Henry VI also tried to get Alfred the Great canonised by the Catholic Church, which could have happened a lot earlier in a number of different ways. My favourite would be preventing the Norman conquest and having Alfred be seen as the primary royal saint of England, possibly with his burial place in Winchester being the nations spiritual/ political capital.
There’s also the potential for a lot of African saints shrines to become important pilgrimage destinations in a world where the reconquista continues into Africa.
I guess a question I have is what are the factors that make a saints shrine politically/ commercially important? What makes a tradition of pilgrimage form around a particular saint? Because plenty of people could have become sainted but didn’t, but there are tons of saints that languish in obscurity, never had any real pilgrimage tradition etc etc
Why did the shrine of Santiago de Compostela have this grand tradition and not say St Andrew of Patras?
Partly it’s gotta be that the places that host the saints relics themselves become politically important and then promote their saint- if Ravenna had become a political centre in the early Middle Ages instead of Venice, st Appolinaris would probably have a much stronger tradition of pilgrimage, because Ravenna would have more money to build bigger cathedrals etc