CIRCONCELLIONI. – A name given in Roman Africa to groups of unemployed and unruly peasants and laborers who committed numerous acts of violence of every kind. The Donatists made use of them and found among them their most fanatical and zealous followers.
The name is explained by St. Augustine (Contra Gaud., I, 28, 32): genus hominum... victus sui causa cellas circumsens rusticanas (“a kind of men who wander around the rustic huts to procure their livelihood”); he adds (Enarr. in Ps., CXXXII, 3) that they were commonly called circelliones and ironically contrasts them, as fanatical wanderers, with monks. This has led some, like Isidore of Seville, to consider them a kind of wandering monks, and some moderns to see in them ascetics. Nor is it accurate to regard them as a true sect.
According to St. Optatus, they were the “agonistici” (“militants”) of Donatism; the same author (III, 4) recalls their leaders Axidus and Fasir, their violent deeds, and their frenzied zeal, a veritable suicidal mania, with which they sought “martyrdom.” St. Augustine recalls that at first they used only clubs, but later had weapons of every kind; they were accompanied by women, got drunk, etc.; shouting “Deo laudes,” they committed outright acts of brigandage against homes, Catholic churches, and persons.
To the memory of such deeds, described by St. Augustine, we probably owe the fact that an author of the 16th century, A. Krantz (Metropolis sive historia ecclesiastica Saxoniae, VIII, Cologne 1520, ch. 18), followed by others up to Moroni, gave this name to a Swabian sect which, according to the Annales Stadenses of Abbot Albert of St. Mary of Stade (in MGH, Scriptores, XVI, p. 371), in 1248 began to support the excommunicated and deposed Emperor Frederick II, declaring instead the Pope and the religious orders to be heretics, their absolutions invalid, etc.