Cantigas de Compostela, part 2: Santiago the king?

Today, July 25, is the feast of Saint James the Elder, whose main cult centre is Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. The establishment of Compostela as the cult centre of an apostle whose death in Palestine is recounted by the Acts of the Apostles appears to have begun in the ninth century, and flourished into one of the main pilgrimage centres of Latin Christendom in the early twelfth century. One of the reasons for the success of Compostela's emergence as the location of the burial of Saint James the Elder is the plasticity of saints, and how this plasticity was applied to the figure of Saint James, or Santiago. The term 'plasticity' in this context means that the saints can take on a wide variety of roles, and a wide variety of stories can be written about them. Few saints have had such a successfully varied iconography as Santiago, as he is known and venerated as an apostle, a martyr, a pilgrim, and a soldier. I have written a brief summary of this iconography here. Santiago was, however, also subject to other iconographies. In the Miracula Jacobi, the second instalment of the collection of material pertaining to Saint James which is commonly called Liber Sancti Jacobi, we read a miracle account where a Greek bishop, Stephen, claims that James should be called a fisherman and not a soldier, as was then evidently in vogue. The account continues to narrate a vision of Stephen's, in which Santiago appears to him dressed as a soldier, in order to prove that he was wrong to dismiss those who called the apostle a soldier also. This particular story both shows that there were several ideas about how Santiago should be understood in circulation, and also that the authorities at the cult centre saw the need to convince some audiences that Santiago was also a soldier. 

Another iconographical branch of Santiago can be suggested by a thirteenth-century stone sculpture currently housed in the cathedral museum in Compostela. Here, the apostle-pilgrim-soldier-fisherman saint is depicted in a different way, namely as a seated king. The staff on which he rests his hand is probably the pilgrim's staff rather than the sceptre - as it looks nothing like typical depictions of sceptres from contemporary art - so the figure is not solely regal. Perhaps we should understand the crown as signifying Santiago's status as a martyr, since the crown was regarded as the prize for obtaining martyrdom. Yet it is also possible that those who commissioned this statue and accepted its appearance - namely the episcopal authorities - aimed to imbue their patron with a more royal aura. Perhaps, as the royal authority of Castilla and León was undergoing increased centralisation - especially under the reign of Alfonso X (r.1252-84) - the episcopal court of Compostela sought to use this current to evoke the historical kingdom of Galicia, and to make Santiago even more relevant than before.  

Ultimately, I must leave it to the experts on the cult of Saint James the Elder to provide some explanation of this rendition. In any case, it serves as an excellent example of how so much of the cult's success relied on the ability to adapt the iconography to new contexts.