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Faith of Conques

Saint Faith (Sainte Foy) was a girl martyred at Agen in southern Gaul. Monks from Conques stole her body in the ninth century, and her golden statue there still wears the head of a Roman emperor. An eleventh-century schoolmaster called it an idol and then wrote down her miracles, which the local people called her jokes.

Feast day: October 6 (the statue is carried into the abbey choir on the Sunday after)
Era: Martyred at Agen, late 3rd or early 4th century; relics at Conques by 883; the Book of Miracles written from 1013 to the mid-11th century
Region: Agen, where she died; the Abbey of Sainte-Foy at Conques in the Rouergue (Aveyron), on the pilgrim road to Santiago de Compostela, where her relics and statue are kept
Status: canonical (pre-congregation; listed for 6 October in the martyrology of Jerome)
Patronage: pilgrims, prisoners, whose broken fetters were hung up at Conques, soldiers, sight and the eyes (after the miracle of Guibert the Illuminated)

Monks living in a remote southern French valley had very little wealth. Over a thousand years ago, they slipped away by night to steal the bones of a legendary Roman girl, hoping her fame would draw pilgrims. They placed her skull inside an eighty-five-centimetre golden statue, and the shrine made their mountain village rich.

Saint Faith still sits on her throne at Conques today. Her golden body is encrusted with ancient jewels, but its head comes from an older sculpture of a Roman emperor, staring outward with dark blue glass eyes.

The girl from Agen

Faith’s story is a legend of martyrdom, written down long after her death. It describes her as a young Christian noblewoman from a Roman market town in south-west Gaul.

A Roman governor came to the town and had her brought before him. When he asked her name, she answered: “My name is Faith.” The governor promised gifts if she sacrificed to pagan gods, and torture if she refused. She answered that those gods were demons.

The governor had her laid on a bronze bed and stretched out by her four limbs. A fire was lit underneath, and the crowd cried out at the injustice. Another Christian of the town was hiding under a rock nearby. He saw a jeweled crown above her and a dove coming down onto her head.

He came forward, confessed his faith, and was tortured. Both were beheaded.

Her feast day is 6 October. Church calendars have kept that day for fourteen hundred years. The year of her death is lost, somewhere around 300.

Stolen from Agen

The monks of Conques took her body because their abbey needed a saint. In the ninth century Conques was poor and far from any road. A shrine with a famous saint brought pilgrims, and pilgrims brought gifts.

The monks had already tried and failed to steal another saint’s remains from Spain.

Then the monks heard about a girl martyr buried outside Agen. One monk joined the clergy who guarded her tomb. He stayed about ten years, until they put him in charge of it. During the New Year festivities he broke the tomb open at night and carried the body to Conques.

The theft succeeded, and her bones arrived in Conques before 883.

Such raids were common in the Middle Ages, and people called them holy thefts. A theft that worked was taken as a sign that the saint had agreed to move. Venice got its patron, Saint Mark, the same way.

The golden Majesty

The statue grew over several hundred years, and its oldest part is its face. The people of Conques called it the Majestas, the Majesty of Saint Faith.

The face is a gold head taken from an ancient statuette, probably of a late Roman emperor. Its dark blue glass eyes came with it. In the ninth century the monks set this head on a wooden body and covered the body in gold.

Around the year 1000 she got a golden throne, and a crown followed a little later. Many of her gems are ancient carved stones, and one is a tiny portrait of a Roman emperor.

Black and white photograph of a small seated golden statue on a throne, seen from the left, with a large round face, a jewelled crown, both hands held forward, a robe covered in gems and a throne side pierced with small crosses — The Majesty of Sainte Foy in an early twentieth-century photograph published as a lantern slide by Franz Stoedtner in Berlin. Look at the head, much larger than the body would need: it is the reused Roman face. The crystal balls on the front posts probably sit where the golden doves once stood. Public domain, Université de Louvain collection, via Wikimedia Commons.

The schoolmaster who called it an idol

Rumors of wild miracles in the mountains eventually drew a church schoolmaster named Bernard south in 1013. He arrived curious, but deeply skeptical.

