The saint who married a Muslim princess

Start at the Pont du Diable over the deeply cut gorge of the River Herault in France's Languedoc region. Cross the I ,000-year-old bridge, turn north on to the D4 and follow the Chemin de St Jacques for two miles to the confluence of the River Gellone, up through the pretty village of St Guilhem le Desert until you are standing in front of the Abbaye de Gellone, the monastery founded by one of Europe's most charismatic saints. Guilhem du Desert.
The scene is beguiling. Dark mountains rise on either side, and beyond the beautiful abbey church lies le bout du monde, the enigmatic name given to the trough end of the valley, two miles to the west, which probably did mark the "end of the world" inhabited by the monks of this once remote monastic foundation.
Here, on December 14, 804, Guilhem, guided by his childhood friend and mentor Benoit, Abbot of Aniane, founded the monastery which was to bear his name. On the feast of SS Peter and Paul 806, Guilhem shaved his head and his beard and began his own monastic life in this place which had so enchanted him on his spiritual journey.
How did this scion of two great dynasties. Merovingian through his father Thierry, and Carolingian through his mother Aude, soldier, statesman, husband and father, come to the contemplative life and become a saint in the few short years before his death on May 28, 812?
The date of Guilhem's birth is not recorded but is thought to have been around the year 755 AD. Grandson of Charles Martel and cousin of Charlemagne, Guilhem received an education befitting his expected destiny in an age of unrelenting war. At Aix-laChapelle he was tutored in the practical rather than the literary arts and here, in his formative years, he enjoyed the company and friendship of his cousin Charlemagne and also of Witiza, the man who was to steer his spiritual development in the final phase of his eventful life. Witiza, son of the Count of Maguelone, was to found the Benedictine monastery at Aniane in 780.
Guilhem lived in troubled times; the Frankish king dom was at war with Lombards in Italy and Saxons in Germany, and engaged in a death struggle for the survival of Christian Europe with the Saracens,' then close to the pinnacle of their conquests in the westward expansion of Islam.
The historical record is mute about the fast 40 years of this earnest Christian soldier, whose reputation portrayed him as a man who loved God, his country and his fellow man, and who desired to serve them all. It was during this period that Guilhem married "the beautiful Cunegonde" with whom he had "numerous" children. Although the marriage appears to have been a happy one, the domestic bliss was not to last, as she died young.
The year 790 marks the opening of a very public phase in Guilhem's life of illustrious military and civic achievement. His cousin Charlemagne made him Duke of Aquitaine and Count of Toulouse. It was in this period of his glittering military and diplomatic career that he subjugated Gascony and turned the tide against the conquering Saracens. In 793 Guilhem pushed the Muslim armies back into Spain, after which they never re-crossed the Pyrenees. During this campaign his reputation for bravery, military prowess and chivalry was established and the record shows that for the Saracens he was a much-admired adversary.
After Guilhem's conquest of Orange he fell in love with a Muslim princess, Guibourc, the daughter of the Saracen King Thibaud. It seems to have been a coup de foudre (strike of lightning), as they so poetically say in France to describe love at first sight. Indeed, in the Chansons de Geste, the famous song cycle sung by the troubadours to extol the epic heroes of the time, Guilbourc is said to have "captured his heart". The feelings seem to have been mutual, for Guibourc converted to Christianity. They married and, so the legend reports, "in this time of his glory and maturity, burdens were lifted and life became lighter and more savoury".
Whether the union was political or a romantic elopement, it seems an astonishingly modern story of cross-cultural marriage driven by love. But the fact that a union between a Muslim princess and a Christian knight could have occurred at all in Europe in the eighth century, when Islam and Christianity were engaged in a struggle to the death, is truly remarkable.
One of the difficulties in understanding the motivations and the consequences of the marriage stems from the blurring of boundary dividing history and legend. Some of the great military and political events trumpeted in the Chansons de Geste are part of an agreed historical record but on much of Guilhem's personal life, a cloud of obscurity has descended. The symbolism of this extraordinary marriage, however, cannot be denied; it shines out like a good deed in a naughty world, having a timely resonance in our times.
Whether the union celebrated in romantic song succeeded in damping down the conflict then raging in Europe between the followers of Christ and those of the Prophet is not clear. There seems to be no record of a detente between the contesting powers and some of the greatest battles were yet to come. Indeed, the climax of Guilhem's military career, the conquest of Barcelona in 803, came more than a decade after his marriage to Guibourc, suggesting that there was no immediate peace dividend echoing the harmony in their liybrid household.
