Themes

Cosmology

amelia.kennedy

“Field of the Star”

According to medieval tradition, St. James’ remains were rediscovered in the ninth century, possibly around 813. Legends vary on the details but often feature a star or stars. One account relates that a bright star caught the eye of shepherds as they tended their flocks. Upon digging at the site indicated by the starlight, the shepherds found the site of St. James’ forgotten tomb. According to another account, it was a hermit named Pelayo who noticed the star over the site of James’ tomb.

These stories contributed to a popular (though probably incorrect) etymology of “Compostela,” which posited that the word derived from campus stellae (“field of the star”).

A “stellar path” leading to St. James

Suddenly, Charlemagne saw a path of stars in the sky, beginning in the Frisian Sea and extending through Germany and Italy, Gaul and Aquitaine, passing directly over Gascony, Vasconia, Navarre and Spain to Galicia, where the body of Saint James lay buried and undiscovered. Looking upon this stellar path several times every night, he began to meditate on its meaning.

Poole, Chronicle, p. 5.

This account appears in Book IV of the Liber Sancti Jacobi, a text known as the Chronicle of Pseudo-Turpin – “Pseudo” because while the narrator purports to be Archbishop Turpin of Rheims, an eighth-century contemporary of Charlemagne, scholars instead hold that this text was a creation of the twelfth century (c. 1140). The Chronicle narrates Charlemagne’s military campaigns against Muslims in Iberia, initiated by the miraculous appearance of the apostle James of Zebedee in the form of a knight:

A knight of splendid appearance, more handsome than words can describe, appeared to Charlemagne one evening in a vision as he sat in deep meditation. […]

[The knight said:] “I am he whom our Lord chose at the shores of the Sea of Galilee, through his ineffable grace, to preach to the nations; whom Herod executed with a sword, and whose body lies forgotten in Galicia, a place still shamefully oppressed by the Saracens…The path of stars that you have contemplated in the sky is the sign indicating that you must take a great army from here to Galicia to do battle with those perfidious pagans, to free my path and my lands and to visit my basilica and my tomb. After you, all peoples from sea to sea will walk there as pilgrims.”

Poole, Chronicle, p. 5-6.

The Apostle James introduces himself with reference to his relationship with Jesus, his preaching of Jesus’ message far and wide, and his execution by King Herod [Agrippa], recorded in Acts 12. His introduction also shares some thematic interests with the Gospels, in particular the use of stars as a sign. In Matthew 2, Herod [the Great], the grandfather of Herod Agrippa, encounters three wise men following a star to the site of Jesus’ Nativity. The Star of Bethlehem has been the subject of both theological and astronomical analysis. As Aaron Adair summarizes, “Theories are plentiful…Such ideas include (but are not limited to) comets, meteors, novae and supernovae, a single planet rising, the discovery of a new planet or asteroid, the conjunction of planets, and horoscopic interpretations” (p. 43).

Now, in Charlemagne’s vision, we have an entire path of stars. Charlemagne’s initial response to this “stellar path” is contemplative – until James makes his visionary appearance to spur him into a more active role. The stars are a call to action, laying out the path that Charlemagne and his army must take across northern Spain to Galicia, conquering these lands and thus opening the pilgrimage route.

This path of stars is often linked to the Milky Way, though as Kevin Poole points out, the Milky Way “forms a relatively straight line across the sky,” whereas “the path of stars described [in the Chronicle of Pseudo-Turpin] would form a reverse L if plotted on a map of the sky covering the geographic regions mentioned” (p. 5, n. 4). Nevertheless, the connection between the Milky Way and the Camino de Santiago has exerted considerable fascination among generations of pilgrims and writers. In his 1618 work the Epitome of Copernican Astronomy, Johannes Kepler wrote that “the way known by the Greeks as the Milky Way and by us as the Path of St. James is diffused through the middle of the orb of the fixed stars (as the orb appears to us), dividing it into two apparent hemispheres” (p. 138).

