Venantius Fortunatus

Venantius Fortunatus received a classical education at Ravenna, then still a center of late Roman learning, before crossing into Merovingian Gaul in 566, reportedly after a pilgrimage of thanks to Saint Martin of Tours for curing an eye ailment, though he never returned home and instead built the rest of his career among the Frankish courts and churches of Gaul. He settled eventually at Poitiers, drawn into the circle of Queen Radegund, a former Thuringian princess and estranged wife of the Frankish king Chlothar I who had founded the convent of the Holy Cross there, and of Agnes, its abbess. Fortunatus became the community's steward and its poet, writing extensively for and about Radegund and Agnes over some three decades, and was ordained a priest during this period. Late in his life, likely in the final years of the sixth century or very early in the seventh, he was elected bishop of Poitiers, a position that recognized both his standing in Gaul's church and the length of his service to its royal and religious households; he died shortly afterward.

Michael Roberts's modern edition of his complete poetry situates Fortunatus as a genuine bridge figure, trained in the vanishing world of classical Latin rhetoric but writing for an audience of Frankish kings and Gallo-Roman bishops who represented the new order replacing it, and his hymns are the part of that large body of work that has had by far the longest afterlife.

In 569 the Byzantine emperor Justin II sent Queen Radegund a relic of the True Cross for her convent at Poitiers, and Venantius Fortunatus marked its arrival with two Latin poems that passed almost immediately into liturgical use and have stayed there since. Vexilla Regis Prodeunt, the banners of the king go forth, is a processional hymn written for the relic's ceremonial reception and became the standard Latin hymn for the veneration of the cross, sung during Holy Week and at feasts of the cross across the Western church.

Pange Lingua Gloriosi Proelium Certaminis, sing my tongue of the glorious battle, tells the story of the crucifixion as a cosmic contest and gave its opening words and metrical form to a long later tradition of Latin hymnody, most famously to Thomas Aquinas, who modeled his own eucharistic hymn Pange Lingua Gloriosi Corporis Mysterium directly on Fortunatus's meter and refrain in the thirteenth century. Both hymns are counted among the small number of genuinely classical era Latin poems that survived into the medieval liturgy essentially intact, prized for combining the rhetorical polish of Fortunatus's late Roman schooling with an emotional directness suited to public ceremony. Their continued use in the Roman rite today, centuries after the political world Fortunatus wrote for disappeared, is the clearest measure of how completely these two poems escaped the rest of his very large surviving body of occasional verse.