Legend, Codex, and the Economics of “El Camino” Heritage

The Codex Calixtinus survived into our time as the earliest and most complete of a group of rare manuscript compilations honoring Saint James “the greater,” or Santiago, one of the apostles closest to Jesus. Among its contents is a “pilgrim’s guide,” which nowadays is the best known and, in translation, the most widely read of the five books that constitute the codex. The terminus of the journey is the supposed resting place of St. James in the crypt of the Cathedral of Santiago. The pilgrim’s guide remains one of the earliest extant records of travel across northern Iberia. It is rightly called the first true guidebook for European travelers, since it recommends sites to see as well as people and places to avoid. More than a record of travels taken (indeed, like modern travel guides, its author did not visit all of the specified sites), it takes as its explicit purposes advertising Santiago’s cult, estimating the several values of pilgrimage to the site, and conjuring up for readers positive images of the trek.^{Footnote 3}

St. James as illustrated in the Codex Calixtinus. (photo credit: Corbis images)

The curious interweaving of history and legend that brought Santiago to Spain—his beheading on order of King Herod in 42 ce, the purported translation of the bodily remains by sea, and their later discovery in a tomb in Galicia—is rightly described as “a puzzle-work of quite incredible complexity.”^{Footnote 4} A hodgepodge of sources offered two bits of instrumental legend that initiated the search leading to the discovery of the saintly remains: first, that James served as the first apostolic missionary to Hispania, at the western extremity of the Roman Empire; and second, that since, according to Jerome and other Church fathers, the bodies of all of the early disciples ultimately came to be buried in the centers of their mission activities, James’s remains were to be found in Spain. The Codex Calixtinus tells us that some eight centuries after the saint’s death, Theodomir, Bishop of Iria Flavia, sought to find the remains. The timing of Theodomir’s search is significant to historians in its correspondence to the early stirrings of a Christian Reconquest of Muslim Al-Andalus. Following stars and other signs, the search party discovered an unusual tomb, which Theodomir recognized as the one he sought. He immediately built a shrine at the site to house the apostle’s relics and thereafter produced an account of the tomb’s discovery to publicize his find. The hagiographical details proffered by Theodomir along with other accounts of the translatio take their place alongside the pilgrim’s guide as one of the five books that would eventually be gathered into the Codex Calixtinus.

Some readers may find dubious the burial of one of Jesus’ disciples in Galicia, but the story has carried great weight for millions of Christian believers for many centuries, with profound consequences. In the years after the discovery around 840, Christians across Europe took great delight in the news of Santiago’s whereabouts, and pilgrims began to travel to the site. By the decades after 950, several important bishops and secular lords left accounts of their having undertaken the difficult journey to seek the saint’s favor. Diego Galmírez, who served as Bishop of Compostela for four decades beginning in 1101, played the most instrumental role in promoting James’s cult. He completed transfer of his Episcopal see from Iria Flavia to Compostela, he gained the approval of Pope Calixtus II to raise its status to an archbishopric, and he effected plans initiated by his predecessor to build a cathedral at a scale worthy of James’s prominence. In the same years, perhaps under Diego’s direction, one or more clerics, perhaps of Gallic origin, produced the pilgrim’s guide.^{Footnote 5} In total, the Codex Calixtinus comprises the two parts mentioned thus far—the book recording the transfer of James’s remains and the guide for pilgrim travelers—and three other books: a book of miracles credited to St. James, a book of liturgical material for celebrating the cult, and the oldest version of the Pseudo-Turpin retelling Charlemagne’s fabled (and fictitious) exploits against Spanish Muslims under James’s inspiration. An appended letter attributed to Calixtus II lent that pope’s authority to the collection; also attached are songs celebrating the cult that count among the earliest extant examples of polyphonic music in Europe. After its compilation, by 1170, the codex became the exemplar from which copies were made for dissemination.

