IT was in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries of the Christian era that Galicia reached her first zenith as a centre of learning and literary fame. During this period her intellectual development and culture far exceeded that of the whole of the rest of Spain: she was freely acknowledged to be the Magistra Litterarum. The writings of the men who made her famous are many of them preserved intact to this day; they are all, without exception, the work of monks or church dignitaries. Outside the Church learning was practically non-existent. But the monks and bishops of those days were anything but mere bookworms, mystics, or recluses; they were men who helped to make history as well as to chronicle and record it. Many a Spanish bishop had earned a name for bravery on the field of battle before his elevation to a See, and was, as Lopez Ferreiro has remarked, a soldier at heart, and, what is also worthy of notice, a married man—with a large family. Many a monk in those days was a bold and fearless traveller, who had seen many peoples and many lands, and enlarged his mental horizon by much and wide observation. We moderns are apt to think that travelling for purposes of education is a comparatively recent invention, but that is not the case. From Galicia in the fourth century young men of spirit and religious zeal—ay, and even young women—started forth to visit far-distant lands and gather for themselves the flowers of learning and piety from their native meadows.

Jerusalem was a great meeting-place for leaders of religious thought at that date, so that it had a double attraction for young Gallegans fired with spiritual ambition and a Celtic love of enterprise. Many found their way thither, and each on his return to Galicia became in himself an influence of culture in his diocese or monastery as the case might be. The journey from Galicia to Palestine, in spite of its difficulties and dangers, seems to have been undertaken by the pious as readily in those days as a journey from London to Rome is in our own. Monasteries, which were in reality schools of higher culture, had already become numerous throughout the province. Most of the parochial churches had already been established before the end of the first half of the fourth century; they were almost all dedicated to martyrs, and erected over some spot sanctified by the presence of holy relics.[39] Young men of noble family invariably took up the profession of arms or entered the Church; consequently, clergy and monks abounded in the land. “Fifteen centuries separate us from that epoch,” says Ferreiro, “and twice has the chain which connects with our own time been broken, first by the invasion of barbarians, and then by that of the Saracens. Yet the stars of that period still shine.” Perhaps the brightest of these stars is Idatius, the father of Spanish historians.

Bishop Idatius, the celebrated author of the earliest chronicles of Spanish history, was born in Galicia, in a town, now non-existent, which took its name from the river Limia, and was called civitas Limicorum, or “the city of the Limicos.” Very little was known about this city till an eminent local archÆologist, Dr. Marcelo Macias, began to devote time and study to the deciphering of some inscriptions that had been found upon certain stones on the shores of the lake of Antela close to the spot where the Limia rises. Dr. Macias has recently found the site of the city, and is now convinced that it was once populous and wealthy, not a Roman but a Gallegan town, and the birthplace of eminent men—a city respected and feared during the later centuries of the Roman Empire.[40] Until Dr. Macias discovered the site, the Portuguese were in the habit of claiming that Portuguese soil had given birth to the famous Idatius, who in his youth had visited Jerusalem and knew St. Jerome, and who in his old age wrote the famous Chronicles—a priceless treasure as regards the early history not only of Spain but also of Spanish Catholicism. Ptolemy mentions this city as f???? ??????, and the Ravenate calls it Limia or LimÆa, and mentions it as the first halting-place on the road leading from Braga to Lugo, by way of Tuy. Dr. Macias has satisfactorily proved that this city once stood in the province of Orense, near what are now the little towns of Lodoselo and Nocela de Pena, two miles to the south-east of Ginzo de Limia; he has proved this from inscriptions discovered in that neighbourhood in the middle of the eighteenth century, which are dedications, the one to Hadrian and the other to Antoninus Pius, by the city of the Limicos (Civitas Limicorum). Till now, most Spanish writers, confounding the Forum Limicorum of Ptolemy with the Limia of the Itinerary, have asserted erroneously that it was the Ponte de Lima in the neighbouring kingdom of Portugal. Florez and HÜbner both helped to make the inscriptions known, but it was left to Dr. Macias to interpret their significance to students of Spanish history. They now stand in the museum of local antiquities at Orense.

