Wise man, patron of the arts, expert in Canon Law, diplomat and, above all, leader of a Church that ended up turning its back on him and declaring him a heretic. In life, Papa Luna’s head turned many times. With death he found no rest either, being the object of ridicule, robbery and, now, the epicenter of a judicial conflict between two neighboring Aragonese towns. A litigation of uncertain outcome that tarnishes the acts of the 600th anniversary of the death of Antipope Benedict XIII, whose memory the Aragonese authorities are fighting to rehabilitate.
“Papa Luna is the noblest son this town has ever had, and we are going to fight to recover his skull.” The person who speaks in this way is the new mayor of Illueca (Zaragoza province), José Javier Vicente, newly inaugurated in office after the May 28 elections. This follows in the wake of his predecessor, who appealed to the courts against the decision of the Government of Aragon to deliver in 2021 the relic they had in deposit to the neighboring municipality of Sabiñán, less than 20 kilometers away. “We hope the courts will let his head rest here, which is where he always wanted to be,” he adds.
Pedro Martínez de Luna y Pérez de Gotor was born in this town on November 25, 1328. He was the second son of the Luna family, one of the main Aragonese lineages, related to archbishops and kings. With a military background, he laid down his arms to enter the Church, of which he was pontiff between 1394 and 1398, until he was deposed after a turbulent conclave. He died in 1423 at the age of 95 in Peñíscola, where he had locked himself in after losing support to maintain his pontificate and being declared a heretic. “He was a key figure at a crucial moment like the Great Western Schism, when what happened in the Church had a direct influence on the daily life of the people,” says Marisancho Menjón, general director of Heritage in Aragon in the last legislature.
In 1430, with the permission of the King of Aragon, his nephew Juan de Luna deposited his embalmed body in his hometown. He was there until, between 1701 and 1707, his corpse was desecrated by the French troops that participated in the War of Succession. The skull, the only remains that was saved, was then transferred to the palace of the Counts of Argillo, owned by the Olazábal family, in the neighboring municipality of Sabiñán. But his odyssey did not end there. In the year 2000, two young people from the town stole the skull to ask for a ransom of one million pesetas, an episode that resulted in their subsequent arrest and conviction. For its part, the head ended up deposited in the warehouse of the Provincial Museum of Zaragoza, where numerous studies were carried out.
During this time, representatives of Illueca met with Menjón to ask her to return her to her native municipality, a decision that she assures did not depend on her discretion. “The terms of the judicial deposit established that it had to be returned to the legitimate owners of it,” she says. Those owners were the Olazábal family, who a few years ago donated the property of the palace and its belongings –skull included– to the Sabiñán City Council. “We have all the pertinent documentation on the transfer in order,” underlines the mayor of the town, Ignacio Marcuello.
While the palace is gradually being rehabilitated, he says that his town hall enabled a chapel in the church of San Pedro Apóstol to be able to house this Asset of Cultural Interest, as cataloged by the Aragon General Council in 2007. “There are security cameras and systems to control temperature and humidity that guarantee its conservation in perfect conditions”, confirms Menjón. Thus, the Aragonese Government finally resolved to deliver the relic to Sabiñán in 2021 to the delight of its neighbors, a decision that in March of this year was endorsed by the Supreme Court of Justice of Aragon (TSJA).
However, from neighboring Illueca they do not give up. One of his lawyers, Jorge Español (who also took part in the Aragon-Catalonia dispute over the assets of the Sijena monastery), confirms that they have filed an appeal before the TSJA and that they hope it will be resolved soon in their favor. . “If not, we do not rule out resorting to the European Court of Human Rights,” he asserts.
From the neighboring town, its mayor criticizes that such an important figure has been dragged into a discussion between neighbors. “All the effort that Illueca makes to claim it and us to defend ourselves would have to combine to get his excommunication revoked and take advantage of his cultural and tourist pull,” argues Marcuello. Even so, he acknowledges that the scope of the conflict makes future understanding difficult for possible collaborations, and he does not renounce demanding “damages.”
The process opened between the two blurs the commemoration of the 600th anniversary of the death of Benedict XIII, who defended Orthodoxy and his legitimacy as pontiff until the end of his life (from his stubbornness comes the phrase “holding his ground”). To commemorate it, numerous talks, guided tours, book presentations and a complete exhibition at the Alma Mater Museum in Zaragoza entitled El Papa Luna have been organized. Knowledge, diplomacy and power in medieval Europe, in which his skull was one of the main attractions.
In parallel, the community authorities continue to fight to rehabilitate his memory. At the end of 2022, the Aragonese president himself, the socialist Javier Lambán, traveled to Rome accompanied by the Archbishop of Zaragoza, Carlos Escribano, to ask Pope Francis for help in this undertaking. “As a good Aragonese, he was a stubborn Pope, but also one of the wisest and most cultured types of his time,” the president said at the time. Likewise, he regretted that the image of the countryman of him as a heretic “does not obey the reality” of going against the Church and stressed that he was “the architect of the Caspe Compromise, embryo of the future union of Spain between Isabel and Fernando ”.
