Europe and The African Cult of Saints Ci PDF

Europe and the African Cult
of Saints, circa 350–900: An Essay in

Mediterranean Communications
By J o n a t h a n P. C o n a n t
Shortly after the Vandals took Carthage in 439, the city’s Catholic bishop, Quod-
vultdeus, and a large number of his clergy were said to have been placed “naked
and despoiled on broken ships” and put to sea, banished from Africa.1 By God’s
mercy, the exiles made their way safely to Naples, where Quodvultdeus quickly
came to be regarded as a saint: a fifth-century mosaic from the catacombs of St.
Januarius (San Gennaro) in Capodimonte seems to depict the African bishop, and
by the middle of the ninth century his feast day was celebrated in the local litur-
gical calendar.2 A similar story could be told of Gaudiosus of Abitina, another
fifth-century African bishop who was said to have fled the Vandals and who
also achieved sainthood in Campania.3 The flight of refugees like Quodvultdeus
and Gaudiosus from the political turmoil that wracked North Africa between
the fifth and the eighth centuries, however, has long been seen as having a far great-
er significance than the reinvention of exiled African bishops as southern Italian
The research for this article was made possible by several generous Faculty Research Grants from the
University of San Diego, which I acknowledge with gratitude. I would also like to express my heartfelt
thanks to Diliana Angelova, Thomas N. Bisson, Vanessa M. Corbera, Brian E. DeLay, Christopher
P. Jones, Michael McCormick, Paul E. Szarmach, Alice-Mary Talbot, and the anonymous reviewers for
Speculum for their many useful comments and suggestions to improve this paper, as well as to Deborah
Brown Stewart, Linda Lott, and Toni Stephens for their patient and invaluable assistance with the col-
lections of the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library. I have designed the maps that illustrate this article
myself, using ArcView GIS 3.1; despite the inevitable distortions of the geographic projection, the
results are sufficiently accurate for my purposes here.
1
Victor of Vita, Historia persecutionis Africanae provinciae 1.15, ed. Michael Petschenig, Corpus Scrip-
torum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (hereafter cited as CSEL) 7 (Vienna, 1881), p. 8: “Tunc uero memo-
ratae urbis episcopum id est Carthaginis, deo et hominibus manifestum, nomine Quoduultdeus, et max-
imam turbam clericorum nauibus fractis inpositam nudos atque expoliatos expelli praecepit.”
2
Victor of Vita, Historia persecutionis 1.15, ed. Petschenig, p. 8; Umberto M. Fasola, Le catacombe di
S. Gennaro a Capodimonte (Rome, 1975), pp. 153–60 and plates XII and XIII; Domenico Mallardo, Il
calendario marmoreo di Napoli, 19 Feb., Bibliotheca Ephemerides Liturgicae 18 (Rome, 1947), p. 21;
Francesco Lanzoni, Le diocesi d’Italia dalle origini al principio del secolo VII (an. 604): Studio critico,
2 vols., Studi e Testi 35 (Faenza, 1927), 2:1093–95 and 1099–1100; Stacey Rebecca Graham, “The Dis-
semination of North African Christian and Intellectual Culture in Late Antiquity” (Ph.D. dissertation,
University of California, Los Angeles, 2005), pp. 60 and 63; and in general André Mandouze, Prosopo-
graphie de l’Afrique chrétienne (303–533), Prosopographie Chrétienne du Bas-Empire 1 (Paris, 1982),
pp. 947–49, “Quodvultdeus 5.”
3
Martyrologium Romanum, v Kal. Nov., in Propylaeum ad Acta sanctorum Decembris, ed. Hippolyte
Delehaye et al. (Brussels, 1940), p. 481 (volumes of the Acta sanctorum are hereafter cited as AASS);
Ernst Diehl, Inscriptiones Latinae Christianae veteres, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1925–31), no. 1017, 1:194; Fasola,
Catacombe di S. Gennaro, p. 158 and fig. 100; Mallardo, Calendario di Napoli, 27 Oct., p. 24; and in
general Mandouze, Prosopographie de l’Afrique, p. 528, “Gaudiosus 4.”
Speculum 85 (2010) doi:10.1017/S0038713409990935 1

