Comets in the sky appeared and countless went in pilgrimage

The development of monasticism had a profound effect on another medieval phenomenon: pilgrimage. Although people had started travelling to visit the Holy Places in Palestine in the third century and many pagan pilgrimage sites had already been appropriated by the Church and Christianised, it was not until the eleventh century that this form of worship began to increase at an exponential rate.

Judging by the size of the new pilgrimage churches which were built at the time, huge throngs of people were expected on the saints' feast days and the roads of western Europe must have been busy with the traffic of pilgrims travelling to the great shrines.

Often originating as hermitages, there was a strong tendency to establish monasteries in remote areas away from the towns and worldy trappings. Paradoxically, monks using relics to generate income sought the attention of the world beyond the cloister and did their best to promote the celebrity of their saint and the miracle working powers of the relics. Thus monasticism and pilgrimage became two sides of a particular coin.

And so the Tripartite Order produced a sub division - that of the pilgrim - who temporarily at least, wore the same mantle of sanctity as the monk and cleric. For the knightly and labouring castes who lacked the spiritual benefits which were the privilege of the monastic vocation and were fearful for their soul's eternal destiny important rewards could be obtained by travelling ever greater distances to the important shrines.

A monk writing in the early eleventh century observed this increase in travel to holy places: “Comets in the sky appeared and countless went in pilgrimage. Their numbers were greater than the past age had ever heard of”.

He was in little doubt why this should be: “Many consulted in these matters about the meaning of this concourse. They were answered that it portended no other than the advent of that corrupt Antichrist, whose coming at the end of this world is prophesied in Holy Scripture”.

The location of Santiago de Compostela proved attractive for several reasons, one of them being that it was as far west as man could possibly go at the time.

The gifts of nature have not entirely rotted away

In early medieval France, men could not help but notice that all around them lay the ruins of a great civilisation.

Temples and theatres, great bridges and roads had crumbled and fallen into disrepair through neglect. Yet what remained spoke of a glorious past, of a society whose organisational and technological capabilities were far beyond those of the present time.

And yet in the early twelfth century a monk, abbot of a northern French monastery wrote criticising those who praised the achievements of the ancients over those of his own day. In doing so he revealed an attitude prevalent in his day. Men believed that their world was quite literally growing old, that its period of greatness was now in the long distant past and that the Roman Empire had constituted a golden age.

What lay ahead was the Apocalypse and the task of society was to prepare the way for the inevitable: “Although pure strength was pre-eminent among the ancients, yet among us, though the end of time has come upon us, the gifts of nature have not entirely rotted away”, so wrote the abbot.


“Certain mortals” he continued, ”have developed the foul habit of praising previous times and attacking what modern men do ... However, no discerning individual could prefer in any way the temporal prosperity of the ancients to any of the strengths of our own day.”

By this the abbot, Guibert de Nogent, meant that the spiritual strengths of his day were of greater value than the material wealth of the past. As society moved inexorably towards the End Times a mutually supporting division developed, a caste system imported from the East. This was the Tripartite division: those who prayed, those who fought and those who laboured. In other words, the monks, the knights and the feudal serfs. Each performed a vital service towards the greater good in a mutually interdependent sctructure.

Those who worked the land provided the necessary food, the knightly aristocracy protected the other two divisions and fought to defend Christendom. It was the monks and clerics however who provided the most vital function: prayer.

For it was considered that humanity was too sinful to be redeemed without constant prayer and so around the relics of saints an ever more elaborate liturgical ritual evolved. And so the monasteries were reformed, they received great donations from kings and the wealthy aristocracy for the provision of foundations and endowments. By the eleventh century European Christendom contained a network of thousands of abbeys and priories.

The Roads

The Joining of Heaven and Earth takes as its point of departure the twelfth century manuscript known as the Codex of Pope Calixtus and particularly the fifth book which is commonly called the Pilgrim's Guide.

The Guide describes four distinct routes to Compostela. They pass through France from different directions and having crossed the Pyrenees, join together at the bridge over the river Arga in Navarre. The Guide describes these roads in terms of the saintly shrines which pilgrims should visit on their way.

The Romanesque period was a time when the veneration of the relics of saints reached a particular pitch. They were preciously guarded by monks and people travelled in great numbers to visit the monasteries where they were kept. Relics were considered to be a conduit between the world of man and the celestial realm where the saints resided. They were quite literally a place where heaven and earth were joined. As such the saint could intercede on behalf of those who prayed before their bones. This intercession provided access to God. Miracles were expected and were said to occur in profusion. In the case of the great saints, there was the possibility of redemption in the afterlife.

The Guide describes twenty-nine shrines and Holy sites. The Joining of Heaven and Earth intends to present its visual material interactively via a map of the pilgrimage roads through France and Spain. It will feature approximately sixty sites which can be clicked on to open up a film sequence which presents that particular geographical location, whether it be a Romanesque church or the landscapes, bridges and roads to be found there.

As well as the places mentioned in the Guide, the map will feature other sites on the roads and their subsidiary routes, all of which existed in the twelfth century. Particular attention being paid to places and monuments which have some bearing on the pilgrimage, especially in terms of the iconography and symbolism of the sculpture.

The intention is that the material might be viewed in a variety of ways, either as individual short films or in a sequence organised around a theme, a style of sculpture or just simply in terms of geographical continuity.

With the aid of optional voice over commentary and supplementary texts the cumulative effect will be the formation of a picture of pilgrimage culture - a window onto a historico-cultural world.

In the Beginning

This blog concerns an extensive project to commit the pilgrimage roads to Santiago de Compostela to film. The project title is “The Joining of Heaven and Earth”. The name comes from the phrase used by Peter Brown in his book “The Cult of the Saints” and is used to describe the relationship between the relics of a saint on earth and their soul in heaven and the belief that there was a conduit between the two which could be used by men.

In broader terms it seems an appropriate title for a work on the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela which, as well as linking so many reliquary shrines along its highways and byways, was also the source of numerous legends of a mystical nature so that the terrestrial road itself, was invested with an inherent and immanent sacred character. This is perfectly expressed in the legend of the Milky Way, wherein the road to Compostela could be traced by following the course of the stars of that galaxy across Europe to its furthest edge in northwestern Spain.

This work limits itself to the eleventh and twelfth centuries when the pilgrimage reached its flowering point, coinciding with the high medieval Romanesque period.

The Joining of Heaven and Earth will take us back to that time by presenting the old roads, bridges and landscapes which the medieval travellers used and passed through, and perhaps more importantly to show the Romanesque churches associated with the pilgrimage.

We see, essentially what a pilgrim travelling in the mid twelfth century would have seen.

The churches of the pilgrimage roads were full of sculpture, inside and out. In fact the Romanesque is the first European art form to create monumental stone sculpture since the decline of the Roman Empire. There was a gap of six hundred years between the Classical sculpture of Late Antiquity and this period. As a result, Romanesque Sculpture was extremely eclectic, representing the slow accumulation and assimilation of influences and cultures that had been mixed together during that long period.

Romanesque Sculpture is highly sacred art. Can it still be meaningful today? The Joining of Heaven and Earth has no remit on the question of faith, but whether one believes in the same way the medieval pilgrim did or not, it is hard not to be filled with awe in the presence of such images. The intention is to convey that sense of awe.

View the split screen multi-image presentation clip.



Music for the Joining of Heaven and Earth is composed and produced by Martin A Smith
http://www.martinasmith.co.uk/