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Saint Denis, the head he carried and the abbey that made kings
MOSSOT · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Saint Denis, the head he carried and the abbey that made kings

14 min read

3rd – 13th century

A bishop sent to Gaul around 250 is beheaded near Paris; legend has him pick up his head and walk to his tomb. Over that tomb Genevieve builds a basilica, Dagobert has himself buried there, and Abbot Suger invents in 1144, with light and the pointed arch, what would come to be called Gothic. In between, a 9th-century abbot made three men into a single saint — and Abelard, who said so out loud, had to flee by night.

A bishop sent to Gaul

The oldest testimony runs to a few lines. In his History of the Franks, written between 575 and 594, Gregory of Tours relates in Book I, chapter 30, that in the consulship of Decius and Gratus seven bishops were sent from Rome to preach in the Gauls: Gatian to Tours, Trophimus to Arles, Paul to Narbonne, Saturninus to Toulouse, Denis to Paris, Austremonius to Clermont, Martial to Limoges. Denis, he adds, was beheaded for Christ after suffering various tortures. That is all. Gregory is writing three centuries after the events and he dates the mission by a consulship, which gives the year 250; other traditions link the martyrdom to the persecution of Valerian, in 258, and hagiography long wavered between 250 and 270. The two companions whom later texts give to Denis, Rusticus and Eleutherius, do not appear in Gregory.

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