Ecumenical Commemoration
Martyr
April 23 · d. 303
also known as George of Lydda, Saint George, George the Martyr
George is the martyr of Lydda in Palestine, remembered as a soldier killed in the Diocletianic persecution that began in 303. Nothing written in his lifetime names him, and the church has said so since the fifth or sixth century, when Rome barred his Acts from being read while leaving his sanctity untouched. What survives instead is a devotion: a shrine, a tomb, pilgrims, and a name carried into almost every Christian language.
George was a Christian in Palestine, and George died for it.
That is the whole of what can be said with certainty, and it is worth pausing on how strange that is. Everyone knows George. He is the knight on the horse with the spear and the dragon, the red cross on the white field, the name on chapels and hospitals and honours for bravery. And of the man himself, no one wrote a line while he lived.
The years are not in doubt. On the twenty-fourth of February in the year 303, the emperor Diocletian posted an edict against the Christians, and the persecution that followed ran on for eight years. Eusebius of Caesarea, who was alive for it and wrote it down, records that as soon as the edict went up in Nicomedia a man of high rank tore it off the wall, and that he kept his spirit "cheerful and undisturbed till death." Eusebius does not give his name. Nicomedia is in Bithynia, and Lydda is in Palestine, several hundred miles away. Later readers wanted the two men to be one man; they are almost certainly not, and the church's own scholars say so.
So the story has to begin somewhere else, and it begins with a builder. In the year 515, in a town called Zorava in the province of Arabia, a man named Ioannes son of Diomedes put up a church on ground where a pagan temple had stood, and had the fact carved in Greek over the door. He wrote that he had laid inside it the worthy relic of the martyr George. And he wrote why he had done it: George had appeared to him, and he wanted it understood that this was not a dream. It happened, he says, manifestly, in the plain light of day.
That inscription is the oldest dated thing in the world that carries George's name, and notice what it is. It is not a life. It is not an argument. It is a man who was visited, and who spent money on stone because of it.
From there the witnesses come steadily. Around 530 a pilgrim named Theodosius wrote that at Diospolis, where Saint George was martyred, his body lies and many miracles are done. Around 570 the pilgrim from Piacenza came through and wrote that the martyr George rests there and that he shows many miracles. Around the 680s Arculf came, and the veneration was still going. A century and a half of travellers, each one a stranger to the last, all stopping at the same tomb because the people of that place had never stopped pointing at it.
Meanwhile the storytellers were at work, and they were not careful men. The oldest surviving Life of George, on burnt fragments of a fifth-century Greek book, has him tortured for seven years by a king of the Persians called Dadianus, a king no historian can find; it has him die and be raised by Christ three times over, and die a fourth. Rome read this and did not like it. In a ruling long ascribed to Pope Gelasius, and now more often dated to somewhere between 519 and 553, the Roman church ordered that the Acts of George not be read aloud, so that no pretext for casual mockery could arise. And in the same document it set his name among those "whose names are justly reverenced among men, but whose actions are only known to God."
Read that slowly, because it is the most remarkable sentence in George's whole history. The church, within two and a half centuries of his death, said out loud: we do not know what he did. And then it went on keeping his feast, for the next fifteen hundred years, without a pause.
The dragon came much later, and George had to be given it. In the cave churches of Cappadocia in the tenth century the horseman spearing the serpent is Theodore Tiro, not George. Only in the eleventh century, in a Georgian text, does the beast pass to George; in the twelfth it reaches the Latin West with the crusading armies; and around 1260 Jacobus de Voragine set it down in the [Golden Legend](work:golden-legend) with a walled city called Silene, a princess, and a whole town coming to the font. That is roughly nine hundred and fifty years after the man died. It is a beautiful story and it is a story.
And still the thing that is not a story sits where it has always sat. At Lod, the old Lydda, there is a Greek Orthodox church rebuilt in 1872 over Crusader stone over Byzantine stone, with a crypt beneath it and a sarcophagus in the crypt, and a mosque of al-Khadr against its wall where Muslims honour the same figure. On the third of November the Orthodox keep the feast of that church's consecration and of the moving of the relics. People are still there. They were there when Theodosius came, and when the Piacenza pilgrim came, and when Ioannes son of Diomedes had his stone cut.
