(early 1600s)
“You’re too simple-minded, Sancho,” answered Don Quijote. “Remember that this great Knight of the Red Cross was given to Spain by God Himself, to be its patron saint and protector, especially in its fierce struggles with the Moors, so he’s invoked and called on in all our battles, and he’s frequently been seen, visibly present on the battlefield, humbling and trampling, destroying and murdering, those Squadrons of Hagar [Moors], a truth of which I could give you many citations from the works of our truthful Spanish chroniclers.”—Miguel de Cervantes1
As discussed earlier within the pages of this study (see Introduction), among many regional Spanish derivations for the name “James,” one of the more popular is “Diego.” In the present day United States, the best-known usage as a place name is of course the country’s eighth largest metropolitan area located in southern California. The European history of that locale in turn dates from the year 1602, in which Spanish explorer Sebastián Vizcaíno led his fleet and flagship San Diego into the same bay previously designated as San Miguel (Saint Michael) by Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo in 1542. Vizcaíno promptly renamed the bay, river, and territory after his flagship, and the newer designations stuck; however, in this instance the name Diego was not a reference to Saint James the Greater, but rather to Saint Didacus (or Diego) of Alcalá (1400?–1463), a Franciscan holy man who died decades before the Reconquista was completed or the New World even discovered. As far as the record shows, Didacus (“Didacus” being a variation on his saintly apostolic namesake) lived a blameless and admirable life, selflessly devoting himself to his fellow beings, especially those less fortunate than himself.2 He was officially canonized in 1588, the same year the Armada was defeated (see Chapter 12), and his original designated Feast Day was November 12, the same date that Vizcaíno’s expedition celebrated the first known Christian mass in modern day California.3 The event is significant in other respects as well. By 1602, Spanish adventurers in the New World were no longer exclusively claiming Saint James the Greater as their personal patron or protector, not merely to be contrarian or individualistic, but more so because the old Santiago cult had ceased to be of central importance in their exploratory endeavors.4 As the 17th century progressed, the military conquest of Latin America was winding down, and for all practical purposes had already become an established fact on the ground. Moreover, the concept of Spanish Catholic world dominion, one so widely perceived and so feared outside of Spain less than a century previous, had by then given way to the idea of a uniquely Latin American culture, as opposed to that of a strictly Iberian colonial outpost.
A mere three years after Vizcaíno made landfall at San Diego Bay, a landmark literary event occur, one in many respects boldly demarking the new attitude of Spanish-speaking peoples throughout Spain and Latin America. In 1605, the first part of El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes Saavadre (1547–1616) was published. It quickly became the most popular Spanish language novel in history on both sides of the Atlantic. Part II of Don Quijote was published 10 years later in 1615 and enjoyed similar success. One year later (1616), its 69-year-old author had passed away in Madrid, by then a celebrity and likely quite aware (and proud) of the major cultural phenomenon which he had single-handedly created.5 This is not the proper place to expound at length upon one of the greatest literary works in history, but suffice it to say that Cervantes took the entire western tradition of romantic chivalry and reduced it to the comic tale of a madman and a simpleton (Don Quijote and Sancho Panza, respectively). References to Saint James the Greater make it into the novel both directly and indirectly. While on one his many road excursions, the Don peruses several bas relief sculptures of SS. George, Martin, Paul, and James, the latter of whom he identifies most enthusiastically: “Now this is a true knight in Christ’s holy army! His name is Don San Diego Matamoros, one of the bravest saints and most courageous knights the world has ever seen or Heaven ever held, to this very day.”6 Cervantes is careful to distinguish San Diego “Matamoros” from the other San Diego who by that time had possibly surpassed his original namesake in popularity as a Catholic saint. One page later, the Don must elaborate further on why Matamoros happens to be so famous, but Sancho quickly loses interest (see header quote). Even in English translation, Cervantes’ trademark sense of titanic irony is difficult to escape.
