Theodulph was a Spanish Visigoth, probably of Saragossa, who fled north from Muslim al-Andalus as a young man and entered the circle of Charlemagne — joining Alcuin as one of the king's two principal cultural advisers. Made bishop of Orléans around 798 and appointed missus dominicus (the king's traveling inspector), he was deeply trusted by the emperor.
His Latin verse — the most accomplished Latin poetry of the Carolingian period — survives in significant quantity. Most famously, while imprisoned in 818 at Angers under the new emperor Louis the Pious (suspected of conspiring with King Bernard of Italy), he composed the Palm Sunday hymn Gloria Laus et Honor — 'All Glory, Laud and Honor to Thee, Redeemer, King' — which has been sung in the Roman procession of Palm Sunday for over twelve hundred years.
He built the tiny but exquisite Oratory of Germigny-des-Prés near Orléans — the earliest surviving church in France, decorated with mosaics of the Ark of the Covenant flanked by angels that were the first Western response to the Eastern iconoclast controversy. He died still in detention at Angers in 821 — by some reports poisoned, by others worn out by his imprisonment.