What remains from this uplifting story is the image of a slender span bridging the chasm between early medieval Montagues and Capulets, through the power of love.
Guilhem's marriages to the almost forgotten Cunegonde, and the romantically celebrated Guibourc, both of whom died when young, left him bereft and broken-hearted. Their 10 surviving children, three girls; Helinbruch, Gerberge and Rolinde, and seven boys; Witcher, Hidehelm, Thierry, Gaucelme, Gamier, Herbert and Bernard de Septimanie, remain a testament to Guilhem, loving father and husband, and their devoted mothers.
The death of Guibourc tipped Guilhem into a slough of despond triggering a period of spiritual transformation. During this time Witiza, his childhood friend who had founded the Abbey of Aniane more than 20 years earlier after renouncing the soldier's life, was the instrument of his salvation. Guilhem retreated to the Abbey and Monastery of Aniane, and Witiza, who had taken the name of the fifth century founder of the order whose rule the monastery followed, Benedict, (or Benoit in French), guided his friend towards the monastic life. Guilhem's renunciation of the role for which he had been honoured was perhaps, as with Benoit before him, a refuge from the horrors of battle. It led him towards a desire for penitence, this time in the context of an infinite love.
Benoit, priest and counsellor to the King, Louis le Pieux, planned to found a monastic cell, an offshoot of the mother abbey at Aniane, in the remote Gellone valley and recognised in Guilhem a worthy custodian of the project. Guilhem embraced a spiritual labour which would complete his search for penitence and peace.
On December 14, 804, Guilhem made a generous founding gift for the establishment of the fledgling cell. Desiring the blessing of Charlemagne, he sought an interview with his cousin and surrendered his arms and his titles. Charlemagne accepted Guilhem's new vocation with regret but recognised his friend's spiritual quest.
When his former lieutenant asked for the gift of a relic of the True Cross which had been given to the emperor by the Patriarch of Jerusalem, Charlemagne gave it to him with his blessing.
OnJune 29, 806, Guilhem took the monk's habit, beginning his monastic life in the Gellone Valley where his two sisters, Albane and Bertrane, joined him in a life "simple and devoted to God" in the Benedictine tradition In these brief six years of his life of penitence and humility Guilhem appears to have been as great a spiritual inspiration as ever he was an epic hero at Charlemagne's side. His reputation as a saintly man spread widely during his lifetime and, together with the relic of the True Cross, Charlemagne's gift, with which Guilhem had endowed the little community he had nurtured, ensured that the abbey he founded became a place of pilgrimage.
St Guilhem le Desert has remained an important pilgrimage site and the saint's relics, (those which have survived the French Revolution and the great flood of 1817), as well as the gift of Charlemagne, are displayed for veneration in the transept of the abbey. The 12thcentury biography of St Guilhem, Vita Sancti Guilhemi, written by the monks to exalt their founder-saint, as well as rapidly growing spontaneous popular devotion did much to develop his cult. But from the early eighth century there emerged another powerful reason for the growing fame of St Guilhem and the monastery he founded in the remote valley of the Gellone.
The burial site of the martyred apostle James, traditionally in Galicia, had been lost by the eighth century. Around 809 the hermit Pelayo (Pelagius) disCovered the tomb and set in motion the timely establishment of what became Christendom's most famous pilgrimage, to the shrine of St James the Apostle at Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, north-west Spain.
As the pilgrim pathways to Santiago became established throughout France the southern route, the Via Tolosana, along which pilgrims travel westwards to the shrine of St James and eastwards to the shrine of StPeter, was inexorably drawn to the established monastery of St Guilhem du Desert.
In this way the already important shrine, which housed the relic of the True Cross, and which would soon contain his own remains, became a notable pilgrims' halt along the route to Spain.
An intriguing footnote relating to this connection lies in the village of Liedena near Puenta la Reina, on the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain. Here, on a plaque outside the village church, is an inscription which claims that St Guilhem, in the company of a female French saint, passed this way on his pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela.
Does St Guilhem have a message for those who encounter him 1200 years later? The answer is a resolute yes. And perhaps we should look no further for it than in the prayer of St Augustine which was, more than any other, on his lips as he languished in the desert after the death of his beloved Guibourc: "Tu m'as fait pour Toi, Seigneur, et rnon coeur en t sans repos rant qu'il ne aemeure en Toi." You have made me for your service, Lord, and my heart is not at peace until it lives in you.