The Crossway

by Guy Stagg

  ‘I don’t drink.’

  ‘Not a Catholic?’

  ‘Not a Catholic.’

  ‘Maybe once you get to Rome—’ Another sob of laughter.

  I wanted to agree, but could not pretend that I was a believer. So I said that I was still getting used to the Catholic churches I visited on the route. At first I was put off by their gaudy interiors – the paintings and relics that decorated every altar, the statues and candles that crowded each chapel – until I learnt to see the longing in these displays, more sincere than the simple Protestant spaces I was used to. Yet I still felt wary of religion as spectacle, because the scale and splendour were proof not of truth but of power.

  ‘No, no,’ said Danilo. ‘Religion has to be bigger than us.’

  During lunch the three friends had decided on an Easter pilgrimage to Bobbio, an abbey on the northern fringe of the Apennines. They started discussing the idea, while one of the three traced their route on my map. It meandered south from here for sixty-six kilometres, lifting into the Trebbia Valley.

  ‘Why Bobbio?’ I asked.

  ‘There were pilgrims to Bobbio since before the Middle Ages,’ the friend replied. ‘It was founded by St Columbanus, the pilgrim saint of Ireland.’

  ‘Francis of Assisi stayed there when he was a young man,’ Danilo added. ‘The monks showed him how to live in the forest and preach to the animals.’

  At this point everyone started talking. No, no, claimed one, that was a local legend. But, claimed another, this region was where the friars were most popular. Mendicants, penitents, flagellants – Emilia Romagna was full of them, said Danilo. Then the friends began listing devotional movements. There was the Humiliati, a brotherhood of twelfth-century penitents based in Lombardy; and the Great Alleluia, a revivalist uprising that overwhelmed the Po Valley in the thirteenth century; and Venturino of Bergamo, who led a peace march to Rome in the early fourteenth century. Although I tried to note down their names, I soon lost track, becoming dizzy with each new detail.

  One word was repeated several times: jubileus. I wasn’t sure what it meant, so the youngest friend had a go at translating. ‘It’s Latin. It means no more debts, no more sins. You are set free, yes?’

  No more debts, free from sin – was this the reason for their pilgrimage? It was hard to know what they believed behind the swaggering stories, the exaggerated laughter, and impossible to say whether they walked to find forgiveness. Yet I was glad for these rowdy exchanges, because they lessened the sense that my own walk was merely a stunt.

  The men folded my map and finished their wine. When I asked how long their hike would take, Danilo marched me out of the barn and back onto the embankment.

  ‘Bobbio,’ he said, pointing south. ‘Can you see?’

  It was past six, but not yet dim, the daylight lasting late as a summer evening. To the south I could see a plain the colour of cloud, and beyond that I could see hills shaped like rippling water. Beyond that lay the rim of the earth, bruise blue where it touched the sky. Blue was the mountains. Blue was the Apennines.

  Next morning the mist was too dense to see the far bank of the Po. I kept hiking east, approaching Piacenza through cloud thick as cloth, thick as ink. The smell of smoke lay on the river, and the air tasted black and bitter. Danilo’s history lesson was still on my mind, his list of devotional movements repeating in my thoughts.

  These were pilgrims too, of course, not solitary monks but mobs of pious laity. Yet I found their motives much harder to understand. I felt some sympathy for the missionaries and martyrs I had learnt about in Switzerland, but the popular side of religion inspired only bafflement and mistrust. It was easier to dismiss it as madness than work out why so many believers would willingly abandon themselves.

  Most of these movements travelled via Piacenza. The city lay at a crossroads, where the Via Francigena joined the Via Emilia. This was another Roman road, linking Parma, Reggio, Modena, and Bologna, with Rimini on the Adriatic coast. Had I hiked its course in the autumn of 1260, I would have met an unusual collection of pilgrims. Penitents mostly, moving in shambolic groups – sometimes a few hundred, sometimes a few thousand. I would have heard them first, for as they walked they chanted psalms. Closer, I would have seen the blood-black stains on their robes and the whips hanging loose from their hands. Closer still, I would I have smelt them, smelt sweat and salt and the reek of open wounds.

  These were the first flagellants.

