Lindsay Rudge PhD Thesis - University of St Andrews

women. Further impetus may have come from the Council of Agde’s ruling that nuns
could not receive the veil before they were forty years old. 118 Caesaria at forty-one may
therefore have seen monastic life as the final and ultimate step she could now take in her
vocation. Canon twenty-seven of the same Council stated that new convents could only
be founded with the permission of the bishop, so it was natural for Caesaria’s new home
to be in Arles. 119
The needs of both siblings therefore drove the monastery’s construction forward.
This was not altogether straightforward. Sometime after the second council of Agde,
which concluded on Sunday 10 th September 506, Caesarius began building a monastery
probably in the area of the medieval Alyscamps, the space on either side of the road
leading out of the city to Marseille which had been used as the cemetery for Arles’ dead
for centuries. 120 The twelfth-century church of Saint-Césaire-le-Vieux may stand on the
site of the monastery. This site fulfilled several requirements, in that it satisfied the
conditions laid down by the council of Agde that women’s monasteries should lie some
distance from those of men, 121 and was in close proximity to the grave of St Genesius,
one of the holiest sites in the city. 122
However, the disadvantages of such a site also became clear. During the winter of
506/7, the city was besieged by an alliance of Franks and Burgundians fighting for Clovis
against the Visigothic king Alaric, who had just been defeated at Vouillé. The growing
monastery proved an easy target; indeed, as the vita Caesarii suggests, the component
parts of the building may have been of use in constructing siege engines: ‘During this
siege the monastery that Caesarius was beginning to have built for his sister and the other
virgins was almost completely destroyed; its beams and upper rooms were ripped apart
118
Agde (506), can. XIX. Concilia Galliae A.314 – A.506, 202.
119
Agde (506), can. XXVII. Concilia Galliae A.314 – A.506, 205.
120
F. Benoît Les cimetières suburbains d’Arles dans l’Antiquité chrétienne et au Moyen Age (Rome, 1935),
53.
121
Agde (506), can. XXVIII. Concilia Galliae A.314 – A.506, 205. For further discussion of the religious
topography of sixth-century Arles, see M. Heijmans, ‘La topographie de la ville d’Arles durant l’Antiquité
tardive’, Journal of Roman Archaeology 12 (1999) 143-167. Dr Heijmans (personal communication) is
clear that this remains conjectural.
122
Klingshirn, Caesarius, 105.
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