“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.”