  Flagellation had been practised in monasteries since the turn of the millennium. It was made fashionable in the late eleventh century by Peter Damian, a Benedictine prior who argued that a flagellant could atone for sin by whipping himself while reciting psalms.

  The prior’s most famous disciple was a monk called Dominic Loricatus. He was a champion flagellant, once managing three hundred thousand lashes during a quiet week in Lent. Following Damian’s calculus, the monk performed a hundred years of purification. By my own estimate, he managed fifty blows a minute.

  In the mid-thirteenth century the practice spread from the cloister. This timing was no coincidence, as Italian society was ringing with apocalyptic prophecies. The most famous was by a Cistercian monk called Joachim of Fiore, who was born in Calabria about a century earlier. As a young man he went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land and then devoted himself to reading the Book of Revelation. His commentary on the text forecast a third and final stage of history, a kingdom of the Holy Spirit that would be realized once the Antichrist brought untold suffering to the world. That dreadful reckoning was due in the year 1260.

  Although Joachim died long before Judgement Day, his prophecy was not forgotten. The monk’s followers were so numerous that Pope Alexander IV had to condemn his work in 1256. But it was too late. Next year, Genoa and Venice went to war, the year after there was famine in the Po Valley, and in 1259 a plague struck central Italy. Surely the Antichrist was on his way.

  That spring a hermit living in the hills above Perugia received a vision. Because of mankind’s sin, the vision revealed, God had decided to destroy the world. However, at the last minute the Virgin Mary stayed his hand. If we repented, we might yet be saved.

  The hermit’s name was Raniero Fasani. Like Joachim of Fiore, he was convinced of the coming apocalypse. But, like Peter Damian, he also believed that flagellation could lessen the penalty of sin.

  Fasani went to the Bishop of Perugia with his vision. In order to be saved, he warned, the whole city must join in penance. The bishop was persuaded, and for six weeks the men of Perugia gathered outside to flog themselves, chanting, ‘Misericordia, misericordia! Pace, pace!’ At home women and even children took part in the rite.

  That autumn the ceremonies spread to northern Italy. The flagellants formed processions, tramping back and forth along the Via Emilia and attracting up to ten thousand penitents at a time. In 1260 they reached Rome and that winter copycat ceremonies sprang up in Bavaria, Bohemia and Poland. At first local clergy welcomed the movement, because the ceremonies were a chance for debts to be settled and feuds forgiven. That is the promise of penance: freedom from guilt, freedom from shame, the burden of sin shed from our backs. But it was heady stuff. As Peter Damian wrote, a flagellant ‘bore in his body the stigmata of Jesus’. He need only look at his reflection, naked and bloody, to catch a glimpse of the crucified Christ.

  Church authorities started to worry that the processions would descend into heresy, while civil authorities worried that they would cause riots. Flagellation was too popular, too unruly, and in January 1261 the Pope banned the movement. The bishops who had encouraged the practice now shut it down, and, as quickly as they began, the ceremonies died away. Or so it seemed.

  After Piacenza I turned south into the Apennines, spending six days hiking across the range. In all that time I never once saw the sun. Sometimes, as my route rose through forested valleys, the showers would part to reveal hillsides of beech, their leaves dead but not fallen, gleaming like wet copper. Otherwise there were no colours, no
shapes, no shining things in all the world, just the sodden vegetation, the smothered outlines of peaks, and the ceaseless sheets of rain.

  Everything seeped. My waterproof trousers, my waterproof jacket and the waterproof cover for my rucksack. And the contents of the rucksack: notebooks, clothes, sleeping bag, food – all of them soaked through. My drenched boots weighed double and the skin on my feet blanched, the toes tender, rotting.

  The Via Francigena lifted to the Cisa Pass and then lowered into Tuscany. For the first few days I climbed between hilltop hamlets unmarked on the map. To pass the time I sang to myself – thumping Victorian hymns half-remembered from schooldays – or else conjured lists of familiar items – every English county, every Shakespeare play. When my memory was exhausted, I became bored, and as the days dragged and the weather got worse, that boredom was edged with dread. How much longer could this weather last?

  The third morning in the Apennines was stormy. Thunderheads streamed off the heights and fractus clouds tumbled over the road. The rain clattered on my hood – pop and clink and thud – while thunder played in the peaks above.