The story of their arrival there is amusing. These stones had been employed in the building of a hermitage erected on the spot where they had been found[41] in honour of St. Peter; they had been built into the porch in such a manner that their inscriptions could be read by those who entered the church, and it was here that a neighbouring abbot noticed them, and, about the year 1775, drew the attention of Florez to them. In 1835, at the taking down of the hermitage, another abbot brought them into the town with several other Roman tablets. He had a stone cross made of them and placed in the open space before the church. As time went on the ignorant peasants got the idea that the cross protected them and their cattle from hailstones, and so strong was their superstition that they did not like strangers to approach the cross even to copy the inscription. The stones were at length presented to the Orense Museum by the bishop of the diocese, and in November 1897 three of the leading members of the Orense ArchÆological Society—Dr. Macias, the late Arturo Vazquez, and SeÑor Benito F. Alonso—started out to fetch them. Although the Abbot of Nocela had assured them that the peasants of the neighbourhood would offer no objection to their taking the stones,—adding that he had continually preached to them on the folly of their superstition,—these gentlemen thought it prudent to be ready for all emergencies, and took along with them some half-dozen policemen from Ginzo. Thanks to this precaution, they did not return home with battered skulls and broken noses, nor were they stoned to death on the road; yet one or the other fate would certainly have befallen them had they ventured on that expedition unprotected, for the men and boys of Nocela, having got wind of their purpose, gathered together before the porch of the little church and protested against the removal of the stones, while their womenfolk set up an outrageous hullabaloo at the corners of the village streets; and one urchin, thinking to get the better of the policemen, climbed the church tower that he might deliver a surprise attack upon the common enemy. No effort on the part of the archÆologists to bring the people to reason met with the least success. “As pedras son nosas,” they cried (“The stones are ours”), and even tried to offer bodily resistance. When at length the stones had been taken possession of, there was not a single yoke of oxen to be found in the village, and a cart had to be brought from the neighbouring town of Lodoselo; but even then the peasant driver, terrified by the threats of the people standing round, begged with tears that he might be released from his bargain, and there was nothing for it but to let him go. Finally, the policemen themselves fetched a pair of oxen from the fields and harnessed them to a cart; the stones were put into it, and an old man was persuaded to drive it. Thus, at nightfall the party set out for Ginzo, the wife and daughter of the driver following the cart and tearfully entreat him to return. The rest of the people, who would have thrown stones but for their fear of the police, accompanied their departure with prolonged howls and hisses. Dr. Macias relates this story in order, he explains, to warn future archÆologists that the modern citizens of the Forum Limicorum are as superstitious as were the Romans who refused to cross the river Limia at the command of Brutus.

In the prologue of the chronicle of Idatius we read these words: “Idatius Provinciae Gallaeciae natus in Lemica Civitate,[42] mage divino munerequam proprio merito summi Praesul creatus officii,” etc. “Neither in his prologue nor in the years 431 and 462 of his chronicle,” says Dr. Macias, “where he speaks of himself as a bishop, does he once mention the name of his diocese; neither is it given us by St. Isidore or by Rodrigo, Archbishop of Toledo, when they speak of Idatius.” Dr. Macias reminds his readers that the fact of Idatius’s having been a native of Limica in no way proves that he was ever a bishop of that city. He is generally mentioned as “a bishop of Galicia” simply.

Idatius gives no clue in his chronicle as to the date of his own birth, but we know that it was towards the close of his life that he sorrowfully wrote, lacrymabile propriae et vita tempus—and ut extremus plagae, ita extremus et vitae. These words were written by him in connection with the events of the year 469, the last year of those included in the chronicle. Dr. Macias adds that if he was about eighty years of age when he finished his chronicle, he must have been born about the year 390. The Portuguese writer Jorge Cardoso states in his Hagiologio that Idatius was of the race of the Sueves; but, as it happens, these people did not invade the Peninsula till twenty years later. Dr. Macias is sure, moreover, that the fact of the name being foreign to the Latin tongue indicates that he was not a Roman but a Limico of the Hispano-Galaic race.

While still young—adhuc infantulus, or, as he says in another place, et infantulus et pupillus—he was taken to the East, either by his father or some other member of his family, and there he met St. Jerome, St. John, St. Eulogius, and St. Theophilus (bishops respectively of Jerusalem and Alexandria). His pilgrimage, as he calls it, could not have lasted longer than the year 402, when he was about twelve or fourteen years old, for he says he cannot give the dates of the deaths of St. Jerome and the other Fathers—among whom he mentions St. Epiphanius, who, we know, died in 402.

