Alfonso II, called the Chaste was King of Asturias . He was born in 759. Son of Fruela I and his wife Munia. He came to the throne by having abdicated Bermudo I in 791. He brought his court to Oviedo in 792. In his struggles against the Muslims, he extended his domain through Castile to the Duero river and raided as far as Lisbon. He also made an alliance with Charlemagne and his son , Louis of Aquitaine, to continue the fight against the Muslims.
Alfonso II died in 842 in Oviedo . He was called the Chaste, because, according to what they say, he did not consummate the marriage with his wife Berta (Frankish princess). Under this reign, in the year 813, Theodomir, bishop of Iria, found a tomb, which he said was that of the apostle James the Greater, who was assassinated in Jerusalem by order of King Herod Agrippa I around the year 42; This is how the legend was invented that says that the apostle Santiago was buried in that tomb; the place of discovery was later called Campus Stelae (Compostela); As a consequence of this, King Alfonso II built a temple and established a pilgrimage to venerate the remains of the apostle Santiago, which is why this king is considered the founder of Santiago de Compostela . However, the etymology that is usually attributed to the name “Compostela” is wrong; that name comes from two Latin words:the verb “compono” (which means, among other things, to bury) and the noun “stela” (which means tomb monument ); thus, with the root of said verb and the indicated noun, the name “Compostela” is formed in the following way:compo + stela =compostela, which means exactly what Bishop Teodomiro found:a sepulchral monument, or a tomb , in a place where the dead were buried; that is, a cemetery. Therefore, the "strange lights" that led to the discovery of said grave were nothing more than will-o'-the-wisps, which occur in cemeteries.
On the other hand, Pope Leo XIII, in his encyclical Deus Omnipotens, in 1884, declared that the remains found in said tomb belonged to the apostle Santiago, and says that he was buried in that place, because the disciples who buried him had to hide, because the queen “doña Lupe” reigned there, who was “very perfidious”. To say that, around the year 42, after the extermination of the Galicians by Emperor Augustus some 15 years earlier.