  Around midday a pair of buildings heaved up out of the storm. The first was a farmhouse, the second a shuttered cafe. A sign on the corner of the house read, Passo della Cisa. This was it, the pass to Tuscany, 1,039 metres above sea level – dim as the deepest reach of a gorge.

  Beyond the sign, at the highpoint of the pass, I found a chapel. On sunny days its tinted windows might let in a dusty disco light, but that morning the room was gloomy. Electric candles guttered against plastic icons and a glow-in-the-dark rosary dangled from a plaster statue. Chandeliers hung off the ceiling, their branches gilded, their bulbs gone. I could smell wet wool, damp stone, and the musty odour of compost.

  I sat in a pew and waited for my sight to adjust. Silk flowers lay over the altar, the leaves a deep green, almost black. The storm made a flailing sound on the roof, but otherwise the chapel was quiet.

  I was still thinking about the flagellants.

  In January 1348, almost a century after Raniero Fasani’s vision, an earthquake hit north-east Italy. Churches crumbled across the Po Valley and a stench of rotting eased from great rents in the ground. That spring the Black Death entered the country via the ports of Genoa, Venice and Pisa. Again it seemed the world was ending. Again the flagellants marched.

  Their ceremonies soon spread beyond the Alps. By the end of the year they were taking place in Switzerland and Hungary, and come 1349 there were ceremonies in Flanders, Holland and Denmark too.

  Flagellants in northern Europe modelled themselves on crusader armies. They refused to wash, shave or sleep in a bed, but dressed as knights and adopted ominous names such as the Brothers of the Cross. Their processions lasted thirty-three days – one for every year of Christ’s life – and while they walked they chanted folk songs called Geisslerlieder, celebrating the Second Coming.

  When the flagellants stopped at a church or cathedral, they would gather outside the entrance, while their leader, known as the Master, read a copy of a letter handed down from heaven. The pilgrims then marched in circles, leaping to the ground to confess their sins, before kneeling in ranks, stripped to the chest, and whipping their bodies with leather thongs, some flogging themselves for 6,666 stripes – the mythic number of blows suffered by Christ – and others studding their thongs with metal to scourge the skin from their backs, hacking away until the metal snagged on muscle and the Master had to kneel beside them, yanking the staple loose and causing gouts of blood to spray over the ground.

  Because the flagellants claimed to be taking on the sins of the world, they were treated as martyrs. Crowds turned up to witness the ceremonies, the sick and dying collecting vials of blood, and the blind pressing stained robes to their eyes. In Strasbourg the penitents were even given a dead child to revive.

  The movement was most popular in towns not yet afflicted by plague, where people hoped the ceremonies would protect them. When it became clear that they were helping to spread the sickness, local authorities cracked down. At this point the processions grew violent. Priests were stoned and Jewish neighbourhoods set alight, while in the forests of central Germany one flagellant Master baptized himself in the blood of his followers and vowed to march until Judgement Day.

  In October 1349 Clement VI condemned the movement via papal bull. Although the Pope had patronized the early processions in Avignon, he now outlawed the practice, and once more the ceremonies were suppressed.

  As I sat in the chapel, listening to the storm, I could not understand why anyone would join the flagellants. Histories of the Black Death treat the movement with a mixture of horror and fascination, as well as a few knowing smiles. For some there might have been an erotic thrill, but the majority took part because they were terrified of pain. They were not trying to scar their bodies, but to free their souls from suffering. This paradox makes sense if you believe that death brings judgement. What was an hour or two of anguish compared with the howling tortures of hell? Yet such arguments mattered less than the strange seduction of the ceremony, and this was what I struggled to understand: the giddy moment when the self was given up, the awful thrill of surrender.

  I could still hear the rain on the roof, the tap and drum, the rattle and snare. It seemed to be leaking through the ceiling, dripping onto the twisted chandeliers and the pale skin of the statue. The altar stained, the fabric decayed, and the flowers bleeding black tongues of silk.