George left no book, no saying, no face. He left a place where people would not stop praying, and it turns out that a man can hand down more by dying well in an unrecorded corner of Palestine than most men hand down in a lifetime of writing.
You will notice that the church has known for fifteen hundred years that it does not know what George did, and has gone on keeping his feast anyway. That is a harder discipline than it looks. It would be easier to defend the dragon, or to quietly drop the man. Instead the tradition holds two things at once: this is a real martyr, and these are not reliable stories about him. There is something in that for anyone who has inherited a faith with gaps in it, or a family history with legends in it, or a memory of God's kindness that has grown a little in the retelling. The question is not whether the ornament is true. It is whether you can love what is actually there once the ornament is set down. What in your own life have you been decorating because you were afraid the plain fact of it would not hold?
The evidence for George divides cleanly in two, and the two halves never quite join. There is the veneration, which is genuinely old and traceable in dated stone and dated ink. And there is the biography, which is legendary from the earliest surviving page of it and was declared so by Rome at the first moment of institutional record.
Nothing contemporary names him. There is no regnal or consular dating for the death, no parents, no career, no place of education. Hippolyte Delehaye's minimum, as the Catholic Encyclopedia reports it, is all that can safely be affirmed: a martyr venerated at Lydda from a very early date. The traditional birth window of about 250 to 284 is a modern back-calculation from the death date and an assumption of military age, and should never be presented as attested. The date of 23 April 303 rests on the church's continuous liturgical memory and on the Passio tradition, not on any contemporary record of the day.
The general frame is solid enough. Eusebius of Caesarea, an eyewitness, records in the eighth book of his Historia Ecclesiastica the edict of 24 February 303 and the persecution that ran through 311; he also records the unnamed man of rank at Nicomedia who tore the edict down and who "kept his spirit cheerful and undisturbed till death." The popular identification of that man with George is a retrojection, and the Catholic Encyclopedia disclaims it: it is now generally admitted that George cannot safely be identified with him. Eusebius names nobody, and Bithynia is not Palestine.
The earliest securely dated witness to the name is the Greek dedicatory inscription of 515 at Izra, ancient Zorava, in the province of Arabia (IGLS 15/1, 244), recording Ioannes son of Diomedes depositing the relic of the martyr George after an apparition "not in a dream, but manifestly." A frequently cited inscription at Shaqqa, often given as fourth-century, in fact computes to 549 and is therefore later, not earlier. A church built at Lydda under Constantine, which Eusebius records as dedicated to an unnamed man of the highest distinction, is identified with George only by later inference.
The earliest surviving Life is fragmentary: Greek leaves in a Vienna palimpsest (Cod. Vindobon. lat. 954, published by D. Detlefsen in 1858; BHG 670), preserving the Pseudo-Passecrates Passio, which Roger Pearse describes as palpably fictional and probably Arian in origin. In it George is tortured for seven years by Dadianus, king of the Persians, and dies and is raised three times by Christ before a fourth death. The Catholic Encyclopedia calls the surviving material full beyond belief of extravagances and of quite incredible marvels, and observes that Diocletian is only a rationalized form of the name Dadianus: the persecutor in the primitive text is a figure no reconstruction of Persian history can accommodate.
The devotion is dispersed rather than concentrated, and that dispersal is itself a fact about how widely he was loved. Tradition holds that George's body was carried to Lydda for burial at his own instruction; the Orthodox keep 3 November as the feast of the consecration of the church there and of the translation of the relics. Pope Zachary, a Greek by origin, moved a relic of George from Cappadocia to San Giorgio in Velabro in Rome during his pontificate of 741 to 752, where it is kept beneath the main altar; San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice is said to hold a portion of the skull, so two churches claim cranial fragments, which is the ordinary pattern for an early martyr venerated everywhere. An arm relic is reported carried west after the sack of Constantinople in 1204, though the traditions conflict over whether it was plunder or a diplomatic gift. St George's Chapel at Windsor held two fingers, part of a heart and part of a skull until Edward VI's commissioners stripped and melted the reliquaries in 1552.
