3 Knighted by the Apostle Himself Political Fabrication and Chivalric Artefact in Compostela, 1332

3 Knighted by the Apostle Himself Political Fabrication and Chivalric Artefact in Compostela, 1332 Rosa M. Rodríguez Porto On the morning of the feast of St James in 1332, at a time when the star of the shrine of St James seemed to wane, the interior of the Romanesque cathedral of Santiago de Compostela was turned into a stage for one of the most exceptional rituals ever performed in Iberia – or anywhere else: King Alfonso XI of Castile’s knighting ceremony by the Apostle himself.1 Documentary records some months before attest to the sov- ereign’s decision to organise his knighting ceremony, since he had asked for a special tribute from some of the cities of his kingdom in order to cover the expenses of the fes- tivities.2 He had also sent some assistants to purchase luxurious textiles and swords in Avignon to enhance this display of royal grandeur.3 Yet, except for the Compostelan canons and those belonging to the closest entourage of the monarch, it would have been hard to ascertain what was going to happen. The chronicle of his reign – written around ten years later than the events described – leaves the historian amazed and frustrated, unable to come to terms with the ceremony described. It is retold there how the king had spent the night in vigil, with his armour on the altar. At dawn on 25 July the archbishop said mass and blessed the weapons with which King Alfonso proceeded to arm himself in full plate armour. Then he girded himself with his sword ‘so he should receive them from no other’ and approached the statue (imagen) of Saint James that was above the altar until he was close enough to make it strike him on the cheek. And ‘this was this manner in which the King received knighthood from the Apostle Saint James’.4 It would be possible to raise doubts about the historicity of the whole story were it not for the fact that the striking imagen de Sanctiago mentioned in the text is still preserved in the royal monastery of Las Huelgas de Burgos, where it has been kept for almost seven centuries (Figures 3.1 and 3.2).5 Erroneously considered by some modern scholars as the ‘knighting device’ used by all Castilian kings according to a fanciful historiographic tradition going back no earlier than the beginning of the eight- eenth century, this remarkable work went unnoticed until recent times.6 Peter Linehan deserves credit for having called attention to the unusual nature of the Compostelan solemnities and masterfully disclosing the political implications of this artefact, which should be regarded as a calculated response to the problem posed by the death of King Fernando IV in 1312 when Alfonso XI was still a little child: since his father had not been able to give him the accolade, how could the young monarch be knighted without compromising his royal authority in relation to his surrogate padrino (godfather) and, above all, without remaining bound to him by feudal homage?7 52 Knighted by the Apostle Himself Figure 3.1 The statue of Santiago del Espaldarazo is arranged for display in the exhibition Santiago: A orixe. Santiago de Compostela, Cidade da Cultura. For a king about to undertake what would prove the definitive military campaign on the Strait of Gibraltar and to mobilise the imagery of chivalry as a cohesive social force after decades of political instability, that was not a minor issue.8 However, the idea of dubbing himself – as the emperor Alfonso VII had done in the Galician basilica in 1124 or as King Pedro IV, el Ceremoniós, will later do at Zaragoza in 1336 – was out of question. Those subterfuges had been dismissed by his great-grandfather Alfonso X, the Learned King, who had stated in his Siete Partidas (c. to 1256–65) that it was mandatory to find another agent capable of conferring that dignity on the king.9 Hence the crucial role, albeit brief and limited to the blow on the cheek, played by St James by means of his imagen at Compostela. For sure, none would have disputed the apostle’s credentials as a warrior or his rule over chivalric matters. However, in order to wholly understand what was at stake for the Castilian king, more should be said about the other ceremonies that followed in Burgos that summer of 1332. There were other reasons indeed that accounted for the anxiety of Alfonso XI to have an impeccable knighting ceremony. The authority of King Sancho IV – Alfonso X’s second son and disinherited by him – and his descendants, Alfonso XI among them, had been under dispute ever since the death of the Learned King in 1284. After having recognised their rights in Alfonso X’s last will, the sons of the Rosa M. Rodríguez Porto 53 Figure 3.2 Santiago del Espaldarazo. Monasterio de Las Huelgas de Burgos. deceased infante Fernando de la Cerda had been pursuing their claims to