The French Roman Catholic diocese of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne (San Giovanni di Moriana in Italian) has since 1966 been effectively suppressed, formally united with the archdiocese of Chambéry. While it has not been suppressed, and is supposed to be on a par with Chambéry and the diocese of Tarentaise, it no longer has a separate bishop or existence. History Saint Gregory of Tours's "De Gloria Martyrum" relates how the church of Maurienne, belonging then to the Diocese of Turin, became a place of pilgrimage, after the holy woman Thigris or Thecla, a native of Valloires, had brought to it as sacred relic from the East a finger of St. John the Baptist. Saint Guntram, King of Burgundy, took from the Lombards in 574 the valleys of Maurienne and Suse (Susa Valley, or Val de Suse), and in 576 founded near the shrine a bishopric, detached from the then Diocese of Turin (in Piedmont, northern Italy), as suffragan of the Archdiocese of Vienne, also comprising the Briançonnais. Its first bishop was Felmasius, known from a document on the Baptist relic's first miracle. In 599 Pope Gregory the Great failed to make the Merovingian Queen Brunhilda of Austrasia ('Brunehaut') oblige the protests of the Bishop of Turin against this foundation. Pope Leo III (795-816) made Darantasia (Tarantaise, Loire) a Metropolitan archbishopric with three suffragans, Aosta, Sion (=Sitten), and Maurienne, but maintained the Ancient primatial status of Vienne. A letter written by John VIII in 878 formally designated the Bishop of Maurienne as suffragan of Tarentaise, but for four centuries this supremacy was the cause of conflicts between the archbishops of Tarentaise and the Metropolitans of Vienna who continued to claim Maurienne as a suffragan see; subsequently under Callistus II (1120) Maurienne was again attached to the metropolis of Vienne. As its first see, a cathedral of John the Baptist was built in the 6th century, destroyed by invading Saracens in 943 and rebuilt in the 11th century. After the Saracens had been driven out, the temporal sovereignty of the Bishop of Maurienne appears to have been very extensive, but there is no proof that such sovereignty had been recognized since Gontran's time. At the death in 1032 of Rudolph III of Burgundy, the last ruler of the independent Kingdom of Burgundy, Bishop Thibaut was powerful enough to join a league against Holy Roman Emperor Conrad II of Franconia. In 1033 the city was destroyed