2 Mediterranean Communications
holy men. In late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, the cults of numerous saints
who had been martyred in Africa and whose cults had originally developed there
spread beyond the shores of the southern Mediterranean to the rest of the Christian
world.4 In seeking to explain the diffusion of these cults, historians have long
focused on the movements of refugees—and, above all, those who fled the Vandals’
conquest of Africa and their subsequent persecution of the region’s Catholic popu-
lation—as displaced Africans such as Quodvultdeus are thought to have brought
the relics of their local saints with them into foreign exile.5
The flight of refugees is in all probability part of this equation. Nevertheless, both
geographical and chronological factors suggest that the spread of African saints’ cults
throughout the Mediterranean was likely the product of a more complex and longer-
lasting process than the movement of refugees alone would imply. Unfortunately, the
diffusion of these cults did not often generate plausible late-antique or medieval ac-
counts. The translation of Cyprian’s remains from Carthage to Charlemagne’s Frank-
ish empire in 801 is perhaps the most notable exception to that rule; but Cyprian was
also one of the most prestigious and widely venerated African saints in the medieval
West, and (probably as a result) the transfer of his relics is uniquely well documented
in a range of sources by contemporary and near-contemporary authors.6 Even so
some modern skeptics have doubted whether this particular translation ever took
4
On the rise of the cult of martyrs and martyrdom in the late-antique Mediterranean in general, see
especially the studies of Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity
and Judaism (Stanford, Calif., 1999); Philippe Buc, “Martyre et ritualité dans l’antiquité tardive: Hori-
zons de l’écriture médiévale des rituels,” Annales: Économies, sociétés, civilisations 52 (1997), 63–92;
G. W. Bowersock, Martyrdom and Rome (Cambridge, Eng., 1995); R. A. Markus, The End of Ancient
Christianity (Cambridge, Eng., 1990), pp. 86–100; Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and
Function in Latin Christianity, The Haskill Lectures on History of Religions, n.s., 2 (Chicago,
1981), pp. 69–85; Victor Saxer, Morts, martyrs, reliques en Afrique chrétienne aux premiers siècles,
Théologie Historique 55 (Paris, 1980); W. H. C. Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early
Church: A Study of a Conflict from the Maccabees to Donatus (New York, 1967); and Hippolyte
Delehaye, Les origines du culte des martyrs, 2nd ed., Subsidia Hagiographica 20 (Brussels, 1933).
5
See, e.g., Thierry Ruinart, Historia persecutionis Vandalicae (Paris, 1694), pp. 580–82; Stefano An-
tonio Morcelli, Africa Christiana, 3 vols. (Brescia, 1816–17), 3:241; Giovanni Battista de Rossi, La Roma
sotterranea cristiana, 3 vols. (Rome, 1864–77), 2:221–25; J. Spencer Northcote and W.-R. Brownlow,
Rome souterraine, trans. Paul Allard, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1874), p. 245, n. 2; and eidem, Roma sotterranea,
2nd ed. (London, 1879), p. 333; Lanzoni, Diocesi, 2:1101; Fasola, Catacombe di S. Gennaro, p. 158;
Yvette Duval, Loca sanctorum Africae: Le culte des martyrs en Afrique du IVe au VIIe siècle, 2 vols.,
Collection de l’École française de Rome 58 (Rome, 1982), 1:30 (no. 13; Thibiuca, Africa Proconsularis)
and 2:729; and Graham, “Dissemination,” pp. 55–93, who emphasizes that such refugees are likely to
have sought out existing African communities elsewhere in the Mediterranean. See also Fedele Savio,
“La leggenda dei Santi Nazario e Celso,” in Ambrosiana: Scritti varii pubblicati nel XV centenario dalla
morte di S. Ambrogio (Milan, 1897), pp. 20–21, whose argument is rejected by Ugo Zanetti, “Les pas-
sions des SS. Nazaire, Gervais, Protais et Celse,” Analecta Bollandiana 97 (1979), 69–88.
6
Florus of Lyons, Carmina 13 (Rector magnificus) and 14 (Hac locuples), ed. Ernst Dümmler, MGH
Poetae 2 (Berlin, 1884), pp. 544–46; Florus, Martyrologium, ed. Henri Quentin, in Les martyrologes
historiques du moyen âge: Étude sur la formation du Martyrologe romain (Paris, 1908), pp. 222–408,
at p. 348; Ado of Vienne, Chronicon, s.a. 807, ed. G. H. Pertz, in MGH SS 2 (Hannover, 1829), p. 320;
Ado, Martyrologium, ed. Quentin, in Martyrologes historiques, pp. 465–681, at pp. 507–14; and see
also Annales regni Francorum, s.a. 802, ed. G. H. Pertz and Friedrich Kurze, MGH SS rer. Germ. 6
(Hannover, 1895; repr. 1950), p. 117.
Mediterranean Communications 3
place.7 In general, though, we are left to deduce where, when, and how the cults of
African saints spread from the traces that they have left in the liturgical calendars,
masses, hymns, sermons, and other texts used in the official celebration of their feast
days; devotional literature, miracle stories, and other works that reveal the public or
private veneration of the martyrs; claims to possess their relics; the presence (or
absence) of churches dedicated to them and other material remnants of their cults;
and the production of hagiographical material, including not only saints’ acts,
lives, and passions but also notices in the historical martyrologies and synaxaria
generated in western Europe and Byzantium in the Middle Ages.8
The complexity of this source base is such that those scholars who have addressed
the issue of when and how African saints’ cults spread abroad have usually
approached the question either through case-by-case examinations of particular cults
or through more generalized explorations of the cult of saints in a specific region.9
These approaches have yielded invaluable, but fragmentary, results. To catch sight
of the broader patterns of movement that linked Christian communities to one an-
other in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, we must examine the migration
of African saints’ cults from a pan-Mediterranean perspective. We must also take
a long view of the history of Africa and its connections to the rest of Christendom.
In particular, the idea that refugees were primarily responsible for the foreign dif-
fusion of African cults seems to be conditioned by a foreshortened vision of the
survival of African Christianity. Despite occasional voices of dissent, historians
of late antiquity have tended to imagine that the conversion of Africa to Islam
was both rapid and thorough, a vision that necessarily implies that the movement
of Christian African cults into the rest of the Mediterranean world was completed
over the course of the eighth century at the latest.10 As I shall show, however,
7
Quentin, Martyrologes historiques, pp. 507–14, and Christian Courtois, “Reliques carthaginoises
et légende carolingienne,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 129 (1945), 57–83, are skeptical as to
the veracity of the translation (see also Pio Franchi de’ Cavalieri, “Le reliquie dei martiri Scillitani,”
Römische Quartalschrift für christliche Altertumskunde und Kirchengeschichte 17 [1903], 209–21).
Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, A.D.
300–900 (Cambridge, Eng., 2001), appendix 4, no. 257 with nos. 254–56, pp. 890–91, and Fabio
Ruggiero, Atti dei martiri Scilitani: Introduzione, testo, traduzione, testimonianze e commento, Atti
della Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Memorie, 9th ser., 1/2 (Rome, 1991), p. 53, accept it.
8
Manuel C. Díaz y Díaz, “El culto de San Cipriano en Hispania,” in José María Soto Rábanos, ed., Pen-
samiento medieval hispano: Homenaje a Horacio Santiago-Otero, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1998), 1:21–37, at
p. 32; Graham, “Dissemination,” pp. 59–64; and Carmen García Rodríguez, El culto de los santos en la
España romana y visigoda, Monografias de Historia Eclesiástica 1 (Madrid, 1966), pp. 13–103, provide
good discussions of how to trace a cult.
9
Lanzoni, Diocesi; García Rodriguez, Culto de los santos; Javier Pérez-Embid Wamba, Hagiología y so-
ciedad en la España medieval: Castilla y León (siglos XI–XIII) (Huelva, 2002); José Ruysschaert, “La com-
mémoration de Cyprien et de Corneille in Callisti,” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 61 (1966), 455–84; Díaz y
Díaz, “Culto de San Cipriano”; Paolo Chiesa, “Un testo agiografico africano ad Aquileia: Gli Acta di Gal-
lonio e dei martiri di Timida Regia,” Analecta Bollandiana 114 (1996), 241–68, and idem, “Pellegrino mar-
tire in urbe Bolitana e Pellegrino di Ancona: Un’altra agiografia africana ad Aquileia?” Analecta Bollandiana
116 (1998), 25–56. Graham, “Dissemination,” pp. 65–93, focuses particularly on the cults of Restituta, Au-
gustine, and Eugenius but places them in the context of a synthetic discussion of the movement of African
saints’ cults into the western Mediterranean in general.
10
On this question see Mark A. Handley, “Disputing the End of African Christianity,” in A. H. Mer-
rills, ed., Vandals, Romans and Berbers: New Perspectives on Late Antique North Africa (Aldershot,
Christianity survived in Africa, and African Christians remained in contact with
their coreligionists in Europe, into the late eleventh century and beyond. This
fact, in turn, opens the possibility that the foreign diffusion of African saints’ cults
was equally long-lived.
Ultimately, the spread of collective and individual veneration of African holy men
and women throughout Christendom was probably the product of the circulation of
people, things, and ideas that characterized exchange in general in late antiquity and
the early Middle Ages. However, the mere existence of such exchange was no guar-
antee that a cult would take root abroad. In some contexts, factors including diver-
gent attitudes toward the relics of the saints, regional chauvinism, and possibly lin-
guistic difficulties and even suspicions of African orthodoxy appear to have inhibited
the diffusion of African saints’ cults. Moreover, this was in all probability both a
“top-down” and a “bottom-up” process, one that not only drew strength from
the existence outside of Africa of populations with distinctive attachments to
one or another African martyr but that also relied on the active promotion and
liturgical celebration of specific African saints by local ecclesiastical authorities.
Studying this process in the Mediterranean as a whole underscores the strength
of Africa’s cultural connections to its closest neighbors and suggests that those
connections were both stronger and longer lasting than historians have supposed.
Equally important, though, it highlights something of a growing cultural divide
between Africa, on the one hand, and Gaul and the Byzantine East, on the other.
This divide, in turn, was to have important long-term consequences, as the ten-
uousness of Africa’s connections to the new centers of power of the early-medieval
Mediterranean seems to have contributed to the region’s marginalization in the
medieval period.
Patterns of Movement
The movement of African saints’ cults in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages
was probably as much a consequence of sustained, mundane contact across the Med-
iterranean as it was the result of the escape of individuals or groups from the horrors
of war and persecution. We can only suppose that the flight of refugees—not only
from the Vandals, but from Berber and Muslim raids as well—must have accelerated
this process in a series of periodic bursts. However, the surviving evidence simply
does not allow us to say with much certainty how great the intensity of that impact
was, or where it was most concentrated, at any given point in late antiquity. Such an
assertion is, of course, complicated by the fact that both refugees and saints’ cults
probably moved along the same networks of commerce and communication that
linked Africa to the Mediterranean more generally in this period. Where they are
traceable, though, the movements of refugees suggest that security rather than, say,
proximity to Africa was their primary concern. Refugees from the Vandals fled
Eng., 2004), pp. 291–310. The rapidity of Africa’s conversion has been challenged by scholars of early
Islam, such as Richard W. Bulliet, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantita-
tive History (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), pp. 76–77 and 95–103; and Elizabeth Savage, A Gateway to
Hell, a Gateway to Paradise: The North African Response to the Arab Conquest, Studies in Late Antiq-
uity and Early Islam 7 (Princeton, N.J., 1997), pp. 89–111; see also the references cited in n. 188 below.
overwhelmingly to the relative safety of the eastern Mediterranean and Italy, while
movement farther west was far more limited.11 In the sixth century we hear of
Africans seeking refuge from Berber incursions in Constantinople and Spain, while
flight from the seventh-century Muslim conquest appears to have focused on Italy,
Sardinia, and southern Gaul.12 Thus, if refugees were the primary motor driving
the overseas diffusion of African saints’ cults, then we would probably expect to
see such cults spread throughout the entire Mediterranean between the fifth and
eighth centuries, with perhaps the greatest concentration in Italy, followed by Con-
stantinople (and the East more generally), Spain, and finally Gaul.
That expectation only partially corresponds with the geographic patterns that we
actually observe. Most strikingly, although African refugees fled in large numbers to
Constantinople and the eastern Mediterranean over the course of the Vandal cen-
tury, markedly few African saints ever entered the Byzantine liturgical calendar.
These saints’ cults also never seem to have taken very deep root in Gaul. Instead,
they appear to have flowed out of Africa in only two main directions. The first route
led from Carthage to southern and western Italy; the second, from Carthage and
Mauretania Caesariensis (modern western Algeria and northern Morocco) to south-
ern and eastern Spain. These patterns, in turn, would seem to suggest that whatever
role the flight of refugees played in the spread of devotion to African saints, other
factors were probably in play as well. I will therefore begin with a detailed exami-
nation of the sources that let us trace these cults’ movements, focusing first on the
two regions to which African saints’ cults spread in significant numbers—Italy and
Spain—and then considering the evidence from those parts of the Mediterranean
where such dissemination was far more limited. I shall then examine what light
the chronology of that movement might throw on how the transmission unfolded;
and finally I shall reconsider the question of why and how these cults spread
abroad, focusing in particular on the issue of why they took root only in certain
parts of the late Roman and early-medieval world.
Carthage–Italy
One of the earliest and most robust routes by which the cults of African saints
spread to the rest of the Mediterranean connected Carthage and its immediate
11
Italy: Victor of Vita, Historia persecutionis 1.15, ed. Petschenig, p. 8; Ferrandus, Vita S. Fulgentii epis-
copi Ruspensis 1, ed. G.-G. Lapeyre, in Vie de Saint Fulgence de Ruspe (Paris, 1929), p. 11, and also 8–9,
pp. 47–57; and in general Lanzoni, Diocesi, 2:1093–1103. Eastern Mediterranean: Theodoret of Cyrrhus,
Epistolae xxiii, 29–36, and 52–53, ed. and trans. Yvan Azéma, in Correspondance, Sources Chrétiennes
40, 98, 111, and 429 (Paris, 1955–98), 1:94, 2:86–100 and 128–30; Victor of Vita, Historia persecutionis
1.29 and 3.30, pp. 13 and 87; see also Theodoret, Epistola 70, 2:152–54. Spain: Victor of Vita, Historia
persecutionis 3.29, pp. 86–87. Gaul: Gregory of Tours, Historiae 2.3, ed. Bruno Krusch and Wilhelm Levi-
son, 2nd ed., MGH SS rer. Merov. 1/1 (Hannover, 1951; repr. 1965), p. 44.
12
Constantinople: Procopius of Caesarea, De Bello Vandalico 2.23.18 and 27–29, ed. Jakob Haury,
in De bellis libri I–IV, vol. 1 of Procopii Caesariensis Opera omnia (Leipzig, 1962), pp. 527 and 529.
Spain: Paul the Deacon, Vitas sanctorum Patrum Emeretensium 3, ed. A. Maya Sánchez, CCSL 116
(Turnhout, 1992), pp. 21–24; and Ildefonsus of Toledo, De viris illustribus 3, ed. Carmen Codoñer
Merino, CCSL 114A (Turnhout, 2007), pp. 605–6. Italy: Sebastian Brock, “An Early Syriac Life of
Maximus the Confessor,” Analecta Bollandiana 91 (1973), 299–346, at p. 318. Sardinia and southern
Gaul: McCormick, Origins, p. 356.
hinterland to Rome, Naples, and, to a much lesser extent, the late Roman centers of
power in Milan, Ravenna, and their environs (see Map 1). The earliest evidence
anywhere in the Mediterranean for the veneration of African martyrs outside of
Africa itself comes from the city of Rome. Already by 354, Bishop Cyprian of
Carthage and the female saints Perpetua and Felicitas were commemorated in the
Depositio martyrum, the earliest surviving calendar of the Roman church.13 Its
inclusion of these Africans is particularly striking, both because the Depositio is
a distinctively local document that makes no attempt to record the feast days of
the saints of the universal church and because Cyprian, Perpetua, and Felicitas
are the only explicitly “foreign” postscriptural saints whose feasts the calendar re-
cords. By the late sixth century both Perpetua and Felicitas had been integrated into
the canon of the Roman Mass, but in general we are poorly informed about their
cult in late antiquity, which seems to have been less extensive than that of Cyprian.14
By contrast, the Carthaginian bishop clearly enjoyed a significant cult in Rome from
at least the fourth century onward. Cyprian’s name appears on a fourth-century
gold-glass medallion, and two contemporary gold-glass plate fragments commem-
orate the North African saint alongside such local Roman martyrs as Peter, Paul,
Lawrence, Hippolytus, and Sixtus.15 By the middle of the fourth century Cyprian’s
feast day was celebrated at the catacombs of Callixtus, which also housed the
earthly remains of Pope Cornelius, a contemporary and correspondent of Cypri-
an’s.16 A close cultic association between the men quickly developed. By the seventh
and early eighth century the Roman church celebrated the joint natales of these two
martyrs on 14 September; and indeed the two may already have shared the same
feast day by the late fourth century, when Jerome observed (somewhat implausibly)
that Cyprian and Cornelius had died on the same day but in different years.17 The
13
Depositio martyrum, xviii Kal. Oct. and Non. Mart., ed. Roberto Valentini and Giuseppe Zucchet-
ti, in Codice topografico della Città di Roma, 4 vols. (Rome, 1940–53), 2:17–28, at pp. 26 (Cyprian)
and 18 (Perpetua and Felicitas).
14
V. L. Kennedy, The Saints of the Canon of the Mass, 2nd ed., Studi di Antichità Cristiana 14 (Vatican
City, 1963), pp. 168–75. As late as the seventh and eighth centuries, Perpetua and Felicitas were not com-
memorated in the Roman evangelistaries edited by Theodor Klauser, Das römische Capitulare Evangelio-
rum: Texte und Untersuchungen zu seiner ältesten Geschichte, 1, Liturgiegeschichtliche Quellen und For-
schungen 28 (Münster, 1935), pp. 13–46 (Typus Π), 58–92 (Λ), 102–30 (Σ), and 140–72 (Δ).
15
Charles Rufus Morey, The Gold-Glass Collection of the Vatican Library with Additional Catalogues
of Other Gold-Glass Collections, ed. Guy Ferrari, Catalogo del Museo Sacro della Biblioteca Apostolica
Vaticana 4 (Vatican City, 1959), nos. 36, 240, and probably 135; and Ruysschaert, “Commémoration,”
p. 467. On gold-glass in general, see Hermann Vopel, Die altchristlichen Goldgläser: Ein Beitrag zur alt-
christlichen Kunst- und Kulturgeschichte, Archäologische Studien zum christlichen Altertum und Mittelal-
ter 5 (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1899); and Stephanie Leigh Smith, “Gold-Glass Vessels of the Late Roman Em-
pire: Production, Context, and Function” (Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers University, 2000).
16
Depositio martyrum, xviii Kal. Oct., ed. Valentini and Zucchetti, p. 26: “Romae celebratur in Calis-
ti.” On the tomb of Cornelius see Louis Reekmans, La tombe du pape Corneille et sa région cémé-
tériale, Roma Sotterranea Cristiana 4 (Vatican City, 1964).
17
Klauser, Das römische Capitulare Evangeliorum, pp. 38–42, 84–88, 123–26; Jerome, De viris inlus-
tribus 67, ed. Ernest Cushing Richardson, Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen
Literatur 14/1 (Leipzig, 1896), p. 38; Delehaye, Origines, p. 263; and Ruysschaert, “Commémoration,”
pp. 460 and 478–79. Cyprian appears to have been the more important of the two, at least in the mind of
Gregory the Great; see Registrum epistularum 2.50, ed. Dag Norberg, CCSL 140–140A (Turnhout,
1982), 1:142–43.
two men quickly found themselves enumerated among the saints of the canon of the
Roman Mass, and in the early seventh century a new fresco depicting the African
bishop beside the Roman pontiff was added as part of the renovations to Corne-
lius’s crypt.18
In addition to those two prominent cults, a handful of other African saints were
also venerated in an area that centered more or less loosely on early-medieval Rome.
For example, the feast of the African martyrs Maxima, Secunda, and Donatilla was
celebrated on 1 August along the Via Prenestina at the thirtieth milestone outside of
the city.19 Farther afield, the titular saints of the cathedral of Gubbio in Umbria are
the Numidian martyrs Marianus and James; their companions Agapius and Secun-
dinus are the patrons of another church in the same city.20 In Rome itself, an eighth-
century lectionary copied for the use of a local priest named Agimund (who served
at the church of Sts. Philip and James, now the Santi Apostoli) contains two Augus-
tinian sermons on the Massa Candida, a group of three hundred martyrs said to
have been burned to a mass of white ash in the African city of Utica (modern Uti-
que, Tunisia).21 These saints had been known in Italy since at least the fifth century,
when Paulinus of Nola made reference to them in a specifically African context; but
the inclusion of two sermons in their honor in Agimund’s lectionary would seem to
indicate that by the eighth century the Utican martyrs had come to be venerated in
Rome as well.22 Perhaps most importantly, though, the city of Rome seems to have
been central to the early development of Augustine’s cult.23 Augustine, of course,
was primarily revered in the West as a prolific theologian rather than as a particu-
larly holy man, and it is therefore fitting that a late-sixth-century fresco from the
Lateran library is probably the earliest surviving depiction of the saint.24 By the
eighth century Augustine’s feast had come to be commemorated in the Gelasian
18
Kennedy, Saints, p. 132; Reekmans, Tombe, pp. 175–84 and figs. 67–68. See also de Rossi, Roma
sotterranea, 1:298–304 and plate VI. The seventh-century De locis sanctis martyrum quae sunt foris
ciuitatis Romae, ed. Valentini and Zucchetti, in Codice topografico, 2:106–31, at p. 111, implies
that Cyprian’s relics had been translated to Rome; this is probably a mistake, but see Ruysschaert,
“Commémoration,” pp. 470–72.
19
Martyrologium Hieronymianum, ed. Henri Quentin and Hippolyte Delehaye, AASS Nov. 2/2 (Brus-
sels, 1931), hereafter cited by title alone, at Kal. Aug., p. 408 with p. 411, n. 59; see also iii Kal. Aug.,
p. 404. On their cult in Africa see below, n. 49.
20
Lanzoni, Diocesi, 1:480.
21
Homilarium Agimundi, ed. Josef Löw, in “Ein stadtrömisches Lektionar des VIII. Jahrhunderts
(Cod. Vatic. lat. No. 3835 und 3836),” Römische Quartalschrift für christliche Altertumskunde und
Kirchengeschichte 37 (1929), 15–39, at p. 30; see also pp. 35–36 (sermons on Cyprian and Perpetua).
22
Paulinus of Nola, Carmen 19, lines 144–48, ed. Wilhelm Hartel, CSEL 30 (Vienna, 1894), p. 123;
Löw, “Stadtrömisches Lektionar,” p. 38.
23
The development of Augustine’s cult deserves a full-length study of its own, but see James J. O’Don-
nell, “The Authority of Augustine,” Augustinian Studies 22 (1991), 7–35; Mark Vessey, “‘Opus im-
perfectum’: Augustine and His Readers, 426–435 A.D.,” Vigiliae Christianae 52 (1998), 264–85; and
Jean-Paul Bouhot, “La transmission d’Hippon à Rome des œuvres de Saint Augustin,” in Donatella Neb-
biai-Dalla Guarda and Jean-François Genest, eds., Du copiste au collectionneur: Mélanges d’histoire des
textes et des bibliothèques en l’honneur d’André Vernet, Bibliologia Elementa ad Librorum Studia Perti-
nentia 18 (Turnhout, 1998), pp. 23–33.
24
See, e.g., Eugippius, Excerpta ex operibus S. Augustini, ed. Pius Knöll, CSEL 9/1 (Vienna, 1885).
On the fresco see Michael Lapidge, The Anglo-Saxon Library (Oxford, 2006), p. 16, n. 62 (my thanks
to James Grebl for this reference); and Henri Leclercq, “Bibliothèques,” in Fernand Cabrol and Henri
sacramentaries.25 The bishop had also clearly joined the ranks of what Peter Brown
has called “the very special dead” by the time his remains were removed from
Hippo, first to Sardinia “on account of the barbarians” (“propter barbaros”)—in
this case probably the Muslim Arabs rather than the Vandals—and then again
from Sardinia to Pavia by the Lombard king Liutprand (712–44).26
As the translation of Augustine’s relics shows, however, Rome had no monopoly on
the outward flow of saints’ cults from Africa to Italy. Though considerably fewer
spread to the north of the peninsula, Paolo Chiesa has noted the frequent association
of Milanese martyrs with Africa in the fourth century.27 Directly or indirectly, Cypri-
an’s cult also quickly spread into northwestern Italy: in the mid-fifth century, Bishop
Maximus II of Turin (ca. 451–65) delivered a homily and a handful of sermons on
Cyprian, and by the first half of the sixth century Ennodius of Pavia had written a
hymn dedicated to the martyr.28 Farther to the east, Cyprian, Perpetua, and Felicitas
Leclercq, eds., Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie, 15 vols. (Paris, 1907–53), 2/1:842–
904, at cols. 869–70 and plate after col. 868.
25
Sacramentarium Gregorianum, ed. Jean Deshusses, in Le sacramentaire grégorien: Ses principales
formes d’après les plus anciens manuscrits, Spicilegium Friburgense 16, 24, and 28 (Fribourg, 1971–
82), 1:318 app. crit., 546–47, 673 app. crit., and 700, 2:51–52 app. crit., 3:138, 142, and 166; Liber
sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. A. Dumas and J. Deshusses, CCSL 159–159A (Turnhout, 1981),
p. 183; Liber sacramentorum Engolismensis, ed. Patrick Saint-Roch, CCSL 159C (Turnhout, 1987),
pp. 187–88 and 257; Sacramentarium Sangallense ii, ed. Kunibert Mohlberg, in Das fränkische Sacra-
mentarium Gelasianum in alamannischer Überlieferung (Codex Sangall. No. 348), St. Galler
Sakramentar-Forschungen I, Liturgiegeschichtliche Quellen 1–2 (Münster, 1918), pp. 204–5; Sacramen-
tarium Modoetiense, ed. Alban Dold and Klaus Gamber, in Das Sakramentar von Monza, Texte und
Arbeiten 1/3 (Beuron, 1957), p. 56*; Bernard Moreton, The Eighth-Century Gelasian Sacramentary:
A Study in Tradition (Oxford, 1976), pp. 152–53; and Kennedy, Saints, p. 70. Augustine’s feast was
also commemorated in the Ambrosian rite; see Sacramentarium triplex, ed. Odilo Heiming, in Corpus
Ambrosiano-liturgicum, 1: Das Sacramentarium Triplex: Die Handschrift C 43 der Zentralbibliothek
Zürich, 2 vols., Liturgiewissenschaftliche Quellen und Forschungen 49 (Münster, 1968), 1:222 and
252–53; Sacramentarium Bergomense, ed. Angelo Paredi and Giuseppe Fassi, Monumenta Bergomensia
6 (Bergamo, 1962), pp. 279–80; and Missale Ambrosianum uetus, ed. Odilo Heiming, in Corpus
Ambrosiano-liturgicum, 2: Das ambrosianische Sakramentar von Biasca: Die Handschrift Mailand Am-
brosiana A 24 bis inf., 1, Liturgiewissenschaftliche Quellen und Forschungen 51 (Münster, 1969), p. 148.
26
Bede, Martyrologium, ed. Quentin, in Martyrologes historiques, pp. 17–119, at p. 109; McCormick,
Origins, p. 297, n. 41. Graham, “Dissemination,” pp. 79–84, cites later medieval traditions that Augus-
tine’s relics were transferred to Sardinia only fifty to seventy years after his death; on the question in general,
see Robert J. Rowland Jr., “The Sojourn of the Body of St. Augustine in Sardinia,” in Joseph C. Schnaubelt
and Frederick Van Fleteren, eds., Augustine in Iconography: History and Legend (New York, 1999), pp.
189–98. The phrase “the very special dead” is from the title of chap. 4, Brown, Cult of the Saints.
27
Chiesa, “Pellegrino,” pp. 35–37. For Tuscany see also Graham, “Dissemination,” pp. 67–68, who
seems to be discussing later traditions.
28
Maximus II of Turin, Homilia 80, PL 57:425–28, and Sermones 74–76 and 78, PL 57:683–92; En-
nodius, Carmen 1, line 12, ed. Friedrich Vogel, MGH Auct. ant. 7 (Berlin, 1885), p. 251. On the attri-
bution to Maximus II see Raymond Étaix, “Trois nouveaux sermons à restituer à la collection du Pseudo-
Maxime,” Revue bénédictine 97 (1987), 28–41, at pp. 37–38. Maximus II’s appear to be the earliest
extant non-African sermons in Cyprian’s honor: Pseudo-Ambrose, Sermo 58, PL 17:722–24 = Maximus,
Sermo 77. Peter Chrysologus, Sermo 129, ed. Alexander Olivar, CCSL 24B (Turnhout, 1982), pp. 793–
95, with the note on p. 792, is thought to be spurious, though Olivar concludes that the text is ancient.
Pseudo-Maximus, Homilia 79 and Sermo 77, are also spurious; see Eligius Dekkers, Clavis Patrum Lati-
norum, 3rd ed., CCSL (Steenbrugge, 1995), nos. 220–21, pp. 80 and 83. Cisalpine Gaul also produced
an early-fifth-century Christian poet named Cyprian, perhaps a further indication of the saint’s popularity
all appeared in the nave mosaics of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna.29 More
surprising is the fact that, outside of Rome, the earliest evidence we have for the
spread of African cults to Italy comes from the city of Verona. There, in the late
fourth century, the local bishop Zeno (himself a Mauretanian by birth) delivered
a sermon to his flock on St. Arcadius of Caesarea (modern Cherchell, Algeria).30
It was to be southern Italy, though—and above all the city of Naples—that main-
tained the strongest and most sustained ties with the African cult of saints. Some early
evidence for this connection comes from the so-called Hieronymian Martyrology, a
notoriously complex text, which appears to have been compiled in Burgundy in the
early seventh century and which combines numerous local calendars with general
martyrologies of Italy, Africa, Gaul, Spain, and the churches of the East into a “uni-
versal” list of martyrs venerated in late-antique Christendom.31 In his painstaking in-
vestigation into the origins of the dioceses of Italy, Francesco Lanzoni identified a
handful of African saints whose cults had spread to Italy by the time this martyrology
was composed, including Felix and Donatus in Apulia and Castus and Emilianus in
Apulia or Capua.32 As in Rome and the north, Cyprian, too, enjoyed an extensive cult
in southern Italy in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages: in the early fifth century,
Paulinus of Nola mentioned the Carthaginian bishop in one of his poems; Cyprian is
said to have figured among the martyrs depicted in the fifth- or sixth-century apse and
dome mosaics from San Prisco in Capua, which were destroyed in 1766 when the
church was restored; and the saint’s feast day is also included in the ninth-century
marble liturgical calendar from Naples.33 Augustine was commemorated in the
in the region before the Vandal conquest; see Charles Pietri and Luce Pietri, Prosopographie de l’Italie
chrétienne (313–604), Prosopographie Chrétienne du Bas-Empire 2 (Rome, 1999), p. 513, “Cyprianus
2.”
29
Friedrich Wilhelm Deichmann, Frühchristliche Bauten und Mosaiken von Ravenna, 2nd ed. (Wies-
baden, 1969; repr. 1995), plates 121 (Cyprian) and 130 (Perpetua and Felicitas).
30
Zeno of Verona, Tractatus 1.39, ed. B. Löfstedt, CCSL 22 (Turnhout, 1971), pp. 107–10. Lanzoni,
Diocesi, 2:919–23, has further identified the Veronese saints Firmus and Rusticus, commemorated in
the Carolingian-era Versus de Verona, ed. Ernst Dümmler, MGH Poetae 1 (Berlin, 1881; repr. Munich,
1978), pp. 118–22, at p. 121, with the homonymous third-century African martyrs.
31
On the work’s textual history see Felice Lifshitz, The Name of the Saint: The Martyrology of Je-
rome and Access to the Sacred in Francia, 627–827 (Notre Dame, Ind., 2006), pp. 13–29; and Pádraig
Ó Riain, “A Northumbrian Phase in the Formation of the Hieronymian Martyrology: The Evidence of
the Martyrology of Tallaght,” Analecta Bollandiana 120 (2002), 311–63, at pp. 312–17. But see also
Jacques Dubois and Jean-Loup Lemaître, Sources et méthodes de l’hagiographie médiévale (Paris,
1993), pp. 106–7; and Jacques Dubois, Les martyrologes du moyen âge latin, Typologie des Sources
du Moyen Âge Occidental 26 (Turnhout, 1978), pp. 29–37.
32
On Castus and Emilianus see Martyrologium Hieronymianum, ii Non. Oct., p. 542 with n. 1 (Apulia
or Capua); and Lanzoni, Diocesi, 1:178–79, 198, 267, and also pp. 255–56. On their cult in Africa see Cyp-
rian, De lapsis 13, ed. Wilhelm Hartel, in Opera omnia, CSEL 3/1 (Vienna, 1868), pp. 246–47; Augustine,
Sermo 285, PL 38:1293–97; Kalendarium antiquissimum ecclesiae Carthaginensis, xi Kal. Jun., PL
13:1220; and Martyrologium Hieronymianum, xi Kal. Jun., p. 267. On Felix and Donatus see Martyrolo-
gium Hieronymianum, Kal. Sept., p. 480 with n. 1, and iii Id. Sept., p. 501 with p. 502, n. 45; and Lanzoni,
Diocesi, 1:284–85. To these Lanzoni adds numerous other saints who, in his estimation, were “con mag-
giore o minore probabilità africani” but who were venerated in Italy as Italians: Diocesi, 2:1097–98.
33
Paulinus, Carmen 19, lines 141–43, ed. Hartel, p. 23; Raffaele Garrucci, Storia della arte cristiana
nei primi otto secoli della chiesa, 6 vols. (Prato, 1872–81), 4:64–65 and plates 254.2–255; and Mal-
lardo, Calendario di Napoli, 14 Sept., p. 24.
same calendar, as were a number of African saints whose feasts were not celebrated in
Rome. In addition to the fifth-century refugee African bishops Quodvultdeus and
Gaudiosus, one of the most prominent of these was the Carthaginian virgin Restituta,
who, according to her vita, was martyred at sea before her body miraculously made
its way to the island of Ischia, in the Bay of Naples.34
Restituta was joined there by two other African saints who were venerated not
only in Naples but across the south. The first of these was the early Christian martyr
Felix of Thibiuca.35 Felix had fallen victim to the Great Persecution in 303, and
Bede’s martyrology—composed in the early eighth century—moves the saint’s trial
and execution from Carthage, where they probably would have taken place, to
Venusia (modern Venosa) in Apulia.36 The earliest extant manuscripts of Felix’s
passio, dating to the eighth or ninth century, similarly relocate the site of Felix’s
martyrdom to Apulia, as did a now-lost manuscript from before 618 transcribed
by Surius in the sixteenth century.37 Another recension of the text, preserved in a
ninth-century manuscript, places the saint’s martyrdom at Nola in Campania.38
At some point the text of Felix’s passion was translated into Greek, and an abbre-
viated (and somewhat confused) version of it survives in the Synaxarium of Con-
stantinople.39 The acts of Felix of Thibiuca also became the basis for a legend dating
to the reign of the Lombard duke Arechis II of Benevento (758–87) that associated
the saint and his companions Septiminus and Januarius with nine other African
martyrs venerated in Italy. The twelve were thought to have been brothers from
34
Mallardo, Calendario di Napoli, 19 Feb. (Quodvultdeus), p. 21; 16 May (Restituta), p. 22; 28 Aug.
(Augustine), p. 23; and 27 Oct. (Gaudiosus), p. 24; perhaps also 7 Feb. (Saturninus), p. 21, and 14 Oct.
(Fortunata), p. 24 (the feast day of Perpetua and Felicitas is not commemorated). On Restituta’s cult see
Peter the Subdeacon, Passio Sanctae Restitutae, ed. Edoardo D’Angelo, in Pietro suddiacono napoletano:
L’opera agiografica (Florence, 2002), pp. 183–99; Graham, “Dissemination,” pp. 72–79; and Lanzoni,
Diocesi, 1:217–18, 2:660 and 689, and also 1:170–71. On Quodvultdeus see above, nn. 1 and 2. On the
identification of Fortunata and Saturninus with the homonymous African martyrs see Lanzoni, Diocesi,
1:218 and 267. A Saturninus is also attributed to Apulia in Martyrologium Hieronymianum, ii. Non.
Oct., p. 542 with n. 1; martyrs of that name are commemorated in several African inscriptions; see Duval,
Loca sanctorum, 1:7–10 and 13–16 (nos. 3 and 6; both Carthage), with discussion at 2:682–83 (the com-
panion of Perpetua); 1:59–67 (nos. 27 and 29; both Uppenna, Byzacena), with discussion at 2:686 and
714 (the martyr from Abitina); and 1:351–53 (no. 167; Rusguniae, Mauretania Caesariensis).
