The Journey Across Gaul

Sentenced to deportation back to Ireland, Columbanus was taken under guard across Gaul to the port of Nantes for embarkation — but, in Jonas’s account, the ship would not carry him away, and the escort eventually let him go. Free again, he turned not back to Burgundy but eastward and northward: through Neustria to the court of Chlothar II, on to Austrasia and the court of Theudebert II, up the Rhine, to a sojourn at Bregenz on Lake Constance among still-pagan peoples, and at last over the Alps into Lombard Italy. This file traces the wandering that turned an expelled abbot into a missionary across half of Europe.

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

The Deportation to Nantes

After the sentence of c. 610, Jonas says, Columbanus and his Irish and Breton companions were taken from Luxeuil under armed escort and conducted across Gaul toward the Atlantic coast, to the port of Nantes on the Loire, whence they were to be shipped back to Ireland (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.21–22; O’Hara and Wood 2017). The journey westward is studded in the Life with the wonders and confrontations characteristic of hagiography — providential supplies, the awe of the guards, the failure of those who tried to harm the saint — all of which are reported here as Jonas’s testimony, not as fact (METHODOLOGY §3.5; see The Life by Jonas of Bobbio).

The climactic episode at Nantes is the centrepiece of this stretch of the narrative. Jonas reports that when Columbanus and his monks had been put aboard a ship bound for Ireland, the vessel ran aground or was prevented from sailing — the sea, in the Life‘s telling, refusing to bear the holy man away from the work God had for him — so that the captain put him ashore again, and the escort, unable to carry out the sentence, abandoned the attempt and left him free (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.23; O’Hara and Wood 2017). Whatever lay behind it, the practical result was decisive: Columbanus was not returned to Ireland, and he was now at large in Gaul, beyond the reach of Burgundy. Before leaving the matter he is said to have written to his monks at Luxeuil a letter of counsel and consolation — the surviving Epistula 4, to the brethren, a precious window into his pastoral heart at the moment of separation (Columbanus, Epistula 4; Walker 1957).

North and East: Chlothar, Theudebert, and the Rhine

Free but unable to return to Burgundy, Columbanus turned toward the other Frankish kingdoms, whose rulers were rivals of Theuderic and Brunhild and so disposed to receive their enemy’s enemy. He went first to Neustria, to the court of King Chlothar II, who welcomed him and would have kept him; Jonas has Columbanus decline to settle and even foretell Chlothar’s coming supremacy over all the Franks (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.24; O’Hara and Wood 2017) — a prophecy the Life, written after Chlothar had indeed united the kingdoms in 613, records with hindsight. From Neustria he passed to Austrasia and the court of King Theudebert II, Theuderic’s brother, who likewise received him and offered him a place to work among the peoples of the upper Rhine (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.27; O’Hara and Wood 2017).

Columbanus then made his way up the Rhine — Jonas gives a vivid account of the monks rowing against the current — into the lands toward the Alps, with the aim, now genuinely missionary, of preaching to the still-pagan or half-pagan peoples of the region (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.27; O’Hara and Wood 2017; Wood 2001). Here the peregrinatio that had begun as ascetic self-exile took on, for the first time, the character of a mission to the heathen (see The Call to Peregrinatio).

Bregenz

The band settled for a time at Bregenz (Latin Brigantium), at the eastern end of Lake Constance, among the Alemanni, where Jonas places some of the most famous missionary episodes of the Life: the destruction of a great vat of beer prepared for a heathen sacrifice (Columbanus blowing the vat apart, in the telling) and the casting of pagan idols into the lake (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.27; O’Hara and Wood 2017). It is from the Bregenz period that the tradition of his companion Gall‘s separation derives: Gall, falling ill (or, in the later and partly tendentious Life of Gall, falling out with Columbanus), remained behind in the region and became the founder-figure of the great later monastery of Sankt Gallen [Disputed: Jonas (Vita I.27) records Gall's remaining behind; the fuller and more dramatic account of a quarrel between the two, and of Columbanus's reproof, comes from the much later *Vitae* of Gall, which have their own agenda, and the details are not securely historical (Wood 2001; O'Hara and Wood 2017)]. The Bregenz sojourn was cut short: the political ground shifted when Theuderic defeated and killed his brother Theudebert in 612, bringing the upper-Rhine region under the control of Columbanus’s Burgundian enemy and making it prudent — and, in Jonas’s telling, divinely prompted — for the old abbot to move on (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.27–30; O’Hara and Wood 2017; Wood 2001).

Over the Alps

So Columbanus, now near seventy, crossed the Alps into Italy, into the kingdom of the Lombards, where King Agilulf would grant him the site of Bobbio (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.30; O’Hara and Wood 2017). The long wandering — Luxeuil to Nantes to Neustria to Austrasia to the Rhine to Bregenz to the Alps — had carried him across the breadth of Gaul and into Italy, and had scattered the seed of his name and his disciples across a swathe of Europe from Burgundy to Lake Constance. The deportation meant to silence him had instead broadcast him. The Italian terminus, Bobbio, and the controversies of his last years are the subject of the next section (see Into Italy and the Lombards).

See Also

References

  • Jonas of Bobbio. Life of Columbanus. Trans. Alexander O’Hara and Ian Wood. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017. (Book I, chapters 21–30: the deportation to Nantes, the ship that would not sail, Chlothar and Theudebert, the Rhine, Bregenz and the missionary episodes, Gall, and the crossing into Italy.)
  • Columbanus. Epistula 4. In Sancti Columbani Opera, ed. and trans. G. S. M. Walker. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1957. (The letter to the monks of Luxeuil at his departure.)
  • Wood, Ian. The Missionary Life. Harlow: Longman, 2001. (The political geography of the journey; the Gall traditions; the move into Italy.)
  • O’Hara, Alexander, and Ian Wood. Introduction and notes to Jonas of Bobbio. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017. (The reliability of the journey narrative and the later Gall material.)