Annegray, Luxeuil, and Fontaines

Arriving in the kingdom of Burgundy in the early 590s, Columbanus and his companions settled first at Annegray, in the ruins of a Roman fort high in the Vosges, then — as disciples multiplied — at the larger Luxeuil, on the site of a ruined Roman spa, and at nearby Fontaines. Welcomed by the Burgundian kings and drawing Frankish nobles in great numbers, Luxeuil became the head of a monastic movement that would reshape Frankish religious life. This file traces the foundations and the court that received them.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic; missionary to the Continent)

Into Burgundy

After crossing into Gaul, Jonas says, Columbanus and his band travelled through the country and came at length into the kingdom of the Burgundians, in the eastern part of Francia, where they were brought before the king (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.6; O’Hara and Wood 2017). The king is named by Jonas as Sigibert, but this is a recognized error: the ruler of Burgundy at the time of Columbanus’s arrival was Guntram (d. 592), and after him his great-nephew Childebert II and then the boy Theuderic II, under the regency of his grandmother Queen Brunhild [Disputed: Jonas (Vita I.6) calls the welcoming king Sigibert, but Sigibert I of Austrasia had died in 575, well before Columbanus's arrival; modern scholars correct this to Guntram of Burgundy or his successors and treat Jonas's regnal notices as confused (Wood 2001; O'Hara and Wood 2017; Charles-Edwards 2000)]. Whatever the confusion of names, the substance is clear: the Burgundian court received the Irish exile with favour and granted him land in the wild, half-deserted uplands of the Vosges, where the disorders of the sixth century had emptied the countryside (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.6; Wood 2001).

Annegray

The first foundation, about 590–591, was at Annegray, in a remote valley of the Vosges, on the site of a ruined Roman fortlet (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.6; O’Hara and Wood 2017). Jonas dwells on the hardship of the early days there: the brethren, he says, were reduced at times to eating the bark of trees and wild herbs, and were sustained — in the Life‘s telling — by providential reliefs, as when a stranger arrived with food at the point of starvation, or when the sick were healed by the saint’s prayer (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.7; O’Hara and Wood 2017). These episodes are reported by Jonas as wonders attending the foundation and are pinned to him as such, not asserted here as fact (METHODOLOGY §3.5). The picture they paint, behind the miraculous frame, is of a genuinely austere eremitical beginning in difficult country — the peregrinus and his band living the desert ideal in the forests of Gaul (Wood 2001).

Luxeuil

As Columbanus’s reputation spread, disciples came in such numbers that Annegray could not hold them, and a larger site was needed. About 591–594 he established Luxeuil (Latin Luxovium), some miles from Annegray, on the site of a ruined Roman spa whose broken baths and statues Jonas describes as overgrown and haunted by wild beasts — a fitting image of the pagan past reclaimed for Christ (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.10; O’Hara and Wood 2017). Luxeuil quickly became the principal house and the centre of the whole movement. A third foundation, Fontaines (Fontanae), was made nearby to accommodate the still-growing community, and the three houses were governed together under Columbanus’s rule, with priors over the daughter-houses (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.10; O’Hara and Wood 2017).

The scale of what grew at Luxeuil is the historically important fact. Frankish aristocrats — and their sons — entered in large numbers, so that the house became a nursery of the Frankish nobility’s piety and, in time, of its bishops and abbots; from Luxeuil and its monks descended a whole network of seventh-century foundations across Francia (Wood 2001; O’Hara, ed., 2018). This is the phenomenon historians call Columbanian or Hiberno-Frankish monasticism: an Irish ascetic rule, carried by an Irish exile, taken up and spread by the native Frankish elite, producing dozens of monasteries — Faremoutiers, Jouarre, Rebais, Corbie, and many more trace their spiritual descent to Luxeuil (Wood 2001; O’Hara, ed., 2018). Columbanus’s peregrinatio, undertaken as a private ascetic act, had become the seed of a movement that reshaped the religious geography of Gaul.

The Court and the Coming Conflict

The same royal favour that founded Luxeuil set the stage for the later rupture. Columbanus’s monasteries lay within the kingdom of Burgundy, ruled in his time by the young Theuderic II under the powerful regency of his grandmother Brunhild, and for a while the relationship was warm: Jonas reports that Theuderic frequently visited Luxeuil and held the abbot in honour (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.18; O’Hara and Wood 2017). But two faults ran beneath the surface. The first was Columbanus’s insistence on the independence of his houses — their Irish rule, their Irish Easter (see The Letters to the Popes), and their exemption, as he saw it, from the ordinary oversight of the Gallic bishops in whose dioceses they sat — which the Frankish episcopate found intolerable (see The Frankish Bishops and Queen Brunhild). The second was his refusal to compromise the moral discipline of the court: the clash that finally expelled him, in Jonas’s account, turned on his refusal to bless Theuderic’s illegitimate sons and his rebuke of the king’s irregular unions, which set Brunhild against him (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.18–19; O’Hara and Wood 2017). Both faults were already implicit in the foundations themselves — in the very independence and rigor that had made them what they were.

The Foundations as Achievement

Before the conflict that drove him out, Columbanus had accomplished something remarkable. In the space of perhaps twenty years he had planted, in the depopulated uplands of eastern Gaul, a cluster of monasteries living a discipline of an austerity the Franks had not known, had drawn to it the flower of the Frankish aristocracy, and had set in motion a movement that would long outlast his own presence in Gaul. Luxeuil itself would become one of the great monasteries and scriptoria of the early medieval West, its books and its script — the famous Luxeuil minuscule — influential far beyond Burgundy (Wood 2001; on the later cult and learning, see Bobbio and the Cult). The expulsion of 610 would remove the founder; it would not undo the foundation.

See Also

References

  • Jonas of Bobbio. Life of Columbanus, Life of John of Réomé, and Life of Vedast. Trans. Alexander O’Hara and Ian Wood. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017. (Book I, chapters 6–10, 18–19: arrival in Burgundy, Annegray, Luxeuil and Fontaines, the court of Theuderic and Brunhild.)
  • Wood, Ian. The Missionary Life: Saints and the Evangelisation of Europe 400–1050. Harlow: Longman, 2001. (The Burgundian context; the regnal confusion in Jonas; Columbanian monasticism and its spread.)
  • O’Hara, Alexander, ed. Columbanus and the Peoples of Post-Roman Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. (The Hiberno-Frankish monastic movement and its daughter-houses.)
  • Charles-Edwards, T. M. Early Christian Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. (The Irish background; chronological problems.)