilgrims because the burial place of Saint James was farther from his homeland than that of any other Apostle. The distance defined the pilgrim. By Dante’s time, the Camino to Santiago had become so completely identified with the experience of long distance sacred travel that the old word for a stranger abroad had become the proper name of the person travelling to Galicia. The Camino did not merely receive pilgrims. It helped create the medieval meaning of the pilgrim.
The quintessence of travel
This linguistic transformation tells us something fundamental about Santiago. The pilgrimage to Compostela represented the quintessence of medieval travel. Within it coexisted distance, uncertainty, hardship, danger, spiritual hope, curiosity and the possibility of personal transformation. Travel for pleasure, as we understand it today, scarcely existed. People travelled for trade, diplomacy, war, study, migration, marriage, religious obligation or necessity. Every long journey removed the traveller from the protection of family, neighbours and local authority. Roads were uncertain and sometimes little more than tracks. Bridges could collapse and rivers could become impassable. Mountain crossings exposed pilgrims to cold and sudden changes of weather. Illness, hunger, robbery and violence were constant possibilities. A traveller could die far from home, surrounded by people who did not know his name or speak his language. This helps explain why travel was not always viewed positively. Medieval society was organised around belonging. A person belonged to a family, a town, a parish, a profession, a lord or a community. The stranger stood outside these relationships and could be treated with suspicion. The pilgrim’s religious purpose made the traveller understandable. The declared search for forgiveness, grace, healing or spiritual fulfilment gave legitimacy to leaving home. Religion justified the movement of a person who might otherwise have appeared rootless or socially dangerous. Yet beneath the religious motivation lay another human desire: the wish to see what existed beyond the known horizon. The historian Eric J. Leed, in The Mind of the Traveler, follows this relationship between journey, knowledge and identity from the ancient story of Gilgamesh to modern tourism. Travel repeatedly takes the same essential form. A person leaves the ordered world of home, enters a space of uncertainty and returns changed by experiences that could not have been acquired without departure. The medieval pilgrimage offered one of the few socially accepted ways of satisfying this desire for knowledge. The pilgrim travelled for the soul, but the journey also created an opportunity to encounter landscapes, cities, peoples and customs that would otherwise have remained unknown. Faith and curiosity did not exclude each other. They travelled together.
Travel as labour and suffering
Our vocabulary still preserves the memory of how difficult travel once was. The English word travel is historically connected with the French travail, meaning effort, work, suffering or torment. The same family of words includes the French travailler and the Spanish trabajo. In Italian, travaglio can describe suffering, strenuous labour and the pains of childbirth. In parts of southern Italy, related forms have also been used in connection with work. These words are generally traced to the late Latin tripalium or trepalium, a structure made from three stakes that became associated with restraint and suffering. For the medieval traveller, the connection between journey and labour was not metaphorical. To travel was to walk, carry, endure and expose oneself to danger. The difficulty of the road was part of the value of the pilgrimage. Salvation could not be separated from sacrifice. The pilgrim did not simply arrive at a sacred place. The pilgrim offered the journey itself: the fatigue, the cold, the uncertainty, the hunger and the distance walked step by step.
The reward of experience
Risk, however, is only one side of travel. The other is experience. The same ancient linguistic world that produced words connected with danger also links knowledge with trial. Experience is not merely something observed from a safe distance. It is knowledge acquired by entering an uncertain situation, passing through it and emerging changed. This is the great reward of the journey. A long pilgrimage forces the traveller to reduce life to what can be carried. Every object must justify its weight. Clothes, food, money and equipment are limited by the strength of the body. What is unnecessary must be left behind. The same process can occur within the personality. At home, individuals are surrounded by roles, possessions, habits and social expectations. They are known by their professions, families, status and reputation. On the road, many of these distinctions lose their importance. The essential questions become simpler. Can you continue walking? Can you find shelter? Can you endure the rain? Can you accept assistance? Can you offer it? The stranger may become a companion. The foreigner whose language is incomprehensible may share food or indicate the correct path. A person who would have remained distant within the structures of ordinary society may become necessary for survival. Travel therefore challenges prejudice. It reveals both the vulnerability of the individual and the value of other people. As unnecessary possessions are abandoned because they cannot be carried, unnecessary layers of personality may also fall away. Pride, certainty, social performance and inherited judgements become difficult to sustain through weeks of fatigue and dependence on strangers. The pilgrim may arrive in Santiago carrying less than at the beginning, yet possessing a deeper understanding of the world and of the self. This is why the true distance of a pilgrimage cannot be measured only in miles or kilometres. The geographical journey creates the possibility of an interior one.
