Ferreolus and Ferrutio
The Holy Martyrs Ferreolus the Presbyter and Ferrutio the Deacon, apostles of the Sequani
Hieromartyr · Priest · Deacon · Martyr · d. c. 212, at Besançon in Gaul
Commemorated 16 June — Martyrdom at Besançon after thirty years' preaching among the Sequani
Ferreolus and Ferrutio — Ferréol and Ferjeux in French — were brothers, a presbyter and a deacon, sent from Lyons to evangelise the Sequani of the upper Doubs and ordained, by the tradition, at the hands of St Irenaeus of Lyons himself. They preached around Besançon for some thirty years, were at length arrested, tortured and beheaded, about the year 212. Their bodies were hidden and forgotten, and were found — so the account runs — in a cave outside the city in 370, when the bishop Anianus enshrined them; the cave and the church built over it are the origin of the two great Besançon dedications that carry their names. They are among the earliest martyrs of eastern Gaul, and their commemoration on June 16 carries a direct line from Smyrna and Polycarp, through Irenaeus, into the forests of the Jura.
From Lyons to the Sequani
The Church of Lyons in the later second century was the missionary base of Gaul, and its bishop was Irenaeus, a Greek of Asia who had heard Polycarp of Smyrna as a boy — so that the Gallic mission of these decades stands two steps from the Apostle John. The tradition of Besançon makes Ferreolus and Ferrutio brothers and members of that mission: Irenaeus, it says, ordained the one priest and the other deacon, and sent them north-east into the country of the Sequani, the people of the Doubs valley whose chief town was Vesontio, the modern Besançon.
Their origins are disputed in the sources themselves. The older legend calls them natives of Asia Minor, which would make them companions of Irenaeus from his own country; the more cautious hagiographers (Alban Butler among them) thought it likelier that they were Gauls who had studied in Asia Minor — either way, the tie to the Greek East is what the tradition insists on.
Thirty years among the Sequani
They laboured about Besançon for thirty years, in a country still wholly pagan, and the Christian community of the city is dated from their preaching. Nothing of the substance of that ministry is transmitted; the legend passes straight from the length of it to its end.
Martyrdom
Under a persecution — the sources name that of Alexander Severus — they were arrested, subjected to many torments, and beheaded, in the year usually given as 212 (some accounts 211). Their bodies were disposed of secretly, and the memory of the place was lost.
The finding of the relics
In 370, according to the passio, a military tribune found the bodies in a cave outside Besançon, and the bishop Anianus translated and enshrined them. Over the cave grew the church of St Ferjeux, and the two names have been attached ever since to the two principal sanctuaries of the city; the relics were the centre of the Besançon cult through the Middle Ages, and pilgrimage to the crypt continues.
Feast and commemoration
June 16 (church date; Old Calendar civil June 29), their martyrdom. Local Western and Western-rite Orthodox usage; at Besançon their day is one of the two principal feasts of the diocese's own calendar.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of martyrs)
Thy martyrs Ferreolus and Ferrutio, O Lord, in their contest received incorruptible crowns from thee our God; for possessing thy strength they cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By their intercessions save our souls.
Iconography
The pair are shown together and by their orders, as the earliest missionary clergy of a Gallic city are always shown: Ferreolus in the vestments of a presbyter, Ferrutio in the deacon's dalmatic or sticharion with the orarion, each holding the palm and the cross of martyrdom, and often a sword or the instrument of beheading at their feet. In Western iconography they are frequently painted at the mouth of the cave in which their bodies lay, which is the identifying attribute of the Besançon cult; sometimes with the city behind them. An Orthodox rendering would place them side by side as a martyr-pair, the presbyter at the viewer's left with the Gospel or the cross, the deacon at the right with the censer or the martyr's cross. No pre-1900 image of them has been located and stored for this collection.
Disputed questions
- The chronology will not quite close. Irenaeus became bishop of Lyons about 177 and died about 202; thirty years of preaching after an ordination at his hands can be made to end about 212 only if the mission began in the 180s, which is possible. What cannot be reconciled is the naming of the persecution of Alexander Severus (222–235) as the occasion of their death: that emperor's reign begins ten years after the date the same sources give for the martyrdom, and he is not otherwise remembered as a persecutor. The passio is late, and its historical furniture is not to be pressed. The elements that carry weight are the antiquity of the Besançon cult, the tradition of a Lyonnais and ultimately Asian origin for the mission, and the fourth-century enshrinement.
- The finding of 370. The discovery of long-lost martyr-bodies by a soldier, and their enshrinement by a named bishop, is a recurrent form in Gallic hagiography. It is recorded here as the tradition gives it. What is beyond doubt is that Besançon venerated these two martyrs from an early date and built its principal shrine over the reputed cave.
- Orthodox usage. As pre-schism Western saints they are kept in the Orthodox calendars of the West — Western-rite parishes, including those of the Antiochian Archdiocese, and the local British and Frankish saints' lists compiled by ROCOR and others. They are not in the Greek Menaion, the Slavonic books or the OCA's synaxarion for June 16.