Legend has it that Victor, an officer of the Roman legions converted to Christianity, is executed to 228 because he refuses to offer incense to Jupiter and reverses the altar. The Emperor Maximilian made him a cut foot, run over by a wheel and then beheaded with his fellow missionaries. Their bodies thrown into the sea, are brought back by an angel in a small cave at the top of which Cassian founded a monastery to 413 after him.
Destroyed by the Saracens, the church was rebuilt in the eleventh century, and fortified by Urban V in the fourteenth. The crypts contain the original basilica.
The Esplanade offers a beautiful view of the Old Port, at the entrance where you can see Fort Saint-Nicolas, Fort St. John and the Major.