medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

Today (26. August) is the feast day of two probably artificial groups of saints venerated in different parts of the Regno, namely:

1)  Orontius (previously, Arontius) and companions (d. ca. 65, supposedly).  O. (in Italian, Oronzo, Oronzio) is a medievally attested saint whose present cult is essentially early modern.  He is the principal patron of Lecce (LE) on Apulia's Salentine Peninsula and a patron of several other towns and cities in the region.

Prior to its revision of 2001, the RM listed for tomorrow (27. August) a group of four saints, Arontius, Honoratus, Fortunatus, and Sabinianus.  Recorded for that day in the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology as martyrs at Potenza in today's Basilicata, all four were among the dozen saints of southern Italy translated to Benevento by duke Arechis
II in 760 and there interred magnificently in his newly built church of Holy Wisdom (Santa Sophia), shown here (exterior):
http://tinyurl.com/yrtne8
http://colloca1.interfree.it/vistalaterale.jpg
and here (interior):
http://tinyurl.com/88nyz
http://www.giannonebn.it/storiacitta/foto/interno.jpg

This larger group was called the "Twelve Brothers" and a Passio was soon written for them (BHL 2297; shorter version, BHL 2298; Donatus, Felix, and companions) in which they literally _are_ brothers.  Hailing, it was said, from Hadrumetum in Roman Africa, they were tried in Carthage (seemingly during the persecution of Diocletian) before an official named Valerianus, imprisoned, and released by an angel.  They then fled to Italy and were there hunted down and executed in small groups at different places at the command of the selfsame Valerianus (whose obsession in this matter makes him something of a forerunner of Hugo's inspector Javert).  Alfanus of Salerno's _carmen 13_ is a metrical version of these saints' Passion and translation to Benevento (BHL 2299; 1000 dactylic hexameters).

Arontius enjoyed a widespread cult of his own in Apulia and Lucania (the latter including parts of today's Campania and Calabria as well as most of Basilicata) that is documented from the eleventh and twelfth century onward.  At Lecce, his cult is first recorded in a charter of the future king Tancred from the year 1181.  The change in name form to Orontius seems to have occurred in the later Middle Ages.  In about 1480 Francesco II del Balzo, duke of Andria, count of Montescaglioso, etc., etc. offered to Lecce the body of Sancto Orontio, whose whereabouts the duke claimed to know.  (This is the same duke who was so instrumental in the rediscovery of the long hidden body of St. Richard of Andria and in later vouching for that saint's canonization when earlier records had inconveniently gone missing).  Lecce was slow to respond, apparently for reasons that were fiscal in nature.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, O. (as we may now abbreviate him) and two other local saints, Justus and Fortunatus, received a new Vita said to have been based in part on a medieval document, not earlier than the twelfth century, that has since disappeared.  This new account makes O. a native of Lecce who greeted the missionary Justus when the latter had been sent to Italy in the 60s by the apostle Paul.  O. was converted by Justus, later travelled to Corinth, where Paul made him Lecce's first bishop, and finally suffered martyrdom at Lecce during the Neronian persecution.

Modern historians have not looked kindly on this story.  Local persistence, aided by O.'s great popularity in the Salento once he had been credited with the region's relatively mild experience of a pestilence that was severe in other parts of the kingdom, led in the later seventeenth century to official confirmation of the cult of Justus, Orontius, and Fortunatus by the Sacred Congregation of the Rites.  In this revised persona O. is commemorated liturgically on 26. August, his supposed _dies natalis_.

O. is the subject of major festivities at Turi (BA), Ostuni (BR), Campi Salentini (LE), Botrugno (LE), and of course Lecce itself, where his statue gazes down from atop a column (parts of which came from one of a pair of Roman-period columns at Brindisi) in the piazza that bears his name:
http://www.baroccolecce.it/photo6.htm
http://tinyurl.com/hvps6
http://tinyurl.com/2fdr2r
Two views of the column(s) as presently located at Brindisi:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gbraschi/1058073306/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gbraschi/1058072234/
Here's O. is again, above the piazza entrance to Lecce's baroque cathedral (Justus and Fortunatus are represented in the niches below):
http://tinyurl.com/36erzz
http://www.flickr.com/photos/blunight72/140774784/
No medieval depictions of O. or medieval buildings dedicated to him appear to have survived.

2)  Simplicius, Constantius, and Victorianus (d. ca. 159, supposedly).   The patron saints of today's Celano (AQ) in Abruzzo, S., C., and V. are three presumed martyrs whose highly legendary central medieval Passio (BHL 1127) makes them nobles of Burgundy who were converted to Christianity under an emperor Antoninus (usually interpreted to mean Antoninus Pius, r. 138-161) and who during a persecution later in the same reign were sent for execution first to Rome (where they made many converts who themselves were martyred) and then to Marsican territory, where they were decapitated on this day.  Jets of water arose from where the severed heads struck the ground, giving rise to a fountain identified with today's Fontegrande at Celano.

According to an early fifteenth-century inscription from Celano, the eleventh-century Pandulf, bishop of the Marsi (in office in 1057) oversaw an invention of the martyrs' remains and the latter's placing under the main altar of Celano's church of St. John (whose locale, specified in other documents as _in capite aquae_ or _ad caput aquae_, is that of the Passio's fountain).  In the thirteenth century that church was replaced as the town's principal one by another in a different location, today's San(ti) Giovanni Battista (ed Evangelista), where in 1406 the then count of Celano had the martyrs' remains translated into a new chapel and interred in a marble sarcophagus.  In 1709 these remains were translated to their present location under that church's then new main altar, which latter is said to incorporate pieces from their early fifteenth-century sarcophagus.

In view of the absence of any early testimony for a martyrdom at Celano, modern scholarly opinion holds that S., C., and V. are actually saints of these names who in life had nought to do with Celano but whose relics had been brought there at some point prior to the eleventh-century Inventio.  Their stated Burgundian origin will have connected them with the Burgundian-descended counts of Marsico, whose territory included Celano and whose family produced several leading churchmen of the eleventh and twelfth centuries (including bishop Pandulf, a son of count Berard II).  

Herewith some views of Celano's San(ti) Giovanni Battista (ed Evangelista), one showing its later fifteenth-century wooden doors with ornamental paneling:
http://tinyurl.com/33g2ty
http://members.tripod.com/virgil111/CelanoEnio01.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/2jh7kl

The original San Giovanni ad caput aquae was rebuilt in the later fourteenth century and, after further vicissitudes, survives as Celano's church of Santa Maria delle Grazie.  An illustrated, Italian-language account of it is here:
http://tinyurl.com/2tkukh

Best,
John Dillon
(Orontius and companions revised from last year's post)

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