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Biography

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Saint Principius was a fifth-century Gallo-Roman bishop of Soissons in northern Gaul and the brother of Saint Remigius of Reims, the bishop who baptized Clovis, king of the Franks. He belonged to a prominent aristocratic family of the Laonnois. Later sources name their father as Emilius (or Aemilius), a man of senatorial standing associated with Laon, and their mother as Saint Cilinia (also called Celina or Celine), herself commemorated as a holy woman. The brothers thus came of the Gallo-Roman nobility that continued to furnish bishops to the cities of Belgica Secunda as imperial administration receded and Frankish power advanced. Almost nothing is recorded of Principius’s early life, education, or the date of his birth. Unlike Remigius, whose youth and consecration at a young age are described in later vitae, Principius appears in the surviving notices only as an adult already identified with the see of Soissons.

Soissons, the ancient civitas of the Suessiones, remained an important ecclesiastical center in the later fifth century. Principius occupied its episcopal throne in the same generation in which his brother Remigius presided at Reims and took part in the conversion of the Franks. Traditional compilations often place Principius’s death around the year 505, but no contemporary chronicle or inscription supplies a verified year of birth or death. No sermons, letters, or conciliar subscriptions can be attributed to him with certainty, and no early vita was written in his honor. His name is preserved above all because of the family dossier of Saint Remigius, including the testament ascribed to Remigius and the ninth-century writings of Hincmar of Reims, which identify Principius as Remigius’s brother and as bishop of Soissons.

According to that same tradition, Principius was the father of Lupus, who succeeded him in the see of Soissons and who is venerated as a saint in his own right, often distinguished as Lupus of Soissons. The report of a son implies that Principius had been married, a situation compatible with the still-fluid discipline of clerical celibacy in fifth-century Gaul, where married men were sometimes raised to the episcopate and where episcopal families were not unknown among the Gallo-Roman aristocracy. The name of his wife is not recorded. Scholars have long discussed the authenticity of the testament of Remigius as transmitted by Hincmar, and some have suspected later interpolation; even so, the basic identification of a Bishop Principius of Soissons, brother of Remigius, is widely accepted in ecclesiastical history and in Latin hagiographical tradition.

Principius is entered in the Roman Martyrology on 25 September, with the brief notice that at Soissons in Gaul is commemorated Saint Principius, bishop, brother of blessed Remigius, bishop of Reims. His cult appears to have remained local. He is not associated in the sources with a particular patronage of trades, illnesses, or places beyond his connection with Soissons, nor is a precise burial site independently documented in early texts. Later medieval calendars and modern lists of saints simply repeat the kinship with Remigius and the episcopal title. In the wider history of the Church in Gaul, Principius represents the often poorly documented Gallo-Roman bishops who maintained urban Christian institutions through the collapse of the Western Empire and the establishment of Merovingian rule, and whose memory was kept alive chiefly through family ties to more famous saints.

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