Saint Florian
Join me today to meet the martyr they were afraid to burn.
Name: Florian
Life: c. 250 - 304 AD
Status: Saint
Feast: May 4
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The governor Aquilinus had come in person to the military camp at Lauriacum on the River Enns, a little South of Linz in modern Austria. Aquilinus was there to solve a mystery.
It was 304 AD. One year earlier, the Emperor Diocletian had issued an order that Christians must sacrifice to the old gods on pain of death. All over the Roman Empire, Christians had been hunted down, rounded up, intimidated and then tortured. If this did not get them to sacrifice to the gods of Rome, Christians were martyred. But for some reason, that wasn’t happening in this part of Aquilinus’ province. Among the soldiers, not to mention in the nearby city of Aelium Cetium, modern day St. Pölten, the total number of arrests so far had been zero.
Why was nobody finding any Christians? Maybe Aquilinus was in charge of the least Christian chunk of the Roman empire, but he doubted it. Something else seemed to be going on.
When Aquilinus got there, he soon discovered part of the problem. Many of the soldiers declared themselves to be Christians. Aquilinus’ men rounded them up and took them into custody.
Still, why hadn’t the other soldiers - the ones who were still pagans - arrested their comrades? It had happened elsewhere. Aquilinus began to suspect that the unwillingness of the region to enforce Diocletian’s orders came from a kind of personal loyalty to a powerful, secret Christian. But who was this man?
As Aquilinus suspected, there was a man living in Aelium Cetium who had won the loyalty both of the city and of the Roman soldiers stationed nearby. He and Aquilinus had in fact been friends for a long time. The man had been one of Aquilinus’ senior officers. He had spent a career in the army, and toward the end of that career, as tradition has it, he had provided a great service to the city of Aelium Cetium. Now he was living there in retirement.
The secret Christian’s name was Florian. His reputation had almost singlehandedly kept the Diocletian persecutions at bay for a year.
Now the persecution had arrived.
What Florian did when he heard gives us a glimpse of the sort of man who could inspire such ferocious loyalty. As soon as Florian heard what Aquilinus was doing, he set out for the camp where the governor was searching for Christians. Maybe Florian could talk his old boss into turning a blind eye. Maybe not. Either way, he was going to stand with the men who had stood with him. He rode hard for the camp, riding into the governor’s party and shouting,
“Brothers, fellow soldiers, who else are you looking for? If you want to get me, since I am definitely a Christian, well I’m right here with you.
Florian had built up a reputation as a soldier. But Florian’s Acts give us a clue as to what it was that Florian had done for the governor in Aelium Cetium - and that clue has been further developed in tradition. Florian had been given the task of keeping the city safe from fire. In other words, he was told to create a fire department.
In the Roman world, light came from oil lamps and torches. Many people cooked in their houses, and pagans tried always to keep the hearthfire burning. For this reason, the risk of fire was always present. But the risk was greater for the Romans than for many earlier Middle Eastern cultures. That was because in places like Egypt or Babylon, houses could be built with cheap and flame-retardant clay fired bricks. In Rome and in the North of Europe, the cheap material was wood.
The wealthier Rome got, the more of a problem fire became. In Roman cities, with no elevators or indoor plumbing, the good apartments were those near the ground floor. Landlords built cheap wooden structures on the top of buildings, and this would be the housing for the urban poor. This meant that the most crowded, most chaotic places were also the most flammable ones.
Without a fire department, you were at the mercy of your powerful neighbours. In Rome, the plutocrat Marcus Licinius Crassus had grown rich by running a very much for-profit fire department. When a building burned, he’d bring his firemen, but instead of helping he’d make the owner a lowball offer. If the owner refused, Crassus would just watch as the building burned, offering smaller and smaller sums of money. When the desperate owner sold, Crassus’ fire brigade would spring into action to save Crassus’ new property.
The people of Rome hated this sort of situation, and the emperors had eventually realized that something needed to be done. The Emperor Augustus had combined Roman organization with Greek technology, setting up the Vigiles, a corps of firefighters, night watchmen, and general keepers-of-the-public-order.
Florian would almost certainly have modelled his firefighting force on the Vigiles. Every night, he would have had men out patrolling the streets, listening for cries of “Fire!”, and on the lookout for smoke or flame. It’s a function we read about in the Roman novel, the Satyricon. In the story, the main character Encolpius gets invited to a party thrown by the nouveau riche Trimalchio. Trimalchio is a nightmare host: rich, tacky, boorish, touchy and dangerous to offend. After a whole evening of him bragging about his wealth, it’s now well past midnight and a very drunk Trimalchio is still holding his guests hostage. He gets the idea to force his guests to show him how sad they will be when he dies. Everyone has to mourn, loudly and convincingly. Trimalchio’s slaves bring out trumpets and horns to add to the mourning. But then there is a lucky turn: the noise alerts the Vigiles. They think there is a fire, and a whole group of them smash in Trimalchio’s door and start passing in buckets of water to put out the blaze. In the confusion, our hero Encolpius makes his escape.