The appearance of the Codex Calixtinus coincided with a dramatic expansion of Santiago’s cult as a cultural heritage phenomenon. Travel to Santiago grew, making his tomb the third most valued pilgrimage site in Christianity after Jerusalem and Rome. This physically demanding and spiritually meaningful journey was an expensive one for pilgrims and a lucrative one for those who offered accommodations, entertainment, and libation. In the middle ages, the way to St. James meant big business.^{Footnote 6} Pilgrimage waned in the early modern period after James’s bones disappeared—hidden, it is said, to keep them from falling prey to 16th-century English attackers. The pilgrimage revived when excavations after 1878 uncovered the crypt.^{Footnote 7} For its part, the codex was dismembered, with various parts taking their separate journeys until rejoined in the 20th century.

The route to St. James has become big business once again. According to records kept by the cathedral, the number of sanctioned pilgrims traveling annually to visit the shrine of St. James in 2010 exceeded 150,000, although roughly 10 times that many el camino trekkers do not receive the requisite stamps in an official credencial issued by cathedral authorities.^{Footnote 8} We might imagine that energetic Catholics, hearty Hispanophiles, and bicycling college-age adventurers make up the bulk of contemporary el camino travelers, but the demographic makeup remains very broad, as it was in the medieval period.^{Footnote 9} Nowadays, travelers come from within Spain and from far beyond Europe’s borders, not only by foot but also by horse, plane, car, and bike. They stop at inns and hotels, they indulge along the way in Spain’s gustatory delights, and they drink lots of wine. By some estimates, Santiago’s story has a direct hold upon some 4.5 million annual visitors to northern Spain who do not even set foot upon the pilgrims’ path. On the modern camino, and for Spain’s tourism-heavy economy more generally, the money spent and earned, by whichever of many current estimates one accepts, is huge.^{Footnote 10} And the spiritual rewards, for those who seek them, are incalculable. Certainly, walking el camino, as medieval pilgrims once did, signifies the consumption of a heritage product and perpetuates the pilgrimage in our secular age as “a living growing phenomenon.”^{Footnote 11}

Valuing Vellum and Bone

The Council of Europe declared the pilgrimage route to Santiago its first European cultural itinerary in 1987, and the cathedral that houses the Codex Calixtinus became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993. UNESCO asserts that some 1800 buildings along the route are of significant historic interest, which, beyond mere quantitative fact, is a measure of the quality of historic experience on offer along el camino and an indicator of the depth of imagination through which one can travel.^{Footnote 12} It is also an indicator of the high risk of theft borne by religious objects encountered along the way.^{Footnote 13}

The tourist industry that has grown up to serve the annual migration to Santiago is connected directly to the valuable Codex Calixtinus, since it is that manuscript that embodies the story of how a holy man who lived in the closest possible proximity to divinity became the focus of Spain’s spiritual geography. The codex is the textual foundation of Santiago’s place as Spain’s patron saint. From an economic perspective, it is an invaluable asset. In 1990 an insurance broker sought six million euros to insure the manuscript. Cathedral administrators decided not to pay the sum since insuring the one-of-a-kind, irreplaceable item seemed irrelevant. Despite its rarity, or indeed because of it, the codex serves as one tangible measure of the value of an experience in time and place, of continuity and change over a significant expanse of time, and also of a perennial journey linked to notions of perpetuity. But consideration of “value” raises difficult questions with respect to the codex and other “goods of cultural interest,” as Spanish law puts it. Measures of cultural heritage value are imprecise, reasonably so if the useful tension is to be maintained between “heritage” (centered on the past) and “culture” (about relevance to the present). In particular, persistent questions include how to measure the value of exemplary heritage relative to accessible, credible copies; how to assess the relative heritage value of movable assets in comparison to fixed architectural heritage; and how best to simultaneously promote and protect the “intangible” value of heritage assets like the codex. How policymakers answer these questions will have real impacts upon the safeguarding of treasures like the codex and the means by which the public can come to know and appreciate cultural properties.

