The Passion of the Martyrs of Agaunum

We set out in writing, to honour what they did, the passion of the holy martyrs who make Agaunum illustrious with their glorious blood, with the same faithfulness, certainly, with which the account of the martyrdom has come down to us. For through the report of those who followed one another, forgetfulness has not yet cut off the memory of the event, even if, for single martyrs, single places that hold them, or single cities, are held to be famous; and not without reason, since the saints pour out their precious souls for the most high God. With what great reverence, then, must that holy place of the Agaunians be honoured, in which so many thousands of martyrs are reported to have been slain by the sword for Christ? Now let us tell the very cause of this most blessed passion.

Under Maximian, who held the government of the Roman state as colleague of Diocletian, peoples of martyrs were torn to pieces or killed throughout almost all the provinces. For this same Maximian, just as he raged, possessed by greed, lust, cruelty and other vices, so also, devoted to the accursed rites of the pagans and profane towards the God of heaven, had armed his impiety to wipe out the name of Christianity. If any then dared to profess the worship of the true God, they were seized for torture or for death by companies of soldiers scattered everywhere; and, as though licence to roam had been given to barbarian nations, he had moved arms against religion altogether. At that time there was in the army a legion of soldiers who were called Thebaeans. A legion was then the name for a unit that had six thousand six hundred men under arms. These had been summoned from the regions of the East and had come to help Maximian: men vigorous in warfare and noble in courage, but nobler in faith; they vied in bravery towards the emperor and in devotion towards Christ. Not forgetful of the gospel precept even under arms, they rendered to God what was God's and gave back to Caesar what was Caesar's. So when these too, like the rest of the soldiers, were assigned to drag in the multitude of Christians, they alone dared to refuse the service of cruelty, and they declare that they will not obey orders of this kind. Maximian was not far away; for, tired from the journey, he was staying near Octodurum. There, when it was reported to him by messengers that this legion, rebellious against the royal commands, had halted in the narrows of Agaunum, he blazed into fury at the prompting of indignation. But before I relate the rest, it seems to me that the situation of the place should be inserted into the account.

Agaunum is about sixty miles from the city of Geneva and fourteen miles from the head of Lake Leman, into which the Rhône flows. The place itself lies in a valley already among the ridges of the Alps; to those going there a rough and narrow road opens with a difficult passage. For the hostile Rhône has left at the foot of the rocky mountain a causeway hardly passable for travellers. When the jaws of the narrows have been overcome and passed, suddenly a plain, and no small one, opens between the cliffs of the mountains. In this the holy legion had encamped. So, as we said above, when Maximian learned the Thebaeans' reply, burning with headlong anger because his commands had been neglected, he orders every tenth man of that legion to be struck with the sword, so that the rest, terrified by the royal commands, might more easily give way through fear; and, renewing his orders, he decrees that the remainder be forced into the persecution of the Christians. But when the repeated order reached the Thebaeans and they learned that the profane executions were again laid upon them, shouting and uproar arose everywhere in the camp, as they affirmed that they would never yield to anyone in such sacrilegious services; that they had always detested the profanities of idols; that they had been steeped in Christian teaching and instructed in the worship of the holy and divine religion, and worshipped the one God of eternity; that it was better to suffer the utmost than to go against the Christian faith. When he learned this, Maximian, more bloodthirsty than any beast, returns again to the savagery of his nature and orders that a tenth of them again be given to death and the rest none the less be forced to the things they spurned. When these orders were again brought to the camp, the man on whom the lot of the tenth had fallen was set apart and struck; but the remaining multitude of soldiers urged one another on in conversation to persevere in so glorious a deed.

The greatest spur to faith at that time, however, was with Saint Maurice, then, as is reported, the primicerius of that legion. Together with Exuperius, the campidoctor, as they call it in the army, and Candidus, the senator of the soldiers, he kindled them, exhorting and warning each one and putting before them the examples even of faithful fellow soldiers who were martyrs. He urged that for the oath of Christ, for the divine laws, if necessity required it, all should die, and he warned them to follow those comrades and tentmates of theirs who had already gone before them into heaven; for already then the glorious ardour of martyrdom was burning in those most blessed men. So, encouraged by these leaders and instigators, they send to Maximian, who was still seething with madness, a message as dutiful as it was brave, which is reported to have run as follows: “We are your soldiers, emperor, but nevertheless servants, as we freely confess, of God. To you we owe military service, to him innocence. From you we have received pay for our labour; from him we have received the beginning of life. In this we can by no means follow the emperor, that we should deny God our author, our author certainly, and, whether you will or not, your author as well. If we are not driven to such deadly acts as to offend him, we will still obey you, as we have done until now; but if otherwise, we will obey him rather than you. We offer our hands against any enemy you please, but we hold it impious to stain them with the blood of innocent men. These right hands know how to fight against the impious and enemies; they do not know how to tear apart the devout and fellow citizens. We remember that we took up arms for citizens rather than against citizens. We have always fought for justice, for devotion, for the safety of the innocent; these have been, until now, the rewards of our dangers. We have fought for faith; how shall we keep it towards you if we do not show it to our God? We swore first to the divine oath; we swore next to the royal oath; you need not trust us at all in the second if we break the first. You order Christians to be hunted out for punishment by us. You need no longer hunt out others for this: you have us here, confessing God the Father, author of all things, and we believe his Son Jesus Christ to be God. We have seen the companions of our labours and dangers slaughtered by the sword, and ourselves too spattered with their blood; and yet we did not weep for the deaths of our most holy fellow soldiers and the funerals of our brothers, we did not grieve, but rather praised them and accompanied them with joy, because they had been counted worthy to suffer for the Lord their God. And now not even this final necessity of life has driven us to rebellion; not even despair, which is strongest in dangers, has armed us against you, emperor. Look, we hold arms and do not resist, because we would much rather die than kill, and we choose to perish innocent rather than live guilty. Whatever further you decree against us, whatever you still order, whatever you bring to bear, fire, tortures, the sword, we are ready to undergo. We confess that we are Christians; we cannot persecute Christians.”