The living shrine is at Lod, the ancient Lydda: a Greek Orthodox church rebuilt in 1872 over the eastern nave of the Crusader cathedral, with a crypt sarcophagus venerated as the tomb. It adjoins the al-Khadr mosque, and the same figure is honoured in Islamic tradition under the identification with al-Khidr. There was never a canonization paper trail, because the devotion is older than any procedure for making one.
His image has outrun his text everywhere. Donatello carved him in marble between 1415 and 1417 for the Florentine guild of armourers and swordmakers, whose patron he was, for a niche at Orsanmichele; Uccello painted him about 1470; Carpaccio painted him in 1502 for the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni in Venice, where the painting still hangs in the room it was made for. Bete Giyorgis at Lalibela, cut downward out of the rock in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, remains an Ethiopian Orthodox pilgrimage church. Genoa flies his cross; Moscow's arms bear the mounted spearman, identified as George by imperial decree in 1781 and restored by mayoral decree in 1993. In 1940 George VI instituted the George Cross for civilian bravery, and put the saint and the dragon on the medal.
The indispensable article remains the Catholic Encyclopedia's entry on George (1913), by Herbert Thurston, which supplies the 1222 synod, the 1415 constitution of Archbishop Chichele, the 1778 reduction, the Dadianus and Diocletian identification, the twelfth- or thirteenth-century floor for the dragon, William of Malmesbury on Antioch in 1098 (Gesta Regum, II, 420), the phrase "extravagances and of quite incredible marvels," and the Decretum's "names justly reverenced among men, but whose actions are only known to God." It is in the public domain and available at New Advent and on Wikisource.
For Eusebius on the persecution and on the unnamed edict-tearer at Nicomedia, including "cheerful and undisturbed till death," see Historia Ecclesiastica VIII.5, in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers translation by A. C. McGiffert (series 2, volume 1), also at New Advent.
The Decretum Gelasianum, including "so that no pretext for casual mockery can arise," is available in English at tertullian.org; for the redating of the five-chapter recension to between 519 and 553, see E. von Dobschütz, Das Decretum Gelasianum (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1912).
Roger Pearse's work is the single best guide to the documentary situation. His post of 23 May 2018 gives the 515 inscription at Izra with translation and the IGLS 15/1, 244 reference; his longer post of 2 August 2018 gives Theodosius on the tomb (via C. Walter, Revue des études byzantines 53, 1995, citing Geyer, Itinera hierosolymitana saeculi IV–VIII, Vienna, 1898, p. 139) and the correction of the Shaqqa inscription to 549; his post of 30 July 2018 catalogues the manuscripts (Vindob. lat. 954, Bollandiana 23, St Gall 550, Vatic. 1660, Paris. gr. 499, BHG 676, BHL 3363, Detlefsen 1858); and his post of 27 November 2020, which calls the earliest Passio "palpably fictional, and probably Arian in origin," accompanies the Bryson and Pearse English translation of BHL 3363, released into the public domain, in which Christ tells George that he will die three times and be raised three times.
The Piacenza Pilgrim, about 570, is quoted here in Andrew Jacobs's translation ("the martyr George rests"; "the blessed George shows many miracles"); the translator's own note dating the martyrdom is modern and not part of the sixth-century text.
For the dragon in Caxton's English, see Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, chapter on Saint George, in the 1483 translation, presented at christianiconography.info; the line "thou shalt be baptized in thy blood" is a thirteenth-century literary composition and nothing older.
