A story told by Sulpicius gave Western Christianity one of its most frequently used technical terms: chapel. Martin was said to have torn his military cloak in half to clothe a poor man, who was later revealed to him in a dream as Christ himself. The cut-down ‘little cloak’, capella in Latin, later became one of the most prized possessions of the Frankish barbarian rulers who succeeded Roman governors in Gaul (see pp. 323–5), and the series of small churches or temporary structures which sheltered this much-venerated relic were named after it: capellae.