In his shorter chronicle, Cronicon pequeÑo, we read that Idatius was converted to Christianity in the year 416,—“Idatii ad Dominum conversio peccatoris,”—and that eleven years afterwards he was elected bishop. Macias, like Florez, explains that the words conversio ad Dominum do not mean that he was converted from heathendom to Christianity, but that, till then a layman, he now entered the Church.

The stipulated peace between the natives of Galicia and the Sueves[43] having been broken, the former commissioned Idatius to represent their case to the general Aecius. He set out for Gaul upon this errand in the year 431, and returned to Galicia the following year, accompanied by Count Censorius, the ambassador sent by Aecius to try and induce Hermanricus II to make a fresh peace. But Censorius being called to Rome by the Empress Placidia before this had been accomplished, the negotiations were left in the hands of Idatius and several other bishops. “Great,” says Dr. Macias, “were the services which upon this critical occasion Idatius rendered to his country”, but this is not by any means his only title to honour. Galicia was at that juncture not only overrun by barbarians but perturbed by heretics, and Idatius played no mean part in the struggle that was sustained between Arianism[44] and the Sueves, and which was more serious against the doctrines of Priscillian, which had by that time taken such deep root in Galicia, “a struggle obscure but heroic,” said Menendez y Pelayo, “which must have left some records behind it; but the torments endured by human thought and by the conscience are those which are the least reflected in the pages of history. What long accounts of conquests and battles, what innumerable catalogues of dynasties would we not gladly relinquish that we might know when and how the heresy of Priscillian disappeared from among the people of Galicia!”[45] But we will leave the subject of the persecution of the Priscillianists to another volume, and turn our attention at present to the writings of Idatius. The greatness of his name is due to the chronicles he left behind him,[46] and not to his religious zeal. Historians have pronounced them to be a literary production of the greatest importance, not only because they are the oldest historical documents possessed by Spain and because they testify to Spain’s having been one of the earliest among the nations to cultivate history, but also on account of the quality of the facts recorded. Florez calls them “an original source from which we may learn the events connected with the entrance of the Vandals, the Alanes, and the Sueves into Spain.” The fifth century would indeed be, historically, almost blank but for the light that is thrown upon its events by the chronicles of Idatius. St. Jerome, the translator and continuer of the history begun by Eusebius of CÆsarea, did not get farther than the year 378, everything having been thrown into confusion by the invasion of the barbarians. This, says Macias, was the point at which Idatius took up the thread. His chronicles begin with the following year, 379, the first year of the reign of Theodosius, and end in the year 469, thus embracing the events of ninety-one years. Idatius witnessed and took part in many of the events he recorded. Being, as he himself said, cognisant of all the calamities of his unfortunate epoch, he relates with truthfulness the invasion of Galicia by the Sueves, and paints their methods of raiding the country with the most lively colours. But for him the Spaniards would to-day be in ignorance of many of the facts which later historians—St. Isidore, and Rodrigo, Archbishop of Toledo, and others—have handed down, for they constantly copied word for word from the chronicles of Idatius.

Until the year 1615, historians possessed only fragmentary editions of the chronicle, bearing the title Chronographia ex Idatio collectore quodem Caroli Maequali. But about that date a more complete and a more correct parchment copy was discovered in a monastery at Metz, and from this editions appeared in Rome, Paris, Leyden, Amsterdam, Frankfort, and other places. There is also his second chronicle, called Cronicon pequeÑo de Idacio, because it is practically an extract, or rÉsumÉ, of the first. It begins twenty-six years later and terminates a hundred years later. In spite of its brevity, it contains several facts that are not included in the larger one, as, for instance, the conversion of Idatius above alluded to. Another document, Fastos Consulares (from the year 45 B.C. to A.D. 468), has been called, by the Jesuit Sirmondo, Idacianos, though it bears no author’s name; but Florez has proved in his EspaÑa Sagrada that Idatius was not the author, and that it must have been penned by some Spaniard of the sixth century. “Truth to say,” concludes Dr. Macias, “Idatius can dispense with this new mark of literary fame. Great enough is the honour due to him as a writer for having traced, in the midst of such calamitous times, the first page of our mediÆval history, a gloomy picture indeed, but one of rugged grandeur, in which his own venerable personality stands clearly forth, a glory to Galicia and an honour to the city of the Limicos.”