Translations of the Liber Sancti Jacobi

Coffey, Thomas F., Linda Kay Davidson, and Maryjane Dunn, trans. The Miracles of St. James: Translations from the Liber Sancti Jacobi. New York: Italica Press, 1995.

Poole, Kevin R., trans. The Chronicle of Pseudo-Turpin: Book IV of the Liber Sancti Jacobi (Codex Calixtinus). New York: Italica Press, 2014.

References & Further Reading

Adair, Aaron. “A Critical Look at the History of Interpreting the Star of Bethlehem in Scientific Literature and
Biblical Studies.” In The Star of Bethlehem and the Magi: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Experts on the Ancient Near East, the Greco-Roman World, and Modern Astronomy. Ed. George H. van Kooten and Peter Barthel. Leiden: Brill, 2015.

Kepler, Johannes. Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae, in Opera Omnia. Ed. Christian Frisch. Frankfurt: Heyder and Zimmer, 1866). Vol. 6: “Via, Graecis lactea, nostris semita S. Jacobi, diffusa est per medium fixarum orbem (uti quidem orbis is nobis apparet), dividens illum in duo apparentia hemisphaeria.”

Hospitality Along the Camino

amelia.kennedy

Hospitality and the “Pilgrim Experience”

The entrance is open to all, infirm and healthy, / not only Catholics but also pagans, / Jews, heretics, idlers, the vain, / and, to put it briefly, both good and profane.

Porta patet omnibus, infirmis et sanis, / Non solum catholicis verum et paganis / Judeis, hereticis, ociosis, vanis, / Et, ut dicam breviter, bonis et profanis.

Carmen in Laudem Roscisvallidis, stanza 15

Occasionally quoted in modern-day pilgrims’ guides and memoirs, these famous lines from an early thirteenth-century poem in praise of the pilgrims’ hospital at Roncesvalles offer a distinctive view of hospitality: This pilgrims’ hospital is not just for devout pilgrims. All are welcome, including various groups that the poet specifies as less deserving or as external to the Christian tradition. Hospitality, in this view, is not about the potential guest at all, but about the performance of hospitable service, seen as one of the acts of Christian charity.

Regardless, hospitable institutions and the sources they produced constitute some of our best evidence for understanding something of the medieval “pilgrim experience” along the Camino de Santiago. Medieval pilgrims faced many hazards on the Camino, from wolves in the Pyrenees to dangerous river crossings to inclement weather to robbery and assault. In response to such dangers, locals built infrastructure, such as bridges and hospitals to facilitate travel. Learning about the hospitable infrastructure along the Camino gives us a better understanding of the options available to medieval pilgrims.

The Medieval “Hospital”

While the term “hospital” derives from hospes (“guest”) and initially denoted a guesthouse for receiving travelers, the word took on a dizzying array of meanings in the Middle Ages. The hospital was one of three main welfare institutions, alongside monasteries and churches, though the three categories sometimes overlapped. A medieval “hospital” thus could be a welfare house, a place for welcoming pilgrims and travelers, a center for distributing alms, and/or an institution that provided care to the sick and poor.

Pilgrims’ hospitals could be described using a number of terms: The medieval poem in praise of the hospital at Roncesvalles used a variety of terms to describe the institution at its center: domus (“house”), hospitale (“hospital”), hospitium (“guesthouse”), and domus hospitalis (“hospitable house”). Hospitals could be big or small, vast institutions caring for hundreds or tiny lodgings for just a handful of people. Depending on the hospital’s function, it might be established in any number of places; some hospitals were near towns or churches, while others were in the middle of nowhere serving travelers and pilgrims who traversed treacherous mountain passes. 

Hospitals arose, for instance, in Alpine passes serving pilgrims traveling to and from Rome. The hospitaller congregation of Great St. Bernard, occupying a site previously held by a Carolingian monastery, was named for the eleventh-century archdeacon of Aosta, Bernard of Monte Giove. Run by canons regular, this hospital community received considerable donations from across Europe, attesting to its important role in ensuring safe travel across the Alps.

