Producing the Route of St. James: The Camino de Santiago in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

Situated on the western coast of Galicia, Santiago de Compostela claims to hold the tomb of St. James the Apostle. According to tradition, James was martyred in Palestine in 44 CE; his body was then miraculously transferred by boat to the Galician coast and buried there, as James was reputed to have evangelized the Iberian Peninsula. Veneration of the relics of St. James began in the ninth century, and by the twelfth century, Compostela was the end-point of an elaborate network of pilgrimage routes—the Camino de Santiago— originating all over Western Europe. Since the Middle Ages, the historiography of the city of Santiago de Compostela has been overshadowed by the Camino de Santiago. The modern revival of pilgrimage along the Camino in the nineteenth century constructed a political ideology that in turn acquired considerable cultural capital in the twentieth century. A look at Santiago de Compostela under Diego Gelmírez (1093–1140), the twelfth-century administrator, bishop, and archbishop-count of the cathedral, allows us to consider what is overlooked and who is excluded in the rich historiography of the cult of St. James of Compostela, a historiography that has often obscured the intensive efforts at production of the cult in the first place.