When Francisco Solano died at the Franciscan convent in Lima, flocks of birds surrounded his body. Music filled the halls of the cloister. Solano’s most distinguished hagiographer, the Peruvian Creole Diego de Cordova Salinas, concluded in 1643 that Solano, who had converted Indians in Paraguay with his violin, was a walking tree of paradise, on which birds perched to sing. Solano was music.

Pouring over hundreds of notarised witness accounts, Cordova Salinas reconstructed the peregrinating life of Solano, from his birthplace in 1549 in Montilla (Andalusia) to this deathbed in 1610 in Lima. Solano was a new Francis and Lima a new Assisi.

Cordoba described in detail Solano’s many miracles, from curing the ulcerous wounds of children and lepers in Andalusia with his tongue to his mastery over animals in the New World. Solano’s control over crabs had saved the lives of both slaves and masters.

The manner of Solano’s arrival in Peru was miraculous. He made the passage in 1589 on a ship with a cargo of slaves coming from Cartagena via Panama. Shipwrecked off the coast of the Colombian island of Gorgona, to the south of Buenaventura, the crew and the Spaniards on board scrambled onto the beach, but Solano stayed behind with the slaves. By dint of his preternatural control of the waters, Francisco held the broken hull from sinking for three whole days, until the slaves were finally rescued by the survivors. When a passing ship finally picked them up from the island three months later, Solano had fed the survivors with hundreds of willing crabs, who daily crawled into his cowl.

Upon arrival in the Viceroyalty of Peru, Solano was sent to the Andean village of Tucumán in what is today Argentina, where his miraculous deeds continued. Birds would follow him. A bull that had killed two Indians in the bullring before breaking loose encountered Solano at the town plaza and became his pet.

Solano devoted much of his time in Tucumán singing to the natives of nearby Paraguay. By infused knowledge, he immediately learned many indigenous languages and preached to the natives in their tongues. The day an army of 6,000 Indians surrounded Tucumán, he pacified a bull; the Indians put down their arms and surrendered to the power of Christ. Solano returned from Tucumán and Paraguay to Lima, walking with cilices on his body and nails on his soles. He headed north to Trujillo in Peru to tend the emerging communities of slaves and Indians who laboured in the sugar mills of the Pacific coast. Circa 1600 he accurately predicted the devastating earthquake that was to wipe out the city of Trujillo in 1619.

But it was in the Nineveh that was Lima where he performed most of his salvific work. Solano was a preacher who did not just pacify birds, bulls, African slaves and Paraguayan Indians. He also had the ability to terrify Spanish, Portuguese and Creole townsmen or vecinos. Solano was the Savonarola of Lima. He would walk for days on the streets of the city, denouncing the rising phenomenon of concubinage. His campaigns netted the church dozens of converted, terrified mixed-race couples living in sin, who now willingly took their sacramental vows of holy matrimony. In his decade of walking about Lima he became known as a prophet, a patriarch, a virgin and a martyr. He would levitate while in trance. He would cure fatally wounded birds and dying children.

When he died, his musky, flowery-scented, uncorrupted body was buried under the altar of the Franciscan church, which within a week became a shrine. When Cordova Salinas described the shrine as one of the jewels of the new Assisi that was Lima, he gave an account of what appears to have been the greatest sacred curing spot and apothecary of South America. The shrine was crowded with discarded crutches and bandages and replicas of copper heads, legs and arms. It was a holy sanctuary of healing for the peregrinating ill. They came from as far away as Trujillo, Tucumán, Paraguay, Santiago de Chile, Málaga and Córdoba. There were crowds in the shrine, fighting over samples of the ground of his burial and the oil of the seven lamps that burnt perpetually in his tomb.

Peruvian Franciscans mounted a campaign to canonise Solano in Rome as a new American St Francis Assisi. They succeeded. In 1675, he was beatified. In 1726 he was canonised, along with the first Tridentine bishop of Peru, Toribio de Mogrovejo, and the Flemish Franciscan Jacob of March (the two young Jesuits Gonzaga and Kostka were also canonised at this time).

In 1728, the Franciscans of Flanders had an altar built for March and Solano (Figure 6). The Franciscans also procured a supply of Solano’s relics, used to cure the peregrinating ill.

In 1728, the Franciscans of Cologne had a treatise written on the lives of March and Solano as the fulfilment of the Old Testament’s Joshua and Caleb.¹ Joshua and Caleb were the only two of the 12 Israelite spies who did not flinch when it came to invading Canaan, the only two who would survive Exodus to see the Promised Land.²

If St Francis was as a second Christ in medieval Christendom, Solano became a second St Francis in early modern Peru. Solano’s ability to sing to birds transformed him into a musical symbol of conversion through sweet persuasion. If Solano was capable of attracting and taming birds and bulls, he was equally capable of converting Indians and African slaves. Upon his death, this walking Peruvian violin became a sacred apothecary. The curative power of his relics attracted to his chapel-pharmacy in Lima hundreds of limping ill who consumed his body and its aura as sacred materia medica. The fame of the curative power of his bones spread across the ocean. Solano’s fame was Lima’s fortune. If Francisco Solano was a new St Francis, then Lima, the city of the kings of Peru, was a new Rome. Francisco’s Peruvian fame earned him beatification first and then canonisation in Rome. Holy relics of the singing violin of Peru who attracted birds, Indians and slaves moved to altars in Flanders and Cologne, where they can still be found today.

FURTHER READING

Gálvez Peña, C.M. (2008) ‘El carro de Ezequiel: la monarquía hispana de fray Buenaventura de Salinas y Córdova’, Histórica, 32 (1): 39–75.

Gálvez Peña, C.M. (2011) ‘Sueños, profecías, visiones y política en las crónicas limeñas del siglo XVII’, in Los sueños en la cultura iberoamericana, siglos XVI–XVIII, edited by S.V. Rose, P. Schmidt, and G. Weber (Seville: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas).

Jouve-Martín, J.R. (2004) ‘En olor de santidad: hagiografía, cultos locales y escritura religiosa en Lima, siglo XVII’, Colonial Latin American Review, 13 (2): 181–98.

Rubial, A. (2006) Profetisas y solitarios: espacios y mensajes de una religión dirigida por ermitaños y beatas laicos en las ciudades de Nueva España (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica).

¹ Zwey Neu-Testamentische Josue und Caleb: d.i. Lobrede von Jacob de Marchia u. Franciscus Solanus (Cologne, 1728).

² Num. 13.