Prior to 1605, life had not dealt a kind hand to Miguel de Cervantes. Born into a proud but impoverished Castilian family in the town of Alcalá, the same city associated with Saint Didacus, no one knows with any certitude how he obtained his prodigious book learning, although it is clear there was a wide gulf between what Cervantes read in those books and what he saw in real life. As a young man, Cervantes did what many impoverished young men from his time and place did, namely, to seek military glory.7 In 1571 at age 24, he found exactly that, not in the New World, which by then had already been conquered, but rather in the eastern Mediterranean at the epic sea battle of Lepanto, in which the Holy League defeated (with great effort) the ever-aggressive Ottoman Turks. Cervantes, fighting in the ranks as a volunteer marine, was severely wounded and permanently lost the use of his left arm, though fortunately for book lovers, not the use of his writing hand. After a lengthy convalescence, he then found himself captured by Barbary pirates and spent five years in North African slavery until his poor relatives eventually raised enough money to ransom his freedom, beggaring themselves in the process. After a stint as a middleman supplier for the failed Spanish Armada invasion of England in 1588, Cervantes declared bankruptcy but still landed in debtor’s prison at Seville (circa 1592) after his bank had failed and all his funds lost during the economic upheavals of that chaotic period. According to reliable tradition, it was in prison that the idea for Don Quijote first took shape. Cervantes spent the next decade or more eking out a living as a tax collector, trying with difficulty to keep his government auditors happy, and creating Part I of the book for which he will always be remembered, meanwhile dreaming of immigration to the Americas and a new life, even as his petitions and job applications for doing so were being repeatedly denied.
As things transpired, it was Don Quijote and Sancho Panza, instead of Cervantes, who reached America, and rather promptly at that. In 1607, a mere two years after the publication of the novel’s Part I, first prize for a jousting tournament in the mountains of Peru went to contestants masquerading as the Man from La Mancha and his loyal sidekick.8 This was less than eight decades after Peru had been brutally conquered by Francisco Pizarro, and Spaniards had begun designating various place names as “Santiago” in and around Lima.9 This was also (still) an astounding seven years before the Mayflower would make landfall at Plymouth Rock in 1620.10 Shortly after the death of Cervantes in 1616, Spain along with most of western Europe was engulfed in the perception-altering conflict later dubbed the Thirty Years War (1618–1648), which began as Catholics and Protestants fighting each other over religious grounds, but ended with uneasy Catholic-Protestant combines negotiating realigned territorial borders in north central Europe. Meanwhile, Stuart England stood mostly aloof, only to erupt into its own civil war between 1642–1646, later ending with a short-lived Puritan ascendency and the Parliament-approved execution of King Charles I in 1649. As England and Spain were distracted by ongoing wars in Europe, the Dutch used the opportunity to invade (and occasionally secure) former Spanish and Portuguese holdings in the New World, most notably in Brazil and the Caribbean.11 Long before the English, French, and Dutch began to seriously challenge Spain’s supremacy in the western hemisphere, however, Don Quijote had already found a firm foothold in the hearts and imaginations of Latin American readers. As observed by the Argentine scholar Valentin de Pedro, “America was the scene where chivalry rode for the last time”—beginning with Christopher Columbus himself, one might well argue.12
In reality, chivalry of the type that had so long nurtured and sustained the Santiago cult probably ended before Don Quijote and Sancho Panza leapt off the pages of Cervantes’ revolutionary novel in 1605. One might even view Don Quijote mounted on his broken-down warhorse Rocinante as representing a subtle parody of Santiago Matamoros—along with a healthy dose of plausible deniability—or worse, Sancho Panza astride his beloved donkey Dapple, representing that same parody taken to a greater extreme. Don Quijote is certainly not an Iberian Reconquista warrior à la jinete in the literal sense, nor a White Rider of the Apocalypse, nor Santiago Matamoros, and yet there are unsettling echoes from all these traditions in the vivid portrayal presented to readers by Cervantes. Quijote imagines himself to be a mounted chivalric champion in the purest sense, following strict precepts taken from the same body of medieval literature in which these traditions had been originally preserved. Cervantes himself would no doubt have taken umbrage at the suggestion, just as he expressly denied (tongue in cheek) being the original author of the novel itself. Even so, no less a perceptive literary critic than W.H. Auden asserted that Don Quijote himself appears to be the caricature of a Christian saint, although he stopped short of saying whether a specific saint was being represented.13 In any event, it is no mere coincidence that in the immediate aftermath of Don Quijote, Spain entertained a fiery public debate as to who in fact the true patron saint or saints of its country should be.
