ELNE. – City of France in the Eastern Pyrenees, an episcopal see from the sixth century to 1601. It is the ancient “Illiberia,” named after the river of the same name, situated on the coastal road between Gaul and Spain, 6 km from the Mediterranean, near the promontory “Pyrseneum,” on elevated ground in the great plain of Roussillon, 13 km from Perpignan. Already much diminished in importance in the time of Trajan (Pliny, Nat. hist., III), it flourished again in the fourth century under the name “Helena,” whence the present E.
The existence of the diocese is attested in 571 by the chronicle of Giovanni de Bicker, who records the bishop Domino in that year (PL 72, 864). A group of bishops of E. is then known who took part in various Councils of Toledo, such as Benenato in 589, Acutolo in 633 and 638, and Claro in 683; Salomone is mentioned in a diploma of Lothair from 834 and in one of Louis the Pious from 836; there then follows the long episcopate of Riculfo, attested at least from 886 to 915 (Jaffé-Wattenbach, 3554).
After the city had been subjected to Saracen incursions, it was rebuilt by the bishops from Berengario IV to Arnoldo I, but was sacked by Philip the Bold in 1285.
The cathedral of E., dedicated to S. Eulalia of Mérida, was built in the twelfth century on the site of an earlier building that seems to have imitated the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem. In the adjoining cloister there are sarcophagi and remains of other monuments. The episcopal residence was transferred by Clement VIII to Perpignan on 1 September 1601.
Within the territory of the diocese there flourished the abbey of S. Maria of Arles-sur-Tech, founded by the Benedictine Castellano beside an ancient thermal building in 738. The abbey was enriched with privileges by Louis the Pious in 821, by Charles the Bald, and by Louis the Stammerer. Pope John VIII made the abbey immediately subject to the Holy See. Under Abbot Almerico, the abbey church was consecrated in 937, and in the same year his successor Arnolfo brought there the relics of the martyrs Abdon and Sennen. The building was reconstructed in the eleventh century and consecrated in 1046; only its façade remains. A new Romanesque church was consecrated in 1157; the handsome adjoining Romanesque cloister dates from the thirteenth century.
In 1392 Clement VIII united with the abbey that of
S. Andrea of Soride. From 1722 it was united with the episcopal mensa of Perpignan and suppressed in 1790.
The twelfth-century missal now in the Library of Perpignan belongs to the abbey (ma. no. 4; G. M. Touar, Les anciens missels du diocèse d'É., in Mémoires de la Société nationale des antiquaires de France, 46 [1885], pp. 32–44).