Two Hymns for a Relic of the Cross

In 569 the Byzantine emperor Justin II sent Queen Radegund a relic of the True Cross for her convent at Poitiers, and Venantius Fortunatus marked its arrival with two Latin poems that passed almost immediately into liturgical use and have stayed there since. Vexilla Regis Prodeunt, the banners of the king go forth, is a processional hymn written for the relic's ceremonial reception and became the standard Latin hymn for the veneration of the cross, sung during Holy Week and at feasts of the cross across the Western church.

Pange Lingua Gloriosi Proelium Certaminis, sing my tongue of the glorious battle, tells the story of the crucifixion as a cosmic contest and gave its opening words and metrical form to a long later tradition of Latin hymnody, most famously to Thomas Aquinas, who modeled his own eucharistic hymn Pange Lingua Gloriosi Corporis Mysterium directly on Fortunatus's meter and refrain in the thirteenth century. Both hymns are counted among the small number of genuinely classical era Latin poems that survived into the medieval liturgy essentially intact, prized for combining the rhetorical polish of Fortunatus's late Roman schooling with an emotional directness suited to public ceremony. Their continued use in the Roman rite today, centuries after the political world Fortunatus wrote for disappeared, is the clearest measure of how completely these two poems escaped the rest of his very large surviving body of occasional verse.