The Beginnings of Santa María de Guadalupe and the Direction of Fourteenth-Century Castile

Abstract

Uncertainty regarding the circumstances in which devotion to the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe was established is almost as old as the devotion itself. The earliest surviving version of the legend, which recounts the adventures of the celebrated statue from the time of Gregory the Great to its discovery in the Montes de Toledo by the pastor Gil Cordero - an account dating from the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century - places its reappearance in the reign of the son of Fernando iii of Castile, ‘su fijo Don Alfonso el qual gano las Algesiras e murio sobre Gibraltar’, thus conflating Alfonso x, Fernando iii's son, who died in 1284, with Alfonso x's great-grandson Alfonso xi (1312–50). Attempts to unscramble or to disguise this confusion have a long history too, the earliest being that of the corrector of Ms AHN 48B, who expunged words and phrases and supplied marginal additions to bridge the gap between the reigns of the two Alfonsos.