The interesting and difficult question of the relative value of originals and exemplars was given special poignancy during the period of the stolen codex’s disappearance. The cathedral’s administrators rarely brought their prize out into public view; instead, they made available in a viewing case a facsimile of very high quality, nearly indistinguishable from the original, complete with wormholes, weathering stains, and brilliant illustrations. Given that enterprising archivists and booksellers have produced digital and print editions and translations—some exceedingly handsome and pricey—perhaps it could be argued that the absence of the original is no great loss.^{Footnote 14}

Walter Benjamin considered this modern devaluation of exemplars when he argued in the 1930s that copies made by mass-production technologies reduced the value of originals. He meant to conceive a communistic theory of art, one that made important objects broadly accessible by valuing their copies. The token copies carried nearly all of the properties of the originals. On the other hand, he recognized that “the uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition.” From his perspective, tradition meant the suspect structures of religion and ritual supporting concentrations of status and wealth. Nonetheless, he recognized that “even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” Moreover, “the presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.”^{Footnote 15} Preservationists and cultural heritage proponents may disagree with Benjamin’s motives and premises, but they nearly all agree with him that what holds for artist-sanctioned multiples, photographs of important places or things, or facsimiles of manuscripts does not hold for premodern artifacts like the Codex Calixtinus. We value the copied images we see of certain objects like the Lindesfarne Gospels or the Mona Lisa or the Codex Calixtinus because they serve as pointers or placeholders in the absence of a wished-for direct relationship between the viewer and the original. Originals and authentic artifacts are different in kind. The weight of history and cultural memory resides in them. That is why we work so hard to preserve them.

Skeptical readers of my effort to restore an appreciation for exemplars may find the evidence weak. The tautology—that we ought to protect one-of-a-kind manuscripts because they are unique—becomes especially problematic when we consider that what counts as singularly significant takes a cultural turn. Asian cultures do not share contemporary Western notions of authenticity. Japan’s Ise Grand Shrine is from one perspective a historically significant cultural landmark, having remained the focus of a rich landscape of Shinto architecture linked to the imperial family since at least the seventh century. However, UNESCO has not put the shrine on its list of World Heritage sites. The reason is simple, if abstruse: The shrine is demolished and rebuilt every 20 years. The centuries-old practice makes the site perpetually old and perennially new in local conception, but disqualifies it according to Western standards of authentic antiquity. In China, Fu Zhipin imitations of ancient vases take their authentic place in a cyclical world view in which the past is perpetuated through its active recreation.^{Footnote 16} Some observers assert that the Western proclivity for authenticity is of recent provenance, dating to the Renaissance or later, although medievalists like myself can see evidence for it in the early Christian theft of relics. Indeed, it may be the peculiar Western practice of making old objects a focus of devotional fetish that not only contributes to a market for fakes but that also encourages sensational thefts like that of the Codex Calixtinus.

The foregoing reflection on the problem of copy and exemplar reminds us that large architectural artifacts, such as China’s Great Wall, the Roman Coliseum, the Panama Canal, and the 1800 examples of heritage architecture along the Camino de Santiago, do not suffer the burden that texts do. While nothing is forever, architecture seems more substantially rooted in a tangible past and more easily substantiated in a signified future than ink on sheepskin hidden away in an archive. Still, it should not be inevitable that UNESCO fails at the promise it made in its Constitution to protect book heritage.^{Footnote 17}

In one sense, what is valuable about the Codex Calixtinus and manuscripts like it is the information it carried between the lines of text. The codex carried valuable information about people and places in 12th-century Europe. In recording his impressions of an extended network of pilgrimage paths through 12th-century France and then across northern Spain, pointing out the sites and saints to be visited along the way, the author marked a crucial moment in European history. A period of population growth and economic expansion culminated in the revitalization of Christian Spain consequent with its reintegration into a European society that was beginning its geo-political ascendance. Presumptions aside about the rise of “the West,” there is no doubt that monastic expansion and pilgrimage travel along el camino contributed to an increasingly tenacious conception of European Christendom, which gave impetus to a militarized Christian rejection of Muslim dominance on Iberian soil in a so-called Reconquest.

The pilgrim’s guide offers a unique lens through which readers and el camino travelers can view Spain’s historic cultural diversity. The sensational prejudices recorded in the guide count for so much of the strange fun in reading it. Its writer shows Basques and the Navarrese in a pretty bad light, indicating that travelers may suffer the consequences of passing through a land where ferrymen overturn their own boats in order to drown their clients, butchers sharpen their knives aside poisoned streams where horses die after a drink, and peasants guard personal interests in their own animals’ affections with chastity belts. The writer’s exuberance for French saints, French churches, and French wine evinces his origins while offering curious confirmatory evidence of common enough prejudices about the self-absorbed Frenchman.

