[293] Diego Gelmírez's death ushered in a long period of turmoil in the history of the church of Santiago de Compostela. Between 1140 and 1173 six archbishops succeeded one another in a series of short pontificates -- two of them lasted less than six months apiece -- punctuated by vacancies -- one of them as long as two and a half years. The enmities which Diego had striven hard to contain burst out into open conflict. There were divisions within the chapter, quarrels with the king, troubles with the local nobility, hostility from ecclesiastical rivals, disharmony in relations with the papal curia. One consequence of these difficulties is clear: this was a time of financial straits for the see of Compostela. It is significant that building operations at the cathedral -- as in the 1090s a sensitive indicator -- ceased between Diego's death and the advent of archbishop Pedro Suárez in 1173. It was to be during his long pontificate that the west front was completed by the addition of the famous Pórtico de la Gloria.

It was probably in response to financial stringency that, about the middle of the century, a canon of Compostela named Pedro Marcio concocted a celebrated forgery known as the 'Diploma of Ramiro I'.⁽¹⁾ It purports to be a charter granted by king Ramiro I (842-50) after a battle at Clavijo in 844. In gratitude for St. James's assistance in the defeat of the Moors the king was made to decree that every part of Spain under Christian rule should render annually a certain quantity of corn and wine to the cathedral community of Compostela; and further, that a share of all booty taken in campaigns against the Moors should likewise be made over to Santiago. This was the render which later generations were to know as the votos de Santiago. Though the diploma has [294] found impassioned defenders in the past, all scholars are now agreed that it is a forgery. The text convicts itself by chronological inaccuracy and glaring anachronism. There are plenty of other suspicious features about it: to name but one, its absence from the cathedral cartulary Tumbo A, copied (as we have seen) in 1129-31. That said, the question whether the clergy of Compostela were claiming the votos before c. 1150 remains an exceedingly difficult one, on which the last word has not yet been said. (I am fairly confident that they were not, but the matter is too complicated to be debated here.)

The 'Diploma of Ramiro I', however, does have a special kind of interest for us. Little, if anything, as it has to tell us of the ninth century, it does shed light on what Pedro Marcio and his circle believed and wanted others to believe about Santiago in the twelfth. In their minds there was a conviction that St. James was the saintly champion of the Christians of Spain in their armed struggle against the hosts of Islam.

The notion that 'St. James the Moor-Slayer' -- Santiago Matamoros -- was the patron saint of a crusading Reconquista has traditionally been accepted without question by a long line of historians of medieval Spain. But the assumption needs to be examined critically. There is a cluster of related problems here. The character of the Reconquista is currently undergoing re-assessment at the hands of a new generation of Spanish medievalists.⁽²⁾ It may be premature to attempt to summarize the results of this timely and salutary activity, but the present position may be stated in general terms as follows. Two old orthodoxies are being weighed in the balance and found wanting: first, the belief in the distinctiveness of the Christian Spanish medieval experience, [295] and second -- and closely connected -- the interpretation of that experience in Catholic and nationalist terms. In place of these, scholars are displaying a willingness to seek analogies for the history of Spain in the experience of other parts of medieval Europe, notably France, and to lay a new stress on the force exerted by economic and social pressures in the development of the Reconquista. Thus, attention has been drawn to evidence of slow but steady demographic growth in the Asturo-Pyrenean mountain zone of the northern strip of the peninsula during the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries; archaeology and the historical study of climate will surely have more to tell us of this process. Attention has also -- and most interestingly -- been directed to certain archaic, aboriginal features of the social institutions and cultural life of this region in the period before c. 800; for example, the tribal organization of society, the almost complete absence of Romanization and the very slow spread of Christianity. From about 750 or so onward, these aboriginal communities began to expand towards the plains, obedient to a Malthusian imperative. In doing so they encountered a Mediterranean culture entirely different from their own in its settlement patterns, economic concerns, legal arrangements, political organization, religious belief, and so forth. From this encounter there gradually emerged between c. 900 and c. 1100 in the central band of the Spanish peninsula a new form of society and a new culture which the revisionists have chosen -- not very happily -- to label 'feudal'. This expansion, encounter and emergence was, it is urged, the Reconquista.

