September 24

The cult of St. Michael in Navarre

Luis Javier Fortún
Ph.D. in History
Corresponding Member of the Royal Academy of History

The cult of St. Michael dates back to his appearance on Mount Gargano (Italy) in 490, which turned this place into a sanctuary and pilgrimage center. In the 6th century, the Michaelic cult passed to France and received a considerable boost after the appearance of the holy archangel to the bishop Saint Aubert of Avranches and the foundation of Mont Saint Michel in 704. It was also present in Visigothic Spain and although there are no concrete testimonies of it, the trace of its September 29th feast can be perceived in the liturgical calendars of the Mozarabic-Visigothic rite. According to Caro Baroja, the cult of St. Michael began to grow from the 8th century onwards as protector of the Christians who began the Reconquest in the northern area and of the shepherds who lived in the mountains. There are testimonies of this in sanctuaries scattered from Asturias (Lillo) to Roussillon (Cuixà), passing through León (Escalada), Castile (Pedroso) or Barcelona (Fay).

 
Apparition of St. Michael on Mount Gargano (490), represented in the central altarpiece of the parish of San Miguel de Cárcar (1728).
Photo by L. J. Fortún

In this European and Hispanic context, the cult of St. Michael in Navarre must be inscribed. For Roldán Jimeno, the devotion to St. Michael would respond to a third moment of Christianization: after the cities and the rural plains, the heights. The micaelic monasteries on the heights would be a triumph against residual pagan practices, although it would only be archaeologically attested in Aralar in the 9th century. 

From these assumptions it is necessary to approach, in the first place, the reality of two sanctuaries in height dedicated to St. Michael in Navarre, Aralar and Izaga, although their incidence was unequal. Located near the summit of the Aralar mountain range, the sanctuary of San Miguel de Excelsis is, without a doubt, the most important and the one that contributes more news, since it speaks to us through its building and its documents. The building is, undoubtedly, subjugating and problematic. Íñiguez Almech, its restorer architect, saw in it a 9th century building of Carolingian influence, whose testimonies were the base of the apses and of the first section of the temple, the horseshoe windows of the central apse, the single nave with two aedicules (which would later generate the lateral apses), the portico and above it the chapel in height. The problem lies in the lack of graphic evidence of the excavation that helped shape this vision. A second stage would be a building of the 11th century, formed by three naves with barrel vaults without sashes, of which a good part of the elevation of the perimeter walls would remain. It is possible to place its consecration around 1074. The third stage would correspond to the temple consecrated in 1141 and influenced by the cathedral of Pamplona consecrated in 1127: the northern wall would be renovated, the apses would be enlarged, the vaults would be implanted with transverse vaults and the interior chapel would be replaced by the present flat-footed chapel, in addition to building the narthex. And this complex trajectory does not exclude the existence of a previous Ara Coeli, a place of pagan worship.

But San Miguel de Aralar also speaks to us through its documents, published more than a century ago by Mariano Arigita, which have been sequentially glossed, but which have not been interpreted systematically and critically. That is why I only dare to trace three stages as an interpretative hypothesis, while waiting to be able to do it in a more complete way. The first corresponds to a good part of the 11th century, in which San Miguel de Excelsis seems to be a dependency of Zamarce (which, in turn, was a dependency of the cathedral of Pamplona) and the five preserved diplomas have been considerably interpolated. The first document that mentions the sanctuary, attributed to 1032, quotation it to begin the description of the northwestern limit of the diocese of Pamplona and the present tenor of the diploma responds to an essay of the end of the XII century, when there were border problems in Guipúzcoa with the diocese of Bayonne. Other problems could be posed to the donations of 1054 and 1074, although the latter offers a reasonable figure for the consecration of the temple. Perhaps the most significant document is the donation of bustalizas (grazing lands) by Sancho el de Peñalén, which should be interpreted more as a cession of the charges for the use of those pastures, since the Navarrese crown always considered the Aralar mountain range as a royal estate and it was later incorporated into the State Patrimony, until its cession to Navarre in 1987.

The second stage (1096-1150) is the peak and is defined by the support of the Navarrese-Aragonese kings, whose certain donations, directed exclusively to San Miguel de Excelsis and imitated by others of the nobility, allowed its detachment from Zamarce. Pedro I opened the way with two donations in 1096 and 1103. The second included the town of Arguindoáin and two monasteries. The following year the nobiliary donations began with another two villas. Alfonso I the Battler even gave possessions in his recent conquests of the Ribera Tudelana from 1119. The most numerous donations came from García Ramírez the Restorer, who witnessed the dedication of the church of Aralar in 1141. The result was a San Miguel de Excelsis separated from Zamarce, endowed with a patrimony B having a community led by an abbot. 

The third stage corresponds to the second half of the 12th century, defined by two facts. One was the extension of the cult of St. Michael in all subject of social groups of the surroundings, which gave rise to the training a multitudinous confraternity, whose presidency and control was assumed by the bishop of Pamplona in 1191. In 1206 the bishop Juan de Tarazona created the dignity of chantre within the chapter of Pamplona and assigned him a part of the cathedral patrimony, among whose goods was the "honor of San Miguel de Excelsis". This historical tour has prudently kept aside the account of the life experience of Teodosio de Goñi and his retreat as a hermit in Aralar, from which the existence of the sanctuary would start. And I have done so because I lack the elements to evaluate an account written in the fourth decade of the 16th century and because I can add little to Caro Baroja's study.

