Santiago de Compostela, the sanctuary city of Saint James in Spain, is the cradle of Christian Iberian spirituality and culture. As a place of destination for pilgrims from different cultures and countries, it is a symbol of cultural diversity in the unity of Church of Christ. It also synthesizes the cultural unifying ideal of “Hispanidad”, which is associated with the image of Saint James the Conquerer. An image which inspired further the Spanish ideological project of a Christian Empire in America.

Tiago Barreira

Santiago de Compostela, the capital of the autonomous region of Galicia and located in northwest Spain, is the site of a large traditional pilgrimage center, and one of the most important in Europe. The city name comes from the Christian missionary apostle Saint James, as it is the location where his body was buried. According to early Christian traditions, James evangelized this region of Spain in the 1st century. Over the following centuries, several miracles attributed to the holy apostle were witnessed in this region, which contributed profoundly to the shaping of Hispanic identity. Currently, the apostle is considered the national patron saint of Spain.

James the Apostle, or James the Great, son of Zebedee, was, according to New Testament sources, one of the most prominent disciples of Jesus of Nazareth, having received from his master the name Boanerges, or “son of thunder”, due to his impetuous character. James, together with Peter and John, made up the group of the only three apostles to witness the mystery of the Transfiguration of Christ. In addition, he was one of the first martyred Christian missionaries, having been beheaded by Herod Agrippa I in Jerusalem in the year 44. After his death, according to early Christian traditions, his remains are supposed to have been transferred to Spain, in the current region of Galicia. Due to the Roman persecution of Christians in the province of Hispania, his tomb was abandoned in the 3rd century.

The pilgrimage to Santiago dates back to the 9th and 10th centuries, when the apostle’s burial place was rediscovered in the year 814. The news of the rediscovery reverberated throughout medieval Europe, leading to the construction of a church in 899. In the year 997, this church was set on fire and reduced to ashes by the Caliphate of Córdoba. The current cathedral was built in its place, with construction beginning in 1075 and with several successive stages of construction that lasted two centuries, being completed only in 1211.

Therefore, the rediscovery of the tomb of James the Apostle not only led to the founding and development of a city that would become a pilgrimage sanctuary during the centuries corresponding to the Middle Ages, but also brought extremely important consequences for the history of European civilization. In this period, between the 10th and 13th centuries, most of the Iberian Peninsula lived under Muslim rule. Numerous religious and chivalric orders, coming from local nobility from different parts of Europe, headed towards Galicia and settled there in order to guarantee the safety of the pilgrimage routes. And subsequently, the growing presence of these orders would make the region a militarized center of resistance to the Muslim occupation, which contributed further to the Christian territorial advance in the Iberian Peninsula and the reconquest of the territories of Al-Andaluz, the Iberian Reconquista. Muslim rule in Spain would come to a definitive end with the capture of Granada in 1492.

For instance, among the main cavalry orders active in the protection of pilgrims was the Order of Saint James, which was founded in 1164. The Saint James knights were present in numerous military campaigns during the Reconquista, and came to control conquered territories that extended across important regions from Spain. At the same time, the custom of invoking the name of Saint James before entering battle also emerged during this period.

Saint James, the conqueror

We can consider that the cult of Saint James made the region of Galicia, located in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula, the principal center of Christian spiritual resistance against Muslim forces located in Iberian south, a spiritual core from which several military campaigns to the south would depart, and thus consolidating the formation of Spanish Christian kingdoms throughout the process of Christian reconquest of the Iberian peninsula.

During this period, the holy apostle was represented in different iconographic forms. Among these forms, there is no other representation that better symbolizes the entire process of reconquest and Spanish national identity itself than the figure of Santiago Matamoros.

Santiago Matamoros is the name popularly given to the representation of the apostle Santiago as a knight in combat. According to medieval chronicles, he miraculously intervened on behalf of Christians against Muslims during the battle of Clavijo, supposedly on May 23, 844.

The Spanish tradition of Matamoros supposedly dates back to the reign of Ramiro I of Asturias. At the beginning of his reign, the Andalusian Muslims of the Emirate of Córdoba demanded the tribute of hundred virgins from the Christian kingdoms of the north. Ramiro I refused to give them the hundred maidens, and on the night before the Battle of Clavijo, according to tradition, the apostle Saint James appeared to him in a dream, who informed him that he was designated by God as Patron Saint of Spain. Santiago encourages Ramiro to fight and asks him to summon him. The Spanish fight shouting “God help Santiago!”, and the Moors are defeated, killing more than five thousand Moors that day.

It was through the archetypal figure of Santiago Matamoros that the symbolic ideal of conquest would definitively enter Spanish culture, marking forever the country as a people of conquerors. Cervantes recorded, in his Don Quixote de la Mancha , that “Santiago Matamoros is one of the most brave saints and knights the world has ever had; he was given to Spain by God, as its patron saint and for its protection”.

