The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda, c.744–c.900 9781107002814, 2011048655

Table of contents :
List of illustrations page x
Preface xi
A note on annotation, citation and translation xiv
List of abbreviations xv
Introduction 1
The making of a monastic community 7
The structure of the book 16
1 The early years: Boniface 19
Boniface and ‘the peoples to whom we are preaching’ 19
The foundation of Fulda 26
‘A wooded place in the waste of a vast wilderness’ 28
Acquiring legal status 30
Oberabt 32
‘Men of strict abstinence’ 34
‘There we have placed a group of monks living under
the Rule of Benedict’ 36
Identity 38
2 After Boniface’s death: from familia
to institution 41
The struggle for Boniface’s inheritance 41
Boniface’s cult-site 44
A royal abbey 50
Writing Fulda’s past 55
Unity through time 58
Annales necrologici 61
An image of community 65
Creating coherence 68
3 Baugulf: the cultivation of learning,
land and the Church 72
The Baugulf list 74
Books, learning and monastic goals 80
The abbey church: an expression of the community’s
growing self-awareness 83
The bigger picture: the Carolingian ‘Renaissance’ 91
An epilogue 96
4 Ratger: church and conflict 99
More building: the transept in the west 100
The rhetoric of architecture 102
Liturgy 107
Building fatigue 114
The Chronicon Laurissense breve and the Annales
Fuldenses antiquissimi 116
The Supplex Libellus 119
The abbot 122
An image of community 126
5 Eigil: new unity 132
Eigil’s crypts 135
A monastic programme 137
A rel ection of the universal Church 141
A monument to Fulda’s past 146
The Vita Sturmi 150
A foundation history 151
A place of holiness and solitude 154
From eremitism to the Rule of Benedict 157
The mentor and the founder 161
A new patron saint? 163
Harmony and reconciliation 165
The chapel of St Michael 168
6 Hrabanus, part I : re form and record 175
An update and renewal of the Annales necrologici 179
Lists of monks 181
More selves on the shelves 189
Organising and recording Fulda’s archival memory 198
Exploring the cartulary and its meanings 201
Hrabanus’ ‘family cartulary’ 206
7 Hrabanus, part II: sins, saints and the
stabi lity of the realm 214
Hrabanus’ relic translations 215
A reliquary and a church: rel ections of Fulda as the ecclesia 218
Dei ning Fulda and spreading the cult of saints 221
Bringing Boniface’s cult to the outside world 225
An answer to sin 227
Rudolf and the Miracula sanctorum 231
A spider in a web of churches 233
The cloister as a frame of reference 234
Solitude 236
Brun Candidus and the Vita Aegil 237
An opus geminatum 240
A monastic programme in prose 243
Discussions concerning the new abbot 244
Admonition and reform 246
Penance and humility 249
Issues of the past and present 253
Texts as pillars of monastic reform 256
‘See with the eyes of the mind’ 258
The unicorn and the ecclesia : fall and rise of a monastery 259
8 Royal power and monastic prayer 265
The gesta of three abbots 267
Conventio , 863 271
A worried king and a call for prayer 276
The diptych 279
The Annales necrologici revisited: the inclusion of ‘outsiders’ 283
Gaining independence 292
Conclusion 297
Bibliography 306
Index 347

Citation preview

Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought

THE M AKING OF TH E M ON A S T IC CO MM U NITY OF FU LDA, C .74 4 – C .9 0 0 The monastic community of Fulda was one of the most powerful institutions in early medieval Europe. This book traces the development of the community from its foundation in the 740s over one and a half centuries, a period richly documented by a variety of texts and archaeological remains. These sources reveal how Fulda’s success forced the monks to rethink their goals and the ways in which they sought to achieve them. Its close connection to the Carolingian royal court also makes Fulda a fascinating case study of how local events inluenced life in the palace, and vice versa. The importance of Fulda and the rich array of sources associated with it have long been recognised, but this is the irst full study, bringing together history, religion, architectural history and archaeology. The result is a vivid picture of life in this monastery and also in early medieval religious communities in general. janne ke ra ai j make r s is a lecturer in Medieval History at the Universiteit Utrecht.

Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought Fourth Series General Editor: ro samond m c k it te rick Professor of Medieval History, University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Sidney Sussex College

Advisory Editors: c hri sti ne carpe nte r Professor of Medieval English History, University of Cambridge

jonathan sh e pard

The series Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought was inaugurated by G. G. Coulton in 1921; Professor Rosamond McKitterick now acts as General Editor of the Fourth Series, with Professor Christine Carpenter and Dr Jonathan Shepard as Advisory Editors. The series brings together outstanding work by medieval scholars over a wide range of human endeavour extending from political economy to the history of ideas. A list of titles in the series can be found at: www.cambridge.org/medievallifeandthought

THE M AK I NG OF T HE MONA S TI C C O M M U N IT Y OF FU LDA, C .74 4– C . 9 0 0 JA NNE KE R A A IJ M AK ERS

cam bridge unive r sity p re s s Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge c b 2 8ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107002814 © Janneke Raaijmakers 2012 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2012 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Raaijmakers, Janneke. The making of the monastic community of Fulda, c.744–c.900 / Janneke Raaijmakers. pages cm. – (Cambridge studies in medieval life and though; Fourth series, 83) Includes bibliographical references and index. i sb n 978-1-107-00281-4 (hardback) 1. Benedictines – Germany – Fulda Region – History. 2. Monasticism and religious orders – Germany – Fulda Region – History. 3. Abtei Fulda – History. 4. Fulda Region (Germany) – Church history. I. Title. bx3036.f86r33 2012 271′.1043412–dc23 2011048655 isbn 978-1-107-00281-4 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For Jaap-Hein

C ONT E NT S

List of illustrations Preface A note on annotation, citation and translation List of abbreviations I ntroduc ti on

page x xi xiv xv 1

The making of a monastic community The structure of the book

1 Th e early year s: B oniface Boniface and ‘the peoples to whom we are preaching’ The foundation of Fulda ‘A wooded place in the waste of a vast wilderness’ Acquiring legal status Oberabt ‘Men of strict abstinence’ ‘There we have placed a group of monks living under the Rule of Benedict’ Identity

2 A fte r Boniface ’s death: from fami lia to i n stitution The struggle for Boniface’s inheritance Boniface’s cult-site A royal abbey Writing Fulda’s past Unity through time Annales necrologici An image of community Creating coherence

vii

7 16

19 19 26 28 30 32 34 36 38

41 41 44 50 55 58 61 65 68

Contents 3 Bau g ulf: the cultivation of learni ng, land and the Church The Baugulf list Books, learning and monastic goals The abbey church: an expression of the community’s growing self-awareness The bigger picture: the Carolingian ‘Renaissance’ An epilogue

4 R atg e r : church and conf l ict More building: the transept in the west The rhetoric of architecture Liturgy Building fatigue The Chronicon Laurissense breve and the Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi The Supplex Libellus The abbot An image of community

5 E i g i l: new unity

72 74 80 83 91 96

99 100 102 107 114 116 119 122 126

132

Eigil’s crypts A monastic programme A relection of the universal Church A monument to Fulda’s past The Vita Sturmi A foundation history A place of holiness and solitude From eremitism to the Rule of Benedict The mentor and the founder A new patron saint? Harmony and reconciliation The chapel of St Michael

6 H rabanu s, part I: re f orm and re cord An update and renewal of the Annales necrologici Lists of monks More selves on the shelves Organising and recording Fulda’s archival memory Exploring the cartulary and its meanings Hrabanus’ ‘family cartulary’

viii

135 137 141 146 150 151 154 157 161 163 165 168

175 179 181 189 198 201 206

Contents 7 H rabanu s, part II: sins, saint s and th e stabi lity of the real m Hrabanus’ relic translations A reliquary and a church: relections of Fulda as the ecclesia Deining Fulda and spreading the cult of saints Bringing Boniface’s cult to the outside world An answer to sin Rudolf and the Miracula sanctorum A spider in a web of churches The cloister as a frame of reference Solitude Brun Candidus and the Vita Aegil An opus geminatum A monastic programme in prose Discussions concerning the new abbot Admonition and reform Penance and humility Issues of the past and present Texts as pillars of monastic reform ‘See with the eyes of the mind’ The unicorn and the ecclesia: fall and rise of a monastery

8 Royal powe r and monastic p raye r The gesta of three abbots Conventio, 863 A worried king and a call for prayer The diptych The Annales necrologici revisited: the inclusion of ‘outsiders’ Gaining independence

214 215 218 221 225 227 231 233 234 236 237 240 243 244 246 249 253 256 258 259

2 65 267 271 276 279 283 292

Conc lu si on

2 97

Bibliography Index

306 347

ix

IL L U S T R AT IO N S

1 The Carolingian realm page 5 2 Annales necrologici, a. 779–783, preceded by a list of abbots. Rome, BAV, Otto. Lat. 2531, fol. 6v. © 2011 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana 63 3 The site of the monastery of Fulda, showing the development of the abbey churches in relation to the earlier structures and landscape. © 2011 Caroline Goodson 88 (a) Structures on the site prior to 744 (b) Area of Sturmi’s abbey church (dotted) and claustrum (grey) c.750 (c) Reconstruction of Ratger’s abbey church c.830 4 The Ratgerbasilica according to Krause, Die Ratgerbasilika in Fulda: Eine forschungsgeschichtliche Untersuchung (Fulda, 2002), igure lxii, p. 377. Scale 1:600. © 2002 Eva Krause 89 5 Grants to Fulda by the family of Hrabanus Maurus. Based on Figure 7 in M. Innes, ‘The Family of Hraban Maur: kinship and property’, in State and Society in the Early Middle Ages:The Middle Rhine Valley 400–1000 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 64 177 6 Map of Fulda and its dependencies 224 7 Ratger depicted as unicorn. Printed in Christopher Brouwer, Fuldensium antiquitatum libri IV (Antwerpen, 1612), p. 90. 260 Universiteitsbibliotheek Utrecht, H. qu. 189 8 The diptych of 875. Rome, BAV, Otto. Lat. 2531, fol. 6r. © 2011 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana 278

x

PR E FAC E

This book is the result of a research project on monasteries and religious transformation in the early Middle Ages, sponsored by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientiic Research (NWO), with a special focus on identity formation in the monastery of Fulda. This special interest was born from my Ph.D. project, which I completed at the University of Amsterdam, which also dealt with the monks of Fulda and their uses of the past. My gratitude goes to both NWO and the University of Amsterdam for inancing the research, which made it possible to write this book, and to my colleagues there who made it a pleasant experience, in particular my roommates Erik Goosmann, Floor Meijer, Maarten Ternede and Vincent Kuitenbrouwer. One of the reasons that motivated me to continue my work on Fulda after completing my Ph.D. was the commentary of Bernd Goebel, who advised me to incorporate Fulda’s cartulary in my analysis of the monks’ attempts to create a group identity. I am grateful to him for this suggestion and his other comments, and to the Förderkreis of the Theologische Fakultät in Fulda, of which he is a member, for awarding me the JosefLeinweber-Preis, which was a great stimulus to continue my work on Fulda. I am also indebted to Barbara Rosenwein, who read the whole thesis meticulously and gave useful comments and suggestions, and who suggested I treat Fulda’s past in a chronological order, instead of focusing on certain themes as I had done in my thesis. Her advice, among other incentives, stimulated me to incorporate new material. I also thank Thomas Noble, another careful reader, who encouraged me to integrate my analysis of the monastery’s architecture more fully into the narrative and to include the second half of the ninth century, instead of ending the book with the abbacy of Hrabanus Maurus (822–842). Moreover, together with the Onderzoeksschool Mediëvistiek that funded my travel expenses, he made it possible for me to spend a couple of months as a postdoctoral xi

Preface research associate at the Medieval Institute at Notre Dame. I thank him and the other members of the Institute for their warm welcome and fruitful discussions, among others Paul Cobb, Anne Lester, Scott Bruce and Caroline Goodson. Scott Bruce was so kind as to read most of the chapters of this book, giving suggestions on how to correct my English and the chapter’s contents. Caroline Goodson came to the rescue when I was in need of a good survey of the monastery’s physical development and drew Figure 3 for me. I am very grateful to them both. To the following people I am indebted for sharing their knowledge and (unpublished) writings, enlightening me in ields outside my discipline and/or discussing the themes and subjects that underlie this book: Julia Smith, Karl Heidecker, Mary Garrison, Lex Bosman, Albrecht Diem, Richard Corradini, Frans Theuws, Els Rose, Louk Meijer, Julian Hendrix, Max Diesenberger, Gerda Heydemann, Hans Hummer, Christopher Zwanzig, James Palmer, John Clay and Peter Hoppenbrouwers. I greatly beneited from the discussions of the Texts and Identities meetings in Vienna, Cambridge and Wassenaar and the T&I sessions at the IMC in Leeds, and thank the participants for their useful suggestions and inspiring contributions. I thank Guy Geltner, John Ackerman, Erik Goosmann and Annika Rulkens for reading parts of the book and preventing me from small and big mistakes. Annika was, moreover, a great help with tidying up my bibliography, the footnotes of the irst chapters and checking references. Jan van Doren helped me with the index, and Dorine van Espelo with correcting the proofs, for which I am very grateful. I am much obliged to Rosamond McKitterick, who has carefully gone through the whole manuscript and whose comments improved both its contents and writing. I thank the staf of Cambridge University Press and Out of House Publishing for their patience and help with inalising the manuscript. The errors, omissions and ‘Dutchisms’ that remain are entirely my own responsibility. I thank the staf of the Hessische Landesbibliothek and the library of the Theologische Fakultät in Fulda, the Hessisches Staatsarchiv in Marburg, the Universiteitsbibliotheek in Leiden, the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna, Trinity College library in Cambridge, the Vatican Library in Rome and the Universiteitsbibliotheek Utrecht for their assistance during my visits and their kindness in providing me with microilms, CDs and photographs. I thank Helmut Reimitz for making it possible to consult Vienna, ÖNB, Cvp 460. The cover picture for the book was supplied by the Vatican Library in Rome. I am very grateful to Florike van Egmond and David McKitterick for their generous help with the illustrations. I also thank Eva Krause, who kindly gave permission to use her drawing of the Ratger basilica (Figure 4 in this book), and xii

Preface the Universiteitsbibliotheek Utrecht for granting me permission to use an image from Brouwer’s Fuldensium antiquitatum (Figure 7). I had already inished the manuscript when the volume Kirche und Schrift: Hrabanus Maurus in Fulda (2010) was published, which included the article ‘Sturmi oder Bonifatius’ of Gereon Becht-Jördens. I was able to incorporate some of his remarks, though others need further processing. I will leave this to another time. I had, however, heard his lecture during the Hrabanus Maurus symposium in Fulda in October 2006, which forms the basis of his article. It inspired me to understand the altar programme in Fulda’s abbey church as a relection of a monastic self-image, in which Eastern and Western traditions of monasticism and the importance of Sturmi and Boniface for Fulda were brought together (see Chapter 5). Some of the material in this book has been published before, though in diferent forms and contexts. I have elaborated on Hrabanus’ churches and relic translations in an article on ‘sacred landscapes’ published in Millenium, in the lecture I presented in Fulda in June 2006, published in the Hrabanus volume mentioned above, and in an article about the role of matter in Christian devotion, which has been published in another Hrabanus volume, this one edited by P. Depreux, S. Lebecq, M. J.-L. Perrin and O. Szerwiniak (2011). Material from the last chapter was published as part of an article on memory and identity in the irst Texts and Identities volume (2006). I once read the preface of somebody who thanked his children for keeping him sane. At that time I liked the remark, but did not fully appreciate its signiicance. Now I do. Keeping me sane is precisely what Aafke and Magnus have done for me. They were born in the same period in which I was writing this book, extending it and making it more worthwhile. I thank my friends and family for their loving support, in particular my mother. I would like to single out three people for special thanks, for without them I would not have got this far. Mayke de Jong has been involved from the start and has been very generous in her support. She supervised my thesis and has been there for me throughout the whole process of writing this book, reading every chapter and providing me with wise counsel. So has Irene van Renswoude. She has been an unfailing support and wonderful friend, while going through a similar process, writing her own book. Reading her work was immensely inspiring, as were her comments on my writings. Lastly, I want to thank Jaap-Hein Vruggink, who has not only read and commented upon every page, but whose trust and love was a steady force guiding me throughout the whole process.To him I dedicate this book. xiii

A NOT E ON A NNOTATI O N, CITAT ION A ND T R A NSLATI O N

For reasons of space, I have used short titles in the footnotes. For the full titles I refer the reader to the bibliography. Titles of sources and literature that I use frequently I have abbreviated. They can be found in the list of used abbreviations. The articles on Fulda’s charters and cartulary that Edmund Stengel published in the Archiv für Urkundenforschung and the Archiv für Diplomatik under the headings Fuldensia I, II, III and IV have later been collected and published in Abhandlungen und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Reichtsabtei Fulda. For my references I have used this edition. Translations of texts from the Vulgate come from the DouayRheims Bible, in the version revised by Richard Challoner. When translations are not my own, I indicate this in the footnotes.

xiv

A BBR E VIAT ION S

799 Kunst und Kultur

AASS AfD AF AFa AMK ARF

AUGRF BAV Candidus, Vita Aegil

CCM

C. Stiegemann and M. Wemhof (eds.), 799 Kunst und Kultur der Karolingerzeit: Karl der Große und Papst Leo III. in Paderborn, 3 vols. (Mainz, 1999) Acta Sanctorum quotquot toto orbe coluntur, ed. J. Bollandus et. al. (Antwerp/Brussels, 1643-) Archiv für Diplomatik Annales Fuldenses sive Annales regni Francorum orientalis, ed. F. Kurze, MGH SRG 7 (Hanover, 1891) Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi, ed. F. Kurze, MGH SRG 7 (Hanover, 1891) Archiv für mittelrheinische Kirchengeschichte Annales regni Francorum unde ab a. 741 usque ad a. 829, qui dicuntur Annales Laurissenses maiores et Einhardi, ed. F. Kurze, MGH SRG 6 (Hanover, 1895) E. E. Stengel, Abhandlungen und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Reichsabtei Fulda, VFG 37 (Fulda, 1960) Biblioteca apostolica Vaticana Candidus, Vita Aegil, ed. G. Becht-Jördens, Vita Aegil abbatis Fuldensis a Candido ad Modestum edita prosa et versibus. Ein opus geminum des IX. Jahrhunderts. Einleitung und kritische Edition (Marburg 1994) I: prose; II: poem Corpus Consuetudinum Monasticarum, ed. K. Hallinger (Siegburg, 1963-) xv

List of abbreviations CCCM CCSL CDF CLA

CLb Clm CSEL DA Eigil,Vita Sturmi

EME FGbl FGM FHSS FrSt FSt FW

Gugel, Handschriften, I and II

Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis (Turnhout, 1966-) Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina (Turnhout, 1952-) Codex diplomaticus Fuldenis, ed. Ernst Dronke (Kassel, 1850) E. A. Lowe, Codices Latini antiquiores. A Palaeographical Guide to Latin Manuscripts Prior to the Ninth Century, 11 vols. plus supplement (Oxford, 1935–71) Chronicon Laurissense breve, ed. F. Schnorr v. Carolsfeld, Neues Archiv 36 (1911), pp. 15–39 Codices latini monacenses Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum Latinorum Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters Eigil, Vita Sturmi, ed. P. Engelbert, Die Vita Sturmi des Eigils von Fulda. Literarkritisch-historische Untersuchung und Edition VHKHW 29 (Marburg 1968) Early Medieval Europe Fuldaer Geschichtsblätter Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters Fuldaer Hochschulschriften Frühmittelalterliche Studien Fuldaer Studien Fulda Werk = K. Schmid et. al. (ed.), Die Klostergemeinschaft von Fulda im früheren Mittelalter, 3 vols., MMS 8 (Munich, 1978) K.Gugel,Welche erhaltenen mittelalterlichen Handschriften dürfen der Bibliothek des Klosters Fulda zugerechnet werden? Teil I: Die Handschriften; Teil II: Die Fragmenten aus Handschriften, FHSS 23a and b (Frankfurt am Main, 1995 and 1996) xvi

List of abbreviations HJL HL Hussong, ‘Fulda’, I and II

Kloster Fulda LdM

LP

LTK

MGH Cap. Conc.

DD Kar. 1 LG LY CIII LC Arn

Hessisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte Hessische Landesbibliothek U. Hussong, ‘Studien zur Geschichte der Reichsabtei Fulda bis zur Jahrtausendwende’, Archiv für Diplomatik 31 (1985), 1–225 and ‘Studien zur Geschichte der Reichsabtei Fulda bis zur Jahrtausendwende. Zweiter Teil’, Archiv für Diplomatik 32 (1986), 129–304 G. Schrimpf (ed.), Das Kloster Fulda in der Welt der Karolinger und Ottonen. Kultur – Politik – Wirtschaft, FSt 7 (Fulda, 1996) Lexikon des Mittelalters, 10 vols (Stuttgart: Metzler, [1977]-1999), in Brepolis Medieval Encyclopaedias – Lexikon des Mittelalters Online Liber pontiicalis, eds. L. Duchense, J. Bayet and C. Vogel, Le liber pontiicalis: texte, introduction et commentaire, 3 vols. (Paris, 1955–1957) Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, eds. M. Buchberger, W. Kasper and K. Baumgartner, 11 vols., 3 edn (Freibourg, 1993–2001) Monumenta Germaniae Historica Capitularia, Legum Sectio II, Capitularia regum Francorum, ed. A. Boretius and V. Krause, 2 vols. (Hanover, 1883–97) Concilia, Legum Sectio III, Concilia: II, ed. A. Werminghof (Hanover, 1906–9); III, ed. W. Hartmann (Hanover, 1984); IV, ed. W. Hartmann (Hanover, 1998) Diplomata (based on MGH abbreviations. See bibliography for full details) Pippin, Carloman and Charlemagne Louis the German Louis the Younger Charles III the Fat Louis the Child Arnulf of Carinthia xvii

List of abbreviations CI HI Epp. Poet. lat. SRG SRM SS MGM MIÖG MMS NCMH, vol. II ÖNB PG PL QAGADF Rudolf, Miracula RB SC Settimane SL TAF TRHS TRW Typologie

Conrad I Henry I Epistolae, 8 vols. (Hanover, 1887–1939) Poetae latini aevi Carolini, eds. E. Dümmler, L. Traube, P. von Winterfeld and K. Strecker, 4 vols. (Hanover, 1881–99) Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum separatim editi, 63 vols. (Hanover, 1871–1987) Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum, eds. B. Krusch and W. Levison, 7 vols. (Hanover, 1885–1920) Scriptores in-folio, 30 vols. (Hanover, 1824–1924) Monographien zur Geschichte des Mittelalters Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung Münstersche Mittelalter-Schriften R. McKitterick (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History II: c. 700-c. 900 (Cambridge, 1995) Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Patrologiae cursus completus. Series Graeca, ed. J.-P. Migne 161 vols. (Paris, 1857–66) Patrologiae cursus completus. Series Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne 221 vols. (Paris, 1841–64) Quellen und Abhandlungen zur Geschichte der Abtei und der Diözese Fulda Rudolf of Fulda, Miracula sanctorum in Fuldenses ecclesias translatorum, MGH SS 15 (Hanover, 1887), pp. 328–41 Regula Benedicti, eds.A. deVogüé and J. Neufville, La règle de Saint Benoît, SC 181–6 (Paris, 1971–1972) Sources Chrétiennes (1942-) Settimane di studio del centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo (1953-) Supplex Libellus monachorum Fuldensium Carolo imperatori porrectus, (a. 812 and 816/7), ed. J. Semmler, CCM 1, pp.319–27 Traditiones et antiquitates Fuldenses, ed. E.F.J. Dronke (Fulda, 1844) Transactions of the Royal Historical Society The Transformation of the Roman World Typologie des sources du moyen âge occidental

xviii

List of abbreviations UBF URH VF VFG VHKH VHKHW VMPIG

Urkundenbuch des Klosters Fulda I, ed. Edmund E. Stengel, VHKHW 10 (Sigmaringen, 1958) Urkundenbuch der Reichsabtei Hersfeld I, ed. H. Weirich, VHKHW 19 (Marburg, 1936) Vorträge und Forschungen Veröfentlichungen der Fuldaer Geschichtsvereins Veröfentlichungen der historischen Kommission für Hessen Veröfentlichungen der historischen Kommission für Hessen und Waldeck Veröfentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte

xix

INT RODU C T ION

There is a wooded place in the waste of a vast wilderness and in the midst of the peoples to whom we are preaching, where we have placed a group of monks, living under the Rule of Benedict, who are building a monastery. They are men of strict abstinence, who refrain from meat and wine and spirits, keep no servants and are content with the labour of their own hands. This place I have acquired by honourable efort, through the help of pious and Godfearing men, especially of Carloman, formerly prince of the Franks, and have dedicated it in honour of the Holy Saviour.1

This is the irst extant portrayal of Fulda, one of the most powerful monastic institutions of early medieval Europe. It was composed by the Anglo-Saxon monk Boniface, a church reformer and founder of several religious communities in what is today Germany. He described Fulda, his latest foundation, in a letter to the pope in the autumn of 751, in which he requested a papal privilege for the monastery. Boniface did not expect to have many more years to live. Looking back on a long and strenuous career, he was preparing his departure from this world. When he came to the Continent in the 710s, attracted by the ascetic ideal of peregrinatio and the desire to work as a missionary, he was already in his early forties. Having worked another thirty-ive years in the service of the Church and under the authority of the Apostolic See, he asked the pope’s permission to retire to Fulda. He also made provisions for his disciples and tried to safeguard what he had achieved.2 For that reason, Boniface pleaded with the pope to provide Fulda with a papal exemption that would free 1

2

‘Est … locus silvaticus in heremo vasticissime˛ solitudinis in medio nationum predicationis nostrae, in quo monasterium construentes monachos constituimus sub regula sancti patris Benedicti viventes, viros stricte˛ abstinentiae, absque carne et vino, absque sicera et servis, proprio manuum suarum labore contentos. Hunc locum supradictum per viros religiosos et Deum timentes, maxime Carlmannum quondam principem Francorum, iusto labore adquisivi et in honore sancti Salvatoris dedicavi.’ Boniface, Epistolae, No. 86, p. 193. Translation by Emerton, Letters, pp. 136–7. Boniface, Epistolae, Nos. 50, 51, 80, 93 and 107, pp. 83, 89, 180, 212–14 and 232–3.