35
Mallardo, Calendario di Napoli, 30 Aug., p. 23; Lanzoni, Diocesi, 1:285–86 and 296–97.
36
Bede, Martyrologium, ed. Quentin, p. 74 with pp. 47–48; Hippolyte Delehaye, “La Passion de
S. Félix de Thibiuca,” Analecta Bollandiana 39 (1921), 241–76, at p. 244. Paul Monceaux, Histoire
littéraire de l’Afrique chrétienne, 7 vols. (Paris, 1901–23), 3:139, writes that the relics of Felix of Thi-
biuca were carried from Africa to Italy at some point in the Vandal or Byzantine period, but he cites no
sources for this statement; his conclusion was accepted by Duval, Loca sanctorum, 2:729.
37
Delehaye, “Passion de S. Félix,” pp. 251 (Venusia in Apulia) and 275 (Cutision in Apulia); for the
dates of the manuscripts see pp. 243 (A; ninth century) and 270 (K; eighth or ninth century). Lanzoni,
Diocesi, 1:296, takes Cutision as a scribal error for Venusia.
38
Delehaye, “Passion de S. Félix,” pp. 257 and 259; for the dates of the manuscripts see pp. 245–46. One
ninth-century manuscript (London, British Library, MS Add. 11880) asserts that Felix was buried in Milan;
but as Milan never claimed Felix, Delehaye, “Passion de S. Félix,” p. 264, takes this to be a scribal error.
39
Synaxarium ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae e codice Sirmondiano nunc Berolinensi adiectis synax-
ariis selectis, ed. Hippolyte Delehaye, AASS Nov. Propylaeum (Brussels, 1902; repr. 1985), hereafter
cited by short title, at 16 Apr. and 30 Aug., cols. 605–6 (synax. select.) and 933; Delehaye, “Passion
de S. Félix,” p. 245. Felix’s voyage from Africa is redirected to Lykaonia (rather than Lucania), where
he is said to have first arrived at the πόλις τῶν Αἰλούρων (city of the cats) rather than at Nerulum.
the African port city of Hadrumetum, sent by the Roman imperial authorities to
Italy where they were executed in four towns throughout Lucania and Apulia.40
By the ninth century, then, Felix of Thibiuca seems to have enjoyed a fairly wide-
spread cult in both the Latin- and the Greek-speaking communities of southern
Italy.
The ninth-century marble liturgical calendar from Naples also provides the ear-
liest unambiguous evidence for the veneration in Italy of the Scillitan martyrs.41
The Scillitans, whose leading figure was Speratus, had been executed in Carthage
in 180 and were among the most illustrious saints from late-antique North Africa.42
Like Felix of Thibiuca, the Scillitan martyrs were venerated by both Latins and
Greeks in medieval southern Italy. Two undated Italo-Byzantine hymns in honor
of Speratus and his companions are preserved in a twelfth-century codex from Mes-
sina in Sicily, while a Greek translation of the acts of the Scillitans is preserved in a
unique codex written by the monk Anastasius and dated by a colophon to 890.43
Anastasius is known to have been active in southern Italy, and, as Fabio Ruggiero
has observed, the translation itself was probably done at some point in the post-
classical period, possibly even in the ninth century.44 Moreover, Speratus also
came to be commemorated in the liturgy of the Great Church in Constantinople,
and it was probably through Sicily or southern Italy that his cult spread there.45
This outpouring of saints’ cults to Italy as a whole is striking not only for its
destinations but also for its geographic origins. Of course, many of the saints
whose cults migrated to Italy were venerated across North Africa, and today
the epigraphic remains of these cults stretch from eastern Algeria to southern
Tunisia. However, the vast majority of the martyrs who came to be the objects
of devotion in late-antique and early-medieval Italy had their original cult centers
not just in North Africa but specifically in the late Roman province of Africa Pro-
consularis (modern northern Tunisia). Indeed, for the most part their cults origi-
nated either in the city of Carthage or in its immediate hinterland. Thus, for ex-
ample, Cyprian, Perpetua and Felicitas, and the Scillitans had all been martyred
in the African metropolis, where their relics remained.46 The exiled bishop Quod-
vultdeus was one of Cyprian’s eventual successors to the Carthaginian see, and
Restituta was also associated with the proconsular capital.47 Felix of Thibiuca
40
Lanzoni, Diocesi, 1:285–88. Their acta are edited in AASS Sept. 1 (Antwerp, 1746; repr. Brussels,
1970), pp. 138–41; see also the Translatio duodecim martyrum, ed. G. Waitz, MGH SS rer. Lang.
(Hannover, 1878), pp. 574–76; and the eleventh-century vita metrica of the martyrs by Archbishop
Alphanus of Salerno, in AASS Sept. 1:144–53.
41
Mallardo, Calendario di Napoli, 17 July (Speratus), p. 23.
42
Their acta are edited by Ruggiero, Atti dei martiri Scilitani, pp. 71–74, with discussion at pp. 43–52.
43
Analecta hymnica Graeca e codicibus eruta Italiae inferioris, ed. Giuseppe Schirò, 13 vols. (Rome,
1966–83), 11:314–33 and 596–99; Ruggiero, Atti dei martiri Scilitani, pp. 77–79, with discussion at p. 61.
44
Ruggiero, Atti dei martiri Scilitani, pp. 60–62.
45
Synaxarium ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae, 17 July, cols. 825–26 (synax. select.).
46
On the cult of Cyprian in Africa see Duval, Loca sanctorum, 1:54–58 (no. 25; Kelibia, Byzacena),
117–20 (nos. 54–55; Haïdra, Africa Proconsularis), 331–37 (no. 157; Kherbet Oum el Ahdam, Mau-
retania Sitifensis), and 2:674–81. On Perpetua see ibid., 1:7–10 and 13–20 (nos. 3 and 6–7; Carthage)
and 2:682–83. On the Scillitans see ibid., 1:7–10 (no. 3; Carthage) and 2:691–92.
47
Quodvultdeus: Victor of Vita, Historia persecutionis 1.15, ed. Petschenig, p. 8. Restituta: Peter the
Subdeacon, Passio S. Restitutae, ed. D’Angelo, p. 192; Graham, “Dissemination,” p. 72.
was probably executed in Carthage as well, and Hippolyte Delehaye has argued
that he was buried in that city in the Basilica Fausti.48 In any case, Thibiuca (mod-
ern az-Zuwaytinah, Tunisia) is less than forty kilometers west of Carthage as the
crow flies. Two other groups of martyrs also came from towns within a fifty-
kilometer radius of the metropolis: Maxima, Secunda, and Donatilla were from
Thuburbo Minus (modern Tebourba, Tunisia), while the martyrs of the Massa
Candida had been burned to death in Utica.49 It is harder to localize the cults
of either Castus and Emilianus or Felix and Donatus, but both feasts were cele-
brated in the calendar of the Carthaginian church.50
Only four of the African saints or groups of saints venerated in late-antique or
early-medieval Italy demonstrably had cults that originated beyond a fifty-kilometer
radius from Carthage. All of them were associated more or less closely with other
important African port cities, but the most curious case is that of the Mauretanian
martyr Arcadius of Caesarea, on whom Bishop Zeno had preached a sermon in
late-fourth-century Verona. The African center of Arcadius’s cult lies far to the
west of that of any of his colleagues. In fact, with the exception of Zeno himself, Ar-
cadius is the only Mauretanian saint known to have had a cult in late-antique or early-
medieval Italy; and whatever the particular devotions of his flock, here one wonders if
Zeno’s interest in and knowledge of the martyr had something to do with the bishop’s
own origins. Of the three remaining non-Carthaginian saints or groups, two were
commemorated in the liturgical calendar of the African metropolis. The most re-
nowned of these was Augustine; the celebration of his depositio in sixth-century
Carthage is the earliest clear evidence for the development of the bishop’s cult outside
his own see of Hippo Regius (modern Annaba, Algeria).51 Of course, even in his own
lifetime Augustine was a very well known figure in the Roman West, and the spread of
his cult to Italy (and elsewhere in the Mediterranean) probably had as much to do
with this fact as with any other. Like that of Augustine, the feast day of Marianus
and James was also celebrated in Carthage, and it was most likely from here that their
cult spread to Italy.52 Conceivably, though, it may have taken a slightly more direct
route: the center of African devotion to the martyrs seems to have been the city of
Cirta in Numidia (modern Constantine, Algeria), whose rather distant port at Rusi-
cade (modern Skikda, Algeria, some sixty-four kilometers to the northeast) was ap-
parently one of the cities from which Africa’s annual grain shipments were sent to
48
Delehaye, “Passion de S. Félix,” pp. 265–66. Epigraphic evidence for Felix’s African cult is provided by
Duval, Loca sanctorum, 1:28–30 (no. 13; Thibiuca, Africa Proconsularis), with discussion at 2:728–30.
49
On the cult of Maxima, Secunda, and Donatilla in Africa see Duval, Loca sanctorum, 1:32–34 (no.
15; Testour, Africa Proconsularis), 138–42 (no. 64; Rouis, near Tébessa), and 222–25 (no. 109; Sila,
Numidia), with discussion at 2:692–93. On the Massa Candida see ibid., 2:700–702.
50
On Castus and Emilianus see n. 32 above, and Duval, Loca sanctorum, 2:726; see also ibid., 1:17–
20 (no. 7 g; Carthage). Felix and Donatus, both of whose names were common in Africa, are associated
with each other on a mensa martyrum from Aïn Melloul, Algeria; see Duval, Loca sanctorum, 1:319–
22 (no. 151; Mauretania Sitifensis), with discussion at 2:718; see also 1:135–38 (no. 63; Henchir el
Hamacha, near Tébessa) and 175–76 (no. 84; Aïoun Berrich, Numidia).
51
Kalendarium ecclesiae Carthaginensis, iv Kal. Sept., PL 13:1224. Epigraphic evidence of Augustine’s
cult in Africa is presented by Duval, Loca sanctorum, 1:182–83 (no. 89; Hippo Regius, Numidia).
52
Kalendarium ecclesiae Carthaginensis, ii Non. Mai., PL 13:1220. Augustine also preached a ser-
mon on the martyrs: Sermo 284, PL 38:1288–93.
Rome down to at least the third century.53 If that was the route that Marianus and
James’s cult took, then they may have been joined by the last of the non-Carthaginian
saints discussed here: Agapius and Secundinus. It is not clear how extensive a cult
these martyrs enjoyed in Africa, though if one did exist, it, too, probably centered
on Cirta. However, given the lack of references to the saints in the surviving African
inscriptions, sermons, and for that matter in the calendar of Carthage, it seems likely
that medieval Italian devotion to Agapius and Secundinus was a product of their tex-
tual association with Marianus and James in those martyrs’ passio.54 For by and
large, the saints whose cults moved to Italy had their origins in the more easterly re-
gions of late Roman Africa, and most were specifically associated with the metropolis
of Carthage itself.
Carthage–Mauretania–Spain
The second major route whereby African saints’ cults spread abroad connected
Carthage and Mauretania to eastern and above all southern Spain (see Map 2). The
earliest evidence for the presence of African cults in Spain comes from the northeastern
province of Tarraconensis where, as in Italy, the first saints to become visible are Cyp-
rian and Perpetua. A fourth-century Christian sarcophagus from Quintanabureba
(some forty kilometers northeast of Burgos) depicts Perpetua’s vision, recounted in
her passio, of her own ascent up a spiritual ladder to heaven.55 Much later, in the me-
dieval period, Perpetua’s feast was celebrated in this same region, and taken together
these facts would seem to suggest that her cult became well established here quite early
on.56 Much the same was true of Cyprian’s cult. Writing in the first decade of the fifth
century, the poet Prudentius mentions the Carthaginian bishop in no fewer than three
of the poems in his Peristephanon, a series of works dedicated to early Christian mar-
tyrs. One of these poems indicates that as early as circa 400, Cyprian’s feast (dies sol-
lemnis), too, was celebrated in Tarraconensis, while a second recounts the story of the
Carthaginian martyr’s passion.57 Prudentius also makes reference to two other African
53
Duval, Loca sanctorum, 1:188–91 (no. 93; near Constantine [Cirta], Numidia), with discussion at
2:702–4; Richard Duncan-Jones, Structure and Scale in the Roman Economy (Cambridge, Eng., 1990),
p. 192; and Paul Reynolds, Trade in the Western Mediterranean, AD 400–700: The Ceramic Evidence,
BAR International Series 604 (Oxford, 1995), pp. 41 and 131. Their martyrdom was said to have tak-
en place, not at Cirta, but at Lambaesis (modern Tazoult-Lambèse, Algeria): Passio SS. Mariani et Ia-
cobi 9, ed. Pio Franchi de’ Cavalieri, Studi e Testi 3 (Rome, 1900), p. 59.
54
Passio SS. Mariani et Iacobi 3 and 11, ed. Franchi de’ Cavalieri, pp. 49–50 and 59–61.
55
Helmut Schlunk, “Zu den frühchristlichen Sarkophagen aus der Bureba (Prov. Burgos),” Madrider
Mitteilungen 6 (1965), 139–66, at pp. 148–61; Helmut Schlunk and Theodor Hauschild, Die Denkmäler
der frühchristlichen und westgotischen Zeit (Mainz am Rhein, 1978), pp. 21, 141–43, and pl. 35; and
Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis 4.3–7, ed. C. van Beek (Nijmegen, 1936), pp. 12–14 (Latin)
and 13–15 (Greek). (My thanks to the anonymous reviewer for Speculum for drawing my attention to
this sarcophagus.)
56
See below, n. 75.
57
Prudentius, Peristephanon, ed. Maurice P. Cunningham, CCSL 126 (Turnhout, 1966), 11, lines
237–38, pp. 377–78 (dies sollemnis); 13, pp. 382–85 (passion); and 4, lines 17–18, p. 286. On Pruden-
tius’s life and work see Anne-Marie Palmer, Prudentius on the Martyrs (Oxford, 1989); Joëlle Soler,
“Religion et récit de voyage: Le Peristephanon de Prudence et le De reditu suo de Rutilius Namatia-
nus,” Revue d’études augustiniennes et patristiques 51 (2005), 297–326; Pierre-Yves Fux, Les sept passions
martyrs or groups of martyrs in the Peristephanon, though it seems unlikely that either
enjoyed a Spanish cult in the fifth century. In his account of Cyprian’s passion, the poet
indicates that a popular story (fama) associated the Carthaginian bishop with the
Massa Candida, while in another piece Prudentius reveals that by the turn of the
fifth century St. Cassian of Tingi (modern Tangier, Morocco) was also known in
the Spanish northeast.58 However, neither of those allusions provides unambiguous
evidence for the active cult of either saint in contemporary Spain: Prudentius had spent
time in Italy, both at the imperial court and in Rome, and given that the poet’s younger
contemporary Paulinus of Nola had also associated Cyprian and the Massa Candida,
the fama to which Prudentius refers could just as easily have been Italian as Tarragon-
ese.59 More importantly, neither Cassian nor the Utican martyrs appear in any of the
earliest liturgical calendars from medieval Spain, an absence that suggests either that
their cults proved ephemeral or that they were never established there.
Apart from Prudentius, all of the earliest textual evidence for the Spanish cults of
African saints dates to the Visigothic period or later, and most of it comes from the
southern and central regions of the peninsula. As in the northeast, Cyprian’s cult
appears to have been well established in the south by the seventh century.60 The
author of the Vitas Patrum Emeretensium actively promoted the bishop’s cult in
Mérida, while Isidore of Seville devoted a short poem to the martyr and indicated
that the saint’s cult was celebrated liturgically in seventh-century Spain.61 The Span-
ish hymn in Cyprian’s honor probably dates to this period as well.62 Similarly, the
text of the martyr’s Spanish mass indicates that “African Carthage preserves his
de Prudence, Paradosis 46 (Fribourg, 2003); Christian Gnilka, Prudentiana, 3 vols. (Munich, 2000–2003);
and Michael Roberts, Poetry and the Cult of the Martyrs: The Liber Peristephanon of Prudentius
(Ann Arbor, Mich., 1993). On the cult of Cyprian in Spain in general, see Díaz y Díaz, “Culto de
San Cipriano,” and García Rodríguez, Culto de los santos, pp. 185–87. Already in the fourth
century Bishop Pacianus of Barcelona was well versed in Cyprian’s writings; see Pacianus, Epistulae,
ed. Lisardo Rubio Fernández, in San Paciano: Obras (Barcelona, 1958), pp. 48–134.
58
Prudentius, Peristephanon 13, lines 76–87 (Massa Candida), and 4, lines 45–48 (Cassian), ed.
Cunningham, pp. 384 and 287.
59
See also Palmer, Prudentius, pp. 236 and 257.
60
The three fragmentary sixth- or seventh-century liturgical calendars from Spain contain no African
saints, but the month of September is missing from all three; see José Vives, Inscripciones cristianas de
la España romana y visigoda, nos. 333 (Carmona), 334 (Itálica), and 335 (Alcalá la Real) (Barcelona,
1942), pp. 113–15. For positive evidence of Cyprian’s cult in the south see below, n. 61. On his
late-seventh- or early-eighth-century cult in the northeast see Oracional visigótico, ed. José Vives, Monu-
menta Hispaniae Sacra, Serie Litúrgica, 1 (Barcelona, 1946), pp. 374–75.
61
Paul the Deacon, Vitas sanctorum Patrum Emeretensium 4.10, ed. Maya Sánchez, p. 45; Isidore of Se-
ville, Versus 10, ed. José María Sánchez Martín, CCSL 113A (Turnhout, 2000), p. 221 (= no. 9 in the edi-
tion of Alfonso Ortega, “Los ‘Versus Isidori,’” Helmántica 12 [1961], 261–99, at p. 278); and Isidore, De
ecclesiasticis officiis 1.35.2, ed. Christopher M. Lawson, CCSL 113 (Turnhout, 1989), p. 40. In the third
century Cyprian himself had written a letter to the people of Mérida, León, and Astorga: Cyprian, Epistula
67, ed. Wilhelm Hartel, in Opera omnia, CSEL 3/2 (Vienna, 1871), pp. 735–43.
62
Clemens Blume, ed., Hymnodia Gotica: Die mozarabischen Hymnen des alt-spanischen Ritus 107,
Analecta Hymnica Medii Aevi 27 (Leipzig, 1897), pp. 152–53, as emended by Birgitta Thorsberg,
Études sur l’hymnologie mozarabe, Studia Latina Stockholmiensia 8 (Stockholm, 1962), pp. 155–
56. On the date see Joseph Szövérffy, Iberian Latin Hymnody: Survey and Problems, 2nd ed., Medieval
Classics Texts and Studies 29 (Turnhout, 1998), p. 36; Justo Perez de Urbel, “Origen de los himnos
mozárabes,” Bulletin hispanique 28 (1926), 5–21, 113–39, 209–45, and 305–20, at pp. 226–27.
glorious ashes (Illius quippe gloriosos cineres retinet Africana Carthago)” and so
likely dates to before the translation of Cyprian’s relics to the Carolingian Empire
in 801.63 Devotion to the saint continued into the Islamic period: by the tenth cen-
tury Cyprian’s cult appears to have become widespread throughout the Iberian
Peninsula, and the saint’s feast day is celebrated in all of the surviving tenth- and
eleventh-century Spanish calendars.64 By the seventh or eighth century Augustine
also seems to have enjoyed at least a nascent cult in southern Spain, though all
of the solid evidence for his liturgical commemoration appears to date to the period
after the Islamic invasion.65
The southern or south-central regions of the peninsula also appear to have been
where the cults of Speratus, Siriacus and Paula, and Martiana of Caesarea first took
root before slowly spreading north of the Tajo River basin. The cult of Speratus, for
example, first becomes visible in Muslim-held Toledo at the very end of the eighth
century. By this point, the saint’s cult was already fully developed: in the course of a
vitriolic exchange with Alcuin over the Adoptionist question, the Toledan metro-
politan Elipandus made reference to a liturgical prayer used in the Spanish church
to honor the saint on his feast day.66 The text of the Spanish hymn dedicated to
63
Liber Mozarabicus sacramentorum, ed. Marius Férotin, in Le Liber Mozarabicus sacramentorum
et les manuscrits mozarabes, Bibliotheca Ephemerides Liturgicae, Subsidia, 78; Instrumenta Liturgica
Quarreriensia 4 (Rome, 1912), cols. 421–25 and 833–34, at col. 424; García Rodríguez, Culto de los
santos, pp. 186–87. By the time this mass was composed, the text of Cyprian’s passion had clearly
made its way to Spain, though in his study of the early-medieval Spanish passionarium Angel Fábrega
Grau concludes that it had done so only after the Islamic conquest; see Pasionario hispánico (siglos
VII–XI), 2 vols., Monumenta Hispaniae Sacra, Serie Litúrgica, 6 (Madrid, 1953–55), 1:189–90.
64
José Vives and Angel Fábrega Grau, “Calendarios hispánicos anteriores al siglo XII,” Hispania
sacra 2 (1949), 119–46 and 339–80; R. Dozy, ed., Le calendrier de Cordoue, Medieval Iberian Penin-
sula Texts and Studies 1 (Leiden, 1961), 14 Sept., p. 139; and Díaz y Díaz, “Culto de San Cipriano,”
pp. 35–36. Cyprian was also included in a fragmentary ninth-century Spanish abbreviation of the Mar-
tyrologium Hieronymianum; see Heribert Plenkers, Untersuchungen zur Überlieferungsgeschichte der
ältesten lateinischen Mönchsregeln, Quellen und Untersuchungen zur lateinischen Philologie des Mit-
telalters 1/3 (Munich, 1906), pp. 85–100, at p. 96. Three notices in the Latin translation of Recemund’s
calendar indicate that Cyprian was the patron of a church and a monastery in Córdoba; see Calendrier
de Cordoue, ed. Dozy, 26 July, p. 117; 22 Nov., p. 169; and 9 Dec., p. 179. See Díaz y Díaz, “Culto de
San Cipriano,” pp. 34–35, but also É. Lévi-Provençal, Histoire de l’Espagne musulmane, 3 vols. (Paris,
1950–53), 1:78–79; and Francisco Javier Simonet, Historia de los mozárabes de España, Memorias de
la Real Academia de la Historia 13 (Madrid, 1903), pp. 248–49.
65
Isidore, Versus 7, ed. Sánchez Martín, p. 219 (= Isidore, Versus 6, ed. Ortega, pp. 275–76); Cróni-
ca mozárabe de 754: Edición crítica y traducción 23, ed. José Eduardo López Pereira, Textos Medie-
vales 58 (Zaragoza, 1980), p. 44; García Rodríguez, Culto de los santos, p. 342; Vives and Fábrega
Grau, “Calendarios hispánicos,” nos. 2–3 (Albelda, 976, and San Millán de la Cogolla, 994),
p. 144; no. 5 (Silos, 1052), p. 359; no. 6 (Compostela, 1055), p. 365; no. 7 (León, tenth or eleventh
century), p. 371; and no. 8 (Silos, pre-1067), p. 377; see also no. 4 (Silos, before 1039), p. 353, into
which Augustine is a later interpolation. Augustine’s feast is included in the Latin translation—but
not the Arabic version—of Calendrier de Cordoue, ed. Dozy, 28 Aug., p. 131. For Augustine’s Spanish
cult see also Liber Mozarabicus sacramentorum, ed. Férotin, cols. 412–21 and 833; Hymnodia Gotica
93, ed. Blume, pp. 133–34; Szövérffy, Iberian Latin Hymnody, pp. 61–62; Perez de Urbel, “Origen de
los himnos,” pp. 225–26; Fábrega Grau, Pasionario hispánico, 1:231 and 272; and Manuel C. Díaz y
Díaz, “Literary Aspects of the Visigothic Liturgy,” in Edward James, ed., Visigothic Spain: New Ap-
proaches (Oxford, 1980), pp. 61–76, at pp. 66–67.
66
Elipandus, Epistula ad Albinum (= Alcuin, Epistola 182), ed. Ernst Dümmler, MGH Epp. 4 (Ber-
lin, 1895), pp. 300–307, at p. 305. The text of this prayer was also included (with only minor
Speratus may similarly date to the eighth century or earlier.67 Indeed, the eighth
century was probably critical for the spread of the martyr’s cult. As late as circa
700 Speratus was apparently not universally venerated in Spain; at least he is not
mentioned in the libellus orationum of Verona, which represents the liturgy
of the northeastern diocese of Tarragona on the eve of the Islamic invasion.68 By
the tenth century, though, the martyr’s feast day had come to be included in the
northern liturgical calendars from Albelda and San Millán de la Cogolla (both in
La Rioja), as well as in the astronomical and agronomical calendar that Bishop
Recemund of Elvira prepared for the Muslim caliph of Córdoba.69 Moreover, along
with Cyprian, Speratus is one of only two African saints whose feasts were unam-
biguously celebrated at the Castilian monastery of Silos before 1039.70 The cult of
Siriacus and Paula also appears to have been strongest in the south, where the mar-
tyrs probably already had multiple cult centers by the tenth century. The Arabic ver-
sion of Recemund’s Córdoban calendar places their execution specifically in Alme-
ría, on Spain’s southern Mediterranean shore, while the thirteenth-century Latin
translation relocates the site of their martyrdom up the coast to Cartagena (perhaps
simply an error for Carthage) and further notes that their feast day was celebrated in
the mountains north of Córdoba.71 Earlier, in the ninth century, the Frankish mar-
tyrologist Usuard had associated these same two saints with the more westerly Med-
iterranean port of Málaga.72 By contrast, though knowledge of the saints had
clearly begun to spread north by the early eleventh century, no surviving northern
calendar commemorates Siriacus and Paula until 1052, by which point their feast
had been integrated into the liturgical year at Silos. Three years later the martyrs
variations) in Cisneros’s 1502 edition of the Mozarabic breviary; see PL 86:1164–65; and Donald A.
Bullough, “What Has Ingeld to Do with Lindisfarne?” Anglo-Saxon England 22 (1993), 93–125, at
p. 112, n. 65. The text of the officium of Speratus and Marina in Liber Mozarabicus sacramentorum,
ed. Férotin, cols. 577–80 and 826, makes reference only to Marina. On the cult of Speratus and the
Scillitans in Spain see in general Ruggiero, Atti dei martiri Scilitani, p. 52; and García Rodríguez, Culto
de los santos, pp. 184–85.
67
Hymnodia Gotica 170, ed. Blume, p. 243; Fábrega Grau, Pasionario hispánico, 1:220; García Ro-
dríguez, Culto de los santos, p. 185; Perez de Urbel, “Origen de los himnos,” pp. 214–15; and Szövérf-
fy, Iberian Latin Hymnody, p. 37.
68
Oracional visigótico, ed. Vives, p. xxxiv; García Rodríguez, Culto de los santos, p. 185.
69
Vives and Fábrega Grau, “Calendarios hispánicos,” nos. 2–3 (Albelda, 976, and San Millán de la
Cogolla, 994), p. 144; Calendrier de Cordoue, ed. Dozy, 19 July (Arabic) and 18 July (Latin), p. 115.
70
Vives and Fábrega Grau, “Calendarios hispánicos,” no. 4 (Silos, before 1039), p. 353; the other Afri-
can saints commemorated in this calendar are later interpolations. Speratus’s feast day continued to be
celebrated across northern Spain in the eleventh century; see Vives and Fábrega Grau, “Calendarios his-
pánicos,” no. 5 (Silos, 1052), p. 359; no. 6 (Compostela, 1055), p. 365; no. 7 (León, tenth or eleventh
century), p. 371; and no. 8 (Silos, before 1067), p. 377. Speratus’s passion is preserved in two tenth-
century manuscripts (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS nouv. acq. lat. 2180, and Madrid, Bi-
blioteca Nacional de España, MS 822); see Fábrega Grau, Pasionario hispánico, 1:220.
71
Calendrier de Cordoue, ed. Dozy, 17 June (Arabic) and 18 June (Latin), p. 99: “et festum utriusque
[est] in montanis sancti Pauli in iufi Cordube.” Dozy notes (p. 98, n. 3) that iufi, an emendation for uifi,
seems to be a Latin transcription of the Arabic jūf (north). The martyrs’ Mozarabic hymn probably
dates to the tenth century; see Hymnodia Gotica 172, ed. Blume, p. 245; and Szövérffy, Iberian Latin
Hymnody, pp. 61–62.
72
Usuard, Martyrologium, ed. Jacques Dubois, in Le martyrologe d’Usuard, Subsidia Hagiographica
40 (Brussels, 1965), p. 249; García Rodríguez, Culto de los santos, p. 183.
had still not been added to the calendar of Compostela.73 All of this would seem to
suggest that devotion to these saints was initially a southern phenomenon and that
their cult was still making its way north as late as the tenth and early eleventh cen-
turies. Much the same could be said of Martiana of Caesarea, whose cult seems to
have spread from the Muslim-dominated south to the Christian kingdoms of the
north at about the same time, while the cult of Arcadius of Caesarea, later associated
with Osuna (roughly seventy-five kilometers southwest of Córdoba), does not ap-
pear to have been particularly widespread in Spain in the early-medieval period.74
Of course, a number of cults also seem to have maintained a distinctively northern
flavor down to the central Middle Ages. The feast of Perpetua and Felicitas, for exam-
ple, was consistently included in the late-tenth- and eleventh-century northern calen-
dars, but it was apparently not celebrated in Córdoba.75 The same was true of Victor
of Caesarea, who came to be associated with Cerezo.76 This may also have been the
73
Vives and Fábrega Grau, “Calendarios hispánicos,” no. 5 (Silos, 1052), p. 358; cf. no. 4 (Silos, before
1039), and see also nos. 1 (Ripoll, tenth or eleventh century), 2–3 (Albelda, 976, and San Millán de la Co-
golla, 994), 6 (Compostela, 1055), and 7 (León, tenth or eleventh century). Siriacus and Paula’s feast day
was 18 June, but the two saints do not feature in the (complete) June fragment of the tenth- or
early-eleventh-century calendar from Barcelona; see José Janini, “Dos calendarios de Barcelona (siglos X
y XIV),” Revista catalana de teologia 3 (1978), 313–25, at p. 314. By the early eleventh century the passio
of Siriacus and Paula had been included in a sanctoral from the Castilian monastery of San Pedro de Car-
deña; see Fábrega Grau, Pasionario hispánico, 1:25–29; and Balduin de Gaiffier, “La passion des SS. Cy-
riaque et Paule,” Analecta Bollandiana 60 (1942), 1–15, at pp. 3–4 (where their inclusion in the passionary
is dated to the late tenth century). Their passio is edited by Fábrega Grau, Pasionario hispánico, 2:387–91;
and by de Gaiffier, “Passion des SS. Cyriaque et Paule,” pp. 10–15.
74
Calendrier de Cordoue, ed. Dozy, 11 July, p. 111. Martiana is mentioned in a tenth-century Notitia
martirum from the Rioja; see José Vives, “El supuesto Pasionario hispánico de San Millán de la Cogolla,”
Hispania sacra 12 (1959), 445–53, at p. 452. Her feast was also added to the Silos liturgical calendar
between 1052 and 1067; see Vives and Fábrega Grau, “Calendarios hispánicos,” no. 8 (Silos, before
1067), p. 377, and also the much-interpolated no. 7 (León, tenth or eleventh century), p. 371. Her
hymn (Hymnodia Gotica 152, ed. Blume, pp. 217–18) is included only in Cisneros’s 1502 collection.
Her passio is edited by Boninus Mombritius in Sanctuarium seu vitae sanctorum, 2 vols. (Paris, 1910;
repr. New York, 1978), 2:256–57. She was later associated with Toledo, but that association seems to
be very late; see Martyrologium Romanum, ed. Delehaye, iv Id. Jul., p. 283; Pseudo-Flavius Lucius Dex-
ter, Chronicon, s.a. 155, PL 31:335; and AASS Jan. 1 (Antwerp, 1643; repr. Brussels, 1965), pp. 568–69.
The association of Arcadius with Osuna is similarly late; see Pseudo-Flavius Lucius Dexter, Chronicon, s.
a. 110, PL 31:297; and AASS Jan. 1:721. His acta are edited in AASS Jan. 1:721–23.
75
The feast of Perpetua and Felicitas is included in Vives and Fábrega Grau, “Calendarios hispánicos,”
nos. 2–3 (Albelda, 976, and San Millán de la Cogolla, 994), p. 142; no. 5 (Silos, 1052), p. 357; no. 7
(León, tenth or eleventh century), p. 369; and no. 8 (Silos, before 1067), p. 375. It is also recorded in
José Janini, “Dos calendarios emilianenses del siglo XI,” Hispania sacra 15 (1962), 177–95, at no. 1,
p. 180, and no. 2, p. 185.
76
Vives and Fábrega Grau, “Calendarios hispánicos,” nos. 2–3 (Albelda, 976, and San Millán de la
Cogolla, 994), p. 144; no. 5 (Silos, 1052), p. 359; no. 6 (Compostela, 1055), p. 365; no. 7 (León, tenth
or eleventh century), p. 371; and no. 8 (Silos, before 1067), p. 377; see also no. 4 (Silos, before 1039),
p. 353, where Victor is a later interpolation. On the association with Cerezo and the reimagining of
Victor as a Spanish saint see Joseph de Guibert, “Saint Victor de Césarée,” Analecta Bollandiana 24
(1905), 257–64. This seems not to have happened yet in the eleventh century; see Vives, “Supuesto Pa-
sionario,” p. 453; and Passio S. Victoris martyris Caesareae 3, ed. Bollandists, in Catalogus codicum
hagiographicorum Latinorum antiquiorum saeculo XVI qui asservantur in Bibliotheca Nationali Pari-
siensi, 3 vols., Subsidia Hagiographica 2 (Brussels, 1889), 3:504 (for the date and provenance of the
manuscript see p. 476).
case with the cults of Salsa of Tipasa, Typasius, and Candida, evidence for whose cults
also emerges in the northern Spanish kingdoms over the course of the tenth and elev-
enth centuries.77 By contrast, the African soldier-martyrs Fabius of Caesarea and even
Marcellus of Tingi (later linked to León) had become so widely venerated in Spain by
the tenth century that it is impossible to say where their cults had first taken root.78
As with the flow of saints’ cults between Africa and Italy, the geographical origins
of these Spanish-bound cults is striking. As I have noted, Cyprian, Perpetua and Fe-
licitas, and Speratus were primarily Carthaginian saints, and the same seems to have
been true of the virgin Candida and her companions.79 Siriacus and Paula were also
from Africa Proconsularis, and though apparently citizens of Urusi (modern Henchir
Sougda, Tunisia), they were put to death in the unidentified coastal city of Tremen-
ta.80 However, about half of the African saints whose cults migrated to Spain were
Mauretanian in origin: Arcadius, Fabius, Martiana, and Victor were all originally
from Caesarea in Mauretania; Salsa was from Tipasa, slightly to the east of Caesarea
along the Mediterranean coast; Typasius was executed in Tigava in Mauretania
(modern El Kherba, Algeria); and Cassian and Marcellus were from Tingi.81 It would
77
On Salsa see Vives and Fábrega Grau, “Calendarios hispánicos,” no. 5 (Silos, 1052), p. 357; no. 7
(León, tenth or eleventh century), p. 369; and no. 8 (Silos, pre-1067), p. 376; Janini, “Dos calendarios emi-
lianenses,” no. 1, p. 180, and no. 2, p. 187; and Fábrega Grau, Pasionario hispánico, 1:231 and 272. On
Typasius see Vives and Fábrega Grau, “Calendarios hispánicos,” no. 7, p. 368, and no. 8, p. 374; Passio
S. Typasii veterani, ed. Charles de Smedt, Joseph de Backer, Fernand van Ortroy, and Joseph van den
Gheyn, in “Passiones tres martyrum Africanorum SS. Maximae, Donatillae et Secundae, S. Typasii veterani
et S. Fabii vexilliferi,” Analecta Bollandiana 9 (1890), 107–34, at pp. 109 and 116–23; on the connections
between this manuscript (Paris, BnF, MS lat. 5306) and the tenth-century passionaria of Cardeña and Silos
see Guy Philippart, “Une recension franco-hispanique des Acta Cypriani,” Analecta Bollandiana 90
(1972), 142. On Candida see Vives and Fábrega Grau, “Calendarios hispánicos,” no. 8, p. 378; Janini,
“Dos calendarios emilianenses,” no. 2, p. 191; and Vives, “Supuesto Pasionario,” p. 452. Felix of Thibiuca
also enters the Spanish calendar at this time, but probably from Italy rather than directly from Africa; see
Vives and Fábrega Grau, “Calendarios hispánicos,” no. 4 (Silos, pre-1039), p. 353, and no. 8 (Silos,
pre-1067), p. 377; and Fábrega Grau, Pasionario hispánico, 1:231, 272, and (on other Italians) 228–29.
78
Fábrega Grau, Pasionario hispánico, 1:55–57; Vives and Fábrega Grau, “Calendarios hispánicos,”
nos. 2–3 (Albelda, 976, and San Millán de la Cogolla, 994), pp. 144–45; no. 5 (Silos, 1052), pp. 359–
60; no. 6 (Compostela, 1055), pp. 365–66; no. 7 (León, tenth or eleventh century), pp. 371–72; and no.
8 (Silos, pre-1067), pp. 377–78; Calendrier de Cordoue, ed. Dozy, 31 July, p. 117 (the Arabic has
“Yāqūb” for the “Favius” of the Latin translation), and 30 Oct., p. 157. As late as the eleventh century
Marcellus was consistently linked with Tingi in the Spanish calendars; in addition to those cited above
in this note see Vives and Fábrega Grau, “Calendarios hispánicos,” no. 4 (Silos, before 1039), p. 354;
and Vives, “Supuesto Pasionario,” pp. 448 and 452. On Marcellus’s Spanish cult see also Pedro Cas-
tillo Maldonado, “Angelorum participes: The Cult of the Saints in Late Antique Spain,” in Kim Bowes
and Michael Kulikowski, eds., Hispania in Late Antiquity: Current Perspectives, The Medieval and
Early Modern Iberian World 24 (Leiden, 2005), pp. 151–88, at pp. 161–62.
79
On Candida and her companions see Vives, “Supuesto Pasionario,” p. 452.
80
De Gaiffier, “Passion des SS. Cyriaque et Paule,” pp. 10–11 and 14, with discussion at pp. 4–6.
Duval, Loca sanctorum, 1:71–72 (no. 32; Pavillier, Byzacena), with discussion at 2:746, may perhaps
preserve an epigraphic trace of Siriacus’s African cult, with or without Paula.
81
On Arcadius see Zeno of Verona, Tractatus 1.39; accepted by Dekkers, Clavis Patrum Latinorum,
no. 2059, p. 679. On Fabius see Martyrologium Lugdunense, ed. Quentin, in Martyrologes historiques,
pp. 131–221, at p. 205; Vives and Fábrega Grau, “Calendarios hispánicos,” no. 7 (León, tenth or elev-
enth century), p. 371; and Passio S. Fabii Vexilliferi, ed. de Smedt et al., in “Passiones tres martyrum
Africanorum,” pp. 109–10 and 123–34. On Martiana see Martyrologium Hieronymianum, v Id. Jul.,
p. 368; and Usuard, Martyrologium, ed. Dubois, pp. 157 and 266. On Victor see de Guibert, “Victor
seem, then, that the saints whose cults moved to Spain had three main points of
geographic origin. The easternmost one was concentrated very closely on Carthage
and its immediate hinterland; the central one was more diffuse, but focused loosely
on Caesarea in Mauretania; and the westernmost one consisted specifically of the
Mauretanian city of Tingi.
Gaul and the East