The second sanctuary in height, San Miguel de Izaga, appears for the first time in a document of 1087, which defines it as a church on Mount Hiiga with its monastery of San Miguel and its own patrimony. It belonged to a widow of the high nobility, Sancha Oriol, who donated it to the monastery of Leire. There is not much later news, but it is undoubtedly its strength in the 13th century, when the church was completely rebuilt, with three naves, arches and pointed vaults, circular pillars and a central polygonal apse on the outside and circular and with groin vaults on the inside, like the one that is considered to have existed in Aralar. 

Taking into account the data provided by both sanctuaries, it seems evident that there is a boost to the cult of St. Michael in height since the mid-11th century, encouraged by the Navarrese monarchy and the high nobility, which does not exclude its earlier existence. 

Another chapter is to consider the cult of St. Michael throughout Navarre. A list of parish dedications, fruit of a pastoral visit of Bishop Arias y Teijeiro in 1800, gives a total of 45 parishes dedicated to St. Michael in Navarre, staggered from north to south of the kingdom: On the Cantabrian slope (2), Barranca-Burunda (2), Eastern Pyrenees (2), southern slope of the Velate watershed (12), pre-Pyrenean basins of Pamplona and Lumbier-Aoiz (16), Zona average (14) and Ribera (6). But as significant as the vertical deployment of the data is its horizontal consideration, which shows 37 parishes of St. Michael in the western zone of Navarre, 8 in the center and 9 in the eastern zone. These are figures that proclaim that the most important impulse to the expansion of the micaelic cult in Navarre came from San Miguel de Excelsis or Aralar. The figures can be increased with the data of Roldán Jimeno, who only in the "nuclear Navarre" (approximately, the northern half) counts 54 churches, which with early medieval monasteries reach 82. Some of these temples may date from the VIII-IX centuries, but it seems more accurate to situate the final conformation of the parish map of Navarre in the X XII centuries. The persistence of the expansion of the devotion to St. Michael beyond the medieval centuries can be perceived through the hermitages that were attributed to the holy archangel. Roldán Jimeno reports 16 medieval hermitages, while he assigns a doubtful chronology to another 94. It is difficult for a Shrine of Our Lady of Fair Love to exist in a town if there is no parish church before (except for those that were previously churches in places that were later depopulated) and that is why the hundred or so hermitages or quite a few of them indicate a persistence in the devotion to St. Michael, after the configuration of the parish network . 

Another aspect of the diffusion of the cult of St. Michael in Navarre is his role as patron saint and promoter of the Reconquest of Navarre, which, although not explicitly proclaimed, can be traced in the two fundamental stages of this process in Navarre. The first takes place in the first quarter of the X century, during the reign of Sancho Garcés I, and was articulated in two campaigns that brought the lower half of Navarre (except for the Ribera Tudelana). In the first (907) Sancho Garcés conquered the fortress of Monjardín and the whole valley of the Ega, up to the Ebro. It is probable that he started from Villatuerta, located on the border of the high land of Deyo (Deyerri, Yerri) and which has the Shrine of Our Lady of Fair Love of San Miguel and its reliefs from the X century. Saint Michael may have been the protector to whom the Christian advance was entrusted, since it is symptomatic that Saint Michael is the saint to whom the two parishes of the towns where the advance culminated were dedicated: Cárcar, located in the valley of the Ega as an outpost in front of Calahorra, and Lodosa on the Ebro, to control the ford of the Roman aqueduct that crossed the Ebro River. The 915 campaign involved the conquest of the lower basins of the Arga, Cidacos and Aragon rivers. The first conquest in the Arga was Larraga, whose parish was also dedicated to St. Michael, while the last advance was in Cadreita, whose parish was also dedicated to St. Michael, as opposed to the neighboring town of Valtierra, which remained in Muslim hands for two more centuries. The second stage of the reconquest of Navarre covered the Ribera Tudelana and took place in 1119 on the initiative of Alfonso I the Battler. In the basin of the Alhama (located in the vertical of the Arga), the main occupied place was Corella, whose parish was dedicated to St. Michael. The participation of the Navarros in the conquest of Zaragoza and the establishment in the city of a colony of Navarros led to the creation of the parish of San Miguel de los Navarros, which still survives. These are facts that show the resource to San Miguel in his condition of prince of the celestial militias on the part of the Navarrese earthly militias in their reconquering enterprises, according to the temples that were dedicated to him, probably as thanksgiving for his protection.

And finally, a question: Can St. Michael be considered the patron saint of the kingdom of Navarre during its medieval period? It is undeniable that he was a devotional reference for the kings of Navarre, as attested by the Codex Vigilano from the end of the X century, the donations to Aralar by Pedro I, Alfonso I and García Ramírez in the 12th century or the devotion of the monarchs of the house of Evreux in the 14th century. But there is no clear concept of patronage of the kingdom, as will become evident in the seventeenth century with St. Francis Xavier and St. Fermin.