Another cause of declining devotion to the Santiago cult was that, by the early 1600s, there had been a number of very real, very well-documented Spanish saints recently born, living, and dying within the confines Spain itself. In addition to the widely-revered Saint Didacus, surely the most famous and beloved of these home-grown Spanish religious paragons was Saint Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582), Carmelite reformer, popular author, and possessing that rarest of titles, a female Doctor of the Roman Catholic Church. Along with Spanish co-reformer Saint John of the Cross (1542–1591), Teresa devoted her life to helping others develop their inner spirituality during a time in which Spanish society was being overtly corrupted by massive amounts of inflowing wealth and power. Hailing from the same region of Spain that a century earlier had produced Queen Isabella I, Teresa was revered by both commoner and nobility alike, somehow managing often to challenge institutional customs without running afoul of the Inquisition.14 Like her secular counterpart Cervantes, she took a critical view of literature devoted to romantic chivalry, for which she was enthusiastic as a child but later blamed (along with some bad company) for a slightly wayward adolescence. Then after it became clear to everyone about three decades after her death that she was destined for official sainthood, something unexpected happened. Many Spaniards, including Spanish royalty, began clamoring that Teresa be made co-patron saint of Spain, along with Saint James the Greater.15 After her canonization in 1622, a public debate on the topic began rather spontaneously, seemingly giving the initial advantage to Teresa’s partisans, but by the mid–1620s the backlash in favor of Santiago had turned the tide in favor of the traditional status quo. In the forefront of the opposition to Teresa was the Spanish courtier poet, Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645), a friend and younger contemporary of Cervantes, even though his serious and reactionary outlook might well be described as anti–Quixotic, depending on one’s perception level of irony within the novel.16 Then in 1630, Pope Urban VIII settled the matter by declaring in favor of Santiago as the Spanish patron saint, along with the Virgin Mary as the national protectress.17
The entire episode seems to have given everyone in Spain a start. Although Spanish ambitions had been decisively checked and contained by the English in 1588, the pretense of world domination continued for long afterwards. For the first time in modern memory, by the beginning of the 17th century there appeared to be a wide chasm between the official policies of the Spanish state and the mood of the Spanish people, or, to put it more forcefully, between rhetoric and reality. Now, misconceptions were beginning to collide with reality, and the 1600s would accordingly witness a painful and gradual decline in Spanish prestige and power, accelerated by aggressive entry into the Americas by the English, French, and Dutch. One cultural expression of this ambiguity was Don Quijote; another was the unanticipated argument over which Christian saints should symbolically represent the Spanish Empire. Santiago, in his incarnation as a Moor-slayer or Indian-slayer, represented the past. Teresa, as a very recent, real-life inspiration for human virtue, wisdom and intelligence, represented for many Spaniards the future. The compromise, ultimately, was that Santiago remained as patron, but with more emphasis on pilgrimage and less on conquest, while the failsafe traditional cult of the Virgin Mary was reaffirmed as national protectress for those needing a more maternal figure of worship. Despite this setback for Teresa’s partisans, however, reminders of her continuing veneration can still be found almost everywhere, including the Americas where the popular shrine at the Immaculate Conception of El Viejo in Nicaragua has received official papal recognition since 1989.18
During the prelude to this historic debate came the works of Cervantes and all the visual arts which it subsequently inspired. The theme of religious pilgrimage held a special place in the imagination of Cervantes, notwithstanding many ironic implications found within Don Quijote. Widely forgotten today is that Cervantes considered his masterpiece to be, not Don Quijote, but rather his final, posthumously published Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda (1617), completed only a few days before his death in 1616. “The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda” is a pilgrimage romance in which the hero and heroine’s final destination is Rome, as opposed to Santiago de Compostela.19 One is immediately reminded of Montaigne’s humorous remark that Spanish pilgrims preferred travel to Italy, a remark published years before Cervantes produced his most famous works (see Chapter 8). As for Cervantes himself, his memory is (not too surprisingly) honored in countless ways throughout Spain, especially in Madrid. Anyone fortunate enough (as this writer was) to visit Madrid in 2016, the 400th anniversary of Cervantes’ death, would encounter numerous reminders of this popular celebration. Unlike concurrent Anglo-American festivities for the same supposed anniversary of William Shakespeare—or, for that matter, the ongoing Spanish traditions of Saint James the Greater—those of Miguel de Cervantes are firmly rooted in documented, undisputed facts. Moreover, readership perceptions concerning Cervantes’ biography fit tidily within the textual themes of his landmark output. In short, there are no gaps, not even small ones, between the literary biography and the literary text.
