Saint Sernin and the bull of Toulouse

People used to tell that Saturninus — Sernin, as the folk here call him — was sent out from Rome to carry the new faith into Gaul. He travelled by way of Nîmes, went on as far as Pamplona, and then turned back to settle in Tolosa, the great Gallo-Roman city on the Garonne. There he gathered the first Christian community of the town, and so became its first bishop.

To go from his house to the place where he preached, Sernin passed every day before the temple on the forum, the Capitol of old Tolosa. And behold, said the pagan priests, ever since that man began walking past, the oracles have fallen silent. The gods are turning away. They must be appeased.

One day in the late autumn, during the persecutions ordered by the emperor Decius, they seized him at the foot of the temple stair. A splendid bull stood waiting there, dressed with ribbons and fillets, ready for the sacrifice. Let him honour Jupiter, they said, let him spill the blood of the beast, and he might walk away free.

Sernin refused. He spoke, so tradition has it, only a few words: he knew but one God, and theirs he did not fear. Then the furious crowd took the sacrificial rope and bound the bishop to the hind legs of the bull. Someone pricked the animal in the flank. It bolted.

The beast plunged down the temple steps, dragging the man behind it. On the stone treads the bishop’s head was broken open. The bull tore straight through the city along the great north-south road, went out by the northern gate and took the road towards Cahors, between the tombstones of the Roman burial ground. There, so people say, the rope gave way at last and the body was left lying in the dust.

No one dared touch it. Yet two young Christian women came, in the dark. The memory of Toulouse calls them the holy Puelles, the young girls. They gathered up what was left of their bishop, laid it in a wooden coffin and dug a deep pit, deep enough that no pagan could disturb the dead man again. Tradition adds that the crowd afterwards drove them out of the city with sticks, and that they found shelter in a village of the Lauragais which still bears their name: Mas-Saintes-Puelles.

A century later bishop Hilary had a brick vault built over the grave and a small wooden oratory set on top of it. A church rose there later, the one now called Notre-Dame du Taur, with its high brick bell-wall standing right across the street. And the street itself kept the name of the animal for good: rue du Taur, from the Occitan word taur, bull.

So many pilgrims came to the little church of the Taur that it soon proved too small. In the year 402 the bones of Sernin were carried in great state to a wider sanctuary outside the old walls: the future basilica of Saint-Sernin. Legend assures us that on that day the crowd sensed a sweet fragrance rising from the bones, a hundred and fifty years after the death.

Out of that sanctuary the canons made, from the end of the eleventh century onward, the great vessel of brick and stone that still stands. Five aisles, an enormous transept, a choir with an ambulatory in which pilgrims could walk around the relics without disturbing the mass, two hundred and sixty carved capitals and an octagonal tower of five storeys rising above the roofs. It is one of the largest surviving Romanesque churches in Europe, and many call it simply the largest.

Toulouse was an important stage on the road to Santiago de Compostela: whoever went down from Arles towards the Pyrenees did not fail to pray at the tomb. The church received relic after relic, until it held a hundred and twenty-eight.

Anyone who walks down the rue du Taur today from the place du Capitole is retracing, without knowing it, the road of the bull. Three hundred and fifty metres of pink brick, a church halfway along, a basilica at the end. And on 29 November Toulouse still celebrates its first bishop.