HISTORY WEEKEND. Saint Guilhem, monk of the abbey of Gellone, cousin of Charlemagne, had made war on the Saracens

Guilhem a été sanctifié au Xe siècle. Thierry Laffond/Société Archéologique de Montpellier

Il y a 1200 ans, il avait bataillé contre les Musulmans dans le Sud de la France et en Espagne à la demande de Charlemagne. Et puis s’était retiré dans l’Hérault. Sa vie et sa mort sont un roman. Ou plusieurs.

It was in Hérault, at the entrance to the Cirque du bout du monde, also nicknamed Infernet, “little hell” in Occitan, that the knight Guillaume d'Aquitaine ended up putting down his suitcases and his fighting soul in the 800s.

In 804, perhaps, 1220 years ago. “It was in a valley, out of the way, that he chose to retire to be all for God”, observes Monsignor Pierre-Marie Carré, Archbishop of Montpellier, in the beautiful book The Grace of Gellone Abbey. “He retires to an inhospitable, wild valley“… A desert.

So much for the Epinal image that we have “dramatized“, smiles Aude-Lise Theule, from the culture and heritage department of the Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert town hall. The place, she insists, is not that isolated. Only seven kilometers separate it from the Aniane Abbey. And if William came this far, it was precisely on the good advice of one of his friends, the Visigoth Witiza, who convinced him.

Cousin of Charlemagne

Witiza, better known today as Benedict, founder in 782 of the monastery of Aniane, wanted to build another one in the valley of Gellone. He entrusted the continuation to William. From friends, they became neighbors. Benedict had stopped his military career nearly thirty years earlier, to become a monk. William, for his part, continued to fight for Charlemagne, who had entrusted him with the mission of controlling the Pyrenees, gradually taking back territories from the Muslims, following in the footsteps of his grandfather, Charles Martel.

Why him? By family duty… William's CV is as long as an arm: his mother is the sister of King Pepin the Short, before the latter passes the throne to his son Charlemagne after having received it from his father Charles Martel. It is this same Charlemagne who therefore entrusts his cousin William with the task of controlling the Pyrenees.

However, he was not on his lands, he the Burgundian raised at the king's court. It was for the needs of the Carolingian cause that he was parachuted into the south of France: he was put in charge of the county of Toulouse in the kingdom of Aquitaine.

His Occitanized name

His name was then Occitanized: Guillaume became Guilhem. However, he became Guillaume again in the 24 chansons de geste that flourished after his death: thus Guillaume was born a second time, this time from Orange, the archetype of the ideal knight and defender of Christianity in the Middle Ages.

The troubadours popularized abundant legends. He is said to have snatched Nîmes from the Saracens with a stratagem: a cart entered the city filled with barrels in which knights were hidden. He is also said to have recovered Orange, to have killed Arneïs d’Orléans who was eyeing the crown of France, to have defended the pope against the Saracens.

The heroic legends obviously ignore historical truths: the warrior turned monk is said to have in fact taken up arms again… He is said to have killed a giant cannibal, defeated the Devil on the bridge of the same name, been imprisoned in Sicily, and to have liberated Paris besieged by the Saracen giant Ysoré.

Guilhem is "both a historical figure and a legendary fictional hero, so much so that today very few people can distinguish what comes from history from what comes from medieval novels in the contemporary portrait of this Frankish warrior who died a monk from Languedoc“, notes historian Matthieu Desachy.

The Jewish thesis

“The few authentic sources” have reinforced this general vagueness, he specifies. According to him, we can agree on a handful of sure values: Guilhem, cousin of Charlemagne, “fought ferociously and mercilessly as leader of the armies of the kingdom of Aquitaine against the Gascon and Saracen troops from Narbonne to Barcelona in the last decade of the 7th century”.

“All the rest is literature, even if it abounds: and here is born from the pen William Short-Nose, William Proudbrace and even William of Orange, heroes whose warlike exploits against the Moors were forged by highly imaginative writers, who also attribute equally epic miracles to him.“

The thesis defended by the American historian Arthur J. Zuckerman in 1972 pushes the cork a little further still: William would indeed be the son of the sister of Pepin the Short but also that of a Jewish descendant of King David, Makhir, renamed Theodorit or Thierry. Which would have been named by Pepin Count of Toulouse, before his son William, to better create a Jewish principality in the South of France, a bulwark against the Muslim world. Life is an eternal recommencement.

To read: The grace of the abbey of Gellone, Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert, éditions La nuée bleue.

The current abbey is not the one that Guilhem had built. A. B.

“As a form of penance, he had himself flogged”

Born around 750 and died around 812, Guilhem lived for about sixty years. In his fifties, he retired to the Gellone valley.

The current abbey is not the one that Guilhem had built. It was rebuilt in the 11th century, a victim of its success and a double pilgrimage requiring more pomp: people came from all over Europe to greet Guilhem who became a Saint in the 10th century and to meditate before the relic of the cross of Christ that Charlemagne is said to have offered to Guilhem.

“It is said that if we put the pieces of the cross of Christ end to end there would be several crosses“, smiles Aude-Lise Theule. “The research of Hungarian medieval historian Edina Bozoky leads me to believe that the beautiful story of the transmission would be a legend invented from scratch to enhance the value of the object in relation to other parts of the True Cross“, Alice M. Colby-Hall points out. The same invention by an anonymous hagiographer who wrote The Life of Saint Guilhem. He claims that while serving as a baker, Guilhem entered the burning oven and removed the embers with his bare hands.

Guilhem was buried on the floor of the church as a form of humility, under the organ staircase, before perhaps being transferred to the crypt. “At the time of the religious wars, Catholics were afraid that Protestants would seize the relics”, Aude-Lise Theule points out. “They were hidden. Partially found in the 17th century by Maurist monks (an arm and the bust), they were, on the eve of the Revolution, entrusted in small pieces to the inhabitants… and ended up being swept away by a flood in 1817. Today, only a few fragments remain.”

According to the testimony of Ardon in 822, a monk of the abbey of Aniane, “as a monk, Guilhem distinguished himself by his humility, his self-denial, his piety and his compunction“. “As a form of penance, he had himself flogged, and the freezing cold did not prevent him from spending half the night praying alone, prostrate and almost naked.”

He is credited with performing miracles after his death: he is said to have performed exorcism, saved a young man from drowning who was on a pilgrimage to his tomb, and forced two pillaging knights to return what they had taken from his abbey. Ultimate mystery surrounding Guilhem ?

What did he actually do within the Gellone Abbey ? "It is by no means certain that he was really a monk“, specified the late heritage curator Jean Nougaret, “even if he shared the daily life of the monastic community of Aniane and then, quickly, of Gellone for the last six years of his life”.

A son, a brother, a husband, a father

According to certain texts, Guilhem could have died on May 28, 812. He had already lost his parents Thierry, Count of Autun, and Aldane (Aude), his two wives Cunégonde and Witburgh, his brothers Théodouin and Adalem, his sisters Albane (Aube) and Bertrane (Berthe).

It has been written that his sisters had taken the veil at Gellone before their brother entered religion, without assurance of veracity.

He would have had about ten children. Two of his sons took up his political torch: Bernard of Septimania was Count of Toulouse and his brother Gaucelme Count of Roussillon.

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