Garcia Martins

Frei Dom Garcia Martins, also García Martínez , was a medieval Portuguese Knight of the Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem, and an important administrator of the Order in Portugal and the Iberian Peninsula.

He is venerated as a Blessed in the Roman Catholic Church; excluding Saint Nuno of Saint Mary, he is the only Portuguese in the sanctorale of the Order of Malta.

Life

Surprisingly little is known about the life of Garcia Martins. One of his biographers tentatively gives his place of origin as São Martinho de Mouros, in Resende.

From available records, it is known that he was the commander of Faia (probably Faia, Cabeceiras de Basto ) in 1277. In 1289, as the lieutenant of the Prior, he was charged with receiving goods donated by the bastard daughter of King Afonso III and widow of the powerful , Leonor Afonso. In 1302, he was Prior as well as commander of Santarém. It is currently located on the church's aisle on the Gospel side of the nave; writing in 1852, António do Carmo Velho de Barbosa (1789–1854) says it had been moved to that location "some forty years ago, more or less". When the tomb was opened then, all there was to be seen was bones and a great deal of rosary beads that had fallen inside the tomb presumably when pilgrims attempted to pass them through the opening on the lid to make them contact relics. By the 1850s, Velho de Barbosa describes the monument as having been nested in "a kind of painted wooden cabinet" that concealed its base and the stone lions.

There are two miracles associated with Blessed Garcia Martins that are particularly remembered because of their spectacularity. When, in the summer of 1490, Philippa of Coimbra, daughter of Infante Peter, Duke of Coimbra and granddaughter of King John I of Portugal, went on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, she stopped with all her entourage in Monastery of Moreira to venerate the True Cross, and in Leça do Balio to venerate the relics of Blessed Garcia Martins; as soon as she left the city, a cripple followed her example and dragged himself to the tomb of Blessed Garcia Martins to pray and was healed. He ran to meet the entourage to everyone's amazement, and Philippa returned to the monastery and remained in prayer there for nine days. Another miracle concerned a blacksmith from Leça who, having put stock in gossip, began to suspect that his wife had failed her wedding vows. The desperate wife invoked the Blessed Garcia Martins and, as proof of her innocence, she offered to take in her hand a red-hot ploughshare from the flames of the forge, and she went quietly to place it beside the tomb of the Blessed; after seeing his wife's fingers miraculously intact, the husband had to acknowledge his mistake. 17th-century accounts still describe the ploughshare as laying by the tomb of Blessed Garcia Martins.

Both the cited Velho de Barbosa in 1854 and José Anastácio de Figueiredo (1766–1805) in 1800 (in his Nova História da Militar Ordem de Malta) attest to the popular persistence of the cultus of Blessed Garcia Martins well into the 19th century: they describe the votive offerings and wax ex-votos the faithful left beside his tomb.