In the 4th century, a middle-aged woman named Egeria, perhaps related to the imperial family, made the oldest recorded voyage in Spain, several centuries ahead of the medieval and Renaissance discoverers.
Egeria left some travel notes addressed to the friends she left behind. In those letters to her “sisters,” the traveler explained in great detail her experience in the Holy Land between 381 and 384, when the Roman Empire was about to collapse.
Although in those years travel was very present in Mediterranean societies, it was conceived as a male privilege. However, as the final moment of the Empire approached, religious pilgrimage was imposed as a specific form of travel that women made their own.
Despite everything, Egeria’s journey is not the oldest in the history of Christianity; In 333 (that is, almost half a century before), an anonymous person recorded having arrived in Palestine from Bordeaux. Egeria was not a pioneer as a pilgrim either, since the Italian Melania had preceded her. On the other hand, she is considered the first known Hispanic traveler and writer, after her story was copied by the hand of a devoted monk in the 11th century and appeared in 1884 in an Italian library.
At the end of the 4th century, a pious woman decided to enter the Via Domitia (the first Roman road built in Gaul) and cross the entire known world until she reached Constantinople, the capital of the pars orientis of the Empire. Later, she decided to continue to Jerusalem and visited Egypt and Roman Mesopotamia.
Egeria walked through these “extreme lands” visiting biblical places, such as the bush of Moses, the spring that gushed out of the rock or the garden where, apparently, Saint John the Baptist exercised his ministry. One of its purposes was to confirm that the places and events cited in the Holy Scriptures were true.
And, in general, she was able to attest to this, which led her to express the deep satisfaction that came from arriving at a place and thinking that the biblical stories developed in the settings that she was contemplating. On one occasion, however, she could not find the location where the pillar of salt that Lot’s wife had become should be. Finding no trace, Egeria expressed some surprise.
“Believe me, venerable ladies,” he writes, “what the column actually is does not appear anywhere, the only thing they show is the place it must have occupied; The statue itself is said to have been swallowed by the Dead Sea. And of course, when we inspected that place, we did not see a statue anywhere, I cannot deceive you about that. The bishop of that place, I mean Segor, told us that for some years there had been no trace of the statue.”
The previous fragment is extracted from Viaje de Egeria (The Line of the Horizon), a recently published book that contextualizes the journey followed by this woman of high lineage. The work has been translated into a multitude of languages ??– there are versions in French, English, German, Italian, Russian, Greek, Spanish… – and has aroused the interest of historians, geographers, philologists and liturgists, according to Carlos Pascual, the person in charge of adapt the Latin text.
As far as is known, Egeria departed from Gallaecia, which has led some historians to consider that she was Galician. However, it is very possible that she was Gallaica, but not Galician, and that she came from somewhere in Bierzo, Astorga itself or even Braga (Portugal). To tell the truth, it is impossible to know, since the first pages of the book were lost, which is why the story begins while she is already on Mount Sinai.
There are few written documents that recreate how life went by in the Roman Empire in the 4th century, “between the end of paganism and the emergence of Christianity,” according to Rosa María Cid, professor of Ancient History at the University of Oviedo.
Cid wrote an interesting study on Egeria in 2011. The nearly eighty thousand kilometers of roads that existed in the year 117 AD, when the Romans reached their peak of geographical expansion, “motivated almost everyone to travel from one place to another, taking advantage of the pax Romana.” states Jerry Toner, a specialist in classical antiquity, in A Travel Guide to the Roman Empire (Criticism).
Cid agrees with Toner by pointing out that people never traveled as much as in the 1st and 2nd centuries, when almost no one dared to challenge the terrifying Roman army. However, even in the 4th century people continued to travel frequently, and although there were bands of robbers, it was normal to reach the destination without incident. Now, the “normal” thing was still for men to travel. When women did it, it was almost never alone, but rather as troupes.
However, with the rise of Christianity, religious pilgrimages became a trend, and some women began to star in their own adventure. This specific form of travel, it must be said, did not please the fathers of the Church, who were not sure that women had enough judgment to lead an independent life. Other historians add even more fuel to the fire by suggesting that life in the Holy Land, beyond prayer, was quite fractious.
In any case, Egeria was not a nun (as Valerio del Bierzo claimed, who presented her as blessed), “since in that early period of Christianity nuns had not yet been invented, so to speak colloquially,” explains Pascual when contextualizing the Egeria trip.
In any case, the first pilgrims were potentially or openly wealthy ladies. “Like the nuns of medieval convents, these first pilgrims also took a vow of poverty and renounced earthly pleasures, to lead an austere life, consecrated to prayer,” explains Cid.
In fact, it is possible that Egeria’s main objective when moving to the Holy Land was to found a convent, as María José Bravo, professor of Roman Law at the University of Vigo, has defended on some occasions. However, she was unable to do so, as she passed away before returning.
The notes that Egeria wrote during his pilgrimage also reveal what daily life was like at that time. Although the imperial pot was boiling and about to overflow, a flood of devotees and gyrovagi (globetrotters) continued moving along the dense network of roads used by the legions, posts and merchants. In the confines of the “barbarian” world, the military garrisons (castelli, castra) provided soldiers to escort movements through the loca suspecta (dangerous places) that lurked the nomadic tribes.
To travel through these places, it was necessary to have a safe conduct, which seems to suggest that Egeria was a woman of high lineage, probably related to the imperial family of Theodosius, which would explain her ease of movement, the ready reception by the religious authorities and the escort of soldiers in threatened cities.
Like Egeria, travelers moved through this network dotted with mutationes (inns that were usually separated by eight miles, that is, about thirteen kilometers) and mansions (post houses that marked the stages of the trip). Between one mansion and another there was a distance – Pascual explains in Viaje de Egeria – that could easily be traveled in one day, so the travel calculation was done by mansions, that is, by days.
In the mansions, apart from food and bedding, the change of animals was facilitated (generally, saddled horses), although Egeria had to make some stages on the back of donkeys and camels, and even on foot.
Another interesting fact is the sense of welcome and protection that existed in the ancient Mediterranean. Hospitality was especially intense among the monks and ascetics who lived in the monasteries (which were not exactly “monasteries” in the current sense of the term, but rather hermitages and caves near holy places, or around some apostle tomb. ).
Many centuries before the French word souvenir emerged, pilgrims like Egeria received eulogies or gifts from the monks, as a souvenir of the place and the trip. These gifts, offered at the time of departure, generally consisted of some fruit, even vessels of oil from some sacred lamp… Some authors consider that the eulogies used to be apples or white figs, very abundant in the Holy Land.
However, the main memory that Egeria has left us is the first recorded travel story in the Iberian Peninsula, from the perspective of a curious, determined and devoted woman.