1

The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda the monastery from the jurisdiction of the diocesan bishop and protect it against the potential exploitation of the monastery’s temporal holdings. Boniface had been closely involved in the foundation of Fulda, as we will see below. He continued to play a prominent role in the lives of the monks, although as the founder and leader of several religious communities, and as bishop and papal legate with wide-ranging responsibilities that demanded his presence at several places spread over a large area, a certain distance between Boniface and the monastery was unavoidable. So he wrote in the letter to the pope, ‘They are men of strict abstinence’, not ‘we’. Nevertheless, to Fulda he wanted to retire, although his duties to Rome and his own bishopric prevented the realisation of his wish. Additionally, he stayed in the monastery frequently and wished the abbey to be his inal resting place.3 His portrayal of Fulda in the request for a papal exemption is thus based on irst-hand experience. It raises several themes which, in the following one-and-a-half centuries and even beyond, continued to be relevant for the monks’ self-understanding: the solitude (eremo) as an ideal environment for the ascetic life, the Rule of Benedict, Boniface and the relationship with the Carolingian family, represented by Carloman. Although by the time Boniface wrote his letter the Carolingians still held the oice of mayor of the palace, they soon took the crown and became the new ruling dynasty. Their reign forms the background against which the monastery, a royal abbey, is studied here. Boniface’s importance for the community increased substantially after his death and burial in Fulda, becoming the monastery’s ‘greatest relic’.4 Also in our times, priests yearly carry around what they believe to be Boniface’s skull, with the marks of the axe that killed him in the north of Frisia, in reverent procession, exhibiting their most precious treasure to the faithful who have gathered to celebrate the saint’s anniversary.The roots of this rich cult and Boniface’s importance for Fulda lie in the early medieval period. Boniface’s letter is one of the many sources under scrutiny in this book, which concerns Fulda’s growing self-awareness from its foundation in 744 to the end of the ninth century. In this period Fulda developed into a powerful royal abbey, closely connected to the Carolingian family. It is with the end of this dynasty and thus of the so-called Carolingian period that this book comes to a close. This period is, moreover, richly documented by a variety of texts and archaeological remains that reveal the ways in which this monastic community attempted to achieve signiicance 3

4

Boniface, Epistolae, No. 86, p. 193; Willibald, Vita Bonifatii, c. 8, p. 46; Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 13, pp. 144–5. Wood, Missionary Life, p. 70.

2

Introduction and cohesion as it went through substantial changes and conlicts. The resulting tensions produced an abundance of documentary and material information, which relects on the ways in which the monks perceived themselves and gives meaning to these developments. Fulda’s history starts with the foundation of the monastery in 744 in the woods of Buchonia, almost 100 km north-east of Frankfurt and Mainz. The monks named their abbey after the river Fulda, which lows beside the place where they built their houses, workshops and church, enclosed by a wall and a stream, the Waidesbach, a branch of the Fulda, to its south. Originally a small religious community of prayer and manual labour at the eastern periphery of the Frankish Empire, Fulda’s position changed in the following century. It became a major royal abbey and an important site within the Carolingian politico-religious orbit. Moreover, it developed into the cult-site of a real martyr, the celebrated Boniface who, within three years of the composition of the above-mentioned letter to the pope, died a violent death in the north of Frisia, an act which was perceived by his contemporaries as a martyr’s death. His martyrdom and subsequent burial in Fulda brought the monastery good fortune. At its apogee, around 825, Fulda owned land from Frisia in the far north to the Bodensee in the south, and from Lotharingia in the west to the outer eastern border of the Frankish realm, and it harboured more than six hundred monks. Through its form, size and materials – Fulda’s abbey church was made of stone – the monastery stood out in a landscape that was covered by forests and whose habitations were mainly huts and houses made of wood, mud and reed. It sat on a hill, though the woods might have initially hidden the abbey from view. In the course of time, trees were felled and the surrounding area was opened up for cultivation, strengthening the mark of the monastery’s physical presence and structure upon the landscape. Being a royal abbey had great implications for the monastic community, its pursuits and its position in society, and the association with the ruler and his family was an important element in the constitution of Fulda’s collective identity. As we shall see, the Carolingian rulers repeatedly intervened in life in the monastery and involved the monastery in their policy of expansion and the consolidation of their rule in the Frankish Empire. Royal service deeply afected the internal life of Fulda. The monastery was being drawn into the world that its irst members had ideally renounced, its integrity threatened by worldly pursuits. Prominent guests entered the cloister, the sons of the nobility received their education there without taking the monastic vows, pilgrims of both sexes visited the cult-sites of the saints in the abbey church, monks managed estates and abbots acted as secular lords. 3

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda The blurring of the boundaries between the cloister and the outside world was the result not only of Fulda’s participation in Charlemagne’s reform programme, but also of the monastery’s position as a social, economic and religious centre for the people living in the region and as a large landowner, possessing estates that lay scattered over a wide area.5 The monastery’s material growth, the rising number of its monks and its growing commitments to the outside world presumably weighed heavily upon the minds of the brethren and their abbot. Because of the great geographical distance at which most monks in diferent communities lived from each other, face-to-face familiarity was no longer a matter of course. This book sets out to analyse how the monks of Fulda dealt with the heterogeneity of their community, the very rapid growth of its number of monks and property and its new responsibilities. How did the monks cope with the tensions between old ideals and new responsibilities and with the diiculties of balancing seclusion from the world and openness? What kind of repercussions did these changes have on how they perceived and represented themselves? In addition, how did they safeguard the continuity of their monastery? As a monastic community, Fulda was a thriving enterprise that lasted for more than a thousand years. The main strategy of continuity consisted of innovation by means of invoking (and sometimes inventing) an authoritative common past. This past was never simply represented, but reshaped for present purposes. This can be clearly observed in the irst century of the monastery’s existence, when abbots and other inluential igures successfully presented themselves as repeating old traditions, while in fact they were assimilating new aspects and transforming the past to the needs of their own time. In early medieval Fulda, tradition was a vital force used by the monks to their best advantage. Of course they did not share a modern attitude to change, but their relation with the past was one of dialogue, in which they had the last word.What mattered most was surviving inner and outer threats and safeguarding the existence of the community. This concern for permanence and coherence demanded much lexibility and the ability to adapt to new circumstances. Tradition was powerful and throwing of old traditions involved conlict and controversy. Yet this is precisely how we are able to study the dynamics of constructing a community, for this constant friction produced the most informative and self-conscious testimonies. Moreover, the tension between continuity and change, between following in the footsteps of the fathers on the one hand and innovation on the other, is 5

Fulda was not the only monastery struggling with these problems. See, for example, De Jong, ‘Carolingian monasticism’, pp. 622–53; Demyttenaere, Claustralization.

6

Introduction not present merely in Fulda’s sources. It is a more general phenomenon of early medieval culture, which makes this period such a fascinating ield of study. How exactly the past was transformed, and why, I intend to investigate in this book. Th e making of a monastic com munity The main theme of the book, therefore, is the construction of group identity, which I understand to be a complex and continuous process of creating a meaningful community. Diferently put, group identity is ‘that which makes a group a reality for its members’.6 I have turned to modern discussions about identity, for they are useful in reaching an understanding of early medieval processes of identity-making, although people in the eighth and ninth century did not use the word identity themselves. Nevertheless, they had as much a sense of ‘us’ against ‘them’ as we do, and like us used the past to shape themselves in dialogue with what they perceived as ‘the other’. They needed to give meaning to their lives and create coherence in order to survive the chaos of the world and come to grips with the passing of time. Many of the modern historical discussions about identity deal with the rise of nations, nationalism, state-formation and ethnogenesis, although recently identity has also been studied in relation to gender, emotions and kinship.7 Contrary to the nineteenth and early twentieth century Romantic ideas about the existence of a Volksgeist or a unique soul, the majority of scholars of our day no longer understands identity to be a static, uniied core which is by nature inherent to individuals and groups and which has objectively knowable characteristics or essences. Instead, students of identity consider it to be the product of never completed social processes and prefer to use the word identiication to emphasise the active role of a group’s members in the process of creating identity.8 One of the reasons for this greater concentration on the dynamics of identiication has been the deconstruction of the concept of identity by French postmodernism, which shifted the focus from the subject to the 6 7

8

Pohl, ‘Identität und Widerspruch’, p. 24. To give some examples: Frazer and Tyrrell (eds.), Social Identity; Anderson, Imagined Communities; Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism; Brown, Contemporary Nationalism; Hall, ‘Ethnicity: identity and diference’, pp. 339–99; Corradini et al. (eds.), The Construction of Communities; Pohl, ‘Aux origines d’une Europe ethnique’, 183–208; Pohl, ‘History in fragments’, 343–74; Geary, ‘Ethnic identity’, pp. 1–17; Geary, Myth of Nations; Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about emotions in history’, 821–45; Rosenwein, ‘Identity and emotions’; Rosenwein, Emotional Communities; Baron et al., Exploring Social Psychology; Schef, Microsociology. Hall, ‘Who needs identity?’, pp. 2–4; Pohl, ‘Tradition, Ethnogenese und literarische Gestaltung’, pp. 9–26.

7

The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda discursive practice and challenged traditional notions of reality. In its most extreme form, postmodernism denies that reality exists outside texts and, additionally, that identity exists outside discourse.9 Most historians reject the denial of any reality beyond texts and depart from the idea that their sources ofer at least indirect access to a reality. Nevertheless, the so-called ‘linguistic turn’, a reference to the impact of literary criticism inspired by postmodernism on the historical discipline, served as a forceful reminder of the ‘constructedness’ of their sources and the importance of studying them in their historical contexts.10 This book is particularly indebted to the work of Walter Pohl, who, in several important contributions to discussions about early medieval ethnic identities, has unfolded the complexities of the origin and development of social groups and the notion of identity.11 In his introduction to the volume The Construction of Communities in the Early Middle Ages (2003), Pohl proposed to understand the creation of group identity as the construction of community, for this concept does justice to the fact that the existence and coherence of a group was not self-evident but the result of social eforts. These eforts to create meaningful communities were generated by both individuals and groups, more often through conlict than harmoniously, and in response to inner and outer tensions. In addition, these attempts comprised both knowledge and action. Constructing community was about transmitting ideas, thoughts and values and creating carriers of meaning to transfer these messages. The eforts to create meaningful communities were, moreover, not always successful.12 I have found the concept of the construction of community most useful, for it acknowledges that identity is variable and needs constant input from its members in response to their social worlds. In addition, it lays the emphasis on the activities of people and the sources that are the products of these activities. Fulda’s extant sources are the results of social eforts on the part of the monks to create meaning and unity. I value each of them – be they written texts, wall paintings or archaeological inds – for what they reveal about Fulda’s identity at a particular point in time. Sometimes, one is confronted with a seemingly clear-cut deinition of community, such as the Annals of the Dead (Annales necrologici), which initially listed only monks of Fulda and which aimed to include all the monks, once they had died. 9

10

11 12

For a response to the deconstruction of the concept ‘identity’, see Hall, ‘Who needs identity?’, pp. 1–17. Also Pohl, ‘The construction of communities’, pp. 1–5. Walter Pohl gives a concise summary of the developments, with further references, in ‘History in fragments’, 343–74. See the Bibliography for full references. Pohl, ‘The construction of communities’, pp. 1–15.

8

Introduction Quite literally, this document provides a deinition of the Fulda community. Nevertheless, occasionally ‘outsiders’ were included, and certainly by the second half of the ninth century, the names of abbots, bishops and later also of counts, dukes and their wives found their way into the lists. What does this tell us about the group awareness of the monks? Did they, from then on, accept these outsiders as members of their community? At other times, it is a hagiographical text, aimed at stimulating the remembrance of a saint or important person, that relects discussions inside the community about the meaning of their existence and the role of traditions. In this source, the references to a communal identity are only a by-product. All these images of Fulda do not simply mirror the monastic community and the world of which it was a part at a certain point in time. They were also the media by which this community responded to this reality and transformed it. These sources, moreover, contributed to the community’s coherence and gave meaning to its existence. It is this process that this book sets out to analyse and reconstruct. The focus of this book lies on sources created by the monks themselves, not deinitions and designations of Fulda by outsiders. Of course, self-perception cannot be detached from the social world in which individuals and groups ind their meaning. To be able to answer the question ‘who am I?’ requires a deinition of what diferentiates one from others. Moreover, how others perceive one, inluences how one deines oneself. As Mary Garrison has argued, it was initially outsiders (various popes and Anglo-Saxon and Spanish scholars) who compared the Franks to the Israelites of the Old Testament before the belief of being God’s chosen people became part of Frankish identity.13 The complex interaction between early medieval self-deinitions and representations by outsiders cannot always be reconstructed as clearly as in the case of the Franks becoming a New Israel. I shall discuss Fulda within its landscape of social, cultural, religious and political relationships. It is within this social world that the monastery deined itself and that the self-representations took on their meanings. Nevertheless, the main focus remains these selfrepresentations. The construction of community was a process in which all members were involved, but only a few were able to leave their mark on this process in such a way that we still know their names. Although there was no self-assured, solid Traditionskern that determined the outline of the community’s identity, those monks whose inluence determined this process of identity-formation belonged to an elite, but one that in the 13

Garrison, ‘The Franks as the New Israel?’, pp. 114–61. For other examples, see Pohl, ‘Ethnicity, theory, and tradition’, pp. 221–39.

9

The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda course of time changed in composition and interests.14 Their superiority over those monks whose names we no longer know lay in the advantages of a good training, which they often received from an early age, and their extraordinary talents, as well as their family’s name and inluence, although social status did not always play a role.15 All this granted them access to high-ranking positions within the community, with potential radiation to the outside world, and the time and means to articulate their ideas in texts, art and architecture. I call their products self-representations of Fulda, but I am aware that these portrayals of Fulda could never cover the opinions and beliefs of all monks at a certain point in time. This, however, does not need to be problematic. On the contrary, such gaps and discrepancies give us insight into how groups worked in the early Middle Ages.Whenever possible, I have attempted to identify the subgroups and individuals whose contribution to the construction of Fulda had an impact on the monastery’s selfunderstanding, or whose work was at least considered to be worthwhile enough to keep and remember, which is not necessarily the same thing. Sometimes initiatives to rewrite Fulda’s past, for example for the beneit of making an abbot a saint, failed, but their products were nevertheless used by the community that considered them valuable for other reasons. Although the authors of Fulda’s self-representations (not only the composers of texts but architects and artists as well) belonged to an elite and did not automatically represent the concerns of the whole community, they were nevertheless bound by the expectations of their audiences. Their creations had to appeal to their listeners and spectators. Therefore they relied on stories known and told by the community’s members, the memories of the (senior) monks and literary conventions. It is often not easy to determine the impact of their products on the monastery’s identity, but by following Fulda’s history for a longer period, during roughly one hundred and ifty years, it is possible to a certain extent to draw out the ways in which these sources inluenced the community’s self-understanding and perception of the past and to see how the authors responded to each other, taking in or rejecting ideas and traditions expressed in the products of their brethren, and to developments outside the monastic conines. Occasionally, one catches a glimpse of the diferent factions that no doubt divided each large religious community. Whereas monasteries presented themselves as places ‘where the blessed poor from all parts 14

15

Wenskus, Stammesbildung und Verfassung; and Pohl’s response, ‘Ethnicity, theory and tradition’, pp. 221–39. McKitterick, History and Memory, pp. 6–7.

10

Introduction of the world gathered, while being of one mind and heart’, they were in fact more like real families. Several groups co-existed inside the community and with that a monastery was home to several identities, depending on, for example, social background, experience and training, the position in the clerical hierarchy and the region of origin. A substantial proportion of the monks came from an aristocratic background, but there is also evidence that unfree men (servi) were admitted to the community.16 In addition, the majority of monks came from nearby regions such as Grabfeld, the Wetterau and the Middle Rhine area, but quite a large group were from areas farther away such as Frisia, Bavaria and Alemannia. An occasional monk came from England, Italy and Aquitaine.17 The existence of conlicting loyalties within a community is not only discernible in the tension between diferent sources, but can sometimes also be detected within a source itself. A clear example of this is the abbey church, which the monks of Fulda built between 791 and 819. The building, dedicated in the autumn of 819, was the product of many minds and hands, conlicting interests and views. For reasons to be discussed below, it took three abbots to complete the church. Instead of understanding sources as coherent statements, we need to search for their inconsistencies, for these are most helpful in reconstructing the dynamics of constructing a community.18 Besides written texts, there were also relics, religious art, liturgy and architecture that played a considerable role in the shaping of Fulda’s identity. In this book, I pay particular attention to the architecture of Fulda’s abbey church. The basilica represented the most important endeavour of the monks: worship and commemoration. Apart from advertising the monastery’s main responsibilities, the basilica’s physical structure and layout also helped to deine the monastery in relation to other communities, both lay and religious. The aim of architecture could be to distinguish the building from others, showing its superiority as a place of divine intervention, or, on the contrary, to show its resemblance to existing churches that represented authority and sanctity, such as, for example, the churches in Rome. In understanding architecture as a tool for a monastic community to express its self-awareness and distinguish itself from others, I respond to the works of Günter Bandmann and Richard Krautheimer, who have laid the foundations of what is called the iconology of architecture, a method of studying architecture 16 17 18

SL, c. 9, p. 324. Geuenich, ‘Die personelle Entwicklung’, pp. 163–76; Freise, ‘Studien’, pp. 1003–269. Pohl, ‘History in fragments’, 353.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda as a means to convey meaning. Richard Krautheimer introduced the concept of ‘the copy’ in the discipline of medieval architecture, providing modern scholars with a tool to study the ways in which medieval builders used older, authoritative buildings as an example for their own constructions. By copying a characteristic element of a certain building, an architect evoked the ediice’s status in his own creation. According to Krautheimer, it was a core group of highly evocative monuments, irst and foremost St Peter’s in Rome, followed by the Anastasis rotunda in Jerusalem, to which builders in the early Middle Ages frequently turned to furnish their own creations with sacred allure and express a certain political association.19 Günter Bandmann pointed out the ideological signiicance of architectural forms. He attempted to reconstruct the multiple uses of certain architectural elements, and the meanings of this symbolic language employed by an elite in diferent political contexts. Bandmann thereby broke with the traditional perspective of an evolutionary development in medieval architecture, searching for explanations for those forms of architecture that did not it this grand narrative.20 Over the past sixty years, the conclusions of both Krautheimer and Bandmann have been criticised for oversimplifying the complex processes of building and the uses and functions of ediices in the early Middle Ages through their focus on architectural form. Subsequent generations of architectural and art historians have added nuances to their views.21 Recently, Caroline Goodson has questioned Krautheimer’s rise-and-fall narrative for the history of architecture in Rome, with its assumption of a radical rupture in architecture in the sixth and seventh centuries and a strong revival of forms of late antique building under the Carolingians. Instead she points to the continuity in building in Rome and criticises Krautheimer’s focus on the plans of churches, which ignores the uses of the buildings, their decoration, relics and the materials with which they were made.22 In studying the meanings of architecture it is indeed important not to lose sight of the most essential function of churches, the liturgy, and the practical circumstances under which the architect created the ediice.23 Churches existed (as they still do) for the performance of liturgy, their most important aim being to accommodate the worship of God. Each 19 20 21 22

23

Krautheimer, ‘Iconography’, 1–33; Krautheimer, ‘Carolingian revival’, 1–38. Bandmann, Mittelalterliche Architektur. For example, Bosman, ‘Speaking in stone’, 13–28; Kunst, ‘Freiheit und Zitat’, pp. 87–102. Goodson, ‘Revival and reality’, pp. 163–92; Goodson, Pope Paschal I. For a discussion of the impact of Bandmann and Krautheimer on architectural history, see Bosman, ‘Speaking in stone’, 13–28. See also Coates-Stephens, ‘Dark age architecture’, 177–232. Groák, Idea of Building, pp. 36–7; Boereijn, ‘Gestaltung mittelalterlicher Städte’, pp. 73–105.

12

Introduction abbey church, therefore, had to fulil some basic demands. It needed to contain room for the high altar, which in one way or another was separated from the rest of the church as its site was the inner sanctum; a choir, where the monks could gather to say mass and celebrate the divine oice; a nave to house guests on important feast days; side aisles and chapels to accommodate more altars for private masses and the veneration of particular saints as required; an entrance that connected the cloister to the church; and an access through which possible visitors could enter, preferably without disturbing the monks. Of course, these demands relect an ideal situation. Reality could well difer. Next to this, each religious community had its own speciic demands determined by local traditions, the eventual presence of saints’ graves and the possibilities of the site. In Fulda, the lime terrace on which the monastery was erected, the nearby Waidesbach and the river Fulda, two roads (the Ortesweg and Semita antiqua), the neighbouring hills Frauenberg and Michaelsberg and the presence of the ruins of a seventh-century villa rustica, all had to be taken into account in the building plan.24 Nevertheless, there was a certain freedom in solving the problems raised by liturgical demands, local traditions and practical circumstances. Architecture was also a means to make a statement, to impress and inluence its spectators and to express views about the status and position of the patron and institution of the building and therefore also needs to be taken into account in studying Fulda’s self-awareness. It is important to include liturgy when studying the process of constructing a community in Fulda, not only to explain the shape of churches, but also to understand and appreciate the key to all monastic existence: prayer.25 In the Carolingian period we need to add to this the increasing amount of votive masses, which contributed to the rising number of priests in monastic communities.26 It is, moreover, where the creation of community began: in the daily gatherings to pray and say mass and to remember Christ’s Last Supper and Passion. In prayer and the celebration of the Eucharist the brethren evoked God’s presence and the presence of the other, absent members of the community, including the dead monks who had once stood there on the same spot to remember their brethren and the benefactors whose generosity enabled the monks to devote their lives to God. They recited their names aloud or read them silently, watching (touching even?) the book in 24 25

26

See below, pp. 26–9, 149. An important recent plea to include liturgy in the study of monasticism is given by Susan Boynton, Shaping a Monastic Identity. De Jong, ‘Carolingian monasticism’, pp. 647–8; Häußling, Eucharistiefeier, pp. 298–347; Nussbaum, Priestermönch.

13

The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda which their names were written. For this reason I have attempted to include liturgy in my study, especially the remembrance of the dead and the veneration of the special dead, the saints, and the inluence of Rome on liturgical traditions in Fulda. Within the process of constructing a monastic community, a signiicant role was granted to the past and the ways in which it was remembered. I shall study the mechanisms with which the past was transformed to meet contemporary needs and analyse the interaction between present and past. The most important aspect of the matter is the interaction between the meaningful images that people in the early Middle Ages constructed of past realities and our imagination and responses to these images today. In this I have been inluenced by the important work of, for example, Patrick Geary, Rosamond McKitterick, Matthew Innes, James Fentress and Chris Wickham, who have all studied the ways in which early medieval societies perceived their past and shaped their memories and how the texts that resulted from this process of remembering and forgetting have determined our perception of the past.27 In comparison to their studies, it is my interdisciplinary approach that makes my work diferent. Not only texts, but also architecture, liturgy, religious art and relics were important means for transmitting messages and inluencing the behaviour and thoughts of audiences. Although writing was an important way of giving meaning and inluencing perceptions of the past and was a vital means of exercising power, it was not the only form of creating social signiicance. I aim to make the most of the variety and contentiousness of the sources, to ind out how monasteries ‘worked’ in the early Middle Ages. Fulda,‘the most venerable and most eminent monastery of the German Middle Ages’, has been much studied.28 To give some examples, historians have examined the monastery’s library, its role in Carolingian and Ottonian politics and its commemoration of the dead.29 They have made great contributions to our understanding of Fulda in early medieval times, providing us with detailed analyses of the content of Fulda’s library in the

27

28 29

Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance; Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory; McKitterick, Perceptions; McKitterick, History and Memory; Innes and Hen, Uses of the Past. Also: Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis; Cubitt, ‘Monastic memory and identity’, pp. 253–76; Coleman, Ancient and Medieval Memories; Lowenthal, Foreign Country; Hobsbawm and Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition. Hussong, ‘Fulda’, i, 22. To give only a few examples: Schrimpf et al. (eds.), Mittelalterliche Bücherverzeichnisse; Schiefer,‘Fulda’, pp. 39–55; Hussong, ‘Fulda’, i and ii; Schmid, ‘Suche’, pp. 125–62; Oexle, ‘Memorialüberlieferung’, pp. 136–77. References to the other works used for this book can be found in my footnotes and Bibliography.

