The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [33]
Basse Navarre is very different from the pretty farmland of neighboring Labourd. It has a wild look with reddish ferns on the slopes and, on the crests, rough rock outcroppings like huge, gray jagged teeth. The last refuge, where pilgrims arrived to prepare for the crossing, was the walled town of St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port. In early morning light the pilgrims would leave the red stone gate traveling toward the steep green pastures that looked soft as chenille against the Pyrenees. The mountains in the morning seemed to form a colossal wall with gauzelike fog draped over the peaks. But there is a path through the wall from the little village of Arnéguy, up to Valcarlos where Charlemagne had waited for Roland, down again past little waterfalls and streams and up again to the heights of Ibañeta and then down once more to the pines of Roncesvalles, where in 1127 a resting home for pilgrims was built, a home which still stands today.
Centuries of passing pilgrims brought Romanesque architecture to Basqueland with its huge scale and carvings and ornaments, depicting biblical lessons to instruct travelers. The pilgrimage also spread French ideas. Many French pilgrims settled in the region, and monasteries in the Spanish Basque provinces came to have more in common with those of France than those of the rest of Iberia. When the monastery of Leyre decided to build a new church, the design was taken from Limousin. Perhaps the ultimate expression of the growing French influence was in the thirteenth century, when the royal house of Navarra, devoid of heirs, turned to French families to continue the monarchy.
Arnéguy in the early twentieth century. The small stone bridge is the border between France and Spain.
Yet in spite of this seemingly considerable openness to the French, Aimeric de Picaud warned pilgrims that they would be poorly received by the Basques. This twelfth-century French monk—the same man who concluded that Basques were of Scottish descent because they wore skirts—wrote a five-volume work, probably with the backing of the influential Cluny monastery in Burgundy, collecting all the stories, legends, and miracles connected with Saint James and including practical information for traveling pilgrims. This work, the Liber Sancti Jacobi, which is still kept at the cathedral of Compostela, became widely known in medieval Europe as the Codex of Calixtus. The latter title comes from a story circulated by Aimeric de Picaud, which is today dismissed as a complete fabrication, that Pope Calixtus II sent the text for editorial comment to the patriarch of Jerusalem and the archbishop of Santiago. Approval of the text, according to Aimeric de Picaud, arrived in the form of a vision.
Included in this divine text is a section on “the crimes of the bad innkeepers along the way of my apostle.” According to Aimeric, the Basques, and especially the Navarrese, were crude, spoke primitively, and were given to crime. The Codex describes them as “enemies of our French people. A Basque or Navarrese would do in a French man for a copper coin.” He recounted how pilgrims would find themselves surrounded by Basques demanding payment. If they refused, they would be stripped and robbed and sometimes, he claimed, killed.
Aimeric made numerous references to wanton sexuality. “When the Navarrese get excited, the man shows the woman and the woman shows the man, that which they should keep concealed. The Navarrese fornicate shamelessly with animals. They say that a Navarrese keeps his mule and his mare chained up to keep others from enjoying them.”
Aimeric de Picaud came from the Poitiers region and lived during the time of the Crusades, the Chanson de Roland, and considerable anti-Muslim frenzy. As pilgrims climbed through the pass to the heights of Ibañeta, now the famous site of Roland’s death, and down to the hospice at Roncesvalles,