Galicia, the Switzerland of Spain. Annette M. B. Meakin

from Ireland. Warlike princes journeyed thither that they might obtain the protection of the Apostle against the enemies they were to meet in the field of battle. Philip II. visited the sepulchre of St. James before embarking with the Armada for the British coast. Among the queenly pilgrims to Santiago were Isabel, queen of Portugal, and Catherine of Aragon, the unhappy wife of our Henry VIII. The Cid and the Gran Capitan both came to Santiago. William X., Count of Portiers and Duke of Aquitaine, expired in 1137 in the nave of the Cathedral while joining in the Divine service. Louis VII. of France came here on his return with the French army from the Second Crusade. It was thought a blessed thing to die on the road to or from Santiago. In the thirteenth century, Juan de Briena, King of Jerusalem and Emperor of Constantinople, was among the pilgrims. The Franciscan monk William de Rubruquis, who was sent by Louis IX. to convert the Mongols of Siberia, found among the Tartars a Nestorian monk who intended to make a pilgrimage to St. James of Galicia. Queen Matilda, the daughter of Henry I. of England and wife of the Emperor Henry V. of Germany, on returning to her old home as a widow in 1124, carried with her the bones of one of the hands of St. James. Contemporary annalists regarded this as an irreparable loss to the Kingdom.

      Pilgrims continued to flock to Galicia in thousands up to and throughout the sixteenth century.

      In the year 1550 the first edition of a book entitled Descripcion del Reyno de Galicia was printed at Mondoñedo. Its author was Francisco Molina, a native of Malaga and a canon of the Cathedral of Mondoñedo. There is a copy of the first edition in the library of Santiago University. This is one of the most curious and at the same time most valuable of all the old works upon Galicia that are still extant. This “Description of the Kingdom of Galicia” is written in verse, with explanatory footnotes on every page. Here we read that of all the cathedrals of the world that of Santiago was the most visited. “It is venerated by all nations,” says the writer, “especially by the Slavs. A Slav who makes a pilgrimage to Santiago is, on his return to his native country, considered free from all his sins and escapes many of the annoyances to which the others (who had not been to Santiago) are subjected. Every year we see, on the 1st of May, processions of Slavs with offerings, with thick and long wax candles. Having shown themselves to their friends at home, they return the next year, in May, till they have been three times, and on the occasion of the third procession they wear three crowns. They then return to Esclavonia, where they henceforth enjoy great liberty.” This is certainly very like the journey of Mohammedans to Mecca! “The number of pilgrims is a marvellous thing!” exclaims Molina. “The only other cathedrals where there is a concourse of pilgrims anything like that at Santiago are St. Peter’s at Rome and St. John’s at Ephesus. More pilgrims come to Santiago than to these two, especially in Jubilee year (every seven years); but since Luther arose with his dangerous views, the number of German, French, English and Bohemian pilgrims has somewhat decreased.” Molina owns that the people who take the least part in these pilgrimages are the Spaniards, “perhaps because they are contented to know that they have the Cathedral and relics of St. James in their own land, or perhaps because they prefer seeing foreign lands to travelling in their own country.”

      Molina tells his readers that the relics are shown to the pilgrims on certain days of the week by a man specially appointed for the purpose on account of his linguistic talents. He is called lenguagero (linguist). The head of the glorious Apostle is carried round the Cathedral on all feast days in solemn procession. “One of the relics is a drop of milk from the breast of the Virgin in a vase as fresh and perfect as if of to-day. There is also a precious lock of her hair, and a thorn from Christ’s crown which turns the colour of blood every Good Friday.”

      “St. James brought nine disciples with him to Spain,” writes Molina. We will leave his account of the great hospital erected for the pilgrims till another chapter. He devotes many pages to a careful description of the arms of the great families of Galicia, and with them of the arms of St. James. “The reason why the pilgrims wear a scallop-shell as the insignum of St. James,” he explains, “is that a certain nobleman, who wished to accompany the body of the Apostle to Galicia, not finding a passage in the ship, entered the sea on horseback, and thus reached Galicia. As he came out of the water it was found that his body and that of his horse were covered with scallop-shells. And now, the pilgrim who does not bring scallop-shells back with him is not believed to have been to Santiago at all.”