14

Introduction Middle Ages, of the monastery’s institutional development as royal abbey until the year 1000 and of its personnel changes from the Carolingian until the Salian period.This book is much indebted to these earlier studies, a great number of which can be found in the Fuldaer Hochschulschriften and Fuldaer Studien, both published by Fulda’s Theologische Fakultät, and the Fuldaer Geschichtsblätter (previously Veröfentlichungen des Fuldaer Geschichtsvereins), the journal of Fulda’s local historical society published from the early twentieth century onwards. Last but not least, the project Societas et fraternitas, which, under the supervision of Karl Schmid and Joachim Wollasch, studied early medieval associations of prayer, made a wealth of information available about Fulda and its relation with the outside world. Their monumental study, Die Klostergemeinschaft von Fulda im früheren Mittelalter, which includes editions of all texts relating to Fulda’s memoria and profound and extensive studies about the monastery in relation to its social network and landed property, allowed me to address the questions signalled above.Without their work my study would have been impossible. Nevertheless, while many scholars have recognised the importance of Fulda in the early Middle Ages and have studied aspects of it, this has not yet led to a fully ledged monograph. There is ample material for this, which my study brings together, beneiting from the important and extensive contributions by previous scholars to the accessibility of Fulda’s sources, to reveal the monastery’s self-understanding and the role tradition and innovation played in the construction of community.30 Studying all these sources together makes us aware of the many dimensions and complexities of monastic life, which was not solely lived inside the conines of the abbey, but interacted closely with the needs of society. Moreover, this complex process of creating an identity was not solely relected in texts, but also found expression and was created in liturgy, saints’ cults, buildings and religious art. With this study that integrates the sources I hope to deepen and enliven our knowledge of this monastery in particular, but also of religious communities in the early Middle Ages in general, using Fulda, a royal abbey closely connected to the Carolingian court, as a prism to study the way in which local events reverberated in the palace and, vice versa, for the way in which the Carolingian programme of reform, correctio and emendatio afected religious life at a local level.

30

Their editions of Fulda’s source material are, naturally, included in the Bibliography and are discussed throughout the book.

15

The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda T he structure of the book This book follows the chronology of Fulda’s abbots. Sturmi (744/765– 779), Baugulf (779–802), Ratger (802–817) and Eigil (818–822) each have their own chapter. Only the abbacy of Hrabanus Maurus (822– 842) will be divided into two chapters, for the wealth of sources from this period requires a more extensive treatment. Chapter 6 is about the non-narrative sources that were created or updated under Hrabanus’ supervision: the lists of monks, the Annales necrologici, the inventories of books and the cartulary, which was made in the 820s–830s and was the irst attempt by the monks to map out systematically the monastery’s property in conveniently arranged volumes. Chapter 7 deals with the narrative sources created in the same period that actively relect upon Fulda’s identity: Rudolf of Fulda’s Miracula sanctorum and Brun Candidus’ Vita Aegil. For opposite reasons, the abbacies of Hatto (842–856), Thioto (856–869) and Sigihard (869–891) have been brought together in one chapter. Each chapter will analyse the extant representations of Fulda and will discuss the changes and continuities in the process of making a monastic community. Within this process, the same themes recur: the connection with the Carolingian family, the importance of Boniface for the community of Fulda, the ailiation with Rome and the gradual adoption of the Rule of Benedict. Certain aspects and themes will come more to the fore in one chapter than in another, as this is what the sources reveal: the making of a monastic community was a process in which the monastery’s legacy was used but with diferent points of particular interest throughout time. Likewise, the chapters are shaped by the kind of sources handed down to us. In some chapters, the emphasis will be on historiography, while in another architecture or relic cults will dominate. In a number of cases it is impossible to pinpoint the process of creation down to one point in time because the sources are the result of long processes that covered several abbacies, as is the case with the construction of the so-called Ratger church, which was started in 791 and dedicated in 819. For the sake of clarity I shall treat its diferent building phases separately, in so far as these can be reconstructed on the basis of written sources.31 Chapter 3 deals with the eastern basilica, which was built under Baugulf , Chapter 4 with the western sanctuary which was 31

See, for example, Vonderau, Ausgrabungen Fulda 1919–1924; Hahn, ‘Vorgängerbauten’, 180–202; Fischer and Oswald, ‘Baugeschichte’, 268–80.

16

Introduction added under Ratger and Chapter 5 with the crypts and the interior of the church for which Eigil was responsible. The separate treatment of the successive building phases will emphasise the impact of this prolonged construction work on the community. Furthermore, this will give an impression of the dynamics of the realisation of such a tremendous building project, and of the discussions it raised about the identity of the monastery and the kind of church that best it this identity. As we will see, diferent attitudes prevailed within the community concerning the uses and purposes of a monastic church. Ratger’s viewpoints, for example, difered radically from Eigil’s wishes. Nevertheless, in the end their opposite viewpoints found their expression in the same building. While Fulda’s abbey church may seem a coherent whole, we need to be aware that the ediice kept changing; not only in its physical forms during the process of building, but also after its consecration, in the ways its inheritors later used it. It is with the collapse of Carolingian rule over the regions east of the Rhine in the late ninth century that this book comes to a close. It seemed a proper end for the story about a monastery whose fate was so closely tied to that of the ruling dynasty. Strictly speaking, there was still a Carolingian on the throne when Huoggi succeeded Sigihard, the last abbot to be discussed in this study, but there are no sources for this short period, besides perhaps the atrium (Paradies) added to Fulda’s abbey church. Therefore, I end with Sigihard’s withdrawal. With the death of the last Carolingian descendant, the history of Fulda did not come to an end. On the contrary, as a monastery, the community continued to exist until the beginning of the eighteenth century, when Fulda became a bishopric. The monastery proved quick to adapt to changing circumstances, becoming an important pawn in the political game of the Ottonians. The depiction of Fulda by Boniface with which I started this Introduction ofers a useful starting-point for a study of the monastery’s identity. Although we need to bear in mind that Boniface used conventional terminology to convince the pope that he had created something special in Germany that deserved the patronage of Rome, he nevertheless introduces several themes which turned out to be of great importance to the monks’ self-awareness in the second half of the eighth and the ninth century, as will become clear in what follows: the solitude, the Rule of Benedict, the Carolingian family, Boniface and the Apostolic city. Later discussions in Fulda about the monastery’s origins repeatedly went back to the days of Boniface and Fulda’s other founder, Sturmi, and to this letter to explain and legitimise contemporary traditions. Especially 17

The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda in the beginning of the ninth century, the time of nostri maiores (‘our fathers’) was often brought up when defending older traditions against reform. Furthermore, knowledge of this early period helps us to discern how discussions of the ninth century transformed the monks’ perception of the foundation. It makes us appreciate how far they have inluenced our perception of Fulda’s past. Therefore, let us go back to the days of Boniface, to the time a small group of monks irst settled in Fulda.

18

Chapter 1

T H E E A R LY YE A R S : BONI FACE

B oniface and ‘the pe op le s to whom we are p reach i ng ’ Boniface was born as Wynfreth, some time between 672 and 675 in Wessex.1 At the age of ive his parents handed him over to the community of Exeter, where he was raised and trained as a monk. He continued his monastic career at Nursling, near Winchester, where after more years of study he was appointed magister and at the age of thirty was ordained as a priest.2 The kind of monastic life in which Boniface grew up in Nursling and Exeter undoubtedly shaped his vision of the religious communities he would later found on the Continent.3 By the time Boniface decided to seek salvation in a mission to the pagan peoples of northern Europe, he was in his early forties and a well-known igure in his homeland. In their letters to Boniface, his Anglo-Saxon colleagues praised him most of all for his skills as teacher and for his expertise as a commentator on the Sacred Scripture.4 This appreciation of his talents, however, could not stop Boniface from embarking on a ship heading for the coastal region on the other side of the North Sea.

1 2

3 4

Levison, England and the Continent, p. 70; Schiefer, Winfrid-Bonifatius, p. 103. Many studies on Boniface have appeared, with a recent increase after 2004, when the 1250th anniversary of his dies natalis was commemorated. They include issue 57 of Archiv für mittelrheinische Kirchengeschichte (2005) and issue 19 of Millenium:Tijdschrift voor Middeleeuwse Studies (2005), which are both dedicated to Boniface; Felten et al. (eds.), Bonifatius: Leben und Nachwirken; Felten (ed.), Bonifatius: Apostel der Deutschen; Nichtweiß (ed.), Bonifatius in Mainz. The volume The Greatest Englishman, edited by Timothy Reuter, still ofers one of the best introductions to Boniface’s life and work. In addition to this there is the still-valuable work of Theodor Schiefer, WinfridBonifatius and Wilhelm Levison, England and the Continent; and more recently Lutz von Padberg, Bonifatius: Missionar und Reformer and Noble’s introduction to the translation by Emerton of Boniface’s letters. Holdsworth, ‘Boniface the monk’, pp. 52–7; Semmler, ‘Instituta’, pp. 79–103; Foot, Monastic Life. For example, Boniface, Epistolae, Nos. 13–14 and 111, pp. 18–26, 238–43.

19

The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda In 716 Boniface crossed the Channel to Frisia, where some years before his fellow countryman Willibrord (658–739) had set up a missionary station in Utrecht (Traiectum), an old Roman border-crossing point along the river Rhine. Unfortunately, because of the unfavourable political situation at that time and lack of support of a strong secular power, Boniface had to return without having achieved his aim. In 718 he made another attempt and this time made sure he was well prepared, backed by the pope and later also Charles Martel, mayor of the Frankish palace (714–741). After working for a couple of years with Willibrord in Utrecht, Boniface moved to Thuringia and Hesse and from there expanded the area of his activities further south along the eastern frontier of the Frankish realm.5 When Boniface left Wessex for the Continent, he intended to bring the light of Christianity to the darkness of the heathen forests.6 Nevertheless, he would spend most of his time in regions where Christianity had already established itself, often in forms that would not always meet with his approval.The area where Boniface was most active consisted of Hesse, Thuringia and Bavaria; regions east of the Rhine that had been subject to Frankish overlordship since the sixth century and that were slowly integrated within the Frankish realm during the following two centuries.7 Under the Merovingian kings Bavaria had become a duchy at the south-eastern border of the Frankish realm, ruled with a great degree of independence by the Agiloling family. Over the course of the eighth century, the Carolingian family increasingly attempted to dismantle this relative autonomy by marrying into the family and intervening in ducal successions, until Charlemagne inally put an end to it by deposing the last Bavarian duke, Tassilo III, and putting Bavaria together with the former Lombard kingdom in a subregnum of the Carolingian realm.8 With Frankish dominance, Christianity advanced east of the Rhine. In cities such as Mainz, where there had been bishoprics in the late Roman period, episcopal sees were re-established.9 Further to the east and north, such an institutional framework was lacking, but Christianity was certainly present. Grave inds with Christian symbols and the excavation of 5

6

7 8

9

Willibald, Vita Bonifatii, cc. 6–7, pp. 26–41; Reuter, ‘Boniface and Europe’, pp. 69–94. Concerning Boniface’s work in Hessia, see John Clay’s recent study, Conversion of Hessia. Boniface’s wish to convert the Saxons to Christianity is expressed in letter 46, Epistolae, pp. 74–5. Schiefer, Winfrid-Bonifatius, p. 109. Innes, State and Society, pp. 165–88. Further Reuter, ‘Boniface and Europe’, pp. 69–94. Pearson, Conlicting Loyalties, pp. 30–74; Spindler (ed.), Bayerischen Geschichte, vol. i, pp. 114–33, 183–92, 280–8; Hammer, From Ducatus to Regnum; Kolmer and Rohr (eds.), Tassilo iii; Brown, Unjust Seizure; Airlie, ‘Narratives of triumph’, 93–119; Wolfram, Salzburg, Bayern, Österreich; Jahn, Ducatus Baiuvariorum. Staab, ‘Heidentum und Christentum’, pp. 117–52; Staab, ‘Mainzer Kirche’, pp. 86–194.

20

The early years small churches hint at the presence of Christians in these regions in the seventh and eighth centuries.10 Like the archaeological sources, the charter material of the Middle Rhine region also attests to the foundation of small monasteries and proprietary churches by local families in the same period. Eventually, these expressions of family piety and memory would be absorbed by larger monasteries such as Fulda.11 Christianity had been largely established in Bavaria by the eighth century, before Boniface arrived. Due to the eforts of Frankish missionaries, the ruling dynasty of Bavaria had probably been Christian from the late sixth century onwards, and in the following centuries large numbers of their subjects converted as well.12 In 716, well before the Carolingians made correctio of the Frankish church one of their priorities, Duke Theodo (c.680–717) attempted to establish a regular structure of bishoprics in Bavaria as part of a broader programme of reform.13 Boniface worked in Bavaria under his successors, Hugobert and Odilo, and at the invitation of Odilo occupied himself with the division of Bavaria into four bishoprics.14 Frisia was the only region in which Boniface worked where Christianity had not yet gained a irm foothold, in spite of the eforts of earlier missionaries from Gaul and England and long-standing contacts between the Frisians and the Frankish world.15 In his mission Boniface was supported by the pope. Even though the pope had not yet attained the status he would have in the later Middle Ages, he was the most prominent bishop in Western Europe and was held in high esteem by the Anglo-Saxon church in which Boniface had grown up. Possibly inspired by the example of his namesake Pope Gregory the Great (590–614), who had commissioned Augustine of Canterbury to preach the Word of God to the pagan Anglo-Saxons, Pope Gregory II (715–731) for his part, wanted to extend his inluence north of the Alps. Boniface ofered a welcome occasion for this. The pontif granted the Anglo-Saxon monk a papal mandate to preach the word of God to the

10

11

12

13 14

15

Roth and Wamers, Hessen im Frühmittelalter; Wood, Missionary Life, pp. 9–10; Classen, Kirchliche Organisation Althessen. This process is notable in the charters that record the transactions kept by these large monasteries. Besides Fulda (UBF), a good example is provided by Lorsch: Codex Laureshamensis; Innes, State and Society, pp. 13–50. Berg, ‘Christentum’, pp. 69–113; Reindel, ‘Grundlegung’, pp. 134–70; Jahn, Ducatus Baiuvariorum, pp. 25–75. Störmer, ‘Die bayerische Herzogskirche’, pp. 115–42. Boniface, Epistolae, No. 45, pp. 71–4; Willibald, Vita Bonifatii, cc. 6–7, pp. 35–44; Reindel, ‘Grundlegung’, pp. 134–70; Jahn, Ducatus Baiuvariorum, pp. 25–75; Hammer, From Ducatus to Regnum, pp. 71–98. Willibald, Vita Bonifatii, c. 5, p. 24. Reuter, ‘Boniface and Europe’, pp. 75–8; Levison, England and the Continent, pp. 45–69; Meens, ‘Bonifatius’, 44–59; Van Egmond, ‘Radbod’, 24–44.

21

The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda peoples of Germany. With papal authorisation, Boniface also received his new name. The pope named him after the fourth-century Roman martyr Boniface, whose death had been commemorated a day earlier, on 14 May.16 With the adoption of this Roman name Boniface sealed his collaboration with Rome and his subordination to St Peter. He would work under papal authority until his death in 754. In 722, the Apostolic See ordained Boniface bishop without a see, which meant that he was directly responsible to Rome. From then on Boniface himself could bless the much-needed priests and other clerics to execute his plans. Ten years later the pope made him archbishop, giving him the blessing to consecrate bishops. During the years in which Boniface worked on the Continent, he often turned to Rome for advice and to report the progress of his work.17 Even though Christianity had reached the regions east of the Rhine long before, the pope and Boniface agreed that the process of Christianisation was far from inished. In a letter of recommendation (1 December 722) that Pope Gregory II gave to Boniface, the pontif explained how he had heard ‘that certain peoples in Germany on the eastern side of the Rhine are wandering in the shadow of death’. Some of them still worshipped idols under pretence of Christianity. Others had not even been baptised and like brutal ‘beasts’ refused to acknowledge God to be their creator.18 Recent scholarship has shown that we cannot take these expressions at face value. The rhetoric that both the Apostolic See and its envoy used in their letters when they described the situation in Germany, and that later writers of missionary hagiography lavishly elaborated on, did not so much relect the state of paganism east of the Rhine as the prejudices of its authors. Reading Boniface’s letters, the bulk of his work appears not to have been the conversion of pagans to Christianity, but improvement (correctio) of the behaviour and beliefs of errant Christians.19 Furthermore, Boniface occupied himself with building up an institutional network to establish and preserve the orthodoxy of faith. Until then Christian communities lacked an episcopal structure that to Boniface was essential for the creation of a universal Christian Church. Churches and monasteries were often in the hands of local aristocratic families who had also 16 17

18

19

Boniface, Epistolae, No. 12, pp. 17–18; Levison, England and the Continent, pp. 72–4. For example, Boniface, Epistolae, Nos. 26, 45, 50–3, 109, pp. 44–7, 71–4, 80–95, 234–5. See also Deanesly, ‘Anglo-Saxon church’, pp. 29–62; Levison, England and the Continent, pp. 70–93; Reuter, ‘Boniface and Europe, pp. 78–9, 85–6. ‘quia “in umbra mortis” aliquas gentes in Germaniae partibus vel plaga orientali Reni luminis … errare … cognovimus.’ Boniface, Epistolae, No. 17, p. 30. Translation by Emerton, Letters, p. 20. Hen, ‘Milites Christi’, 18–19; Wood, Missionary Life, pp. 57–78; McKitterick, ‘England and the continent’, pp. 76–8; Meens, ‘Bonifatius’, 45–60.

22

The early years initiated their foundation, and many of the clergymen who attended to these churches had adopted a lifestyle too secular for Boniface’s liking.20 The Anglo-Saxon monk set himself to correct their lives and to install his interpretation of Christian belief, values and practices irmly in these regions. To enhance his chances of success Boniface also collaborated with the Carolingian family, whose rise to power formed the political background to his activities on the Continent. In 723 Charles Martel, the mayor of the Frankish palace, took Boniface under his protection (mundeburdium et defensio), in a period during which the ruler came to dominate the political scene in the Frankish world.21 Charles Martel was a member of the Pippinid family, now better known as the Carolingians, an aristocratic family from the Meuse-Moselle region. This dynasty had established itself at the head of the aristocratic families in the Frankish kingdom, monopolising the high oice of mayor of the palace. Eventually they would seize total control and dethrone the last Merovingian king, but that day had yet to come.22 As we will see below, the Carolingian family would play an essential role in the foundation of Fulda. The course of the alliance between Boniface and Charles is obscure and has led to much speculation, but without doubt Boniface considered the collaboration with the Frankish rulers to be crucial for his work.23 In the 740s, after Charles Martel had been succeeded by his sons Carloman and Pippin, Boniface wrote to Bishop Daniel of Winchester (705–744, d. 745): ‘Without the support of the Frankish prince I can neither govern the members of the Church nor defend the priests, clerks, monks and maids of God; nor can I, without orders from him and the fear inspired by him, prevent the pagan rites and the sacrilegious worship of idols in Germany.’24 For his part, Charles Martel must have seen the advantages of supporting Boniface in his mission. The spread of Christianity in the regions at the north-eastern border of the Frankish kingdom and the reform of the Church itted in well with the Carolingian ambitions to create a united realm and to integrate newly conquered peoples such as the Frisians within the Frankish christianitas.25 After his death in 741, 20 21 22

23

24 25

Smith, ‘“Emending evil ways”’, pp. 189–223, at 195–6; Innes, State and Society, pp. 174–5. Bonifatius, Epistolae, No. 22, pp. 36–8. It would be too much to cite all literature on the rise of the Carolingians. Some of the most important studies include: Fouracre, ‘Frankish Gaul’, pp. 85–109, 900–1; Gerberding, Rise of the Carolingians; McKitterick, Charlemagne, pp. 57–74; Riché, Carolingians; Becher (ed.), Dynastiewechsel. Reuter, ‘Boniface and Europe’, pp. 92–3, footnote 73; Noble, Introduction to Emerton, Letters, pp. xv–xviii. Bonifatius, Epistolae, No. 63, p. 130. McKitterick, ‘England and the continent’, pp. 67f.

23

The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda Charles’ sons Pippin and Carloman took up the idea of reform and continued to collaborate with Boniface. Boniface realised that to strengthen and preserve his work he needed to set up institutions and build an infrastructure in which knowledge, priests, books and liturgical objects could easily move. He created a network of monasteries, where both men and women dedicated their lives to his cause. Amöneburg (c.722), Ohrdurf (725) and Fritzlar (c.734) were all communities of men.26 Shortly after 733, Boniface founded the nunneries of Tauberbischofsheim, Kitzingen and Ochsenfurt in the Main area, near Würzburg. As far as we know, Fulda was the last of Boniface’s foundations. There may have been many more communities; in a letter written around 752 Boniface complained to the pope that within his group of monastic cells (per titulos et cellas nostras) more than thirty churches had been plundered and burned in a Saxon rebellion.27 The monasteries that Boniface established were missionary stations and schools for the instruction of local clergy, founded in rural areas. Relatively isolated from the world outside and in the spirit of the apostles, new generations of monks and clerics that could carry on Boniface’s work received their training here.28 Boniface put his followers, of whom a considerable number igure prominently in his letter collection, in charge of his communities.29 Like him, most of these religious men and women were of Anglo-Saxon origin and highly educated.30 In this way, Boniface created a network of communities to aid his pastoral work east of the Rhine. Their churches and buildings symbolised the progress of Boniface’s work; their way of life ofered an example of holiness for the local population to follow. In his reliance on monasteries as bases to propagate ‘correct Christianity’, Boniface would most likely have been inluenced by his experiences and training as a monk of Exeter and Nursling, both communities in a land with a long Christian history but with a ruling elite that had only relatively recently converted to Christianity.31 In the world in which Boniface had grown up, monasteries, or minsters, had an active role in their locality as centres of preaching and teaching.32 Already as a child 26

27 28 29 30

31 32

Josef Semmler ofers a useful introduction to Boniface’s foundations and the relevant source material in his article ‘Instituta’, pp. 79–103. Willibald, Vita Bonifatii, c. 6, pp. 26–27, 33, 35; Otloh, Vita Bonifatii, i, 23, p. 136; Heinemeyer, ‘Gründung Fulda’, 4–5; Gockel, ‘Fritzlar’, pp. 89–120. Boniface, Epistolae, No. 108, p. 234. Willibald, Vita Bonifatii, cc. 5–6, pp. 26, 33–4. See Schipperges, Bonifatius. Willibald, Vita Bonifatii, c. 6, p. 34. Schipperges, Bonifatius, pp. 190–2; McKitterick, ‘Anglo-Saxon missionaries’, pp. 1–40. Holdsworth, ‘Boniface the monk’, pp. 53–4; Clay, Conversion of Hessia, pp. 78–92, 108–13. Foot, Monastic Life, pp. 283–336. For the minster debate, see: the several articles in EME (4 and 5, 1995–1996) and, further, Blair (ed.), Minsters; Blair and Sharpe (eds.), Pastoral Care.

24

The early years Boniface had had experiences with the active role of minsters in society. It was the members of these monasteria, travelling around to preach, who supposedly won him over for the monastic vocation. In the words of Boniface’s irst hagiographer Willibald: ‘When priests and clerics, as is the custom in those parts, visited to preach to the people and came to the village and the house of his father, he would converse with them on spiritual matters.’33 In his dependence on monasteries as operating bases during his mission, Boniface may also have been inspired by the example of his older contemporary Willibrord, with whom he had worked during the irst years of his stay on the Continent and who, in close collaboration with prominent members of the Austrasian nobility (including Pippin II and his wife Plectrude), had founded several monasteries to support his work.34 These foundations were inhabited by ‘wandering monks’ (monachi peregrini or fratres peregrini), who combined an ascetic way of life with an active role in society as preachers of Christianity. The charters of Echternach and Susteren ascribe to the monks a regular way of life (vita sancta et regulari or secundum ordinem sanctum), most likely a reference to a ‘mixed rule’, combining precepts from several authorities, including the Rule of Benedict and the teachings of Columbanus.35 Willibrord was in charge of his communities, as abbot and custos, although he left the day-to-day management to his disciples.36 As explained below, Boniface would manage his community in a similar way. To anchor his work more irmly in the early 740s Boniface erected bishoprics in central Germany: Büraburg, Erfurt and Würzburg.37 Additionally, he was involved in the organisation of a set of church councils: the Concilium Germanicum (1 April 742), the Council of Les Estinnes (1 March 743), the Council of Soissons (2 March 744) and two other councils that took place in 745 and 747 at unknown locations. The aim of these councils was to establish a proper metropolitan hierarchy with bishoprics clustered under metropolitan bishops or archbishops; the 33

34

35 36 37

‘Cum vero aliqui, sicut illis regionibus moris est, presbiteri sive clerici populares vel laicos praedicandi causa adissent et ad villam domumque praefati patrisfamilias venissent, … coeperat cum eis de caelestibus loquendo tractare ...’ Willibald, Vita Bonifatii, c. 1, p. 5; translation by Talbot in Noble and Head (eds.), Soldiers of Christ, p. 111, adapted by me. In Utrecht, Susteren, Echternach, Elst, Aldeneik and Rindern. Schiefer, Winfrid-Bonifatius, pp. 97–101, 133–5; Van Vliet, Kringen van Kanunniken, pp. 39–41, 72–7; Angenendt, ‘Willibrord im Dienste der Karolinger’, pp. 93–103; Angenendt, ‘Willibrord’, 100–10. Wampach (ed.), Echternach, vol. i.2, Nos. 14–15, 24, pp. 39, 42, 59. Van Vliet, Kringen van Kannuniken, p. 42. The dates of the foundations of the bishoprics are disputed and it into a larger discussion on the sequence of events related to Boniface in the 740s, which has been summarised by Reuter, ‘Boniface and Europe’, pp. 92–3, footnote 73. By the time of Boniface’s death, the bishoprics of Erfurt and Büraburg presumably no longer existed. Schiefer, Angelsachsen, pp. 1493–500. See also Hussong, ‘Fulda’, i, 90, footnote 364.

