Image: St. George and the Dragon, c. 1490, Storkyrkan Stockholm (photo: Øyvind Holmstad, CC BY-SA 4.0)
In 494, Pope Gelasius issued a decree now traditionally referred to as the Decretum Gelasianum at the Council of Rome.[1] The final section of the decree lists a number of works as apocryphal, including the passiones of Saint George. This is perhaps the most fitting way to begin a discussion of such a widely-venerated and memorialized figure—in recognition of the fact that, from the very beginning of George’s cult, there were those who hyperbolized his martyrdom to such an extent that it necessitated an ecclesiastical response. Given this, I think it would be helpful—on this St. George’s Day, and with his feast upcoming on April 28th—to uncover some of the manuscript tradition which explains why a Cappadocian soldier became the dragon-slaying national patron of England.
George’s extant manuscript tradition begins with the aforementioned condemned passio. The Church’s condemnation is not particularly surprising, though, especially when one reads the apocryphal version of George’s passio, recorded on a fragmentary fifth-century Greek palimpsest in Vienna believed to have been based on an earlier account written by or with the assistance of George’s supposed servant, Pasicrates.[2] In it, George is tortured for seven years in unique and terrible ways at the hands of a Persian emperor named Dadianus, dies three times during the course of his torture, and is resurrected by the Archangel Michael upon each death. This account, while impressive, was too much even for the sympathetic ears of the Church with the edification of Her laity in mind.
Then, Andrew, the Archbishop of Crete in the seventh and eighth centuries, produced a less hyperbolized version of the passio.[3] In it, George, a tribune in the Roman army, is tortured for seven days at the hands of Diocletian in Nicomedia, and dies only once. Simeon Metaphrastes and Gregory of Cyprus continued with Andrew’s adjusted narrative in the East with their accounts in the tenth and thirteenth centuries, respectively. It is not until the eleventh century, though, that the dragon first emerged in George’s Eastern extant hagiographical tradition in the form of a Georgian miraculum, and not until the thirteenth century that this miraculum really took hold of the Christian West.
In all probability, it is the First Crusade which we must thank for the prominence of Saint George in the Western tradition. It is not that Saint George had not been revered in the West prior to the eleventh century. Evidence for the cult of Saint George among the Franks appears as early as the sixth century.[4] Rather, it is that he was revered primarily as an exemplary martyr and a patron of agriculture, as his name, deriving from geos and ergon, meaning ‘earth-worker,’ might suggest.
In contrast, Saint George had for many years already been revered in Byzantium for his status as a military saint who could directly influence the outcomes of battles. By the twelfth century, George even appears on the coinage of the Byzantine emperor John II Komnenos as a recognizable symbol of Byzantine political and military power across the Eastern Mediterranean.[5] He was the national patron of the East before he was embraced in such a way by the West, of that there is no doubt.
In the eleventh century, the crusaders would have encountered, if not yet on coinage, then certainly in the many churches and dedications for George, this robust Eastern tradition of veneration. They would have seen the church of Saint George of Mangana when they assembled at Constantinople, recently built by Emperor Constantine IX to rival the Hagia Sophia; they would have crossed the arm of Saint George, as the Hellespont was known at the time, and then arrived at Saint George’s gate and monastery in Antioch.[6] At some point in all these encounters, George’s dragon miracula made their way, as did the iconography and understanding of George as a military intercessor, from their Eastern home and into new soil, where it took only a short amount of time, and a few invested clerics and kings, to ensure they would take root in the hagiographical and broader religious tradition of the medieval West.
One such cleric was the Dominican Jacobus de Voragine, who compiled a work now known as the Legenda Aurea, the Golden Legend, from 1260-1267. This is the work which the Western world can thank for the prominence of Saint George and his dragon in its own tradition. The importance of the Legenda in the medieval mind cannot be overstated—The Legenda survives in almost one thousand Latin manuscript copies alone, with another five hundred copies in other European languages. Even as early as the 1280s it was already shaping hagiographical works outside of Italy, but its popularity was to be both immediate and long-lasting. After the development of the printing press, Jacobus’s Legenda was printed in eighty-seven Latin versions and sixty-nine versions in various vernaculars; four of these latter were in English alone. These numbers are considerably larger than for any known printings of the Bible in the same period.[7]
In our brief survey we have discovered the Eastern roots of a beloved Western characterization of Saint George, but up to this point we have been learning about George’s manuscript tradition, rather than the saint himself. What can we actually say about Saint George as a historical figure?
Not much.
All that can be comfortably claimed about the historical George is as follows: there was a man named George, possibly from Cappadocia, likely with a military background, who was martyred in the late third or early fourth century; evidence of the emergence of his cult at Lydda in Palestine confirms this.[8] Beyond this, though, the many narratives composed about George, his passiones, vitae, and miracula, his depiction as a warrior saint in the Byzantine tradition and subsequent elevation to the status of national patron in England, and, of course, his escapades involving a certain dragon and a certain damsel, have all been creative endeavors.
Given this, most investigations of George, rather than dealing with the historical figure himself, are actually studies of societies and the methods by which they propagated his cult continuously through the centuries, in word, image, or relic. Thus, even though we know relatively little about the man himself, any study of Saint George—whether it be for academic purposes or our own personal edification—channels glimpses into the literary techniques, visual customs, and cultural backgrounds of the different societies carrying on his tradition, with the possibility of revealing the incredible ability of certain motifs, narratives, images, and the truths they communicate, to transcend the boundaries of time and culture. Chief among these, of course, is the triumph of light over darkness, good over evil, the remembrance that the battle has already been won—an idea which I think we would all do well to appreciate on this day honoring a saint with such a splendid and robust tradition of veneration.
Saint George, pray for us.
[1] Jonathan Good, The Cult of Saint George in Medieval England (Woodbridge, UK ; Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2009), 25–26.
[2] Samantha Riches, St George: Hero, Martyr and Myth (The History Press, 2005), 10.
[3] Good, The Cult of Saint George in Medieval England, 27.
[4] Good, The Cult of Saint George in Medieval England, 28.
[5] Heather A. Badamo, Saint George between Empires: Image and Encounter in the Medieval East (University Park (Pa.): The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2023), 46, 56.
[6] Good, The Cult of Saint George in Medieval England, 37–38.
[7] Eamon Duffy, Introduction to The Golden Legend, p. xii.