The symbolism of Matamoros would manifest itself in different forms throughout Spanish cultural history, serving as inspiration for several later historical events, such as the Spanish conquest of America, also synthesizing the cultural ideal of Hispanidad. Pagan indigenous peoples took the place of Muslim Moors as the people to be Christianized by the Spanish conquerors of America. Countless miracles in battles fought against indigenous people would again be reported and attributed to Saint James, making him the founding patron saint of several cities in Mexico and Central America.

In contemporary Spain, the public display of images of Santiago Matamoros has become politically incorrect and has been target of cancellations by the Spanish political left in recent years in Galicia. According to the left, the figure of Matamoros is associated with the legitimization of the European colonization process in America, understood as genocidal in nature.

However, contrary to what the leftist interpretation tends to assert, the ideal of the Spanish conquest of America was in no way guided by a supremacist biological racial ideal over the indigenous people, as was done by English colonization. The cultural ideal of Hispanidad would present from the beginning an integrative and unifying character of races and origins around the spiritual unity of the Catholic faith. The greatest evidence of this is that Hispanic countries have as a major characteristic attribute the strong presence of mixed race population, a characteristic which was absent in Protestant English colonization process.

Saint James, the pilgrim

A second iconographic representation of Saint James, also very present in the Spanish cultural imagination, is the figure of Santiago the Pilgrim. In it, the apostle presents a much less combative appearance than the figure of Matamoros, and instead of being represented as a military knight, he appears as a hermit monk. Numerous sculptures, paintings and stained glass windows referring to this image can be found in the Santiago Cathedral.

This less bellicist and more spiritualized face of Saint James identifies the figure of the apostle with the devotees who arrive at his sanctuary, which are dedicated to the ascetic experience of peregrinatio . Since James was also a pilgrim in his life, having visited the entire region of 1st century Hispania on foot in his evangelizing walks. And later, in the Middle Ages, the current religious and cultural imaginary did not hesitate to represent him as a devout walker who uses a staff, covered with a hat and a large cloak and carries a bag on his shoulder adorned with a scallop shell, the Santiago’s shell.

The attributes that characterize the devotee dedicated to the peregrinatio – especially the staff and the scallop shell – contained a symbolic meaning. The staff on which the pilgrim rests as if it were a third foot symbolizes the Holy Trinity. Santiago’s shell symbolizes the good works in which each pilgrim must persevere after having completed his expiatory journey to the Jacobean shrine.

The symbolism of the shell

We cannot help but remember there is a deeper meaning behind the symbolism of Santiago’s shell. The shell also represents the map of pilgrimage routes to Santiago, which, analogously to the design of a shell, has multiple lines converging towards the final destination, as we can see below.

All roads, therefore, lead to Santiago. The end of the shell, as the point of intersection of multiple paths, can be understood as an analogy to the very element of unity and diversity of the Christian religion, in its doctrinal unity in the cultural diversity of ethnic, linguistic and national identities.

Since on the one hand the Christian Church is catholic, universal, endowed with doctrinal unity and an evangelizing mission that has as its final goal the total conversion of the world to the Church, this same search for universality also paradoxically implies a distancing from the earthly interests of a national or local ethnic political entity.

Therefore, we cannot speak of a Church as a project for an earthly empire that competes with other empires. The same Church that proposes the reign of Christ over the world is also the one that calls on members to fulfill their due social duties with the temporal authorities, paying Caesar his share of taxes due.

Finally, the multiple paths towards truth, in this sense, can also be understood as the Christian notion of freedom, one of the greatest legacies that Christianity exerted on the formation of Western culture, in its ideals of universal human dignity based on freedom of conscience.

The moral freedom of human conscience sets multiple paths to be taken by human person. But on the other hand, contrary to what postmodernity claims, this moral freedom of conscience has a meaning and a direction, a compass and north. This north is the truth, the final destination to which all multiple individual paths point. Just like the shell, these paths then converge to a single end, the full realization of the human being and his happiness guided according to the truth of the Logos.

References

The appearances of Santiago Combatiente during the conquest of America, a historiographical debate . https://apami.home.blog/2021/07/28/las-apariciones-de-santiago-combatiente-durante-la-conquista-de-america-un-debate-historiografico/ <Accessed on September 19, 2023 >

Santiago de Compostela , https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santiago_de_Compostela <Accessed on September 19, 2023>

Santiago Matamoros , https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santiago_Matamoros <Accessed on September 19, 2023>

Santiago Peregrino , https://xacopedia.com/Santiago_peregrino <Accessed on September 19, 2023>