On his journey, he stopped at another abbey and saw a golden statue of a saint standing above the altar. To his northern eyes, this local southern custom looked dangerously close to pagan idolatry.

Bernard turned to his travelling companion with a smirk. “Brother, what do you think of this idol?” he asked, mocking it as fit for ancient Roman gods like Jupiter or Mars.

Three days later he stood before Faith’s statue at Conques. The church was so crowded that he could not kneel. He prayed standing, and again he looked sideways at his friend and smiled. It seemed foolish to him that so many people prayed to a thing with no speech or sense.

Locals warned Bernard about a cleric who had ridiculed the statue. That night, an angry lady appeared in the scoffer’s dream, struck him with a rod, and left him dead by morning.

Bernard changed his mind. He decided the statue was a box for relics. Its shape was the artist’s choice, and inside it lay the saint’s head. Nobody sacrificed to it. Bernard returned twice to document her wonders in the Book of Miracles. Later monks continued the compilation into the mid-eleventh century.

Miracles and jokes

The miracles give the saint a sharp personality. She heals and punishes, and she likes gold.

Her most famous miracle restored a mutilated man’s sight.

A jealous priest attacked his young servant on the road home from Conques. The priest gouged out the youth’s eyes with his bare fingers. Local witnesses claimed a bird snatched up the severed eyes and flew straight toward the abbey.

The blind man earned his living for a year as a street entertainer. On the eve of the next feast, a small girl in a golden dress appeared to him in a dream. His sight came back, and from then on people called him Guibert the Illuminated. The story spread through almost all of Europe, and the poor abbey grew rich.

Other stories are stranger. A knight’s prized mule died on the road to Conques. He hired two peasants to skin it and went on to pray before the statue. The mule got up, kicked the two men away and trotted into the village.

The saint also asked for gifts. She appeared in dreams as a beautiful girl, not yet grown, and asked local people and pilgrims for rings and brooches. The gold went into a new altar front. A visiting abbot owned two golden doves that Faith demanded for her throne in his dreams. He offered the equal weight in gold coins, but she refused until he surrendered the sculpted birds.

Local people called these stories her jokes. A local lord gave his second wife a ring that his dying first wife had promised to the saint. The new wife’s finger swelled around it. On the third night at the shrine she blew her nose, and the ring shot off and cracked on the pavement far away.

At a regional church council, a sudden miraculous cure caused a commotion. A local countess calmed the startled assembly, remarking that Sainte Foy was merely joking, as she always did. Prisoners prayed to her too. So many came to Conques with broken chains that the monks had the iron forged into doors for the church.

Conques today

The pilgrims paid for a new church. Work began in the eleventh century, and the Romanesque abbey church still stands. The abbey stood directly along the main pilgrimage trail heading toward northern Spain.

Centuries later, the statue nearly vanished during the French Revolution. Revolutionary authorities seized and melted down most church treasures. At the end of 1793 the people of Conques hid theirs in their houses and gardens and returned it later.

Her fame soon spread far beyond the mountains, inspiring one of Europe’s earliest vernacular rhyming poems about her death.

Each year, on the Sunday after 6 October, the Majesty leaves the treasury. It is carried into the choir of the abbey church, the same space Bernard found too crowded to kneel in. The Roman face still looks out over the people who come to see it.

Sources

Passio sanctae Fidis et sancti Caprasii, Latin text printed in A. Bouillet and L. Servières, Sainte Foy, vierge et martyre. Rodez: Carrère, 1900, Appendix I
Bernard of Angers and continuators, Liber miraculorum sancte Fidis, ed. Auguste Bouillet. Paris: Picard, 1897 (Latin text consulted via the la Cabalesta digital library)
Pamela Sheingorn (trans.), The Book of Sainte Foy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995
Gustave Desjardins (ed.), Cartulaire de l’abbaye de Conques en Rouergue. Paris: Picard, 1879, introduction (the Vincent relics, the theft from Agen, the charter of 30 July 883)
Patrick J. Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages. Princeton University Press, 1978 (rev. ed. 1990)
Jean Taralon, restoration and study of the reliquary statue, 1954-1955, as summarized in the French Wikipedia article ‘Statue reliquaire de sainte Foy’
Cançó de Santa Fe, Occitan-Catalan verse Passion of 593 lines, c. 1054-1076
Office de Tourisme de Conques, ‘The Treasure’ (the treasury hidden by the villagers at the end of 1793)
Franz Stoedtner (publisher), ‘Majesté de Sainte Foy’, lantern-slide photograph, Berlin, early 20th century, Université de Louvain collection (the reference for this entry’s hero plate)