In contrast to Italy and Spain, the African cult of saints seems to have had only
very limited appeal in Gaul and the East in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages
(see Map 3). The early transmission of saints’ cults to Gaul in particular seems to
have been both fairly short-lived and largely restricted to Carthaginians of the high-
est profile. In his Dialogues, for example, the Aquitainian author Sulpicius Severus
indicates that a traveler stopping over in Africa might visit the loca sanctorum in
Carthage, and above all venerate the relics of Cyprian.82 Severus’s younger contem-
porary Prosper of Aquitaine referred both to Cyprian and to Perpetua and Felicitas
in his chronicle.83 Much later, in the sixth century, Cyprian once again merited a
reference in Gregory of Tours’s In gloria martyrum.84 An “authentic” from the sev-
enth or eighth century attests to the legitimacy of some of Cyprian’s relics in the
Sens cathedral treasury.85 In the eighth century, Sens also claimed to have relics
de Césarée,” pp. 260–62. On Salsa see Passio S. Salsae martyris Tipasitanae, ed. Bollandists, in Cata-
logus codicum hagiographicorum, 1:344–52; for evidence of her African cult see Duval, Loca sancto-
rum, 1:358–65 (nos. 170–72; Tipasa, Mauretania Caesariensis), with discussion at 2:697–700; and
also Victor Saxer, “Die Ursprünge des Märtyrerkultes in Afrika,” Römische Quartalschrift für christ-
liche Altertumskunde und Kirchengeschichte 79 (1984), 1–11, at p. 8. On Typasius see Passio S. Ty-
pasii, ed. de Smedt et al., p. 116; to judge from this passio, the inscription edited in Duval, Loca sanc-
torum, 1:387–89 (no. 183; Aïn Defla, Mauretania Caesariensis), with discussion at 2:722, probably
commemorates another martyr of the same name. On Cassian see Prudentius, Peristephanon 4, lines
45–46, ed. Cunningham, p. 287; see also Hippolyte Delehaye, “Les Actes de S. Marcel le centurion,”
Analecta Bollandiana 41 (1923), 257–87, at pp. 277–78; and François Dolbeau, “À propos du texte de
la ‘Passio Marcelli centurionis,’” Analecta Bollandiana 90 (1972), 329–35, at pp. 331–32, both of
whom observe that Cassian’s extant passio is largely derivative of that of Marcellus of Tingi. The Cas-
sian commemorated in Duval, Loca sanctorum, 1:271 (no. 130; Henchir Akrib, Numidia), with discus-
sion at 2:689, could be an eponymous Italian saint. On Marcellus see Balduin de Gaiffier, “S. Marcel
de Tanger ou de Léon? Évolution d’une légende,” Analecta Bollandiana 61 (1943), 116–39; revisited in
idem, “À propos de S. Marcel le centurion,” Archivos leoneses 45–46 (1969), 13–23, and “Un nouveau
témoin de la passion de S. Marcel le centurion,” Analecta sacra Tarraconensia 43 (1970), 93–96.
82
Sulpicius Severus, Dialogi 1.3.2, ed. Carl Halm, CSEL 1 (Vienna, 1866), p. 154; see also 2.17.5,
p. 215.
83
Prosper Tiro, Epitoma chronicon, s.aa. 204 and 255, ed. Theodor Mommsen, MGH Auct. ant. 9
(Berlin, 1892), pp. 434 and 440.
84
Gregory of Tours, In gloria martyrum 93, ed. Bruno Krusch, 2nd ed., MGH SS rer. Merov. 1/2
(Hannover, 1969), p. 100; see also idem, Historiae 1.32, ed. Krusch and Levison, p. 24. Perpetua
and Felicitas are notably absent.
85
See Albert Bruckner and Robert Marichal, eds., Chartae Latinae antiquiores: Facsimile-Edition of
the Latin Charters prior to the Ninth Century, no. 682.46 (Olten, 1954–), 19:50; and McCormick,
Origins, p. 297. McCormick also points to five additional relics in the same collection of potentially
African origins (ibid., p. 297, n. 42). Intriguingly, the ninth-century sacramentary used at Sens includes
a litany that (uniquely) makes reference to the African saint Fulgentius of Ruspe; see Sacramentarium
Gregorianum, ed. Deshusses, 3:166. None of the eleven relic authentics from the abbey of Saint-Pierre
of Augustine of Hippo, as did Notre-Dame-de-Valère in Sion, Switzerland—though
again, the movement of Augustine’s body from Hippo to Sardinia and then to Pavia
presumably means that the relics had made their way to Gaul across the Alps from
Italy rather than directly across the Mediterranean from Africa.86
However, even the cults of such high-profile Africans as Cyprian, Perpetua and
Felicitas, and Augustine do not seem to have been particularly prominent in early-
medieval Gaul. Indeed, in the Merovingian period the focus of the Gallic cult of
martyrs seems for the most part to have trended toward the veneration of locally
produced saints rather than martyrs imported from abroad or saints of the universal
church, including even the Virgin, Peter, Paul, and Stephen.87 Not until the ninth
century, when Charlemagne secured the translation of Cyprian’s relics from Car-
thage to the Frankish empire, did the African bishop seem to excite much enthusi-
asm in Gaul.88 Neither Cyprian nor any other African saint appears among the pa-
trons of late-antique and early-medieval Gallic churches surveyed by Eugen Ewig.89
Similarly, the calendar composed by Bishop Perpetuus of Tours (d. 491) and preserved
in Gregory’s History would seem to indicate that not a single African saint’s feast
day was officially celebrated in the late-fifth-century Touraine.90 Nor are any Afri-
cans included in the surviving fragment of a late-seventh- or early-eighth-century
calendar from Corbie or Luxeuil. Here only the feasts from 1 January to 2 August
survive, and so it is impossible to say whether Augustine or Cyprian was originally
commemorated, but Perpetua and Felicitas (whose canonical feast day was 7
March) were not.91 In fact, not until the eighth and early ninth century is there pos-
itive evidence for the inclusion of Perpetua, Felicitas, and Augustine in the handful
of surviving liturgical calendars from the Frankish kingdoms.92
de Solignac dating to the ninth century or earlier clearly pertain to African saints; see Jean-Loup Le-
maître, “Reliques et authentiques de reliques de l’abbaye Saint-Pierre de Solignac,” Bulletin de la Soci-
été nationale des antiquaires de France (1985), pp. 115–37.
86
On Sens see Bruckner and Marichal, eds., Chartae Latinae antiquiores, nos. 682.14 (eighth cen-
tury) and 682.45 (seventh or eighth century), 19:43 and 49; and McCormick, Origins, p. 297. On
Sion see Bruckner and Marichal, eds., Chartae Latinae antiquiores, no. 177 (eighth century, now
lost), 2:133. A Sermo in depositione S. Augustini, ed. August Engelbrecht, CSEL 21 (Vienna, 1891),
pp. 330–34, is attributed to the fifth-century bishop Faustus of Riez, but this attribution is dubious;
see Dekkers, Clavis Patrum Latinorum, no. 973, p. 315.
87
Alan Thacker, “Loca sanctorum: The Significance of Place in the Study of the Saints,” in Alan
Thacker and Richard Sharpe, eds., Local Saints and Local Churches in the Early Medieval West (Ox-
ford, 2002), pp. 1–43, at pp. 25–29; Ian Wood, “Constructing Cults in Early Medieval France: Local
Saints and Churches in Burgundy and the Auvergne 400–1000,” ibid., pp. 155–87.
88
See above, n. 6.
89
Eugen Ewig, “Die Kathedralpatrozinien im römischen und im fränkischen Gallien,” in his Spätan-
tikes und fränkisches Gallien: Gesammelte Schriften (1952–1973), ed. Hartmut Atsma, 2 vols., Bei-
hefte der Francia 3 (Munich, 1979), 2:260–317, and “Beobachtungen zur Frühgeschichte des Bistums
Köln,” ibid., 2:126–53, esp. p. 132.
90
Gregory of Tours, Historiae 10.31, ed. Krusch and Levison, p. 530.
91
Kalendarium Corbeiense uel Luxouiense, ed. André Wilmart, in Dictionnaire d’archéologie chré-
tienne et de liturgie, 3/2:2927–28. Africans are also absent from the Elenchus stationum in urbe Au-
tissiodorensi anno DCXC, ed. L.-M. Duru, in Bibliothèque historique de l’Yonne, 2 vols. (Auxerre,
1850), 1:343–46.
92
Kalendarium Rhenaugiense, ed. Léopold Delisle, in “Mémoires sur d’anciens sacramentaires,” Mé-
moires de l’Institut national de France, Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres 32 (1886), 57–423, at
Of course, African saints were among the martyrs of the universal church commem-
orated in the numerous martyrologies produced in the Frankish kingdoms in the early
Middle Ages. The earliest of these, the Hieronymian Martyrology, lists hundreds of
the African holy dead. However, beyond the access that the names of these (and
all) martyrs were believed to grant to the realm of sacred power, the compilers of
the Hieronymian Martyrology betray no special devotion to any particular African
saint.93 Despite their more historical character, the same is largely true of the hundred
or more African saints or groups of saints commemorated in the string of martyrol-
ogies composed over the course of the ninth century in Lyons, Mainz, Prüm, and
Saint-Germain-des-Prés.94
pp. 310–13, with E. A. Lowe, ed., Codices Latini antiquiores: A Palaeographical Guide to Latin Manu-
scripts prior to the Ninth Century, 12 vols. (Oxford, 1936–66), no. 1019, 7:50 (Perpetua and Felicitas
only, but the fragment preserves only the feasts from Christmas to 11 July); Litania omnium sanctorum
e cod. rescripto Clm 6333, ed. Alban Dold, in “Palimpsest-Studien II.: Altertümliche Sakramentar- und
Litanei-Fragmente im Cod. Lat. Monac. 6333,” Texte und Arbeiten 1/48 (1957), 87*–95*, at p. 88*;
and G. Kentenich, “Ein altes Mainzer Kalendarium,” Mainzer Zeitschrift 24–25 (1929–30), 120–22, at
p. 121. See also The Calendar of St. Willibrord, ed. H. A. Wilson, Henry Bradshaw Society 55 (London,
1918; repr. Rochester, N.Y., 1998), pp. 5 and 10. Cyprian is included (with Cornelius) in Peter Siffrin,
“Das Walderdorffer Kalendarfragment saec. VIII und die Berliner Blätter eines Sakramentars aus Regens-
burg,” Ephemerides liturgicae 47 (1933), 201–24, at p. 207 (Faustus—but not Augustine—is included at
p. 206); see also Bogdan Bolz, “Najstarszy kalendarz w re˛ kopisach gnieźnieńskich (MS 1 z roku około
800),” Studia Źródłoznawcze 12 (1967), 23–38, at p. 34.
93
Lifshitz, Name of the Saint, pp. 26–27; Dubois, Martyrologes du moyen âge latin, p. 27.
94
In addition to the notices for Augustine, Castus and Emilianus, Cyprian, Felix of Thibiuca, Perpetua
and Felicitas, Salvius, and the Scillitan martyrs, reproduced from Bede (see below, n. 130), the Martyro-
logium Lugdunense, ed. Quentin, included entries on Crispina (pp. 153–54), Fulgentius of Ruspe (pp.
171–72), Guddenes (p. 174), Arcadius (p. 204), Martiana (p. 204), Fabius (p. 205), Marcellus (p. 205),
Severinus and Aquila (p. 211), Jocundianus (p. 213), and Januarius et al. (p. 213). Recension M of Florus,
Martyrologium, ed. Quentin, added new notices on Agapius and Secundinus (p. 266), Marianus and James
(pp. 266–67), Massa Candida (pp. 268–70), Maxima, Donatilla, and Secunda (p. 270), Rogatianus and
Felicissimus (p. 288), Mappalicus (p. 288), Celerinus et al. (pp. 288–89), Nemesianus et al. (p. 289), Felix
of Toniza (p. 303), Arcadius et al. (p. 321), Aquilinus et al. (p. 326), Saturninus et al. (p. 327), Damianus
miles (p. 328), Eusebius (p. 329), Timothy et al. (p. 333), Catulinus et al. (p. 336), the 260 Martyrs (p. 342),
the 220 Martyrs (p. 342), Cassian of Tingi (p. 343), Moysitus (p. 344), and Maximilian (p. 345). Recension
ET of Florus, Martyrologium, ed. Quentin, added a notice on Quadratus (p. 369) and drew on Victor of
Vita’s Historia persecutionis and the Passio septem monachorum to include ten additional groups of Afri-
can saints (pp. 350–57). Ado, Martyrologium, ed. Quentin, added an entry on Pontius (p. 623). Wandal-
bert of Prüm, Martyrologium, ed. Ernst Dümmler, MGH Poetae 2 (Berlin, 1884; repr. Munich, 1978),
pp. 578–603, also mentioned Avitus (p. 579), Publius and Julian (p. 581), Donatus (p. 581), Peter (p.
582), Romulus and Secundulus (p. 582), Diodolus and Anesus (p. 583), Agrippina (p. 596), Verus and Se-
curus (p. 600), though Wandalbert localizes only Avitus, Agrippina, and Verus and Securus to Africa; for
the origins of the others see Martyrologium Hieronymianum, xv Kal. Mart., p. 105 (Publius and Julian);
Kal. Mart., p. 120 with n. 12 (Donatus); ii Id. Mart., p. 143 (Peter); ix Kal. April., p. 157 (Romulus and
Secundulus); and ii Kal. April., p. 168 (Diodolus and Anesus). Usuard, Martyrologium, ed. Dubois, added
notices on Revolutus et al. (p. 157), Saturninus and the Abitinian martyrs (p. 179), Verolus et al. (p. 185),
Epyphanius et al. (p. 208), Heliodorus et al. (p. 225), Quiriacus and Apollonaris (p. 251), and Siriacus and
Paula (whom Usuard localizes to Spain, p. 249). Hrabanus Maurus, Martyrologium, ed. John McCulloh,
CCCM 44 (Turnhout, 1979), pp. 1–134, represents a different tradition and includes notices on Datus et al.
(p. 17), Victor, Publius, and Saturninus (p. 18), Verolus et al. (p. 24), Donatus et al. (p. 25), Dionysius et al.
(p. 25), Rogatus et al. (p. 26), Donatus, Ephrosius, and Frunimus (p. 28), Timothy (p. 30), Saturninus et al.
(p. 31), Fidelis et al. (p. 31), Agapius (p. 31), Rogatus and Successus (p. 32), the 16 Martyrs (p. 32), Anisus
(p. 33), Amphianus et al. (p. 33), Januarius, Macharius, and Maxima (p. 34), Concessa (p. 34), Fortunatus
Certainly, the Carolingian period did see what appears to have been a new
interest in the ancient texts that recounted the lives and actions of African holy
men and women.95 Possidius’s biography of Augustine, the vita of Fulgentius of
Ruspe, the passiones of the Scillitan martyrs, Crispina, Marianus and James,
Montanus and Lucius, and the history of the Vandal persecution all exist in
ninth-century copies.96 The passions of Marcellus of Tingi, Fabius of Caesarea,
and Saturninus and his companions, all of which survive in later manuscripts,
had also clearly begun to circulate by the first half of the ninth century, as had a
number of African passiones that are now lost.97 It is therefore possible that these
saints—almost all of whom came to be commemorated in the contemporary
Frankish martyrologies—had a special significance in the Carolingian world. In
the ninth century, for example, a copy of a saint’s vita could be used to authenti-
cate relics.98 However, these martyrs do not appear to have inspired hymns,
poems, or other devotional literature, and so whatever particular significance
they may have had in the Frankish kingdoms is, for the most part, lost to us.
The spread of African saints’ cults to the eastern Mediterranean was equally
limited. The poverty of Africa’s contribution to the Byzantine cult of saints is per-
haps best illustrated by the universal absence of so prominent a martyr as Cyprian
and Marcianus (p. 37), Lasranus, Ermogenis, and Expeditus (p. 37), Quirinus (p. 54), Amantus and Lucius
(p. 54), Aresus et al. (p. 56), Lucianus and Fortunatus (p. 56), Marianus, Benedict, and Januarius (p. 67),
Lucianus et al. (p. 69), Democretus et al. (p. 75), Martial et al. (p. 99), Audactus (p. 101), Ninus et al.
(p. 104), Publius et al. (p. 112), Primus et al. (p. 112), Rogatus et al. (p. 113), Inaurulus and Publius
(p. 115), Secundus et al. (p. 116), Vitalis and Januarius (p. 116), Maurus (pp. 118–19), Verus et al.
(p. 123), Crispinus et al. (p. 123), Julius et al. (p. 124), Zelotus, Fortunatus, and Gratus (p. 124), Peter
et al. (p. 127), Faustinus et al. (p. 128), Quintus et al. (p. 129), and Domicus et al. (p. 133).
95
This development is part of a larger shift toward ancient martyrs explored by Paul Fouracre, “The
Origins of the Carolingian Attempt to Regulate the Cult of Saints,” in James Howard-Johnston and
Paul Anthony Hayward, eds., The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Essays on
the Contribution of Peter Brown (Oxford, 1999), pp. 143–65.
96
Possidius of Calama, Vita Augustini, ed. Michele Pellegrino, in Vita di S. Agostino, Verba Senio-
rum 4 (Alba, 1955), p. 5; Lapeyre, Vie de Saint Fulgence, pp. vii–viii; Ruggiero, Atti dei martiri Scili-
tani, p. 56; Passio S. Crispinae, ed. Pio Franchi de’ Cavalieri, in Nuove note agiografiche, Studi e Testi 9
(Rome, 1902), pp. 21–35, at p. 32 app. crit.; Passio SS. Mariani et Iacobi, ed. Franchi de’ Cavalieri,
pp. 29–30; Passio SS. Montani et Lucii, ed. François Dolbeau, in “La Passion des Saints Lucius et Mon-
tanus: Histoire et édition du texte,” Revue des études augustiniennes 29 (1983), 39–82, at p. 42; and
Victor of Vita, Historia persecutionis, ed. Petschenig, p. i.
97
De Smedt et al., “Passiones tres martyrum Africanorum,” p. 110, and Delehaye, “Actes de
S. Marcel,” pp. 257–60, were used by Florus, Martyrologium, ed. Quentin, pp. 260–61 and 266 re-
spectively; Passio SS. Saturnini, Dativi, Felicis, Ampelii et sociorum, ed. Pio Franchi de’ Cavalieri,
in Note agiografiche, 8, Studi e Testi 65 (Rome, 1935), pp. 1–71, at pp. 45–46, was used by Usuard,
Martyrologium, ed. Dubois, p. 179. On the use of lost texts see Martyrologium Lugdunense, ed. Quen-
tin, p. 174; and Ado, Martyrologium, ed. Quentin, pp. 558–60; see also Ado’s claim (probably false) to
have the acts of Aquilinus (p. 582).
98
Julia M. H. Smith, “Old Saints, New Cults: Roman Relics in Carolingian Francia,” in eadem, ed., Early
Medieval Rome and the Christian West: Essays in Honour of Donald A. Bullough, The Medieval Mediter-
ranean: Peoples, Economies and Cultures, 400–1453, 28 (Leiden, 2000), pp. 317–39, at p. 327; Martin
Heinzelmann, Translationsberichte und andere Quellen des Reliquienkultes, Typologie des Sources du
Moyen Âge Occidental 33 (Turnhout, 1979), p. 84. On the importance of such vitae to sustaining a saint’s
cult see Thomas Head, Hagiography and the Cult of Saints: The Diocese of Orléans, 800–1200, Cambridge
Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, 4th ser., 14 (Cambridge, Eng., 1990), esp. pp. 32–33.
of Carthage from the Greek liturgical calendar. To be sure, this absence was, in a
sense, the result of a historical accident: late in the fourth century, Gregory of
Nazianzus composed an elegy intended to honor the Carthaginian bishop, but
Gregory’s own poor command of Latin and the evident lack of reliable Greek
source material on the African saint led the theologian to conflate Cyprian of
Carthage with the eponymous bishop of Antioch.99 Nevertheless, the conflation
of the two Cyprians was to prove all-pervasive in the Greek-speaking world—
so much so, in fact, that from a very early date the Carthaginian bishop appears
to have enjoyed no significant cult (independent of that of Cyprian of Antioch) in
the Byzantine East.100
Though Africa itself did figure into the Greek hagiographical imagination, it
provided little more than a backdrop for the lives and deaths of otherwise purely
Byzantine saints. Above all, Africa seems to have been imagined as a place of
transit. The vast majority of Byzantine saints with connections to the region
were said to have been travelers to or from Constantinople, Italy, or the Levant.
Thus, for example, Peter the Publican (who, before his conversion, was said in
the synaxaria to have served Justinian as the imperial tax collector responsible
for Africa) ended his life in the Queen of Cities, from which he had presumably
also been sent to the West in the first place.101 The dissidents Eugenius and Maca-
rius were exiled by Julian the Apostate to Mauretania, where they died.102 In the
first century St. Photeine (in the Byzantine tradition consistently identified with the
Samaritan woman from John’s Gospel) was said to have traveled from Palestine to
Carthage, where she settled and preached Christianity before being called to Rome
to face the emperor Nero.103 Similarly, Simon the Zealot was thought to have con-
verted Mauretania, Africa, and Libya to Christianity.104 Bishop Epaenetus of Car-
thage, a contemporary of Simon and Photeine’s, was associated in an eleventh-century
manuscript with the early Christian missionary of the same name mentioned by
99
Hippolyte Delehaye, “Cyprien d’Antioche et Cyprien de Carthage,” Analecta Bollandiana 39
(1921), 314–32. On Gregory of Nazianzus’s Latin see his Epistola 173, PG 37:281. Eusebius mentions
Cyprian twice but appears to have been unaware that he died a martyr; see Historia ecclesiastica 6.43
and 7.3, ed. Eduard Schwartz, in Eusebius Kirchengeschichte (Leipzig, 1908), pp. 263–64 and 272.
Eusebius makes no mention of Perpetua and Felicitas.
100
Thus, e.g., the entry for Cyprian of Carthage in François Halkin, ed., Bibliotheca hagiographica
Graeca, 3rd ed., 3 vols., Subsidia Hagiographica 8a (Brussels, 1957; repr. Wetteren, 1986), hereafter
cited as BHG, 1:140, refers the reader to Cyprian of Antioch, BHG nos. 452–461c, 1:137–40.
101
Synaxarium ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae, 20 Jan., col. 408; cf. BHG no. 2366, 3:65, where his
appointment was said to have been to the Thebaid. See also Albert Ehrhard, Überlieferung und Bestand
der hagiographischen und homiletischen Literatur der griechischen Kirche, von den Anfängen bis zum
Ende des 16. Jahrhunderts, Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur 50–
52 (Leipzig, 1937–52), 1:563, 3:761–62 and 857.
102
Synaxarium ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae, 20 Dec., cols. 330–31; cf. BHG nos. 2126–27, 3:26.
103
Synaxarium ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae, 20 Mar., cols. 549–52; see also BHG nos. 1541–
1541 m, 2:208. On her Byzantine cult see Alice-Mary Talbot and Alexander P. Kazhdan, “The Byzan-
tine Cult of St. Photeine,” in Andrew R. Dyck and Sarolta A. Takács, eds., Presence of Byzantium:
Studies Presented to Milton V. Anastos in Honor of His Eighty-Fifth Birthday (Amsterdam, 1994),
pp. 103–12; and Alice-Mary Talbot, “The Posthumous Miracles of St. Photeine,” Analecta Bollandi-
ana 112 (1994), 85–104; repr. in eadem, Women and Religious Life in Byzantium (Aldershot, Eng.,
2001), as essays IX and VIII respectively.
104
Synaxarium ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae, 10 May, col. 671, and 30 June, col. 781.
Paul in Romans 16.5.105 After the Islamic conquest, Muslim raiders from Africa
made frequent attacks on Byzantine Sicily and southern Italy, carrying local Chris-
tians off into captivity. That was the fate of Elias the Younger, who was eventually
emancipated, and of Andrew, John, Peter, and Antoninus, who were martyred in
Muslim Ifriqiya in the late ninth century.106
Communications between Africa and the Byzantine world—fictional and other-
wise—were thought to have gone both ways. The imperial capital was, of course,
an important destination for travelers from Africa. According to the Synaxarium
of Constantinople, for example, in the reign of Theodosius the Great (379–95), the
future hegumena Domnica left her native Carthage for the Queen of Cities, where
she was to live well into the fifth century.107 From at least the ninth century onward
it was also believed that Theodosius had orchestrated the translation of the relics of
the African martyrs Terentius and Africanus to Constantinople, where they were in-
terred in the sanctuary of St. Euphemia.108 In 484 a group of refugees from the Van-
dal kingdom fled to the imperial capital, where they appear to have given an account
of the horrors of Huneric’s persecution of the African Catholics.109 However, it was
not only Constantinople that was thought to have welcomed sojourners from the
West. The Holy Land may have exercised an even greater draw on travelers and ref-
ugees from North Africa. In the face of the Visigothic invasion, Melania the Younger
105
Ibid., 30 July, cols. 855–56 (synax. select.); see also 26 June, cols. 773–74 (synax. select.), and 30
June, col. 785.
106
Vita S. Eliae iunioris 9, ed. Giuseppe Rossi Taibbi, in Vita di Sant’Elia il Giovane, Istituto Sicilia-
no di Studi Bizantini e Neoellenici, Testi e Monumenti, 7 (Palermo, 1962), p. 14; Synaxarium ecclesiae
Constantinopolitanae, 23 Sept., cols. 72–74; and, on the date, McCormick, Origins, appendix 4, no.
654, p. 952. On the movements of Byzantine saints in general, and Elias the Younger and Melania the
Younger in particular, see Elisabeth Malamut, Sur la route des saints byzantins (Paris, 1993).
107
Synaxarium ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae, 8 Jan., col. 377; her vita (BHG no. 562) was edited
by Theophilos Ioannou in Μνημεία Αγιολογικά (Venice, 1884), pp. 268–84, emended by P. Nikitin’,
Mémoires de l’Académie impériale de Saint-Pétersbourg, 8th ser., 1/1 (1895), 57.
108
George the Monk, Chronicon breve 4.100.7, PG 110:716; Symeon the Logothete, Chronicon, ed.
Immanuel Bekker, in Leonis grammatici chronographia (Bonn, 1842), pp. 101–2; Symeon Meta-
phrastes, Martyrium SS. Terentii, Africani, Maximi, Pompii et sociorum quadraginta, BHG no.
1700, PG 115:96–106; Synaxarium ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae, 10 Apr., cols. 595–96, and 28
Oct., cols. 169–70; and Pseudo-Codinus, Origines Constantinopolis 2a.2, ed. Theodor Preger, in Scrip-
tores originum Constantinopolitanarum, 2 (Leipzig, 1907), p. 211. The passage from Theodore the
Lector, Historia ecclesiastica 2.62, PG 86/1:213, cited by Delehaye, Origines, p. 56, is not included
in the edition of Günther Christian Hansen, Theodoros Anagnostes Kirchengeschichte (Berlin,
1971). The cult of Terentius and Africanus appears to have been unknown in the West.
109
Synaxarium ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae, 8 Dec., cols. 287–89; Wolfgang Lackner, “Westliche
Heilige des 5. und 6. Jahrhunderts im Synaxarium Ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae,” Jahrbuch der ös-
terreichischen Byzantinistik 19 (1970), 185–202, at pp. 192–99. These refugees remained quite the
cause célèbre well into the sixth century; see Victor of Vita, Historia persecutionis 3.30, ed. Petschenig,
p. 87; Marcellinus comes, Chronicon, s.a. 484, ed. Theodor Mommsen, MGH Auct. ant. 11 (Berlin,
1894; repr. Munich, 1981), pp. 92–93; Aeneas of Gaza, Theophrastus, PG 85:872–1004, at cols.
1000–1001; Evagrius Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History 4.14, ed. J. Bidez and L. Parmentier (London,
1898), pp. 163–64; Paul Krüger, ed., Codex Iustinianus 1.27.1.4, 15th ed., vol. 2 of Theodor Momm-
sen, Paul Krüger, Rudolf Schöll, and Wilhelm Kroll, eds., Corpus juris civilis (Berlin, 1970), p. 77; Pro-
copius, De Bello Vandalico 1.8.4, ed. Haury, pp. 345–46; Victor Tonnennensis, Chronica, s.aa. 479
and 567(?), ed. Mommsen, MGH Auct. ant. 11:189 and 206; Gregory the Great, Dialogi 3.32, ed.
A. de Vogüé, in Dialogues, Sources Chrétiennes 251, 260, 265 (Paris, 1978–80), 2:390–92.
fled from Italy to Africa, and thence traveled on to Jerusalem, where she died.110 Peter
the Publican returned to Constantinople from Africa by way of Jerusalem.111 In the
seventh century Sophronius tells of an African tribune who was cured of blindness
after bathing in the pool of Siloam in Jerusalem.112 Sophronius’s spiritual father,
John Moschus, similarly relates the story of a Byzantine dragoon who became a
monk in Jerusalem after having been miraculously spared in battle.113 Once he was
freed from his slavery, the younger Elias also made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land,
