1. The Historia Compostellana

Our principal authority is the work known since its publication in the eighteenth century as the Historia Compostellana. The work was commissioned by Diego Gelmírez as a record of his pontificate and has therefore the authority of a contemporary witness. Its authorship, mode and date of composition, purposes and trustworthiness are all matters that have generated scholarly debate. On none of these questions, in my view, has a definitive conclusion yet been reached: much work remains to be done. That said, certain things are tolerably clear. The work was conceived as a collection (registrum) of documents loosely threaded together by stretches of narrative. It was the work of several successive authors -- at least four -- of whom the most prolific was Gerald, a native of Beauvais, canon of Compostela from perhaps 1112 and magister scolarum from c. 1118 to c. 1134. The internal evidence of the text confirms that composition was intermittent: parts of the Historia may have been written as early as about 1106, it is unlikely that any of it was composed later than 1139. Since the authors' aim was to record and to glorify the deeds of Diego Gelmírez it is inevitably a tendentious work, for instance in their attitude to queen Urraca or to Diego's ecclesiastical rivals; but it is not difficult to make allowance for strident partisanship of this sort. The authors were men who wore their hearts and their prejudices on their sleeves. The Historia is not a work of subtle complexity but a plain and at times almost embarrassingly candid record of a great prelate's gesta.

The Historia was first printed by Enrique Flórez in 1765 as volume XX of his España Sagrada under the title Historia Compostellana, sive de rebus gestis D. Didaci Gelmirez primi [302] Compostellani archiepiscopi. This edition was reproduced under the auspices of the Real Academia de la Historia in 1965. In my footnotes I have abbreviated the title to HC and given references to pages of this edition, not to book or chapter numbers. The pagination of Flórez's edition is bedevilled by misprints between pages 273 and 287: references to these pages are given in the form 278 (276), where (276) is the page number printed and 278 is the correct one.

Flórez's text of the Historia was reprinted in Migne's Patrología Latina, vol. CLXX (Paris, 1854), cols. 889-4236. In 1950 a translation into Spanish was published at Santiago de Compostela by M. Suárez, with notes by J. Campelo: the annotation is particularly useful in its bearing on Galician topography.

Flórez worked from the earliest surviving manuscript, now Salamanca, Biblioteca de la Universidad, MS 2658. This is a copy of the mid- or late-thirteenth century, probably more than one remove from the original manuscript, the work of a careless scribe whose Latin was poor. Flórez made the best of a bad job and by recourse to liberal and intelligent emendation produced a usable text. But it cannot be said that the Historia Compostellana has ever been critically edited. (It is rumoured that a new edition is in preparation in Spain.) Not without considerable difficulty, Professor Antonio García y García procured a microfilm of Salamanca MS 2658 for me; for which I am profoundly grateful to him. With the aid of this, and some readings from the later, fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts in the cathedral archive of Santiago de Compostela, I have ventured to depart from Flórez's text here and there. My changes have been for the most part of minor significance and I have not drawn attention to them. Where they seemed of more importance, for example in their bearing on chronology, they have been documented in a footnote.

The most recent discussion of the Historia Compostellana, with full references to earlier literature, is to be found in Vones, Kirchenpolitik, pp. 4-74.

[303] 2. Royal charters

All royal charters granted to the church of Santiago de Compostela down to the year 1127 were copied into the cathedral cartulary now known as Tumbo A between 1129 and 1131; subsequent charters of Alfonso VII and his successors were added to this manuscript later in the century. The originals do not survive. On the circumstances in which this cartulary was compiled, see chapter X. Very nearly all these documents have been printed either by Flórez in the appendices to España Sagrada vol. XIX or by López Ferreiro in the appendices to his Historia de la Santa A. M. Iglesia de Santiago de Compostela. Judged by modern standards, the editing leaves something to be desired. Through the good offices of Professor Antonio García I was enabled by the kindness of D. Salvador Domato Bua, Director del Archivo Histórico Diocesano de Santiago de Compostela, and D. José-María Díaz, Canónigo-Archivero de la Catedral de Santiago de Compostela, to secure photographs of the relevant folios (1-46r) of Tumbo A in 1978, so that I have been able to check the printed versions against the manuscript copies. This photographic record was executed under difficult conditions (there was then no electric light in the cathedral archive) by Sr. Nóvoa, whose skill I acknowledge with admiration and gratitude.

