Lyon

Lyon was founded as a Roman colony in 43 BCE where the Rhone meets the Saone and became the administrative capital of the three Gallic provinces, with an imperial cult sanctuary at the confluence to which delegates from sixty Gaulish peoples came each year. Its Christian community is the earliest in Gaul about which anything detailed is known, and what is known comes from a letter the churches of Lyon and Vienne sent to Asia Minor describing the persecution of 177, preserved almost entire by Eusebius.

The letter names the deacon Sanctus, the physician Attalus, the ninety year old bishop Pothinus who died in prison, and above all the slave Blandina, whose endurance in the amphitheatre it describes at length and whose social position it deliberately underlines. Irenaeus, who had come from Smyrna and had heard Polycarp as a boy, became bishop after Pothinus, and his Against Heresies is the fullest early account of the Gnostic schools and the first sustained argument that the public teaching held in common by widely separated communities is the test of what the apostles taught. The see still carries the title Primate of the Gauls, and the amphitheatre on the Croix-Rousse slope where the martyrs died is still visible.

The first council of Lyons, in 1245, was convened by Innocent IV, who had fled Rome for a city outside imperial reach, and its principal business was the deposition of the emperor Frederick II, pronounced with the bishops holding lighted candles that they then threw to the ground. It also gave cardinals the red hat and legislated for a crusade. The second, in 1274, was larger and more ambitious: it enacted the rules for papal conclaves that still govern the enclosure of the electors, and it proclaimed a union with the Greek church negotiated with the emperor Michael VIII, whose delegates accepted the Roman claims on his behalf.

The union collapsed within a decade because the Byzantine clergy and people would not have it, and Michael was denied burial rites by his own church. Thomas Aquinas died on the road to that council and Bonaventure died during it. A century before either, the city had produced a movement of a different kind: a merchant called Valdes gave away his property in about 1173, had parts of the scriptures put into the local speech, and began to preach. Forbidden to preach without licence, his followers went on, were excommunicated, and became the Waldensians, who survived in the alpine valleys and eventually joined the Reformation.