where he, too, decided to become a monk.114
To be sure, the feasts of distinctively African saints were celebrated in the course of
the Greek liturgical year; but, as Hippolyte Delehaye observed in his edition of the
Synaxarium of Constantinople, they were remarkably few in number.115 The major-
ity of the saints discussed above ended their lives in the eastern Mediterranean, where
their cults developed. Even the Byzantine saints who were said to have died in Africa
or elsewhere in the West appear for the most part to have been the object of particular
devotion only in the East. Photeine, for example, was said to have lived in Carthage
and died in Rome, but her cult seems to have developed in the Greek East and above
all in Constantinople.116 The cults of Terentius and Africanus, Eugenius and Maca-
rius, and Epaenetus all deserve further study; but once again, no surviving inscriptions
commemorate these saints in Africa, they are mostly unknown to the Latin calendri-
cal and martyrological traditions, and one searches in vain for mention of them in the
African homiletic or devotional sources.117 Moreover, the martyr Timothy, who was
said to have been a Mauretanian deacon and who did enjoy a cult in both the West
and the East, may well originally have been an Eastern saint.118 Indeed, together with
110
Vita Sanctae Melaniae senatricis Romae 1.19–21 and 2.3–4, ed. Charles de Smedt, Joseph de
Backer, Fernand van Ortroy, and Joseph van den Gheyn, “Vita Sanctae Melaniae Junioris auctore
coaevo et sanctae familiari,” Analecta Bollandiana 8 (1889), 16–63, at pp. 34–35 and 43–44; and
Βίος τῆς ὁσίας Μελάνης 19–21 and 34–35, ed. Charles de Smedt, Fernand van Ortroy, Joseph van
den Gheyn, Hippolyte Delehaye, and Albert Poncelet, “S. Melaniae Iunioris acta Graeca,” Analecta
Bollandiana 22 (1903), 5–49, at pp. 19–21 and 25–27. On the theme of Byzantine pilgrimage to
the Holy Land in general, see A. Kuelzer, “Byzantine and Early Post-Byzantine Pilgrimage to the
Holy Land and to Mount Sinai,” in Ruth Macrides, ed., Travel in the Byzantine World, Society for
the Promotion of Byzantine Studies Publications 10 (Aldershot, Eng., 2002), pp. 149–61.
111
Synaxarium ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae, 20 Jan., col. 408.
112
Sophronius of Jerusalem, Miracula Sanctorum Cyri et Ioannis 46, ed. Natalio Fernandez Marcos,
in Los thaumata de Sofronio (Madrid, 1975), pp. 351–53.
113
John Moschus, Pratum spirituale 20, PG 87/3:2868. The soldiers Majorus and Meortius, who
served in the tagma of the Moors, were martyred under Diocletian, and Majorus, at least, was executed
in Gaza; see Synaxarium ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae, 15 Feb., col. 467, and 12 Jan., cols. 386–88.
For the posting of the Moors to the Eastern frontier see A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire,
284–602: A Social, Economic and Administrative Survey, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1964; repr. Baltimore, 1986),
1:55 and appendix 2, table 10.
114
Vita S. Eliae 14 and 18, ed. Rossi Taibbi, pp. 22 and 26–28.
115
Synaxarium ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae, col. lxxi.
116
Talbot and Kazhdan, “Byzantine Cult,” p. 105.
117
For the cult of Eugenius and Macarius in the East see Ehrhard, Überlieferung, 1:529, 570–74, and
3:187–88. For the West see Martyrologium Hieronymianum, x Kal. Feb., p. 57 with p. 58, n. 54.
118
The earliest attestation of his cult is in the early-fifth-century Breviarium Syriacum, 21 Iyar (May),
ed. and trans. L. Duchesne, AASS Nov. 2/1 (Brussels, 1894), p. lvii (in the Greek translation his feast is
attributed to 20 May). Here Timothy is paired with Polyeuctus and, unlike Perpetua (below, n. 119), he
is not identified as African. (I am grateful to Jeanne-Nicole Saint-Laurent, Stephen Shoemaker, and
Felix of Thibiuca, the only clearly African saints to be venerated by the Great Church
in Constantinople were Perpetua and Speratus.119
The direct transmission of African saints’ cults to Gaul and the East might have
been even more limited than this overview suggests, for a number of the cults that
spread to those regions seem to have done so by way of Spain and especially Italy
rather than straight across the Mediterranean from Africa. The evidence is suggestive
rather than conclusive, but with respect to the Byzantine world it hints that Italy may
well have played a central role in the transmission of African cults to the eastern Med-
iterranean. I have already noted that the cults of Felix of Thibiuca and Speratus took
root in Byzantine southern Italy in the early Middle Ages and that this may be where
their acta were first translated into Greek. In striking contrast to their African col-
leagues, Italian saints—particularly those from Rome and Sicily—play a prominent
role in the Greek synaxaria; much of the late-antique hagiography translated from
Latin into Greek concerns Italian saints; and the ninth-century marble calendar
from Naples shows that a close relationship existed between the Greek and Latin li-
turgical communities of Byzantine southern Italy.120 Thus it may have been from Italy,
Scott Johnson for helping me with the Syriac.) This feast is absent from the (complete) May entries of
Kalendarium ecclesiae Carthaginensis, PL 13:1219–21; indeed the only Timothy celebrated in this cal-
endar had his feast in late August (ibid., col. 1224, where the date is given as “. . . Kal. Sept.”). This is
probably the same Timothy who was commemorated in Rome on the Via Ostiensis on 22 Aug. (Mar-
tyrologium Hieronymianum, xi Kal. Sept., pp. 456–57 with n. 1). Elsewhere in the West, however, a
St. Timothy’s feast continued to be celebrated on 21 May; see Martyrologium Hieronymianum, xii Kal.
Jun., p. 265 with n. 1; Florus, Martyrologium, ed. Quentin, p. 333; Ado, Martyrologium, ed. Quentin,
p. 482; Usuard, Martyrologium, ed. Dubois, p. 233; and Hrabanus Maurus, Martyrologium, ed.
McCulloh, p. 49. The first source to assign Timothy to Mauretania is Martyrologium Hieronymianum,
xii Kal. Jun., p. 265 with n. 1, where he is paired with the martyr Polyeuctus of Caesarea in Cappa-
docia and where the extant texts appear to be corrupt. Given the number of Caesareas, the potential
for confusion among them, the absence of this Timothy from the Carthaginian calendar, and the West-
ern origins of the attribution of Timothy to Mauretania, the attribution is probably an error. It is sus-
tained in Synaxarium ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae, 19 Dec., cols. 327–28, but this could conceivably
be under the influence of Timothy’s Italian cult, on which see ibid., synax. select. (a twelfth-century
Italo-Byzantine synaxarium from Grottaferrata, about eighteen kilometers southeast of Rome). On
the Italian influence on the Synaxarium of Constantinople in general, see below, n. 120.
119
Speratus: Synaxarium ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae, 17 July, cols. 825–26 (synax. select.). Per-
petua: ibid., 2 Feb., col. 440; 4 Mar., col. 508; 14 Mar., col. 536; and Breviarium Syriacum, 7 Mar., ed.
Duchesne, p. liv.
120
On Italian and Sicilian contributions to the Byzantine liturgical calendar see Synaxarium ecclesiae
Constantinopolitanae, cols. lvii–lx and lxxi. Paulinus’s life of Ambrose was translated as Βίος τοῦ ὁσίου
πατρὸς ἡμῶν Ἀμβροσίου ἐπισκόπου Μεδιολάνων, ed. A. Papadopoulos-Kerameus, in Ἀνάλεκτα ἱεροσολυ-
μιτικῆς σταχυολογίας, 5 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1891–98; repr. Brussels, 1963), 1:27–88; the life of Chrysan-
thus and Darias as Βίος καὶ μαρτύριον τῶν ἁγίων μαρτύρων Χρυσάνθου καὶ Δαρείας, in AASS Oct. 11 (Brus-
sels, 1864; repr. 1970), pp. 469–84; and the passio of Clement as Μαρτύριον τοῦ ἁγίου Κλήμεντος πάπα
Ῥώμης, ed. Franz Xavier Funk and Franz Diekamp, in Patres apostolici, 2 vols. (Tübingen, 1901–13),
2:50–81. Hippolyte Delehaye, Étude sur le Légendier romain: Les saints de novembre et de décembre, Sub-
sidia Hagiographica 23 (Brussels, 1936), pp. 178–80, discusses the translation of the Passio SS. Eugeniae,
Prothi et Hyacinthi. On the Greek version of the Inuentio et passio SS. Geruasii et Protasii see Michel Au-
bineau, “Jean Damascène et l’Epistula de inventione Gervasii et Protasii attribuée à Ambroise,” Analecta
Bollandiana 90 (1972), 1–14. On the Greek Passio Nazarii et Celsi see Ugo Zanetti, “Les passions des SS.
Nazaire, Gervais, Protais et Celse,” Analecta Bollandiana 97 (1979), 69–88. The translation of Pancra-
tius’s passio was done in southern Italy; see Pio Franchi de’ Cavalieri, Hagiographica, Studi e Testi 19
(Rome, 1908), pp. 77–120, at p. 83. It is not clear whether the Greek or Latin version of Gerontius’s
rather than directly from Africa, that the cults of Felix and Speratus were carried east.
There may even have been some limited Italian influence in the Byzantine commem-
oration of Perpetua and Felicitas’s martyrdom, though initially their cult probably
did spread straight from Africa to the eastern Mediterranean. The Greek version of
Perpetua and Felicitas’s passio appears to have been composed either contemporane-
ously with or very shortly after the Latin version and thus was probably written in
Africa.121 Although it was not used by Eusebius of Caesarea (who generally seems
to have been fairly poorly informed about the African church), the text certainly cir-
culated in the East: it was known to the fourth-century hagiographer of the Eastern
martyr Polyeuctus, and it probably formed the basis of the 2 February entry in the
Synaxarium of Constantinople commemorating Perpetua and her companions.122
Moreover, by the early fifth century Perpetua was already commemorated in a Syriac
martyrology.123 However, the entry for 14 March in the Constantinopolitan synaxa-
rium relocates Perpetua and Felicitas’s execution from Africa to Rome (ἀθλησάντων
ἐν Ῥώμῃ), and this in turn probably suggests that this particular feast entered the Byz-
antine liturgical calendar by way of the Eternal City, despite the fact that the saints’
martyrdom was consistently observed a week earlier in the West.124
Italy and Italians also seem to have played an important role in mediating between
Gaul and the African cult of saints in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. I have
already shown that this was likely the case with Augustine’s relics. Prosper of Aqui-
taine had himself been to Rome, and it is probably no coincidence that the two Afri-
can saints whom he mentioned in his chronicle were also the only two African saints
included in the fourth-century Roman calendar.125 Interestingly Gregory of Tours’s
contemporary and sometime protégé Venantius Fortunatus, who is responsible for
another of the handful of early references to Cyprian in the late-antique Gallic literary
sources, was a native of northeastern Italy.126 The early-seventh-century Burgundian
redactors of the Hieronymian Martyrology likely also came by their information on
Vita Melaniae Iunioris is primary; see Albert Siegmund, Die Überlieferung der griechischen christlichen
Literatur in der lateinischen Kirche bis zum zwölften Jahrhundert, Abhandlung der Bayerischen
Benediktiner-Akademie 5 (Munich, 1949), p. 222. On the Neapolitan calendar see Ruggiero, Atti dei mar-
tiri Scilitani, p. 62, n. 28, and in general Mallardo, Calendario di Napoli.
121
On the complicated question of whether the Latin or Greek text is primary see Åke Fridh, Le
problème de la Passion des Saintes Perpétue et Félicité, Studia Graeca et Latina Gothoburgensia 26
(Göteborg, 1968); however, see also Louis Robert, “Une vision de Perpétue martyre à Carthage en
203,” Comptes rendus de séances de l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres ([Paris], 1982), pp.
228–76, who argues for the primacy of the Greek text.
122
Passio S. Polyeucti, ed. B. Aubé, in Polyeucte dans l’histoire (Paris, 1882), pp. 73–104, at p. 77;
Synaxarium ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae, 2 Feb., col. 440; cf. Passio SS. Perpetuae et Felicitatis 2.1,
ed. van Beek, p. 7, which states that they were arrested “Ἐν πόλει Θου<βου>ρβιτανῶν τῇ μικροτέρᾳ”
(missing in the Latin version, at p. 6).
123
See above, n. 119.
124
Synaxarium ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae, 14 Mar., col. 536.
125
On Prosper’s life and work see Steven Muhlberger, The Fifth-Century Chroniclers: Prosper, Hy-
datius, and the Gallic Chronicler of 452, ARCA Classical and Medieval Texts, Papers and Mono-
graphs, 27 (Leeds, 1990), pp. 48–135.
126
Venantius Fortunatus, Carmen 8.3.153 (De virginitate), ed. Friedrich Leo, MGH Auct. ant. 4/1
(Berlin, 1881), pp. 181–91, at p. 185. On Fortunatus’s life and work see Judith W. George, Venantius
Fortunatus: A Latin Poet in Merovingian Gaul (Oxford, 1992), pp. 18–34.
the saints of the African church by way of Italy.127 Similarly, the so-called Gothic
Missal (also composed in Burgundy but in the late seventh or early eighth century)
contains a Mass order for the martyrs Cyprian and Cornelius—the pairing of the
Carthaginian bishop with the Roman pontiff suggesting that here, too, the influence
of Rome was at play.128 Perhaps more to the point, though, before the ninth century,
the only African cults that made their way into the nonmartyrological sources in
Gaul were also ones that had already taken root in Italy, and more specifically in
the city of Rome. The sole exception to this rule was the Vandal-era bishop of Car-
thage, Eugenius (or Eugetius), mentioned by Gregory of Tours in his In gloria marty-
rum. Eugenius, though, was something of a special case in that he ended his life in
Albi as an exile from the Vandal persecution, and it was in southern Gaul that his
cult first developed.129
Italy’s influential role in spreading knowledge of African saints also had an inter-
esting coda in early-medieval Northumbria, where it seems to be reflected in Bede’s
martyrology, composed there in the early eighth century. The seven African saints
or groups of saints that Bede mentions in his text are Cyprian, Perpetua and Felici-
tas, Augustine, Castus and Emilianus, Felix of Thibiuca, the Scillitans, and a martyr
by the name of Salvius of Membressa (to whom Augustine occasionally alluded in
the exposition of his anti-Donatist arguments).130 As I have shown, the first six all
managed to establish at least a foothold on the Italian Peninsula in the early Middle
Ages, five of them certainly by the time Bede was writing. It seems reasonable to
suppose that an Italian cult of the sixth—the Scillitans—may have developed al-
ready by the late seventh or early eighth century, even though we have no positive
evidence for it until the ninth. Of course it is also possible that Bede came by some
of his information from Spain, where Speratus (the most prominent of the Scillitans)
was the object of particular devotion; Salvius of Membressa also appears to have
127
Lifshitz, Name of the Saint, pp. 14 and 133–38, is critical of the idea that the Martyrologium Hi-
eronymianum went through a recensio Italica, but she accepts the importance of the Aquileia-
Burgundy connection (pp. 16–19); cf. Dubois, Martyrologes du moyen âge latin, pp. 29–30 and 33–34.
128
Missale Gothicum, ed. Els Rose, CCSL 159D (Turnhout, 2005), pp. 504–5. On the manuscript
see ibid., pp. 12 and 15–16, and Lowe, ed., Codices Latini antiquiores, no. 106, 1:32, with 6:x.
This is the only place where a Mass order for Cornelius and Cyprian is found in the Gallican liturgy;
see Missale Gothicum, ed. Rose, p. 289.
129
Gregory of Tours, In gloria martyrum 57, ed. Krusch, pp. 77–78, and Historiae 2.3, ed. Krusch
and Levison, p. 44; Graham, “Dissemination,” pp. 84–89, but see also pp. 69–70, a discussion of what
seem to be later traditions.
130
Bede, Martyrologium, ed. Quentin, pp. 70 (Cyprian), 74 (Felix of Thibiuca), 87–88 (Perpetua and
Felicitas), 89–90 (Scillitans), 97–98 (Castus and Emilianus), 108 (Salvius), and 109 (Augustine), with
pp. 47–48; see also pp. 64–65 (Caesarius, an African deacon said to have been martyred in Campania;
his acts, and those of his Italian companion Julian, are edited in AASS Nov. 1 [Paris, 1887], pp. 106–17).
On Salvius see also Kalendarium ecclesiae Carthaginensis, iii Id. Jan., PL 13:1228; Augustine, Contra
Cresconium grammaticum et Donatistam 4.48.58–4.51.61, ed. M. Petschenig, CSEL 52 (Vienna,
1909), pp. 555–59; and Augustine, Contra epistulam Parmeniani 3.4.22 and 3.6.29, ed. M. Petschenig,
CSEL 51 (Vienna, 1908), pp. 127 and 139–41. Augustine also wrote two (now lost) homilies on his
feast day; see Possidius of Calama, Operum S. Augustini elenchus, ed. André Wilmart, in Miscellanea
Agostiniana, 2 vols. (Rome, 1930–31), 2:149–233, at pp. 171, no. 42, and 206, no. 186. A saint of
the same name is mentioned in two inscriptions from Aïn Regada in Numidia, together with Nivalis
and Matrona; see Duval, Loca sanctorum, 1:207–10 (nos. 100–101; Aïn Regada, Numidia), with discus-
sion at 2:734.
had a Spanish cult in late antiquity, though if one developed in early-medieval Italy
it has left no discernible trace.131 However, Bede himself tells us that his information
for Salvius’s entry came from a sermon (now lost) that “Augustine made to the peo-
ple of Carthage” on the saint’s feast day, and this fact probably points to Rome as
Bede’s immediate source.132 Thus one gets the sense that Bede’s information about
the African church probably arrived in Jarrow in manuscripts that had traveled
north along the same routes that carried Anglo-Saxon pilgrims and merchants to
and from Italy.133
Bede’s martyrology served as the basis for the later Carolingian-era Frankish mar-
tyrologies, and thus it indirectly reinforced the Italian influence on the dissemination
of African saints’ cults in early-medieval Gaul. Yet here connections with Spain do
seem to have been important, above all to the inclusion of four Mauretanian saints
in an anonymous martyrology composed in Lyons shortly before 801.134 The
Anonymous of Lyons elaborates on Bede’s text with reference to the Hieronymian
Martyrology, the passiones of different martyrs, and various other hagiographical
sources. Among the new entries that the Anonymous added are references to
Marcellus of Tingi and to Arcadius, Fabius, and Martiana of Caesarea.135 These
martyrs received only brief notices—too short to tell what sources the Anonymous
used in their composition—and this very brevity would seem to suggest that these
saints’ passiones were not yet available in Lyons at the time of the work’s
131
A Spanish Salvius commemorated in the Hieronymian Martyrology shares the feast day of 11 January
with Bede’s eponymous African saint; see Martyrologium Hieronymianum, iii Id. Jan., p. 35 with p. 36,
n. 26. Salvius also appears in a ninth-century litany from Sens; see Sacramentarium Gregorianum, ed. De-
shusses, 3:166. A Northumbrian connection to Spain may have existed through Ireland; on early-medieval
Spanish-Irish contacts see J. N. Hillgarth, “The East, Visigothic Spain and the Irish,” in F. L. Cross, ed.,
Papers Presented to the Third International Conference on Patristic Studies Held at Christ Church, Oxford,
1959, Studia Patristica 3–6, Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur 78–81
(Berlin, 1961), 2:442–56; idem, “Visigothic Spain and Early Christian Ireland,” Proceedings of the Royal
Irish Academy, Section C 62 (1962), 167–94; and idem, “Ireland and Spain in the Seventh Century,” Peritia
3 (1984), 1–16; repr. in his Visigothic Spain, Byzantium, and the Irish (London, 1985) as essays VI, VII, and
VIII respectively. On the well-known Irish influence in Anglo-Saxon Northumbria see, e.g., Henry Mayr-
Harting, The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd ed. (University Park, Pa., 1991), pp. 78–
102. Irish influence on the Anglo-Saxon cult of saints is, however, hard to detect; see David Rollason, Saints
and Relics in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 1989), pp. 78–81.
132
Bede, Martyrologium, ed. Quentin, p. 108: “III Id. Ian. In Africa, sancti Salvii. In huius natali
sanctus Augustinus verbum fecit ad populum Carthagine.” For Rome as the probable source see Bou-
hot, “Transmission d’Hippon à Rome.”
133
Rollason, Saints and Relics, pp. 60–69; David N. Dumville, “The Importation of Mediterranean
Manuscripts into Theodore’s England,” in Michael Lapidge, ed., Archbishop Theodore: Commemorative
Studies on His Life and Influence, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 11 (Cambridge, Eng.,
1995), pp. 96–119, esp. pp. 102–10; McCormick, Origins, pp. 81, n. 68, 129–31, and 621; see also
Alan Thacker, “In Search of Saints: The English Church and the Cult of Roman Apostles and Martyrs
in the Seventh and Eighth Centuries,” in Smith, ed., Early Medieval Rome, pp. 247–77, at pp. 260–62
and 274–76.
134
Martyrologium Lugdunense, ed. Quentin, pp. 136–37 and 219–21. Quentin dates the manuscript
to before 806 on the basis of its omission of any mention of the translation of the Scillitans’ relics to
Lyons, but see McCormick, Origins, appendix 4, no. 257, p. 891, who dates this translation (which is
said to have accompanied that of Cyprian’s relics) to circa 801.
135
Martyrologium Lugdunense, ed. Quentin, pp. 204–5 (where Arcadius’s passion is not localized to
Mauretania).
compilation.136 As I have noted, though, all four of these Mauretanian martyrs were
(or were to become) Spanish saints in the medieval period. Moreover, the anony-
mous ninth-century Frankish martyrologist seems clearly to have been working
from a Spanish source of some sort. The Lyons martyrology added seventeen Span-
ish saints or groups of saints to those mentioned by Bede, including (among others)
Eulalia of Barcelona, the martyrs of Zaragoza, Felix of Gerona, Leocadia of Toledo,
and Eulalia and Victor of Mérida. Henri Quentin has observed that, intriguingly, all
of the Spanish saints mentioned in the anonymous martyrology from Lyons are also
included in the tenth-century passionaria from Silos and Cardeña, while none of the
Spanish saints commemorated in those later passionaria is left out of the Lyons mar-
tyrology. Thus when composing his work, the Lyons hagiographer may have used a
passionarium similar to those that survive from tenth-century Spain.137
Even so, the use of such a source would not in itself explain the presence of the four
Mauretanian saints in the Frankish martyrology. Again, the Anonymous of Lyons be-
trays no knowledge of the texts of these martyrs’ passiones, and in any case these texts
had almost certainly not been integrated into the Spanish passionary tradition as
early as the ninth century. To be sure, accounts of both Fabius and Marcellus were
included in the tenth-century passionarium from Silos, but they are absent from
the Cardeña recension.138 Moreover, Martiana did not enter the Silos passionarium
until the eleventh century, and Arcadius was not included even at that late date.139
Thus, if knowledge of the four Mauretanian saints arrived in the Carolingian Empire
by way of the Iberian Peninsula, the transfer of information was probably oral rather
than textual, possibly carried north either by Visigothic émigrés from Muslim Spain
or along the trade routes that seem to have linked Córdoba and Lyons in the early
800s.140 In any case, by the early ninth century the communications network that
linked Spain and the Carolingian Empire seems to have carried knowledge of Maure-
tanian saints north across the Pyrenees.
In sum, then, the flight of Africans seeking a safe haven from the repeated con-
quests and reconquests of the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries could certainly
help to explain the widespread veneration of African martyrs in early-medieval Italy
and Spain. Those two regions (and especially their southern Mediterranean coasts)
enjoyed strong links to the African cult of saints, above all to those clustered around
136
Of the four, only Martiana is mentioned in the Martyrologium Hieronymianum, at v Id. Jul.,
p. 368 (“in Mauritania civitate Cessarea Marciani”). Quentin (Martyrologium Lugdunense, p. 204)
does not seem to have believed that the Pseudo-Jerome text was the basis for the entry in the Lyons
martyrology, as the wording in the latter, “V id. Ian. In Mauritania Caesariensi, natale sanctae Mar-
tianae virginis et martyris,” is more detailed than the wording in the former. Note, too, the transposi-
tion of the date in the Lyons martyrology: v Id. Jan. (9 Jan.) for v Id. Jul. (11 July).
137
Martyrologium Lugdunense, ed. Quentin, pp. 139–44.
138
Fábrega Grau, Pasionario hispánico, 1:55–57 and 221–22; their passiones are not included in
Fábrega Grau’s edition of London, British Library, MS Add. 25600 (Cardeña, tenth century), in the
second volume of this work.
139
Fábrega Grau, Pasionario hispánico, 1:231 and 272.
140
McCormick, Origins, pp. 675 and 761 (trade corridor); see also pp. 345–49 (refugees from the
Muslims, though the numismatic evidence clusters much farther south than Lyons). Fabius, Martiana,
and Marcellus are all commemorated in the tenth-century Córdoba calendar, though Arcadius and a
number of the Spanish saints included in the Lyons martyrology are not; see Calendrier de Cordoue,
ed. Dozy, 11 July, p. 111; 31 July, p. 117 (with Yāqūb for Fabius in the Arabic text); and 30 Oct., p. 157.
Carthage and, in the case of Spain, to those in western Mauretania as well. Moreover,
African refugees are known to have settled in both Italy and Spain in late antiquity,
and it is not unreasonable to suppose that they may occasionally have brought relics
of their local saints with them into exile. On a Mediterranean-wide level, though, the
movement of refugees is considerably less satisfying as a general explanation for me-
dieval devotion to African saints, for the late-antique period also saw significant Afri-
can flight to both southern Gaul and the eastern Mediterranean. Some of the dis-
placed Africans involved in that flight even came to be regarded locally as holy
men and themselves became the objects of cultic veneration, as was the case with
Bishop Eugenius of Carthage in Albi and the confessors of Tipasa in Constantinople.
Yet the available evidence would seem to suggest not only that relatively few cults of
African origins found their way to Gaul or the East but also that direct transmission
of such cults to each region was remarkably limited. Instead, those cults that took
root in Byzantium and the Frankish kingdoms seem to have traveled there by way
of Italy or Spain. While this conclusion serves to highlight the strength and impor-
tance of Africa’s connections to its closest neighbors, it also suggests that—whatever
role refugees played in the transmission of African cults—other factors must also have
been at work.
The Chronology of Movement
Chronological considerations hint at a similar conclusion. Of course, any attempt

