Family and Historical Context
Fulgentius was the youngest of four children of Severianus, a Hispano-Roman of elite standing whose family lived first at Cartagena. Later tradition — described by sources as doubtful or possibly legendary — held Severianus to have been a Roman imperial prefect, or a dux or governor. The mother of the family was named Theodora. The household relocated to Seville around 554.
The family was staunchly Catholic, which set it apart from the Arian Visigothic nobility of the day, and it proved instrumental in the political and religious effort that brought the Visigothic kings from Arianism to Catholic orthodoxy. All four siblings achieved religious prominence and came to be recognized as saints in both the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches: Leander (c. 534–600/601) and Isidore, successive Archbishops of Seville; their sister Florentina, an abbess remembered by tradition as directing forty convents and a thousand nuns; and Fulgentius, the youngest, who became Bishop of Astigi.
Episcopate at Astigi
Probably through the influence of his brother Leander, who was made Archbishop of Seville in 584, Fulgentius was chosen Bishop of Astigi (Écija) at some point between 590 and 600, near the start of the reign of the Catholic Visigothic king Reccared. His documented acts as bishop mark the span of his tenure.
In 610 he signed the decree of King Gundemar (610–614) which established the province of Toledo by separating territory from that of Cartagena. At the Second Synod of Seville in 619 he attended in person, his name appearing among the signatures to the Acts of the council, which determined that thirty years' undisturbed possession should constitute a legal title in a parish-boundary dispute. He had died before 633, since one Marcianus is shown to have been Bishop of Astigi by that year.
Relationship with Isidore of Seville
Fulgentius's brother Isidore dedicated to him — as 'his lord, the servant of God' — the work 'De ecclesiasticis officiis,' on the offices of the Church. According to Isidore's own account, it was at Fulgentius's solicitation that the treatise was written, a detail that testifies to Fulgentius's active interest in the liturgical and pastoral ordering of the Church.
Relics and Shrines
A portion of the bones of Fulgentius, together with those of his sister Florentina, was carried for safety into the Sierra de Guadalupe and, in the fourteenth century, found in the village of Berzocana. The remaining portion of their relics rests in the Cathedral of Murcia at Cartagena, where Fulgentius is venerated as patron of the diocese.
Confusion with Fulgentius of Ruspe
In medieval writings Fulgentius of Astigi is frequently confused with the earlier North African bishop Fulgentius of Ruspe. Some works were attributed to the Spanish Fulgentius of which no traces remain, and his feast has been celebrated on differing days — the Bollandists' Acta Sanctorum places it on 14 January, while the Orthodox commemoration is kept on January 16.
