The patronage of the saints was part of the very fibre of Frankish society. The Franks had adopted the belief in this miraculous power, and the relics which served as its focus, from the conquered Gallo–Roman population as part of the process of their conversion to Christianity. Until the twelfth century many, indeed most, of the important saintly patrons within the Frankish realms were the martyrs, bishops, and abbots of Gallo–Roman society. Ironically the Gallo–Romans themselves, as we know from the works of Gregory of Tours, had seen these saints and their relics as one of their most powerful defences against the Germanic invaders. When that bishop retold the story of how Bishop Anianus had turned away the attacking Huns from Orléans, it must have had particular resonance for an audience themselves embattled by the Franks. In an extraordinary process of cultural synthesis, the Franks made such patrons as Anianus their own. The cult of the saints had been and continued to be an eminently local phenomenon. Anianus was above all a patron for the Orléanais, its Gallo–Roman population, the Franks who conquered and settled it, and the Christian descendants of mixed race who were the progeny of the invasions.

A story told by Hariulf in the early twelfth century demonstrates how those descendants clung to the patronage provided by their local saints. When the members of the First Crusade took ship to go to the Holy Land, they included ‘men of diverse nations, namely Franks, Burgundians, Aquitanians, Gascons, Spaniards, Italians, Sicilians, Calabrians, and other nations as well’.