Irish pilgrims have been going to Santiago de Compostela for over 800 years. Salvador Ryan explores how their experiences compare with today
Salvador Ryan
In an age of decreasing religious practice (at least as measured in terms of Mass attendance), some traditional pilgrimages, revived and re-packaged, as it were, for a new generation, appear to be bucking that downward trend.
One of the most striking examples of this is the well-known Camino de Santiago whose destination is the famous shrine of St James (Sant Yago) at Compostela in Galicia, northern Spain. The figures speak for themselves: in 2015 a total of 262,458 pilgrims collected their ‘Compostela’ certificate, for which one is required to complete, as a minimum, the last 100km on foot or cycle the last 200km.
This figure showed an increase of almost 25,000 pilgrims on the previous year, which had, itself, marked an increase of another 25,000 on the number in 2013. And these figures just account for those who reached the shrine and who chose to collect their ‘Compostela’; they do not cover the large number of pilgrims who undertake to walk just a portion of the journey, or who have decided to complete the pilgrimage piecemeal, over several summers.
Predictably, the number of pilgrims swells in the days leading up to the feast of St James on July 25.
Familiar
While the modern Camino pilgrimage has become familiar to many in recent years, no doubt further assisted by the release of the 2010 movie, The Way, featuring father and son, Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez, the shrine of Santiago de Compostela has a long and rich history with pilgrims making their way there in sizeable numbers since the 12th Century.
We know of Irish pilgrims travelling to Compostela from as early as the 13th Century, but it is from the 15th Century in particular that accounts of Irish pilgrims proliferate, most of them travelling by boat to La Coruña and making the journey on foot from there. Very occasionally we are afforded more than a fleeting glimpse of the circumstances of such pilgrimages.
Most dramatically, perhaps, in 1473, a ship carrying some 400 pilgrims returning to Waterford was captured by pirates who later released the pilgrims at Youghal. To embark on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St James was an expensive business and it is little wonder that such journeys were restricted to the wealthier members of society.
For instance, the Lord Mayor of Waterford, James Rice, took leave of office twice to travel to the shrine, in 1473 and 1483. Meanwhile, the wife of the Mayor of Galway completed the pilgrimage in 1510.
Those who could afford to commission tombs often asked that the image of St James be featured on them, complete with scallop shell, to indicate that the deceased had completed the pilgrimage for the good of their souls. Scallop shells have since been unearthed in medieval Irish burials discovered in 1986 at St Mary’s cathedral, Tuam, and in 1996 at the site of a 13th-Century Augustinian priory in Mullingar.
But, again, surviving Irish records can only offer us such tantalisingly meagre clues to how the Camino might have been experienced by our forebears.
This is what makes a largely forgotten document from the 17th Century (forgotten, at least until 1997) so significant. While the account is not of Irish provenance, it nevertheless provides us with one of the most complete historical descriptions to survive of a pilgrim’s experience of the journey to Compostela.
The author was a priest called Domenico Laffi, who was born in 1636 in a village in the foothills of the Apennines near Bologna, and who undertook no fewer than three journeys from Bologna to Compostela (each of approximately 1,300 miles) in the years 1666, 1670 and 1673. Laffi wasn’t your conventional parish priest; in fact, he was an indefatigable wanderer, professing that he had “no other joy but to travel”, and was assiduous in recording the various sights, people and customs that he encountered on his journeys.
He published his composite account of his three journeys to Compostela in the year 1681, but it remained largely ignored until it was translated to English by James Hall in 1997 at a time when interest in the pilgrimage was reviving.
Laffi, who always brought a companion with him, followed the traditional Italian route to Santiago via Bologna, Milan, Turin, Montgenèvre, Avignon, Toulouse, Roncesvalles, Pamplona, Burgos and León.
With an eye for detail, his notes the architecture, religious customs, and, indeed, people, to life. His descriptions of monuments, sculptures and works of art that he encountered along the way has since become an indispensable and sometimes unique record of many of these which have become lost or destroyed, or indeed of buildings which no longer stand.
So what sorts of things attracted the attention of this somewhat untypical cleric and what can his account tell us of the experience of pilgrimage to Compostela in the late 17th Century? Laffi’s account is both long and detailed, and is well worth reading in full; what follows here provides but a taste of what seem to have been some notable highlights of the priest’s journey.
Having set out from Bologna, upon reaching Reggio, in the territory of the Duke of Modena, Laffi relates that he had seen the image of the Madonna of Reggio which had been minted onto a gold coin, depicting Mary adoring her infant son with the words: “Quem genuit, adoravit” [“She adored Him whom she bore”].
Crucifixion
At Milan, Laffi called the cathedral an “eighth wonder of the world” and made special mention of its relic collection which reportedly included one of the nails of crucifixion (a gift from the emperor Theodosius to St Ambrose) and no fewer than eleven bodies of the Holy Innocents killed by Herod.
In the town of Vercelli, Laffi visited a Dominican monastery which housed a chastity belt that, it was said, had been given by angels to Thomas Aquinas when he was locked up in the family castle by his brothers who tried to dissuade him from becoming a Dominican by plying him with some young female company.
After leaving the town of San Germano, Laffi recounted being driven by hunger to beg some food from a miller. The bread and cheese that the miller offered him were clearly not very fresh (and certainly were not the kind of fare that this cleric was used to) for Laffi quipped that they “must have been made in the age of Romulus and Remus”.
Laffi arrived at Turin just in time for the festival of the Holy Shroud (May 4) and he describes how a new chapel was being constructed to house the prized relic (this would be completed in 1694).
