I believe the fascination surrounding the Grail stems from a circumstance that is, at its core, exceptional: few objects have managed, over the centuries, to bring together historical, religious, literary, and even symbolic dimensions of such enormous significance. It belongs simultaneously to the history of Christianity, as the chalice of Christ—the distant basis for this legend—and to the construction of a European medieval imagination, embodied in the entire legend of this object, with its special qualities that gave rise to a body of Arthurian literature. It also speaks to the deeply human need to find material evidence that allows us to establish a tangible link with major events of the past.
From a Christian perspective, the chalice of the Last Supper is extraordinarily important, because we would not be dealing with just any relic, but with the vessel used by Jesus Christ at the Last Supper, which gave rise to the Eucharist. If we accept this identification—which is the basis of the literary creation, and it is very important to stress this, of what would later become the Grail myth—we would be looking at one of the essential elements for understanding even chivalric literature. It is also worth remembering that, in the medieval mindset, relics were not merely pious mementos, but material testimonies to the sacred. They were also instruments of political legitimacy.
A historian has a method and must therefore approach it in the same way as any other historical question: through a critical analysis of the sources, by placing the testimonies in context, by studying, in this case, the material object, and above all by distinguishing between what we can prove, what we consider probable, and those other elements born of tradition—an oral tradition not based on documents or other forms of testimony, but preserved as a pious legend. Naturally, we must also distinguish what is a literary creation. I believe this distinction is essential, because history is not about confirming our beliefs or destroying traditions, but about establishing what really happened in the past, using every tool available to historians in scholarly research.
It was another piece kept there—a nickel-plated silver box—that caught our attention, along with other objects. The question was why those objects were there and, especially, why that casket was there, given that it was a diplomatic gift of the highest order. We followed the sources, tracing Christian and Muslim sources, chronicles, and Christian documentation, but found nothing. That led us to think that perhaps the answers lay in Egypt. News emerged that the chalice of Christ, venerated by Christian communities since the construction of the Holy Sepulchre in the time of the Roman Emperor Constantine, had its own chapel within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. We know that these objects reached not only Dénia, but also León.
When you are educated to understand the past and taught to love it from the outset, you realize that all the testimonies and sources together create a reality that cannot be interpreted in isolation.
To a large extent, that influence came from my family. My mother, who was an extraordinary woman, taught me to love history. I did not grow up with Little Red Riding Hood or other children’s stories; I grew up with accounts of great deeds, stories, and biographies of our great heroes. I grew up loving history. I must confess that I am equally passionate about the Roman era. Everything represented by the Roman Empire greatly appeals to me, perhaps because, as a woman from León, I am to a large extent the daughter of the two legions that controlled Hispania after Octavian Augustus conquered the last unconquered territory of the Iberian Peninsula: the lands of my ancestors, the Cantabrians and Asturians.
Historical research involves far more excitement than people generally imagine, because there is a widespread image of the historian as someone who spends a lifetime surrounded by old documents, examining parchments with magnifying glasses and trying to decipher scripts that ceased to be used centuries ago. Part of our work involves that, but behind it lies an extraordinary intellectual adventure of far greater scope. Sometimes you have to travel to the places themselves to understand where the sun rises and where it sets, and thus understand how a battle unfolded. And you must do so with the utmost humility, because that is one of the great lessons I have learned.
I must confess that the response was far greater than José Miguel Ortega del Río and I could have imagined when we published our study. We thought that, initially, the debate would remain within academic circles and that other historians would examine the same sources, discuss them, and contribute evidence. One thing that unpleasantly surprised me was seeing that, before the book had even gone on sale, a Spanish professor was already criticizing what it contained, even though it was impossible for him to have read it because it was not yet on the market.
Monasteries played an essential role in the creation, preservation, and transmission of memory throughout the Middle Ages. To understand this, one must abandon the image of the monastery as a place devoted solely to prayer or spiritual isolation. Although they were major religious centers, and that is undeniable, they were also leading cultural, economic, and political institutions. They were true archives of the collective memory of medieval kingdoms and, in fact, thanks to their documents, cartularies, and so forth, we can now reconstruct much of our country’s medieval history.
Relics played a central role in this entire process because, in the medieval Christian mindset, a relic was neither an object nor a keepsake: it was a material link to the sacred.
