"Cut off a thong of his skin" ~ The martyrdom of Saint Herculanus AD 549

The Burial of St. Ercolano outside the Gates of Perugia
by Benedetto Bonfigli, ca. 1460.

March 1 is the feast day of the ancient Italian Saint Herculanus of Perugia. (He is also remembered on November 7). Though little-known today, Herculanus was bishop of that city and died a martyr in AD 549 during the disastrous Romano-Gothic War in Italy. Along with Saint Constantius, he is one of the ancient patrons of Perugia.

Practically all we know of the life and death of Herculanus comes from a passage in the Dialogues of Saint Gregory the Great, written down about fifty years after the event. Having surrendered to the Roman armies of Belisarius upon his arrival in central Italy in AD 537, Perugia endured sieges by the resurgent Goths in the 540s, culminating with the city's fall to the Gothic king, Totila, in AD 549.

Here is Pope Gregory’s account of what happened in the aftermath of the siege:

The virtuous Bishop Floridus told me a notable miracle, which was this:

"The great holy man," quoth he, "Herculanus, who brought me up, was Bishop of Perusium, exalted to that dignity from the state of a monk: in whose time the perfidious king Totila besieged it for seven years together, and the famine within was so great that many of the townsmen forsook the place: and before the seventh year was ended, the army of the Goths took the city. 

"The commander of his camp dispatched messengers to Totila, to know his pleasure what he should do with the Bishop, and the rest of the citizens: to whom he returned answer, that he should, from the top of the Bishop's head to his very foot, cut off a thong of his skin, and that done, to strike off his head. And as for the rest of the people, to put them all to the sword.

Click for more info.

"When he had received this order, he commanded the reverent Bishop Herculanus to be carried to the walls, and there to have his head strooken off, and when he was dead, that his skin should be cut from the very crown down to the very foot, as though indeed a thong had been taken from his body—after which barbarous fact they threw his dead corpse over the wall. Then some upon pity, joining the head to the body, did bury him, together with an infant that was there found dead.

"Forty days after, Totila making proclamation that the inhabitants, which were gone, should without all fear come back again, those, which upon extremity of hunger departed, returned home to their houses, and calling to mind the holy life of their Bishop, they sought for his body, that it might, as he deserved, be buried in the church of St. Peter. And when they came to the place where it lay, they digged, and found the body of the infant that was buried together with him, putrefied and full of worms: but the Bishop's body was so sound as though it had been newly put into the earth, and that which is more to be admired, and deserveth greater reverence, his head was so fast joined to his body as though it had never been cut off, neither did any sign of his beheading appear at all. Then they viewed likewise his back, whether that were also whole and sound, and they found it so perfect and well, as though never any knife had touched the same." [Taken from: The Dialogues of Saint Gregory the Great, Book III, Chapter 13]

For a good deal more on Saint Herculanus and the legends that grew up around him in medieval Perugia, The Key to Umbria has some excellent information.