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Biography

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Saint Eustorgius I was bishop of Milan in the middle of the fourth century, in the generation immediately after the Council of Nicaea and during the height of the Arian controversy in the Roman Empire. He succeeded Saint Protasius in the Milanese see about 343 and held the office until his death, which episcopal catalogues and later martyrologies place in 349. Contemporary testimony treats him as a defender of the Nicene faith. Athanasius of Alexandria numbered him among the confessors of orthodoxy, and a letter of Pope Julius I written in 343 or 344 to the bishops of Macedonia cites Eustorgius among Western prelates who had remained loyal to Nicaea. He took part in the Council of Sardica in 343, the gathering that attempted to restore Athanasius and to settle the status of disputed Eastern sees. After his death the bishopric passed to Dionysius, who was later driven into exile when an Arian, Auxentius, was imposed on Milan.

Almost nothing can be verified about his birth, family, or early career. His name is Greek, and later writers inferred that he came from the Greek-speaking East, sometimes linking him with Constantinople, but no fourth-century source records a birthplace, a birth year, or the circumstances of his election. He is not known to have belonged to a monastic order, nor is there surviving evidence of a wife or children. What can be said of his episcopate is that it belonged to the Nicene, anti-Arian party in a city that would, within a few years of his death, become one of the principal Arian centres of the West until the arrival of Ambrose.

Medieval Milanese tradition assigned to Eustorgius a famous translation of relics: the bodies of the Three Magi, said to have been given him by an emperor (often named as Constantine) and brought from the East in a great sarcophagus. That sarcophagus was later shown in the church that bears his name. Historians regard the Magi story as a later legend rather than a documented act of the 340s. The cult of the Magi at Milan is securely attested only in the later Middle Ages. In 1164, after the capture of Milan, Rainald of Dassel, archbishop of Cologne and chancellor of Frederick Barbarossa, removed the relics from Sant'Eustorgio to Cologne, where they remain. The association of those relics with Eustorgius therefore belongs to the medieval memory of the saint, not to demonstrable fourth-century history, though it powerfully shaped his later cult and the identity of his basilica.

Eustorgius was buried in a cemetery outside the Roman walls of Milan on the road toward Pavia. Over that tomb rose the Basilica of Sant'Eustorgio, rebuilt in subsequent centuries and for a long period served by the Dominican Order; it remains his principal shrine and one of the historic churches of the city. His cult is ancient and local rather than the product of a later papal canonization. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on 18 September. He is honoured among the holy bishops of Milan, but he is not recorded as a principal patron of the city or of a specific trade, illness, or cause in the way that Ambrose or Charles Borromeo later were. The historical Eustorgius is thus a briefly documented Nicene bishop of the 340s, around whom Milanese piety later gathered the splendid legend of the Magi.

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