History
The Catholic History of Madrid
Madrid is a court city that had no bishop for three centuries after it became the capital. Its saints are a farmer, Isidore, and cloistered women, and the royal convents of the Habsburgs and the popular devotions to the Almudena, Medinaceli and the Paloma carry its faith more than any one church. The 19th and 20th centuries destroyed and rebuilt much of it, and from the same city came Opus Dei in 1928 and the Neocatechumenal Way in 1964.
Before 1085
Complutum, the Mozarabs and the Muslim Fortress
No Roman town stood where central Madrid is now. The first see in the region was Complutum, today Alcalá de Henares, and its boy martyrs Justus and Pastor, killed in the persecution of Diocletian, are the oldest Christian names of the area. When the diocese of Madrid was founded in 1885 it was named Madrid-Alcalá to claim that inheritance, and Alcalá, a commuter-train ride from Madrid, is still the natural day trip for anyone following those martyrs.
In the 800s the emir Muhammad I of Córdoba built a fortress on the ridge where the cathedral and the Royal Palace now stand, and the settlement was called Mayrit. Scholars now derive the name Almudena from the Arabic al-mudayna, meaning the citadel. Christians lived under Muslim rule as Mozarabs, meaning Christians keeping their faith in an Arab-ruled land. A stretch of the Arab wall survives on the Cuesta de la Vega, below the entrance of the cathedral crypt.
