To venerate the saint and his miracles, a chapel and then in 879 a church were founded at Compostela. Though sacked by the infidel Almanzor in 907, the saint's relics were miraculously protected. Compostela's fame spread throughout Christendom, so that from 951 (when the first French pilgrimage was made) through the fourteenth century it rivaled Rome as a pilgrimage destination.
Pilgrims to Santiago took weeks or months to make the journey. To avoid being robbed or murdered they carried little money, instead seeking alms (and presumably laboring for bread and lodging). They wore a distinctive uniform: heavy cape, eight-foot staff with a gourd attached to carry water, stout sandals and a broad-brimmed felt slouch hat (to shield their necks from the sun), brim turned upward and marked with three or four scallop shells. As Compostela's fame spread, the pilgrimages swelled to the thousands and the millions.
The Way included nine main routes named for their origin: Netherlands (Pays-bas), Denmark, Poland, Austria (Brenner Pass), Hungary, Croatia, Adriatic Italy, Tyrrhenian Italy, and Portugal. (The English took ship: to Calais to join Pays-bas or to Bordeaux.) All the routes went through southwestern France and converged in the western Pyrenees at a few passes into northwestern Spain, where they united into a single Way that ran along the Galician coast to Compostela.
Perigord and Quercy are astride the Santiago way-stations, most of them abbeys (at intervals of 12 to 20 miles, a day's walk) founded to support the pilgrims. They bound together Christendom, a culture struggling for definition after the fall of Rome and the rise of Islam, their pilgrims a vector of slow cultural diffusion, akin to the Spanish missions in the American southwest, not merely towns but truly the advance of civilization into wilderness.
Indeed, the pilgrimage to Compostela probably marks the birth of tourism. Towns in southwestern France vied to provide pilgrim accommodations and their own sites, relics, and holy places. By 1135 the world's first tour guide had been published, the Liber Sancti Jacobi or the Codex Calixtinus. Written in Latin by a French monk, probably Aymeri Picaud, it identified appropriate routes, gave advice on climate and weather conditions, listed the most interesting routes, towns, and sites along the way, and spiced its more mundane information with asides on local customs and morality.