Jonas of Bobbio, writing in the mid seventh century, was not only a major Latin monastic author, but also an historical figure in his own right. Born in the ancient Roman town of Susa at the foothills of the Italian Alps, he became a monk of Bobbio, the monastery founded by the Irish saint and monastic founder, Columbanus, soon after the saint's death. He became the archivist and personal assistant to successive Bobbio abbots, travelled to Rome to obtain the first papal privilege of immunity, and served as a missionary on the northern borderlands of the Frankish kingdom. He spent the rest of his life in Merovingian Gaul as abbot of the double monastic community of Marchiennes-Hamage, where he wrote his Vita Columbani, one of the most influential works of early medieval hagiography. As abbot of a community in the far north of the Frankish kingdom, Jonas was part of an extensive monastic network that stretched from the English Channel to the Italian Apennines. By the time of Jonas's death towards the end of the seventh century the monastic landscape of this region had been transformed. This was the result of a socio-religious revolution, initiated by the Irish ascetic exile and monastic founder, Columbanus (d. 615), and continued by his Frankish disciples in the decades after his death. Columbanus established a cluster of monasteries in the Vosges forests of Burgundy in the last decade of the sixth century, chief among which was Luxeuil. During the course of the seventh century, Luxeuil, its abbots, and the Merovingian royal court in Paris spearheaded an unprecedented monastic movement in Merovingian Gaul. This resulted in monasteries becoming more integrated into social and political power structures and ultimately to the changing role and function of monasteries in the West.