Though not a massively implied construct on the scale of Stratford-upon-Avon or Santiago de Compostela, the Cervantes Monument in Madrid, located within the attractive Plaza de España, has in modern times become, in its own right, a pilgrimage destination of sorts, and certainly one that great city’s most visited destinations both for tourists and locals. Built originally during the late 1920s, with some additions during the late 1950s, the centerpiece of the plaza is a large monument depicting four-dimensional sculpted scenes inspired by Don Quijote. The location of the plaza, a short walk north from the Sabatini Gardens and monumental Palacio Real, has itself a significant history on several different levels. In addition to being near the old Camino route from Madrid to Santiago, the site of the Plaza de España, according to tradition, was also the scene of Spanish patriots being executed by French soldiers on May 3, 1808, during the Napoleonic-era Peninsular War (see Chapter 16). This vividly re-imagined event was forever stamped into the popular consciousness by Francisco de Goya’s tremendous canvass, The Third of May 1808, still conveniently on display for the viewing public at the Museo de Prado on the other side of central Madrid. Thus the plaza itself becomes for all visitors highly symbolic of Spanish patriotism, martyrdom, and sacrifice, in this particular instance, all rolled into one and topped off by a magnificent, imposing reminder of Spanish Renaissance literary achievement. By extension, this same literary symbol has been transformed into universal cultural heritage, including for those of us in the English-speaking world.
As previously noted, to the immediate south of the Plaza de España is the Palacio Real (“Royal Palace”), one of Madrid’s most imposing tourist attractions and built upon the foundations of the original Islamic fortress established in response to early successes of the Reconquista back in the ninth century. There in 2016, as one small part of the Cervantes 400th anniversary celebration, displayed throughout the Main Gallery were several sets of embroidered tapestries decorated with scenes from Don Quijote. Among these were those commissioned by King Philip V of Spain (1683–1746) between 1721–1746, titled The Story or Fable of Don Quixote of La Mancha, designed by the artists Andrea Procaccini (1671–1734) and Domingo María Sani (1690–1773), and manufactured by the Dutch master weavers Jacobo and Francisco Vandergoten. Among these beautiful, brightly colored tapestries is “Don Quixote in the cage,” based Chapters 56–57 from Book I, in which the Don is tricked into confinement by devious local officials wishing to transport him back to his home town. Here we see a perplexed Quixote seated in a portable cage being drawn by two enormous oxen in procession, surrounded by local peasantry and nobility, many of whom are in disguise. The scene is alarmingly reminiscent of the popular legend of the martyred Saint James the Greater being drawn by a pair of oxen to the Galician castle of Queen Lupa, as depicted by many Renaissance artists (see Chapter 5). In the Cervantes tapestry, a loyal Sancho Panza, along with his donkey Dapple and the broken down Rocinante, substitute for the saint’s disciples—representing another alarming similarity. Most striking, however, at the bottom center of the scene, are two seated (not standing) Camino pilgrims, clearly demarked with staff and scallop shell emblems, observing the proceedings in wonder or amazement. This detail is not found in Cervantes’ novel and obviously represents considerable artistic license, although it appears merely to take one step further the description contained within the novel. All in all, this cheeky attitude is both in keeping with the ironic tone of Don Quijote and a deep, nearly hostile skepticism of the Enlightenment directed towards most conventional religious beliefs.