The pilgrim’s guide connects to a broad range of spin-off traditions, histories, and legends. The iconography of St. James includes the scallop shell, now a ubiquitous sign of Christian pilgrimage even beyond the pilgrimage trail. And James himself has taken on more than one persona. He is the missionary apostle of Jesus with gospel in hand and the Christian pilgrim clutching a walking staff. Monks at the Abbey of Reading venerated the saint as a divinus medicus, a holy healer.^{Footnote 18} In a sequel tradition, outside the contents of the codex but a result of its capacity to instigate myth and legend, James becomes the Matamoros, the moor-slayer, who, for example, at Clavijo in 844 and Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, mounts his ghostly white charger to lead Christian troops into spiritual combat against Muslim foes. The Cathedral dedicated to Santa María in Burgos, the seat of Castilian royal power, the seat of Castilian royal power during the High Middle Ages and a major stop along el camino, houses a mannequin of St. James with a movable arm holding a sword that is still used to confirm new entrants into the military Order of Santiago.

The Codex Calixtinus, then, is an exquisite repository of a complex cultural heritage about which we still have much to learn. Scholar-academics and tourism managers could enhance tourism in Spain by putting the stories and histories it contains to better use. We might say that this is an opportunity accorded as a second chance, since, while the codex went missing, it could be exploited only via the substitute copies. Of course, there are bones in Compostela that may be the bones of the apostle James, but those bones could not tell their own story in its entirety. Nor, arguably, could they by themselves initiate a thousand years of pilgrimage history.^{Footnote 19} On its first folio the Codex Calixtinus calls itself “the Jacobus.” It is, in some respects, as much a part of St. James as his physical remains. The real value of the codex is the way it has generated memory, the way it lives like a dream not only in the minds of travelers to Santiago but more broadly in the popular imagination about Spain and about the medieval.

Proponents of religious and cultural tourism should be cautioned here. Over the centuries, interest in the codex has waxed and waned with interest in the pilgrimage, and vice versa. In the period from the Reformation through the breakdown of the Spanish Empire, the body of St. James went into hiding, the codex was dismembered, and the Cathedral at Compostela became just another façade for baroque experiments. In that period the pilgrims stayed home. Present-day observers may doubt that the current enthusiasm can diminish, but history suggests that Santiago-related tourism is fragile. We are fortunate that the Codex Calixtinus is no longer lost to us. We are equally fortunate that we do not need to test the cultural carrying capacity of the facsimiles, that we do not need to test whether a dream would fail to recur because the talismanic dream-inducing object went missing.

Codex in the Gap: Competing Tendencies in Principle, Law, and Administration

What counts as valuable in cultural heritage policy and law varies with the social and economic priorities of whatever place and time one examines. International, national, intra- or subnational, and local interests are in play. Contests between proprietary and public interests arise, and advocates of tourism and other market potentials vie with proponents of conservation and preventive limited access. Principles, laws, administrative activities, and public action do not all move in single-direction lockstep.

Spaniards have been unfortunate heirs to a legacy of spectacular destruction of their cultural assets; especially often cited are the destruction of historic infrastructure caused by Napoleon’s armies during the Peninsular War (1808–1814) and the abandonment and disrepair caused to church property by the Desamortización carried out through the 19th century. Nonetheless, Spain still enjoys an embarrassment of historical riches. As historiographical studies of the evolution of Spanish heritage law point out, Spaniards have long recognized and honored the great wealth of artifacts left to them by their ancestors.^{Footnote 20}