For the other language traditions: E. A. Wallis Budge, The Martyrdom and Miracles of Saint George of Cappadocia: The Coptic Texts, Edited with an English Translation (London: D. Nutt, 1888), on the Internet Archive; E. W. Brooks, "Acts of St George," Le Muséon 38 (1925), for the Syriac; and for modern criticism Hippolyte Delehaye, Les légendes grecques des saints militaires (Paris, 1909), pp. 45 to 76, Karl Krumbacher, Der heilige Georg in der griechischen Überlieferung (Munich, Bavarian Academy; dated 1911, though Pearse gives 1908), and J. B. Aufhauser, Miracula S. Georgii (Leipzig, 1913).
George is said of geos, which is as much to say as earth, and orge that is tilling. So George is to say as tilling the earth, that is his flesh. And S. Austin says, in libro de Trinitate that, good earth is in the height of the mountains, in the temperance of the valleys, and in the plain of the fields. The first is good for herbs being green, the second to vines, and the third to wheat and corn. Thus the blessed George was high in despising low things, and therefore he had verdure in himself, he was attemperate by discretion, and therefore he had wine of gladness, and within he was plane of humility, and thereby put he forth wheat of good works. Or George may be said of gerar, that is holy, and of gyon, that is a wrestler, that is an holy wrestler, for he wrestled with the dragon. Or George is said of gero, that is a pilgrim, and gir, that is detrenched out, and ys, that is a councillor. He was a pilgrim in the sight of the world, and he was cut and detrenched by the crown of martyrdom, and he was a good councillor in preaching. And his legend is numbered among other scriptures apocryphal in the council of Nicene, because his martyrdom has no certain relation. For in the calendar of Bede it is said that he suffered martyrdom in Persia in the city of Diaspolin, and in other places it is read that he rests in the city of Diaspolin which tofore was called Lidda, which is by the city of Joppa or Japh. And in another place it is said that he suffered death under Diocletian and Maximian, which that time were emperors. And in another place under Diocletian emperor of Persia, being present seventy kings of his empire. And it is said here that he suffered death under Dacian the provost, then Diocletian and Maximian being emperors.
S. George was a knight and born in Cappadocia. On a time he came in to the province of Libya, to a city which is said Silene. And by this city was a stagne or a pond like a sea, wherein was a dragon which envenomed all the country. And on a time the people were assembled for to slay him, and when they saw him they fled. And when he came nigh the city he venomed the people with his breath, and therefore the people of the city gave to him every day two sheep for to feed him, because he should do no harm to the people, and when the sheep failed there was taken a man and a sheep. Then was an ordinance made in the town that there should be taken the children and young people of them of the town by lot, and every each one as it fell, were he gentle or poor, should be delivered when the lot fell on him or her. So it happed that many of them of the town were then delivered, insomuch that the lot fell upon the king's daughter, whereof the king was sorry, and said unto the people: For the love of the gods take gold and silver and all that I have, and let me have my daughter. They said: How sir! you have made and ordained the law, and our children be now dead, and you would do the contrary. Your daughter shall be given, or else we shall burn you and your house.
When the king saw he might no more do, he began to weep, and said to his daughter: Now shall I never see your espousals. Then returned he to the people and demanded eight days' respite, and they granted it to him. And when the eight days were passed they came to him and said: You see that the city perishes: Then did the king do array his daughter like as she should be wedded, and embraced her, kissed her and gave her hls benediction, and after, led her to the place where the dragon was.
When she was there S. George passed by, and when he saw the lady he demanded the lady what she made there and she said: Go you your way fair young man, that you perish not also. Then said he: Tell to me what have you and why weep you, and doubt you of nothing. When she saw that he would know, she said to him how she was delivered to the dragon. Then said S. George: Fair daughter, doubt you no thing hereof for I shall help you in the name of Jesu Christ. She said: For God's sake, good knight, go your way, and abide not with me, for you may not deliver me. Thus as they spake together the dragon appeared and came running to them, and S. George was upon his horse, and drew out his sword and garnished him with the sign of the cross, and rode hardily against the dragon which came towards him, and smote him with his spear and hurt him sore and threw him to the ground. And after said to the maid: Deliver to me your girdle, and bind it about the neck of the dragon and be not afeard. When she had done so the dragon followed her as it had been a meek beast and debonair. Then she led him into the city, and the people fled by mountains and valleys, and said: Alas! alas! we shall be all dead. Then S. George said to them: Ne doubt you no thing, without more, believe you in God, Jesu Christ, and do you to be baptized and I shall slay the dragon. Then the king was baptized and all his people, and S. George slew the dragon and smote off his head, and commanded that he should be thrown in the fields, and they took four carts with oxen that drew him out of the city.