the Castilian throne for decades. So it was not unreasonable for Alfonso XI to consider the possibility of being formally crowned some years after his coming of age in 1325, in the hope of adding a surplus of ‘royal mystique’ to his not yet fully established figure.10 It should be noted that Iberian kings – and particularly Castilian kings – were not crowned but proclaimed by the highest ranks of the nobility after the death of their predecessors.11 Since, therefore, coronation was not common practice for Castilian kings, it was necessary to produce a proper Coronation Book (Escorial, MS &.III.3; c. 1328–31) wherein the diverse steps of the ritual were analysed in detail and accompanied by explanatory miniatures.12 As one of the oldest coronation books preserved and only comparable to the ordo made for Louis IX around 1250 (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms. lat. 1246), Escorial, MS &.III.3 was remarkable in more senses than one.13 Yet, as Peter Linehan has pointed out, the Libro de la Coronación was left unfin- ished because it felt short of the king’s ambitions.14 In fact, analysis of the text of the Crónica de Alfonso XI reveals that several changes were introduced in the order of these ceremonies in 1332, beginning with the separation and relocation of anointing and coronation. Instead of taking place in Santiago de Compostela as prescribed by 54 Knighted by the Apostle Himself the ordo, both rituals were performed at the Cistercian abbey of Las Huelgas, the very same place where Fernando de la Cerda had been buried. Other aspects, though, must have been defined after a careful scrutiny of the coronation of Alfonso IV of Aragón in 1328.15 On that occasion, the Aragonese king had crowned himself, an act of obvious significance that was replicated by Alfonso XI in Las Huelgas despite the fact that the Libro de la Coronación would have presumably prescribed a more orthodox imposition of the crown by the archbishop of Santiago.16 But, even if the Castilian king claimed his part in the interaction of regnum and sacerdotium as eagerly as his Aragonese counterpart, the definition of the remaining rituals was subtler in Burgos, not least because Alfonso XI had been proclaimed king of Castile more than twenty years before and had been acting on his own since 1327. In contrast to Alfonso IV – who had experienced these rituals shortly after his father’s death – neither the anointing nor the coronation was meant to change the status of the Castilian king. As a result, the girding became the pivotal element in the Compostelan solemnities since it was the only actual rite of passage the king was to go through. In fact, the traditio gladii was loaded with meaning for Iberian kings due to the prominence of the sword among the regalia: for the ‘reconquering’ Iberian kings, it was deemed more important for defining the power and authority of the monarch than the crown itself.17 Well aware of the consideration of kings first and foremost as conquering warriors, the author of the ordo – Bishop Raymond II Ebrard of Coimbra – had prescribed that the king was to take the sword from the altar himself. Nonetheless, the problem posed by the homage to the padrino remained until, in a stroke of genius, the arrangement of a ceremonial knighting by effigy was introduced for the sophisticated articulation of the ritual’s different elements. In doing so, Alfonso XI was also able to avoid any kind of ecclesiastical interference in an act that was deemed crucial for defining royal authority. On the other hand, the substitution of the ecclesiastical liturgy by a strictly secular or para-liturgical formulation of the knighting ceremony – with the pescozada (blow on the cheek) as the key element rather than the handing over of the sword by the bishop – would also have imprinted a more martial and lay tone on these solemnities, in accordance with the chivalric ethos that the king was trying to promote with the creation of the Orden de la Banda (Order of the Sash).18 Last but not least, by creating a personal bond with the apostle, the king would have placed himself above Castilian society and, most specifically, at the apex of a knightly and aristocratic elite. As a result, this gesture would have contributed as well to the taming of the rebellious nobility after decades of internecine struggles, since many young members of the most renowned aristocratic lineages were to be subsequently knighted by the king in Burgos, and the bond then created would last until the end of Alfonso’s reign.19 However, the use of an articulated statue of the Apostle Saint James would have also evoked a constellation of disparate images in the minds of the viewers, bringing with them unexpected connotations and further problematising the perception of the knighting ceremony.

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