The Latin Hymn-writers and Their Hymns

by Samuel Willoughby Duffield

And wander the wide world over,

Singing from land to land.”

With Sigebert, King of Austrasia, he contracted quite a friendship, and being at Poitiers when Gelesuintha was put to death, he lamented her in verses which pleased Sigebert, her brother-in-law and avenger, greatly. He also became well acquainted with Euphronius of Tours, nephew of St. Gregory, the bishop, and thus laid a good foundation for ecclesiastical preferment. But it was to Poitiers that he gradually drifted, and there circumstances fixed him for the most of his life.

We may safely conclude that Tours, which is not a great distance off, first attracted his wandering feet. He had a duty to the blessed St. Martin’s holy lamp and to the blessed St. Martin’s holy memory, and these devout proceedings were more than sufficient to commend him to a hospitable bishop. Contemporary accounts of him are lacking, if we except the brief notice of Paul the Deacon, which cannot properly be called contemporary, as it is in his history of the Lombards, which was prepared in the first half of the eighth century. But Fortunatus again comes to our rescue with quite a goodly supply of verses and with some epistles which show that the life of that period was a curious resultant between the Roman and barbarian ideas. It ought in honesty to be added that Brunehilda was no saint, and that the court of the Merovingians was so barbaric that it stood by and saw her torn to death, at eighty, at the heels of a wild horse; and this was later even than Fortunatus’s day.

By this time Treviso (Trevisium) had been regularly attacked by the Lombards, and the pilgrimage, which had changed to a pleasure-trip, changed again to a residence. He speaks of himself later as having been “for nine years an exile from Italy,” and his only reference to his family that is discoverable is when he tells the Abbess Agnes that she is as dear to him as his own sister Titiana. He is a poet driven like a leaf before the storm, and he is whirled first into Tours and then into the safe eddy of Poitiers, which he celebrates reverently in song as the home of the great Hilary.

His royal friendships are made apparent by epithalamia—especially that on the marriage of Sigebert and Brunehilda—and by various odes. But now comes the real romance of our poet’s life. Clotaire the First had married a fair woman named Radegunda, whose piety gave him not a little trouble. She was determined to keep all her vigils and fasts and to exert herself in works of charity, even to the scrubbing of the base of the altar with her own hands. It was one of her greatest pleasures to take leprous women in her arms and kiss them, and when one of the lepers said to her, “Who will kiss you after you embrace us?” she “answered benevolently, that if others will not kiss me, it is truly no affair of mine.”

It would be beneath the dignity of this narrative, if it were not a portion of her own life in the Latin, for us to record the incident which helped to cause her separation from her husband. She had arisen at night and came back thoroughly chilled, and with her feet properly cold. Clotaire growled out that he would sooner have a nun for a wife (jugalem monacham) than such a queen. So she took him at his word, founded a convent at Poitiers, and distinguished herself to later generations by many noble works.

Over this convent she placed her maid Agnes, and served her former servant with profound humility and obedience, albeit she must always have been herself the ruling spirit of the place. With Fortunatus she formed a close friendship. And as this is the beginning of the conventual and ecclesiastical side of his career, we may as well bring the story up to its parallel point in current history.

Gregory, Archbishop of Tours and historian of France, always addresses his friend Fortunatus as presbyter Italicus. That Fortunatus embraced the monastic life at Aquileia (about 558-59) has been maintained, and the opinion is also fairly defended that he was enrolled as a “cleric” at Poitiers, although he was novus, or a “new-comer,” there. He had evidently some quasi ecclesiastical connection, and those were days when the celibacy of the clergy was much mooted, but when the wandering monks had not yet been held to the stringencies of the monastic orders. If we ask Fortunatus why he remained in Gaul, he replies that Radegunda retained him there “by her prayers and vows.” It is conjectural that he was first chaplain to the convent, and it is certain that then he was elevated to the rank of Bishop of Poitiers.

To this daughter of Berthar, King of the Thuringi, our troubadour now paid his devoirs. Often at “the convivial banquets of the barbarians” he had “poured forth his verses.” He was now to become the devoted cavalier of a queen and an abbess, and to furnish literature with some very unique specimens of religio-amatory verse.