Then were there well fifteen thousand men baptized, without women and children, and the king did do make a church there of our Lady and of S. George, in the which yet sourds a fountain of living water, which heals sick people that drink thereof. After this the king offered to S. George as much money as there might be numbered, but he refused all and commanded that it should be given to poor people for God's sake; and enjoined the king four things, that is, that he should have charge of the churches, and that he should honour the priests and hear their service diligently, and that he should have pity on the poor people, and after, kissed the king and departed.
Now it happed that in the time of Diocletian and Maximian, which were emperors, was so great persecution of christian men that within a month were martyred well twenty-two thousand, and therefore they had so great dread that some renied and forsook God and did sacrifice to the idols. When S. George saw this, he left the habit of a knight and sold all that he had, and gave it to the poor, and took the habit of a christian man, and went into the middle of the paynims and began to cry: All the gods of the paynims and gentiles be devils, my God made the heavens and is very God. Then said the provost to him: Of what presumption comes this to you, that you say that our gods be devils? And say to us what you are and what is your name. He answered anon and said: I am named George, I am a gentleman, a knight of Cappadocia, and have left all for to serve the God of heaven. Then the provost enforced himself to draw him unto his faith by fair words, and when he might not bring him thereto he did do raise him on a gibbet; and so much beat him with great staves and broches of iron, that his body was all tobroken in pieces. And after he did do take brands of iron and join them to his sides, and his bowels which then appeared he did do frot with salt, and so sent him into prison, but our Lord appeared to him the of same night with great light and comforted him much sweetly. And by this great consolation he took to him so good heart that he doubted no torment that they might make him suffer. Then, when Dacian the provost saw that he might not surmount him, he called his enchanter and said to him: I see that these christian people doubt not our torments. The enchanter bound himself, upon his head to be smitten off, if he overcame not his crafts. Then he did take strong venom and meddled it with wine, and made invocation of the names of his false gods, and gave it to S. George to drink. S. George took it and made the sign of the cross on it, and anon drank it without grieving him any thing. Then the enchanter made it more stronger than it was tofore of venom, and gave it him to drink, and it grieved him nothing. When the enchanter saw that, he kneeled down at the feet of S. George and prayed him that he would make him christian. And when Dacian knew that he was become christian he made to smite off his head. And after, on the morn, he made S. George to be set between two wheels, which were full of swords, sharp and cutting on both sides, but anon the wheels were broken and S. George escaped without hurt. And then commanded Dacian that they should put him in a caldron full of molten lead, and when S. George entered therein, by the virtue of our Lord it seemed that he was in a bath well at ease. Then Dacian seeing this began to assuage his ire, and to flatter him by fair words, and said to him: George, the patience of our gods is over great unto you which have blasphemed them, and done to them great despite, then fair, and right sweet son, I pray you that you return to our law and make sacrifice to the idols, and leave your folly, and I shall enhance you to great honour and worship. Then began S. George to smile, and said to him: Wherefore saidst you not to me thus at the beginning? I am ready to do as you say. Then was Dacian glad and made to cry over all the town that all the people should assemble for to see George make sacrifice which so much had striven there against. Then was the city arrayed and feast kept throughout all the town, and all came to the temple for to see him.
