The Frankish Bishops and Queen Brunhild

Columbanus’s downfall in Burgundy came from a convergence of causes: the long resentment of the Gallic bishops against his independent Irish monasteries and their alien Easter, and a direct moral clash with the court of the young king Theuderic II and his regent grandmother Brunhild — sparked, in Jonas’s account, by Columbanus’s refusal to bless Theuderic’s illegitimate sons and his rebuke of the king’s irregular unions. About 610 he was condemned and ordered expelled from the kingdom. This file sets out the causes and the rupture.

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

The Episcopal Grievance

Beneath the dramatic court-confrontation that Jonas foregrounds lay a slower, structural conflict with the Gallic episcopate, and it is the more fundamental cause. Columbanus’s monasteries sat within Frankish dioceses but behaved as if exempt from the bishops who governed them: they kept the Irish Easter, lived under an Irish rule, and looked to their abbot rather than to the diocesan bishop for authority (see Rome and the Celtic Churches). To the Frankish bishops this was intolerable on two counts. First, the Easter difference was a visible scandal that exposed them, by association, to the charge of harbouring an irregular and possibly heretical practice (see The Letters to the Popes). Second, the jurisdictional independence of the Columban houses challenged the whole diocesan order of the Frankish church (Wood 2001; Charles-Edwards 2000).

The bishops summoned Columbanus to answer for his Easter; a Gallic synod, probably at Chalon-sur-Saône around 603, took up the matter. Columbanus did not attend in person but addressed the assembled bishops by letter — the surviving Epistula 2 — asking, with a mixture of courtesy and defiance, to be left in peace to keep his own custom and live under his own rule (Columbanus, Epistula 2; Walker 1957; Stancliffe 2018). The synod did not resolve the matter, and the episcopal hostility remained a standing pressure that the court could later mobilize against him.

The Court of Theuderic and Brunhild

The kingdom of Burgundy in Columbanus’s later years there was ruled by the young Theuderic II, and effective power lay with his grandmother, the dowager queen Brunhild, one of the most formidable political figures of the Merovingian age, regent and king-maker across two generations (Wood 2001; O’Hara and Wood 2017). Relations with Luxeuil had begun warmly — Jonas says Theuderic often visited the monastery and honoured its abbot (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.18; O’Hara and Wood 2017). The breach, in Jonas’s telling, came over morals.

Jonas reports that Theuderic was living with concubines rather than taking a lawful queen, and that Columbanus rebuked him for it and urged him to marry honourably and put away his irregular unions (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.18–19; O’Hara and Wood 2017). The crisis came to a head, Jonas says, when Brunhild, fearing that a lawful queen and legitimate heirs would diminish her own power, set herself against the abbot, and when she presented Theuderic’s sons by his concubines to Columbanus for his blessing, he refused to bless them, declaring that they would never hold the royal scepter because they sprang from sin (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.19; O’Hara and Wood 2017). The refusal turned Brunhild into his implacable enemy. Jonas frames the whole episode in the biblical key of the prophet against the wicked queen — the colours of Elijah against Jezebel and John the Baptist against Herodias — and the literary shaping must be kept in view: this is Jonas’s morally charged narrative, pinned to him under METHODOLOGY §3.5, not an independent record [Disputed: Jonas (Vita I.18–19) makes the moral confrontation over Theuderic's concubinage and bastard sons the cause of the rupture, in a prophet-versus-queen frame; modern historians (Wood 2001; O'Hara 2018) accept a real conflict but stress that the episcopal and political tensions — Easter, jurisdiction, and the threat an uncontrollable holy man posed to the court — were at least as decisive, and that Jonas's moralizing simplifies a more political quarrel].

Condemnation and Expulsion

The forces converged. Brunhild stirred the nobles and the bishops against Columbanus; the court harassed Luxeuil, restricting the abbot’s movements and the monastery’s liberties (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.19–20; O’Hara and Wood 2017). When Columbanus would not yield — would not open his monastery to royal visitors as commanded, would not bless the boys, would not soften — Theuderic and Brunhild moved to be rid of him. About 610 he was condemned and ordered to be removed from Burgundy and sent back to Ireland, the land of his origin, under guard (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.20; O’Hara and Wood 2017; Wood 2001). Crucially, the sentence fell on Columbanus and the Irish (and Breton) monks — the foreigners — while the Frankish brethren were to remain at Luxeuil: it was an expulsion of the alien founder, not a dissolution of the community, and Luxeuil survived (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.20; Wood 2001).

The expulsion is, in retrospect, the hinge of Columbanus’s career and of his European significance. Had he stayed at Luxeuil he would have remained a great Burgundian abbot; cast out, he carried his witness across Gaul, to the Rhineland, and at last over the Alps to found Bobbio, becoming in his exile the figure of pan-European stature that the cult would later celebrate (see Into Italy and the Lombards; Legacy and Assessment). The journey that the deportation forced upon him is the subject of the companion file (see The Journey Across Gaul).

See Also

References

  • Jonas of Bobbio. Life of Columbanus. Trans. Alexander O’Hara and Ian Wood. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017. (Book I, chapters 18–20: the early favour, the rebuke of Theuderic, the refusal to bless the sons, Brunhild’s enmity, and the order of expulsion.)
  • Columbanus. Epistula 2. In Sancti Columbani Opera, ed. and trans. G. S. M. Walker. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1957. (The letter to the Gallic synod.)
  • Wood, Ian. The Missionary Life. Harlow: Longman, 2001. (The political and episcopal causes; the expulsion of the foreigners only; Luxeuil’s survival.)
  • O’Hara, Alexander. Jonas of Bobbio and the Legacy of Columbanus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. (Jonas’s shaping of the conflict; the politics of Brunhild’s court.)
  • Charles-Edwards, T. M. Early Christian Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. (The jurisdictional dimension.)