Primary Sources

Passio sanctae Fidis et sancti Caprasii, Latin text printed in A. Bouillet and L. Servières, *Sainte Foy, vierge et martyre*. Rodez: Carrère, 1900, Appendix I
Bernard of Angers and continuators, *Liber miraculorum sancte Fidis*, ed. Auguste Bouillet. Paris: Picard, 1897 (Latin text consulted via the la Cabalesta digital library)
Pamela Sheingorn (trans.), *The Book of Sainte Foy*. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995
Gustave Desjardins (ed.), *Cartulaire de l'abbaye de Conques en Rouergue*. Paris: Picard, 1879, introduction (the Vincent relics, the theft from Agen, the charter of 30 July 883)
Patrick J. Geary, *Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages*. Princeton University Press, 1978 (rev. ed. 1990)
Jean Taralon, restoration and study of the reliquary statue, 1954-1955, as summarized in the French Wikipedia article 'Statue reliquaire de sainte Foy'
*Cançó de Santa Fe*, Occitan-Catalan verse Passion of 593 lines, c. 1054-1076
Office de Tourisme de Conques, 'The Treasure' (the treasury hidden by the villagers at the end of 1793)
Franz Stoedtner (publisher), 'Majesté de Sainte Foy', lantern-slide photograph, Berlin, early 20th century, Université de Louvain collection (the reference for this entry's hero plate)

Related Beings

Common Questions

Who was Saint Faith of Conques?

Saint Faith, Sainte Foy in French and Sancta Fides in Latin, was a young Christian woman of Agen in south-west Gaul. Her Passion says the Roman prefect Dacian ordered her to sacrifice to Diana. She refused, and he had her stretched on a bronze bed over a fire. She and a fellow Christian, Caprasius, were then beheaded. She is called Faith of Conques because her relics have been kept at the abbey of Conques since the ninth century.

When is the feast day of Saint Faith?

6 October. The date appears in the martyrology of Jerome, and her Passion names the same day. At Conques the golden statue is carried from the treasury into the choir of the abbey church on the Sunday after 6 October.

Why did the monks of Conques steal her relics?

Conques was a poor abbey in a remote valley, and a monastery without a famous saint drew few pilgrims or gifts. The monks had already tried for the body of Saint Vincent of Saragossa and lost it to Castres in 863. According to the account of the transfer, a monk named Arinisdus then joined the clergy who guarded Faith’s tomb at Agen, won their trust, broke open the tomb during a festival and carried the body to Conques. A charter shows the relics there by 30 July 883. The traditional date of the theft is 866. Historians call such raids furta sacra, holy thefts.

What is the golden statue of Sainte Foy made of?

A core of yew wood about 85 cm high, covered in gold and gilded silver and set with gems, including 33 cameos and 31 engraved stones from antiquity. One of them shows the Roman emperor Caracalla. The face is a reused late Roman gold head, probably from a statue of an emperor, with eyes of dark blue and white glass. The skull of the saint is kept inside. The statue was built up in stages from the ninth century onward.

What are the jokes of Sainte Foy?

The Book of Miracles of Saint Faith calls some of her miracles joca, jokes or tricks. In one, a knight’s lost hawk flew back into his dining hall during supper. In another, a woman who wore a ring promised to the saint by her husband’s dying first wife suffered a swollen finger. The ring shot off onto the church floor when she blew her nose. At a church council a countess explained a sudden cure by saying that Sainte Foy was joking, as she usually did.