25

The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda reform of the clergy that according to Boniface over the past decades had fallen into sin; the restitution of alienated church property; the promotion of the Rule of Benedict for all monks to follow; and the improvement of the moral life of the laity.38 In this same busy and productive period of church reform, Fulda was founded. It would be Boniface’s last monastic foundation and like his other religious communities was set up as a preaching centre and school. Lying between the old episcopal see of Mainz and the new bishoprics of Büraburg, Erfurt and Würzburg that Boniface had established in the early 740s at the outer borders of the Frankish kingdom, the monastery would indeed be right in the midst of the area in which Boniface worked, in medio nationum predicationis nostrae, as he wrote to the pope in 751.39 The f oundation of F ul da Sturmi, who presided over the group of monks that Boniface ‘placed’ in Fulda, is one of the few followers of Boniface who did not come from Anglo-Saxon England. He is not among Boniface’s correspondents, but he might be identiied with a certain Styrmi, who was a cook in the bishop’s deputation in Fritzlar.40 He belonged to what one could call ‘the second generation’ of helpers.The irst Boniface had recruited from his homeland, often from the well-known environment of his own family. The second consisted of locals who Boniface and his disciples had recruited during their mission on the Continent, usually young children of local aristocratic families, and who they instructed in the newly established religious cells. Sturmi was born into a noble family that resided in the region around Freising, Bavaria. During one of Boniface’s visits to Bavaria, probably as early as 719, Sturmi’s parents handed their son over to the bishop, with a view to an ecclesiastical career.41 Boniface took the boy with him to Hesse. In Fritzlar Sturmi received his training as a priest under the supervision of Wigbert, a priest-monk from Glastonbury (d. 738), who had followed Boniface to the Continent and was appointed by the bishop as the head of Fritzlar and (temporarily) Ohrdurf.42 After being ordained priest, Sturmi probably worked in the surroundings of Fritzlar. His daily activities consisted of preaching and instructing the local population in the Christian faith, exorcism, banishing ‘poisonous doctrines of 38

39 40 41 42

For a summary of the councils, see Hartmann, Synoden, pp. 47–63; Levison, England and the Continent, pp. 83–90. See above, p. 1. Boniface, Epistolae, No. 40, pp. 64–5; and see Schmid, ‘Anfängen’, pp. 108–35. See Engelbert, Die Vita Sturmi, p. 75. For Sturmi’s family, see Störmer, ‘Adelsgruppe’, pp. 1–34. For Wigbert and his date of death, see Schmid, ‘Anfängen’, pp. 108–35.

26

The early years error’, settling disputes and probably also baptism, hearing confession and examining candidates for conirmation, all activities that it in a society that was already Christian.43 What happened next is not entirely clear. The Vita Sturmi, written in the late 810s, is the only source that recounts the course of the life of Sturmi, but as we shall see in more detail in Chapter 5, it is primarily a foundation history of Fulda. Therefore, all events leading up to the year 744, when Sturmi and his companions irst settled in Fulda, are interpreted as heralding the foundation of the abbey. Furthermore, the text is fairly political and coloured by the discussions of the early ninth century. The sequence of events that form its narrative nonetheless might relect the outline of what had happened. The Vita Sturmi describes how, after working as a priest for three years, Sturmi left the immediate area of Fritzlar to set up religious life elsewhere. According to the Vita Sturmi the priest wanted to become a hermit. This might well have been Sturmi’s original intention and not only a hagiographical topos, for another source narrates that Boniface used to call Sturmi his ‘hermit’.44 The author of this source, the Vita Aegil, writing in the 840s, seems to have based his work on an oral tradition in Fulda that for all those years had kept alive the remembrance of Boniface’s nickname for Sturmi. Together with two other brethren who he probably knew from his time in Fritzlar, Sturmi founded a cell in Buchonia, a good 45 km to the south-east of Fritzlar on the left bank of the river Fulda (736).45 Buchonia was the early medieval name of the dense beech woods that covered the valley between the hills of the Vogelsberg in the west and the Rhön in the east.46 Some thirty-ive years later Lull, another disciple of Boniface, who by then had succeeded his master as bishop of Mainz, established the monastery of Hersfeld at the site where Sturmi had irst settled.Yet, in the 730s, the place did not seem it for such an enterprise. After a couple of years Sturmi left again, probably because the threat of Saxons had made a longer stay impossible.47 This time Sturmi moved further south along the river Fulda and farther away from the north-eastern border until he came to ‘Eihloha’, a small area in Buchonia that appears to have been an ‘island’ of oaks amidst this beech forest.48 Near water and 43 44 45

46

47 48

Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 3, p. 133. Ibid., cc. 5–6, pp. 135, 138; Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 3, p. 5. For the discussion on the dates of the foundation of Hersfeld, see Schmid, ‘Anfängen’, pp. 108–35, 131; Engelbert, Die Vita Sturmi, p. 72f; Heinemeyer, ‘Gründung Fulda’, 19, footnote 90. Stengel has established the borders of Buchonia to have been the rivers Werra, Fulda, Schwalm and Saale. UBF, p. 1, footnote 1. Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 5, p. 135. Hussong, ‘Fulda’, i, 37. The German word for oak is ‘Eiche’. In Dutch it is ‘eik’.

27

The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda trade routes and encircled by hills that gave them a good view of the surrounding area, Sturmi had found a suitable place to take up a permanent residence. It lay on the eastern bank of the river Fulda that would give the new monastery its name.The fertility of its soil and the availability of running water made it well suited to support a religious community.49 As soon as Sturmi had reported his discovery, Boniface travelled to court to arrange the legal transaction of acquiring the piece of land. At that time, there were two mayors of the palace, one for the east and one for the west of the Frankish kingdom. Pippin (742–751) ruled over the western territories, namely Neustria, Burgundy and Provence; his brother Carloman (742–747, d. 754) controlled the east – Austrasia, Alemannia and Thuringia – including the region where Fulda was founded. It was the latter, therefore, to whom Boniface turned and who granted the bishop the piece of land on which he and the monks would build the monastery. Nonetheless, the legitimacy of Carloman’s gift appears not to have been undisputed, for others may have laid claim to the ownership of Eihloha. ‘A woode d p lace in th e waste of a vast wi l de rne s s ’ When Boniface tried to characterise Fulda in his letter to the pope, he pictured it as a remote place, situated in the wilderness (solitudo). Buchonia seems indeed to have been a thinly populated area in the eighth century.50 Yet, underneath the medieval monastery of Fulda, excavations have revealed the remains of a seventh-century villa rustica that apparently was largely destroyed in a ire around 700 (see Figure 3a).51 When Sturmi and his companions settled at the spot in the 740s, the ruins were still there. Excavations have revealed signs of occupation of some of the buildings of the villa, even into the early ninth century.52 That Fulda was not built in ‘a vast wilderness’ is also apparent from the fact that the place that had caught Sturmi’s eye lay near two important roads. One, in the early ninth century called ‘Antsanvia’, connected the north to the south and was used frequently by long-distance travellers such as merchants to go from Thuringia to Frankfurt and Mainz, and vice versa; the other one, in those times referred to as ‘Ortessveca’, united the 49 50 51

52

Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 10, p. 142; Foot, Monastic Life, pp. 90–1. Weidinger, Wirtschaftsstruktur, pp. 156–8. Compare Kind, ‘Fulda’, pp. 401–3. According to Heinrich Hahn there was also a seventh-century church. Hahn, ‘Vorgängerbauten’, 182–3. See the following chapter for another interpretation of the archaeologist’s discoveries. Vonderau, Ausgrabungen 1908–1913; Vonderau, Ausgrabungen 1919–1924; Vonderau, Ausgrabungen 1941. See the summary of these excavations by Hahn, ‘Ausgrabungen 1953’, pp. 641–3 and Hahn, ‘Eihloha’, 55–62.

28

The early years regions Wetterau and Grabfeld. The ‘semita antiqua’, a road of only local importance, connected Fulda to these two busy arteries.53 It is even possible that Boniface, who must have passed the spot where the monastery was founded several times during his work trips, had recommended the villa to Sturmi. That Boniface described the area to the pope as ‘solitude’ had to do with the purpose of his letter. By picturing the community as an exemplary place of holiness according to the contemporary conventions of asceticism, he hoped to acquire papal favour and a privilege. For this, Boniface elaborated on the tradition of the desert fathers and evoked the early examples of Antony, Paul, Hilarion and Malchus, which Sturmi tried to follow.54 The architectural structure of the villa rustica that Sturmi encountered has equivalents in the western parts of the Frankish realm.Yet, east of the Rhine this kind of building was rare. This could indicate that its former owners had been connected with the royal court or the Frankish aristocracy.55 Because of the richness of the objects found in and around the villa, archaeologists think that it once belonged to a powerful family, possibly the Frankish-Thuringian Heden family. This dynasty had its residence in Würzburg, a city at the eastern border of the Frankish kingdom along the river Main and at a distance of some 100 km from Fulda. In the second half of the seventh and the beginning of the eighth century, the power of this family reached from Main to Saale, into the Grabfeld where Eihloha lay.56 After having held the position of duke for many years, the family suddenly disappeared from the political scene around 717. A possible explanation for their departure might be that Charles Martel expelled the Hedens from their position of power in an attempt to re-establish Frankish control over central Germany. In this military operation, the Carolingian magnate may also have laid waste to the villa in Buchonia.57 Former Heden property later emerged in charters as royal goods, while the family’s reputation sufered a damnatio memoriae in pro-Carolingian historiography.58 In 777 Charlemagne donated Hammelburg, once given by Heden to Boniface’s older contemporary Willibrord, to Fulda.59 What the Carolingian king did in 777 his uncle may have done thirty years 53

54 55 56

57

58 59

The roads are mentioned in the Vita Sturmi, cc. 7–8, pp. 139–40. Görich, ‘Ortesweg’, 68–88; Görich, ‘Frühe Straße’, 65–79; Wehlt, Reichsabtei, pp. 234–5. Brunert, ‘In eremo’, pp. 61–5; Brunert, Wüstenaskese. Vonderau, Ausgrabungen 1941; Hahn, ‘Ausgrabungen 1953’, pp. 665f; Hahn, ‘Eihloha’, 58–9. Innes, State and Society, p. 176; Mordek,‘Die Hedenen’, pp. 345–66; Schlesinger,‘Das Frühmittelalter’, pp. 338–41. Hussong, ‘Fulda’, i, 28; Heinemeyer, ‘Gründung Fulda’, 35–6. Compare Clay, Conversion of Hessia, p. 157. See Chapter 5. Wampach (ed.), Echternach, vol. i.2, No. 26, pp. 63–5; MGH DD Kar. 1, No. 116, pp. 162–3.

29

The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda earlier, when he endowed Boniface with Eihloha, in other words transferring property of old enemies into the hands of new associates.60 Fulda’s only foundation history, the Vita Sturmi, makes no mention of former owners or the ruins of the villa rustica as a matter of fact, but does inform its audience that ‘evil men’ (mali homines) obstructed Sturmi and his brethren in establishing themselves in Eihloha before the transaction of the land was oicially settled.61 While Boniface travelled to court to ask Carloman for the donation of the piece of land, Sturmi had to withdraw to a place now unknown to us, called Dryhlar (Thrihlari). Only when Carloman had granted Boniface the land to found the monastery could Sturmi and his companions return safely. On 12 March 744, the feast day of Gregory the Great, Fulda’s pioneers for the irst time set foot on the ground where their monastery would arise.62 The identity of the ‘evil men’ who had hindered the monks is obscure and, although it is tempting to identify them with descendants of the expelled Thuringian duke, the author of the Vita Sturmi has left us with too little evidence to draw any further conclusions.63 Acquiring le gal statu s The gift of Eihloha to Boniface by the mayor of the east-Frankish regions, Carloman, established the community of Fulda as a physical entity. It diferentiated the abbey from its neighbours and other religious communities, including Boniface’s other foundations, that had an inluence in the region. Often this concern to distinguish a community from others is relected in the care of scribes to record the boundaries of property donations in charters.64 According to the Vita Sturmi, which describes the grant in full detail, Carloman’s gift was registered in a charter.65 The document has however not survived. We thus depend on the Vita Sturmi, composed around 820, which for the description of the grant may well have used the now lost charter.66 It narrates that Carloman gave to Boniface the property that he had asked for in the presence of his nobles, using the following words: I give the place that you ask for and which, as you say, is called Eihloha on the banks of the river Fulda, [namely] all that I seem to possess there at this date, 60 62

63 64 65 66

Brunert, ‘In eremo’, p. 77. 61 Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 11, p. 142. Ibid., c. 13, p. 144. Concerning the date, see Engelbert, Die Vita Sturmi, p. 90 footnote 96; Tangl, Bonifatiusfragen, p. 40. Hussong, ‘Fulda’, i, 34–6. Remensnyder, Remembering Kings Past, pp. 28, 40, 82. Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 12, p. 143. Stengel, UBF, No. 4, pp. 1–6. The charter probably still existed in the later Middle Ages.

30

The early years whole and entire to God, including all the land that lies north, south, east and west of that point for a distance of four miles.67

Whether Carloman, besides the transaction of property, further shaped his relation with the monks of Fulda through certain rights and privileges is unclear. According to the Vita Sturmi, Boniface had asked Carloman to grant the piece of land that belonged to his property (dicio68) ‘so that under your protection [defensio] we may serve Christ there’, which suggests that the contract entailed more than an ordinary transaction of possessions, if there existed such a thing as an ‘ordinary transaction’ in a society in which gift-giving was all about creating and strengthening bonds.69 Nevertheless, what this protection involved precisely, we do not know. Another important step for the monastery in distinguishing itself from external powers and their agents, and becoming a legal institution, was the acquisition of a papal exemption. Following upon Boniface’s request in the letter that started the Introduction of this book, the pope endowed Fulda with the papal exemption in November 751.70 There exist two versions of the privilege, a long one and a short one. Modern scholarship agrees that the short one, of which the oldest copy, now in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, dates to the late eighth or early ninth century, represents the original exemption.71 The long version is a later revision, possibly from the hand of Rudolf of Fulda, who would have adapted the exemption on behalf of his community in 822 or 823 to meet the needs of the monks in the struggle with the dioceses of Mainz and Würzburg over the tithes of its churches.72 The charter was sent to Rome for papal conirmation, but Pope Paschal discovered the changes, imprisoned the monks who had brought the letter and threatened to excommunicate Fulda’s abbot, Hrabanus Maurus, for it.73 The papal exemption of 751, by then granted to only a few religious communities, placed the monastery under the direct authority of Rome. It put a restraint on the bishops of Mainz and Würzburg – Fulda lay at the frontier between both dioceses – in their attempts to control the monastery.74 67

68

69 71

72 73 74

‘Locum quidem quem petitis et qui ut asseris Eihloha nuncupatur in ripa luminis Fuldae, quidquid in hac die proprium ibi videor habere, totum et integrum de iure meo in ius Domini trado, ita ut ab illo loco undique in circuitu ab oriente scilicet et ab occidente, a septentrione et meridie, marcha per quatuor milia passuum tendatur.’ Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 12, p. 143. Although dicio can also be translated as ‘protection’, its meaning here is property. For the complex meanings of dicio, see Rosenwein, Negotiating Space, pp. 106–12. 70 Boniface, Epistolae, No. 89, pp. 203–5. Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 12, p. 143. Tangl, ‘Die Fuldaer Privilegienfrage’, 193–252; Stengel, ‘Fuldensia i’, pp. 64–81; Anton, Klosterprivilegien, pp. 86–92. Concerning the monastic possession of tithes, see Constable, Monastic Tithes, pp. 57–197. Epist. Fuld. fragm., No. 26, p. 528; Stengel, ‘Fuldensia i’, pp. 69–70. Rosenwein, Negotiating Space, pp. 106–9; Ewig, ‘Klosterprivilegien’, pp. 411–26; Anton, Klosterprivilegien, pp. 49–92; Hussong, ‘Fulda’, i, 85; Wood, ‘Jonas’, pp. 99–120.

31

The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda Each monastery depended on a bishop for the consecration of its clerics and liturgical objects, the dedication of its altars and churches and for the supply of the Holy Communion, holy water and unction. Often bishops considered their duties to exceed these elementary provisions and used this power to extend their control over the religious communities.Without this exemption, Fulda would have fallen under the jurisdiction of the bishopric of Würzburg or Mainz.75 The papal exemption licensed Fulda to invite a bishop of its own liking on the occasion of, for example, a church dedication, and thus limited episcopal inluence. Additionally, no priest, unless he belonged to the Church of Rome, was allowed to enter the monastery, even to say mass there, without the invitation of the abbot.76 When Boniface asked the pope for a papal privilege, he was thinking of the long term, spurred by the illnesses of old age which reminded him that death was near.77 The disappearance from the political scene of Carloman, who in 747 had exchanged his secular clothes and sword for the monastic habit, may also have played a role. Carloman had always supported Boniface in his work, but his brother Pippin, who took all power after Carloman’s entry into the monastery, seems to have been less favourable towards Boniface.78 Boniface felt that he had to make preparations for the future when he would no longer be there to protect what he had built up, and it is against this background that we need to consider Fulda’s papal privilege. It was not Boniface’s intention to place Fulda outside the diocesan hierarchy, which he himself had helped to establish and of which he himself as bishop of Mainz was part, but to provide Fulda with the means to resist claims to property and power by bishops with priorities that clashed with the interests of Boniface and his abbey. Thus it was Boniface who acquired the papal privilege for Fulda (Bonifa[t]io episcopo et per eum in monasterio ab eo constructo et succesim abbatibus) and to whom Carloman granted the land on which Fulda was founded.79 What does this tell us about who was in charge in Fulda?

Obe rabt Even though tradition in Fulda remembers Sturmi as its irst abbot, we need to be aware that in those early days, when Boniface was still alive, 75

76

77 78

79

For a summary of the discussion of which diocese Fulda belonged to, see Hussong, ‘Fulda’, i, 47–61 and recently also Kölzer, ‘Bonifatius und Fulda’, 41. For the debate on the details of this privilege and the interpretation of the word dicio, see Hussong, ‘Fulda’, i, 61–85; Rosenwein, Negotiating Space, pp. 106–12; Becht-Jördens, ‘Rechtsstatus Fulda’, 15. Boniface, Epistolae, No. 86, pp. 191–4. Schiefer, Angelsachsen, pp. 1455–63; McKitterick, ‘England and the continent’, p. 76; De Jong, ‘Opting out?’, pp. 291–328, especially 323–7; De Jong, ‘Angelsaksische priester-monnik’, p. 12. UBF, No. 15, p. 30.

32

The early years Sturmi’s position was not as clear as later sources suggest. Sturmi did not appear as abbot in the charters of Fulda during Boniface’s lifetime. In fact, it is only from the 760s onward that the charters mention him at all. The irst time that he appears as a representative of Fulda, is just before the king sent him into exile and, disregarding the papal privilege, handed the monastery over to the bishop of Mainz.80 In addition to this, when Carloman granted the monks permission to found a monastery in Eihloha, it was Boniface who acted as the representative of the monks, not Sturmi. Boniface wrote, moreover, in his letter to the pope: ‘This place I have acquired …’81 Even the Vita Sturmi, which is aimed at establishing Sturmi as the founder and irst abbot of Fulda, only refers to Sturmi as abbas after the description of Boniface’s death and burial in Fulda.82 The reason for the uncertainty about Sturmi’s position is that even though Boniface’s disciples presided over his communities, the bishop himself stayed in charge. As Karl Schmid has argued convincingly, Boniface was lord and ‘Oberabt’ to the web of monks and nuns clustered around him.83 Like the Frankish kings who ruled their realm from a network of regional centres of power, travelling between palaces, royal villae and royal monasteries, Boniface supervised and guided his ‘dominion’ from a network of small monasteries. Unlike the Carolingian ruler, who had at his disposal a body of representative oicials, Boniface’s exercise of control depended on his physical presence.84 According to the Vita Wigberti, written around 836, Boniface had his own little house (domuncula) in Fritzlar.85 We know that when Boniface visited Fulda, he retired to a hill north of the abbey for prayer and study. Perhaps the monks of Fulda had built him a little house on top of the hill, from where he could keep a sharp eye on what went on in the monastery, while meditating on the Holy Scripture, and where he could supervise the foundation of Fulda. By the time Eigil wrote his Vita Sturmi, the name of this hill, Bishop’s Mount (Bischofsberg), still reminded the monks of the frequent visits of Boniface to their community.86 The attempts of Lupus of Ferrières and Eigil, authors of the Vita Wigberti and the Vita Sturmi respectively, to link the present-day habitat of their communities 80

81 82 83

84

85

UBF, No. 39 (19 November 762–28 August 763), pp. 66–8. From this point on Sturmi appears more frequently in the charters, apart from the years 763–765, when he was in exile. To Sturmi’s exile I will return in the following chapter. Boniface, Epistolae, No. 86, p. 193. Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 16, p. 150. Schmid, ‘Anfängen’, pp. 108–35, especially 129–35. Also, Hussong, ‘Fulda’, i, 85. See also Boniface, Epistolae, Nos. 40, 103, pp. 65, 226. McKitterick, Charlemagne, pp. 137–291; De Jong, ‘Charlemagne’s balcony’, pp. 277–89; Nelson, ‘Aachen’, pp. 217–41. 86 Lupus of Ferrières, Vita Wigberti, p. 39. Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 13, p. 144.

33

The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda to Boniface, by now a saint, might well relect precisely how Boniface’s teaching and supervision lived on in local oral tradition and the physical landscape. Through their writings, we get an image of an active bishop who was continuously on the move, using the stays in his dependencies to supervise and exhort the monks or nuns who lived there and to advise them in their everyday concerns and troubles. As long as Boniface lived, the communities subordinate to him depended on him as their patron and spiritual guide. When Boniface died, his ‘dominion’ disintegrated, although his successor to the bishopric of Mainz, Lull, attempted, to no avail, to keep Boniface’s communities together under the control of the bishop of Mainz. A similar situation occurred with Willibrord, who as abbot and archbishop of the Frisians also ruled over a network of religious communities. What tied all these religious houses together was Willibrord and the mission in which they all participated. Once Willibrord had died, the monasteries, at least at irst, lost their unity and became independent units.87 Boniface himself probably acted as abbot of Fulda with Sturmi as his deputy.88 Only after Boniface’s death did Sturmi oicially become abbot of Fulda. Sturmi may have not been too happy about this situation. His biography, written by Eigil, his relative who had known him for twenty years, claims that Sturmi was the irst abbot and founder of Fulda. Eigil’s attempt to push his relative forward as primus abbas et fundator may well relect Sturmi’s possible frustrations with his prolonged subordination to Boniface. As we will see, Eigil would be successful. Whereas the early charters state that Boniface constructed Fulda, later sources refer to Sturmi as Fulda’s founder.89 ‘Me n of st rict ab stine nc e ’ Initially, Fulda was only a small cell of a couple of men sustaining themselves by the work of their own hands, while the rhythm of their daily life was determined by the hours of prayer. When the irst brethren arrived, they had to prepare a place to live and worship. They may have initially inhabited the ruins of the villa rustica, while they cleared the site and worked on the construction of the abbey church and its adjacent cloister. In this they were aided by Boniface, who according to the Vita Sturmi brought a group of workers to help them fell the trees and clear away the 87 88

89

Van Vliet, Kringen van Kanunniken, p. 77. The only other abbot in the network of Boniface’s foundations referred to in the bishop’s letters is a certain Abbot Tatwin. Boniface, Epistolae, No. 40, p. 65. See Chapters 2 and 5.

34

The early years brushwood. In addition to this, the bishop gave the monks some villulas, small villages or estates, so that they could support themselves.90 There is no record of these provisions, although there are some charters that show that Boniface used his contacts as bishop of Mainz to endow Fulda with land and vineyards.91 Life in Fulda would not have difered much from that in Boniface’s other religious communities. Willibald’s Vita Bonifatii, written in the 760s, described Ohrdurf as a community of men of God (servi Dei) and monks of the utmost holiness, where the brethren, having no servants, ‘in the manner of the apostles procured food and clothing with their own hands and contented themselves with constant labour’.92 Boniface described Fulda in the same way in his letter to the pope of 751, and, probably following this letter, so did Rudolf when he wrote the Vita Leobae in the 830s.93 With his allusion to manual labour and the lack of servants, Boniface wanted to depict Fulda as a community that followed in the footsteps of the apostles and the desert fathers. He may have had Benedict of Nursia’s recommendation in mind: ‘They must not become distressed if local conditions or their poverty should force them to do the harvesting themselves. When they live by the labour of their hands, as our fathers and the apostles did, then they are really monks.’94 At the same time, Boniface’s reference probably also relected a day-to-day reality: the monks were too poor to have servants. Poverty demanded that they tilled the land and did all the other manual work necessary to sustain themselves. Another letter of Boniface, this time addressed to the brethren of Fritzlar, who had recently lost their father (pater, not abbas) who had presided over the community, gives more information on how monastic life was organised.95 To prevent the community from falling apart after the death of their superior, Boniface assigned special duties to the senior monks and reminded them of their responsibilities. Two of them, probably the most experienced and high-ranking ones, saw to it that 90 91 92

93 94

95

Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 14, p. 147. UBF, Nos. 11, 18, pp. 16–17, 35–6. ‘qui propriis sibi more apostolico manibus victum vestitumque instanter laborando adquesierunt.’ Willibald, Vita Bonifatii, c. 6, pp. 33–4. Translation by Talbot in Noble and Head (eds.), Soldiers, p. 128. Rudolf, Vita Leobae, c. 17, p. 129. ‘Si autem necessitas loci aut paupertas exegerit ut ad fruges recollegendas per se occupuntur, non contristentur, quia tunc uere monachi sunt si labore manuum suarum uiuunt, sicut et Patres nostri et apostoli.’ RB, c. 48, p. 600; Fry, Rule, p. 249. Fritzlar is not mentioned in the letter, but it is likely that the Wigbert to whose death Boniface refers should be identiied with Wigbert, abbot of Fritzlar. Concerning the discussion on the date of this letter, see Boniface, Epistolae, No. 40, pp. 64–5, footnote 2; Tangl, Bonifatiusfragen, p. 13. Compare Schmid, ‘Anfängen’, pp. 108–35.

