Vincent was a deacon, not a general or a king. Around the year 304, under the Roman governor Dacian at Valencia, he was tortured and died. Most of what is told about the manner of it comes from texts written long afterwards, so this account separates what the sources can carry from the legend.
The Horror
Vincent was born at Osca, now Huesca, and became deacon to Bishop Valerius of Saragossa. Valerius had a speech impediment, so Vincent spoke for him. During the persecution under Diocletian, both men were brought before the governor Dacian at Valencia. Valerius was sent into exile. Vincent was kept and, according to the tradition, put to death around 304.
The earliest account is a poem by Prudentius, the Peristephanon. Later hagiographies, themselves based on a lost fifth-century Passion, add detail. Scholars regard the later Acts as freely coloured by their compilers’ imagination. The sources describe Vincent stretched on the rack, torn with iron hooks, rubbed with salt and burned on a gridiron. The gridiron may have been borrowed from the martyrdom of Lawrence, another saint from Huesca. In the traditional account he died in prison, and his jailer was converted. The specific details of the torture should be treated as hagiography, not as documented fact.
The Legend
The best-known part of the story is what followed. Dacian is said to have had the body thrown into the sea in a sack so that Christians could not honour it. It was recovered, and ravens are said to have kept vultures and wild animals away from it. Modern accounts present the ravens, the gridiron and the sea burial as legendary or hagiographic elements. The poem and the lost Passion are the earliest textual basis, and the detail of the birds is not in them as far as the sources show.
The Modern Relic
A shrine is said to have been built at Cape St Vincent, the south-western tip of Portugal, where the body was taken. The Arab geographer al-Idrisi called the place the “Church of the Raven”. In 1173 King Afonso I of Portugal had the relics exhumed and shipped to Lisbon. Tradition says ravens accompanied the ship, and the transfer is shown on the city’s coat of arms.
At Cape St Vincent today, a 24-metre lighthouse, built in 1846 over the ruins of a 16th-century Franciscan convent, marks the headland. Valencia Cathedral displays Vincent’s left arm. His feast day is 22 January.
