ON ST. PETER OF SEVILLE, MARTYR, IN HISPANIA BAETICA,
Of uncertain century.
SYLLOGE.
A Saint little known: his deeds uncertain: his sacred cult.
Peter, martyr, at Seville in Hispania Baetica. (S.)
BY J. B.
Usuard, first of the martyrologists, brought St. Peter, martyr, who suffered for the faith at Seville, which is the archiepiscopal city of Hispania Baetica, into his Martyrology at the 8th day of October in these few words: Of St. Peter first, but in few words, Likewise in the city of Seville, of St. Peter, martyr: Usuard was followed by Maurolico, Galesini, Molanus, and the present Roman Martyrology, using almost the same words as Usuard; neither adding anything to these words nor taking anything away: the words of the Roman Martyrology are: At Seville in Spain, of St. Peter, martyr. Bellinus too had earlier used the words of Usuard; but for Petri he had faultily written Pateris, which error the Martyrologists who followed him rightly removed. The author of our manuscript Florarium of the Saints, who wrote in the year 1486, also employs almost the words of Usuard: these, therefore, seem to have had absolutely nothing with which to inform the reader about St. Peter besides those few words of Usuard. And indeed to find more about St. Peter, such at least as is certain and supported by approved testimonies, is altogether difficult. For if you consult the other ancient martyrologists, I do not know whether you will find among them any who makes mention of St. Peter. Will you betake yourself to the Spanish historians? In vain too will you do it: there is deep silence everywhere among them about St. Peter: or, if you find any mention of him among them, it will be very meagre, and proceeding from nowhere else than from very recent writers, some of whom see recounted by Tamayo in the Annotations on the 8th day of October.
[2] It is therefore chiefly owing to Usuard if the memory of this holy Martyr has not altogether perished: Usuard mentions; but someone will ask how he became known to Usuard himself? Valencia having been laid waste by the Moors, a hope had arisen among the monks of St. Germain in France that they might be able to acquire the remains of St. Vincent, martyr and levite. Two of them, Usuard and Odilard, having set out into Spain for that reason, when they understood that the remains of St. Vincent had been carried away from there, and there was no hope of obtaining them, lest they should return empty to Gaul, endeavoured to procure for themselves the relics of SS. George and Aurelius, then recently put to martyrdom at Córdoba, and, their wish being in very fact fulfilled, carried them into Gaul in the year 858, as may be seen in volume 6 of July, page 459 and following. It is probable, therefore, that Usuard, while he was staying in Spain, obtained knowledge both of St. Peter and of other Spanish Saints, and then about the year 875 enriched his Martyrology with them: Du Sollier, in his Usuard, suspected that Usuard's announcement of St. Peter flowed from this source, observing these things on the announcement of Peter the Martyr: I find Peter, martyr of Seville, nowhere outside Usuard: let it be permitted, therefore, to suspect that he is of the number of those whom our author brought from Spain into France, as has often had to be supposed elsewhere, namely when no other source was available from which we might conjecture he drew it. And indeed that nothing older than Usuard's testimony concerning Peter is found has also been admitted lately by Enrique Flórez, volume 9 of España Sagrada, page 301.
[3] hence the various things which, of his homeland, Since, therefore, Peter is found first mentioned only by Usuard, and he has consigned to letters no more about him than his name, his martyrdom and perhaps the place of his contest, it is no wonder that more recent writers either treat of him very meagrely or differ much among themselves, while they wish to set forth more about him than they have drawn from monuments of approved credit. Hence some of them suspect that St. Peter underwent martyrdom in the first century of Christ; others in the second, under Trajan; others under Maximian and Diocletian. Flórez, cited, says it can be conjectured that this happened after the coming of the Moors into Spain, because Peter is found first mentioned by Usuard: but why could not Usuard in the ninth century have procured for himself in Spain from elsewhere knowledge of Peter, though he suffered long before and was perhaps not mentioned by writers older than himself, and then have made mention of him in his Martyrology? All these things, therefore, are uncertain: wherefore I thought his martyrdom ought to be bound above to a likewise uncertain century. There is more agreement among the Spanish writers who treat of Peter about his homeland, which they judge to have been Seville: for no other cause, I think, than because he fell a martyr there: but although it is not established that Peter the martyr was born elsewhere than at Seville, yet it is not proved with certainty from his martyrdom accomplished there that the same place fell to him for birth and death of his military service, and the circumstances of his martyrdom.
[4] Tamayo dares more than the rest: he not only writes that St. Peter was born at Seville and Spanish by origin, but adds also that he was born of heathen parents: that he served under Trajan in Dacia: that, having then returned to Rome and been enrolled among the veteran soldiers, he returned to his homeland in the year 105, in which Trajan came forth consul for the fifth time. That he then gave his name to Christ there, and some years after, beheaded for the faith of Christ, died, namely about the year 110. Trajan, as Pagi would have it in the Critica, was consul for the fifth time in the year 103, and triumphed over the Dacians in the following year. But let us not raise a dispute with Tamayo on that matter: let us rather hear whence he learned these things. From Aulus Halus, he says, whose poem on St. Peter is of this kind:
Seville, O how many martyrs of Christ, alas, dost thou number Who suffered for the Name *, whom thou venerate still. Then Peter gave his consecrated limbs for the Godhead, He thy citizen, for whom thy love burns. He as a soldier often follows the foreign phalanxes Of Trajan, going to the camps of Dacia. A veteran, he returned to his homeland in the fifth consulship, Where the honour of the city receives the name of Christ.
