Valerianus of Tournus

Valerianus of Tournus, known in French as saint Valérien de Tournus, is a Christian martyr whose cult is attached to the town of Tournus on the Saône in Burgundy (today in the French department of Saône-et-Loire). No contemporary second- or third-century document names him. Everything that is repeated about his origin, companions, and death comes from later Burgundian hagiography, which populated Roman Gaul with missionary martyrs supposedly sent from the East or from Rome. In that literature he appears as a preacher of the Gospel who was put to death at Tournus for refusing to abandon the Christian faith. His birthplace, family, and the year of his birth are unknown; later writers sometimes implied an eastern or Italian origin, but that claim is not independently verified.

The legendary passions connect him, with varying consistency, to the circle of saint Benignus of Dijon and to the priest Andochius and the deacon Thyrsus, figures whom medieval authors said had been dispatched in connection with saint Polycarp of Smyrna to evangelize the Saône valley. One version of the story has Valerian continue his ministry after companions were killed at Saulieu or elsewhere, take refuge near Tournus, and there be arrested and beheaded for refusing sacrifice to the pagan gods. Local and martyrological tradition often placed this death in the persecution under Marcus Aurelius, in the same generation as the martyrs of Lyon (177), and the year 178 is frequently copied in later calendars and local histories. Those dates and missionary genealogies are not confirmed by independent evidence from the second century and are treated by modern historians as pious constructions of late antiquity or the early Middle Ages. Whether he was a priest, as some accounts call him, or a lay confessor is likewise unproven.

A church was built over the site associated with his tomb at Tournus, and a local cult of saint Valerian took root there. In the ninth century, Benedictine monks of the community of saint Philibert, driven from Noirmoutier and subsequent refuges by Viking raids, settled at Tournus with Philibert’s relics and founded the abbey later known as Saint-Philibert de Tournus. The cult of the earlier local martyr was not suppressed: his memory remained bound to the town and to a church or chapel under his name, and a crypt associated with saint Valerian formed part of the sacred topography of the abbey. The great Romanesque abbey church that still dominates Tournus thus stands on ground already marked by Valerian’s veneration, even though the monastic house itself was dedicated to Philibert.

Valerian is entered in the Roman Martyrology on 15 September with the notice of his martyrdom at Tournus in Gaul. He was never the object of a formal papal canonization of the later medieval or modern type; his status as a saint rests on ancient local cult and on inclusion in the martyrologies. He held neither the papacy nor any patriarchal see, and he belonged to no later religious order. No reliable source records a spouse or children. Devotion to him has remained essentially local, centered on Tournus and the former abbey, rather than spreading into a wide network of patronages of trades, illnesses, or distant places.