35

The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda the brethren observed the monastic rule, which demanded chastity and obedience. They preached to the monks, gave advice and taught the youngsters. Furthermore, they were responsible for the divine oice.The prior (prepositus) was in charge of the servants of the community. Another senior was in charge of the kitchen. Within the organisation of this hierarchical community, the last in the pecking order was the labourer (operarius) who built the cells (domuncula) where the monks lived. Thus, the Oice, the training of the monks, the education of the children and the administration of the servants and property were the main responsibilities of the seniors. Life in Fulda was probably organised in a similar manner, with teaching, prayer and manual labour being the main daily activities of the brethren. ‘T he re we have p lace d a g roup of monks l iving unde r the Rule of B e ne di c t ’ Yet, in one sense, Fulda seems to have difered from the other communities. While Boniface, in his letters, always talked about a monastic rule in general terms, such as ‘the order of a monastic way of life’ (regulam monasterialis normam vite˛ ) in the case of Fritzlar, he explicitly mentioned the Rule of Benedict when he described Fulda in his letter to the pope, asking for a papal exemption. In understanding Boniface’s reference to the Rule of Benedict and the importance of this monastic rule for the identity of Fulda around the middle of the eighth century, hindsight and modern assumptions about rules as law easily hinder us. Boniface, who between 742 and 747 initiated three, perhaps ive, reform councils, is often represented as one of the principal protagonists of the ‘Carolingian Renaissance’.This programme of religious reform (emendatio and correctio) gained a strong impetus under Charlemagne and Louis the Pious and culminated in the Aachen reform councils of 816 and 817 that ordered the Rule of Benedict to become the rule for all monasteries to follow.96 One of the concerns of the councils that in the 740s had gathered under Boniface’s leadership had also been that monasteries carefully follow the Rule of Benedict. The Concilium Germanicum directed: ‘Let monks and cloistered maids of God be appointed and live according to the Rule of Benedict, and let them do their best to lead

96

Semmler, ‘Bonifatius’, pp. 3–49; Semmler, ‘Mönche und Kanoniker’, pp. 78–111; Semmler, ‘Benedictus ii’, pp. 1–49; Semmler, ‘Fränkische Mönchtum’, pp. 255–89; De Jong, ‘Carolingian monasticism’, pp. 629–34. Concerning the importance of the rule for Anglo-Saxon monasteries, see Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Long-haired kings’, pp. 148–248; Holdsworth, ‘Boniface the monk’, pp. 47–67; Reuter, ‘Boniface and Europe’, pp. 69–94; Foot, Monastic Life.

36

The early years their lives accordingly.’97 The Council of Les Estinnes in the following year decreed that ‘abbots and monks should accept the rule of the holy father Benedict in order to restore the norm of a regular life’.98 In the same period in which Boniface chaired these church meetings, he founded Fulda. It thus makes sense to assume a connection between the councils’ focus on the Rule of Benedict and Fulda’s decision to follow the Italian rule, referred to in Boniface’s letter to the pope.99 Nevertheless, in understanding the meaning of this decision we need to ignore the success of later monastic reforms and consider it in the light of its own time. In addition, we need to bear in mind that Boniface’s world was less formal and institutionalised than our society, in which a relatively eicient bureaucracy sees to it that laws issued by the state are strictly observed. However, Boniface worked under diferent conditions and with diferent means of communication. Behaviour in a monastery was shaped irst and foremost by intense mutual control and correction. Tradition, passed on by older members to the younger ones, was more important than royal capitularies.100 Boniface would have preferred his monks and nuns to lead a regular way of life, rather than following the Rule of Benedict to the letter. He interpreted the Rule of Benedict as a mirror for religious men and women to relect upon their way of life, not a code of law in the modern sense. When Boniface summarised, in a letter to the archbishop of Canterbury, the outcome of the Frankish councils that he had organised in the 740s, he did not mention the Rule of Benedict. Yet, as we have seen, the councils had ordered the monks and nuns to live according to this particular monastic rule. Instead, he wrote that ‘every year the canonical degrees, the laws of the Church, and the rule of the regular life shall be read and renewed at the synod’.101 In addition, he himself came from a monastic background governed by a number of diferent customs, of which the Rule of Benedict was just one, and in his personal life he seems to have been more concerned to follow the example of the apostles than any particular rule. In the course of the years he nevertheless became increasingly convinced that the way of life described by the Rule of Benedict approached his ideal relatively 97

98

99

100 101

‘Et ut monachi et ancilleç Dei monasteriales iuxtam regulam sancti Benedicti ordinare et vivere, vitam propriam gubernare studeant.’ Boniface, Epistolae, No. 56, p. 101. Translation by Emerton, Letters, p. 71, slightly altered by me. ‘Abbates et monachi receperunt sancti patris Benedicti [regulam] ad restaurandam normam regularis viteç.’ Boniface, Epistolae, No. 56, p. 101. Heinemeyer, ‘Gründung Fulda’, 27–31; Hahn, ‘Eihloha’, 52; Engelbert, Die Vita Sturmi, pp. 81, 96; Hussong, ‘Fulda’, i, 38–42, 96–9; Staab, ‘Bonifatius’, 55–69; Kölzer, ‘Bonifatius und Fulda’, 27–8. Demyttenaere, Claustralization; Cubitt, ‘Monastic memory and identity’, pp. 253–76. ‘Statuimus, ut per annos singulos canonum decreta et eçcclesiae iura et norma regularis viteç in sinodo legantur et recuperentur.’ Boniface, Epistolae, No. 78, p. 163.Translation by Emerton, Letters, p. 115.

37

The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda well, although he did not think that obedience to this rule ofered the only way to reach monastic perfection.102 In his letter to the pope of 751, Boniface in one and the same breath, and without any sign of discomfort, mentions that the monks of Fulda followed the Rule of Benedict, that they ate no meat, drank no wine and did all the work with their own hands. Apparently, Boniface saw no discrepancy in the characteristics attributed to Fulda. On the contrary, he hoped to win the pope’s approval with it. Modern historians on the other hand immediately notice that Boniface’s description of monastic life in Fulda was not in keeping with the directions drawn up in the Rule of Benedict. After all, the rule does not prohibit the consumption of wine or meat. It only demands moderation. Moreover, even though the Rule of Benedict values manual labour as a means to ight idleness, monks were not required to do all the work themselves.103 Already in the 810s, Eigil felt the need to explain to the audience of his Vita Sturmi why the monks of Fulda in the early days only drank weak beer instead of wine.104 Eigil was clearly aware of the diference between what was considered right in his own time and what was the practice in Fulda in the days of Boniface, and felt a need to explain it. What Boniface meant when he wrote that the monks of Fulda lived according to the Rule of Benedict difered from what the reform councils of 816 and 817 prescribed when stating that all monks and nuns should follow the Rule of Benedict. In this context, it should be noted that in the irst half of the ninth century, the customs in Fulda, which according to tradition had been once instituted by Boniface and Sturmi around the middle of the eighth century, had to be defended against application of the Rule of Benedict and the monastic custom as prescribed in Aachen.105 Ide ntity Having analysed the irst picture of Fulda, a crucial question remains: how would the monks themselves have deined their community? Fulda was part of a larger network of communities that seems to have sought its raison d’être in its relation with Boniface.Together all the cells formed one community, held together by spiritual bonds, friendship and discipline. From this network of disciples and adherents, the later institutions would develop, but in Boniface’s days the communities were not established as 102 103 104

Holdsworth, ‘Boniface the monk’, pp. 54–7. Brunert, ‘In eremo’, p. 62; Semmler, ‘Instituta’, pp. 95–6; Semmler, ‘Anfänge’, 181–200, at 188–9. 105 See below, pp. 127–8, 159. Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 13, p. 145.

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The early years such and their identities had not taken shape the way they would in later times. Boniface justiied their existence, irst and foremost. Nowhere in his letters did Boniface mention his religious communities by name, not even Fulda in his request for a papal privilege. In his allusion to the abbey, he suiced by saying ‘There is a wooded place in the midst of a vast wilderness …’ In other letters, he addressed the communities as ‘To his most dear sons …’, ‘To his beloved sons … and all our brothers and sisters’, referring to them by naming the individual members or addressing them as his spiritual family.106 He wrote about ‘bonds of spiritual brotherhood’.107 When Boniface wrote a letter to Abbot Optatus of Monte Cassino, asking him to join him in a prayer bond, he concluded this confraternity on behalf of probably all the men and women tied to the religious communities he founded, not only on behalf of himself and Fulda, as some have argued.108 Boniface’s letter to the pope, however, shows that even though Fulda was part of a spiritual family clustered around Boniface, it at the same time distinguished itself from the bishop’s other foundations. The decision to follow the Rule of Benedict, the acquisition of the papal privilege and Boniface’s decision to be buried in Fulda all distinguished the monastery from Boniface’s other foundations: Fritzlar, Ohrdurf, Kitzingen or Tauberbischofsheim. Even though we should be careful in our conclusions of its meaning, the fact that the monks of Fulda decided to follow the Rule of Benedict was nevertheless signiicant. That way they determined what kind of community they wanted to be, dropping other alternatives. In addition, Boniface’s reference to the rule in his letter to the pope was an occasional argument to give his plea for papal exemption a solid basis. Besides the link with Rome, the connection with the Carolingian family also helped the community of Fulda to gain the respect of local landowners, to establish itself as an institution and to secure itself a central position in society. The gift of Carloman demarcated the dominion of the monks and tied the monastery to the powerful social network of the Frankish court, just as the papal privilege instituted it as a sacred place, exempted from the normal jurisdiction of the local diocesan bishop. Therefore, it is plausible that Carloman’s grant and the papal exemption had a strong impact on how the monks perceived themselves, but the question remains of when Fulda’s bond with Rome and the Carolingians became the focus of its identity. This happened probably only after 106 107 108

For example, Boniface, Epistolae, Nos. 40, 41, pp. 65–6. Ibid., No. 91, p. 206. Ibid., No. 106, pp. 231–2. In this, I agree with Schmid, ‘Anfängen’, p. 130.

39

The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda Boniface’s death, when the jurisdiction of the monastery became the issue of a conlict with the bishop of Mainz, another heir of Boniface. The Carolingians and the papal exemption were to help Fulda out. Boniface died on 5 June 754, from the wounds inlicted upon him by the swords of those who would go down in history as pagan Frisians.109 The bishop and those who had accompanied him to Frisia had pitched their tents near the river Boorne, on the border of Westergo and Oostergo, in the far north of the modern-day Netherlands. They were waiting for a group of people that they had recently baptised, but who still needed to receive conirmation. On the morning of their expected arrival, a band of robbers turned up instead. They attacked and plundered the camp and killed Boniface and his companions. Word of their deaths spread quickly and delegates from Utrecht, the nearest Frankish settlement and Boniface’s operating base, rushed to collect the bodies. Boniface’s remains were carried to the abbey of Fulda, where the bishop wished to be buried and where his body has rested ever since.110 As we shall see in the following chapter, the death of Boniface was the irst event that would confront the monks with tough issues relating to their identity. Boniface’s burial in Fulda heralded major changes for its monks.The presence of the martyr stirred the generosity of faithful, who sought his heavenly patronage. Aristocratic families donated pieces of land and entrusted their sons to the monks. More urgently, Fulda, as with the bishop’s other communities, lost its spiritual master and patron. The leadership of Fulda became an issue, together with the monastery’s jurisdiction. In the aftermath of this conlict with the archbishop of Mainz over the jurisdiction of the monastery, the Carolingians took control and made Fulda a royal abbey. It was another change that forced the monks to consider their objectives and the ways in which they wanted to realise them. Thinking about their identity, the monks would often turn to Boniface’s letter to Pope Zacharias, adapting its meaning to their own needs. 109

110

Levison discusses this date in footnote 2 in his edition of Otloh’s Vita Bonifatii, p. 55. Tradition in Mainz placed Boniface’s death in 755. Fulda considered 754 to be Boniface’s year of death. See, for example, the AFa, a. 754, p. 137. Willibald, Vita Bonifatii, c. 8, pp. 47–56.

40

Chapter 2

A F T E R BONIFAC E ’S DEATH: F ROM FAM ILIA TO INS TI TUTI O N

Th e struggle for Boniface ’s i nh e ritanc e In the years following Boniface’s death, the monks of Fulda and the bishop of Mainz fought for control of the monastery, which now housed the powerful relics of the saint. The papal privilege that Boniface had acquired for Fulda withdrew the monastery from the power of local bishops, but apparently left room for uncertainty as to who was in command of the abbey. The bishop of Mainz, Lull, was a priest from Wessex. He had met Boniface in Rome in 737 and had followed the bishop to Germany to become one of his closest disciples.1 It was Lull who was sent by Boniface to Rome to negotiate the papal privilege for Fulda and who Boniface designated as his successor in Mainz. Before his departure to Frisia, moreover, Boniface had asked Lull to continue his work: ‘But you, my dear son, must bring to completion the building of the churches that I began in Thuringia. Earnestly recall the people from the paths of error, inish the construction of the basilica at Fulda, which is now in the process of being built, and bring my body, now wasted by the toil of years, there.’2 Even though the Vita Bonifatii was written by one of Lull’s priests and most likely will have depicted the events in the bishop’s favour, the description of Boniface’s last will was probably truthful. A letter from Boniface to Fulrad, abbot of St Denis (750–784) and arch-chaplain of the Frankish king, bears witness to the same anxieties about the continuation of the bishop’s work and the future of his disciples, and to his wish for

1

2

Boniface, Epistolae, Nos. 98, 135, pp. 220, 274; Lampert of Hersfeld, Vita Lulli, p. 310. For more details on Lull’s background, see Schipperges, Bonifatius, p. 186. ‘Sed tu, ili karissime, structuram in Thyringea a me ceptam e˛cclesiarum ad perfectionis terminum deduc; tu populum ab erroris invio instantissime revoca tuque aediicationem basilicae iam inchoatae ad Fuldan conple ibidemque meum multis annorum curriculis corpus inveteratum perduc.’ Willibald, Vita Bonifatii, c. 8, p. 46. Translation by Talbot in Noble and Head (eds.), Soldiers, p. 134, adapted by me.

41

The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda Lull to be his successor.3 Presumably, Boniface’s worries also concerned Fulda, a community that the bishop had described to the pope as poor.4 Therefore, it would not be strange if Boniface had asked Lull to keep an eye on Fulda. The construction of the abbey church demanded considerable resources and labour, which were diicult for a young community to aford and arrange. Nevertheless, in his attempts to safeguard his life’s work Boniface had not been clear enough, or perhaps had taken insuicient account of the clashing personalities and interests of Lull and Sturmi. A complicating factor was that during his lifetime Boniface had held several positions, all of which would not necessarily be inherited by the same person. While Lull took his responsibilities as the bishop’s successor very seriously and as another ‘Oberabt’ tried to bring Boniface’s foundations under his inluence, Sturmi attempted to establish himself at the head of Fulda, to take control of Boniface’s cult and to free the monastery from external claims.5 In 763 King Pippin III sent Sturmi into exile because of disloyalty to the court.6 With the abbot gone, discussions about jurisdiction and leadership lared up between the monks of Fulda and the bishop of Mainz. It is an odd story, which is only recounted in Eigil’s Vita Sturmi, written several decades later in the late 810s. Eigil tells how Lull, jealous of Sturmi, had encouraged three monks of Fulda to accuse their abbot of treason at court. Poisoned by their evil words, the king sent the abbot into exile at the monastery of Jumièges in Normandy and gave Lull permission to place Fulda under the jurisdiction of Mainz.7 Nevertheless, while blaming Lull, Eigil did not conceal that it had been monks from Fulda who had gone to court to complain about their abbot. This small crack in the otherwise perfectly harmonious picture that Eigil painted of Fulda in the days of Sturmi gives us a glimpse of internal diferences within the community. Sturmi’s position in Fulda seems to have been controversial. Clearly not all monks agreed with Sturmi’s claim to leadership, but we can only speculate about their objections. Was it the abbot’s 3 4 5

6

7

Boniface, Epistolae, No. 93, pp. 212–14. Ibid., No. 86, p. 193. For Lull’s interference with Boniface’s foundations, see, for example, Lull, Epistolae, Nos. 110, 113, 128, pp. 236–8, 245, 265–6. Also Palmer, ‘Bishop Lull’, 249–76. Concerning Fulda, see Hussong, ‘Fulda’, i, 85–95. The date is based on the fact that there are no charters for Sturmi’s abbacy between the beginning of 763 and May 765, and that there are two in which Lull acted as Fulda’s representative in an exchange of goods: UBF, Nos. 40–1, pp. 69–72. See Patzold, ‘Konlikte’, 73, footnote 14; Ölsner, Jahrbücher, pp. 516–17. Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 18, pp. 152–3. For the use of monasteries as ‘prisons’, see De Jong,‘Opting out?’, pp. 291–328.

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After Boniface’s death political preferences that led a group of monks to organise themselves and go to court? Was it his Bavarian background? Although historians have recently questioned the vehemence of the conlict between King Pippin and the duke of Bavaria as early as the 760s and thereby have nuanced the importance of this struggle for our understanding of Sturmi’s exile, politics still may have played a role.8 Another reason for the opposition to Sturmi’s leadership in Fulda may have been his personality. Had Lampert of Hersfeld been right when he wrote that Sturmi was ‘a man with great talent and praised sanctity, but excessively tempestuous and ferocious of nature’?9 With Sturmi removed from oice, Lull appointed one of his own priests as abbot of Fulda. Nevertheless, the majority of monks rejected this outsider and pleaded for Sturmi’s return. Faced with the protests and seeing an opportunity to bring the monastery under his control, Pippin allowed Sturmi to return. Once the intervention of the Frankish king had settled the conlict and Sturmi had come back from Jumièges, Fulda was free from Lull’s domination. On his return, Sturmi embellished the abbey church and constructed a monument on Boniface’s grave – an indication of his gratitude for a safe homecoming perhaps, and surely a statement against Lull, demonstrating his control over Boniface’s cult and the rightfulness of his claim to Fulda’s abbacy. Sturmi furthermore repaired the monastic buildings and improved the living conditions of the monks by channelling water from the river Fulda through subterranean channels to the monastery, giving Fulda its own waterworks.10 In his course of action, he showed himself to be a capable manager and worthy abbot. Sturmi’s abbacy was a period of growth and rapid changes. It was a time when both the property and number of monks expanded considerably and during which Fulda became a royal abbey. From a group of monks who shared ascetic ideals, Fulda developed into an institution and a cult-site, popular among local families looking for holy patronage and prayer. As years went by, the monastery established itself more irmly. The brethren reclaimed the nearby woods. The irst monks, who were raised and trained in Fulda, died and were buried in the monastery’s cemetery. No longer did every monk know all his brethren personally. Stories had to be told by the seniors to keep alive the memory of those who had already passed away. For those who lived in the monastery’s 8

9

10

Patzold, ‘Konlikte’, 76–7; Becher, Eid und Herrschaft, pp. 21–77; Depreux, ‘Tassilon iii’, 62–5; Jahn, Ducatus Baiuvariorum, pp. 372–5. ‘vir excellentis ingenii et predicandae sanctitatis, sed vehementis nimium et ferocis naturae.’ Lampert, Vita Lulli, c. 13, p. 323. The conlict has attracted a lot of attention. For a summary of the discussion, see Patzold, ‘Konlikte’, 73–91. Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 21, p. 156.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda dependencies, ways of communication had to be created to inform them about what had happened in the mother convent, and vice versa, and to make them all feel part of Fulda. The earliest expressions of Fulda’s communal identity also date from the time of Sturmi’s abbacy. These include the abbey church with Boniface’s grave, a monument to the monastery’s new opportunities as a cult-site; charters, both private and royal; lists in which the monks recorded the names of their dead; and the Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi, a form of history writing that linked Fulda’s past with the history of the Carolingian dynasty and embedded it in salvation history. These sources exude a self-conidence beitting a rising monastery and stress Fulda’s distinctive attitude towards a wider world.What do they tell us about the ways in which the monastery perceived itself? Boniface ’s cult - site When in 754 the monks of Fulda came into possession of a martyr, they had to rethink their goals. Only a few places east of the Rhine possessed the relics of martyrs: St Alban, according to tradition was a priest who preached in the region of Mainz before his martyrdom around 406 (not to be confused with Britain’s ‘proto-martyr’ St Alban of Verulamium), was buried in Mainz, and Würzburg owned the relics of St Kilian.11 Because in their sufering they had followed Christ to extremes, already in Late Antiquity martyrs were popular intercessors much sought after by the faithful. Once Christianity had established itself as the dominant and privileged religion in the Roman Empire in the fourth century, the number of Christians who sacriiced their lives for their faith diminished. The martyrdom of Boniface, which in the eyes of modern historians looks more like a robbery with murder, was therefore fully exploited by the Church.12 No wonder the people of Utrecht, aware of Boniface’s value as saint, were reluctant to let go of him once they had brought his body to their city.13 Boniface’s eforts to make Utrecht a diocese while he was still alive of course only enhanced his signiicance for the Frisian city. Supposedly, Mainz, where Boniface had been bishop since 746, had struggled with similar considerations. According to the Vita Sturmi the inhabitants of Mainz also wanted to keep the bishop’s body.Through miracles, Boniface had to remind them of his last wish, before his body was inally brought 11

12 13

There is a lot of confusion concerning the course of Alban of Mainz’s life and death. Hrabanus Maurus, Martyrologium (21 June), p. 60; Vollständiges Heiligen-Lexikon, vol. i, pp. 96–9. Concerning Kilian, see Passio Kiliani, pp. 711–28; Wood, Missionary Life, pp. 160–1. Noble, Introduction to Emerton, Letters, p. xxvii; Reuter, ‘Boniface and Europe’, p. 79. Willibald, Vita Bonifatii, c. 8, pp. 52–3.

