The Mozarabic Madrid of the 11th century He had a young wellman, diviner, farmer, son of Pedro and Inés, who lived in the San Andrés area, what is today the La Latina neighborhood. Castizo from the cradle.
The young Isidro traveled to Torrelaguna where he met his wife, María Toribia, who would also be a saint and known as María de la Cabeza. And it is in old age when the Isidro who found water where no one else did, became something more for everyone. In it Codex of San Isidro only five of its details are detailed miraclesalthough other books speak of more than 400. San Isidro was not beatified until the 17th century, and what has come down to us is a mixture of legend and history.
Isidro was born around the year 1082, shortly before Madrid passed into Christian hands, and he did so in the Muslim Mayrit. A farmer, like everyone else, he made a living as best he could. His knowledge of the land, the way to find water, even other “miracles” related to families, gave him all his fame.
Why is San Isidro so important?
For his miracles related to water in a time when the land, even more so than now, was key to survival. At the time, the Muslims settled in the center of the plateau because of its abundance; The Visigoths already documented the enormous aquifer that runs through the Madrid subsoil.
The oldest document and almost the only one where we can know the life of San Isidro is the one called “Codex of Juan Deacon”, an anonymous text of 25 sheets of parchment grouped in three notebooks written in medieval Latin that narrate a list of miracles. Dated in 1275, it is a document with oral accounts from witnesses contemporary to the chronicler and, therefore, it recounts the events with little precision.
But, according to these testimonies, the most abundant type of miracle among the 400 attributed to him is find water even in the most difficult areas. As proof of this, he made a spring gush out of a dry field on one occasion with just a blow of his staff, just in a year when Madrid experienced an intense drought.
Why 15-M
On May 15 It is the date on which the body of San Isidro was transferred to the Church of San Andrés, where he ended up resting on the main altar of the Collegiate Church of San Isidro. She also has a silver urn where her remains rest, since she posthumously “helped” Queen Doña Mariana of Neoburgo in 1691 to survive an illness caused by her doctors while they were trying for her to stay. pregnant.
The date also coincides with the review that Pope Paul V made of the customs of the Church after the Trento council, when he decided to beatify San Isidro in 1619 and decreed that the date of his festival would be May 15.
