James, the son of Zebedee and Maria Salome, and brother of John, was killed in Palestine in A.D. 42, the first apostle to die as a martyr to the new faith. But, according to early Christian tradition, he had already made a missionary journey to the Iberian peninsula and so his followers took the body, placed on a marble bier, on board a ship and sailed for Galicia. The ship came ashore at Padron. When the author and his wife visited this lovely little town, an old man, cleaning the church there, showed them a deep recess under the High Altar. In this recess was an ancient white marble stone marked with Latin letters, which was claimed to be the original stone on which the corpse of St James had been conveyed.
The body was taken to the place which is now Santiago de Compostela (St James of the Field of Stars). Knowledge of the resting place of the locus apostolicus became confused with the passing of the centuries and with the schisms within the Christian movement. It seemed that those churches, now retrospectively called the Celtic Church, which clung to the original liturgy and rites of the Christian movement long after the Roman Church had begun to reform its theology and practices, continued to respect Santiago de Compostela as a last resting place of James.
There is nothing anachronistic about a pilgrimage to Santiago by Fidelma. Indeed, we are told in an early Christian text that ten thousand Irish peregrinatio pro Christo visited Santiago with the benediction of Patrick himself in the fifth century. The twelfth-century Liber Sancti Jacobi (Book of St Jacob) speaks of the long tradition of the pilgrimages and says that the symbol of James, one of the Galilean fishermen, was a scallop shell. Archaeologists have turned up many scallop shells at Irish sites, mostly buried with corpses at ecclesiastical sites, dating to the medieval period. Liber Sancti Jacobi describes stalls selling the scallop shells to pilgrims at Santiago. Today, shops in Santiago still sell scallop-shell objets d’art.
The author often receives letters from readers wondering if he is simply inventing the social background and technology of Fidelma’s world, and, indeed, one recent reviewer seemed to believe that he was claiming a technology which they felt was beyond Irish capability at that time. It might interest readers to know that the following sources have been drawn on for the background to this particular story:
In this matter of such pilgrimages the author is grateful to ‘The Irish Medieval Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela’ by Dagmar O Riain-Raedal in History Ireland, Autumn, 1998.
The author is also grateful to the following for background material: ‘Irish Pioneers in Ocean Navigation of the Middle Ages’ by G.J. Marcus in Irish Ecclesiastical Record, November, 1951, and December, 1951; ‘Further Light on Early Irish Navigation’ by G.J. Marcus in Irish Ecclesiastical Record, 1954, pp. 93-100; ‘St Brandan (sic) The Navigator’, by Commander Anthony MacDermott RN, KM, in Mariner’s Mirror, 1944, pp. 73-80; ‘The Ships of the Veneti’ by Craig Weatherhill in Cornish Archaeology No. 24, 1985; ‘Irish Travellers in the Norse World’ by Rosemary Power in Aspects of Irish Studies, Ed. Hill & Barber, 1990; and ‘Archaic Navigational Instruments’ by John Moorwood in Atlantic Visions, 1989.
The Sister Fidelma books
By Peter Tremayne
Absolution by Murder
Shroud for the Archbishop
Suffer Little Children
The Subtle Serpent
The Spider’s Web
Valley of the Shadow
Hemlock at Vespers
The Monk Who Vanished
Act of Mercy
*Our Lady of Darkness
*forthcoming
ACT OF MERCY. Copyright © 1999 by Peter Tremayne. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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Act of Mercy Page 33