Another Gallegan star of the fourth century was Paul Orosius, also an historian. In the time of King Alfred Orosius was so well known that his name was commonly used instead of the title of his work. This is evident from the first sentence of Alfred’s translation—“Here beginneth the book which men call Orosius.” Joseph Bosworth, whose literal translation of King Alfred’s Anglo-Saxon version appeared in 1854, said in his preface, “The compendious history of the world from the creation to the year A.D. 116, written by Orosius, continued to be held in high esteem from the days of Alfred till the invention of printing, for it was selected as one of the first works to be committed to the press. The first edition appeared in Germany as early as 1471. After this numerous editions were published by the most celebrated printers”; and this writer adds, “It must be interesting to know the origin of a work that has attracted so much attention and been highly valued for so many ages,—a work chosen by the first man of his age, our glorious King Alfred, as a book worthy to be translated by him into Anglo-Saxon,—the English of his day—to teach his people history.”

For centuries it was erroneously believed that Orosius was a native of Tarragona, on the shores of the Mediterranean, but Florez and others have now satisfactorily proved that he was a native of Braga in Galicia. Orosius himself stated that his patria was ab oceani littore (on the ocean shore), and that it was overrun by barbarians. He was born before the year 395, in which Arcadius and Honorius ascended the throne. It seems that he received his education and was ordained to the priesthood at Braga, for he was already a presbyter[47] when he started on his travels.

It appears from the testimony of both St. Augustine and Orosius that the latter left Braga by ship, without any definite intention of going to see St. Augustine, but that, on finding that his ship touched upon the African coast, he felt himself impelled by some hidden power to break his journey there and visit St. Augustine at Hippo. Priscillian’s heresy was then widely spread throughout Galicia; our historian’s own writings tell us that he was still in Spain at the time of the entrance of the Sueves and the Vandals,[48] and that he was far more afflicted by the heresies that had crept into his beloved church than by the invasions of the cruellest enemy. “Dilacerati gravius a doctoribus pravis quam a cruentissemis hostibus sumus,”[49] and it is probable that he was glad of an opportunity to seek Augustine’s advice and counsel as to the best means of bringing about the extirpation of the above-mentioned heresy. He also consulted St. Augustine “on several abstruse points of doctrine,” and discussed with him the nature and origin of the reasoning mind. He wrote, about that time, his Consultatio sive commonitorium ad Augustinum de errore Priscillianistarium et Origenistarium, in answer to which Augustine published his Ad Orosium contra Priscillianistas et Origenistas. These are both included in the works of St. Augustine. About A.D. 414, St. Augustine advised Orosius to proceed to Palestine to study the heresy of Origen on the spot, and at the same time to consult St. Jerome on some of his difficulties as to the origin of the soul. St. Jerome was then living at Bethlehem, engaged in translating the Scriptures into Latin from the Hebrew and Greek originals. That translation is the present Vulgate or Authorised Version of the Roman Catholics, which is now (1909) being revised with the sanction of the Pope. Orosius was not himself acquainted with the Greek language.

He carried with him to Palestine a letter of introduction to St. Jerome, in which St. Augustine wrote of him as follows: “Behold there has come to me a religious young man in Catholic peace, a brother,—in age, a son; in rank, a co-presbyter,—Orosius; of active talents, ready eloquence, ardent application, etc.” While Orosius was in Palestine, Pelagius was disseminating his new doctrine with great zeal, and our historian was called on to oppose him before a synod held at Jerusalem in July A.D. 415, and presided over by John, the bishop of that city. It was then that Orosius wrote his celebrated treatise, which he modestly called Apologia contra Pelagium de arbitrii libertate. It is appended to his History.

