The Holy Corporals of Daroca

A corporal is the square of white linen spread on the altar at Mass. The bread and the chalice rest on it. After the consecration it holds the Body of Christ, and that is how it got its name. Daroca's relic is a cloth of this kind, marked by what tradition says were six consecrated Hosts. The Spanish word corporales is plural, and people speak of "the Corporals".

Everything that follows in this section is according to tradition. The sources differ in places, and this page says where.

In the 1230s King James I of Aragon was conquering the Muslim kingdom of Valencia. The city of Valencia fell to him in 1238. The countryside to the south remained in dispute, with castles held on both sides. Soldiers from the Aragonese towns of Daroca, Teruel and Calatayud served in this war. The tradition names their leader as Berenguer de Entenza (Berenguer d'Entença in Catalan).

Their target was a castle near Llutxent, in the Vall d'Albaida, south of Valencia. The sources spell its name Chío, Chiva or Xiu, which are forms of one name. The camp was on a height called the Puig del Còdol, facing the castle.

This was a war between two peoples who had lived side by side for centuries. The Muslims of Valencia were defending their homes. The old accounts tell the story from one side only, and they call the other side "the Moors". This page keeps to what the story says about the Eucharist.

The priest was a chaplain from Daroca. Most accounts call him Mateo Martínez. One Catalan reference says only "the rector of Sant Cristòfol of Daroca", and gives no name.

Before the battle he offered Mass in the field, and he consecrated six Hosts for six captains. The accounts name them as Jiménez Pérez, Fernando Sánchez, Pedro, Raimundo, Guillermo and Simón Carroz. The list comes in several later retellings, and the spellings vary.

From here the versions divide. In the better known one, a sudden attack broke up the camp just after the consecration. The priest stopped the Mass, wrapped the six Hosts in the corporal, and hid them under a stone. The Christians drove off the attack. The captains then asked for Communion in thanksgiving. The priest went back to the hiding place and found the six Hosts soaked in blood and stuck to the cloth.

In a second version, known from the document called the Letter of Chiva, the troops were threatened by a great army and there was no time for all the soldiers to confess. Berenguer ordered a Mass for the six captains alone. As the priest laid the six Hosts on the corporal, blood came from them, and he had not yet given Communion.

Both versions go on the same way. The captains took the sign as God's favour. The priest raised the stained cloth on a lance or a frame, like a banner, and the army went into battle behind it. The castle was taken.

Then came a quarrel. Daroca, Teruel and Calatayud each wanted the relic. Lots were drawn, and the story says Daroca won three times. Some suspected a trick, and two commanders refused to accept the result.

So they agreed on a test. The cloth was placed in a casket on the back of a mule, one taken from the Muslims and said never to have known Christian country. It would walk where it pleased, and where it stopped, the relic would stay.

According to the tradition the mule set out on 24 February 1239, with priests carrying candles and soldiers walking behind. It went north by way of the plain of Valencia without entering the city, then by Segorbe, Jérica and Teruel, and did not stop at any of them. It walked for about twelve days and, the accounts say, about two hundred miles. On 7 March it reached Daroca and fell dead at the hospital of San Marcos, near the lower gate. One 2026 report gives eleven days, and the sources differ on the exact spot.

Later retellings add angels singing on the road, healings and conversions. Even devotional writers on this miracle say plainly that there is no record of these things and that they are local stories.

The oldest narrative named in the sources checked here is the Letter of Chiva (Carta de Chiva). It is a parchment with notaries' seals, dated 1340 and kept at the church in Daroca. The people of Daroca asked the authorities of Chiva to write down what they knew. They answered with the story as it was known to them, from witnesses worthy of faith, "asin Xristianos como moros", both Christians and Moors, as one article quotes it.

So the first narrative we can point to comes about a hundred years after 1239. It was written at the request of the town that held the relic. A long oral memory is quite possible. But it is not an eyewitness record, and it should not be spoken of as one.

A little earlier, in 1335, a hermitage in memory of the event was built near Llutxent. It later became the Dominican convent of Corpus Christi. Together, these two facts show the story alive in both places by the 1330s and 1340s.

One devotional article says that the blood on the corporal has been analysed and found to be human, and that nothing is known of its blood type. It names no laboratory, no date and no publication. No such report is known to us. So this claim should not be relied on, and no one should call it proof. Faith in the Eucharist does not depend on it.

Many readers will be uneasy at the thought of the Host in a cloth carried as a banner into a battle. They are right to think about it. This is how men of the thirteenth century told their story. The Eucharist is the sacrament of Christ's self-giving and of peace. Nothing in the Church's faith asks anyone to read this tradition as God's approval of a war, or as a judgment on the Muslim people of Valencia. What the Church today honours at Daroca is the Body and Blood of the Lord, and the long devotion of a town.

Corpus Christi is the great feast of Daroca. The relic's arrival on 7 March also remains a local day. Documents from the early fifteenth century describe costumes for figures of Our Lady, God and the angels, payment for minstrels, and an order that houses be hung with cloth. The centre of it has not changed since at least 1414: the Corporals go out in procession from Santa María to the edge of town, so that many people can see them.

Daroca keeps the feast on the Thursday, the traditional day, though many dioceses have moved it to Sunday. Early in the morning people lay carpets of flowers at the Puerta del Perdón and along the streets. After a sung Mass, at which children of the town make their First Communion, a priest walks under a canopy with the monstrance. Petals fall from the windows. At a platform called the Torreta, near the walls, the celebrant shows the cloth to the four quarters of the sky. Representatives from Llutxent and from Carboneras de Guadazaón take part. The cloths then remain exposed in the church for some days. The feast has been listed as of tourist interest in Aragon since 2006.

The Chapel of the Corporals occupies what was the head of the old Romanesque church. It was built in the fifteenth century, and is one of the few works in Spain in the Burgundian Gothic style. A set of carved stone altarpieces tells the story of the miracle: the battle, the priest and the cloth, the mule, the arrival. Part of the scenes were lost in a later alteration. The work has been attributed to Juan de la Huerta, a sculptor from Daroca trained in France, and to Pere Johan.

The great piece of Daroca is the reliquary monstrance by Pere Moragues, a silversmith of Barcelona who worked at Zaragoza. It is about a metre high, in gilded silver with translucent enamel, and is built like a small altarpiece on two levels. Above is the Crucifixion. Below are the Virgin and Child, with the king and queen kneeling as donors. At the back is a little cupboard with a gold box for the Corporals. The final payment was ordered on 21 February 1386, for 8,910 sous. The king's debts delayed things, and the goldsmith's widow Caterina threatened to sell the work until a royal letter of 1388 promised payment. The doors and evangelists were added in the late fifteenth century, and the sunburst for the Blessed Sacrament in the eighteenth. Some scholars think King John I and Queen Yolande really paid for it.

The Colegial Museum opened on 29 March 1939, for the seventh centenary of the arrival. It reopened in a new form on 11 October 2003. It holds the casket of James I, the Moragues monstrance, the painted lid of the chest said to have carried the cloths, the banner of James I and vestments embroidered with the miracle, along with works of Bartolomé Bermejo.

The second relic, the Santa Hijuela, is a small round cloth that covers the paten. It is kept at Carboneras de Guadazaón in the province of Cuenca, in its own chapel.

At Llutxent the memory lives on in the convent and in the local festivals of Moors and Christians. A play on the miracle was written by Tomàs Torres in 1787 and printed in 1876. The fame of the relic reached Spanish speech: writers of 1541 and 1596 record people swearing by "the corporals of Daroca". The town's coat of arms carries them too.