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After Boniface’s death to Fulda.14 Although we need to be careful in trusting Eigil’s account of the struggle over Boniface’s relics, which is strongly biased at the expense of Lull, it is plausible that the community of Mainz had diiculties handing over Boniface’s relics to Fulda, because of their personal link with the bishop and the beneits of possessing the relics of a real martyr. After Boniface’s burial in Fulda the monastery developed into the centre of a saint’s cult, though not without diiculties. Having originally been a community of prayer and asceticism, the monks had to consider how control over the saint’s relics would afect their way of life. After Lull and his clerics had carried the remains of Boniface to Fulda, the monks buried their founder’s body in the western part of the abbey church, opposite the altar of the Holy Saviour which stood in the eastern apse. The grave, discovered by Joseph Vonderau in 1929, lay along the central axis of the church, 2.6 metres from the western entrance that lay people used to enter the basilica (see Figure 4).15 It was at a respectful distance from the liturgical centre of the church and at irst rather sober. It was also within the immediate reach of pilgrims who wished to pray at the martyr’s grave. The entrance side of the church, ‘a location of penitential humility’, was an uncommon place to bury such an important person.16 Often patrons of religious communities lay near the high altar, their sepulchres enriched with luxuriously decorated superstructures. When Lull translated the body of Wigbert to Hersfeld in 780, he adorned his tomb with gold, silver and other precious metals as was customary ‘throughout Gaul and Germany’.17 When he died in 739, Willibrord was also buried right behind the altar of Echternach’s abbey church. Like Boniface, Willibrord himself had selected the place where he wanted his body to rest. The tomb had been excavated in the choir while the church was built under his supervision. Already around the middle of the eighth century, the monks of Echternach removed Willibrord’s body from the tomb and displayed it in a sarcophagus above the ground, but in the same place, directly behind the altar. A raised cenotaph on top of the stone casket made Willibrord’s tomb clearly visible.18 14

15 16

17

18

Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 16, pp. 149–50. Compare Willibald’s version:Willibald, Vita Bonifatii, c. 8, p. 54. See also Wood, Missionary Life, pp. 71–2; Kehl, Kult und Nachleben, pp. 19–26. Vonderau, Gründung Fulda, pp. 27–8. On the entrance, see Jacobsen, ‘Abteikirche Fulda’, p. 111. Pippin iii was also buried at the entrance of the church at St Denis. Louis the Pious wanted to be buried in a similar way. Jacobsen, ‘Abteikirche Fulda’, p. 111; Nelson, ‘Carolingian royal funerals’, pp. 131–84, with, at p. 141, the phrase ‘location of penitential humility’; Angenendt ‘In porticu’, pp. 68–80; Krüger, Königsgrabkirchen, pp. 495–6. ‘quo more per Gallias Germaniamque ceterorum sanctorum uisuntur.’ Lupus of Ferrières, Vita Wigberti, c. 25, p. 43; Crook, Architectural Setting, p. 252. Jacobsen, ‘Saints’ tombs’, 1131.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda Apart from relecting Boniface’s last wish, the soberness of Boniface’s grave might also indicate that Fulda wanted to stay a modest centre of prayer with restricted lay access, rather than becoming a popular pilgrimage centre like St Martin in Tours or St Denis near Paris had been in their early days. When these episcopal basilicas became monasteries around 660, access to their saints’ shrines was restricted.19 For monasteries, the presence of saints’ shrines was not only an advantage, but also a burden because of the low of pilgrims it attracted. How could they preserve their integrity against the polluting inluence of the secular world, when, for example, members of the opposite sex entered the monastery? What was more important, the needs of the laity seeking the closeness to the saint, or the requirements of monastic observance, which demanded the monks’ full attention and the peace and quiet to fulil the duties of the liturgy respectfully? A solution to this problem was to build a separate church to house the relics of the saint, which was accessible to laymen and women.20 In 789, Charlemagne would legislate that ‘where the bodies of saints rest there shall be another chapel where the monks can pray privately’.21 Although Fulda did not have a separate church, the result of burying Boniface near the western entrance was the same: Boniface’s sepulchre was far removed from the liturgical centre where the monks of Fulda spent a large part of their days in prayer. In the following years, this distance would slowly narrow, though the relationship between the abbey and the martyr remained complex. As long as Fulda was a monastery, the monks would struggle with the distracting presence of the pilgrims Boniface attracted, but little by little the martyr took hold of a prominent position in the community and its self-representations. When Sturmi returned in 765 from Jumièges, he changed the original simplicity of Boniface’s tomb, enriching it with a canopy (ciborium) made out of silver and gold and called a requiem by the monks.22 The abbot, or one of his successors, either Baugulf (779–802) or Ratger (802–817), also placed a golden altar at Boniface’s grave.23 The addition of the canopy shows the changing position of Boniface’s grave as a new focus within the church. It was the irst visual step towards developing the saint’s cult. It emphasised Boniface’s increasing meaning for the community of Fulda.The addition of an altar, necessary to celebrate mass, 19 20 21

22 23

Hahn, ‘Seeing and believing’, 1100; Smith, ‘Women at the tomb’, pp. 172, 175. Ibid., pp. 173–4. ‘Ut ubi corpora sanctorum requiescunt aliud oratorium habeatur, ubi fratres secrete possint orare.’ Duplex legationis edictum (23 March 789), MGH Cap. 1, p. 63. Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 21, p. 156. Both the canopy and the altar were still there when Eigil wrote his Vita Sturmi: c. 21, p. 156. From Eigil’s words it is not clear when the altar was added.

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After Boniface’s death would be another step. It is signiicant because it implies that the martyr’s grave had become integrated into the liturgical space of the church. The heart of the liturgy was still in the east, where the main altar stood, but Boniface’s tomb in the western part of the church had developed into a liturgical centre of its own. Archaeological inds by Joseph Vonderau and Heinrich Hahn endorse this viewpoint. When Vonderau carried out an excavation in the western part of the nave of the modern Dom in 1931, he discovered twelve wooden coins and loose human bones in the area directly to the west of Boniface’s (old) grave.24 Are they the remains of Fulda’s irst monastic cemetery? Possibly. Although the wood and bones have not been dated with the aid of modern techniques such as dendrochronology and radiocarbon dating, we know that Fulda’s second abbey church, built between 791 and 819, was constructed on top of this burial ground, which limits the date of the cemetery to the period before the late eighth century.25 The burials around the martyr’s tomb are therefore another indication of Boniface’s growing importance for the monastic community, possibly as early as during the days of Sturmi. More than forty years after Vonderau’s discoveries, Heinrich Hahn excavated – again in the western part of the present-day nave, though a bit more to the west of the early burials – foundations of ancient walls.26 Hahn believed that the remains once belonged to a pre-Bonifatian church, indicating that the inhabitants of the seventh-century villa rustica were Christians. It would have been a small hall church with a square choir, a type of church common in this area in late Merovingian times: the same kind of church we ind in, for example, Echternach, founded by Willibrord in 706 near Trier, and in Reichenau, built by another missionary, Pirmin, in 724 on an island in the Bodensee on the border of modern Germany and Switzerland.27 This type of church was still used in Saxony in Carolingian times.28 David Parsons has argued, however, that what Hahn has identiied to be an early church is in fact the remains of an atrium built around Boniface’s grave. This example of an early ‘westwerk’ would have served to house the pilgrims who came to honour Boniface.29 Again, there is too little evidence to determine exactly what kind of building we are dealing with and the purposes it might have 24 25 26

27 28 29

Vonderau, Gründung Fulda, cited in Krause, Ratgerbasilika, p. 206. Krause, Ratgerbasilika, inding V/3/4, p. 206. See also Plate 26 and Fig. xxiii and xxiv. Hahn, ‘Benediktuskrypta’, 49–117; Hahn, ‘Ostkrypta’, 42–91; Hahn, ‘Eihloha’, 57–62; Krause, Ratgerbasilika, indings H/3/1-H/3/38, pp. 228–38. Oswald et al. (eds.), Vorromanische Kirchenbauten, vol. i, pp. 65–6 and vol. iii, pp. 278–81. Lobbedey, ‘Kirchenbau im sächsischen Missionsgebiet’, pp. 498–511. Parsons, ‘Sites and monuments’, 298–306.

47

The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda had.30 Still, it is tempting to speculate that with Boniface’s growing importance a building was added to the west of his grave to ofer room for his cult to develop further, a predecessor of the western transept that was built in later times and to which Boniface’s body would be moved in 819. As there are no extant liturgical sources from this early period, it is diicult to reconstruct liturgical observances in Fulda in the eighth century and Boniface’s position in them. Without doubt, Boniface’s feast had been celebrated in Fulda from the start. Churches in England and the Frankish kingdom included his name in their calendars soon after Boniface’s death in 754, which meant that his anniversary became part of their annual cycle of feast days.31 It would have been no diferent in Fulda.32 On Boniface’s dies natalis the monks would have read a mass in the bishop’s honour. They probably used the general formulary of the Commune martyrum for it, until Boniface got his own mass around 800, written by no less a person than Alcuin.33 Initially the festivity must have taken place at the main altar, but as soon as Boniface received his own altar, the liturgical observance most likely moved there. An early ninthcentury source recalls how in the time of ‘our forefathers’ the monks used to gather every Monday at Boniface’s grave (iuxta corpus beati martyris) to remember the monastery’s benefactors.34 This practice may well have dated back to the abbacy of Sturmi. In retrospect, it seems as if Boniface’s growing importance for Fulda was inevitable; as if, literally from his grave, the martyr forced his cult on the community. That was, of course, not the way it worked. Developing a cult was a deliberate undertaking, which required careful organisation and direction by the community that looked after the saint’s remembrance. With no community including the name of the saint in its calendar and prayers and with no veneration by the faithful to nourish a saint’s popularity, a cult was doomed to disappear. Boniface’s growing importance for Fulda was partly fostered by external factors such as the foundation of new monasteries in the neighbourhood. In 764, a powerful landowning family in the Middle Rhine founded the abbey of Lorsch. The new monastery lay in an area where most of Fulda’s initial benefactors came from. Soon after its foundation, the founders handed Lorsch over to their relative, Chrodegang, bishop of Metz (747–766) and, like Boniface, a papal legate and inluential church 30 31 32

33 34

Krause, Ratgerbasilika, pp. 228–38. Kehl, Kult und Nachleben, pp. 51–5, 77–80. Fulda’s oldest calendar, Codex Sangallensis 878, includes Boniface’s anniversary. It was composed in 827–829, but most likely relects an earlier situation. Heyne, Studien, pp. 55–64. Alcuin, Epistolae, No. 250, p. 405; Kehl, Kult und Nachleben, p. 32. SL, c. 1, p. 321.

48

After Boniface’s death reformer. Chrodegang made Lorsch an instant threat to Fulda’s wealth and status by providing his abbey with the body of Nazarius, a Roman martyr. The presence of Nazarius attracted a wave of pious gifts: during the irst ive years of its existence, Lorsch received over a hundred donations of land each year, while the number of benefactions to Fulda was only gradually increasing.35 Lorsch’s success demanded a response, and the enrichment of Boniface’s grave was Fulda’s reply. If the monks of Fulda had not yet realised the importance of possessing a saint like Boniface, Chrodegang’s strategy of launching a new cult-site certainly woke them up. Next to the changing architectural setting of Boniface’s cult, the provisions of the charters also show the martyr’s growing prominence in Fulda. Boniface became the prominent representative of the monastery, though it took a while before he would replace the Holy Saviour as patron saint.36 There are only three original charters still extant from the period from the 750s to the 770s, all royal diplomas.37 The rest – private, royal and papal charters – survive in a ninth-century cartulary, an early tenth-century rotulus that contains all important royal grants up to the 920s, some separate copies of individual charters and, inally, the twelfth-century Codex Eberhardi.38 The latter was written in the 1160s to defend Fulda’s property and rights against claims of secular and ecclesiastical powers, and included older material now lost to us. Even though Eberhard, the composer of the codex, often abbreviated the text of the charters and omitted lists of witnesses and the dates of the documents, he seems to have reproduced the provision of the charters verbatim.39 Likewise, the composers of Fulda’s ninth-century cartulary seem to have copied the provision of their examples faithfully.40 The monastery’s early charters refer to Boniface as founder of Fulda and to Fulda’s position as the location of Boniface’s burial and cult.41 A charter from the 760s describes Fulda as: ‘the monastery that is called Fulda, which is built in honour of the Holy Saviour, which the holy Boniface built from scratch, and where the precious martyr himself rests with his body.’42 In the following years, Fulda is also identiied as ‘the 35 37

38

39 40 42

Innes, State and Society, pp. 18–19. 36 Kehl, Kult und Nachleben, pp. 39–43. Donation of Deiningen by Pippin (760), of Umstadt again by Pippin (766) and of Hünfeld to Fulda by Charlemagne (777). UBF, Nos. 34, 43, 77, pp. 59–63, 74–6, 140–7. For short descriptions of these sources, see Stengel, UBF, p. xvii and Gugel, Handschriften, ii, pp. 17, 21, 30–1. See below, Chapter 6. Stengel, UBF, pp. xxv–xxxv; Codex Eberhardi, vols. i and ii. See below, pp. 202–3. 41 UBF, Nos. 22–6, pp. 43–51. ‘(ad) monastirio noncupante Fulda, qui est constructus in honoure sancti salvatoris, quem sanctus Bonefatius a novo construxit opere, ubi ipse praeciosus martyr corpore requie[scit].’ UBF, No. 34, p. 61.

49

The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda monastery of St Boniface’, although it is still also called ‘the monastery of the Holy Saviour’ or simply ‘the monastery Fulda’.43 The charter material thus shows that when the monks of Fulda had to name their community to the outside world they chose more and more often to single out Boniface as a symbol of their community, irst as founder of Fulda and later as the martyr-saint who was buried in the monastery. In the following decades, the image of Boniface as a historical igure who had built Fulda would recede into the background.44 A royal abb ey Apart from developing into a cult centre, it was also under Sturmi’s abbacy that Fulda became a royal abbey.45 Becoming a royal abbey was often a long, complex process in which the royal family, in competition with other powerful aristocratic clans, tried to exert greater inluence over monasteries, and monasteries in their turn sought the protection of secular lords.46 It is diicult to narrow this process down to one particular event. In the case of Fulda, there are several moments in history that qualify as determinants in this respect. The irst is the above-mentioned grant by Carloman around 743, which marked the beginning of the relationship between Fulda and the Carolingians, then still holding the oice of mayor of the palace, but already a very powerful family whose patronage was much sought after. There is no charter to ascertain the contents of this gift, but, as said above, the Vita Sturmi described the transaction, for which Eigil may have used an original charter, if there was one.47 According to the vita, Boniface had asked Carloman for the piece of land in Eihloha to found Fulda, ‘so that under your protection [defensio] we may serve Christ there’. In the mid 760s Pippin seized the opportunity of the struggle for power between the monks of Fulda and the bishop of Mainz to further tie the monastery to the fate of his family. Pippin interfered and placed the abbey under his immediate protection (defensio). From now on Fulda 43

44

45

46 47

‘monasterium sancti Bonifatii’: UBF, Nos. 25, 37–8, 44, 48–50, 52, 55–6, 58, 63–4, 66, 70–1, 73, 75–6, 80–1, pp. 48–50, 63–6, 76–8, 81–8, 90–3, 100–1, 110–15, 126–8, 130–9, 148–50. ‘Monasterium sancti salvatoris et sancti Bonifatii martyris Christi’: UBF, Nos. 33, 61, pp. 58, 103–4. ‘Monasterium Fulda’: UBF, Nos. 51, 53, pp. 85–6, 88–9. Although a papal privilege of 27 March 943 again refers to Boniface’s role in Fulda’s foundation: ‘monasterium salvatoris a sancto Bonifatio primitus constructum.’ CDF, No. 685, p. 318. For Fulda as a royal abbey, see Wehlt, Reichsabtei; Hussong, ‘Fulda’, i, 1–225 and ii, 129–304; Schiefer, ‘Fulda’, pp. 39–55; Stengel, ‘Reichsabtei Fulda’, pp. 1–26; Hen, Royal Patronage, pp. 89–94; Corradini, ‘Zeiträume’, pp. 116–18. Semmler, ‘Traditio und Königsschutz’, 1–33; Bernhardt, Itinerant Kingship, pp. 70–5. See Chapter 1.

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After Boniface’s death should turn to him only, the king, in case of future claims by third parties and for protection, a decisive step in the process of becoming a royal abbey.48 The royal protection was not laid down in a charter, but, just like Carloman’s grant, is transmitted through the Vita Sturmi. I quote the relevant passage in full, for it contains some interesting information with regard to the relation between the royal protection and the papal exemption that Fulda possessed since 751: After a little while the king ordered Sturmi to come to him and commanded him to rule the monastery, which he held earlier. He ordered him to return with all honour to the monastery of Fulda, which was released from the dominion of Bishop Lull, and to govern the monastery with the privilege that blessed Pope Zachary, the supreme pontif of the apostolic see, had formerly granted to the holy Boniface. The brethren keep this privilege in the monastery to this day. He [also] ordered that the well-being and the defence [defensio] of the monastery are in the hands of no one other than the king. After having received the power from the king together with the above mentioned privilege, which he accepted from the hands of the king, Sturmi returned to the monastery.49

The passage is signiicant for several reasons.To start with, the Vita Sturmi suggests that Pippin had taken away the exemption charter when he sent Sturmi into exile in 763 and placed Fulda under the jurisdiction of Lull. Without the physical evidence of the agreement the monastery was unable to defend itself against the intrusion of the bishop. For the interpretation of this event, it is important that Eigil explicitly states that Sturmi received the papal exemption from the hands of the king. The king thereby acknowledged the validity of the privilege; he had kept it instead of destroying it and ordered Sturmi to rule his monastery accordingly. In addition, it was thus the king who took control and determined that Fulda was allowed a papal exemption, with the addition that it was he, the king, who was the monastery’s sole protector. Papal exemption and royal protection were thus combined; the king from now on protected the monastery, including the observance of the papal exemption.

48

49

Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 20, p. 155. Hussong, ‘Fulda’, i, 100–8. See also Rosenwein, Negotiating Space, pp. 99–101, 109–12; Le Jan, ‘Convents, violence and competition’, pp. 243–69. ‘Post non multum temporis spatium rex vocari ad se Sturmen iussit eique monasterium Fuldae quod prius habuit ad regendum commendavit, absolutumque ab omni dominio Lulli episcopi ad coenobium Fuldae eum cum omni honore ire praecepit, ut cum suo privilegio, quod beatus Zacharias papa summus apostolicae sedis pontifex dudum sancto tradidit Bonifatio, monasterium regeret, quod privilegium usque hodie in monasterio fratres conservatum habent; quod etiam causam suam et monasterii defensionem a nullo alio quaereret nisi a rege imperavit. Accepta a domino rege potestate, cum privilegio supradicto quod de manu regis acceperat, ad suum perrexit coenobium.’ Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 20, p. 155 (Würzburg manuscript).

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda Whether or not Eigil painted the events of 763–765 precisely as they had happened, his reading of this episode from Fulda’s past seems to have corresponded with reality, demonstrating an increasing royal control over and involvement in, monastic business. It is likely that the king indeed both acknowledged the papal exemption and took control of the monastery by placing it under his protection.50 When in the late eighth century the bishop of Würzburg threatened to violate the freedom granted by the papal exemption, it was a meeting of bishops under the chairmanship of the king (in praesentia Caroli et episcoporum in synodo) that passed judgement and protected Fulda’s interests.51 The union between Fulda and the king was further developed under Pippin’s son, Charlemagne. When Charlemagne succeeded his father in 768, the involvement of the Carolingians with afairs in Fulda became stronger. The new king put much efort into tying the local centres of power, including the monasteries, to the royal court.52 As it was one of Charlemagne’s aims to conquer and convert the Saxons, the king took especially great interest in the regions bordering on Saxony, namely Hesse and Thuringia. By granting immunities to Fulda (774), Lorsch (772), Hersfeld (775), Fritzlar (at the latest in 782) and presumably Amöneburg, Charlemagne put all important monasteries on the north-eastern periphery of his kingdom under his control.53 The original charter of Fulda’s immunity no longer exists, but the original conirmation of the immunity by King Maximilian I (1494) does and the text of the charter is transmitted through the Codex Eberhardi.54 Summarised, the contents of the immunity were as follows: no lay oicials, apart from missi, special royal inspectors, and the king himself, were allowed to set foot in the monastery or the villae subordinate to Fulda, or to call on its hospitality and supplies. Any claims that might be brought against the monastery were to be judged by the royal court, and the monks were to appeal to the king in case of conlicts.55 As we will see, both the Carolingian rulers and the monks of Fulda would refer to these rights repeatedly. Together with the immunity, the king granted the monastery the right to elect its own abbot. The monks were allowed to choose their abbot from their own ranks, as long as they followed the regula sancta (the Rule of Benedict), maintained discipline and were faithful to the king. The 50

51 52 53 54 55

Compare with the privilege of Salonnes, elaborated on by Rosenwein, Negotiating Space, pp. 115–34. Epist. Fuld. fragm., p. 528. Hussong, ‘Fulda’, i, 146–8. Innes, State and Society, pp. 180–8. Semmler, ‘Fränkische Mönchtum’, p. 271; Hussong, ‘Fulda’, i, 104–8, with further references. UBF, No. 68, p. 121. Ibid., pp. 121–5; Hussong, ‘Fulda’, i, 111; Rosenwein, Negotiating Space, pp. 99–134.

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After Boniface’s death king nevertheless stayed in control, for it was he who had to conirm the election.56 In practice, he also had the right to depose an abbot.57 Being a royal abbey meant that in exchange for protection, immunity, wealth and status, the monks of Fulda were bound to the servitium regis. This term covers all the payments and services that a royal abbey had to render to the king and court. This was not a static set of demands imposed by all the Carolingian kings on their monasteries to an equal extent, but something that was negotiated and changed over time. The services performed by monasteries or their representatives on behalf of the king and the court included: the obligation of hospitality for the king and his oicers, the missi, when they called in at monasteries or monastic estates during their travels; annual payments in kind (sometimes in money); the duty to assist the ruler through the provision of advice or diplomatic service; and the obligation to pray for the salvation of the king, his wife, children and the people subordinate to him and for the well-being of his kingdom. The most rich and powerful monasteries also had to provide military contingents for the king’s army.58 Additionally, everything that the monastery owned was part of the royal possessions (proprietas dominicalis).59 This did not mean that the Frankish ruler plundered the monastic resources whenever he felt the need. On the contrary, Fulda received some of its most important landholdings from the Carolingians: Deiningen (760), Umstadt (765) and Hammelburg (777), all powerful centres of economic activity on which the monastery relied heavily for its income and inluence.60 As a royal abbey, Fulda was drawn into the Carolingian policy of expansion and consolidation of the Carolingian rule in the Frankish Empire. Monasteries like Fulda played a crucial role in the programme of correction and emendation of the Frankish church, orchestrated by the royal court. Royal responsibility for the salvation of the people subordinate to him and the condition of the Christian church in Francia was one of the hallmarks of Carolingian kingship. Anointed by the grace of God, the king should see to it that the laws of the Lord were observed within his kingdom. Charlemagne dedicated himself to providing instruction to the Frankish people in the Christian faith, education of the clergy, correction 56 57 58

59

60

UBF, No. 67, p. 120; Hussong, ‘Fulda’, i, 104, 149–50. See below, pp. 130, 268–70. Notitia de servitio monasteriorum, pp. 483–99. See also Bernhardt, Itinerant Kingship, pp. 75–84; Hussong, ‘Fulda’, ii, 276–304. See the letter of Hrabanus Maurus to Archbishop Otgar of Mainz of 830: ‘proprietas dominicalis, quae domino imperatori ex paterna successione haereditario iure prouenit.’ Epist. Fuld. fragm., No. 10, p. 520; Semmler, ‘Anfänge’, 182. MGH DD Kar. 1, Nos. 13, 21, 63, 106, 127, 139, 140, 145, pp. 18–19, 30–1, 91–3, 150–1, 176–8, 189–91, 196–7.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda of the abuses within the Frankish church and the establishment of a ecclesiastical hierarchy. To put his plans into efect, the Carolingian king used monasteries. Monasteries were the ideal suppliers of personnel to teach the Frankish people and a rich source of learning for the instruction of the clerics. Charlemagne expected of the monasteries and bishoprics entrusted to him that the monks, nuns and clergy were not only zealous in their duty to observe the religious life, to which they had vowed, but that they also applied themselves to learning and literacy. To the king it was important that apart from living an exemplary life of holiness, monks also mastered the language of the Holy Scripture, for God turned a deaf ear to prayers said in incorrect Latin. Badly copied texts not only displeased God but could also encourage doctrinal errors.61 Under the patronage of the Frankish ruler, who created a climate in which learning could prosper, and thanks to the eforts of the abbots of the monastery, Fulda would become an important centre of intellectual activity and cultural productivity. In the days of Sturmi, Fulda was not yet the lourishing centre of scholarship it would become in the irst half of the ninth century. Nonetheless, it was during Sturmi’s abbacy that Fulda established a scriptorium and the monks started the Annales necrologici (Annals of the Dead) and the Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi (Fulda’s Oldest Annals).Whereas the Annales necrologici listed the names of deceased monks, the Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi represented a special form of history writing, recorded in the margins of Easter Tables, that focused on events relating to Fulda and the royal court. Both texts were continued over a longer period: the Annales necrologici until 1065, the Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi until 822, which shows that Fulda had the means and organisation to keep the written records up to date. Relecting a strong interest in chronology and history, they embedded Fulda’s past in a framework that transcended the conines of the monastery, both literally and spiritually. Their primary purposes were commemoration and record-keeping, but they also aimed to deine the community of Fulda. The Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi position the monastery in relation to the success story of the Carolingians. Besides events relating to Fulda itself, they speciically include happenings concerning the royal court, which indicates the importance of being a royal abbey for Fulda’s perception of its position within society. The Annales 61

Epistola de litteris colendis, MGH Cap. i, No. 29, pp. 78–9; Admonitio generalis, MGH Cap. i, No. 22, pp. 52–62. For the role of monasteries in the Carolingian programme of correctio, see: De Jong, ‘Kloosterscholen’, pp. 57–85; De Jong, ‘Carolingian monasticism’, pp. 622–53. More generally on the ‘Carolingian Renaissance’: Brown, ‘Carolingian Renaissance’, pp. 1–51; McKitterick, Written Word; McKitterick, Frankish Church; Contreni, ‘Carolingian Renaissance’, pp. 709–57, 1013–25; Contreni (ed.), Carolingian Learning; Riché, Écoles.