The cleric was impressed by the ensuing procession and ceremony, noting how the shroud was unwound by no fewer than “seven bishops wearing full canonicals” and how, upon its display, everyone knelt and wept out loud for the forgiveness of their sins.
The variable conditions of travel along the pilgrim route can be observed in the fact that, while there, Laffi sought out the palace of Msgr Angelo Ranuzzi, a Bolognese nobleman who offered the travellers “many courtesies” and yet, nine miles further on, at Sant’ Ambrogio, Laffi was back to more basic conditions, staying at a “hovel” of an inn where all he had to enjoy were a few chestnuts and a bed of dried leaves.
17th-Century accounts of pilgrim travel are, incidentally, not without their humour, and Laffi is generous in providing us with many an encounter to make us smile.
One of these involved his arrival to the town of Cesana, which saw Laffi and his travelling companion become inadvertent wedding-crashers, caught up in a procession to the church ceremony and, thereafter, invited to the family feast afterwards.
Their mirth was temporarily suspended, however, when a collection for the bride was made after the meal. Happily for the pilgrims, instead of asking for something, the bride donated some of the money collected to Laffi and his friend.
In another village, the Bolognese travellers scorned the efforts of some country-dwellers to sing the Office of the Blessed Virgin, the efforts of which they likened to donkeys.
Their attitude to the locals brightened, though, when one of the villagers invited them to supper; that is, until, when they were about to depart, the same villager asked them to pay up!
Laffi was in Avignon in May 1670, some months after the death of Pope Clement IX and before a new Pope was elected.
This occasioned his mentioning the local belief that all the olive trees in Avignon dry up and lose their leaves during the period of sede vacante, a phenomenon which Laffi professed to have witnessed.
Tales that included elements of the miraculous clearly appealed to Laffi. Also at Avignon, he relates the story of a miracle wrought by ‘St Benedict’ (a local 12th-Century saint called Jean Bénézet) concerning a boy who told a lie and who swore that if it was not the truth that his head should be turned back to front – which it duly was! A visit to the St Bénézet’s chapel was organised to reverse (if you’ll pardon the pun) the damage.
Pilgrimage on foot in the 17th Century was a risky business. On his way from Avignon to Colombier, Laffi met an Italian from Parma who was on his way home from the shrine and related how he had been attacked by a band of robbers, stripped, relieved of his pieces of eight, and then assaulted. Pitying him, Laffi offered him some alms.
Hardly a mile further on the pilgrims encountered two hermits from Naples, who related how they had had a similar experience near Perpignan. In this case, though, the hermits had gone to the local justices to complain.
The magistrate sent constables with the pilgrims who were to show them the area in which the assault had occurred. After a thorough search, three perpetrators were apprehended, bound and led back to the city where they were summarily hanged and quartered, their quarters being thereafter returned to the scene of the crime.
At Montpellier, during a tour of the cathedral, the pilgrims were shown an unfinished fresco by a Bolognese master who had died prematurely.
Laffi’s companion at the time was Domenico Codici, an accomplished artist from Bologna, and he was asked to consider staying on to complete it, but declined, deciding to press on instead. One wonders how many skilled pilgrims in Laffi’s day were offered work opportunities en route, and never, in fact made their destination.
At Béziers, Codici’s skills were put to good use when a priest offered the pilgrims a meal in exchange for having his portrait sketched with red chalk.
Laffi had a keen interest in recording local liturgical customs and forms of popular piety. In Montpellier he recounts the tradition of lighting a row of large red wax candles at the moment of the elevation of the host at Mass, which remained lighting until after Holy Communion.
In a town between Carcassonne and Toulouse, Laffi and a priest friend celebrated Mass in a Carmelite chapel “and gave communion to many people, as it was Pentecost”.
Afterwards, many of those attending asked them to go round the tombs and to recite the De Profundis and other prayers for their dead relatives. Laffi celebrated the feast of Corpus Christi in the village of Orthez, which he described as being “full of heretics”.
In describing the Corpus Christi procession he makes mention of “heretic scoundrels…laughing like lunatics while the procession passed”, one of many references he makes to contemporary divisions within Christendom.
Although the inn at which they stayed was “run by a heretic”, Laffi nevertheless remarked that he “looked after us very well”.
While at Mass in Roncesvalles, he noted the custom there of consecrating the bread and cutting it into little pieces just before the Elevation and, instead of exchanging the “kiss of peace”, passing around “a large metal plate” to kiss (the pax-board bearing a religious image, which was widely used in the later Middle Ages and with which Laffi seems to have been unfamiliar).
The Spanish leg of the journey involved the pilgrims passing through such notable sites as Roncesvalles, Santo Domingo de la Calzada (with its legend of the unjustly hanged pilgrim saved from death by St James) and Burgos, where they visited the famous Crucifix of Burgos, allegedly one of three fashioned by Nicodemus.
Among the remaining challenges they faced were dangers from wolves and plagues of locusts. At one point, they came upon a dead pilgrim whose body they covered to preserve it from the ravaging insects.
When eventually they came in view of Santiago, the pilgrims fell to their knees and “having unburdened ourselves and spent our tears” together sang a Te Deum. Having reached their destination, they entered the church of St James and proceeded to the high altar where they knelt “in great joy”. Laffi continues: “We thanked God and the apostle for having led us safe and sound to the goal we had so longed for, after a journey of such length, with all its toils and anxieties. Then we went behind the altar and climbed a few steps, where we could embrace the apostle’s image”.
Salvador Ryan is Professor of Ecclesiastical History at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth. For the full account see Domenico Laffi, A Journey to the West: the Diary of a Seventeenth-Century Pilgrim from Bologna to Santiago de Compostela. Trans. James Hall. Leiden: Primavera Press, 1997.
