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The cult of Saint Torquatus has strong roots in the city of Guimarães, in the north of Portugal, where, tradition narrates his incorrupt body was found. The devotion to this martyr saint goes back to the eighth century, a time when Vita Torquati was written, based on the expansion and development of Christian resistance and thus grounded in the mythical times of the founders of Iberian kingdoms. The devotion to Saint Torquatus underwent, however, a new surge at the end of the Middle Ages, with reports of the apparition, in duplicate, of his incorrupt body. The description of the prodigious miracle and the translation of his holy body are repeated and amplified in literature of a memorialist nature in the Modern Era. Understood by some as one of the Apostolic Fathers who were direct disciples of São Tiago (Saint James), the evangeliser of Hispania and by others as Torcato Felix, former archbishop of Braga of the eighth century, his iconography follows the traditions of a bishop. This paper intends to demonstrate how the devotion to Saint Torquatus was constructed, strengthened and spread throughout the medieval and early modern periods and how it was subjected to cultural, religious and political issues in the peninsular territory, in the first phase and specific locations in the second phase. It will equally give a definition of its iconography, bearing in mind the saint’s identity and chronological duplicity, as well as the complexity of legends developed, enforced and spread in memorialist literature of the Early Modern age.
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