George

George is venerated across an extraordinary geographic range, patron of England, Georgia, Ethiopia, soldiers, and many cities, on the strength of a legend and very little history. The historical core is a soldier-martyr of the early fourth century, probably executed under Diocletian's persecution; the famous dragon appears only much later, in medieval accounts, and became his defining image. In the story he arrives at a city terrorized by a dragon to which the people offer human victims, saves the princess chosen by lot, subdues the beast, and converts the citizens.

The tale is a Christian reworking of an ancient motif, the hero who slays the monster to free the maiden, and it made George an emblem of courage against evil that crusaders carried across the Mediterranean, which is how his red cross became the flag of England and a device on many others. His wide veneration, including in Islamic tradition where he is sometimes identified with the immortal figure al-Khidr, makes him one of the most thoroughly cross-cultural of saints.

The dragon that defines George in popular imagination today is not part of his earliest attested veneration. The oldest sources, from the fourth century onward, describe him simply as a soldier who was martyred for his Christian faith, with no mention of any dragon at all. The dragon-slaying story that later became inseparable from his identity is a considerably later medieval addition, popularized above all through the widely read thirteenth century collection of saints' lives known as the Golden Legend, which assembled and embellished older material for a broad devotional readership centuries after George's presumed death. Doubts about the reliability of his earlier acts were not a modern invention either: the Gelasian Decree, a Church document usually dated to around the sixth century, already listed accounts of George's martyrdom among apocryphal writings not to be trusted as reliable history, showing that uncertainty about his story is nearly as old as the story's written record itself.

None of this prevented an extraordinarily wide later cult: George became patron saint of England, Georgia, Portugal, Catalonia, and numerous other places and institutions, a geographic reach built almost entirely on the later medieval legendary version rather than on the sparse and largely unverifiable earlier material, which is itself already flagged by the Church's own early sources as unreliable.