A more subversive (though less obvious) moment occurs within the pages of the novel itself in Book II, Chapter 54, when Sancho, recently disillusioned with governing an island, astride Dapple and traveling alone along one of the Caminos encounters a group of Germans wearing hooded pilgrim’s gear. To his astonishment, one of the pilgrims reveals himself to be Sancho’s former neighbor, Ricote the Moor, a Morisco (Christianized Muslim) recently expelled from Spain but returning now in disguise to retrieve buried treasure near their village.20 Sancho agrees not to reveal Ricote’s secret but also refuses to offer help, which would be treason in Sancho’s view, as well as far more courage and energy that he is able to offer for much of anything. Later in Chapter 63, all problems are neatly resolved when Ricote’s virtuous daughter Ana Felix, a devout Christian (unlike her father), marries a Spanish gentleman. This strange, funny, and relatively unknown interlude near the end of Don Quixote foreshadows Cervantes’ next and last work, Persiles y Sigismunda, with its blended themes of romance, personal disguise, and religious pilgrimage. Stepping further back from the Quijote narrative, one is reminded that Cervantes humorously distances himself from the entire tale by attributing the entire work to the (fictional) Arab historian Sidi Hamid Benengeli (“Mr. Eggplant”), via an anonymous Morisco translator, after Cervantes allegedly discovered the original Arabic manuscript in Toledo.21 Thus attributed authorship for one of the greatest works in all of world literature is emphatically denied within the text by the narrator who is obviously in fact the true author.22
The memorable episode of Sancho Panza, Ricote, and the Pilgrims was perhaps nowhere better illustrated than in 1863 by the inimitable Gustave Doré (1832–1883), the prolific French commercial artist whose pictorial work did for Cervantes’ novel what that of his English contemporary John Gilbert also did for Shakespeare (see Chapter 12). Frequently partnered with the engraver Héliodore Pisan (1822–1890), Doré produced vivid literary images that are often difficult to disassociate from their much older textual inspirations.23 In the case of Don Quijote alone, these illustrations staggeringly number over 500, but none better showcase his talent than that of the disturbing encounter between Quijote’s loyal sidekick in misadventure and Ricote the Moor with the Camino pilgrims. Here we see a very corpulent Sancho Panza riding Dapple slowly in the opposite direction of the departing pilgrims (including Ricote), his mouth covered in comic disbelief, horror, fear, or perhaps all the above—it is difficult to tell. Sancho silently conveys the proverbial “I know nothing” better than any words possibly could, not unlike the Sergeant Schultz character from the popular late–1960s television series Hogan’s Heroes. When confronted with an inconvenient truth, Sancho (like Schultz), prefers feigned ignorance or, better yet, plausible deniability. Matters are not helped in Cervantes’ account by the genuine German pilgrims seemingly being on the Camino mostly to vacation, frolic, and escape duties closer to home so vigorously preached by the likes of Martin Luther, similar to the pleasure-loving pilgrims found in Boccaccio or Chaucer. Ricote, though a fraud, at least has a somewhat logical reason for making his feigned pilgrimage. By the early 1600s, as Spain began its long decline as a world power, the Road to Santiago had obviously lost much of its earlier mystique, probably even for those patriotic Spaniards who still depended upon the Caminos for a livelihood.
By the mid–17th century, in midst of tremendous shifts involving military and economic realignments across the globe, if there was one thing that most observers could agree upon it would be that the Protestant Reformation had been victorious, but at a very high cost. England was finally beginning to assert its presence in North America, especially now the English Civil War had ended, while north central Europe had made it abundantly clear that its future political fate would be mostly independent of Rome, Madrid, and all other outside forces. The conclusion of the Thirty Years War had restored diplomatic order of sorts to Europe, but the conflict had also changed the way people thought and behaved, especially with regards to religious matters. France, despite its Roman Catholic faith, had demonstrated to its neighbors that worldly affairs always took precedence over spiritual matters, at least within the realm of international politics. Meanwhile, Spain continued to behave as if it were leading global affairs, when in fact several of its rivals, including England and France, had already passed it by. No sooner had Spain symbolically decided for good that Santiago was indeed its national patron saint than the always artificial Iberian Union between Spain and Portugal came to an abrupt halt in 1640 with the latter reasserting its own distinctive national identity. One immediate result was that Brazil, the largest country in Latin America, began to appear more separate and politically unique within the western hemisphere. Another was that Protestant churches across the western hemisphere began to establish their own notions of what constituted legitimate pilgrimage and saintly veneration. As for traditional ideals of chivalry, these may have ended, but did not necessarily die. Instead, for many devout believers, these old notions had been more internalized, rather than simply cast aside. Therefore, it would be remiss for this survey not to briefly review some of the outstanding artistic productions flowing from this new attitude.