A road of languages and ideas
The personal transformation of the pilgrim was part of a much wider historical movement. Every traveller carried more than a staff and a bag. Pilgrims carried languages, songs, stories, prayers, technical knowledge, artistic models and ways of understanding the world. They exchanged information about roads and markets, but also about architecture, medicine, agriculture and political events. Craftsmen saw unfamiliar buildings and decorative forms. Clerics encountered different liturgical practices. Merchants discovered new products and commercial opportunities. Travellers heard legends from distant regions and carried them home in altered forms. Ideas moved because people moved. The Camino became a vast space of translation. Latin provided a common language for educated clergy, but the roads sounded with medieval forms of Galician, Castilian, Basque, Occitan, French, Italian, German, English and many other languages. Communication was imperfect, yet repeated encounters created familiarity across differences. The pilgrimage did not eliminate conflict or produce a unified medieval Europe. The continent remained divided into kingdoms, principalities, cities and territories that frequently fought one another. Nevertheless, the roads to Santiago created a shared geography of shrines, bridges, hospitals and symbols that could be recognised across political boundaries. A scallop shell understood in Galicia could also be recognised in France, England, Italy or the German lands.
The backbone of Europe
The Camino is sometimes described as the backbone of Europe. The metaphor is powerful because a backbone both supports a body and connects its different parts. The routes leading to Santiago linked remote communities to a common destination. They connected the Iberian Peninsula with regions beyond the Pyrenees and created enduring channels through which people, beliefs, art and knowledge could circulate. The often repeated phrase “Europe was born on pilgrimage” is traditionally attributed to Goethe. Whatever the precise origin of the wording, it expresses a compelling historical truth. Europe did not emerge only through royal dynasties, wars, treaties or institutions. It was also shaped through the physical movement of ordinary people who crossed borders, entered foreign towns and depended upon the hospitality of strangers. On the Camino, Europeans encountered one another before they possessed a modern political idea of Europe. In 1987, the Council of Europe chose the Routes of Santiago as its first European Cultural Route. UNESCO later recognised the routes in Spain and France for their exceptional role in religious and cultural exchange during the Middle Ages. These modern recognitions did not invent the European importance of the Camino. They acknowledged a connection created over centuries by millions of individual journeys.
The Holy Year of 2027
The pilgrims who walk to Santiago in 2027 will inhabit a different world from that of their medieval predecessors. They will have detailed maps, marked paths, modern equipment and access to assistance. They may communicate instantly with families thousands of kilometres away. Their reasons for walking will be more diverse than those officially recognised by medieval society. Some will seek the plenary indulgence associated with the Holy Year. Some will walk in memory of another person. Others will look for silence, history, human companionship or a change in the direction of their lives. Yet the essential form of the journey remains. The pilgrim leaves the familiar world, accepts the limitations of the body and enters a road shared with strangers. Possessions are reduced. Time changes its rhythm. Distance must be crossed one step at a time. The road continues to offer what it offered centuries ago: danger transformed into experience, effort transformed into knowledge and distance transformed into encounter. The Camino de Santiago gave the medieval peregrinus his most complete identity. It made the traveller into the pilgrim and the journey into an experience of spiritual, physical and personal transformation. At the same time, it changed towns, landscapes and entire societies. It created bridges and hospitals, supported cities, carried art and engineering across frontiers and brought distant languages into contact. The pilgrims of 2027 will therefore walk along more than a route to a cathedral. They will follow one of the great historical arteries through which Europe learned to recognise itself. The road ends in Santiago, but its meaning was never contained in one city. It lives in every meeting, every shared language, every act of hospitality and every border crossed along the way. The Camino became the backbone of Europe because, for more than a thousand years, it taught people that travelling towards a common destination could connect worlds that had previously seemed impossibly far apart.