When Maximian heard these words and saw the minds of the men obstinate in the faith of Christ, despairing that their glorious constancy could be turned back, he decreed by one sentence that all be killed, and ordered the thing to be done by columns of soldiers surrounding them. When those sent came to the most blessed legion, they drew the impious sword against the saints, who did not refuse to die out of love of life. They were cut down everywhere by swords, not even protesting or resisting, but laying down their arms and offering their necks to the persecutors and their throats, or their uncovered bodies, to the slayers. They were not lifted up by their own great number nor by the protection of arms so as to try to defend the cause of justice with the sword; but remembering only this, that they were confessing him who was led to the slaughter without protest and, like a lamb, did not open his mouth, they too, like the Lord's flock of sheep, allowed themselves to be torn as by wolves rushing in. The earth there was covered with the bodies of the devout falling in death; rivers of precious blood flowed. What madness, apart from war, ever caused so great a slaughter of human bodies? What savagery ever ordered by its sentence so many to perish at once, even if guilty? Their number did not obtain that the just should not be punished, although what a multitude does wrong usually goes unpunished. By this cruelty of the most monstrous tyrant, then, that people of saints was destroyed who despised the things of the present for the hope of the things to come. So was slain that truly angelic legion, which, as we believe, now with those legions of angels ever praises in the heavens the Lord God of Sabaoth.

Victor the martyr, however, was neither of that legion nor a soldier, but a veteran whose service was already completed. As he was travelling, he suddenly came upon those who were feasting here and there, glad with the spoils of the martyrs. Invited by them to eat with them, he learned the cause from them as they told it point by point in their exultation; and, detesting the guests and detesting the feast, he was fleeing. When they asked whether he too perhaps was a Christian, he replied that he was a Christian and always would be, and at once he was killed by those who rushed on him; and he was joined to the other martyrs in the same place in honour as in death. Of that number of martyrs only these names have been found out by us, namely those of the most blessed Maurice, Exuperius, Candidus and Victor; the rest are unknown to us, indeed, but they are written in the book of life. From this same legion are also said to have been those martyrs Ursus and Victor whom report confirms to have suffered at Solothurn. Solothurn is a fort on the river Aar, situated not far from the Rhine.

It is worth while also to show what end afterwards overtook Maximian, the savage tyrant. When he laid snares and plotted the death of his son-in-law Constantine, who then held the kingdom, his treachery was discovered; he was captured at Marseilles, and not long afterwards strangled; afflicted with this most hideous punishment, he ended his impious life with a fitting death. But the bodies of the most blessed martyrs of Agaunum are reported to have been revealed, many years after their passion, to Saint Theodore, bishop of that place. When a basilica was being built in their honour, which now lies joined to the vast rock, leaning against it on one side only, I thought that the miracle which then appeared should by no means be passed over in silence. It happened that among the other craftsmen who were seen to have come together, invited to that work, there was a certain smith who was known still to be a pagan. When, on the Lord's day, when the rest had gone away to await the feast of that day, he had stayed alone in the workshop, in that solitude the saints suddenly showed themselves in a bright light; this same smith was seized and stretched out for punishment or torture, and, visibly seeing the throng of martyrs, he was beaten and also rebuked, because he alone was absent from the church on the Lord's day, or because, a pagan, he dared to undertake that holy work of building. This was so clearly done by the saints in mercy that the smith, dismayed and terrified, asked for the saving name for himself and at once became a Christian.

Nor shall I pass over among the miracles of the saints this one, which is equally famous and known to all. The wife of Quintus, an excellent and honoured man, was so bound by paralysis that even the use of her feet was denied her; she asked her husband to have her carried to Agaunum, a long journey. When she arrived there, she was carried into the basilica of the holy martyrs by the hands of her servants, and returned to her lodging on her own feet; and, restored to health in limbs that had been as good as dead, she now carries her miracle about with her. These two wonders only I thought should be added to the passion of the saints. But there are very many things which the power of the Lord works there daily through his saints, whether in the cleansing of demons or in other cures.

I have sent to your Blessedness the passion of our martyrs in writing. For I feared that through carelessness time might wipe out from human memory the deeds of so glorious a martyrdom. Moreover I sought the truth of the matter from suitable witnesses, from those, namely, who affirmed that they had learned this account of the passion, which I have set out, from Isaac, the holy bishop of Geneva, who, I believe, had in turn received it earlier from the most blessed bishop Theodore, a man of an earlier time. So, while others from various places and provinces offer gifts of gold and silver and various things in honour and service of the saints, we, with your support, humbly offer these our writings, asking in return for intercession for all my sins and, for the future, the constant protection of those who are always my patrons. Remember us too, you who always cling to the service of the saints, in the sight of the Lord, holy lord and deservedly most blessed brother.