      The crowding of the pilgrims to Mass was so great in the early years of the seventeenth century, that the priest, after administering the Holy Communion in the Chapel of the King of France, administered it in the nave, in the transept, in the cloisters, and even in the large square which is now called Plaza de los Literarios, but which was then called the La Quintana. All these places were tightly packed with pilgrims. As late as the year 1706, altars were temporarily erected in the cloister for the priest to say Mass. In 1794, D. Miguel Ferro, Architect of the Cathedral, wrote: “The crowd of pilgrims on the great feast days is so large, that only two-thirds of them can get into the Cathedral, apart from the families who live in the town.”[87] “Since then,” wrote Sanchez in 1888, “the revolutions which inaugurated the present epoch, and the spirit of religious indifference which has unfortunately affected modern minds, have influenced the decadence of pilgrimages to Santiago; they are now only the shadow of what they were.... To-day, nevertheless, we feel the fervour and enthusiasm of bygone days is once more growing.... With the discovery of the Sacred Relics of the Apostle, Santiago appears at certain epochs to recover her former appearance. Never shall we forget the 29th of June 1883, on which, staff in hand, and on foot, and chanting hymns, there arrived at the sacred portal of the Cathedral a company of Augustine friars, who had been unjustly forced to leave France, their mother country. Shortly after their arrival we witnessed that of another band of pilgrims, composed of students from the Catholic University of Paris, and most of whom belonged to the noblest families of France.”

      It has been seen that the portals of the Cathedral were kept open day and night for the convenience of the pilgrims; those who had been unable to receive shelter in the overcrowded inns often passed entire nights within the precincts of the Cathedral, sleeping on the stones of the cloister and even in the Cathedral itself, using the galleries as if the sacred edifice had been an inn. If we may trust Quintela Naya, it was not till the thirteenth century that the making up of beds in the Cathedral was forbidden. In order that the atmosphere of the edifice might be purified for the relays of pilgrims, recourse was had to incense-burning, and there eventually came into use, history cannot tell us when, the wonderful botafumeiro, or giant censer, which is to this very day one of the glories of the Cathedral.

      There seems to be no trace of the use of incense in Christian worship during the first three centuries. St. Clement of Alexandria (A.D. 192) said, when contrasting the Christian service with pagan rites, “the truly holy altar is the just soul, and its perfume is holy prayer.”[88] Only when great crowds of unwashed pilgrims began to make the air of the churches intolerable was the use of incense, as a disinfectant, introduced into Divine Service.[89] Its use as a part of the ritual dates from about the end of the fifth century. It is supposed that all the side chapels of Santiago Cathedral had at first their own incense-burners, but that when the pilgrims took to sleeping round the altar and in the gallery which encircles the nave and transept, these being found insufficient to purify the air of the entire building, their place was taken by a huge silver casket filled with incense and suspended by iron chains and by ropes and pulleys from the triangle of the cupola. This great incensario was solemnly swung the whole length of the nave backwards and forwards above the heads of the pilgrims.

      Whether the botafumeiro, which may still be seen to swing in Santiago Cathedral is the original one which was in use there in the thirteenth century, is not known. Señor Villa-Amil was not able for many years to find any earlier allusion to this one than a passage discovered by Zepedano in Oscea’s Historia del glorioso Apostol Santiago (1615), which says that in 1602 an order was given for the old beams from which the great incense-burner was suspended to be replaced by new ones, and new pulleys to be provided from the Biscay iron-works. The censer is described as resembling a great silver cauldron, into which were put from four to six pounds of perfume, and which, suspended by a long rope, was swung to and fro by five or six men during the principal festivals so as to fumigate the entire edifice. Recently, with the help of Señor Lopez Ferreiro, a passage dating from the fourteenth