When efforts to define and protect cultural heritage began in earnest early in the 20th century, Spanish authorities took an early lead. The nation has done extremely well at positing law based upon some laudable principles not only for the protection of its heritage but also for promoting public access. The Law of Excavations and Antiquities of 1911 and the Law of Monuments of 1915 count among early efforts in the modern era to safeguard important heritage markers. The Spanish Constitution of 1978, ushering in a democratic constitutional monarchy following years of Franco dictatorship, made explicit in Article 46 the state’s responsibility for preserving and enhancing access to its cultural heritage assets. Beyond Article 46, commentators have asserted that heritage protections identified in that article are in principle related to environmental protections defended by Articles 41 and 45, and thus, as constitutional principle, Spanish land and the heritage artifacts found upon it are part and parcel of Spaniards’ national trust, making up a single “indispensable collective solidarity.”^{Footnote 21} The Spanish Parliament passed a Historical Heritage Act in 1985 that explicated various means of compliance with the principles of the 1978 Constitution. Importantly, while the Heritage Act safeguards fixed heritage resources like important archeological sites and exemplary historic architecture, it also specifically mentions and seeks to defend movable heritage.^{Footnote 22}

The Spanish state has been precocious in its role as a promoter and agent of culture, and its efforts, for the most part, have been commendable. However, to turn principle into action, the 1985 Heritage Act and later legislative accretions to it give broad scope to Spain’s autonomous regions over the design of legislation governing the administration of cultural affairs in their local communities. In practice, the state defers much of its active, positive role in heritage protection to its autonomous regional governments, with the result that, in Sanz Salla’s assessment, what now exists is a “complex mix of state and regional law” built upon definitions of heritage that remain “intentionally vague,” “ambiguous and indeterminate.” Quirosa García calls national law in its application to regional and local situations “confused and insufficient.” Administrative directives passed by local communities, by the autonomous regions, and at the national level can end up working at cross purposes, serving competing ends, and UNESCO’s deference to states also offers occasion for nurturing legal inefficacies.^{Footnote 23}

Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy hands over the recovered Codex Calixtinus to Archbishop Julián Barrio. (photo credit: Corbis images)

The Codex Calixtinus is a Spanish national treasure, perhaps even a world heritage resource, but you would not know it by reading the law because, in law, the codex belongs to the bishop of the Cathedral of Compostela. Taking note of this leads us to consider questions about state’s rights vis-à-vis proprietary interests. At issue in practical terms are the administrative responsibilities on public behalf of nongovernmental owners of patrimony. The Heritage Act of 1985 attempts to safeguard privately owned and Church-owned movable heritage by, for example, preventing sale without notification to the state or penalizing those found guilty of causing imprudent damage to heritage goods in their possession. Moreover, Spanish law conceives of a “social function,” as Sanz Salla puts it, applicable to heritage assets like the Codex Calixtinus that recognizes public right of access to privately held heritage properties.^{Footnote 24} Nonetheless, ambiguities in the law generally work to the benefit of proprietary over public interests.^{Footnote 25} The intervention of international bodies like UNESCO seem in some respects only to add a fuzzily defined supranational tier to confirmations of ownership interests.^{Footnote 26}

Proprietary interests in law and practice have become intimately situated within a commodification mentality. The most valuable cultural heritage assets, the ones that garner the most attention in the application of heritage law, are the ones that can be “sold” to tourists either as specific tourism destinations, like the Alhambra, or as objects removed from their original settings for presentation in museums, such as the Burgos Cathedral’s façade sculptures. Heritage researchers regard the emphasis on proprietors’ rights and commodification as a universal concern.^{Footnote 27}

A related concern is incompetence, neglect, or mismanagement by public or private administrators of heritage assets. The case of the Codex Calixtinus illustrates a range of occasions for negligence. The admitted thief exploited the cathedral’s weak security systems and lax oversight, thus demonstrating that currently available policies and practices meant to protect cultural assets do not suffice. The Archbishop of the Cathedral of Santiago ultimately dismissed José María Díaz, the cathedral’s dean and, for 35 years, its chief archivist charged with responsibility for the codex. Díaz’s firing from his post was in no way swift, he will not leave the archbishop’s employ, and he asserts that he is a victim rather than a lax defender of an important piece of Spain’s patrimony.^{Footnote 28} In general, as in this case, few toothy sanctions fall upon local proprietors who screw up.

