Lambert of Zaragoza

Lambert of Zaragoza was a martyr beheaded for his Christian faith, honoured as a saint in the Catholic Church. It has usually been thought that he died in the persecutions of Diocletian at the start of the fourth century. But his name, of Germanic origin, and the fact that he is not mentioned by Prudentius, by Eugenius of Toledo or in the Acts of the martyrs of Zaragoza, suggest that his martyrdom was later, probably during Muslim rule (eighth to eleventh centuries).

From the fifteenth century the Zaragoza breviary preserves the details of the traditional legend. According to it, Lambert was a peasant and servant of an unbelieving master, who forced him to renounce Christianity. When he refused, he was beheaded by his master; then the prodigy took place that the saint took his severed head in his hands and walked following his oxen, until he came to the place where the bodies of the Martyrs of Zaragoza were buried, where he let himself fall and was buried.

The fact that he was buried with the fourth-⁠century martyrs eventually led his life and martyrdom to be assimilated to the same time. The passage of the pope-⁠elect Adrian VI through Zaragoza in 1522 revived the veneration of Lambert. Adrian was from Utrecht, a city whose patron is Saint Lambert of Liège, a martyr of the seventh century, so he visited the crypt and tomb of Lambert of Zaragoza, said Mass there and took some relics to Rome. Since he was a peasant, the farmers of Zaragoza venerated him as patron, forming a confraternity dedicated to the saint and holding processions on his feast day, in the month of June.