He serves in the faith, who for Caesar's omen bore Wars valiantly, until love seizes him. At last, under the point of the sword, his hoary head The love that drank him in offered to the Spanish prince.
[5] But what Nicolás Antonio, in the Old Spanish Library, book 7, on the writers of the XI and XII centuries, chapter 7, number 115, thinks of Tamayo and of the monuments cited here and there by him, hear: the things besides that are narrated are false or uncertain: But, he says, the reputation of the man (namely Tamayo) is pressed down the more in that he passed off very many monuments of his own concoction and of other recent writers as old and marked with the seal of antiquity; such as are almost all those epigrams inscribed with the titles of Julian of Toledo, Cyprian of Córdoba, and other anonymous writers, and scattered through the whole Work (he means Tamayo's Spanish Martyrology), where however it seemed expedient to corroborate the fictions of Dexter and his companions with other fictions, not in confirming true and certain things (which wonderfully proves the stupid security of the man). To these is added the frequent exhibition of old Breviaries and Legendaries, as they call them, not in clear matters which shine with the light of true history, but in the most difficult and apocryphal, or more truly false, things, which, unless they were propped up by false substructures too, "were soon to fall" "with the ruin already showing through" (as Juvenal says). This briefly concerning Juan Tamayo, that we might not omit this part of sacrificing to the truth, and of more easily persuading by this prejudgement of the crime which was committed in the little book of Aulus Halus. Neither the epigram of Aulus Halus praised by Tamayo, therefore, nor accordingly the Acts of St. Peter the martyr presented by Tamayo and built upon it, merit credence.
[6] Further, Tamayo, cited, and Antonio Quintanadueñas, On the Saints of Seville, page 63, write it is established, however, of his sacred that the body of St. Peter is believed to have been buried at Seville in the field of St. Justa; the credit for which matter let rest with them. And as regards the sacred cult of St. Peter, Tamayo says that his Office was formerly entered in the ancient Breviaries of Évora, Seville, Zamora, Palencia and Tui; which to me indeed is suspect, both on account of what I have just recited about Tamayo from Nicolás Antonio, and because Flórez, cited above at number 2, says he found the Office of St. Peter the martyr in no Breviary: Baronius, however, in the Annotations on this day praises the Breviary of Évora in these words: Peter's Usuard on the same, Vaseo in the Chronicle from the Breviary of Évora, and the Flos Sanctorum of Spain. I do not know, however, whether Vaseo is rightly praised here by Baronius. The words of Vaseo at the year 306 are: At Seville, St. Carpophorus and Abundius, St. Peter, St. Florentinus, St. Justa and Rufina, virgins, partly under Dacian himself, partly under Diogenian, the legate of Dacian. The body of Blessed Justa from a very deep well, into which it had been thrown, and the bones of Blessed Rufina, whose body had been burned in the amphitheatre, were buried by the venerable bishop Sabinus in the cemetery of the suburb of Seville. To which he subjoins: From the Breviary of Évora. In the Breviary of Évora of the year 1548 (Vaseo wrote in the year 1551) the things which Vaseo relates of St. Justa and Rufina are indeed read, but of Peter I found not even a word: so that Baronius seems to have wrongly extended to Peter the martyr those words of Vaseo, uttered, as Flórez also observes, about SS. Justa and Rufina.
[7] cult in the diocese of Seville. The name of St. Peter the Martyr, says Flórez, is read no more in the perpetual Calendar of the Saints of the diocese of Seville of Pedro Ruiz, printed in the year 1578, than in the ancient Spanish Breviaries: Galesini, however, a writer of the same time, in the Annotations at the 8th day of October praised a certain Calendar of Seville, from which, as also from Usuard, he brought the name of St. Peter into his Martyrology: however that may be, I do not judge that St. Peter, martyr, and lacking all sacred cult, was inserted by Usuard into his Martyrology without suitable cause; and, if perhaps his cult among the people of Seville had been interrupted or was very slight, it was at any rate restored in the seventeenth century, when it had advanced to the year 24, by order of the chapter of Seville, the see being vacant, as they say, by the death of Pedro de Castro, archbishop of Seville; from which time it was prescribed that the Office of St. Peter should be recited throughout the diocese of Seville on the 8th day of October with the double rite of the second class, as Tamayo and Quintanadueñas write: but, because few things were known for certain about St. Peter the martyr, it seemed good to the Chapter to prescribe the lessons to be recited from the common of one martyr, as also the Mass Laetabor with the Credo, as I understand from the Order of reciting and celebrating in the metropolitan church of Seville of the year 1656. The same may be seen in the Proper Offices of the Saints of the patriarchal church and diocese of Seville, recognized and approved by the sacred Congregation of rites by order of Sixtus V, confirmed by Apostolic authority, and published at Seville in the year 1751 by the care and work of Rodrigo Cardinal de Castro, archbishop of Seville.
Annotation* read: Numine the Godhead