The ruin of Spain and its many and great evils

A Spanish chronicler writing in 754 about forty years after the Arab invasion was at a loss for words to describe the extent of his country's misfortune: “Who can relate such perils? Who can enumerate such grievous disasters?” he wrote.“Even if every limb were transformed into a tongue, it would be beyond human capacity to express the ruin of Spain and its many and great evils”.

In 711 when an army of Arab and Berber invaders crossed from north Africa via the Straits of Gibraltar, Spain was a Christian Catholic kingdom of Visigoths.

The Visigoths were one of the two branches of the Gothic people who had migrated to the eastern Roman empire from the Russian steppes in the fourth century. The word visi suggested noble in the Gothic language although contemporary historians took it to mean western when they settled in France and Spain in the sixth century.

The Visigoths were Christianised early on but they had adopted the Arian creed which was then quite prevalent in the Roman Empire but was subsequently contested and denounced as heretical. Although the ruling elite later accepted orthodox Catholicism, this combined with the Arab invasion had meant the the Spanish church was for a long time distinctive and seperate. In particular the Book of Revelation held a special significance in the liturgy. These differences were to have important consequences later on.

After the Arab invasion, Christian Spain was restricted to a small kingdom north of the Cantabrian mountains called Asturias. It was from here that the origins of the Reconquest were born and that an abbot, Beatus of Liebana composed a famous commentary on the Apocalypse in the late eighth century. The Christians of Asturias found significance in their defeat at the hands of the Saracens.

These were events long prophesied. It was reckoned that the Antichrist was now come and the End Times were unfoldng. Beatus was one of the first to claim that Saint James had fulfilled his Apostolic Mission in Spain following the Pentecost and prior to his martyrdom at Jerusalem in A.D. 44.

It was not long after, in the early years of the ninth century that the miraculous discovery of his tomb was made by a shepherd at Compostela. The location of the most important shrine of western Europe at such a significant site as the frontier between Christendom and the Caliphate on the very edge of the known world, may not have been mere coincidence but it certainly had a great pull on contemporary imaginations. How the body had reached Spain from Jerusalem was the subject of an elaborate legend.

The manuscript of Beatus' Commentary on the Apocalypse was copied in the monasteries which lined the pilgrim road, for a long time the front line of the war between Christians and Arabs

We venerate the saints in their bodies or better in their relics

In the Book of Revelation, after the breaking of the fifth seal, the author declares, “I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God and for the testimony which they held”

From early Christianity, it was the practice to venerate the relics of the saints. Relics were the bodies. It was said that these were in many cases prefectly preserved and that rather than smell of decompostion they emitted an attractive perfume, hence the expression “to die in the odour of sanctity”. In reality it was the skeleton or a part thereof.

Men would have to wait until the End of Time to enter Paradise, but the saint ascended directly into the presence of God. Out of this arose the notion of their mortal remains being a conduit bewteen Heaven and Earth. Prayers said before relics carried much greater weight.

The Christian cult of the saints held that they were of two orders: the martyrs and the confessors. That is those who were killed for their faith and those who were celebrated for upholding and spreading it. The wave of persecutions of Christians which spread through Gaul in the early fourth century produced no shortgage of martyrs and a canon of the Council of Carthage in 401, taking its lead from Revelation, stated that the bones of saints should be placed under all church altars.

The popularity of relics grew as more and more pagans were converted. Their cults were transformed from the magical to the miraculous. Secondary relics, such as cloth worn by the saint also became widespread.


In the East an alternative cult had developed, that of icons - pictures of saints which held the same miraculous properties as relics. In about 790, the Frankish ruler Charlemagne issued a lengthy text to Pope Adrian on the question of icons. Charlemagne insisted on the cult of relics: “The Greeks place almost all the hope of their credulity in images but it remains firm that we venerate the saints in their bodies or better in their relics”.

The edict of the Council of Carthage regarding the placing of bones under all altars had been allowed to lapse but it was now revived. However, with the wave of church building which was now taking place in western Europe, the shortage of suitable additional relics to furnish the corresponding altars posed a problem. The availability of martyrs had diminished since the Empire became Christian, although in Spain there were some who died for their faith at the hands of the Saracens.

There were several ways in which a relic could arrive at a church. Most obviously, the church was erected over the site of the saint's burial. Alternatively, it could be transferred in the ceremony known as a “translatio”. Also cases of relic theft were not infrequent and since it was reckoned that the saint chose themselves where their bones resided, these thefts were considered sacred or “furta sacra”. By extension, saints whose bones lay buried and neglected could choose how and when they were discovered: this was known as “inventio”.

The monk chronicler Radulfus Glaber writing in the early eleventh century noted that, “the relics of many saints were revealed by various signs where they had long lain hidden.”

And indeed, in the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries a number of “inventios” of significant Biblical characters were discovered in Western Europe and siezed the popular imagination. In Burgundy there was Mary Magdalene and Lazarus, in Provence near Avignon, Martha. In Aquitaine, the head of John the Baptist and at Compostela, the Apostle James.

Each of these became important pilgrimage shrines in their own right but for reasons we will come to, none surpassed Compostela.