94 EARLY MEDIEVAL SPAINstanding was also important. This depended principally on the effec-
tiveness, in local eyes at least, of the bishop's relationship with the
patron saint of the city. Spain was particularly well endowed with
these, mostly martyr saints of the Decian (249-251) or Diocletianic
(303-311) persecutions. Modern scholarship has revealed the exist-
ence of some of these saints to be spurious or highly dubious, but
that is irrelevant to the important position they occupied in popular
devotion from the fourth to seventh centuries, the highest point in
the cult of martyrs in early Spanish history. Virtually every town of any
note could claim its own particular martyred saint, whose relics would
be preserved and venerated, usually in a basilica erected over the
supposed site of burial. As well as indigenous saints, with the growth
of the traffic in relics from the early fifth century onwards, other non-
Spanish cults came to be introduced into the peninsula, especially of
Roman and southern Gallic martyrs such as Laurence and Maurice.1I
As small relics of these more 'international' saints came to be ac-
quired, subsidiary basilicas were erected in the Spanish towns to house
them, and a series of secondary cults would thus develop alongside
that of the central indigenous saint. Such additional cults and their
churches distributed in and around the cities and towns may also
have catered for refinements in local particularism, with different
districts of the towns or surrounding regions being able to focus their
loyalty on the saint whose relics and basilica they had in their midst,
whilst still reserving a general veneration for the patron saint of the
city as a whole. It was possibly to emphasise the cohesion of the whole
against the centrifugal tendencies that such secondary cults might
encourage, that from the later fifth century onwards liturgical proces-
sions come into being in most parts of the western Church. These
took the form of ceremonial processions, usually starting and ending
at the principal patron saint's basilica, but taking in most of the other
churches of the city en route. Obviously each town that employed such
processions varied them to fit local requirements, and it was possible,
as in the City of Rome, to have more than one type of procession.
There, as in some of the cities of southern Gaul, special penitential
processions came into existence to implore divine assistance in times
of plague or war. In Merida, as doubtless elsewhere, processions seem
to have been principally connected with the great feasts of the litur-
gical year. They manifested the respect of the city for all its cults and
highlighted the dominant role of the principal one. The distinction
is also mirrored in the miracle stories of the Lives of the Fathers, where