On the mode of reference in this book to these and other royal charters of the rulers of León-Castile, see below, Appendix B.

3. Other charters

Some hundreds of private (i.e. non-royal) charters of the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries from Galicia and northern Portugal have survived either as originals or as cartulary copies. They constitute invaluable materials for the reconstruction of the economic, social and ecclesiastical history of the region. Only a proportion -- perhaps, in rough terms, between a third and a half -- of this corpus of evidence has found its way into print in some form or another. The printed collections which I have found the most useful are [304] those of the charters of the monasteries of Carboeiro, Jubia and Sobrado: bibliographical details may be found in the list of abbreviations. I have also made use of large numbers of unpublished documents from the following archives: the Archivo Histórico Nacional (AHN) in Madrid, the Archivo Histórico del Reino de Galicia (AHRG) in Corunna, the Instituto de Valencia de Don Juan (IVDJ) and the Biblioteca Nacional (BN), both in Madrid, and the Archivo de la Catedral (AC) of the several cathedrals of Galicia.

4.Papal letters

Nearly all the papal letters which I have cited are preserved in the Historia Compostellana. In addition to the page references I have provided cross-references to Jaffé's Regesta Pontificum Romanorum in the revised (1885) edition by Löwenfeld and others. References are given in the standard form used by medievalists, i.e. JL followed by the number of the letter. A few unpublished papal letters have also been cited.

5. The Liber Sancti Jacobi

This is the title conventionally, if incorrectly, given to the bizarre compilation put together in France about the middle years of the twelfth century containing in its five books (i) lessons, sermons, prayers and hymns for the feasts of St. James; (ii) a collection of the miracles of St. James; (iii) materials relating to the translation of the body of St. James from Palestine to Galicia; (iv) a fabulous account of Charlemagne's campaigns in Spain attributed to archbishop Turpin of Rheims; and (v) a guidebook for the use of pilgrims from France to the shrine of St. James at Compostela.

Historians of medieval Compostela, particularly those concerned with pilgrimages thereto, have traditionally made somewhat incautious, at times reckless, use of materials contained in the first, second and fifth books. My acquaintance with these puzzling texts had left me somewhat baffled, but at any rate convinced that greater circumspection [305] was needed in using them for historical purposes than had usually been shown in the past. It was then that I encountered Mr Christopher Hohler's 'A note on Jacobus', Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 35 (1972), 31-80. Mr Hohler's learned, vigorous and richly entertaining polemic, which contains references to recent contributions to the voluminous literature on the Jacobus, is now the best introduction to this desperately problematical group of texts. His work convinced me that I must needs be even more circumspect in my employment of them than I had allowed. Certain references which had found their way into earlier drafts of this book have accordingly been excised. But not all. Some materials in Jacobus, it seems to me, may be used for certain limited ends by the historian of twelfth-century Compostela; and I have permitted myself this liberty here and there, notably in chapter VII, though not without a degree of trepidation.

The only (and far from satisfactory) edition of the whole text is that of W. M. Whitehill, Liber Sancti Jacobi, Codex Calixtinus (Santiago de Compostela, 1944), vol. I. In my notes I have given page references to this edition under the abbreviation LSJ.

6.Modern work

The above is not an exhaustive list of the original sources which I have used, but it should serve to indicate the main categories of those which have proved the most useful. Since, as will be apparent to the reader, the modern or secondary literature devoted to my subject is not extensive, I decided after some consideration that to provide a formal bibliography would serve little useful purpose. Accordingly, the bibliography is to be found in the footnotes. However, it might be helpful to comment briefly here on those secondary works to which I have repeatedly turned, invariably to the profit of my understanding, and to whose authors I owe a debt of gratitude not readily to be appreciated from my references to them in the footnotes; references too often occasioned (as is the way with footnotes) by a wish merely to record dissent; but this (I trust) in no carping spirit.

