James (Jacopo) was another one of those reluctant archbishops, and in his case, he had good cause. Genoa was divided between feuding families -- the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. The thing that made this feud even more dangerous than, say, the Montagues and Capulets was that the Guelphs backed the papacy while the Ghibellines backed the Holy Roman Emperor. If you've read Machiavelli's The Prince, you have some sense of how dangerous it was to be backing the wrong side.
Like many of the candidates for archbishop, James got to decline the job once, but upon another vacancy, the Pope ordered him to take it. He couldn't heal the breach between the feuding clans, but he did extract many charitable donations from each of them. He channeled their rivalry into a contest of who can feed the most poor people, build the best hospitals, and restore the most monasteries and churches, which is far preferable to competition to assassinate the most officials and burn the most houses.
I probably would have overlooked the Saint James -- and I am calling him saint even though he is officially a beatus -- because he is the author of the Golden Legend. This book, said to be the first printed bestseller, went through more than 100 editions. It tells the edifying stories of the lives of the saints -- not the historical, not the verifiable, but the edifying. It is full of miraculous rewards and heroic sacrifices. Priests loved to draw lessons from it. The best of hagiomajor probably comes from it too, though it comes by way of other sources. So if James was declared a saint immediately by those who knew him best but only declared blessed by the folks in charge, I figure there's no harm in promoting him one level here.
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