Juxtaposing James the Greater: Interpreting the Interstices of Santiago as Peregrino and Matamoros

JUXTAPOSING JAMES THE GREATER: INTERPRETING THE INTERSTICES OF SANTIAGO AS PEREGRINO AND MATAMOROS John K. Moore, Jr. University ofAlabama at Birmingham The nation now known as Spain has arguably had a fractured identity since the First Castilian Civil War (1366-1369) between Pedro I and Enrique de Trastámara,1 and one saint embodies both extremes Santiago , as Peregrino and Matamoros.2 The irreconcilable dichotomy Jacobean scholars have heretofore seen in these apparently antithetical manifestations of the saint emphasizes what separates rather than what connects these two representations of Santiago. Thomas D. 1 Cristina González believes that this civil war was the beginning ofthe two Spains. Pedro represented the left (in favor of the people and the Jews), while Enrique represented the right (in favor of the nobility and against the Jews). González expressed these ideas in her talk, "The Destruction of Jerusalem, the Conquest of America and the Black Legend", Thirty-Ninth International Congress of Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 8, 2004. 2 It is beyond the scope of this article to consider Santiago's other roles and representations -as apostle, fisherman, son of thunder, missionary of the Gospel to Spain- that are less crucial to the saint's Hispanic identity. La corónica 36.2 (Spring 2008): 313-44 314John K. Moore, Jr.La corónica 36.2, 2008 Spaccarelli enumerates a series ofbinary opposites associated with these manifestations of this saint -egalitarianism vs. hierarchy, peacefulness vs. militancy, internationalism vs. nationalism, receptivity of difference vs. rejection ofthe other- which he applies toward an understanding of what Americo Castro termed the "conflictive" nature ofSpanish identity (36-38). For William Melczer, too, Santiago's divergent attributes and functions are paramount (65-67). The general argument tends to be that Peregrino's staff, satchel, and scallop shell hide all personal difference with pilgrims to his Compostelan shrine and proclaim humility, whereas Matamoros's sword, horse, and banner reinforce the chain of command and nationalism, and serve as a rallying point for militant crusade. Moreover, this thinking goes, the image of Peregrino implicitly challenges hierarchy as a democratic symbol ofEveryman's travails, while the image ofMatamoros promotes a rigid social structure as an icon ofrank and violence and ofthe Church's prominence in the Reconquest enterprise. Francisco Márquez Villanueva goes as far as to suggest that Matamoros eventually extinguishes the figure of Peregrino: "el Hijo del Trueno pondría fin [empezando en la época de los Reyes Católicos] a su larga peregrinación por la historia transformado en intencionadojeroglífico de lamás absolutaintolerancia" (192-93). But while Matamoros comes to dominate southern Spain and Hispano-America, Peregrino concurrently retains his relevance (despite the temporary decline in pilgrimage after the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century) in northern Spain and in the European sphere. Just as historians have come to recognize the close relationship between pilgrimage and crusade on the Iberian peninsula during the Middle Ages, so does a focus on the interstices ofthese seemingly contradictory representations of Santiago in history, art, and literature yield a more complex understanding of the saint. Richard Fletcher illustrates that by 1100, European Christian knights (milites) were encouraged to engage in pilgrimage, and participants in Urban II's First Crusade to Jerusalem (1096) thought of themselves as pilgrims rather than as crusaders (96-97). In 1123, "pope Calixtus II made it unambiguously plain that he regarded the wars in Spain as crusades ... [and] Spaniards themselves thought of their wars as crusades" by the mid twelfth century (Fletcher 297-98). Later evidence that medieval JuxtaposingJames the Greater315 Spain thought ofitselfas fighting a crusade can be found in the various attempts of the Compostelan bishops to free themselves of the Crusade taxes imposed by the Fourth Lateran council (1215), taken to mean that these churchmen saw their efforts against the infidel at home as an aid to the crusades further east (Maria Eugenia Lacarra 31-32). In the tenth century, though not yet conceived as a crusade, the Christian advance south on the Iberian Peninsula nonetheless is what first allowed the Road to Santiago to spread across the north of the peninsula and across the Pyrenees (Constance Mary Storrs 34). In fact, many of...