Kilian or Kuln was a holy Irish monk, of noble Scottish extraction.
With two zealous companions he travelled to Rome in 686, and obtained
of pope Conon a commission to preach the gospel to the German
idolaters in Franconia; upon which occasion Kilian was invested
with episcopal authority. The missionaries converted and baptized
great numbers at Wurtzburg, and among others Gosbert, the duke of
that name. This prince had taken to wife Geilana, the relict of his
deceased brother; and though he loved her tenderly, being put in mind
by St. Kilian that such a marriage was condemned and void by the law
of the gospel, he promised to dismiss her, saying that we are bound
to love God above father, mother, or wife. Geilana was tormented in
mind beyond measure at this resolution; jealousy and ambition equally
inflamed her breast; and, as the vengeance of a wicked woman has no
bounds, during the absence of the duke in a military expedition, she
sent assassins, who privately murdered the three holy missionaries in
688. The ruffians were themselves pursued by divine vengeance, and
all perished miserably. St. Burchard, who, in the following century,
was placed by St. Boniface in the episcopal see of Wurtzburg,
translated their relics into his cathedral. A portion of those of
St. Kilian, in a rich shrine, was preserved in the treasury of the
elector of Brunswic-Lunenburg in 1713, as appears from the printed
description of that cabinet. See the acts of these martyrs compiled
by Egilward, monk of St. Burchard’s at Wurtzburg, extant imperfect
in the eleventh century, in Surius, t. 4, entire in Canisius, t. 4,
par. 2, p. 628, and t. 3, ed. Basn., p. 174. Also among the Opuscula
of Serrarius, printed at Mentz in 1611, in the collection of the
writers of Wurtzburg published by Ludewig, p. 966, and in Mabillon
and the Bollandists. See also Thesaurus reliquiarum Electoralis
Brunsvico-Luneburgicus. Hanoveræ, 1713, and Solier, t. 2, Julij, p.
600.