Fig. 225.—The Legend of St. Martin.—From a piece of tapestry of the Thirteenth Century, in the Louvre (No. 1117).—1. St. Martin sharing his cloak with a poor man.—2. He sees in a dream Jesus Christ clad with this half of his cloak.—3. The saint’s baptism, the priest sprinkling him with water, and God blessing him.—4. He brings to life a catechumen, who had died without being baptized, in his monastery at Ligugé, near Poitiers.—5. At the same place he recalls to life a slave, who is first represented as hung from a gibbet, and afterwards standing on the ground and giving him thanks.—6. St. Martin consecrated Bishop of Tours in 371.—7. He evokes the spectre of a pretended martyr, held in veneration about Tours, and when it appears and avows that it had been executed for its crimes, the chapel is demolished.—8. He gives his tunic to a poor man.—9. He brings to life the son of a peasant in a heathen village near Chartres.—10. He drives out the evil spirit from the body of a mad cow.—11. Seeing on the banks of a river some birds watching to catch fish, he bids them fly away, saying, “Here we see the type of the enemies of our salvation, always on the watch to seize our souls.”—12. Death of St. Martin. His soul, in the form of a child, is being borne off to heaven by two angels.
“The bishops carried out, with as much dignity as benevolence, their sublime mission of sympathizing with the people and those who were oppressed; having a paternal solicitude for their flock, they placed themselves face to face with conquerors, whom they knew how to pacify and to conciliate. The veneration with which they were surrounded and the holiness of their lives earned them the respect even of Attila and Genseric.
They were entrusted with the embassies, and they administered in the room of magistrates, whose power had been crushed. Epiphanius, Bishop of Pavia, was sent to the Burgundian kings Gundibald and Godegesil, to procure the release of a number of Italian prisoners, whom he brought back with him in triumph. When the Ligurians were ravaged by the incursions of the Transalpines, the king remitted, at the prayer of the bishop, one-third of the indemnity. St. Cæsarius, Bishop of Arles, sold the patens and chalices to ransom the prisoners. Euspicius, Bishop of Sergiopolis, upon the Euphrates, paid Chosroës for the ransom of twelve thousand prisoners. St. Germain, Bishop of Paris, gave away even his own tunic by way of charity; ‘so that,’ to use the language of an artless chronicler, ‘he was often shivering with cold, while those upon whom he had bestowed his favours were warm.’”
The bishops were sometimes obliged to exercise the duties of royalty. Honorius, of Novara, when Theodoric and Odoacer were at war, fortified, in order to give shelter to his flock, a certain number of places similar to those in which the military were garrisoned. Nicetius, Bishop of Trèves, “an apostolic man, in his progress through the country, constructed, like a good shepherd that he was, a fold to protect his flock; he surrounded the hill with thirty towers, which shut it in on all sides, and an edifice rose where hitherto a forest had cast its shadow.”
During the reigns of the last of the Merovingians and the first of the Carlovingians, the jurisconsults and the magistrates were generally bishops or plain priests, whose venerable character, in addition to their knowledge and wisdom, had caused them to be designated to fulfil these high functions. Dagobert, when about to draw up the Capitularies which were to govern the Germans, the Thuringians, the Burgundians, the Neustrians, the Ripuairians, and the Romans, entrusted the work to four ecclesiastical doctors, and consequently the disposition of this new code was remarkably tolerant,—“for,” said these pious legislators, “there is no sin so grave, but that the culprit’s life may be spared, if he will but hold God in fear and the saints in respect, seeing that the Lord hath said, ‘He who pardons shall himself be forgiven, but he who pardoneth not shall obtain no mercy.’” In cases where the crime seemed of a nature to deserve no clemency, the law remitted the culprit to be judged by the bishop or a priest delegated by him, whose tribunal, standing in the midst of a church, was from that very fact inviolable, and placed under the tutelary protection of religion. The royal decree added, “When the culprit shall take refuge in a church, let no one dare to drag him out with violence; if he has already crossed the threshold of the sanctuary, let the bishop or curate of that church be sent for, and if they refuse to deliver him up, it is to them that the pursuers shall look for his punishment.”
Fig. 226.—Consecration of St. Remigius, Bishop of Rheims.—Fac-simile of an Engraving of the “Rheims Tapestry,” in the cathedral of that city, published by M. Ach. Jubinal. (Sixteenth Century.)
For more than a century before, the spiritual and temporal constitution of the Church was regularly organized throughout France. The diocese comprised the territorial boundaries which the Roman administration had established in the provinces for the civil government of the vicars and the counts, and most of these dioceses were kept, within about the same limits, down to 1789. The ecclesiastical province, of which the metropolitan or the archbishop was head, was made up of several dioceses or suffragan bishoprics, and when a provincial council took place, it assembled in the metropolis under the presidency of the archbishop. Above the metropolitans there were the patriarchs and the primates, dignitaries occupying the principal apostolic sees, such as Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, Cesarea, and Heraclea in the East, and in the West, Milan, Lyons, Rheims, Trèves, and Mayence—which latter city became, under Pope Zacharias (741–752), the metropolis of all Germany. The supremacy of Rome was acknowledged by the universal Church from the days of the Apostles, as is attested by all the Fathers, and especially by St. Irenæus, whose spiritual father was Polycarp, a disciple of St. John.
