Over the course of its existence, the cult of St. George acquired an impressive number of aspects. Originally celebrated as an exemplary martyr, St. George was also celebrated as a patron of agriculture, a patron of warfare and crusading, and a patron of chivalry. Although official ecclesiastical opinion was not always enthusiastic about the saint, popular opinion was, setting the stage for him to become the national patron of England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

By tradition, St. George was a Christian army officer from Cappadocia in Asia Minor, who was martyred in the late third or early fourth century. Since no primary source account of his life or martyrdom exists, exactly where and when this event occurred, if it occurred at all, is anyone's guess. Such lack of documentation did not prevent the saint from becoming widely popular throughout the eastern Roman Empire from the sixth century on. Lydda (or Diospolis) in Palestine boasted St. George's tomb, whose existence and miracles were witnessed by late-antique pilgrims to the Holy Land, such as the early sixth-century Theodosius, the late sixthcentury Antoninus, or the eighth-century Epiphanius the Monk. Other sources from the Near East reveal other manifestations of the cult. The Life of St. John the Silentiary (454–558), for instance, refers to a monastery of St. George in Jerusalem, Procopius of Caesarea writes that the Emperor Justinian (527–65) built a church to St. George in Bizani, Armenia, and the Patria of the early sixth-century historian Heschius of Miletus records several churches to St. George in Constantinople. There is also sixthcentury evidence for a monastery in Jericho, a church in Edessa, and a monastery at Dorylleon. A Coptic church to St. George (“Mâri Girgis”) was dedicated in 684 in Cairo, the first of some forty Egyptian churches and monasteries to the saint that came to exist by the thirteenth century. St. George seems to have been especially popular in Arabia and Syria, since he is mentioned in several fifth- and sixth-century inscriptions there, such as one from a monastery at Ezra (a former pagan temple):