  That afternoon I dropped seven hundred and fifty metres, back below the cloudline. Rain lisped in the trees and applauded against the cliffs, while the wind ransacked the villages, pulling chimneys and rooftiles apart. A motorway hung off the western wall of the valley, the traffic making a shredding sound as it drove by, tyres skimming over plate water. Lower down, these sounds were lost to the rushing chorus of the River Magra.

  Pontremoli was a cheerless town splayed above the river. I spent a night at the Capuchin monastery on its southern boundary. The walls of my cell were mottled with mould and none of the radiators worked. Although it was just gone seven, I had no choice but to strip my sodden clothes, spread them on the floor and slip naked under six woollen blankets. Yet I could not sleep, as every half-hour one of the friars opened the door to ask for money, because the brothers were so poor, so poor.

  After four days of rain the forest paths were slipping away. I threw out my blotted maps and tried the road instead. The tarmac uncoiled along the banks of the River Magra – one side bordered with rock, the other side sunk under water. For much of the morning I hiked on the valley side, pressed into the rockface as trucks drove keen against the kerb. Otherwise I hiked on the river side, jumping the surf from cars as they ploughed through the flooded verge. Whichever side I chose, I regretted it.

  Some of the cars slowed to offer me a lift. At one point a taxi stopped, the driver calling for me to get in. He said he would drive me for free, drive me to the steps of St Peter’s, but when I told him I had to walk, he crossed himself and shouted that he could not help me.

  The road veered from left to right, sinking through towns of gathered grey. In Villafranca I squatted in the wreck of a cement factory, eating clammy bread and cheese. In Lusuolo I sheltered beneath the concrete stilts of the motorway, in Masero under the crippled arches of a railway bridge. Otherwise I limped along, counting my paces – one two, three four, five six, seven eight – and with each pace grew more and more frustrated. When I get to Italy the route will be easy – that’s what I had expected. But now I wanted to go home. Eight hours, ten hours of rain, day after day, my clothes never drying, my will dripdripping away. Nipples chafing, skin shrivelled, sores lining my inner thigh. And then the doubt: why walk every step if you don’t even believe?

  Day five in the Apennines. The air dim and hurting.

  Bodies lay by the roadside: a burst hedgehog, a maimed rabbit and a polecat turned inside out. And a heron with its wings fanned flat as a deck of cards.

  Danilo’s vo
ice was scratching in my head. Maybe if you hitchhike. All alone – nobody will know.

  When a car drove past, I tried to thumb a lift, but it did not even slow. The second car was the same, and the third car, the fourth. Then I withdrew my arm and trudged on, face hot with shame. I was sorry I had started this journey, sorry I ever left home, and wished now that the walk was over.

  That afternoon the rain beat so hard I started laughing. Raindrops hammered the road, flying up like sparks. The sound grew louder and louder, building to a crescendo, never seeming to break. I could not stop laughing.

  A deserted house stood on the verge, its upper storeys part-collapsed. Rain splashed through the door and spilled from the first-floor window. I went up to the house, took off my hood and stood beneath the stream. Water washed through my hair and trickled down my spine. There was water in my eyes, in the sockets, and water flooding my mouth. It smelt of iron, tasted of blood. Sharp, sharper – until I could not feel the water any more, until I felt nothing at all. But I stayed where I was, letting it pour from my fingers in strands of black silk. I stayed where I was, surrendered to the storm.

  Sometimes the fear of pain is worse than the pain itself. Sometimes pain is a release from fear, frees us from our thoughts, keeps us close to the living moment. And sometimes, when we make our own suffering, the pain is a feeling like power.

  On the sixth day I passed a roadside shrine tangled with gifts. There were toy lion cubs, a dinosaur from a Disney cartoon, and a baptism dress foaming with lace. Each one was labelled with a card, names and dates and messages of thanks written on the back. I wanted to read the messages, but everything was soaked, the gifts bleeding colour and the messages bleeding too, dyeing the card a watery blue.

  A staircase led into the trees behind the shrine, rising towards a chapel. I began climbing, but halfway up I paused. To my right was a clearing, and beyond the clearing I could see the clouds part and the valley open wide. As I watched the landscape compose itself, I felt a sudden swell of relief, like being lifted on a wave. Ahead I could see the empty sky, the flushed earth, the bits and pieces of rainbow – and a yawning space near the horizon which I guessed was the sea.