tried to shake off the yoke of Rome during the invasion of the Cimbri, but at the beginning of the empire it was a prosperous Roman civitas with famous schools in which the three brothers of the Emperor Constantine were pupils.

According to Gregory of Tours history written in the 6th century, Saturninus was martyred by being dragged by a bull, and due to his having been abandoned by the local priests, he prayed to Christ that the diocese would forever be ruled by bishops that were not citizens of the city.

[1] St. Honoratus, given in some lists as St. Saturninus's successor, is recognised as a pre-Schism Western saint by the Orthodox Church and it is therefore wrong to suggest that he seems just to have crept in through error from the fabulous legend of St. Firminus of Amiens.

Among the bishops of Toulouse may be mentioned: Rhodanius (350-58), exiled by Constantius to Phrygia because of his efforts against Arianism at the Council of Béziers in 356; St. Hilary, whom some historians place before Rhodanius, but who is placed after him by Duchesne; St. Sylvius (360-400); St. Exuperius (c. 400), who drove from his diocese in 405 the heretic Vigilantius, saved Toulouse from the Vandals, and was the friend of St. Jerome; St. Germerius (Germier), whose episcopate (c. 541) is questioned by Duchesne; Magnulphus (c. 585), exiled by King Gundoald; St. Erembert [fr](657), a monk of Fontenelle who returned to his monastery to die.

The marriage (1249) of Jeanne, daughter of Raymond VII, with Alphonse de Poitiers, brother of Louis IX of France, led to the uniting in 1271 of the County of Toulouse to the Crown of France, and Toulouse became the capital of the Province of Languedoc.

Louis had resigned to his brother Robert all rights over the Kingdom of Naples, and had accepted from Pope Boniface VIII the See of Toulouse after becoming a Franciscan friar.

According to Pope John XXII, not only was the diocese too large and too populated for a single bishop to carry out all of his necessary functions, but also it was immensely rich and did not spend its wealth for the growth of the faith, but on luxuries and dissipation of every sort.

The first archbishop was Raymond de Comminges, Bishop of Maguelonne from 1309, who, when created cardinal in 1327, resigned the See of Toulouse in order to take up his duties at the Papal Curia in Avignon, where he died in 1348.

As early as 1563 the Catholics of Toulouse founded a league to uphold the prerogatives of Catholicism, protected by the Parlement but jeopardized by certain Protestant town-councillors.

From 1586 to 1595 the League party under Montmorency, Governor of Languedoc, and the Duc de Joyeuse held control in Toulouse.