If firemen were sometimes overeager, that was because they knew how important it was to catch a fire quickly. A Roman firefighter’s great fear was not so much that a fire might start, but that it might spread. And in 64 AD, this had happened in the city of Rome. We call the result the Great Fire, a blaze which raged for six days, and just when people started to recover, it somehow rekindled itself and burned again for three more days. The fire burned so hot that stone cracked and much of the city was destroyed. The emperor at the time, Nero, had managed to save his political career by blaming it on a group hardly anyone in Rome had heard of: the Christians.
Centuries had gone by, and now Christians like Florian were the ones in charge of fire departments. Florian would have organized his men into night watches, patrolling the city and looking for signs of fire. This would have had the secondary effect of deterring a lot of night-time crime, making Aelium Cetium safer than it had ever been.
If a fire was found, Florian probably had a rapid response team made up of men carrying or maybe wearing an early fire extinguisher: large waterskins with a spout attached. The fireman would then put the waterskin under his arm and squeeze as if it were a set of bagpipes. He’d use the spout to aim the water at the fire. Even if the men with these waterskins couldn’t put out the fire, they could try to contain it with squirts of water as the bucket brigade sprang to work.
A long line of firemen would form, handing buckets back and forth between the fire and the nearest aqueduct, pond, river, or reservoir. It’s possible that Florian, like the firemen in Rome, had access to a Siphon: a water pump invented by an Egyptian Greek that could suck water out of a nearby pond or river and spray bursts of water into the building.
Meanwhile the firefighters would work on getting people out of the building while making sure that the fire stayed in. If the fire was in the upper floors, the firemen might bring ladders to help people get out. If that was not possible, a group of firemen could stretch out a blanket to allow those in the burning building to jump on it without breaking any limbs. These same blankets could be soaked and used to throw on the fire to try to smother it.
Other firefighters would use poles to prop up the sides of house, to make sure a wall did not fall and spray flame onto the next house over.
There’s even a curious possibility that Florian’s men may have used siege weaponry to fight fires. The Vigiles in Rome were issued with ballistae, siege engines that could hurl large stones and arrows. It’s hard to see what these were used for, but one possibility is that they were used to launch jars of a vinegar solution which acted as a chemical fire extinguisher for hard-to-reach places.
And what was Florian’s role in all this? As a mid-level officer, he could have set things up and watched from the safety of the sidelines as his men did all the work. But that would make it hard to understand the loyalty that Florian received from his men as well as the people of the city. There seems to have been genuine gratitude for his work, which suggests to me that Florian stood with his men, and led from the front.
And so it was not entirely surprising that, when Florian heard that his men were in danger, and his former boss Aquilinus was there looking for Christians, Florian’s first instinct was to ride out and announce that they should take him first.
In the accounts of Florian’s martyrdom, the governor Aquilinus is definitely made out to be a villain. But even so, there’s a suggestion that Florian’s appearance gave him pause. The men had worked together. It’s clear that there is some mutual respect. Aquilinus calls Florian a “very dear friend”.
But as the two men talked, it became obvious that they were on different paths. Aquilinus was determined to enforce the law. Perhaps he was afraid of getting in trouble. He had a boss too, for Aquilinus himself was one of four subordinate governors in the Diocese of Pannonia. Florian had become a Christian, and he wasn’t going to change. And so the situation shifted from two old friends meeting, to a man being arrested and punished by a superior authority. Finally, and I have to think reluctantly, the governor ordered Florian to be treated like any other Christian. When he refused to sacrifice, he was tortured. And then the governor said that if he still refused, Florian would face death. He tried one final appeal to Florian as a friend. Florian said:
I await your decision as a soldier should, but far be it from me to sacrifice to demons
The question was then how Florian would die. But when someone suggested that Florian should be burned alive, he just smiled and told them to go ahead. Florian had long ago overcome his fear of fire.
Aquilinus, though, was a politician. He understood that burning the great fireman of Aelium Cetium would not go over well among the ordinary people. And so it was that Florian, was executed, not by fire, but by water. A millstone was tied around his neck and his body was thrown into the river Enns.
Aelium Cetium had lost a defender, but they had gained a saint. Led by dreams, the persecuted Christian community of the city found Florian’s body and brought it home.
A year later, the Emperor Diocletian stepped down from his office. Perhaps he was confident that Christianity had been pretty well eradicated. But the blood of martyrs has always been the seed of the Church. And in truth, by the time Florian rode out to die, there were not even ten years remaining until Rome would begin to tolerate Christianity under an emperor who would be baptized as a Christian himself.
And for centuries after that, in fact right up until the present day, men who fight fires have done so under the sign of the eight pointed cross, the Cross of Saint Florian.
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So,then he should be listed as a martyr,not just a saint