Of course, the theft of the codex is not the only recent cultural catastrophe. The looting of the National Museum of Iraq that followed the U.S. bombing of Baghdad in 2003 is a sufficient reminder that international decisions can have devastating national and local consequences, all of which might be characterized as accidental fallout. Nonetheless, the theft in Compostela takes its place among egregious criminal appropriations of relics and religious objects that could have easily been prevented.^{Footnote 29} In truth, some cultural assets presumed to have universal value, especially texts, are provided too little oversight, and improving the situation will require making extremely difficult decisions about who manages those assets and how.

Better protection of heritage artifacts, and enhanced access to them, will mean creating legal and policy mechanisms that take us beyond the current limitations of proprietary responsibility. Perhaps these should include strengthened enforcement of specific provisions for payment by proprietors of the costs of safeguarding a public interest in a privately held asset under penalty of confiscation. Perhaps the notion of a tragedy of the commons, so much in vogue at present, must be turned on its heads so that private ownership becomes the tragedy.

Underlying the shifting emphases in various and vague definitions of heritage is the distinction, broad and thinly elaborated, between movable and immovable heritage, a distinction that is not helpful to movable cultural heritage.^{Footnote 30} Despite Spain’s period of Desamortización, through which much of the property of the Catholic Church was confiscated by state authority, the Church is still the single largest property owner in Spain. We tend to think of the Church’s holdings in real property terms despite the fact that very significant movable resources, like the codex, are held in monastic and Episcopal archives. My own personal experience examining manuscripts in several monastic archives has taught me that these resources are often not well accounted for and are not controlled in keeping with best practices for their preservation. Some scholars have pleaded for stronger controls and even urged continued confiscations of Church property.^{Footnote 31} Spain’s Catholic institutions can draw upon huge reserves of political clout and legal precedent to block such action. Nonetheless, movable heritage resources like the Codex Calixtinus could benefit from more thought about decoupling proprietorship and administrative responsibility.

A Landscape For Santiago’s Memory

The defense of heritage is an especially messy business at sites where cultural interests collide. Santiago himself offers a poignant example of past and present contests of cultures. The saint developed a reputation as the Matamoros, a killer of Muslims (Moors), whose pugnacity good Christians deemed worthy of the greatest honor. Numerous paintings and sculptures along el camino depict him on horseback with sword raised, trampling beheaded Muslim enemies. One of these sculptures was prominently displayed in the Cathedral at Compostela until, in our current age of political correctness, the cathedral staff responded to protests and removed it. The removal brought counter-protests, which inspired several years of fierce debate that ultimately gave way to a compromise. The sculpture has been restored to its place of importance in public view inside the cathedral, but it is decorated with foliage that hides from view James’s hoof-beaten enemies.^{Footnote 32} This is a compromise that covers up an important, if tendentious, legacy.

The Cathedral of Cordoba/La Mesquita, also a UNESCO World Heritage Site, has a similarly contested history. Fernando III, the Catholic King of Castile, found this famously beautiful mosque so exquisite that when he captured it in 1236, he had it consecrated as a Catholic Church rather than destroying it. Fernando’s son, Alfonso the Wise, began a building campaign that eventuated in the creative reconstruction we see today—a cathedral of Gothic exterior and Renaissance interior built into the very heart of the mosque.^{Footnote 33} In recent decades, Cordoba’s Muslims have petitioned for permission to pray in the space (as Christians routinely do), but their pleas have been rebuffed. In 2010 a group of European Muslim tourists visited the site, and several knelt to pray, apparently spontaneously. Security guards sought to prevent their prayers, starting a fight that left the guards seriously injured.^{Footnote 34} Granada’s Alhambra Palace has been the locus of incidents of defacement, some of them apparently motivated by religious sentiments.^{Footnote 35}

While the Codex Calixtinus has not itself suffered from controversies of this kind, the dissemination of its contents played an instrumental, if indirect, part in the promotion of Santiago as the Matamoros, and thus, it was an instigator of cultural contests, as texts often are.^{Footnote 36} The question of contested heritage is a live one for manuscripts. Although we may want to wish away inquisitional book-burning and book-banning malice as a thing of the past, evidence from within the United States, in Afghanistan, and elsewhere demonstrates that culture wars are often fought through and about books. Manuscripts often become the collateral damage when cultures clash, as was the case at the start of the Iraq war. More instrumentally, texts are often the talismans that provoke or aggravate cultural wars. This latter point is not easily rectified since it is one of the essential features of heritage texts that their contested reinterpretation makes them prominent vehicles for moving a living history into the present. Such is the case with respect to the cultural heritage associated with Spain’s Civil War.^{Footnote 37}

