St James in Tuscany: The Opera di San Jacopo of Pistoia and Pilgrimage to Compostela

Abstract

Pilgrimage is universally recognised by historians as a principal feature of medieval popular religion, if by ‘popular’ we mean something in which the ordinary laity fully participated. While we can be confident of the fact of this participation, accurate measures of its scale are less easy to come by, while putting names to the thousands of humble participants is less easy still. Narrative sources, such as chronicles and hagiographies, tend to describe the pilgrimages of the great and good (and also of the not so good), and even when, especially in and after the fourteenth century, pilgrims themselves begin to leave accounts of their journeys for their own satisfaction, or for the edification and information of others, they can be seen, almost by definition, as standing somewhat apart from the nameless masses because they are either literate themselves, or addressing a literate pilgrimage ‘public’.

The task of putting not merely names, but faces, to ‘ordinary’ pilgrims is not quite hopeless, however, although the materials which make it possible vary in their availability and abundance at different times and places. Use has been made of monastic cartularies to trace at least fragments of the biographies and family histories of members of the knightly classes whose participation in pilgrimage, it has been argued, helped to foster the crusading movement. A little later, the records of English royal government reveal the names of numerous pilgrims who sought royal licence and safe-conduct for their travels, registered the appointment of attorneys for the duration of their absence, or, as witnesses at inquisitions post mortem, remembered births and deaths by the year in which they themselves, or kin or friends, went to the Holy Land, to Canterbury, Compostela or elsewhere. Some at least of these names are those of men (and women) who occur elsewhere in surviving records and about whose lives and connections it is therefore possible to know at least a little. From all over Christendom, too, there are wills, made by intending pilgrims as a necessary part of their preparations.