Vincent of Saragossa

Life and Ministry

Vincent was a deacon of the church at Saragossa in northern Spain under Bishop Valerius, who was elderly and afflicted with a stammer that made it difficult for him to preach. By long tradition Valerius assigned the public preaching of the diocese to Vincent, who became the recognized voice of the Spanish church in his bishop's place. When Diocletian's edict of 303 reached the western provinces, the prefect of Hispania, Dacian, summoned the Christian leadership to Valencia. Valerius was sent into exile on account of his age; Vincent, the deacon, was singled out for prosecution.

Circumstances of Death

Dacian subjected Vincent to an escalating sequence of tortures over several days — the rack, hooks, an iron grate over fire — recorded in detail in the Peristephanon hymn of Prudentius, written within a century. Vincent, by every account ancient and medieval, answered each round of torture with a steady refusal and an apparent indifference to pain that his torturers experienced as a personal affront. Dacian, frustrated, ordered him cast into a dungeon strewn with broken pottery to lie in the dark on the shards. Vincent was found the next morning at peace among the broken pots, bathed in light. He was dragged out to be tortured again and died from the cumulative wounds on January 22, 304.

Legacy

Vincent's grave at Valencia became a major pilgrimage site by the late fourth century; Augustine preached at least four sermons on his feast, and the cathedral chapter at Valencia preserved Vincent's reputed arm-bone as a relic for centuries. He is the patron saint of Lisbon, where his relics were translated in the twelfth century after the Reconquest, and the patron of vintners across the Mediterranean by accident of medieval iconography (his deacon's role and the proximity of his feast to pruning season). Prudentius's hymn on him — Hymn V of the Peristephanon — was the model the Latin church used to teach how a deacon should die.