Tag Archives: Santiago Mataespanois

Guest Essay: Santiago Matamoros in the Americas by Alfred J. Andrea

Main Image: Santiago Mataespañois, (Santiago, Killer of Spaniards) Museo das Peregrinacións e de Santiago. Photo by A. J. Andrea.

See also: Guest Essay: Santiago Matamoros by Alfred J. Andrea

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Santiago Matamoros was every bit as much the patron of the Spaniards’ conquests in the Americas as he had been during the preceding four and a half centuries of Iberian Reconquista.  The fact that numerous cities and towns throughout Latin America were blessed with the names “Santiago,” and “Matamoros,” including 27 Santiagos and 16 Matamoroses in Mexico alone, indicates the warrior saint’s importance to the conquistadors and the colonists who followed them. And those numbers do not include the many locales to which the saint’s name was added as an honorific, such as Mexico City’s Santiago de Tlateloco, which appears below.

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Guest Essay: Santiago Matamoros by Alfred J. Andrea

Main Image (Above): Francisco Camilo, El Apóstol Santiago a caballo o Santiago Matamoros (1649), Prado Museum. Source: https://www.museodelprado.es/coleccion/obra-de-arte/el-apostol-santiago-a-caballo-o-santiago-matamoros/cc593ac0-b3bf-428d-90fa-87f9a7d80294 (accessed December 15, 2020.

The following essay is by Alfred J. Andrea, the former president of the World History Association, a mentor, and a noted medieval historian. In it, he provides background on Santiago Matamoros, the subject of the cover image of our forthcoming book Sanctified Violence: Holy War in World History.

See also: Guest Essay: Santiago of the Americas by Andrea J. Andrea

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Santiago Matamoros

This seventeenth-century painting, which graces the cover of the paperback version of Andrea and Holt, Sanctified Violence: Holy War in World History, deserves a bit of explanation. The title translates as “The Apostle Saint James on Horseback, or Saint James the Moor-slayer.” How, one rightly asks, did an apostle of Jesus, the same Jesus who preached “Blessed are the peacemakers,”[1] get in the business of killing Moors? And what is that strange symbol on the white banner that he carries? Answers to those questions tells us quite a bit about the holy war known as the Spanish Reconquista and Spanish conquests in the Americas.

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