The challenge of the new thesis is lost in a crude summary of this kind. Certainly, it is being very ably argued and defended, and bids fair to become a new orthodoxy as potent as the old ones it has displaced. This prospect may be viewed not altogether without a degree of disquiet. Some of the emphases -- but only some -- of the traditional school were valuable; for instance, the stress laid by Menéndez Pidal and Sánchez Albornoz on the 'neo-Gothic' ideal of kingship at the court of Alfonso III is one which we should be unwise to displace. There is also the risk that some of the new concepts will be embraced too eagerly; that the [296] importation of an over-rigid schema first worked out and applied to their own country by French medieval historians might have as constricting an effect on our understanding of Spanish medieval history as it has had on that of French. One feature in particular of the revisionist school, which may owe something to French intellectual fashion, is a little disturbing: its devotees singularly lack interest in the church -- except as a landowning corporation -- or religion. This results in the curious paradox that, because they have not been subjected to critical scrutiny, completely traditional ideas about Santiago's patronage of a crusading Reconquista continue to find expression even in the writings of those who are among the most strident of the revisionists.⁽³⁾

Insistent questions remain. Can we any longer be sure that the military operations of the Asturian and Leonese kings were sustained by the moral imperative -- whatever its social roots -- of 'reconquest'? How closely was St. James associated with this impulse in the minds of kings, clergy, nobility? Did these wars always have a 'crusading' character? If not always, when and how did they acquire it? Simply to ask these questions is to be reminded how little we yet know about the 'thought-world' of the Christians of Spain in the early middle ages. To attempt to answer them would demand another book at least as long as this one. A very few observations, however, may be put forward here by way of an epilogue to the career of Diego Gelmírez.

We have already seen in chapter III that Alfonso III in the later part of the ninth century could regard St. James as his patron and the giver of victory over his enemies. So did several of his tenth- and eleventh-century successors. What is noteworthy, however, is that it is not until the twelfth that widespread evidence exists to testify to any real intimacy of relationship between St. James and aggressive warfare waged by kings against Muslims. In 1140 Alfonso VII put it on record that he owed the conquest of Coria to the intercession of St. James. His son Fernando II referred to himself in 1158 as 'the standard-bearer' (vexillifer) of St. James.⁽⁴⁾ It was in the [297] 1130s that the militias of Avila, Segovia and Toledo were to be found invoking St. James during campaigns against the Almoravides.⁽⁵⁾ Significance was discovered in the fact that the great Portuguese victory at Aulic was won on St. James's day, 25 July, in 1139.⁽⁶⁾ Two of the miracles of St. James associate the apostle with warfare against Islam.⁽⁷⁾ Given this climate of opinion it is not surprising that when a Spanish military order was founded in the 1170s it was placed under the patronage of Santiago.

When did the Spanish wars become 'crusades'? To those who would claim that they had never been anything else it is refutation enough to point out that the term 'crusade' is being employed too loosely. Warfare that has a vaguely Christian character is not crusading warfare. Historians today insist that 'crusade' is a technical term. (Possibly they insist on its technicality a little too much.) To qualify as a 'crusade' a campaign must be sponsored or blessed by the pope or his representative and underpinned by the notion of warfare as spiritually meritorious. Those who participate in it must be shown to have enjoyed a special type of ecclesiastical privilege, the crusading indulgence, and to have fortified their intention with a vow. Not a single one of these characteristics may be encountered among the records relating to warfare in Spain before the very end of the eleventh century.⁽⁸⁾ Certain pronouncements of Urban II and Paschal II show that the popes were slowly coming to see the wars against the Muslims of Spain as sharing in the distinctiveness of those waged against the Muslims of Palestine and Syria. But it was not until 1123 that pope Calixtus II made it unambiguously plain that he [298] regarded the wars in Spain as crusades.⁽⁹⁾ Whether the Spaniards themselves thought of their wars as crusades must remain uncertain until we reach the campaigns of 1147-8 which brought about the conquests of Almería, Lisbon, Lérida and Tortosa.⁽¹⁰⁾ These were certainly perceived as crusades by the contemporaries who recorded them.

Though the argument cannot be developed here, I would suggest that the 'crusade-idea' was an alien importation which took root in Spain only in the second quarter of the twelfth century. It further seems to me of significance that the notion of St. James as a patron saint of warfare against Islam emerges clearly for the first time at the same period. The implications may be far-reaching.

We must return for the last time to Diego Gelmírez. It is a striking fact -- and some have found it an awkward one -- that the Historia Compostellana has so very little to say of warfare against the Moors, of the Reconquista, of crusading, of Santiago Matamoros. Two passages, however, deserve some attention. In 1113, at Burgos, Diego was called on by queen Urraca to address an assembly at a time when the Almoravides were pressing hard upon the southern frontier.⁽¹¹⁾ His speech was a call to stand firm against enemies. We have our backs to the wall, he said in effect. We must avenge the wrongs done to us just as the Israelites slaughtered the people of Gibeah (Judges: 19-20). Our cause is just; God is on our side. Now the elements which would permit us to call this a crusading sermon are conspicuous by their absence. Diego was preaching what Erdmann called a Verteidigungskrieg or defensive war, a well-known genre of the pre-crusading era.⁽¹²⁾ Far different was it eleven years later when in 1124 Diego addressed one of his legatine councils at Compostela.⁽¹³⁾ As [299] the pope's legate he preached an aggressive military campaign (expeditio) against the Moors, to the confusion of paganism and the exaltation of Christianity. To all those taking part in it he promised full absolution and remission of sins. A document was drawn up for circulation giving details of the spiritual and other benefits which would accrue to those soldiers of Christ (milites Christi) who heeded the call: remission of sins, and protection of their property, enforceable by the sanction of excommunication, during their absence. All of which, we are told, was done in accordance with papal decree (iuxta domini papae edictum); it is surely reasonable to detect in this a reference to the bull of Calixtus II of 1123 to which reference has aleady been made. The contrast between these two pronouncements is marked. The call to arms of 1113 was not the preaching of a crusade; that of 1124 was. It would be unwise to press the implications of this contrast too far. But it is worth bearing in mind that between these two dates Diego's contacts with the papal curia had been extremely close. If the different content of the two speeches does indeed witness to development in his thoughts on the subject of Christian warfare in Spain, this evolution was suggestively parallel to that which papal thinking seems to have undergone during the same period.

