Prosper of Tarragona

Saint Prosper was archbishop of Tarragona from 711 to 713 or 718, and died at Camogli, in the Lombard kingdom. He is venerated as a local saint in the Catholic Church, at Camogli (2 September) and at Tarragona (18 May). Our sources show no Orthodox canonization or commemoration.

Flight from Tarragona

No news of his family and his early years has been preserved. It is believed that in 711 he received the archiepiscopal see of Tarragona, in which he was preceded by Vera, whose last mention is from 691. Soon after Prosper became archbishop, the Arab invasion of the Iberian Peninsula took place. In 711 the army of the Umayyad caliphate, under Tariq ibn Ziyad, defeated at Guadalete the army of King Roderic, and in a few years the Moors took most of the Visigothic kingdom. Many Spanish cities were plundered, among them Tarragona, destroyed by the Arabs in 713 or 718.

Church tradition says that, before the Moors took Tarragona, Archbishop Prosper fled from the city with several priests (Justin, Procopius, Pantaleon, Martial and George). They took with them the most precious relics of the archdiocese, among them those of Fructuosus and his companions. They found refuge in the Italian peninsula: setting out by ship from Tarragona, they came first to Cagliari, in Sardinia, then to Pisa, then landed on the Ligurian coast. Here, on the hill of Capodimonte, near Camogli, the archbishop founded a monastery dedicated to Saint Fructuosus. Beloved of the Italians for his piety already in life, Prosper died in the monastery he had founded. The date of his death is not certain. Some hagiographic sources put it in 713 or 718, but they are probably wrong, because these years are rather those of his flight from Tarragona. By order of the Lombard king Liutprand, his body was buried in a church at Reggio, and in 997 it was moved to a monastery on the edge of the city.

Veneration

Prosper is the last archbishop of Tarragona before the conquest of Spain by the Moors. Despite attempts in the tenth century to renew the see, the archdiocese was restored only at the end of the eleventh century, after the city was reconquered by Christians. In the Middle Ages no veneration of him as a saint is mentioned. But in 1854 Pope Pius IX declared him a saint and fixed his commemoration at Camogli on 2 September. The entry went into the Roman Martyrology, but put his years at the turn of the fourth and fifth centuries, probably from a mixing of two legends from Camogli: one about the real archbishop of the 710s, the other about a legendary bishop of the same name, who fled Spain from the oppression of the Vandals and died on 24 November 409. In the latest editions of the Roman Martyrology Prosper of Tarragona no longer appears. Today he is venerated as a local saint both at Camogli and at Tarragona, where the commemoration of 18 May was set by the bull of Pope John XXIII. In iconography, Saint Prosper is shown with the archiepiscopal crozier in his right hand and a ship in his left. The relics of the saints brought by the Spanish refugees to Italy are kept in the cathedral of Verona, where there is also a service book, the Codex of Verona, made in Spain about 700 and brought by Archbishop Prosper.