The sacking of Rome had afforded the Romans a pretence for accusing Christianity of being the cause of the ruin which had befallen the Empire, and for asserting that Christianity had been injurious to mankind. St. Augustine wrote his celebrated treatise to show the absurdity of this assertion, “and to prove, by historical facts, how much the world had been ameliorated by revelation.” Orosius wished to prove, from the history of the world, what Augustine had proved from the history of the Church, and the result was the great work for which he is famous. It is written on Christian lines and is in reality a defence of the Christian religion. Orosius undertook the work at the request of St. Augustine, to whom it is dedicated. King Alfred, in translating it into Anglo-Saxon, introduced much new matter. Here is a paragraph relating to the history of our own land:—

“The Romans gave Caius Julius (CÆsar) seven legions, to the end that he might wage war four years on the Gauls. When he had overcome them, he went into the island of Britain, and fought against the Britons, and was routed in the land, which was called Kentland, and they were routed. Their third battle was near the river, which is called Thames, near the ford called Wallingford.

“After that battle the king came into his hands, and the townspeople that were in Cirencester, and afterwards all that were in the island.”[50]

Another remarkable traveller who started out from Galicia was a woman. “Jerome had been the leader,” says Montalembert, “of that permanent emigration which, during the last years of the fourth century, drew so many noble Romans and Christians of the West towards Palestine and Egypt.” “In proportion,” he adds, “as souls were more penetrated with the truths of the faith, and gave themselves to the practice of Christian virtues, they experienced an attraction more and more irresistible towards the countries which were at once the cradle of the Christian religion and of monastic life. Then were seen beginning those pilgrimages which ended in the Crusades.” The writer has given us an account of many Romans, both men and women, who undertook pilgrimages to Palestine in the fourth century, but the story of Etheria—the illustrious Spanish lady who travelled to the Holy Land from distant Galicia about 385 A.D.,[51] and who wrote a book about her journey, the original manuscript of which is still in existence, quite escaped his notice. Florez, writing towards the end of the eighteenth century, believed that of this interesting lady no other record had been preserved than that which he found in the works of the Abbot Valerius, and which he published for the first time. Florez devoted several pages of his volume on Galicia to this plucky abbess, or nun, whichever she might be, because he felt sure that she was a native of that province. Long after his day the discovery of her own writings (in 1883), and the research of which she has since been the subject, has proved beyond all doubt that she was indeed a native of Galicia. Florez begins his account by a disquisition upon her name; he tells us that Morales spoke of her as Echeria, that Tamazo called her Eucheria, and that the Toledo manuscripts have her name as Egeria and Etheria. Florez had the same manuscript to go by as Morales had had two centuries earlier—that of the Cistercian Monastery of Carracedo in Bierzo, so he decided to adopt the name Echeria in writing of her. As, however, it is now agreed that her right name was Etheria, we will adopt that in preference.

A certain monk, Valerius, wrote a letter in Latin, in the second half of the seventh century, to the monks of the Bergidensis, telling them about the pilgrimage of Etheria, and holding her up to them as a model of fortitude and perseverance. He spoke of her as “the most blessed Etheria,” and related how, fired with religious enthusiasm, she had undertaken a perilous journey to the East, in order that she might see for herself the sacred land where her Saviour had lived and suffered for the redemption of the world. He told of the difficulties she had faced and the risks she had encountered in that long and fatiguing journey over sea and land, over river and mountain, to Palestine and Egypt. She felt that, like Abraham, she had received a call, and neither the weakness of her body nor the love of her home could hinder her from answering it, that is, from setting out on what, in those days, was, for a woman, an unheard-of journey. Etheria crossed seas and ascended mountains, no obstacle, no difficulty, no hardship could stop her till she reached at length that holy spot where Christ was born, suffered, and rose again. On her way Etheria visited the tombs of many martyrs and prayed beside them, often going considerably out of her way to do so. She carried with her as her guide both the Old and the New Testaments. To reach the places mentioned in the Bible, she boldly crossed the most dangerous deserts, and travelled by the most perilous roads; she visited many isolated monasteries, and conversed with the most inaccessible hermits in their cells.[52] She refreshed her soul, says Valerius, with the sweet teachings of these seraphic beings. She also studied with particular care the Book of Exodus, and followed the very road that the Children of Israel took when they set out for the Land of Promise. She reached at length the spot where Moses drew water from the rock, and there she refreshed herself with the Water of Life. She came to the desert, where the manna fell and where the foolish multitudes had sighed for the flesh-pots of Egypt, being weary of their celestial food; here she fed her spirit with the precious word of God. The pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night which led the Israelites through the desert did not prevent them from remembering all that they had left behind them in Egypt. But Etheria had but one desire, to reach Mount Sinai. On arriving at the foot of that mountain, she mounted to its summit, and stood where Moses had stood to view the Promised Land, and then she fell upon her knees, offering up her heart in praise and fervent prayer. Thence she passed to Mount Tabor, whence Moses viewed the Promised Land, and the mountain on which Christ Himself had prayed.

