The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James Read Online Free PDF

CHARLEMAGNE AND ROLAND

    Raoul le Glabre, in the Prologue of his Chronicles, recalls how Charlemagne and his son Louis restored the Orbis Romanus: ‘quasi una domus famulatur suis imperatoribus Orbis Romanus’. And again: ‘Charlemagne exalted the Kingdom of the Franks; he ruled from Mount Gargano to Córdoba, and though engaged in wars in Gaul, in Germany and in Lombardy, he went to the assistance of the Christians who bore the cruel hordes of the Saracens.’ The Charlemagne who appears before us in the Chanson de Roland is a baron, but still more a saint and still more the leader of the people chosen by God; he reigns over the Franks of France like Saul over Israel, and his twelve peers like the Twelve Apostles around Jesus. His knights are men in the flower of their age, and he after two hundred years still leads them as he led their ancestors in endless wars which are always Holy wars. His army, like that of the Crusaders, is full of priests, and he himself is a priest as David and Moses were; when he sleeps, St. Gabriel watches by his bed; God speaks to him by the voice of the angels; when he prays the sun stops in the heavens; when his warriors go into battle he blesses them with his right hand.
    His figure, though Godlike, is human nevertheless, and near to us, for it is sorrowful. We weep with him for Roland the fair, slain at Roncevaux in 778. 13
    But the angel of God is implacable with Charlemagne the Emperor, and reminds him what his mission must be. Roland lies dead upon the green sward at Roncevaux with his face turned towards Spain, so that Charlemagne should not think he turned his back upon his foes. Roncevaux was a lost battle, but Roland became the best-beloved hero of the Middle Ages, as immortal as Leonidas at Thermopylae, and the minstrels sang of his deeds for centuries. At Hastings in 1066, the Norman jongleur, Taillefer sang of Roland as he spurred on his horse and tossed his sword aloft before William’s army. And the memory of Roland echoed in the minds of innumerable pilgrims of the eleventh and twelfth centuries as they plodded through the passes of the Pyrenees towards far-off Compostella.
    They thought of Roland when they entered the dark valley of Roncevaux at eventide through the dismal gorge with its grim rocks which seemed to echo and re-echo with the distant battle-cry, “Mont-joie”, and the melancholy winding of Roland’s horn, Olifaunt. And they thought of Roland’s peer, Archbishop Turpin, who not only celebrated Mass and consecrated knights, pledging Heaven itself as a return for every life, but turned aside to handle lance and blade. For, said the Chanson, not even St. Michael himself fought more fiercely against the fallen angels and ‘Soon four hundred pagans lie stretched around him—a tremendous exploit, even for an archbishop’. And the dying Roland, seeing his beloved archbishop lying dead on the green , sward with his shapely white hands crossed over his breast, commends to God the soul ‘of one who all his life had been a valiant champion against the heathen both in word and deed’.
    So sang the twelfth-century poet of the Chanson, but then we are told by the scholars that the poet was wrong and that Turpin never even took part in the Battle of Roncevaux, for when it was taking place he was celebrating Mass a few leagues away.
    According to the tradition in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, after the disaster Turpin had returned to France and retired to Vienne, where he laid up his helmet and sword and cured his wounds. Then, being at leisure, he resolved to write his memoirs, for his friend, Leoprand, the Dean of Aix-la-Chapelle, had asked him to tell the story of the Emperor Charlemagne’s expeditions to deliver Spain and Galicia from the Saracens. And so the good Archbishop wrote back announcing his intention of describing in all sincerity, as befits one who is Charlemagne’s historian, the marches and counter-marches of the Emperor, the miracles of God and