Brubaker and Wickham: Processions, power and community identity (original) (raw)

The Vitas patrum Emeritensium, the Lives of the fathers of Mérida, written in the seventh century, sets out the deeds of the holy men of one of the major cities of Visigothic Spain. Its account of Bishop Fidelis, who lived in the mid-sixth century, tells of a servant, puer, of the bishop who was locked out of the city one night and had to wait till dawn to get in. As he waited, he saw a fiery globe, glovus igneus, going from the extramural church of S. Fausto to that of S. Lucrecia, and a multitudo sanctorum following it, with Fidelis in the middle; they crossed the great Guadiana bridge and the gate opened by divine power to let them into the city, closing again afterwards. The servant told the bishop about this when he came into town the following day, and Fidelis warned him to tell no one during the bishop's lifetime, for fear of his life. Wise words; another man saw Fidelis process with the saints from the church of S. Eulalia, Mérida's main civic saint, around the other martyrial churches outside the walls (these would presumably have included Fausto and Lucrecia again), but did tell people; the bishop warned him that he would die at once, which he did. 2 On one level, it is quite clear what Fidelis was supposed to have been doing, apparently routinely: he was protecting Mérida in secret, with the most powerful set of associated protectors he could possibly work with. Processing around the walls of a city was a standard way of doing this, as we shall see; not many processions had as much massed saintly backup as these, however. 3 1 LB would like to thank Vasiliki Manolopoulou (whose PhD thesis is cited in n. 45 below) for stimulating discussion, and Lauren Wainwright for compiling a list of processions in the Book of Ceremonies. Both LB and CW thank the rest of the contributors to the Empires and Communities research group for critiques, and ongoing discussions. 2 Vitas sanctorum patrum Emeritensium, ed. A. Maya Sánchez (Turnhout, 1992), 4.7-8. 3 The named saints' churches would not necessarily have taken Fidelis all around the walls; the first two churches were over the river to the west of the city and Eulalia lay to the north. But Eulalia was nearly at Constantinople Byzantine processions have rarely been explored from the point of view of establishing power relationships and community identity. 7 Though Byzantinists have published on liturgical 7 Exceptions are L. Brubaker, 'Topography and the creation of public space in early medieval Constantinople', in Topographies of power in the early Middle Ages,