Mozarabic Rite

Before Spain was Roman in its worship it had a liturgy of its own, and a distinguished one. The Old Hispanic rite matured in the Visigothic kingdom of the sixth and seventh centuries, when the peninsula's church was led by scholars of European stature: Leander and Isidore of Seville, Ildephonsus and Julian of Toledo. The councils of Toledo legislated for worship as for doctrine, and the rite's prayer books grew into a corpus of remarkable richness, with long, theologically dense prayers that change with the calendar far more than the fixed Roman Canon does. Its eucharistic prayer is built of variable elements, so that the great prayer of one feast differs from another's, and the rite keeps distinctive usages such as the breaking of the consecrated bread into nine particles named for mysteries of the life of Christ.

Around the texts stands a chant repertory, the Old Hispanic chant, preserved in manuscripts whose musical notation records the melodic gestures but not exact pitches; because the tradition of singing it was broken, most of that music can no longer be transcribed, and it stands as one of the great sealed archives of medieval European music. The rite's name is a memorial of endurance: the Mozarabs were the Christians who lived under al-Andalus and kept this liturgy for three centuries when most of the peninsula's political map had changed around them.

The Old Hispanic rite was not lost by neglect but abolished by policy, and saved by a counter-policy two centuries later. In the eleventh century the reforming papacy pressed the Spanish kingdoms to adopt the Roman liturgy as a mark of unity with Rome, and the Council of Burgos in 1080, under Alfonso VI of Castile, decreed the change.

Legend remembered the resistance: chronicles tell of trial by combat and of rival books cast into fire, with the Toledan book surviving the flames, stories that are folklore but truthful about how bitterly the change was felt. When Alfonso took Toledo in 1085, the city's Christian community secured the privilege of keeping the old rite in six named parishes, and those parishes carried it, increasingly threadbare, through four centuries.

The decisive rescue came from Cardinal Francisco Jimenez de Cisneros, archbishop of Toledo, who around 1500 gathered the manuscripts, had the Missale Mixtum printed in 1500 and the breviary in 1502, and founded and endowed the Corpus Christi chapel in Toledo cathedral with a college of chaplains bound to celebrate the Mozarabic liturgy daily. That chapel has done so ever since, and a revised Hispano-Mozarabic missal approved in 1988 brought the rite's texts into a modern critical edition. What survives is a fraction of what the Visigothic church knew, but it is a living fraction, not a museum piece.