Remy

Saint Remigius, known in French as Saint Rémi or Saint Remy, was Bishop of Reims in late Roman and early Frankish Gaul and is remembered as the apostle of the Franks. Traditional accounts, followed by standard reference works, place his birth about 437 at or near Laon (often specified as Cerny-en-Laonnois) in a Gallo-Roman aristocratic family. Later medieval writers name his father as Emilius, associated with the countship of Laon, and his mother as Celina or Cilinia. He received a classical and Christian education and was already noted for learning and eloquence in his youth. The Gallo-Roman poet Sidonius Apollinaris, a contemporary, praised his preaching and letters. According to the received tradition he was chosen bishop of Reims while still a young man, around 459, and held the see for an exceptionally long episcopate. Exact years of birth and consecration rest on later calculation rather than on a surviving contemporary chronicle, but his activity as bishop of Reims in the second half of the fifth century is historically secure.

Remigius’s lasting historical importance rests on his role in the conversion of Clovis I, king of the Salian Franks. Clovis’s Burgundian wife Clotilde was a Nicene Christian, and after a vow associated in later narrative with the Battle of Tolbiac, Clovis accepted baptism at Remigius’s hands in Reims. The ceremony is traditionally dated to Christmas 496, though some modern historians prefer a date near 498 or even later in the first decade of the sixth century. Gregory of Tours, writing in the late sixth century, is the principal near-contemporary narrative source: he records the baptism of the king and of a large number of Frankish warriors, and he preserves the famous admonition attributed to Remigius, that the Sicambrian should humble himself, adore what he had burned, and burn what he had adored. The event aligned the Frankish monarchy with Catholic rather than Arian Christianity and had far-reaching consequences for the religious and political map of post-Roman Gaul. Carolingian legend later added the story of the Holy Ampulla, a vial of chrism said to have been brought by a dove for Clovis’s anointing, which became part of the coronation ritual of French kings at Reims.

As bishop, Remigius worked to organize the church in territories coming under Frankish rule. He is credited with founding or restoring several dioceses and with corresponding on discipline and doctrine. The ninth-century Vita Remigii composed by Archbishop Hincmar of Reims attributes numerous miracles to him, including healings and the quenching of a fire at Reims, and it presents him as a model metropolitan for the Carolingian church. That vita mixes earlier memory with later political theology and must be used with caution as a historical source. Independent contemporary or near-contemporary evidence is thinner: Gregory of Tours, the testimony of Sidonius, and a small number of letters. Remigius appears in these materials as a Gallo-Roman prelate of high culture who negotiated the transition from imperial Gaul to a Frankish Catholic kingdom, rather than as the wonder-worker of later legend.

He died at Reims, according to tradition on 13 January 533, after a very long episcopate. He was buried in the church of Saint-Christophe, which developed into the Abbey of Saint-Remi; his relics remain in the Basilica of Saint-Remi at Reims and were a focus of medieval pilgrimage. Veneration of Remigius is ancient; he was never the subject of a formal papal canonization of the later medieval type, and his cult belongs to the pre-congregation period. His principal feast is kept on 1 October, with 13 January also observed in some calendars as the anniversary of his death. He is invoked as a patron of France and of the city of Reims, and against epidemics, plague, and snakebite. Despite legendary accretions, the historical Remigius remains a central figure in the Christianization of the Franks and in the formation of the medieval church in Gaul.