Etheria took several years to accomplish this pilgrimage, and all the time she thought with longing of her far-off home. “It is marvellous,” cries Valerius, “how much she endured and how much she went through”; it is a story to confound the proud, a story to show how God chooses His weakest vessels, passing by the strong, to show what the human breast can endure when filled with the love of Christ. The world itself was the theatre of her undertaking; seas, rivers, and mountains were the steps she trod. “What,” he asks, “must have been the force of that love which so many waters failed to quench? with what firm hope did Etheria pass through all those different countries with their different races and different customs, and many of them barbarians! What must have been the faith that could have preserved her intrepid to the end!” “Usque in finem irrevocabili audacia procul dubio perpetravit.” This, according to Florez, was Etheria’s greatest triumph, and Valerius said in his day that, not desiring to have rest in this world, but rather to enter into eternity palm in hand, she even maltreated her own body that she might prepare her soul for heaven and make it spotless. She made herself “a pilgrim upon earth, that she might rest in heaven and stand with the choir of virgins round their glorious Queen.” Valerius does not say where she died, but he adds that she reached her house in safety. He related all this to the monks, that, at the thought of such heroic virtue on the part of one of the weaker sex, they might be ashamed of their own half-heartedness and shortcomings, and beware lest, at the coming of the Bridegroom, Etheria’s lamp might be found brightly trimmed and their own be extinguished for lack of oil.

Florez based his conjecture, as to Etheria having been a native of Galicia, on Valerius’s statement that she was a native of territory in the west bordering upon the Ocean. “Extremo occidui maris Oceani littore exorta.” But nearly a hundred years after the death of Florez, an Italian, M. Gamurrini,[53] made a very interesting discovery. He found in the year 1883, in an Arezzo manuscript, part of a long account of Etheria’s pilgrimage written by herself. Three years later he published it in book form under the title of Sanctae Silvae Acquitanae peregrinatio ad loca sancta. This manuscript, written in the second half of the fourth century, had till that moment remained unknown to any but a small circle of devotees to early Christian literature.

In 1888, M. Gamurrini published a second and more carefully prepared edition. A year later a translation of this appeared in Russian at St. Petersburg, accompanied by the Latin text. It was not till the year 1891, that the Palestine Pilgrims Tract Society published, in London, the original text, accompanied by an English version made by John H. Bernard, an introduction and notes. The English title was as follows, “The Pilgrimage of St. Silvia of Acquitaine to the Holy Places about 385 A.D.” In 1898 a learned edition was published at Vienna by Herr Paul Geyer.[54]

The manuscript of Arezzo is incomplete,—having neither beginning nor end, and it has no author’s name. Now the question that naturally arises in our minds is, How did M. Gamurrini know that the writer was Silvia of Acquitaine? What autobiographical details did the manuscript reveal? It certainly revealed that its author was a lady of distinction, and that she was a native of a western province of the Roman Empire, bordered by the ocean. After the discovery of the manuscript there was a great deal of discussion as to who could have been its author. Some thought she must be Silvia, sister of Rufinus; Kohler thought she was Galla Placidia, daughter of Theodosius;—it will be remembered that this emperor was born in Galicia; but now the date of the pilgrimage is known to have been much earlier than that of the birth of Theodosius, so that the pilgrim could not have been his daughter. In October 1903, Father Marius FÉrotin, a learned French monk of the Benedictine Order, published an article in the Revue des Questions Historiques, entitled “Le VÉritable auteur de la Peregrinatio Silvae. La vierge Espagnole Etheria.”[55] This student says that the first sentence of the manuscript shows us the intrepid lady traveller already far from her native land—at the foot of Mount Sinai. “Dans un Latin vulgaire plein de simplicitÉ, j’allais dire de bonhomie, mais qui ne manque pas de charme et oÙ dÉborde À chaque page un saint enthusiasme pour les souvenirs bibliques.” She tells her readers that she is in haste to see everything. “Ego, ut satis curiosa” (satis is here used for valde), and the number of questions she asks prove that she has not exaggerated. When she came to where the city of Sodom once stood, she wrote: “The place where there was once an inscription about Lot’s wife was shown to us, which place we read of in the Scriptures. But, believe me, venerable ladies (the nuns of her convent in Galicia), the pillar itself is not visible, only the place is shown. The pillar is said to be covered up in the Dead Sea. We certainly saw the place, but we saw no pillar; I cannot deceive you about this matter. The bishop of the place, that is, of Segor, told us that it is now some years since the pillar was visible.”[56]