When S. George was on his knees, and they supposed that he would have worshipped the idols, he prayed our Lord God of heaven that he would destroy the temple and the idol in the honour of his name, for to make the people to be converted. And anon the fire descended from heaven and burnt the temple, and the idols, and their priests, and sith the earth opened and swallowed all the cinders and ashes that were left. Then Dacian made him to be brought tofore him, and said to him: What be the evil deeds that you have done and also great untruth? Then said to him S. George: Ah, sir, believe it not, but come with me and see how I shall sacrifice. Then said Dacian to him: I see well your fraud and your barat, you will make the earth to swallow me, like as you have the temple and my gods. Then said S. George: O caitiff, tell me how may your gods help you when they may not help themselves! Then was Dacian so angry that he said to his wife: I shall die for anger if I may not surmount and overcome this man. Then said she to him: Evil and cruel tyrant! ne seest thou not the great virtue of the christian people? I said to you well that you should not do to them any harm, for their God fights for them, and know you well that I will become christian. Then was Dacian much abashed and said to her: Will you be christian? Then he took her by the hair, and did do beat her cruelly. Then demanded she of S. George: What may I become because I am not christened? Then answered the blessed George: Doubt you nothing, fair daughter, for you shall be baptized in your blood. Then began she to worship our Lord Jesu Christ, and so she died and went to heaven. On the morn Dacian gave his sentence that S. George should be drawn through all the city, and after, his head should be smitten off. Then made he his prayer to our Lord that all they that desired any boon might get it of our Lord God in his name, and a voice came from heaven which said that it which he had desired was granted; and after he had made his orison his head was smitten off, about the year of our Lord two hundred and eighty-seven. When Dacian went homeward from the place where he was beheaded towards his palace, fire fell down from heaven upon him and burnt him and all his servants.
Gregory of Tours tells that there were some that bare certain relics of S. George, and came into a certain oratory in a hospital, and on the morning when they should depart they could not move the door till they had left there part of their relics. It is also found in the history of Antioch, that when the christian men went over sea to conquer Jerusalem, that one, a right fair young man, appeared to a priest of the host and counselled him that he should bear with him a little of the relics of S. George. for he was conductor of the battle, and so he did so much that he had some. And when it was so that they had assieged Jerusalem and durst not mount ne go up on the walls for the quarrels and defence of the Saracens, they saw appertly S. George which had white arms with a red cross, that went up tofore them on the walls, and they followed him, and so was Jerusalem taken by his help. And between Jerusalem and port Jaffa, by a town called Ramys, is a chapel of S. George which is now desolate and uncovered, and therein dwell christian Greeks. And in the said chapel lies the body of S. George, but not the head. And there lie his father and mother and his uncle, not in the chapel but under the wall of the chapel; and the keepers will not suffer pilgrims to come therein, but if they pay two ducats, and therefore come but few therein, but offer without the chapel at an altar. And there is seven years and seven lents of pardon; and the body of S. George lies in the middle of the quire or choir of the said chapel, and in his tomb is an hole that a man may put in his hand. And when a Saracen, being mad, is brought thither, and if he put his head in the hole he shall anon be made perfectly whole, and have his wit again.
This blessed and holy martyr S. George is patron of this realm of England and the cry of men of war. In the worship of whom is founded the noble order of the garter, and also a noble college in the castle of Windsor by kings of England, in which college is the heart of S. George, which Sigismund, the emperor of Almayne, brought and gave for a great and a precious relique to King Harry the fifth. And also the said Sigismund was a brother of the said garter, and also there is a piece of his head, which college is nobly endowed to the honour and worship of Almighty God and his blessed martyr S. George. Then let us pray unto him that he be special protector and defender of this realm.
The Roman ruling known as the Gelasian Decree (De Libris Recipiendis) was traditionally ascribed to Gelasius I (492 to 496); most modern scholarship, following E. von Dobschütz in 1912, dates the five-chapter recension to an anonymous compiler between 519 and 553. It bars the Acts of George from reading in the Roman church "so that no pretext for casual mockery can arise," lists them among works composed by heretics, and places George among those "whose names are justly reverenced among men, but whose actions are only known to God." On the later dating the Decree is not the first document to name George; the Izra inscription of 515 is. What the Decree holds is the earlier and more interesting distinction of being the first Roman institutional judgement on the material.
