Santiago, the Camino, and a Spanish Mission the Sources Do Not Support

From the ninth century a tradition held that James had preached in Hispania before returning to Judea to die, and that his body was afterward carried back to Galicia in the far northwest of Spain. Around the reported discovery of his tomb there grew the shrine of Santiago de Compostela, Santiago being Spanish for Saint James, which became, with Rome and Jerusalem, one of the three great pilgrimage destinations of Latin Christendom. The Camino de Santiago, the network of pilgrim roads across the Pyrenees to his shrine, is walked to this day.

Historians treat the Spanish mission as legendary. It is unattested before the seventh century, sits awkwardly against the New Testament chronology of his early death, and served an evident purpose: to give the Christian kingdoms of the north an apostolic founder of their own during the long conflict with Muslim rule in the peninsula.

That conflict shaped his iconography. As Santiago Matamoros, the Moor-slayer, he was depicted on horseback riding down enemies, a martial patron invoked in the Reconquista. The figure is a medieval construction laid over a Galilean fisherman whom the book of Acts shows dying, quietly and early, under a Herodian sword.