SANTIAGO LETTER:Far from deterring pilgrims to his supposed burial place, St James's alleged bloodthirsty exploits in battle against Muslims have long bolstered his standing
IF YOU stand on tiptoe on the granite step in front of a small, railed-off chapel in the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela, you are greeted by a glimpse of such fanatical bloodlust that it is hard to believe you are visiting one of Christendom’s holiest sites. There, hidden behind a joyless arrangement of plastic white daisies, the sculpted head of a man stares back, open-mouthed in pain, blood flowing from his neck, his eyes seemingly resigned to death.
This portrait of a murder, heightened by the vivid colours in which the work is painted, is a detail on the bottom half of a statue by the 18th century baroque sculptor José Gambino. The top half, unobstructed by synthetic foliage, depicts Spain’s national saint astride a white horse that is reared up in mid-battle.
Santiago, otherwise known as St James the apostle, has an arm raised behind his head as he prepares to lower his sword on the enemy. He looks down with derision at his victims (although only one can be seen, a bush in fact masks three Muslims being trampled beneath his horse, plus a severed head), confident in the merit of his actions.
The statue prompts bemused nudges among pilgrims, almost 250,000 of whom have so far this year walked or cycled at least part of the 750km camino route across the French Pyrenees to this northwestern corner of Spain. This being a holy year, in which the July 25th feast of the saint falls on a Sunday, almost twice the annual average number of pilgrims have been drawn to this medieval Unesco world heritage town.
Surprisingly, it took almost 250 years for the cathedral’s Matamoros, the Moor-Slayer, to be considered controversial. An announcement in 2004 by church authorities that the statue was to be removed, in case it offended Muslims, was met with scepticism that the decision had more to do with fears of provoking the Arab world following the killings in March of that year of 191 commuters by Islamic terrorists in the Madrid train bombings. Six years later, the sculpture remains, the daisies covering the carnage wrought by the sword-wielding saint the apparent compromise that quietened the debate.
Matamoros was a common theme in Spanish art during the crusades against Muslim rule, when Christian army leaders claimed the saint appeared on battlefields and fought alongside them against the Moors. Ramiro I of Asturias swore that James – said to have been beheaded in Jerusalem by King Herod Agrippa in 44AD – had personally slaughtered 60,000 Saracens at the battle of Clavijo in 844. Over the next six centuries the saint reportedly manifested himself at some 40 battles, even participating in the massacre of American Indians in the New World.
The covering up of James’s alleged war exploits was no novel idea in 2004: when Franco deployed Spain’s toughest troops – the Moroccan regulares – in his native Galicia in the campaign against republicans, all such statues were hidden beneath sheets.
Strangely, the question of how St James made his way from Judea to northern Spain and showed up for battle 800 years after his death has proved even less of a controversy than the cathedral authority’s taste in art. Stranger still, to those who packaged and peddled the cult of Santiago, the idea that a fisherman-evangelist was transformed in death into a bloodthirsty knight intent on slicing off the heads of swarthy, bearded Arabs did not appear at odds with any Christian message.
You could hardly be accused of splitting hairs for pointing out that the story of how James’s remains were discovered (then lost, then retrieved, then lost, then retrieved) at Santiago, and now lie in the tomb beneath the cathedral’s high altar, suffers from more than a few lapses in logic and benefits from unadulterated political and ecclesiastical opportunism.
The legend is that after he was killed, two of James’s followers brought his body to Jaffa, where a boat appeared, with neither sails nor crew, and carried them to Padrón, 20km downstream from Santiago. The journey took a week, a detail that might raise an eyebrow if previous ones did not, since the English travel writer Richard Ford remarked in his 1845 Handbook for Travellers in Spain, “the Oriental Steam Company can do nothing like it”.
The body was lost and forgotten about for 750 years, then rediscovered under a buried altar at Compostela in 813, just when Catholic Spain was in desperate need of a mascot in its wars against the Moors. James’s remains were reportedly found on a hillside with the help of a hermit who had followed a star. The hill became known as Compostela from the Latin campus stellae, meaning field of the star.
The bones were again lost in 1700, having been hidden in anticipation of an English invasion, and found during building works in 1879. That three skeletons were dug up instead of one posed no dilemma, as it was found that a bone said to be from James’s skull and preserved in a church in Tuscany fitted exactly one of those unearthed. The identity of the remains was somehow confirmed in 1884 by Pope Leo XIII, and reinforced by John Paul II’s visit in 1982. Pope Benedict XVI’s visit on November 6th will cement the affirmations of his predecessors.
The cult of Santiago during the Reconquest began what is arguably Europe’s first exercise in mass tourism. Far from deterring the thousands who began following the road to his supposed burial place, James’s alleged exploits in battle instead strengthened his standing in the church. As Ford observed: “If people can once believe that Santiago ever came to Spain at all, all the rest is plain sailing.”