Antidius of Besançon

Saint Antidius of Besançon (also called Antel, Antible or Tude) was a disciple and successor of Saint Froninus as bishop of Besançon in France, and he was put to death by the Vandals at Ruffey. Some lists give his death around 265, but French historians place it around 407 or 411, at the time of the Vandal invasion.

He was born into a Roman family of Sequania, entered the clergy at the cathedral of Saint Stephen and then became bishop. When the Arian Vandals under the general Crocus invaded Gaul, they arrested him, betrayed by some of his faithful. A variant of the legend says that he had asked Crocus to spare the Christian population. He was stripped of his sacred vestments, cruelly beaten and beheaded at Ruffiacum, now Ruffey-⁠le-⁠Château in the Doubs.

His relics, desecrated by the Protestants in 1560, are kept in a reliquary in the choir of the church of Saint-⁠Pierre-⁠aux-⁠Liens at Palleau in Saône-⁠et-⁠Loire. A chapel built on the presumed place of his martyrdom survives today as a nineteenth-⁠century oratory. The church of Naisey-⁠les-⁠Granges in the Doubs bears his name, and Saint Jeanne-⁠Antide Thouret received the name Antide in his honour. He is commemorated on 17 June as a saint of the West before the Great Schism (a saint of the undivided Church), by the New Calendar.