The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

Crown a menace to the unity of Spain.
    The moment for action came when the Master of the Order, the Conde de Paredes (whose memory has been immortalized by his son, Jorge Manrique, in Copias de Oro ), died, and Queen Isabella visited Uclés, the headquarters of the Order, and ordered the Chapter to appeal to the Pope to grant the Mastership to Ferdinand. And so in 1493 the Order and all its property were incorporated in the Crown. Henceforth its emblem, the little red sword, called el lagarto, or lizard, becomes a courtly symbol, which gives a subtle touch of elegance to the knights in El Greco’s pictures, who wear it on their doublets and cloaks. *

ST. JAMES GOES OVERSEAS

    The war of Granada, with its glorious pageant of chivalry that lives for us still in the fifty-four scenes carved on the choir-stalls of Toledo Cathedral, marked the end of the first phase of St. James’s apostolate for Spain. He had inspired the Spaniards to bring to fulfilment the dream of eight centuries of struggle against the Moors, but there were still tasks ahead and conquests overseas,*-which needed the supernatural aid of Santiago mounted on his snow-white steed. And so St. James the Moor-slayer crosses the ocean, riding in the clouds above the Spanish galleons, many of which bore his name on their bows. Cunninghame Graham, a modern conquistador, has described the epic in the following words: ‘There had been but one real conquest worthy of the name —that of the New World. The human race in all its annals holds no record like it. Uncharted seas; unnavigated gulfs; new constellations; the unfathomable black pit of the Magellan clouds; the Cross hanging in the sky; the very needle varying from the Pole; islands innumerable and an unknown world rising from out the sea; all unsuspected races living in a flora never seen by Europeans, made it an achievement unique in all the history of mankind.’ *
    Throughout the conquest ‘Santiago’ was the war-cry of the Spaniards in their struggle against the Indians as it had been in the past against the Moors. On March 12, 1519, when Cortes was in danger of perishing in the mud by the River Grijalba, in the words of Bernal Diaz the soldier chronicler: ‘We were in mortal danger until we reached the bank, but then calling upon My Lord Santiago we charged the enemy fiercely and drove him back.’ On the march towards the mysterious city of Montezuma, when the small force of Cortes was attacked ceaselessly by the Indians in overwhelming numbers, Cortes shouted the war-cry, “Santiago y a ellos” (“St. James and at ’em”), and with the help of the Apostle the Indians were driven back with great slaughter.
    The help of the Apostle again was sought in the misadventures of the ‘sad night’, when the bridge over the lake collapsed and men and horses fell into the water amidst a shower of arrows from the Indian bowmen. ‘What dismay and horrors we felt’, says Bernal Diaz, ‘when in the dark we heard the cries of the victims calling upon Our Lady and My Lord Santiago for help’.
    A supreme instance of the intervention of St. James took place in the Battle of Otumba, when the Spanish survivors, during their harassed retreat from Mexico, had to turn at bay against the huge army of Guatemoc. Bernal Diaz, in the course of his description (for sheer epic grandeur, unequalled in literature) adds that the Apostle was seen in the battle on horseback driving back the enemy. And in the South American continent Francisco Pizarro, in preparing his daredevil enterprise at Cajamarca against the Inca Atahualpa and his army, gave the cry “Santiago” as the sign to attack. With the help of the Apostle, in half an hour, an army of forty thousand Indians was routed by Pizarro’s handful of men on horse and foot.
    A proof of the prestige won by the Apostle in America is the number of cities, towns and villages in the new world which bear his name. He became as great a celebrity among the Portuguese as among the Spaniards, and protected their explorers and conquistadors as devotedly as he did the Spaniards, and the cult of the Apostle was especially strong in the Archdiocese of Braga. From the Jesuit historian, Father Juan Pedro Maffeo’s History of the East Indians, we learn that the Portuguese attributed their conquest of Goa not only to the Cross but also to ‘the Apostle St. James, the president of the Spaniards’. *

ST. JAMES REACHES THE APOGEE

    The capture of Granada and the fall of Moorish