The formation of the Camino de Santiago routes from the Roman roads
The classic route of the Camino de Santiago Frances and its evolution
During the reigns of Ordoño I (850-866) and his son Alfonso (866-910), the Asturian kingdom managed to extend and consolidate its frontier as far as the river Duero. A large part of the road XXXIV Ab Asturica Burdigalam, with its towns of Ponferrada, Astorga, León and Carrión (Carrión de los Condes), thus fell within its territory. The inhabitants of the new southern territories used this road to head west as far as Lugo, and from there to the Locus Sancti Iacobi. Christian rule over the upper Ebro was likewise consolidated, opening up its full use all the way to Frankish territory.
The road followed by the earliest pilgrims crossing the Pyrenees was the aforementioned Roman road Ab Asturica Burdigalam, which linked Bordeaux with Astorga and entered the peninsula through the Roncesvalles pass, after which it reached Pamplona. From this city it continued westward through the valleys of the Araquil and Zadorra rivers, then reached present-day Miranda to cross the river Ebro, and continued on to the important junction at Briviesca, where it joined the road coming from Zaragoza that ran south of the Ebro. The stretch between Pamplona and Miranda allowed it to skirt, to the north, the natural obstacle posed by the Sierras de Andía and Urbasa.
Sancho el Mayor rerouted the road during the first third of the 11th century, shifting its course further south across open ground, where he had previously — for military reasons — developed a route protected by fortresses running through La Rioja. The new route crossed the valleys of the Arga, Salado and Ega rivers, initially reaching some point near Logroño, where it crossed the Ebro, and from 1095 onward passed through the city itself once it had been resettled and its bridge repaired. From there it headed to Nájera, continued on to Burgos and, shortly before arriving, rejoined the old Roman road, although on leaving the city it left it again to continue along an alternative route as far as Carrión de los Condes.
From Burgos it would continue via Tardajos to Sasamón, Melgar de Fernamental and Osorno as far as Carrión. These roads never fell out of use, since, being built on firmer and better-drained ground, they remained the best-kept routes throughout the medieval and modern periods, used mainly by convoys with slow, heavy means of transport and larger loads, as still happens today. To this day, recent land surveys of towns such as Grijalba still refer to the old Camino Real de Burgos – Melgar, as it passes through the municipal boundary, as the Calzada Romana or road of the pilgrims.
Between these two towns (Melgar and Carrión), however, the road along the Vía Romana de Italia a Hispania is known throughout its length as the Camino Frances or Carrera Francesa, a name commonly used for the Camino de Santiago. There are milestones along this Roman road that may indicate the passage of the Camino de Santiago along it — the Alto de Santiagón is one such case. The very recent identification of this road as the Vía Romana de Italia a Hispania or the Vía Aquitana seems reason enough for nothing to be known of its connection to the pilgrim past, as it has never been studied as such by historians of any period. This means that, across the vast, desolate plain of Tierra de Campos, on clay soils impossible to cross in wet weather, the Roman road’s infrastructure was, in the first instance, the shelter available — and if a town happened to be along the way, so much the better.
From Tardajos onward the road was consistently poor throughout. With no infrastructure of any kind, all that can be seen are a few lines of stones from isolated attempts to shore up the surface against the mud, and little else. In exchange, pilgrims found shelter in the villages — poor, but villages nonetheless. Despite the worse quality of its surface, this new route had the advantage of passing through more inhabited settlements than the old Roman road running further north.
Heading further west, once past Sahagún, the road reached the vicinity of the river Porma, and after crossing it, a branch left the main route towards León. From that city, a road ran north which, crossing the mountains, connected it to Oviedo. To rejoin the main road, the route followed a secondary Roman road that passed through present-day Valverde de la Virgen and met up with the main route again on crossing the river Órbigo. Shortly after this point it reached the important junction at Astorga, where it ended.
From Astorga the old road XIX Bracara Asturicam headed west. To overcome the natural obstacle posed by the mountains of León and reach Ponferrada, the original road passed through the Manzanal pass. Although some pilgrims used this old route, an alternative path developed further south, passing through the puerto de Foncebadón, which came to be far more widely used.