Despite these cultural contests, and perhaps because of them, efforts to preserve heritage while simultaneously animating its public appreciation should be encouraged. And yet, extolling the virtues and benefits of individual historic resources has its limits. Certainly it is better than not to place important sites on various heritage lists and to enter movables onto inventories, although, even here, administration of such lists continues an incomplete experiment, a process of “constantly trying out new methods.”^{Footnote 38}

At the extreme, recent examples of administrative efforts to make lists of cultural heritage assets lead one to wonder whether the preservation discourse will be drained of significance. UNESCO’s recent willingness to count falconry and the Mediterranean diet among Spain’s “intangible” cultural heritage seems shortsighted. Such efforts at identifying individual pieces of culture, ever tinier bits of history relevant to some constituency somewhere, like panning for ever smaller nuggets of gold, will garner decreasing returns on investment and, along with the incessant push to draw maximum tourist dollars out of every heritage asset, may bring our contemporary heritage boom to a bust. To use another metaphor, we should avoid wearing out the whole fabric of heritage concept and practice by patching it up with ever thinner threads. Surely, we must particularize the touristic appeal of major sites like the Alhambra, Cordoba’s Cathedral Mosque, and, indeed, the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. But overdoing such atomizing attention may backfire. We might find it a more beneficial approach in the long run to attempt to nurture public sentiment for a range of heritage resources taken as a collective, composite whole. Instead of exhorting tourists to order tapas as a way of consuming culture or to attend human-castle-building events to participate in some vague “intangible” referent to the past, we may find it a worthier and more workable goal to link the full array of heritage resources to broad landscapes of historic riches.^{Footnote 39}

Just as stone walls inscribe memory upon a landscape, we need to learn to appreciate the ways in which individual heritage assets, movable and immovable, contribute to broad geographies of memory and meaning.^{Footnote 40} The concept of cultural landscapes has its own recent history. Cultural landscapes were added to the operational guidelines of the World Heritage Convention in 1992. Since then, parties to the convention have asserted the place of cultural landscapes “at the heart of the notion of World Heritage,” although, in practice, identifying, promoting, and preserving landscape heritage continues to entail “numerous challenges.” One challenge is that while cultural memory studies have become so numerous that students can now receive specialized master’s degrees in the subject, the literature often focuses on discrete islands of commodified heritage assets when it might instead envision an expanse of memory resources. It is a significant challenge as well that movable heritage has not found its place in discussions of cultural or heritage landscapes or environments that emphasize “well-established, long-occupied places.”^{Footnote 41} One compensating suggestion is to learn to see various individual heritage assets as participants in a whole network of cultural assets that make, store, consume, and employ cultural memories.^{Footnote 42} This complementary ecological understanding of cultural property could more easily accommodate movable heritage, giving it a firmer place within heritage environments.

Attending to cultural landscapes and ecologies rather than to individual artifacts will require deliberate examination. In the case of Spain, such an examination is made easier than it might be elsewhere because of the well-understood fit of an enormous array of heritage assets to a diversified and powerful Iberian geography. It seems truer for Spain than almost anywhere else that varied physical terrain and a multitude of historically potent sites and objects operate together as part of a network of linked places and resources that operate together in the making of collective memory. Romanesque reliquaries, Reconquest castles, Umayyad mosques, and Nasrid palaces—and the Cathedral of Santiago, too—are in themselves lifeless relics. These sites in stone become resplendent historic landmarks through their linkages to the numerous resources that together infer, resonate, and resound. Textual resources are part of this landscape, and they play a very necessary part in telling histories and recounting past deeds. The histories in these texts help bring the stones to life.