to establish a chronology for the dissemination of African saints’ cults into the rest
of the Mediterranean world is hampered by the fact that a cult’s initial appearance
in the non-African literary sources only provides us with the date before which that
cult must have taken root abroad. Comparative evidence from late-antique Gaul in-
dicates that even indigenous cults could exist for a hundred years or more in the epi-
graphic record before their first literary attestation, and the early examples of Cyp-
rian, Perpetua and Felicitas, Arcadius, and even Cassian suggest that it may have
taken the transplanted cults of African saints a similar amount of time to make
the transition from popular to official veneration abroad.141 Though the evidence
must therefore be treated with caution, the chronology of the sources would never-
theless seem to suggest that the dissemination of these cults was a long, slow process
accelerated—though probably not primarily driven—by the flight of individuals
from the political turmoil that disturbed Africa in late antiquity.
Indeed, the relocation of refugees does not appear to have been necessary to the
early proliferation of African cults. To be sure, it probably did at least partially in-
form the spread of the large number of cults that first become visible between the
141
Mark Handley, “Beyond Hagiography: Epigraphic Commemoration and the Cult of Saints in
Late Antique Trier,” in Ralph W. Mathisen and Danuta Shanzer, eds., Society and Culture in Late
Antique Gaul: Revisiting the Sources (Aldershot, Eng., 2001), pp. 187–200. Cyprian was martyred
in 258, and Perpetua and Felicitas in 203; both were commemorated in the Roman Depositio
martyrum of 354 (see above, n. 13). Alfred Baudrillart et al., Dictionnaire d’histoire et de géographie
ecclésiastiques (Paris, 1912–), 3:1485–87, date Arcadius’s martyrdom to 305; he was celebrated
by Zeno of Verona in the late fourth century (see above, n. 30). Cassian was mentioned by Prudentius
in the early fifth century (see above, n. 58); Delehaye, Origines, p. 390, dates his martyrdom to 298.
late sixth and late ninth centuries, including most prominently the cults of Felix of
Thibiuca, the Twelve Brothers of Hadrumetum, and Restituta in Italy; those of Siri-
acus and Paula, Marcellus of Tingi, and Arcadius, Fabius, and Martiana of Caesa-
rea in Spain; and that of the Scillitan martyrs in both regions. However, at least a
handful of African saints’ cults had clearly begun to spread abroad well before
the Vandal conquest. Despite the abortive nature of his cult’s spread to the East,
by the first decade of the fifth century Cyprian had devotees throughout the
West, and his feast day was celebrated both in Rome and in northeastern Spain. Per-
petua became the object of veneration throughout the Mediterranean in the same
period. The near universality that these two cults later attained might seem to
make them exceptional cases, but it is worth remembering that each seems to
have spread quite independently of the other and that both appear to have been sub-
ject to the same vagaries that affected the movements of other cults. Moreover, even
at this early date Cyprian and Perpetua were not completely alone. Arcadius, too,
was venerated in northeastern Italy in the late fourth century; by the early fifth cen-
tury Cassian of Tingi was at least familiar to Prudentius’s readers in northeastern
Spain; and in the 420s the Massa Candida may already have been the object of a
nascent cult in Italy. Though we hear of far more African saints in the European
sources after circa 600, this small handful of early examples would seem to suggest
that cults could move for a variety of reasons and at a variety of speeds and that such
movement was not exclusively dependent on the disruptive trauma that rent Africa
from the mid-fifth century onward.
It is also possible—though by no means certain—that the spread of these cults
was longer lasting than historians have usually supposed. Even after circa 900 Afri-
can saints whose cults were previously unattested in Europe continue to appear for
the first time in the Latin sources. Thus, for example, the Mauretanian martyrs Victor
of Caesarea, Typasius, and Salsa of Tipasa first show up in Spanish texts in the tenth
and eleventh centuries; in Italy, the African martyrs Gallonius and Peregrinus do not
become visible until the thirteenth.142 The remarkably late date of the sources con-
cerned with these saints may simply be a result of source preservation or a reflection
of these cults’ slow internal diffusion within Spain and Italy; but it might conceivably
suggest that the spread of African cults was an ongoing process well into the medieval
period.
The fact that the Christian communities of Islamic North Africa remained in
communication with those of Europe until at least the eleventh century renders
this suggestion a very real possibility.143 We are admittedly not very well informed
about the connections between the African and Spanish churches in the Islamic pe-
riod, though such connections certainly continued to exist. Numerous direct routes
linked southeastern Spain to the rest of the Maghrib, and perhaps the best-
documented Christian to take advantage of them was a Palestinian monk by the
name of George. He had traveled from St. Sabas monastery in Jerusalem to Africa,
where he realized that the local church “was being severely beaten by the attacks
142
For Victor, Typasius, and Salsa see above, nn. 76 and 77. On Gallonius and Peregrinus see Chiesa,
“Acta S. Gallonii,” pp. 241–42, and “Pellegrino,” pp. 29–30. See also Lanzoni, Diocesi, 1:166, 241–
42, 255, 326 (with AASS Aug. 5 [Paris, 1868], pp. 813–14), 365–67, and 480–481.
143
On the Christian communities of Islamic North Africa see above, n. 10, and below, n. 188.
of tyrants” and so continued on to Spain.144 By contrast, Africa’s connections to
early-medieval Italy are remarkably well documented. From the eighth century on-
ward we hear of popes investing African bishops: an epitaph of Hadrian I (772–95)
records that “Africa, held captive [by the Muslims] for so many years, rejoices to
have merited bishops by your prayers,” and Benedict VII (975–84) later ordained
as bishop of Carthage a man named James who had been elected to the office by
the clergy and people of that city.145 By Leo IX’s day (1049–54), James’s successors
received the pallium from Rome.146 However, within twenty-five years there were
only two bishops left in Africa, and the situation forced Gregory VII (1073–85)
to intervene and consecrate a priest named Servandus as the new bishop of Hippo
Regius.147 It is not entirely clear how much longer the Christians of North Africa
stayed in contact with their coreligionists across the Mediterranean, but down until
at least the late eleventh century, the lines of communication remained open.
None of this guarantees that African saints’ cults continued to be carried across
the sea into the central Middle Ages. Even in Italy, the clearest examples of late-
medieval texts relating to previously unattested cults of African saints come from
Aquileia rather than from Rome.148 When taken together with the first tentative
steps of African saints onto the Mediterranean stage in the mid-fourth and early
fifth centuries, though, the survival of ties between the Christians of Africa and
those of Italy into the eleventh century does raise the possibility that any dispersals
of cults due to communal flight from the horrors of war and persecution may simply
represent more intense phases punctuating a much longer, slower, and more mun-
dane process that had already begun well before the Vandal invasion and of whose
end point we are quite simply ignorant.
Communications, Culture, and the Spread