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After Boniface’s death necrologici, however, deliberately exclude the social world of which Fulda was part; it was mainly monks of Fulda who found their way into the lists. Both texts thus ofer a picture of Fulda, but each one from a diferent angle. Writing F ul da’s past Some time between 750 and 778, a manual to determine the date of Easter arrived in Fulda. The manuscript contained Bede’s De temporum ratione (a treatise on time and methods of dating) and his Easter Tables. Easter Tables are liturgical manuals in which priests could easily look up when to celebrate Easter, a moveable feast that takes place after the irst full moon after the vernal equinox (when day and night are equal in length). Its celebration is rooted in Jewish tradition, which has a lunar calendar.Yet, the Christian church followed the Julian calendar, which it had adopted from the Romans and which is based on the cycle of the sun. Therefore, to ix the date of Easter, clerics had to assess the movements of both the moon and the sun. The tables spared them the trouble of this complicated calculation.62 Because various methods and cycles were used to calculate the conjunction of the sun and the moon, one could never be sure that Easter was celebrated on the correct and same day throughout the whole of Christendom.To solve this problem, Christian scholars such as Dionysius Exiguus, who lived in Rome at the beginning of the sixth century, computed the dates in advance and put these into Easter Tables. To structure the progression of time, Dionysius structured the tables according to the year of the birth of Christ (annus Domini), a special way of dating full of symbolism, to which I shall return shortly. He furthermore started from the idea that each moon cycle took nineteen years, a novelty in time reckoning in those days.63 By the second half of the seventh century, Dionysius’ method of calculating Easter was accepted both in England and on the Continent.The Anglo-Saxon scholar Bede (675–735) adopted Dionysius’ use of the year of the birth of Christ and the nineteen-year cycle for the calculation of Easter in his own work.64 It may have been through Boniface or Lull, whom we know to have asked the communities of York and Wearmouth for copies of Bede’s computistic work, that a 62 63 64

McKitterick, History and Memory, pp. 90–4; Corradini, ‘Zeiträume’, pp. 119–31. Krusch, Chronologie, pp. 59–87. McKitterick warns us not to overestimate the Anglo-Saxon inluence in spreading the use of AD-years. The Franks became familiar with Bede's dating system also directly through the work of Dionysius Exiguus: History and Memory, p. 93.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda manuscript with his Easter Tables (covering the period 532–778) arrived in Fulda in the third quarter of the eighth century.65 In the margins of these Easter Tables, someone, presumably a monk of Lindisfarne or Wearmouth-Jarrow, had added the deaths of Roman emperors and had inscribed particular events relating to Northumbria, where Lindisfarne is situated, near the year in which they had happened.66 These concerned primarily the accession or burials of Northumbrian kings. In the nineteenth century the German historian Georg Pertz, one of the editors of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, edited these marginal notes as part of the Annales Corbeienses (the Annals of Corvey), the book to which the folios carrying these tables and glosses were added in the twelfth century at Corvey.67 Together with other marginal notes of similar content in other Easter Tables, these notae, which contain information about the history of early Anglo-Saxon England ‘not found in any other source, not even in Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum’, were part of a tradition of history writing that has also been labelled the ‘Frankish annals of Lindisfarne and Kent’.68 In Fulda, the monks copied and continued the example of their Anglo-Saxon colleague. They added another section of Easter Tables to the manuscript for the period 779–1063.69 Before the end of 779, the manuscript left Fulda, but not before the same Fulda monk who had extended the Anglo-Saxon notes had made a copy of the tables and their annalistic additions. This copy stayed in the monastery. The scribe supplemented the Anglo-Saxon glosses with entries concerning the history of his own monastery and that of the Frankish dynasty. The conversion of the Saxons in 776 is the last event that the monk recorded. His work was continued by eight other scribes until 822. Their notes were not spontaneous, ad hoc responses to important events, but were made at intervals of some years.70 Following their Northumbrian model, the monks recorded events related to both their own community and the royal court in the margins of the tables. These included the foundation of the monastery in 744, 65 66

67 68 69

70

Boniface, Epistolae, No. 76, pp. 158–9. Corradini, ‘Rhetoric of crisis’, p. 281. Münster, Nordrhein-Westfälisches Staatsarchiv Msc. i, 243, originally fols. 1r–8v, now fols. 1r–2v, 11r–12v; CLA, ix, No. 1233. See, for a careful description and analysis, Corradini, ‘Zeiträume’, p. 130; Corradini,‘Rhetoric of crisis’, pp. 130–1; Freise, Geschichtsschreibung, pp. 16–66.The catalogue of Roman emperors has been edited as: Adnotationes antiquiores ad cyclos Dionysianos, pp. 715–56. Joanna Story has made the case for Wearmouth-Jarrow. See: ‘Frankish Annals’, 59–109, at 61–4. Annales Corbeiensis, pp. 1–18; Story, ‘Frankish Annals’, 59. Story, ‘Frankish Annals’, 59, with references to the relevant editions. Münster, Nordrhein-Westfälisches Staatsarchiv Msc. i, 243, originally fols. 9r–16r, now fols. 3r–10r. Corradini, ‘Zeiträume’, p. 132. For example, after 794, 814 and 822. Freise, Geschichtsschreibung, p. 49.

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After Boniface’s death the martyrdom of Boniface in 754 and the beginning of the building of a new abbey church in 791, as well as the death of Pippin in 768, the coronation of Charlemagne as emperor in 800 and the visits of the pope to Francia.71 By writing these events down, they made them part of Fulda’s collective memory. Apparently, the monks did not think it was only worthwhile to remember what happened at Fulda, but considered the success story of the Carolingians, their victories over the Longobards and their connections with Rome, as just as relevant for their existence. The visits of the popes to Francia seem to have been recorded not because of a direct interest in Rome on the part of Fulda but because of the collaboration of the Apostolic See with the Frankish court that culminated in the coronation of Charlemagne in St Peter’s in 800. Apart from the contacts between the Carolingians and the pope there are no events relating to Rome, no deaths of popes for example, included in the Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi. The notes thus formed a particular version of the past that in the irst place tied Fulda to the centre of the Frankish kingdom. Events such as the death of Carloman, who donated the land on which Fulda was built, in 754, or Sturmi’s exile were not included. The historical events, to which the notae referred, were not chosen at random. They concerned special moments from Fulda’s own past and that of the royal family. The aim of these historical notes was to construct a history that closely tied the fate of the monastery to that of the Carolingians and to connect their past to salvation history.72 First through the insertion of certain historical events in the Easter Tables, which were aimed at facilitating Christianity’s most important feast, the monks tied their past to the commemoration of the Saviour’s Passion. Second, Fulda’s past was embedded in salvation history by particularly linking it to the organising principle of the Easter Tables.The tables were arranged according to the year of the birth of Christ, Anno (ab incarnatione) Domini. This was also the structure of the annalistic notes. In the early Middle Ages, Jewish, Roman and early Christian systems of chronology co-existed. Classical writers had structured their narratives according to generations of rulers (a dating system closely tied to political systems), indictions (periods of ifteen years linked to the Roman system of taxation) or reckoned from the foundation of Rome. To this variety of chronologies, the Christians had added the cycle of the liturgical year,

71

72

Of the Münster manuscript, one page is now missing. Therefore the historical notes for the years 741–759 and 760–778 are absent. Corradini, ‘Zeiträume’, p. 131; Corradini, ‘Rhetoric of crisis’, pp. 281–2. Corradini, ‘Zeiträume’, pp. 162–3; Corradini, ‘Rhetoric of crisis’, p. 303. Compare Freise, Geschichtsschreibung, p. 66; Freise, ‘Geburtsjahr Hrabanus’, pp. 18–74.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda based on the life of Christ, with Christmas and Easter as its most important feasts. In addition, they divided time into six periods. Since Creation, ive periods had passed, and after the sixth, Christ would come to bring the Last Judgement. Christ marked the beginning of the last era before the End of Times. To structure the passage of time in the sexta aetas some Christian scholars reckoned from the Passion of Christ, others (among them Dionysius Exiguus and Bede) from his birth.73 During the reign of the Carolingians, it became more common to name the years after the Incarnation of Christ, but it took a while before the reckoning of Anno Domini had replaced other systems of chronology.74 To people in the early Middle Ages, this form of structuring time and recording the past explicitly linked the present to the sexta aetas.75 By recording how many years had passed between the birth of Christ and events that concerned their own community they positioned themselves in salvation history. Similarly, the monks of Fulda oriented important events of local and royal history in relation to the Incarnation of Christ. Their historical notes in the Easter Tables bridged temporal time and eternal time, the historia profana and the sacra historia, Fulda’s past and the eschatological future of the Heavenly Jerusalem.76 Unity through ti m e In the course of time, Fulda scribes made several copies of the Easter Tables, of which three are still extant: one is in Vienna, another in Kassel and the third in Munich.77 Their textual development and transmission are very complex.78 No manuscript is an exact copy of the other or of the Anglo-Saxon exemplar. In the nineteenth century, Friedrich Kurze edited all the entries in the margins of the Fulda tables of Fulda origin together as the Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi.79 For the sake of clarity, I will also use this term, but we need to be aware that we are actually 73

74

75

76 77

78 79

McKitterick, ‘Constructing the past’, 101–29; Innes and McKitterick, ‘The writing of history’, pp. 194–7. Mauskopf Deliyannis, ‘Year-dates’, p. 7; DeClercq, Anno Domini; Markus, ‘Sight of the end’, pp. 23–34. Innes and McKitterick, ‘The writing of history’, p. 198; Mauskopf Deliyannis, ‘Year-dates’, pp. 10–13; DeClercq, Anno Domini, pp. 149–88. McKitterick, ‘Constructing the past’, 101–29; Innes and McKitterick, ‘The writing of history’, pp. 193–220; McCormick, Annales. Corradini, ‘Zeiträume’, pp. 162–3. Vienna, ÖNB Cvp 460 (ii), binio (late eighth, early ninth century); Kassel, Hessische Landesbibliothek & Murhardsche Bibliothek (Gesamthochschulbibliothek) 2º ms. astron. 2, fols. 1r–8v (beginning of the ninth century); and Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 14641, fols. 32r–46v/47r (late eighth century); CLA, ix, No. 1306. Corradini, ‘Zeiträume’, pp. 133–4. Ibid., p. 113–63, for a detailed analysis. MGH SRG 7, pp. 136–8.

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After Boniface’s death talking about a complex tradition of several manuscripts, each with its own context. The Munich manuscript, started around 779, contains Easter Tables (for the period 532–1063), the Annales Lindisfarnenses, the Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi (741/2–822) and the catalogue of Roman emperors.80 This is important, because it shows that the manuscript did not have a purely liturgical function. Had the monks only used the tables to determine the date of Easter, they would have omitted the older ones that were no longer valid and usable, including the Anglo-Saxon notes in the margins. Moreover, it suggests that the Fulda monks considered their past to be in keeping with the history of the Roman Empire and Northumbria in the seventh century. The strict separation that the later editors of the Adnotationes antiquiores ad cyclos Dionysianos, the Annales Lindisfarnenses and Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi created was apparently not relevant to them. Compared to the former manuscript, the Vienna manuscript, which was composed in the same period as the Munich one, seems to have had a more practical goal and audience. Its composers were only concerned with Fulda’s past and left out the Anglo-Saxon annals. The Easter Tables cover the period 741–854. In the right margin, scribes included annalistic notes relating to Fulda; in the left margin, someone added personal glosses. Because the manuscript is severely damaged, we can only read some of them. These include the birth of Hrabanus Maurus (ad 780) and the ordination of a certain Gerart (ad 781).81 The events recorded were not an oicial redaction of Fulda’s past, as they did not concern the whole monastery. They were a private initiative, only relevant to a small group of monks and presumably connected to the later abbot Hrabanus Maurus (822–842).82 The glosses are therefore an exceptional witness to the existence of particular groups within Fulda. Moreover, they show that while the continuation with the Roman and Anglo-Saxon past might be of great signiicance in an oicial redaction of the Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi and representation of Fulda, these links were not necessarily relevant to all monks of Fulda at all times. Both the Munich and Vienna copies of the Easter Tables with annalistic notes seem to have been used in a liturgical context. The Munich copy, originally a loose fascicle, was later bound together with letters of 80

81 82

There existed two redactions of the Frankish Annals of Lindisfarne and Kent. The redaction that focused solely on events relating to Northumbria was used in the manuscripts associated with Fulda. Therefore, when I talk about the Anglo-Saxon glosses in the Easter Tables that preceded the AFa, I refer to them as the Annales Lindisfarnenses. Corradini, ‘Rhetoric of crisis’, pp. 290–2. Corradini, ‘Zeiträume’, p. 149.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda Pliny, Jerome and Gregory the Great, Einhard’s epitaph for Charlemagne and Ambrose’s De oiciis.83 The Vienna copy, now a severely damaged binion, was probably once part of a liturgical miscellany.84 Of the Kassel manuscript, we know that after the Easter Tables with annalistic notes were composed, they were bound together with Bede’s De temporum ratione. The manuscript was a textbook presumably used by Hrabanus Maurus when he still was the head of Fulda’s monastic school. Here the tables had a pedagogic function.85 Like the Munich manuscript, the Kassel manuscript included besides the Easter Tables both the Annales Lindisfarnensis (for the period 651–735/742) and the Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi (until 814).86 Where they overlap (the period 742–814), all three manuscripts include the same events, though their redaction and wording difers.Whereas the Vienna manuscript, for example, records at the year 795 AD Quando sedebat Karolus rex ad Eresburg (‘When king Charles stayed at the Eresburg’), the Munich manuscript reads Karlus sedebat apud Eresburg (‘Charles stayed near the Eresburg’) and the scribe of the Kassel manuscript wrote down Karlus rex sedit ad Eresburg (‘King Charles has stayed at the Eresburg’).87 Moreover, some events are dated diferently.The Vienna manuscript dates the selection of Ratger as abbot of Fulda in 802, the Munich manuscript places it in 803 and the Kassel manuscript again in 802.88 A probable explanation for these diferences is that they were kept up to date in diferent places. A note on the last page of the Kassel manuscript indeed suggests that this manuscript was used by the monks who lived in the monastery’s dependency dedicated to St Mary on Frauenberg (also known as Bischofsberg), just to the north of Fulda. It reads: ‘When it is the second ferial (Monday) let all come together in the basilica of St Mary on the mountain where the meeting of the faithful takes place’.89 Perhaps each major dependency of Fulda once owned its own copy of the Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi.This would make sense considering the extent of the monastery. The majority of Fulda’s monks lived outside the mother convent, taking care of the property of the abbey. Thus, next to the practical function of the Easter Tables, the Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi could have been a medium to tie this dispersed 83 84 85 86 87 88 89

Ibid., p. 135, n. 151; Freise, Geschichtsschreibung, p. 50. Corradini, ‘Zeiträume’, p. 138. Ibid., p. 138–40; Corradini, ‘Rhetoric of crisis’, p. 278–80; Spilling, ‘Frühe Phase’, pp. 258–60. Corradini, ‘Zeiträume’, pp. 138–40. AFa a. 795, p. 138; Corradini, ‘Zeiträume’, p. 147. AFa a. 802, p. 138; Corradini, ‘Zeiträume’, p. 150. (F(e)r(ia) II veniente statio erit in basilica sanctae Mariae in Monte,omnes convenite).Corradini,‘Zeiträume’, p. 161. Compare Freise, Geschichtsschreibung, p. 63, footnote 614.

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After Boniface’s death community to the mother convent and to create a self-image that overcame the geographical distance at which most of monks lived. Notwithstanding the variations in the three copies of the Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi, the basic information was the same. Whatever the other possible purposes, what they had in common was that they were part of establishing an agreed version of Fulda’s past and with this a sense of community. Moreover, they brought unity in the monastery’s perception of time by introducing Anno Domini dating into the monastery’s precincts.90 ANNALES NECROLOGICI

In the last quarter of the eighth century, around the same time a new edition of the Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi was made, the monks started the Annales necrologici: commemorative registers in which the monks listed the names of their deceased brethren according to the year of death.91 The monks, at least in late medieval times, called it the Liber mortuorum fratrum monasteriorum.92 They continued the lists until 1065, when they seem to have switched to necrologies, another form of memoria, which organises the community of deceased according to the date, not the year, of death and thus is structured like a calendar.93 As with the Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi, several copies of the Annales necrologici existed, of which ive fragments are still extant. Two fragments are now in Rome, bound together in the same manuscript. One was composed around 875 and continued until the late tenth century (the edition by Karl Schmid et al. refers to this text as fragment I).94 It contains the names of monks who died between 779 and 980. The other one was initiated around 1023 (fragment IV).95 It holds the names of those who died between 971 and 1065.Two other fragments remained in Fulda. One of them (fragment II) was written at the beginning of the tenth century and continued, with intervals, until 997.96 It lists the names of those who died between 779 and 920, and between 967 and 997. The other section (fragment III) was started in the last quarter of the tenth century, running from 946 to 976.97 Finally, the ifth fragment, now in Munich, dates 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97

Corradini, ‘Rhetoric of crisis’, p. 296. Oexle, ‘Memorialüberlieferung’, p. 145; Schmid, ‘Anfängen’, pp. 132–3. Fulda, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Hs. B 1, fol. 1r. Oexle, ‘Überlieferung’, p. 467. Wollasch, ‘Die Necrologien’, pp. 931–8. Rome, BAV, Otto. Lat. 2531, fols. 6v–29v. Ibid., fols. 30r–38v. Fulda, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Hs. B 1, fols. 6r–21v. Ibid., fols. 22r–24r.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda from 923 to 937 and is transmitted to us in a sixteenth-century copy by Conrad Peutinger.98 Here we ind the names of those who passed away between 779 and 793 and between 862/3 and 890.99 In the past, scholars believed that the monks of Fulda started to write down the names of their dead in the Annales necrologici as soon as the irst monk of their community had died, and that these lists, recording the names of all the brethren who had died since the foundation of Fulda in 744, have not survived the ravages of time.100 There is no evidence for this, however, and it seems more likely that this particular way of recording the dead was set up only at the end of Sturmi’s abbacy, possibly even after the abbot’s death. All three copies that go back the furthest in time start with the year ‘779’, mentioned in a heading that chronicles Sturmi’s death. This heading is followed by a list of Sturmi’s successors (its length depending on how much time had passed since Sturmi’s death in 779 and before the date of composition of the manuscript in question101) and a list of monks. This list forms the beginning of the Annales necrologici, which then continues with the year ‘780’ and so forth.We do not know if all the monks enumerated on this irst small list, containing some twenty names, died in 779.102 We only know that they had died before ‘780’, the next year-entry in the Annales necrologici, and, as the sixteenth-century copy also records their dates of death, that they died in the months February to July, apart from the last two entries. Some of them may have died before 779, but all of them had died before Sturmi’s death in December 779. What matters, however, is that only at the end of Sturmi’s abbacy, possibly only after his death, the monks of Fulda started systematically to record their dead and to write down their names in the particular format of the Annales necrologici. The extant copies of the Annales necrologici are very similar to each other.They start with the name of the irst abbot of Fulda, Sturmi, marked in red ink, and, as explained above, a list of his successors. All manuscripts indicate the AD-years in red ink and organise the names of the dead monks in two or three columns per page. Yet, the fragments also difer between each other, especially after the year 875, which would mean that they were kept up to date at diferent places and/or by diferent 98

Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 4012, fols. 1r–4v. For an extensive description of the manuscripts, see Oexle, ‘Überlieferung’ pp. 458–85. 100 Dronke, TAF, p. xv; for further references, see Oexle, ‘Überlieferung’, p. 482, footnote 211. 101 Rome, BAV, Otto. Lat. 2531, fol. 6v lists the abbots of Fulda from Sturmi until Thioto (d. 871), Fulda, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Hs. B 1, fol. 5v from Sturmi until Ercanbald (d. 1021), Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 4012, fol. 1r from Sturmi until Haicho (d. 923). 102 Otto. Lat. 2531 holds twenty names, Fulda B 1 and Clm 4012 omit one name but are further the same (same names, same order, only sometimes diferent spelling). 99

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After Boniface’s death

Figure 2 Annales necrologici, a. 779–783, preceded by a list of abbots. Rome, BAV, Otto. Lat. 2531, fol. 6v. © 2011 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda groups.103 It seems that, as with the Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi, several dependencies of Fulda owned their own copy of the Annales necrologici.104 The diferences that start to occur after 875 were probably a sign of the growing independence of these cellae in relation to the mother convent, a subject to which I return in Chapter 8.105 The earliest manuscript containing the Annales necrologici (fragment I) dates from the late ninth century and was composed more than a century after the monks had started to register their dead. The other four extant copies date from even later periods. They are thus likely to relect both the situation in Fulda in the late ninth and tenth centuries as well as eighth-century usage. The main reason to discuss them here, and not solely as a late-ninth-century representation of Fulda, is that the organising principle of the Annales necrologici and the ideas underlying its composition have their roots in the 770s. The Annales necrologici were probably liturgical texts that were used to remember the deceased monks of Fulda. Commemoration of the dead goes back to pagan antiquity and the early Christian church. Christ himself had given the most important impetus for commemoration when he instructed his disciples: ‘This is my body, which is given for you. Do this for a commemoration of me.’106 Even at a very early stage, Christian scholars acknowledged the value of prayer, the saying of mass and the giving of alms for the dead, for which they found examples in the Scripture.107 The names of those to pray for were recorded in special liturgical books or texts serving commemoration, earthly representatives of what was believed to be God’s heavenly Book of Life.108 Often these books were ordered like a calendar, listing the days of death of those people involved, according to liturgical time. Alternatively, they divided the names of those to be prayed for into categories like ‘living’ and ‘dead’, using organising principles other than chronology to structure the names. The annalistic form used in Fulda to record its deaths is therefore unique. It is diferent from all the other forms of commemoration that have been transmitted from the early medieval period, and, in fact, from medieval times in general. There is only a single other extant example of a commemoration

103 104

105 106

107 108

For an extensive comparison of the diferent manuscripts, see Oexle, ‘Überlieferung’, p. 484. We know that in the eleventh century the newly founded church of St Andreas, a dependency of Fulda just to the west of the monastery, received a copy. Oexle, ‘Überlieferung’, p. 493. See below, pp. 292–6. Luke 22: 19; 1 Cor. 11: 24–5. Constable, ‘Commemoration’, p. 169; Boon, Joodse Wortels, pp. 29–56. 2 Macc. 12: 43–6; 1 Tim. 2: 1–8. See Constable, ‘Commemoration’, pp. 171–2. Acts 20: 12–15. Constable, ‘Commemoration’, p. 169; Erhart and Kuratli Hüeblin (eds.), Bücher des Leben.

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After Boniface’s death of the dead similar to Fulda’s: the Annales necrologici of Prüm, composed in the eleventh century and continued until 1104. Nevertheless, this was a clear case of imitation: the monks of Prüm deliberately copied Fulda’s example, because of an exclusive confraternity of prayer between the two communities.109 The practice of Anno Domini dating that we ind in the Anglo-Saxon Easter Tables, and that was continued in the Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi, apparently had inspired the monks to list their dead within the same framework. As with the historical notes in the Easter Tables, the monks used the Annales necrologici to structure the progression of time in relation to the Incarnation of Christ. Death was not the end of a Christian life. It was the beginning of the fulilment of the promise of salvation. By registering how many years had passed between the birth of Christ and the death of each monk, the brethren positioned their community within the whole course of Christian history. The sequence of years and the listing of names strengthened its continuity. An image of community Initially, the Annales necrologici listed all the monks of Fulda, including those who had lived outside the mother convent in the dependencies of the monastery.110 Even when a monk had left the abbey to make an ecclesiastical career for himself, his link with the community was not broken and he would likely be recorded in the Annales necrologici after his death. Additionally, it was apparently important that the list of names was uninterrupted and that every monk was included in it. We know, for example, that in the periods 795–806 and 812–823 not all the names of the deceased brothers were registered. Internal conlicts or commitments that were more urgent absorbed all the time of the monks and resulted in a waning interest in commemoration. Around 824, after Hrabanus Maurus had taken up oice as abbot, he made sure that the names of the monks who had been left out earlier were now inscribed in the Annales necrologici.111

109

110

111

Prüm’s Annales necrologici included the ile of Fulda monks registered between 1039 and 1065 and members of communities with which Fulda had entered into a prayer alliance. Edition: FW 1, pp. 364–84; Oexle, ‘Memorialüberlieferung’, pp. 136–7; Schmid, ‘Suche’, p. 130; Althof , ‘Beziehungen’, pp. 888–930, especially 889, 919 and 922–6. See the parallel registers made by the Societas et Fraternitas research group from Münster, in FW 2.1. See also Hlawitschka, ‘Memorialüberlieferung Fulda’, 166–79; Schmid, ‘Suche’, pp. 125–62; Jakobi, ‘Magnaten’, p. 800, footnote 55; Schmid, ‘Mönchslisten’, pp. 615, 629. Schmid, ‘Suche’, pp. 142–152; Schmid, ‘Mönchslisten’, pp. 618–19.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda Moreover, in the irst ifty years the Annales necrologici mainly listed monks from Fulda.There are a few exceptions. First, not every individual in the Annales necrologici was a professed monk. Einhard (d. 840), raised in Fulda, courtier of Charlemagne and later abbot of, among others, Michelstadt and Seligenstadt, is listed in the Annales necrologici, even though he had never received the tonsure.112 Nevertheless, the monks of Fulda regarded Einhard as one of their own and after his death wrote down his name with the other brethren. Other examples of special cases are Leoba (d. 782), one of the few women in the Annales necrologici until the middle of the ninth century, and Samuel, bishop of Worms (838–856) and abbot of Lorsch (838–856). They all had a special relationship with Fulda. Samuel had been a friend of Hrabanus Maurus. As young and brilliant students, they had studied together under the famous scholar Alcuin in Tours. Leoba, a relative and disciple of Boniface, had an unusual position in the monastery through her bond with the martyred bishop. According to her biographer, Rudolf of Fulda, she was the only woman who was ever allowed entrance in the abbey church of Fulda to pray at Boniface’s grave.113 After her death, the monks buried her in the abbey church – as had been Boniface’s wish.The parents of Hrabanus were presumably also included in the Annales necrologici (d. 802 and 807) as well as the priest Denehart, an acquaintance of Boniface and Lull.114 Whether or not the Carolingian family was incorporated in this special kind of commemoration is diicult to tell. One extant copy of the Annales necrologici (fragment II, now in Fulda) indeed lists the names of members of the Carolingian family.115 It was copied during the abbacy of Haicho (917–923) and continued with intervals until 996, the period in which the Ottonians rose to power.116 The late-ninth-century copy in Rome (fragment I) does not list the Carolingians, although marks in the list near their years of death suggest that its composer considered them part of its underlying concept. Together with the copy of the Annales necrologici, the scribe had also made a diptych, to be discussed in Chapter 8, in which their names were listed.117 Considering the fact that Fulda was a royal abbey, which is also brought to the fore in the Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi, it is likely that the Carolingians were included from the start. 112 113 114

115 116

FW 1, p. 289; Fulda, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Hs. B 1, fol. 6r. Rudolf, Vita Leobae, cc. 22–23, pp. 130–1. The majority of the people listed in the Annales necrologici have not been identiied with certainty. Regarding Denehart, see ‘Kommentiertes Parallelregister’, FW 2.1, X6, p. 439. For other examples of the inclusion of magnates in the Annales necrologici, see Jakobi,‘Magnaten’, pp. 837–40; ‘Kommentiertes Parallelregister’, FW 2.1, pp. 438–46. The inclusion of Hrabanus’ parents is discussed in Chapter 6. Fulda, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Hs. B 1, fols. 6r–21v. 117 Ibid., p. 485. Oexle, ‘Überlieferung’, p. 470.

