of Nola. At the beginning of the 5th century a mysterious figure, who according to Saint Gregory of Tours came from the East, appeared in Bordeaux: Severinus (Seurin), in whose favour Bishop Amand abdicated the see from 410 to 420, resuming it after Seurin's death and occupying it until 432. In the 6th century, Bordeaux had as its bishop Leontius II (542–564), a man of great influence who used his wealth in building churches and clearing lands and whom the poet Fortunatus calls patriae caput. During this Merovingian period the cathedral church, founded in the fourth century, occupied the same site that it does today, tight against the ramparts of the ancient city. The Faubourg Saint-Seurin outside the city was a great centre of popular devotion, with its three large basilicas of Saints Stephen, Seurin, and Martin surrounding a large necropolis from which a certain number of sarcophagi are still preserved. The cemetery of Saint Seurin was full of tombs of the Merovingian (early dark ages) period around which the popular imagination was to create legends. In the high noon of the Middle Ages it used to be told how Christ had consecrated this cemetery and that Charlemagne, having fought the Saracens near Bordeaux, had visited it and laid Roland's wonderful horn Olivant/Oliphant on the altar of Seurin. Many tombs passed for those of Charlemagne's gallant knights and others were honored as the resting-places of Veronica and Benedicta. At the other extremity of the city, Benedictines drained and filled in the marshes of L'Eau-Bourde and founded there the monastery of Sainte-Croix. While thus surrounded by evidence of Christian conquest, the academic Bordeaux of the Merovingian period continued to cherish the memory of its former school of eloquence, whose chief glories had been the poet Ausonius (310–395) and St Paulinus (353–431), who had been a rhetorician at Bordeaux and died Bishop of Nola. Middle Ages During the whole 8th century and part of the 9th, no bishops are mentioned for Bordeaux among Vatican and local records. Frotharius was archbishop in 870, when he fled the city in the face of Viking raids. In the late tenth century, ecclesiastical power was once again concentrated in the hands of the archbishop of Bordeaux when Gombald, brother of William II of Gascony and bishop of all the Gascon sees became archbishop (989). In 1027, the duke of Gascony, Sancho VI, and the duke of