A “Charitable Revolution”

Historians such as André Vauchez and Adam Davis have characterized the 12th and 13th centuries as a “charitable revolution,” a time of rapid and widespread foundation of hospitals across Europe. Caritas, or “charity,” had a long history in the ancient and medieval world, in the early Middle Ages denoting a sense of duty to assist one’s relations. From the 12th-century on, as Sally Mayall Brasher has explained, charitable impulses shifted more toward misericordia, the need to support the poor and vulnerable for the sake of a community’s overall well-being (Ch. 1).

Hospital founders came from a variety of backgrounds; they could be kings, towns, bishops, religious institutions, nobles, and so on. While some specialized in certain populations (for example, leprosaria or houses for the blind), others were more general in their service. Managing and operating the hospital could fall to a variety of people as well, such as monks or nuns, canons, or even a married couple. Given the differences among all the different hospitals–in terms of their foundations, functions, daily operations, and institutional affiliations–it is hard to settle on a single clear and specific definition of the medieval “hospital.” Yet as Sethina Watson argues, “the chaotic variety of [the hospital’s] manifestations was not a sign of its liminality but, rather, a consequence of its very significance in Christian religion and Christian society” (p. 314).

Crossing the Pyrenees: The Hospital of Roncesvalles

Santa María de Roncesvalles emerged within this diverse and “chaotic” context. It belonged to a group of three hospitals in Pyrenean mountain passes, all three of which were larger than typical hospitals, lived as communities of canons following the Rule of St. Augustine, and led to the emergence of minor hospitaller orders. Historian James Brodman has outlined the development and functions of these hospitals.

The Hospital of Santa Cristina de Somport was the earliest and likely the smallest of the three Pyrenean foundations, emerging sometime between 1100 and 1115 to support pilgrims on routes between Béarn and Saragossa. Early documents indicate the presence of a prior and only five to seven brothers, while thirteenth-century sources show that the population there had risen modestly to about a dozen. The Hospital of Aubrac emerged slightly later, between 1120 and 1122. According to legend, it was founded by a former pilgrim named Adalard who was caught in a snowstorm while headed through the Pyrenees en route to Compostela. In 1162, the Bishop of Rodez approved a rule, and the hospital received papal recognition from Alexander III. 

The Hospital of Roncesvalles was founded in 1132 by Bishop Sancho of Larrosa, the bishop of Pamplona from 1124 until 1142. The poem composed in its praise, paraphrasing the foundation charter, remarks in stanzas 6 and 7 that Bishop Sancho founded his hospital “at the base of the highest mountain of the Pyrenees” with financial assistance from the king Alfonso–that is, Alfonso I “the Battler” of Navarre and Aragon (r. 1104-1134).

Over the course of its operation, the hospital at Roncesvalles acquired various dependencies, including, by the thirteenth century, nine additional hospitals in the Pyrenees, one in Toulouse, some in Normandy and northern France, one at Westminster, and a small foundation in Valencia. 

Primary Sources on Digital Camino

References & Further Reading

Brasher, Sally Mayall. Hospitals and Charity: Religious Culture and Civic Life in Medieval Northern Italy. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017.

Brodman, James. Charity and Religion in Medieval Europe. Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2009. See Chapter 3: “To Shelter the Pilgrim: Military Orders, Hospices, and Bridges,” and esp. p. 116-118 on the Pyrenean hospitals at Aubrac, Roncesvalles, and Somport.

Brodman, James. Charity and Welfare: Hospitals and the Poor in Medieval Catalonia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998.

Davis, Adam. The Medieval Economy of Salvation: Charity, Commerce and the Rise of the Hospital. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019.

Vauchez, André. La spiritualité du Moyen Âge occidental (VIIIe-XIIIe siècle). 2nd ed. Paris: Seuil, 1994. See esp. p. 118.

Watson, Sethina. On Hospitals: Welfare, Law, and Christianity in Western Europe, 400-1320. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.

Ziegler, Tiffany. Medieval Healthcare and the Rise of Charitable Institutions: The History of the Municipal Hospital. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Pivot, 2018.