[306] Pride of place must go to Antonio López Ferreiro, Historia de la Santa Apostólica Metropolitana Iglesia de Santiago de Compostela (Santiago de Compostela, 1898-1911), of which volumes II, III, and IV have been, after the Historia Compostellana itself, my prop and stay. This is a noble work, learned and stately, pious and humane; a monument of devout historical scholarship. An English historian, approaching in the 1980s that period of Compostelan history treated in those three majestic volumes, will necessarily view it in a somewhat different perspective; moreover, he will or should have access to techniques of historical scholarship not indeed unavailable to López Ferreiro but which have undergone refinement since the time at which he did his work. Which is only to say, as discreetly as may be, that López Ferreiro has, inevitably, dated. He was a Catholic priest of the nineteenth century who wrote to celebrate the traditions of the church of St. James. Minute and painstaking, loving but also critical, though his attention was to the early history of his native Galicia, his vision did not stray far beyond her confines. Acutely conscious of being but 'a pygmy on the shoulders of a giant', I have sought here only to hint at additional ways of interpreting the materials which he knew so much better than anyone before or since; to afforce his scholarship, not to attempt (which would be presumptuous) to supplant it. A word of gratitude must finally be said, before we leave him, for the documentary appendices which so stoutly buttress his text. In the three volumes in question they amount to over five hundred pages of documents for the most part previously unpublished, some of which have been lost since his day. My debt to this great store of information is apparent in the footnotes to this book.

My first acquaintance with Diego Gelmírez was made through the work of A. G. Biggs, Diego Gelmírez, first archbishop of Compostela (Washington, 1949), which remains the only full treatment of Diego's career in English. It has to be said that this is a somewhat pedestrian work; furthermore, the author relied only on sources available in print. For all these limitations, however, this is a very careful work which brings together conveniently much information not otherwise easy of access. The only other work in the [307] English language which deserves mention is both more recent and of very much higher quality: B. F. Reilly, The kingdom of León-Castilla under queen Urraca 1109-1126 (Princeton, 1982), is the first adequate study in any language of the reign of queen Urraca and deserves to lead the field for many years to come. I have elsewhere in this book, at the beginning of chapter VI, acknowledged my indebtedness to this work and to certain kindnesses shown me by its author in connection with it.

Of works in languages other than English, easily the most stimulating is the collection of essays by Pierre David, Études historiques sur la Galice et le Portugal du VI^e au XII^e siècle (Lisbon-Paris, 1947). David was a most remarkable scholar who single-handedly transformed the study of the medieval history first of Poland and then of Portugal. His Études historiques are distinguished not only by the breadth of their range in time and by the depth of their erudition, but also and above all by the alert and sparkling intelligence which informs them and all other of his writings on Iberian history (and, so I am told, on early Polish history too). Whether assessing the evidence of annals or charters, church-dedications, place-names or liturgy; whether investigating the ecclesiastical organization of the Suevic kingdom in the sixth century or the strange and tragic career of archbishop Maurice of Braga in the early twelfth; he invariably had something to convey that was fresh, clever and arresting. A gifted teacher, he imparted something of his distinctive style and tone and approach to his pupil Avelino de Jesus da Costa, whose book O bispo D. Pedro e a organização da diocese de Braga (Coimbra, 1959: first published in the journal Biblos) is the most acute as well as the most exhaustive study of any Iberian churchman in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Of works devoted to Galicia proper in the early middle ages, I have learnt much from the writings of Manuel Ruben García Alvarez. To a large number of articles published over the last twenty years or so, for the most part in the periodicals Compostellanum and Cuadernos de Estudios Gallegos, he has recently added the first instalment of a book, Galicia y los gallegos en la alta edad media (Santiago de Compostela, 1975). Dr García Alvarez's work has attracted [308] a good deal of odium academicum (possibly, I suspect, because he is an 'amateur'); to my mind, unjustly. Most of his work has been sober, careful and thorough. To one series of studies in particular I am deeply indebted, his very useful catalogue of royal charters relating to Galicia: on this see further below, Appendix B.

German scholarly interest in the ecclesiastical history of the western parts of the Iberian peninsula during the eleventh and twelfth centuries -- first manifested itself in a series of characteristically distinguished studies by Carl Erdmann; notably his fine edition of the surviving Papsturkunden in Portugal published in 1927. After lying dormant for many years it has recently flowered again in the exceptionally thorough and penetrating study of Dr Ludwig Vones, Die Historia Compostellana und die Kirchenpolitik des nordwestspanischen Raumes 1070-1130 (Cologne, 1980); a work to which I have already paid tribute in this book, at the beginning of chapter VIII. Dr Vones's book is provided (pp. 564-603) with a full bibliography: readers who are distressed by the absence of such an apparatus in this book may turn with confidence to Dr Vones.