Boulogne-Sur-Mer: St. Patrick's Native Town — John Shaqi
Boulogne-Sur-Mer: St. Patrick's Native TownFleming, William
History
Boulogne-Sur-Mer: St. Patrick's Native Town
Fleming, William
Patrick, Saint, 373?-463?
The history of this tower, on account of its close connection with the
history of St. Patrick, cannot fail to be interesting. Caligula, or
Caius Caesar, who died A.D. 41, meditated a descent upon Britain, and
with that object marshalled his troops at Bononia. Fearful, however, of
the dangers and fatigues of a long campaign in that inhospitable
island, and full of childish vanity, he determined at length, as
Suetonius humorously observes, "to make war in earnest; he drew up his
army on the shore of the ocean, with his ballistse and other engines of
war, and, while no one could imagine what he intended to do, on a
sudden commanded them to gather up sea shells and fill their helmets
and the folds of their dresses with them, calling them 'the spoils of
the ocean due to the Capitol and the Palatium.' As a monument of his
success, he raised a lofty tower, upon which, as at Pharos, he ordered
lights to be burnt in the night time for the guidance of ships at sea"
("Lives of the Twelve Caesars," Caligula, p. 283).
"It seems generally agreed," writes Forester, the translator of
Suetonius' Lives, "that the point of the coast which was signalised by
this ridiculous bravado of Caligula, somewhat redeemed by the erection
of a high house, was Itium, afterwards called Gessoriacum and Bononia
(Boulogne), a town belonging to the Gaulish tribe of the Morini" (note,
p. 283).
For many centuries this tower called Turris Ordens, Turris Ardens, or
Turris Ordinis by the Romans, and Neamthur by the Gauls, spread its
light over land and sea on the north-eastern cliffs of Boulogne.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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