Saint George and the Dragon

In the legend as the Golden Legend tells it, a city in Libya has a lake beside it in which a dragon lives, poisoning the air with its breath. The people appease it first with two sheep a day, then, when the sheep run out, with one sheep and one child chosen by lot, and no household is exempt. The lot falls at length on the king's daughter. He offers his gold and half his kingdom for her, and the citizens, who have buried their own children under the same rule, refuse. She is dressed as a bride and sent out to the lake, and George, a soldier riding past, finds her there and will not leave. When the dragon rises he makes the sign of the cross, wounds it with his lance and brings it to the ground, then tells the girl to put her girdle around its neck; it follows her back into the city like a tame animal on a lead.

The people run, and George calls them back with the offer that gives the story its point: he will kill the dragon if they will believe and be baptised. They agree, the head is struck off and carried out of the city on ox carts, and the king builds a church on the site, from whose altar a spring runs that heals the sick. George refuses the reward, tells the king to care for the churches and the poor, and rides on.

The dragon is a late arrival. The earliest material about George, in Greek and Latin and in Syriac, Coptic and Ethiopic versions, is martyrdom literature: a soldier who refuses to sacrifice and is tortured through an escalating and frankly extravagant sequence, killed and revived more than once, before finally being beheaded. That material was already circulating widely by the fifth century, and George was venerated across the Christian East long before anyone attached a reptile to him. A decree associated with the late fifth century listed his acts among writings to be read with caution precisely because of their extravagance, which is evidence of how popular they had become.

The dragon episode appears in the Latin West only in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, in the period of the crusades, and its wide circulation is owed above all to the Golden Legend, the compilation of saints' lives made by the Dominican Jacobus de Voragine in the thirteenth century, which was among the most copied books of the later Middle Ages. From there the scene passed into altarpieces, civic pageantry, guild processions and heraldry, and George was adopted as patron by soldiers, by military orders and eventually by whole countries, including England, Georgia, Ethiopia and Catalonia, and by cities from Moscow to Genoa. The rescue of the princess, which occupies a few lines in the legend and is not its stated point, became in art the whole of the story.