EXILED IN SAINT BERTRAND

Saint Bertrand de Comminges is a beautiful, old small city poised amongst the foothills of the Pyrenees. It is nestled amidst forests beyond lowlands full of History. A cathedral full of marvellous items dominates the city. Very old houses and private mansions line the twisty-turny streets. Bertrand de Got had been one of its bishops in days past. Phillip-the-Fair had made him what he was, and had had him elected pope under the name Clement V. He accepted without much concern for the wishes of his king who would move the Vatican to Avignon and force him to accuse and condemn the Knights Templar. Perhaps he was included in the curse that the Grand Master of the Templar’s pronounced at the stake where he was to be burned, thus provoking his death.

But centuries earlier a very different historic figure had visited Saint Bertrand de Comminges. In the neighbouring fields of Saint Bertrand was one of the largest Roman cities in Gaul, with at least 60,000 inhabitants. This was where the Emperor Caligula had once exiled… Herod Antipas with his wife Herodias. He was the one ceded to the pressure of his wife and his stepdaughter Salomé’s to condemn John the Baptist to death. He was also the one in front of whom Jesus Christ was dragged and, who, following a probing interrogation, sent him back to Pilate. He was the sovereign of part of Palestine, but he had fallen into disgrace and the Roman leader had sent him to this far away place in exile.

“ Yet the Emperor authorised his wife Herodiade to come back to Palestine.
She refused to stay with her husband.Out of love,by fidelity ?
So the two famous characters of the Gsopels,linked with John the Baptist,linked with Christ,
linked with Palestine,grew old and died in this corner of the Pyrenees.
No one knows where they were buried.”


by  Prince Michael of Greece