Saint Peter Thomas

In October 1365 a crusading fleet led by the king of Cyprus fell on the Egyptian port of Alexandria, took the city and abandoned it again within a week. The papal legate travelling with that expedition was a Carmelite friar from the Périgord in southwestern France, Peter Thomas, who by then held the title of Latin patriarch of Constantinople, a city still in Greek hands. He died a few months later in Famagusta, on Cyprus, early in 1366. Nearly three centuries on, the Carmelites of Seville still counted him among the heroes of their order. Zurbarán painted him for an altarpiece in the church of their college of San Alberto, at the first altar on the right as you came in. The canvas is tall and very narrow, about a metre high and only a third as wide, one of the slender panels of that altarpiece, and the name S. P. Thomas is lettered on the ledge beneath him.