The tomb enters the literature about 530 with Theodosius, De Situ Terrae Sanctae: at Diospolis, where Saint George was martyred, there also is his body, and many miracles occur. The Piacenza Pilgrim about 570 records that at Diospolis the martyr George rests and that the blessed George shows many miracles; the translator's own note dating the martyrdom to 303 is modern editorial matter and not sixth-century testimony. Arculf, reported through Adomnán about the 680s, attests continuing veneration at the same site.
The hagiographic transmission runs in four languages and was never harmonized. The Latin line survives in two ninth-century manuscripts, Codex Gallicanus (Bollandiana 23, Brussels) and Codex Sangallensis (St Gall 550), under BHL 3363. A revised Greek "Normal Text," which replaces Dadianus with Diocletian and tones down the marvels, survives in Cod. Vatic. 1660 of AD 916 and Cod. Paris. gr. 499 of the eleventh century. Symeon Metaphrastes, who worked in the late tenth century though Pearse dates this edition to the eleventh, produced the standard Byzantine liturgical form (BHG 676; Acta Sanctorum, April III.7 to 12, reprinted in PG 115). An independent Coptic dossier of a Martyrdom, two Encomia and a Miracles collection was edited from five manuscripts by E. A. Wallis Budge in 1888. A Syriac version of about 600 is judged to preserve the fullest recoverable form of the primitive narrative, translated into English by E. W. Brooks in 1925. Modern critical work begins with Delehaye in 1909 and continues with Krumbacher and Aufhauser.
The dragon is the last arrival and the most famous. The Catholic Encyclopedia states that the episode cannot be traced further back than the twelfth or thirteenth century, and that its origin remains very obscure; Delehaye rejected both a derivation from Perseus and a simple allegorical origin as unproven. Tenth-century frescoes in the Cappadocian cave churches of Göreme show military saints spearing serpents, but at that date the motif belongs to Theodore Tiro. The oldest record attaching it specifically to George is an eleventh-century Georgian text, with the episode set in Cappadocia; it reached the Latin West in the twelfth century by way of the Crusades, and Jacobus de Voragine fixed it about 1260, moving the setting to Silene in Libya. Caxton's translation of 1483 carried it into England.
The English elevation of George is a separate and better-documented sequence. William of Malmesbury reports that George and Demetrius, "the martyr knights," were seen assisting the Franks at the battle of Antioch in 1098 (Gesta Regum, II, 420), which is a twelfth-century chronicler's report and should be read as one. The national Synod of Oxford ordered his day kept as a lesser holiday as early as 1222. Edward III made him patron of the Order of the Garter, founded in 1347 or 1348 (New Advent says about 1347, other sources 1348, and the difference is genuine); the chapel at Windsor, built by Henry III for Edward the Confessor, was re-dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, George the Martyr, and Edward the Confessor together, and only came to be known by George's name alone through long usage. In 1415, the year of Agincourt, the Constitution of Archbishop Chichele raised his day to the rank of one of the greatest feasts and ordered it observed like Christmas Day. In 1778 Rome reduced it to a simple feast of devotion, though it continued to rank liturgically as a double of the first class with an octave.
Two claims of the popular kind should be set down as unsafe. The story that England took the red cross and the patron from Genoa under Richard I is an eighteenth-century Genoese tradition, and the literature that reports it also records that the red cross entered England in the late thirteenth century neither as a flag nor in association with George. And the belief that the country of Georgia is named for the saint is contested: etymologists trace the Western name to Persian and Arabic Gurj or Kurj, on a route where the devotion was not the operative influence, however genuinely Georgians have venerated George as patron.
What no source supplies is a document naming George from within his own century, or any record of the martyrdom independent of the devotion that grew up around it.
Almighty God, you gave your servant George boldness to confess the Name of our Savior Jesus Christ before the rulers of this world, and courage to die for this faith: Grant that we may always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in us, and to suffer gladly for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Readings for a Martyr
Jeremiah 15:15–21Psalm 34Revelation 7:9–17Luke 12:4–12