Does this make Diego Gelmírez a 'crusader'? Does it place him among the architects of the idea of St. James's patronage of a reconquest of Spain? I doubt it. The notions we have glanced at here, hazy as yet, seem to run together and 'set' in a new mould only after he was dead and gone. Diego's mind had been shaped long before, back in the 1070s and 1080s. His native Galicia was an enormous distance -- and not just geographically -- from the southern frontier. He did not face that way. The reticence of the Historia is eloquent.

That work, as we have had occasion to stress more than once, is not a window into Diego's soul. We know so much of what he did, so little of what he was like. Back in 1102, when he had stolen the relics of St. Fructuosus but before he had made his escape with them from Braga, he was so beset with anxiety that he had a sleepless night.⁽¹⁴⁾ There, [300] suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye, we can glimpse the man behind the bishop; and then he is gone. To end this study of him on so many questioning and uncertain notes is to confess the honest perplexities of the twentieth-century historian as he stalks his quarry along the cunning passages, contrived corridors and issues, of history. But to end this book thus hesitantly is hardly just to its subject. Diego Gelmírez always knew where he was going and how to get there. He was nothing if not sure of himself.

1. Printed in LFH II, pp. 132-7. As Vones, Kirchenpolitik, p. 206, n. 171, points out, no critical edition yet exists.

2. See the articles of A. Barbero and M. Vigil collected in their Sobre los orígenes sociales de la Reconquista (Barcelona, 1974); the sanie authors' La formación del feudalismo en la Península Ibérica (Barcelona, 1978); S. de Moxó, Repoblación y sociedad en la España cristiana medieval (Madrid, 1979); J. A. García de Cortazar and C. Díez Herrera, La formación de la sociedad hispano-cristiana del Cantábrico al Ebro en los siglos VIII al XI (Santander, 1982); and the contribution of J. Faci Lacasta to Historia de la Iglesia en España, vol. II, part i, 'La Iglesia en la España de los siglos VIII al XIV', ed. J. Fernández Conde (Madrid, 1982), pp. 99-139.

3. See, for example, Faci Lacasta, op. cit., pp. 112-13.

4. R. 1 July 1140, 30 September 1158; cf. also R. 24 August 1165, 18 March 1169.

5. CAI, cc. 117, 121.

6. M. Blöcker-Walter, Alfons I von Portugal (Zurich, 1966), pp. 33-5; P. Feige, 'Die Anfänge des portugiesischen Konigtums und seiner Landeskirche', Spanische Forschungen der Görresgesellschaft 29 (1978), 85-436, at pp. 244-6.

7. LSJ, pp. 271-2, 283-5. It is true that the setting of the latter is Fernando I's siege and conquest of Coimbra in 1064. But the story is an elaboration of that to be found in the anonymous Historia Silense (ed. J. Pérez de Urbel and A. González Ruiz-Zorrilla (Madrid, 1959), c. 89, pp. 191-2) composed at León c. 1120. The earliest references to the campaign have nothing to say of St. James: see P. David, 'Annales Portugalenses veteres' in his Études historiques, pp. 257-340.

8. The view that the Barbastro expedition of 1064 was a 'pre-Crusade crusade', as Erdmann argued, is not tenable.

9. JL 7116. For a recent translation see J and L. Riley-Smith, The Crusades. Idea and reality, 1095-1274 (London, 1981), no. 12, pp. 73-4.

10. G. Constable, 'The Second Crusade as seen by contemporaries', Traditio 9 (1953), 213-79. The attitudes of the authors of the Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris and the De Expugnatione Lyxbonensi seem to me distinctive and (in a Spanish context) novel. The author of the latter work was of course an Englishman but I am prepared to trust his report of the crusading sermon preached by Pedro Pitoês, bishop of Porto.

11. HC, pp. 158-61.

12. C. Erdmann, Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens (Stuttgart, 1935), pp. 22-4.

13. HC, pp. 427-30.

14. HC, p. 39.