of African Saints’ Cults
Indeed, it seems likely that the movement both of saints’ cults and of refugees was
facilitated by the same regular networks of communication and exchange that bound
the Mediterranean world together. Connections of this sort between Africa on the
one hand and Italy and Spain on the other are well attested archaeologically for
144
Eulogius of Toledo, Memorialae sanctorum 2.10.23–35, PL 115:786–92; the quotation is from
2.10.23, col. 787. On direct routes see Reynolds, Trade, p. 136; Míkel de Espalza, “Costas alicantinas
y costas magrebíes: El espacio marítimo musulmán según los textos árabes,” Sharq al-Andalus 3
(1986), 25–31; and Tadeus Lewicki, “Les voies maritimes de la Méditerranée dans le haut moyen
âge d’après les sources arabes,” in La navigazione mediterranea nell’alto medioevo, Settimane di Studio
della Fondazione Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo 25 (Spoleto, 1978), pp. 439–69, at
pp. 458–62.
145
On Hadrian I see Epitaphium Adriani I Papae, ed. Dümmler, MGH Poetae 1, p. 114: “Africa lae-
tatur, multos captiva per annos, / Pontifices precibus promeruisse tuis.” On Benedict VII see Leo abbas
et legatus, Ad Hugonem et Rotbertum reges epistola, ed. G. H. Pertz, MGH SS 3 (Hannover, 1839), pp.
686–90, at p. 689.
146
Leo IX, Epistulae 83–84, PL 143:727–31.
147
Gregory VII, Epistulae 3.19–21, ed. Erich Caspar, 2 vols., MGH Epp. sel. 2 (Berlin, 1920–23;
repr. 1955), pp. 285–88; see also Gregory VII, Epistula 1.23, pp. 39–40.
148
See above, n. 142.
late antiquity and, as I have noted, they are also traceable in the medieval period.
Moreover, if the devotees of African saints traveled in the same ships that carried
the region’s exports abroad, it would help make sense of some of the geographical
and chronological patterns in the sources. Rome and Naples, the most important
cult centers of African saints in Italy, were both linked to the region around Carthage
by direct trade routes in late antiquity. Naples continued to import African goods
down to circa 700; but shipping to Italy appears to have been on the decline from
the fifth century onward, and though it would later revive, the connection to Rome
seems to have become tenuous by the late sixth century.149 It is thus perhaps no co-
incidence that the sources for the spread of African cults to the city of Rome are
for the most part quite early and that the strongest evidence for the presence of
such cults in early-medieval Italy as a whole comes from the south, where ties seem
to have been the strongest. Similarly, though commercial exchange had long con-
nected Africa to the ports of Spain’s Mediterranean and even Atlantic coasts, down
to at least the mid-fifth century the city of Tarragona and its hinterland appear to
have enjoyed remarkably close contact with Africa Proconsularis, including Car-
thage.150 This link in turn might help to explain the early appearance of Cyprian’s
and Perpetua’s cults in northeastern Spain. The more southerly provenance of the
Visigothic- and early Islamic-era sources may also reflect a real (though somewhat
earlier) shift in the primary focus of Spanish-African communications, for in the
late sixth and early seventh century, shipping out of Carthage—now under Byzantine
control—appears increasingly to have concentrated on Cartagena, the capital of the
recently reconquered imperial province of southern Spain.151 The cults of the Cartha-
ginian saints Siriacus and Paula (associated with the port cities of the Spanish south-
east) and Speratus (first visible in Toledo) may well only have traveled west during this
Byzantine phase of Spanish communications with the African metropolis. Probably at
the same time, shorter-distance, more or less local connections seem to have gained in
149
Reynolds, Trade, pp. 33–34, 56, 59, and 131; McCormick, Origins, pp. 100–104, 511–15, and
637–38; Paul Arthur, Naples: From Roman Town to City-State, Archaeological Monographs of the
British School at Rome 12 (London, 2002), pp. 110, 113, 128–32, and also pp. 142–43; and Jean-
Pierre Sodini, “Productions et échanges dans le monde protobyzantin (IVe–VIIe s.): Le cas de la céra-
mique,” in Klaus Belke, Friedrich Hild, Johannes Koder, and Peter Soustal, eds., Byzanz als Raum: Zu
Methoden und Inhalten der historischen Geographie des östlichen Mittelmeerraumes, Tabula Imperii
Byzantini 7 (Vienna, 2000), pp. 181–208, at p. 188, who indicates that African fine wares continued
to reach Rome as late as the late seventh century.
150
S. J. Keay, Late Roman Amphorae in the Western Mediterranean. A Typology and Economic Study:
The Catalan Evidence, 2 vols., BAR International Series 196 (Oxford, 1984), 2:411, 414–17, 423–24, and
432–33; Reynolds, Trade, pp. 49, 52, 128, and 137; and Paul Reynolds, “Hispania in the Later Roman
Mediterranean: Ceramics and Trade,” in Bowes and Kulikowski, eds., Hispania, pp. 369–486, at
pp. 411 and 433–34. However, see also Javier Arce, “Spain and the African Provinces in Late Antiquity,”
ibid., pp. 341–61, who stresses the limits of the cultural ties between Spain and Africa in late antiquity.
151
Reynolds, Trade, pp. 34, 59–60, and 132; and Keay, Late Roman Amphorae, 2:427–28; though Mi-
chel Bonifay, Études sur la céramique romaine tardive d’Afrique, BAR International Series 1301 (Oxford,
2004), p. 447, notes that African products were still reaching Barcelona in the seventh century. The seventh-
century life of St. Felix of Gerona similarly imagined the saint arriving in northeastern Spain from Carthage
by way of Caesarea in Mauretania; see Passio S. Felicis Gerundensis 3, ed. Fábrega Grau, in Pasionario
hispánico, 2:320–21, with discussion at 1:144–50 and 261; and also Hymnodia Gotica 106 and 123,
ed. Blume, pp. 150–52 and 177–78. The early but very short mention of Felix in Prudentius, Peristephanon
4, lines 29–30, ed. Cunningham, p. 287, says nothing of his African origins.
significance. These had presumably always been important to the flow of African
saints’ cults, both to Italy and to Spain, but by the ninth century the Spanish-
Carthaginian connection seems to have weakened, and thereafter almost all of the
cults that become visible in Spain were of specifically Mauretanian origins.
One wonders in this context about the unexpected interest in African cults in
the ninth-century Carolingian Empire and even in the tenth-century Holy Land.
Charlemagne’s translation of Carthaginian relics, the copying of African saints’
lives, and the inclusion of the early Christian martyr Salvius and the sixth-century
theologian Fulgentius of Ruspe in a litany from Sens took place in the context of
increased economic interactions (through Italy) between the Frankish world and
Islamic North Africa.152 Einhard even tells us that Charlemagne entered into dip-
lomatic relations with the Muslim ruler of Ifriqiya so as to care for the poverty-
stricken Christians of Carthage, and Notker the Stammerer later also remembered
the Frankish emperor’s gifts of wealth, grain, wine, and oil to the Africans.153
It seems likely that an even stronger network of communications linked North
Africa to the eastern Mediterranean, much of it, too, now under Muslim control.
Around 767, for example, a representative of the patriarch of Alexandria made his
way from Egypt to Rome by way of Africa.154 The lives of Elias the Younger and
the Palestinian monk George testify to the existence of similar ties between Africa
and the East in the ninth century, as does the fact that a group of contemporary
Western penitents traveled from Rome to Jerusalem to Egypt and then on to
Africa, from where they made their way back to Rome.155 Somewhat later, legates
of the African church traveled to Rome to inform Pope Formosus (891–96) that
news of heresy had reached their province from the East, presumably by much
the same route.156 It is perhaps no surprise, then, to find a community of African
Christians active in the eastern Mediterranean, quite possibly in the Holy Land, in
the following century. Preserved in St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai is a
Latin calendar that includes several African saints otherwise unknown in the East,
such as Cyprian of Carthage, the Massa Candida, Castus and Emilianus, the Thu-
burbitans (Maxima, Secunda, and Donatilla), and Crispina.157 The calendar is con-
tained in one of three Latin liturgical manuscripts—a Psalter, an epistolary, and an
antiphonary, all provisionally assigned by E. A. Lowe to the tenth century—all of
which are now in Sinai and all of which appear to have been produced by the
152
See above, nn. 6 (translation), 96–97 (lives), and 85 and 131 (litany). On economic interactions see Mc-
Cormick, Origins, pp. 252, 264–65, 370, 375, 382–84, 411, 512–15, 519–22, 527, 618, 637–38, and 753.
153
Einhard, Vita Karoli magni 27, ed. G. H. Pertz and G. Waitz, 5th ed., MGH SS rer. Germ. 25
(Hannover, 1905), pp. 27–28; Notker Balbulus, Gesta Karoli magni imperatoris 2.9, ed. Hans F. Hae-
fele, MGH SS rer. germ. N. S. 12 (Berlin, 1962), pp. 62–63; see also ibid. 1.26, p. 37, on African pov-
erty and 2.14, p. 77, on African merchants in ninth-century Gallia Narbonensis.
154
Codex Carolinus 40 (Pope Paul I to Pippin), ed. W. Gundlach, MGH Epp. 3 (Berlin, 1892),
pp. 552–53. On the date see McCormick, Origins, p. 874, n. 41. For the early development of this
network in the eighth century see ibid., pp. 508–11.
155
Gesta sanctorum Rotonensium 3.8, ed. Caroline Brett, in The Monks of Redon, Studies in Celtic
History 10 (Woodbridge, Eng., 1989), pp. 207–9.
156
Flodoard of Reims, Historiae Remensis ecclesiae 4.2, ed. Martina Stratmann, MGH SS 36 (Han-
nover, 1998), p. 372.
157
J. Gribomont, “Le mystérieux calendrier latin du Sinai: Édition et commentaire,” Analecta Bol-
landiana 75 (1957), 105–34, at pp. 112–14.
same scriptorium.158 Although the epistolary uses the African version of the Old
Latin Bible, the atelier that produced the manuscripts appears to have served a com-
munity resident somewhere in the East: not only does the calendar include a large
number of Eastern saints, but the orthography of all three manuscripts shows signs
of contemporary Greek, Arabic, and even Syriac influence.159 This community was
probably composed of African Christians who, like Elias the Younger, had chosen
to seek their salvation in the Holy Land.
While important to facilitating exchange, though, regular communications are
not in themselves sufficient to explain the overall regional and chronological distri-
bution of African saints’ cults throughout the Mediterranean, for such ties also
bound Africa to Gaul and the East in late antiquity. As with Rome, Naples, and
Cartagena, direct networks of exchange appear to have linked Carthage and Mar-
seilles well into the seventh century, even as African goods disappeared from most
other Western ports.160 Similarly, in the fourth and early fifth century, the eastern
Mediterranean became an important market for African fine tablewares, and the
Byzantine reconquest of Africa redirected the region’s agricultural surplus to the
East from the early sixth to the later seventh century.161 Levantine merchants con-
tinued to trade in Carthage into the Byzantine period, and, as I have noted, regular
communications between North Africa and the Levant furthermore appear to have
resumed fairly quickly after the Islamic conquest of the West.162 We even have some
indication that contacts of this sort could have facilitated the circulation of saints’
cults in general, for during the century and a half of Byzantine rule in Africa Eastern
martyrs came to be widely venerated there.163 Yet the reverse was not true. Some-
thing seems to have impeded the spread of African saints to Gaul and the East.
158
E. A. Lowe, “An Unknown Latin Psalter on Mount Sinai,” Scriptorium 9 (1955), 177–99; idem,
“Two Other Unknown Latin Liturgical Fragments on Mount Sinai,” Scriptorium 19 (1965), 3–29.
159
Bonifatius Fischer, “Zur Liturgie der lateinischen Handschriften vom Sinai,” Revue bénédictine 74
(1964), 284–97; E. A. Lowe, “Two New Latin Liturgical Fragments on Mount Sinai,” Revue bénédic-
tine 74 (1964), 252–83; “Unknown Latin Psalter,” pp. 188–94; and “Two Other Fragments,” pp. 14–23.
160
Reynolds, Trade, pp. 21, 25–27, 31–34, 58–60, and 131; Sodini, “Productions et échanges,” p. 188;
Bonifay, Céramique romaine, pp. 457–58 and (for the earlier period) 452–54; McCormick, Origins,
pp. 107 and 351–52; S. T. Loseby, “Marseille: A Late Antique Success Story?” Journal of Roman Studies
82 (1992), 165–83, at pp. 171–72; idem, “Marseille and the Pirenne Thesis, I: Gregory of Tours, the Mer-
ovingian kings and ‘un grand port,’” in Richard Hodges and William Bowden, eds., The Sixth Century:
Production, Distribution, and Demand, Transformation of the Roman World 3 (Leiden, 1998), pp.
203–29, at pp. 213–17; and see also idem, “Marseille and the Pirenne Thesis II: ‘Ville morte,’” in Inge
Lyse Hansen and Chris Wickham, eds., The Long Eighth Century: Production, Distribution and Demand,
Transformation of the Roman World 11 (Leiden, 2000), pp. 167–93, at pp. 172–75.
161
McCormick, Origins, pp. 55 (with maps 2.2 and 2.3) and 102; Sodini, “Productions et échanges,”
pp. 188–90 but also pp. 191–93; Bonifay, Céramique romaine, pp. 454–56; Reynolds, Trade, p. 34;
John W. Hayes, Late Roman Pottery (London, 1972), pp. 419–24; and idem, A Supplement to Late
Roman Pottery (London, 1980), pp. 521–23.
162
McCormick, Origins, pp. 107 and 508–10; see also Sodini, “Productions et échanges,” p. 194.
163
Duval, Loca sanctorum, 2:657–70; Paul Monceaux, Enquête sur l’épigraphie chrétienne d’Afrique,
Mémoires Présentés à l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres 12 (Paris, 1907), pp. 7–8. See also Anas-
tasios the Sinaite 40, ed. F. Nau, in “Le texte grec des récits du moine Anastase sur les saints pères du Sinaï,”
Oriens Christianus 2 (1902), 83–87, abridged in Synaxarium ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae, 29 Apr. (sy-
nax. select.) and 30 Apr. (synax. select.), cols. 637–42, which relates the story of an adulterous taxeotes’
vision of hell from early-seventh-century Carthage, in the time of Bishop Thalassios. Thalassios himself is
Of course, what determined the success or failure of a particular cult in a particular
region is an elusive question that ultimately can only really be answered (if at all) after
close and detailed study of that cult in the context of the region in question.164 Neverthe-
less, some general factors do suggest themselves, not all of them equally satisfying and
each probably important in differing degrees in different places and at different times.
In the Byzantine East, for example, where the official liturgical veneration of a saint nat-
urally went hand in hand with the existence of hagiographical material in Greek, lan-
guage may have been an issue. It is difficult to know, though, whether it was the re-
stricted production of Greek literature that led to lack of interest in African saints or
vice versa. In Cyprian’s case it seems to have been the former: Gregory of Nazianzus
wanted to honor the Carthaginian saint, but, as Delehaye noted, he seems to have lacked
Greek source material. It is surely also significant that the only Eastern community in
which African saints appear to have been venerated to any significant degree was also
one in which Latin was used as the liturgical language. Nevertheless, it is important
not to overemphasize the role of linguistic barriers in dividing the Mediterranean.165 In-
deed, the substantial amount of Italian hagiography that was rendered into Greek, the
ability of African saints to cross the linguistic divide in southern Italy and Sicily, and the
production there of Greek versions of some of these saints’ lives are all testaments to the
fact that, when it came to translation, where there was a will, there was a way.
African martyrs specifically may also have been regarded with special suspicion by
those whose vantage point fell outside the “ties of mutual visibility” that bound Africa,
southern Italy, and southern Spain so closely together.166 Evidence for such a suppo-
sition is by its very nature difficult to come by, though again it is surely significant
that so many of the African saints’ cults that came to be commemorated in Gaul,
Byzantium, and even Northumbria over the course of late antiquity appear to
have made their way to Italy (and in some cases Spain) before gaining acceptance
elsewhere. Perhaps, then, veneration abroad—and above all in Italy—could give
an African cult a kind of cultural prestige that it otherwise would have lacked, pos-
sibly even by allaying others’ anxieties about potentially dubious African martyrs.
Certainly the combined influences of Arianism, Manichaeism, and Donatism
celebrated in Synaxarium ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae, 20 May, col. 698; very little is known about him,
but in the estimation of M.-Th. Disdier, “Le témoignage spiritual de Thalassius le Lybien,” Études byzan-
tines 2 (1944), 79–118, at p. 81, he was “un grec, un pur byzantine.” On his life and work see also Michel
van Parys, “Un maître spirituel oublié: Thalassios de Libye,” Irénikon 52 (1979), 214–40.
164
See, though, the reflections of I. N. Wood, “Early Merovingian Devotion in Town and Country,”
in Derek Baker, ed., The Church in Town and Countryside, Studies in Church History 16 (Oxford,
1979), pp. 61–76, at p. 68.
165
On Gregory see above, n. 99. On knowledge of Latin in the East see Claudia Rapp, “Hagiography and
Monastic Literature between Greek East and Latin West in Late Antiquity,” in Cristianità d’occidente e cri-
stianità d’oriente (secoli VI–IX), 2 vols., Settimane di Studio della Fondazione Centro Italiano di Studi sul-
l’Alto Medioevo 51 (Spoleto, 2004), 2:1221–80, at pp. 1228–38; see also pp. 1254–57. Greek was also a
spoken language in Carthage, even before the Byzantine reconquest; see Frank M. Clover, “Carthage and
the Vandals,” in J. H. Humphrey, ed., Excavations at Carthage 1978, Conducted by the University of Mich-
igan, 7 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1982), pp. 1–22, at p. 11. On the question of a late-antique East-West divide in
general, see Peter Brown, “Eastern and Western Christendom in Late Antiquity: A Parting of the Ways,” in
his Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, Calif., 1982), pp. 166–95, at pp. 168–73.
166
The quotation is from Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of
Mediterranean History (Oxford, 2000), p. 125.
quickly rendered African orthodoxy so suspect that from the late fifth century down
to the mid-eleventh even the bishops of Rome sporadically cautioned against accept-
ing Africans into ecclesiastical orders.167 Similarly, by the ninth and early tenth cen-
turies Florus of Lyons and the Byzantine author of the vita of Elias the Younger seem
to have shared the perception that, in the wake of the Islamic invasion, Christianity
was no longer firmly established in Africa.168 Such concerns may have contributed
to a certain amount of skepticism with respect to cults of African origins, but they
could also cut at least one other way. In Florus’s estimation, the dubious underpin-
ning of African orthodoxy was an argument for reclaiming the most precious relics
of the region’s Christian past and protecting them within the territory of the Frank-
ish empire, rather than for regarding African martyrs with tacit hostility. If
Carolingian-era interest in the lives of African martyrs is anything to go by, the
same would seem to have been true for many of Florus’s Frankish contemporaries.
Thus the lack of enthusiasm for African saints in Gaul and the East in late antiquity
may simply have been a result of a certain amount of regionalism in both areas. I have
already shown that in the late Roman and Merovingian periods the Gallic cult of
saints was generally local in focus and also that, for all its Eastern ecumenism, the Byz-
antine church similarly appears to have been somewhat reluctant to embrace the cults
of Western martyrs who did not have a connection to Italy.
It seems likely, though, that increasingly divergent attitudes toward the cult of relics
in Africa on the one hand and Gaul and Byzantium on the other also played a role in
limiting the spread of these cults. Devotion to relics, of course, did not enjoy a spiritual
monopoly over individual or collective piety in the early-medieval world: recent schol-
arship has begun to explore the many ways in which the faithful gained access to the
realm of sacred power, including through living holy people, dreams, and saints’
names.169 Relics were not essential to the dedication of early altars, and despite later
injunctions requiring their presence they were rarely mentioned in Gallic dedicatory
inscriptions dating from the eighth to the tenth century.170 Nevertheless, relics could
be a critical element in the establishment of the cults of long-dead saints.
167
See Gelasius I’s formula on accepting Africans into ecclesiastical orders: Constituta quae episcopi in
sua ordinatione accipiunt, PL 59:137–38, at col. 137; reiterated in Gregory the Great, Registrum 2.31, ed.
Norberg, 1:118; Gregory II to Boniface (= Boniface, Epistula 18), ed. Ernst Dümmler, MGH Epp. 3 (Berlin,
1892), pp. 267–68, at p. 267; Liber diurnus Romanorum pontificum, ed. T. E. von Sickel (Vienna, 1889),
p. 6; Nicholas II, Epistula 25, PL 143:1346–47, at col. 1347; and see the discussion of R. A. Markus, “Do-
natism: The Last Phase,” Studies in Church History 1 (1964), 118–26, at pp. 124–25, and idem, “Country
Bishops in Byzantine Africa,” in Baker, ed., Church in Town and Countryside, pp. 1–15, at pp. 5–6; repr. in
Markus, From Augustine to Gregory the Great: History and Christianity in Late Antiquity (London,
1983), as essays VI and IX respectively.
168
Florus, Carmen 13, p. 544; Vita S. Eliae iunioris 4, ed. Rossi Taibbi, p. 6.
169
In addition to Peter Brown’s classic, “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity,”
Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971), 80–101, see Paul Anthony Hayward, “Demystifying the Role of
Sanctity in Western Christendom,” in Howard-Johnston and Hayward, eds., Cult of Saints, pp. 115–
42, esp. p. 125; Fouracre, “Origins”; Isabel Moreira, “Dreams and Divination in Early Medieval Ca-
nonical and Narrative Sources: The Question of Clerical Control,” Catholic Historical Review 89
(2003), 621–42; Lifshitz, Name of the Saint, esp. p. 8; and see also Raymond Van Dam, Saints and
Their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul (Princeton, N.J., 1993), pp. 128–29.
170
Rollason, Saints and Relics, p. 25; Nicole Herrmann-Mascard, Les reliques des saints: Formation cou-
tumière d’un droit, Société d’Histoire du Droit, Collection d’Histoire Institutionnelle et Sociale 6 (Paris,
However, given the nature of early African practices with respect to the relics of
the saints, it seems unlikely that the physical remains of African martyrs traveled
abroad with much frequency, at least prior to the eighth century. The Western
churches in general, and the church of Rome in particular, had a long-standing re-
luctance to disturb the graves of saints, either by moving their bodies or by dismem-
bering them for corporeal relics; and from the fourth to the seventh century, the
church in Africa appears to have shared the Roman attitude toward the inviolability
of martyrs’ tombs and bodies.171 In practical terms the African church seems to have
been quite willing to receive corporeal relics from abroad, but at least as late as the
fifth century African churchmen could react with a certain amount of skepticism
and even hostility to the bones of alleged martyrs that had been disinterred or dis-
membered, particularly when they were allowed to circulate free of clerical con-
trol.172 Clerical control was presumably also at stake in the repeated attempts of
African bishops to curtail the erection of altars and memoriae martyrum on loca-
tions that had only been hallowed by the “dreams and empty revelations of what-
ever people you like”—a telling phrase that seems to suggest that in Africa, as else-
where in the late-antique West, popular devotion to the saints was by no means
uniformly relic-centered.173 Instead, the African bishops wanted monuments to
be built only where material remembrances of the martyrs could be found: their
bodies, of course, but also their dwellings, possessions, or sites of martyrdom.174
Africans also shared the Roman acceptance of secondary relics: Augustine, for ex-
ample, makes it clear that objects such as flowers, clothes, and oil that had come
into contact with the corporeal remains of St. Stephen had the same healing proper-
ties as the bones of the protomartyr himself.175
In late antiquity, then, the bodies of African saints were at least theoretically to be
kept safe from disinterment and dismemberment, and, if need be, their miraculous
1975), pp. 146–55 and 162–68; L. Duchesne, Christian Worship: Its Origin and Evolution. A Study in the
Latin Liturgy up to the Time of Charlemagne, trans. M. L. McClure (London, 1903), pp. 403–18, esp.
p. 404; Heinzelmann, Translationsberichte, pp. 25–28; and Jean Michaud, “Culte des reliques et épigra-
phie: L’example des dédicaces et des consécrations d’autels,” in Edina Bozóky and Anne-Marie Helvétius,
eds., Les reliques. Objets, cultes, symboles: Acts du colloque international de l’Université du Littoral-Côte
d’Opale (Boulogne-sur-Mer), 4–6 septembre 1997 (Turnhout, 1999), pp. 199–212.
171
Delehaye, Origines, pp. 50–53; John McCulloh, “The Cult of Relics in the Letters and ‘Dialogues’
of Pope Gregory the Great: A Lexicographical Study,” Traditio 32 (1976), 145–84, at pp. 152–53 and
181; and Duval, Loca sanctorum, 2:549.
172
Optatus of Mileu, Contra Parmenianum Donatistam 1.16, ed. Karl Ziwsa, CSEL 26 (Vienna,
1893), pp. 18–19; Augustine, De opere monachorum 28.36, ed. Josef Zycha, CSEL 41 (Vienna,
1900), p. 585; De miraculis Sancti Stephani protomartyris 1.1, PL 41:834; and Delehaye, Origines,
pp. 66 and 90. The African church was remarkably cautious even in its treatment of noncorporeal
relics, and from the late fifth century onward it documented the ceremonies surrounding their deposi-
tions in inscriptions discussed by Duval, Loca sanctorum, 2:550–80.
173
Registri ecclesiae Carthaginensis excerpta 83, ed. Charles Munier, in Concilia Africae a. 345–a. 525,
CCSL 149 (Turnhout, 1974), pp. 204–5; see also Concilium Carthaginense a. 525, ibid., p. 266; Ferrandus
of Carthage, Breviatio canonum 171, ibid., p. 301; and Cresconius, Concordia canonum 69, PL 88:872.
174
Registri ecclesiae Carthaginensis excerpta 83, ed. Munier, pp. 204–5; cf. Cresconius, Concordia
canonum 69, PL 88:872.
175
Augustine, De civitate Dei 22.8, ed. B. Dombart and A. Kalb, CCSL 47–48 (Turnhout, 1955),
pp. 821–23; Duval, Loca sanctorum, 2:546. The subtleties of Roman relic practice are examined by
McCulloh, “Cult of Relics,” pp. 153–83.
powers were to be carried beyond the sites of their tombs through secondary relics.
As a result, the remains of the martyrs themselves probably only rarely traveled
beyond the shores of Africa. The invasion of heretical Vandals may have created
an exception to that rule and (as some scholars have argued) could conceivably
have prompted the evacuation of the remains of such saints as Augustine, Felix
of Thibiuca, and a Mauretanian bishop named Optatus who is commemorated
in the catacombs of Callixtus in Rome.176 On the face of it, though, this seems un-
likely. In the case of Augustine the evidence is equivocal at best, while Felix’s cult
probably existed simultaneously in Africa and southern Italy.177 Optatus, a contem-
porary of Augustine’s who appears to have been active in Africa until 424 or 425,
may very well have died as a refugee in Rome, as Quodvultdeus and Gaudiosus did
in Naples.178 Moreover, the non-African texts that lay claim to the bodies of African
saints date, for the most part, to the eighth century or later, by which point even
Roman opposition to moving the remains of the martyrs had begun to relax some-
what.179 Thus, if the translation of these saints’ earthly remnants to the northern
Mediterranean did in fact take place, on the whole it may have been a medieval
rather than a late-antique phenomenon.
176
On the permissibility of moving bodies when they could be profaned by heretics see Herrmann-
Mascard, Reliques des saints, p. 36.
177
On Augustine see above, n. 26; on Felix see Duval, Loca sanctorum, 1:30 (no. 13; Thibiuca, Africa
Proconsularis) and 2:729. Duval’s suggestion that Felix’s relics may have been transferred to southern
Italy in the Vandal period and that his cult was later reimported to Africa under the Byzantine regime
is certainly possible, but it seems to me less likely. See also Lanzoni, Diocesi, 1:480, on Marianus and
James.
178
Inscriptiones Christianae urbis Romae septimo saeculo antiquiores, n.s., 4 (Rome, 1964), no.
9370, p. 5; no. 9516, pp. 27–28; and no. 9517, p. 28, with Gesta conlationis Carthaginiensis, anno
411 1.120, ed. Serge Lancel, CCSL 149A (Turnhout, 1974), p. 99. The identification was made by
de Rossi, Roma sotterranea, 2:221–25, and is accepted by Pietri and Pietri, Prosopographie de l’Italie,
p. 1561, “Optatus 2.” De Rossi argued that Optatus died and that his relics were carried to Rome in
the Vandal period; Pietri and Pietri suggest (more plausibly) that Optatus may himself have fled to and
died in Rome. This is probably the same Optatus who signed Augustine, Epistula 141, ed. A. Gold-
bacher, CSEL 44 (Vienna, 1904), p. 235 (= idem, Retractationes 2.66.1, ed. Pius Knöll, CSEL 36 [Vien-
na, 1902], p. 179), and Concilium Carthaginense a. 424–425, ed. Munier, in Concilia Africae, p. 169,
and who is mentioned in Augustine, Epistula 185.2.6, ed. A. Goldbacher, CSEL 57 (Vienna, 1911),
p. 6. On his career in Africa see Mandouze, Prosopographie de l’Afrique, pp. 801–2, “Optatus 4.”
In the twelfth century he was commemorated as a martyr by William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum
Anglorum, ed. Valentini and Zucchetti, in Codice topografico, 2:149, but he is not mentioned in the
Martyrologium Hieronymianum, v Id. Aug., pp. 427–30, which otherwise mentions many of the
same bishops listed in Inscriptiones Christianae urbis Romae, n.s., 4, no. 9516, p. 27.
179
In addition to Augustine’s translation, first mentioned in Bede, Martyrologium, ed. Quentin,
p. 109, see above, n. 6 (Cyprian); Chiesa, “Acta S. Gallonii,” esp. pp. 241–42 and 263–64 (Gallonius);
de Gaiffier, “S. Marcel de Tanger,” p. 124, and (on the date of the manuscript) idem, “Les notices his-
paniques dans le martyrologe d’Usuard,” Analecta Bollandiana 55 (1937), 268–83, at p. 271, n. 2
(Marcellus of Tingi); Chiesa, “Pellegrino,” esp. pp. 25–30 (Peregrinus); Peter the Subdeacon, Passio
S. Restitutae, ed. D’Angelo, p. 198 (Restituta); Usuard, Martyrologium, ed. Dubois, p. 249 (Siriacus
and Paula); George the Monk, Chronicon breve 4.100.7, PG 110:716 (Terentius and Africanus);
and de Guibert, “Victor de Césarée,” p. 263 (Victor of Caesarea); on the Twelve Brothers of Hadru-
metum see above, n. 40. The notable exception to the rule is Felix of Thibiuca, whose body, Delehaye
(“Passion de S. Félix,” pp. 251–52) implies, remained in Venosa; however, see also p. 259, a later text,
where Felix’s body is explicitly said to have been buried in Milan (here presumably an error for Nola),
though his relics (reliquie eius) were sent to Carthage.
Secondary relics, by contrast, were far more mobile. Not only were they typically
smaller and thus inherently more portable than a human cadaver, they were also at
least occasionally to be found in the possession of private individuals and as such
could circulate as easily as did their owners themselves.180 Doubts about the authen-
ticity of such relics could be dispelled by an episcopal letter of the sort that Augus-
tine addressed to a certain Bishop Quintilian, assuring him as to the legitimacy of
the relics of St. Stephen owned by the widow Galla and her daughter Simpliciola.181
However, the extent to which secondary relics were likely to become the physical
focus of devotion beyond the territory of a saint’s shrine presumably depended in
large part on the enthusiasm of the host community for items that had merely
been in contact with nonlocal (and, in the case of Africa, at least potentially suspect)
martyrs. And while the idea that objects could be hallowed through contact with
Christ or a saint seems to have been more or less universally accepted throughout
late-antique and early-medieval Christendom, one gets the sense that, even as early
as the sixth and seventh centuries, at least some of the Christian faithful in Gaul,
England, and the eastern Mediterranean placed more trust in the corporeal remains
of foreign martyrs than they did in the secondary relics of those saints.182 The an-
cient Roman aversion to disturbing the resting dead had more or less completely
dissipated in the East by this point, and it seems to have been under increasing as-
sault in the West.183 By the eighth and ninth centuries, the demand for corporeal
relics had become so strong that, like any other precious commodity, they could
be bought or sold, bestowed as gifts, or even stolen, and the value of contact relics
began to depreciate even further.184 Against this general backdrop, the apparent
180
Duval, Loca sanctorum, 2:546.
181
Augustine, Epistula 212, ed. Goldbacher, CSEL 57, p. 372.
182
Gregory the Great, Registrum 4.30, ed. Norberg, 1:248–50; John McCulloh, “From Antiquity to
the Middle Ages: Continuity and Change in Papal Relic Policy from the 6th to the 8th Century,” in
Ernst Dassmann and K. Suso Frank, eds., Pietas: Festschrift für Bernhard Kötting, Jahrbuch für Antike
und Christentum, Ergänzungband 8 (Münster, 1980), pp. 313–24. For the cult of relics in Spain see
Castillo Maldonado, “Angelorum participes,” pp. 179–83; and García Rodriguez, Culto de los santos,
pp. 365–70. Relics from the Holy Land, especially those relating to the life and work of Christ, would
seem to be something of an exception to the rule; see Yitzhak Hen, “Les authentiques des reliques de la
Terre Sainte en Gaule franque,” Le moyen âge: Revue d’histoire et de philologie 105 (1999), 71–90.
183
See esp. Thacker, “In Search of Saints,” pp. 255–56; but also Herrmann-Mascard, Reliques des saints,
pp. 26–49; Gillian Clark, “Translating Relics: Victricius of Rouen and Fourth-Century Debate,” Early Me-
dieval Europe 10 (2001), 161–76; David G. Hunter, “Vigilantius of Calagurris and Victricius of Rouen:
Ascetics, Relics, and Clerics in Late Roman Gaul,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 7 (1999), 401–30;
Conrad Leyser, “The Temptations of Cult: Roman Martyr Piety in the Age of Gregory the Great,” Early
Medieval Europe 9 (2000), 289–307; Head, Hagiography, pp. 23–24; J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Frankish
Church (Oxford, 1983), pp. 9–10; Peter Brown, “Relics and Social Status in the Age of Gregory of Tours,”
in his Society and the Holy, pp. 222–50; idem, Cult of the Saints, pp. 78 and 87–105; though also idem,
“Eastern and Western Christendom,” pp. 187–90; and above, n. 182.
184
Patrick J. Geary, “Sacred Commodities: The Circulation of Medieval Relics,” in Arjun Appadurai,
ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, Eng., 1986), pp. 169–
90; idem, Furta sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages, rev. ed. (Princeton, N.J., 1990);
Herrmann-Mascard, Reliques des saints, pp. 49–70; John Osborne, “Politics, Diplomacy and the
Cult of Relics in Venice and the Northern Adriatic in the First Half of the Ninth Century,” Early Medi-
eval Europe 8 (1999), 369–86; and Holger A. Klein, “Eastern Objects and Western Desires: Relics and
Reliquaries between Byzantium and the West,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 58 (2004), 283–314.
unwillingness of the African church to dismember and circulate the bodies of its
martyrs might further help to explain the relative lack of enthusiasm for African
saints in Gaul and the East.
Absent such cultural factors, then, the potential for African cults to spread north
and east probably existed throughout the late-antique and early-medieval Mediterra-
nean. The existence of regular interregional communications—punctuated on occa-
sion by the flight of refugees—probably helped facilitate this process by providing an
audience, or at least the makings of an audience, across the sea for the African cult of
saints.185 This was likely composed of Africans themselves who (voluntarily or not)
had settled abroad for a variety of economic, political, and religious reasons and who
carried their cultic devotions with them; the more or less steady stream of non-African
traders, soldiers, pilgrims, diplomats, and other travelers, at least some of whom
probably developed their own attachments to particular African martyrs; and local
populations abroad who were infected with a fervor for African saints by either or
both of those two groups. But cults need more than audiences; they need patrons
and promoters as well. Whether or not African cults took deep root beyond their na-
tive shores probably owed much to their ability to secure such backers. This does not
seem to have been a problem in southern Italy and Spain, where the proximity of the
regions to Africa and their resulting ability to sustain regular communications over
the long term probably ensured that, in time, local churchmen became familiar and
comfortable enough with the African saints in question to endorse and propagate
their cults. Indeed, given the nature of “connectivity” in the premodern Mediterra-
nean world, a significant presence of devotion to African saints in Italy and Spain
should not surprise us.186 Outside of southern Italy and Spain, though, these cults
probably faced a variable combination of regional chauvinism, differing attitudes to-
ward relics, and perhaps also linguistic difficulties and even uncertainties about a
saint’s orthodoxy. This variety of cultural factors probably combined to inhibit the
willingness of local ecclesiastical hierarchies in Gaul and the East to embrace and pro-
mote the cults of African martyrs, thus limiting their spread.
Studying the diffusion of African saints’ cults on a Mediterranean-wide basis may

