The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

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Book: Read The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James for Free Online
Authors: Walter Starkie
from a conqueror who differed from them both in race and religion. The Order of Santiago was confirmed in 1175 by Pope Alexander III, and its ideal was that of the Knights Templars, whose motto was: Non nobis non nobis, Domine, sed nomini tuo da gloriam.
    Two ideals, the military-chivalrous and the religious-monastic, crystallize in the form of the military Orders and the urgency of the appeal against the Infidel at the doors gave strength to these associations in Spain when they had lost their vitality in other countries. 17 In Spain, moreover, besides the redemption of the country from the Moors, the Knights of St. James undertook to protect the pilgrims on their way to and from Compostella.
    The motto of the Order was Rubet ensis sanguine Arabum (The sword is red with the blood of the Moors), and the badge was a blood-red sword in the form of a cross charged with a white scallop shell. The original thirteen Knights had taken the voluntary vow of chastity, but after 1350 a substitute or emienda could take the place of an absent Knight in the Chapter. The Knights were to be lions in battle and lambs in their convents, and they had to resign some of their personal rights. The married ones lost their patria potestas, so that they and their families became, nominally at least, the property of the Order.
    They were not only Crusaders on the field of battle, but they also regulated in many ways the relations between the Spanish monarchs and the Moslem world of Spain and North Africa in the matter of rescuing and ransoming captives, a great work which was afterwards continued by the Monks of Mercy. 18
    The Order grew in favour and wealth in the succeeding centuries, so that it possessed at the end of the fifteenth century no less than two hundred commanderies, with as many priories, and an immense number of castles and villages, together with property of every description. It had become, in fact, a state within a state, and the Catholic monarchs considered its independence of the Crown a menace to the unity of Spain.
    The moment for action came when the Master of the Order, the Conde de Paredes (whose memory has been immortalized by his son, Jorge Manrique, in Copias de Oro ), died, and Queen Isabella visited Uclés, the headquarters of the Order, and ordered the Chapter to appeal to the Pope to grant the Mastership to Ferdinand. And so in 1493 the Order and all its property were incorporated in the Crown. Henceforth its emblem, the little red sword, called el lagarto, or lizard, becomes a courtly symbol, which gives a subtle touch of elegance to the knights in El Greco’s pictures, who wear it on their doublets and cloaks. *

ST. JAMES GOES OVERSEAS

    The war of Granada, with its glorious pageant of chivalry that lives for us still in the fifty-four scenes carved on the choir-stalls of Toledo Cathedral, marked the end of the first phase of St. James’s apostolate for Spain. He had inspired the Spaniards to bring to fulfilment the dream of eight centuries of struggle against the Moors, but there were still tasks ahead and conquests overseas,*-which needed the supernatural aid of Santiago mounted on his snow-white steed. And so St. James the Moor-slayer crosses the ocean, riding in the clouds above the Spanish galleons, many of which bore his name on their bows. Cunninghame Graham, a modern conquistador, has described the epic in the following words: ‘There had been but one real conquest worthy of the name —that of the New World. The human race in all its annals holds no record like it. Uncharted seas; unnavigated gulfs; new constellations; the unfathomable black pit of the Magellan clouds; the Cross hanging in the sky; the very needle varying from the Pole; islands innumerable and an unknown world rising from out the sea; all unsuspected races living in a flora never seen by Europeans, made it an achievement unique in all the history of mankind.’ *
    Throughout the conquest ‘Santiago’ was the war-cry of the Spaniards in

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