It is evident that it was Etheria’s own account of her journey which gave rise to Valerius’s letter to the monks. The date, as well as the departure and the various stages of the journey, all tally with those given by Valerius, and he even makes use at times of the identical expressions used by Etheria. As Father FÉrotin truly remarks, although history is known to repeat itself, it has never done so to such an extent as to give us two such women and two such journeys to Palestine! Greek names were rare in Spain in the fourth century. Etheria is the Greek equivalent for CÉleste. The name of Etheria in its masculine form is found in Spain in the eighth century,—it was the name of a bishop—St. Etherius. “La liturgie wisegothique faisait grand usage de l’ÉpÉthÈte etheria.”[57] FÉrotin gives the whole of the Latin from the original manuscript, the Codex Escurialensis of Valerius’s letter to the monks, which ends with the exhortation: “Ideo fratres dilectissimi, cui non erubescimus, qui uribus corporis et integretate salutes consistimus, mulierem patriarchi Abrahe sanctum complesse exemplum, qui femineum fragile sexum,” etc., of which I have given Florez’s free translation above.

FÉrotin reminds his readers that the greater part of this interesting and important manuscript has yet to be discovered, but that we now know for certain the name, the native land, and the rank of this illustrious lady of Galicia, which a short time since were supposed to have been lost for ever. Father FÉrotin does not think, like Gamurrini, that she was an abbess, though the catalogue of Limoges gives her that title.

It has fallen, then, to the lot of a Frenchman to discover that the manuscript published by an Italian (Gamurrini) is the original from which the Spanish abbot Valerius drew the account of Etheria’s journey which he sent in his letter to the Bergidensian monks. But perhaps the most interesting point in connection with that discovery is the fact that in Lemberg another monk, of yet another nationality, made the same discovery at the very same time, and would have published it had not he accidentally learned that FÉrotin had anticipated him by a few days. Father FÉrotin tells us that while his article was in the press he received a letter from Father A. Lambert of Lemberg, dated 8th July 1903, in which the latter informed him that he too had made the same discovery, and had been on the point of publishing it when he saw that of FÉrotin announced in the Review in which it afterwards appeared; and he adds: “La dÉcouverte de la lettre de l’abbÉ Valerius ad monarchos Bergidenses m’avait amenÉ sur l’origine de la Peregrinatio a une resultat identique, mais par une route differente.” “I found it,” he adds, “by noticing a sentence that occurs in three of the catalogues of the manuscripts of St. Martial, J. Limoges (thirteenth century). I found that mention was made of a journey made by the Abbess Etheria, Itinerarium Egeriae Abbatissae, the identification of which with that of the account above mentioned is beyond all doubt.” Father FÉrotin published the whole of the letter at the close of his article, that his readers might see for themselves how two persons quite unknown to one another had made the discovery simultaneously.

Etheria wrote, as we have seen, the story of her travels for the religious edification of the nuns of her convent. It was of quite a private nature, and this probably accounts for the fact that no other writer besides Valerius seems to have had his attention drawn to it.[58] The archives of Spain’s convents and churches teem with unread and unpublished manuscripts which await the student of the future. Among them may perhaps, some day, be discovered the lost part of Etheria’s Journey to Jerusalem, or possibly it may lie hidden in some dusty parchment roll at Florence, or in the Vatican.