After Ponferrada, the road crossed the rivers Cua and Burbia at Cacabelos and Villafranca del Bierzo respectively, ran into the valley of the río Valcarce and crossed the mountain at Ambasmestas. Although shortly after this point the road continued on to Lugo, a more direct route was developed which, passing through O Cebreiro and Barbadelo, crossed the Miño at Portomarín and rejoined the old Roman route at Palas de Rei. This continued southwest to the Locus Sancti Iacobi, where it also joined the old XX per loca maritima coming from the area of Provincia A Coruña.
The oldest surviving mention of its use as a route to reach Compostela appears in the Crónica Silense, written ca. 1110, in a passage recounting events involving Sancho el Mayor that took place during the 1030s:
ipsis namque Pirineis iugis adusque castrum Nazara quidquid terre infra continetur a potestate paganorum eripiens, iter Sancti Iacobi quod barbárico timore per devia Alave peregrini declinabant absque retractionis obstáculo currere fecit.
“On his death, his son Sancho succeeded to his father’s kingdom. God, seeing him a devout avenger of the Christian faith through the toil of his army, not only granted him prosperous fortunes but also multiplied his offspring across many generations. For, wresting from pagan rule all the land contained between the very peaks of the Pyrenees and the castle of Nájera, he made the road of Santiago run without retreat — the road which pilgrims, out of fear of the barbarians, used to bend aside through Álava.”
A century later, the chronicler Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, archbishop of Toledo in the first half of the 13th century, wrote the Historia de los hechos de España (De rebus hispaniae) at the request of King Fernando III the Saint — grandson of Alfonso VIII, who had opened the new route via Bayonne–Irún to protect the dowry of his wife Eleanor of Plantagenet, Duchess of Aquitaine and Countess of Gascony — and in doing so reinterpreted and substantially altered the account. He states that Sancho el Mayor took the road via Nájera, Briviesca and Amaya to Carrión, the same road pilgrims had previously followed through Alava and the remote paths of Asturias (via Santillana) out of fear of the Moors. Later, in the 20th century, R. Menéndez Pidal adopted Jiménez de Rada’s version, interpreting in his own way that before the Camino Frances opened there had been an earlier coastal route passing through Alava and Asturias (via Santillana) and entering via Irún; a road that Sancho el Mayor of Navarra would already have rerouted in the 11th century via Nájera to Briviesca, Amaya and Carrión, and later via Santo Domingo de la Calzada, Belorado and Burgos.
The early route along the Vía Aquitana, it appears — and in light of the scarce data we have, as noted above — carried pilgrimage traffic through Álava until the reign of Sancho el Mayor, following the old Roman road De Hispania in Aequitania. Ab Asturica Burdigalam.
By the middle years of that 11th century, it had already become common to refer to the route as the «Camino de Santiago» or «road of the Franks». A good number of hospitals were built along its length, including at the mountain passes that presented particular difficulty. Bridges were built or fitted out for river crossings where none existed. In this way, by the end of the century the route was already firmly established and, with only minor variations, was the one used by pilgrims over the following centuries.
The route became linked to the old road from Oviedo owing to the growing popularity of the cult of the Arca Santa during the 12th century, which made this destination the second most important pilgrimage within the Iberian Peninsula. As a result, a good number of pilgrims would branch off from León and choose to continue to Santiago via the old Asturian capital, despite having to use a road considered «poorly populated and barren, and much more mountainous than the other one».
To reach Oviedo, pilgrims travelled via La Robla, Puente de Alba, La Pola de Gordón, Buiza, Villasimpliz, Villamanín, the puerto de Pajares, Puente de los Fierros, Campomanes, Mamorana, Pola de Lena, Ujo, Mieres del Camino, El Padrún, Olloniego and Manjoya. From there they continued towards Lugo along the old road via Grado, Salas, Tineo and Castroverde. After the walled city, they went on via San Juan del Alto, El Burgo, El Hospital, Retorta and Ferreira de Negral until reaching Libureiro, where they rejoined the main road.
Founder of the Vía Aquitania
Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, together with Quintus Fabius Maximus Allobrogicus, defeated the Gallic tribes of the Allobroges and the Arverni in 121 BC. In 118 BC, he founded the city of Narbo Martius, today Narbonne, and built the Via Domitia to make travel to Hispania easier. The Vía Aquitana is a branch of the Via Domitia running through southwestern Gaul in the province of Aquitania. Who commissioned the Vía Aquitania is unknown, but it was probably Domitius Ahenobarbus, with the aim of more easily collecting tribute from the recently conquered tribes.