thus highlight something of the precariousness of Africa’s integration into the chang-
ing world of early-medieval Christendom. That precariousness did not develop, how-
ever, because Africans rejected either Christianity or integration.187 In fact, Africa re-
mained a part of the larger Christian Mediterranean for much longer than scholars
have sometimes thought. An indigenous Christian community endured in Africa
185
On these points in general, see Barbara Abou-el-Haj, “The Audiences for the Medieval Cult of
Saints,” Gesta 30 (1991), 3–15; and Peter Brown, “Enjoying the Saints in Late Antiquity,” Early Medi-
eval Europe 9 (2000), 1–24.
186
See in general Horden and Purcell, Corrupting Sea, pp. 123–72, 365–87, and 438–60.
187
The idea of African resistance to the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church, and even Christianity itself
gained particular currency through some of the seminal studies of the second half of the twentieth century,
esp. W. H. C. Frend, The Donatist Church: A Movement of Protest in Roman North Africa (Oxford, 1952;
repr. 1971); Christian Courtois, Les Vandales et l’Afrique (Paris, 1955), esp. p. 148; R. A. Markus, “Chris-
tianity and Dissent in Roman North Africa: Changing Perspectives in Recent Work,” in Derek Baker, ed.,
Schism, Heresy and Religious Protest, Studies in Church History 9 (Cambridge, Eng., 1972), pp. 21–36, at
pp. 34–35; and Marcel Bénabou, La résistance africaine à la romanisation (Paris, 1976).
for centuries after the Islamic conquest, and African communications with the rest of
the Mediterranean either survived the end of the ancient economy or were reborn
shortly thereafter. Rather, the precariousness of Africa’s situation lay in the widening
cultural divide that separated the region from the new centers of power in the early-
medieval world: Gaul and Byzantium. Africa remained in touch with these “new
Romes” to the north and east, but it seems to have found itself increasingly out of
step with them. Indeed, it would appear that Africa was slowly left behind by cultural
developments elsewhere in the Mediterranean. In general, the reaction of key seg-
ments of African society to the altered circumstances in which they found themselves
from the fifth century onward was to cling fiercely and conservatively to Roman tra-
dition. This is seen not only in the shared aversion of the Roman and African churches
to disturbing the graves of the martyrs through translations and in their respect for the
physical integrity of the bodies of the saints but also in the fact that the two churches
maintained their ties for nearly four hundred years after the Islamic conquest and, for
that matter, in the fact that Latin appears to have survived as both a spoken and an
epigraphic language in Africa down to the eleventh century and beyond.188 But in the
remaking of the Mediterranean world in late antiquity, clinging to the Roman past
does not always seem to have been a winning proposition. Like the Romans of
Rome, African Christians eventually learned to adapt to the changed realities that
confronted them; but whereas the former were saved from irrelevance by their city’s
unique historical, cultural, religious, and political significance, Africans found them-
selves relegated ever more to the margins of the new medieval Europe.
188
Al-Idrı̄sı̄, Nuzhat al-mushtāq fı̄ ikhtirāq al-āfāq, ed. and trans. R. Dozy and M. J. de Goeje, in
Description de l’Afrique et de l’Espagne (Leiden, 1866), pp. 104–5 (in the Arabic text); Charles Sau-
magne, Bulletin archéologique du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques (1928–29), pp. 370–
71; L’année épigraphique 147 (1965), 47–48; William Seston, “Sur les derniers temps du christianisme
en Afrique,” Mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’École française de Rome 53 (1936), 101–24;
Christian Courtois, “Grégoire VII et l’Afrique du Nord: Remarques sur les communautés chrétiennes
d’Afrique au XIe siècle,” Revue historique 195 (1945), 97–122 and 193–226; and Amar Mahjoubi,
“Nouveau témoignage épigraphique sur la communauté chrétienne de Kairouan au XIe siècle,” Africa
[Institut national d’archéologie et d’art, Tunis] 1 (1966), 85–103.
Jonathan P. Conant is Assistant Professor in the Department of History, University of San

Diego, San Diego, CA 92110 (e-mail: conant@sandiego.edu).

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Europe and the African Cult

of Saints, circa 350–900: An Essay in

Speculum 85 (2010) doi:10.1017/S0038713409990935 1

Gaul and the East

The Chronology of Movement

Chronological considerations hint at a similar conclusion. Of course, any attempt

Communications, Culture, and the Spread

Studying the diffusion of African saints’ cults on a Mediterranean-wide basis may

Jonathan P. Conant is Assistant Professor in the Department of History, University of San

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