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Biography

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Saint Aurelianus, also known as Aurelian of Arles, was metropolitan bishop of Arles in southern Gaul in the mid-sixth century. He held the see from about 546 until his death in 551, succeeding Auxanius. Surviving sources, including papal letters and later martyrologies, give no verified year or place of birth and no information about his family. He belongs to the generation of Gallic bishops immediately after Caesarius of Arles (d. 542), whose monastic and pastoral work had already made Arles a leading church in a region passing from Ostrogothic to Frankish control.

Aurelianus is known above all as a monastic founder. In Arles he established a monastery for men dedicated to the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul and a monastery for women dedicated to the Virgin Mary. For both houses he wrote rules of life that drew heavily on the legislation of Caesarius, regulating the Divine Office, enclosure, poverty, and common life in an urban setting. In 546 Pope Vigilius granted him the pallium and confirmed metropolitan rights of Arles over a wide group of suffragan sees in Gaul. The grant continued earlier papal recognition of Arles and took place amid the Three Chapters controversy and shifting relations among the papacy, the eastern empire, and the Frankish kingdoms.

Few personal details, letters, or miracle stories survive. No contemporary vita is known. Aurelianus maintained contact with Rome and acted as a principal bishop in Provence in the first years of Frankish rule after the Ostrogoths ceded the region. He died in 551. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on 16 June at Arles. His cult is of early-medieval local origin and was later received into wider calendars; he was never the subject of a documented papal canonization or beatification of the later medieval type.

The precise place of his burial is not firmly recorded. The monasteries he founded did not survive in their original form through all later centuries, but the rules attributed to him remain evidence for the Caesarian monastic tradition in sixth-century Gaul. In the ecclesiastical history of late-antique Provence he stands as a metropolitan who continued the organization and monastic patronage of Arles during a period of political change. Beyond these points the documentary record is sparse, as is common for many bishops of the period who did not become the subjects of full hagiographical lives.

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