Some of the difficulty of defining and defending heritage, of selecting sites and items to declare worthy of protection, might be remedied by putting more energy into understanding how essential the connection might be among textual heritage, physical artifacts, and performative histories. To draw on two Catalan examples: The Drassanes Maritime Museum in Barcelona is not just a space for exhibiting old boats, it is a complex of 14th- and 15th-century warehouses used to build the merchant ships by which the Catalan count-kings and their merchants controlled Mediterranean ports from Sicily to Greece. Four of the greatest medieval European royal chronicles, the Catalan Quatre Grans Cròniques, tell the story of the building and use of the shipyard facility. As an architectural treasure, the set of buildings that make up the Drassanes has its own varied history of use and adaptive reuse. Its present use is an active performance, retelling Barcelona’s past as the center of a late-medieval Mediterranean empire in a way that creates new value in the present. Human-castle-building events provide another example. They offer great entertainment value to tourists, but their bolder function is to build community and Catalan identity by performing a lived memorializing ritual (in a substantially medieval way) that recalls for Catalan observers their history in a land of castles and castellans.

Several medieval Spanish, American, and other travel texts have a place in our mental landscapes. In addition to the Codex Calixtinus these include the Poema de Mio Cid, the Cantigas de Santa Maria, the Llibre dels Fets and others. Each of these grounds Spain’s famously rich supply of exemplary archeological, architectural, and artistic treasures in the evidence of real people whose actions brought to life the spaces and places they inhabited. Each is part of the field of imagination one encounters when thinking about Spain, either as a construct of the past or the present, whether as an academic exercise or as a tourist experience. For many American readers the mere mention of Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra conjures land and heritage associations.

Cultural landscapes—sites and physical resources, texts and other artifacts—can be drawn into memory in myriad ways, including through film and other arts, which give life to cultural memory by performing it in and for our own time. Many of the novelistic, documentary, and feature film treatments of the Camino de Santiago have drawn explicitly upon the contents of the Codex Calixtinus. Brian Sewell’s BBC documentary, The Naked Pilgrim, begins as a prim critique of Romanesque and Gothic architecture along el camino, but over its course it gets under the skin, becoming a metaphor for pilgrimage by inviting self-reflection. Emilio Estevez’s film, The Way, about a father’s quest to complete his dead son’s journey to Santiago de Compostela, might offer characters that are a little flat, but the film evokes the scenery experienced by el camino travelers in a way that is very inviting for would-be travelers. Among the events in 2011 celebrating the 800 years since the dedication of the Cathedral of Compostela was an impressive light show projection onto the cathedral façade, which, in equal parts architectural fantasy game and history lesson, generated emotional responses clearly audible even on observers’ web postings of the event.^{Footnote 43} These are a few of the newest pieces of the whole substance of historic imagination St. James has engendered. No matter that memories of the past change with each new interpretation (and, as in the case of Santiago de Compostela, they can open themselves to metahistorical, mystical-esoteric fictions only loosely tied to any sense of authentic historical truth).^{Footnote 44} Historians know that without this malleable aspect of the historical process, and without concerted efforts to recollect the past as a fabric of stories and physical objects, both of which can be talismanic, our heritage would become either so rigid or so vacuous that recalling the past would have little merit for the present and future.^{Footnote 45}

As William Melczer rightly said in opening his study of the 12th-century pilgrim’s guide: “The future is mortgaged on present expectations.”^{Footnote 46} The codex has been found and restored to the Archbishopric of Compostela, and hopefully its owner will keep it safe, under better conditions, from theft or physical damage while also putting it into public view rather than hiding it away in a cupboard. It is my hope that the manuscript will be more broadly cherished, dreamed about, and imagined as part of a heritage landscape in which we draw upon the past to create a present that envisions a future rich in historical resonances. This is where the loss of the Codex Calixtinus, while it was missing, really hurt, since the prospect that it would not reappear meant the loss of an important piece of Spain’s cultural landscape. No doubt some see its rediscovery as a miracle attributed to St. James; at least we should agree to recognize it as a sign of remarkable and sweet good fortune. Let us now take the opportunity to limit particularizing notions of heritage, turning our thoughts and actions instead toward holistic pursuits that will call many and varied bits of heritage into a mutually beneficial defense of their landscape and memory.