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After Boniface’s death Because of their special bond with the monastery, another exception was made for the archbishops of Mainz, who were responsible for the dedication of many of Fulda’s churches and the consecration of the clergy of the monastery (Mainz became an archbishopric in 782). As we will see in the following chapters, they also intervened when there was internal conlict in the monastery and were present at important festivities such as the dedication of the abbey church in 819.118 As in the case of the members of the Carolingian family, the names of the archbishops of Mainz were initially included in fragment II and not in fragment I, the oldest extant fragment. Their names are, however, included in the diptych that also lists the Carolingians and its author marked the position in the Annales necrologici where their name should have been with a sign. Nevertheless, the irst two archbishops of Mainz, Lull (d. 786) and Richulf (d. 813), were not listed in the Annales necrologici, although Lull’s death was recorded in the Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi.119 Despite Alcuin’s repeated requests to be remembered in their prayers, the monks did not enter his name, even though he had been the teacher of Hrabanus Maurus and Hatto, had been a friend of Fulda’s second abbot Baugulf and was remembered as a devotee of Boniface’s monastery in his biography, the Vita Alcuini.120 Boniface himself is not in the Annales necrologici either, but he died long before the year 779, which was the irst year to be included in the commemorative lists. His death was remembered in other texts, namely the Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi and the monastery’s calendar of the saints. Another signiicant omission in the Annales necrologici concerns the members of religious communities with which the monks were allied through prayer associations. Such confraternities, bonds of commemorative prayers, came into being from the eighth and ninth centuries onwards.The prayer associations were instituted between individuals and groups, clerics and laymen. Communities exchanged lists of names and prayed for the members of the other community.121 The most famous example is the confraternity book of Reichenau, begun around 824.The codex includes more than ifty communities, which yields almost 40,000 names.122 Fulda was involved in similar confraternities, but they were 118 120

121

122

119 See Chapter 4. AFa, a. 785, p. 137. Vita Alcuini, c. 11, p. 191.Yet, we have to take into account that this vita was written around 829. See also Alcuin, Epistolae, No. 250, p. 405. Alcuin was, however, mentioned in the martyrology of Hrabanus Maurus: 19 May, p. 48. Schmid and Wollasch, ‘Gemeinschaft’, 365–405; Oexle and Schmid, ‘Gebetsbundes Attigny’, 71–122; Hendrix, ‘Liturgy for the dead’. Schmid, ‘Reichenauer Verbrüderungsbuches’, pp. 24–41; Schmid, ‘Wege zur Erschließung’, pp. lxv–lxviii; Autenrieth, ‘Beschreibung des Codex’, pp. xv–xvi.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda not included in the Annales necrologici. The monastery was, for example, one of the ifty communities listed in Reichenau’s confraternity book.123 Nevertheless, only from the end of the ninth century onwards did scribes include the names of the abbots of allied religious communities such as Hersfeld, Lorsch and Corvey in the Annales necrologici.124 Additionally, it is strange that the abbey, which through the papal privilege had strong ties with the Apostolic See since its foundation, did not include the names of the popes before the beginning of the eleventh century.125 A list like the Annales necrologici could merely exist by the grace of all the others – the Carolingians, members of befriended aristocratic families and other religious communities being recorded elsewhere. The monks would certainly not exclude them from their prayers. A monastery had to appeal to noble families. It needed their support and gifts, and had to make sure that the landowning elite wanted to associate itself with the community, its patron saint(s) and social networks. In the Supplex Libellus, which sets out the liturgical practices as they existed in Fulda before 802, we read that on the anniversary of Sturmi, the monks remembered their abbot and the founders of the monastery, by which is probably meant the patrons of the monastery in the early days of its existence.126 Moreover, the monks prayed daily for the king, his family and the populus christianus during the Oice, and every Monday for all living benefactors near the grave of Boniface.127 Thus there must have existed some kind of registration of those who had a right to commemoration in the liturgy because of their special relation with Fulda or, alternatively, an oral tradition, but these are now lost to us. The cartula missalis which Alcuin sent to the Fulda monks around 801 not only contained a formula for a mass for Boniface and for deceased monks, but also for living friends.128 This supports the idea that commemoration of speciic individuals and groups that were closely connected to the abbey through ties of friendship existed in Fulda already in the second half of the eighth century. Creating cohe re nc e The exclusive membership of the Annales necrologici must have bound the monks strongly together as a group. Bearing in mind that commemoration was irst aimed at intercessory prayer, therefore one goal of the Annales necrologici seems to have been to create coherence, a sense of belonging to the elect, as part of the community of Fulda. As we have 123 125 127

FW 1, pp. 227–30; Schmid, ‘Mönchslisten’, pp. 572–96. Jakobi, ‘Magnaten’, pp. 800, 842–67. 126 SL, c. 1, p. 321. 128 Alcuin, Epistolae, No. 250, p. 405. Ibid.

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124

See Chapter 8.

After Boniface’s death seen, Fulda experienced a rapid growth under Sturmi. Most monks lived outside the mother convent, managing the monastery’s expanding property or possibly working in the mission.129 Apart from this, the monks of Fulda faced another dilemma in the late 770s: the irst abbot and founder of Fulda, a charismatic igure and important point of reference for the community, did not have many more years to live. Sturmi was probably already in his seventies, which is old if we consider the fact that the average life expectancy for a Fulda monk was ifty years.130 If we are to believe his biographer, he was ‘weak and weary with age’.131 After his stay with Charlemagne at the fortiication of Eresburg in 779, Sturmi returned home very ill.132 By then the other founding father of the monastery, Boniface, had been dead for twenty-ive years. Obviously the neglect of a monastic way of life and the dissolution of the community were genuine dangers for a relatively young religious community that had just lost its leader, as we have seen in Boniface’s letter to the community of Fritzlar. Boniface comforted the brothers of Fritzlar after their abbot had died and arranged the tasks and relationships among them. With the letter, the bishop tried to safeguard its continuity and unity. Boniface’s letter is but one example, which bears witness to the diiculties of keeping a community together and safeguarding its continuity. One way of dealing with these problems was the production of texts that deined the congregation in terms of physical and spiritual boundaries, for example a vita, a foundation history or a monastic rule. It was probably for this reason that Abbess Caesaria of the convent of St John wanted a vita to be written about the founder of her convent, her cousin Caesarius of Arles, soon after his death in 542: to secure the continued existence of her community after the death of its founder.133 The Annales necrologici were a response to the threat of disintegration and downfall and the need for coherence and continuity in the monastery of Fulda. The lists united all the monks of Fulda, whether they lived in the mother convent or in the cellae of the monastery, and brought the living and the dead together in one community.The exclusion of outsiders strengthened the unity that the Annales necrologici tried to express and accomplished even more. Continuity was created through the listing of the names of the deceased monks, going back to Sturmi. Together the 129 130

131

132 133

See Chapter 3. Hlawitschka, ‘Memorialüberlieferung Fulda’, 176–9. Compare Geuenich, ‘Die personelle Entwicklung’, p. 172. (Würzburg manuscript) ‘inirmum, iam senectute fessum’; (the other manuscripts) ‘iam inirmum ac senectute fessum’. Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 25, p. 161. Ibid., c. 24, p. 160; Wollasch, Mönchtum, p. 35. Diem, Monastische Experiment, pp. 12–13.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda names formed an unbroken chronological link that connected the present with the past of the monastery, and through AD-dating the community was tied to salvation history, connecting Fulda’s history to the eschatological future of the Heavenly Jerusalem. The liturgy evoked the same sense of community. Since the Annales necrologici were structured by year, it was impossible to commemorate the monks individually. Contrary to practices based on necrologies and calendars that consisted of a day-by-day remembrance of the individual community members, all the monks of Fulda had to be commemorated at once, as one congregatio. Early-ninth-century liturgical sources indeed conirm that the monks of Fulda remembered their brethren as a group and not individually. Each day at morning service and after vespers, the monks commemorated the deceased fratres with an antiphon and psalm. The irst day of the month, they said a vigil and ifty psalms for their brethren.134 Presumably, the monks did not recite the names of all the brethren aloud. With the increasing number of people that a community had to remember, the recital of names became less common.135 Giles Constable argued the case for the liber memorialis of Remiremont. It cannot have served the community of nuns as a practical record of individual names for the commemoration of individuals or speciic groups and was probably never intended as such. To that end the book is arranged too complexly, incorporating liturgical texts, a liber vitae proper, three necrologies, a cartulary and rent book, and with lists of names and records of grants added to any available empty space. In addition, a liturgical text in the manuscript indicates that the book was used to commemorate together all the faithful, who were tied to the monastery through gifts of property and alms or had recommended themselves to the nuns’ prayers.136 Yet, the signiicance of the commemoration of the dead and its efect did not solely depend on quantities of recited names.137 The presence of the book of names on the altar, sanctiied through the proximity to the relics of the saint(s) and the consecration ritual, the possible nearness of the monastic cemetery, as well as the regularity and the communal nature of the ritual, always within the same setting, together had the efect of commemoration. These commemorative gatherings, where the monks remembered those members who had already passed away, must have strengthened the cohesion of the community, not only among the living, but also among the dead. Through commemoration, the deceased

134 136 137

135 SL, c. 1, pp. 321–2. Oexle, ‘Memoria’, 77. Constable, ‘Remiremont’, 263–4. McLaughlin, Consorting with Saints, pp. 55–101.

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After Boniface’s death were brought into the presence of the remembering community and the eternal and the temporal were linked.138 The abbey church, the charters, the Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi and the Annales necrologici are each in their own way self-representations of Fulda from the abbacy of Sturmi.They vary among themselves in nature, material, goals and audiences. They all ofer us a picture of Fulda in the second half of the eighth century, but each one of them from a diferent perspective: the abbey church which became Boniface’s burial site and the liturgical preoccupations of the monks; the charters with regard to competing religious communities and benefactors; the Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi in relation to the Frankish court, Anglo-Saxon history, the Roman emperors and salvation history; and the Annales necrologici from within the community in response to the social world of the monastery. The diiculty of inding consonance among these diferent pictures shows the complexity of the process of imagining the self and of creating a community in a monastic familia where several groups co-existed. Still, in these self-representations several persistent themes come to the fore: the Carolingians, Rome and Boniface. Boniface’s position in Fulda was complex, though he soon came to be a symbol of the monastery’s identity. In the early period, he was remembered as the founder of Fulda, next to being a martyr, but as we will see in the following chapters, the image of Boniface as founding father slowly receded and was replaced by that of Sturmi. 138

Boon, Joodse Wortels, pp. 29–56; Oexle, ‘Memoria’, 79–86; Oexle, ‘Gegenwart’, pp. 19–77.

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Chapter 3

BAU G U L F: T H E C U LTI VATI O N OF L E AR NING, L A ND A ND THE CHURCH

After Sturmi died in the winter of 779, the monks of Fulda elected Baugulf to be their new abbot. Baugulf was a member of a noble family that owned property in east Francia, south of the Main, and was part of the royal aristocratic elite.1 His high birth gave Baugulf excellent connections, both on a local and supra-regional level.2 When, in 786, Charlemagne uncovered a conspiracy against his majesty, the plotters, a group of Thuringian noblemen, took refuge in Fulda, hoping not only for the intercession of the martyr who lay buried in the monastery’s church, but also relying on its abbot’s inluence at court.3 Some scholars have identiied Abbot Baugulf with Count Baugulf of the Speyergau, a trusted follower of irst Pippin and later his son Charlemagne who had been active at the court since the 750s.4 As a gift for years of loyal service Charlemagne would have awarded the magnate (who had supported him in the power struggle with his brother Carloman) with the abbacy of Fulda when his presence was no longer needed in the Worms area after Carloman’s death in 771.5 Although it happened that a secular lord was appointed abbot in those days, it was a rare switch that only occurred in the highest circles of society.6 Moreover, none of the 1 2

3

4

5 6

Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. ii, c. 4, p. 38; Bosl, Franken, pp. 88, 134; Freise, ‘Studien’, pp. 1008, 1131. See, for example, his friendship with Alcuin: Alcuin, Epistolae, No. 250, p. 405; Vita Alcuini, c. 11, p. 191. Annales Nazariani, a. 786, pp. 40–4; Annales Laureshamenses, a. 786, p. 32; McKitterick, Perceptions, pp. 84–9, with a transcription of Rome, BAV, Vaticanus palatinus latinus 966, fols. 56v–57r at pp. 86–7. Innes, State and Society, pp. 186–7. Baugulf himself stayed at court at least once, in 800 to defend Fulda’s papal privilege against Würzburg. Epist. Fuld. fragm., No. 26, p. 528. In 782, after a diet in Lippe on the Rhine, the king visited Fulda at Baugulf ’s request. Gesta abbatum, p. 272;Wehlt, Reichsabtei, p. 235. MGH D Kar. 1, Nos. 6, 16. Historians who have identiied the abbot with the count: Stengel, UBF, No. 523, p. 504; Metz, ‘Austrasische Adelsherrschaft’, 284–5; Innes, State and Society, p. 190. Ibid. An example is Wala, child of the youngest son of Charles Martel, irst count, then abbot of Corbie and Corvey. Weinrich, Wala. See also Felten, Äbte und Laienäbte.

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Baugulf Fulda sources refer to a supposed career outside the monastery of Baugulf and instead remember the abbot as being one of their own, as a monk of Fulda.7 It is diicult to reconcile this picture of Baugulf with the career of the Austrasian count who by 771 still acted in his worldly capacity as the witness of a transaction.8 In addition, if Michael Gockel is right in arguing that Count Baugulf of the Speyergau is the same man as Count Baugulf who operated as witness in 782 and 788 in Lorsch, the count can certainly not be identiied with the abbot.9 It seems more likely that Abbot Baugulf had been raised and trained in Fulda, just like his brother Ercanbert, the later bishop of Minden (c.790–830). Nonetheless, given the rare occurrence of the name ‘Baugulf ’, the count and the abbot may well have been members of the same aristocratic family.10 For all his prominence during life, Baugulf ’s reign left little trace. The twenty-three years of his abbacy can now be witnessed only through some letters (including the famous Epistola de litteris colendis, or ‘Letter on the cultivation of learning’), the charters that record the exchange of property and that are a testimony to the monastery’s relations with the outside world under his abbacy, a list of monks (the so-called ‘Baugulf list’), a list of books and the few remains of the church that was built while he was abbot. Still, some observations can be made about the monastic community in those days and the ways in which it perceived and deined itself. Of course, the lists, both of monks and books, originated from a practical desire: the list of monks to gain an overview of an expanding community, and the list of books to record a collection of texts owned by Fulda or one of its dependencies. Their intention was not to relect upon the higher meaning of the monastery’s existence. Yet, underneath their creation and preservation lie ideas that touch upon questions of identity.The list of monks, which records all members living in Fulda and its dependencies around 781, can be considered to be the irst group portrait of the community and a deinition of who belonged and who did not. The book catalogue relects an image of Fulda as a school and centre of cultural activity and lists some of the textual traditions that the monks considered to form the basics of monastic learning. Although the church was a place for practical use too, its size and 7

8

9

10

Candidus refers to Baugulf as being a monk: ‘eiusdem monasterium monachus’: Vita Aegil, b. ii, p. 5. So do the Annales Fuldenses: ‘Sturmi abbas Fuldensis coenobii moritur, cui successit Baugolf eiusdem monasterii monachus.’ AF, a. 779, p. 10. Count Baugulf is mentioned with his brother, Count Wilant, in a charter that might be dated to the period 780–800. UBF, No. 523, p. 504. Codex Laureshamensis, vol. ii, Nos. 909, 965, pp. 265, 284; Gockel, Konigshöfe, p. 194, footnote 1175 and pp. 302–5. Freise, ‘Studien’, p. 1009, footnote 30.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda shape, the high demands of building it, the sacred power of the liturgical observances performed within it and the perpetuity of the material from which it was constructed made it a unique bearer of meaning and selfrepresentation. What little is left of Fulda’s old church still ofers enough evidence roughly to reconstruct some of its former state and the impact it must have had both on the monks themselves and those outsiders who understood the rhetoric of architecture. These divergent pictures of the Fulda community form the skeleton on which this chapter is built. T he B augul f l ist Baugulf used his connections well to further strengthen Fulda’s social and economic position. Under his abbacy the area from which the monastery drew its property and recruits extended from the Middle Rhine valley to the Frankish region north of the Middle and Upper Main. In 781, the king granted the monastery the campus of Hünfeld and its surrounding woods 30 km to the north-east of Fulda.11 Charlemagne furthermore conirmed the conveyance of the mark Rasdorf and the neighbouring mark Soisdorf near Hünfeld to Fulda, both former royal properties. They were gifts from the kin-group around Abbess Emhild of Milz and her brothers, a very powerful family in East Franconia, and strengthened Fulda’s position in the area between the monastery and the Thuringian forest.12 To the endowment of Rasdorf and Soisdorf Emhild added her own monastery at Milz and its rich possessions to Fulda’s ownership in the same region.13 Besides gaining a foothold in East Franconia, Fulda also expanded its inluence in the Middle Rhine valley and the region just to its north.The king granted the monastery two important royal estates in this region, one in Dienheim to the south of Mainz, and one in Echzell, a former Roman fortiication, which lies almost halfway between Mainz and Fulda and which was therefore a strategic point for monks passing through the Wetterau on their way to the episcopal city or the monastery’s possessions in the Middle Rhineland.14 In the following years, Echzell gained prominence as it became the centre from which the Vogelsberg area was opened up for further cultivation, and which moreover connected the monastery to its landholdings in the south-west.15 Dienheim, a former royal villa some 40 km along the river Rhine south of Mainz, developed 11 12 13

14

UBF, No. 146, pp. 206–8. UBF, No. 145 a and b, pp. 203–6. See also Gockel, ‘Emhilt von Milz’, pp. 1–70. Milz owned property in over thirty settlements between the Rhön and the Thuringian forest. UBF, No. 264, pp. 372–9. Backhaus, ‘Frühkarolingischer Klöster’, p. 47. 15 UBF, No. 149, pp. 214–21. Backhaus, ‘Frühkarolingischer Klöster’, p. 48.

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Baugulf into Fulda’s key centre of landed property in the Middle Rhine region. The settlement played an important role in the daily life of the inhabitants of the region, for it owned a portus to cross the river Rhine and was a place where transactions took place, charters were written and disputes settled.16 The extension of Fulda’s sphere of inluence is not only visible in the charters that record the transactions of property, but can also be traced through the names of the monks listed in the Annales necrologici and in the so-called Baugulf list. Shortly after Baugulf had taken oice as abbot, between November 781 and the beginning of January 782, he ordered the composition of a list that included all monks living in Fulda and its dependent cellae, numbering 364 in total.17 The aim of the list will at irst have been purely practical. As the freshly appointed leader of a growing community, Baugulf probably wished to make an inventory of the monks entrusted to his care, including those who lived beyond his direct ield of vision in the dependencies of the monastery. The end of December was probably the most convenient time to make such a list; many of the monks will have been present in the mother convent to commemorate the second anniversary of Sturmi’s day of death and celebrate the festivities of Christmas.18 In addition, the liturgical remembrance and the importance of those two events for the community’s self-understanding, the death of Sturmi and Christ’s birth, illed the act of recording the names of Fulda’s members with symbolic meaning. In this way Baugulf could turn a practical, administrative act into an event that enforced his rule and created a sense of community. Together with the membership list of all the living monks, Baugulf had another list made, also around the turn of the year 781/782, that records the names of the monks who had passed away. More than two-thirds of the deceased monks included in the list are not registered in the Annales necrologici, which probably means that they died before the year 779 when the Annales necrologici were started.19 This register of dead brethren, headed by ‘STURMI ABB’, most likely served commemorative purposes. The lists made under Baugulf no longer exist in their original form. They are transmitted to us together with another list, the so-called Hrabanus list, in the confraternity book of Reichenau, amidst thousands of other names, whose bearers the monks of Reichenau remembered in their prayers.20 Besides the names of the brethren from Reichenau and 16 17

18 20

Ibid.; Innes, State and Society, pp. 22–4, 101, 107–9, 116–17; Gockel, Konigshöfe, pp. 184–203. For a description, see Schmid, ‘Mönchslisten’, pp. 572–96, discussing the date of composition at pp. 578–81. 19 Ibid., p. 581. Ibid., p. 574. Verbrüderungsbuch Reichenau, pp. 36–8; FW 1, pp. 227–30.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda those of the abbey’s benefactors, the confraternity book contains lists of members of more than ifty religious communities that were joined together in an association of prayer, including Fulda. Names continued to be added in the following decades, until well into the tenth century.21 The so-called Baugulf list and the list headed by Sturmi were included when the book was compiled, in the mid 820s, but possibly had been sent to the monastery much earlier.22 Under the heading ‘nomina fratrum de congregatione sancti Bonifacii de monasterio, quod Fulta nominatur’ a scribe copied both lists into the book. Apparently, the monk from Reichenau sometimes had diiculties with understanding his Fulda example, mishearing or misreading a name, and in certain cases he adapted the names from the original list to local spelling customs.23 In total, the two lists register 458 names, neatly ordered in twelve columns spread over three pages. A fourth page is missing, so perhaps we should add another 150 names to the ile that the confraternity book once contained.24 Later, another hand added another list of names, the Hrabanus list, between the columns of the Baugulf list and the list headed by Sturmi and to the empty spaces that once separated the lists (and their subdivisions) from each other. This list will be discussed in Chapter 6. As a group portrait of the community of living monks, the Baugulf list ofers some insight into the constitution of the Fulda community in the early 780s. For example, most names in the Baugulf list do not match with those recorded in the list of the deceased monks, which was also made around 781. This suggests that the new generation of monks was recruited in other regions or from other families than those who joined the monastic community in the early years of Sturmi’s abbacy.25 Anglo-Saxon or Bavarian names, for example, only appear in the list of dead monks and in the early year-entries of the Annales necrologici.26 Their bearers seem to have belonged to the irst generation of monks who had been recruited by Boniface and Sturmi from their homelands. By the time Baugulf made his lists most of them had died and young novices from other regions had taken up their places.27 The Baugulf list was written up too early to relect the monastery’s latest acquisitions in East Franconia. Nevertheless, the presence of a large number of 21

22 23 24 25 26

27

Concerning the updates with names of Fulda monks, see Freise, ‘Fuldischer Namengruppen’, pp. 529–62. Schmid, ‘Mönchslisten’, p. 574. Geuenich, Personennamen Fulda, pp. 205–9. Verbrüderungsbuch Reichenau, p. 36; Schmid, ‘Mönchslisten’, p. 574. UBF, No. 34, pp. 59–63; Freise, ‘Studien’, p. 1057. Most of them had died by the early 780s. The last ones were included in the Annales necrologici by 826. Freise, ‘Studien’, p. 1072. An exception is Eigil, a relative of Sturmi from Bavaria. He died in 822.

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Baugulf Alemannian names indicates that Fulda had successfully built up a new clientele among local families in northern Alemannia since the donation of Deiningen by King Pippin in 760.28 On the basis of a comparison between the names of benefactors and witnesses in the charters on the one hand, and the names of monks in the Annales necrologici and in lists like the Baugulf list on the other, Eckhard Freise concludes that the area from which Fulda recruited new monks to a large extent overlapped with the region from which the monastery’s patrons originated and where most of the abbey’s possessions lay.29 Of course we need to be careful when using names to identify individuals and to create genealogies, because the preferences that inluenced namegiving luctuated and social mobility, for instance through marriage, resulted in the assimilation of new family names. Still, name-giving in early medieval Germany was often bound by ancestry and social expectations. Children were named after close relatives: their mother or father, uncle or aunt, or one of their grandparents, with a strong preference for the paternal ailiation. When an infant was predestined for an ecclesiastical vocation, its parents often named it after a relative who was a member of a religious community; preferably someone who had achieved the status of bishop, abbot or abbess. Naming thus deined a person within its kin, and sometimes also in relation to a future career. Even though the identiication of individuals on the basis of name comparison remains diicult, names can help us in reconstructing the social background of people from the past.30 In respect to Fulda’s involvement in the mission to the Saxons, Freise came up with some interesting results. Typically Saxon names, i.e. names that occur only in the volume registering donations from Saxony and not in the other volumes of Fulda’s ninth-century cartulary, such as Aluuart, Beio and Ostac, crop up relatively late. Only two monks in the Baugulf list can be identiied as Saxons with relative certainty,31 although it is also possible that names such as Heio and Wigbald, which were popular in Saalegau, Thuringia and Alemannia as well as in Saxony, in fact refer to monks of Saxon origin.32 Still, while historians have argued that Fulda was deeply engaged in the preaching of the Christian faith and the plantation of an ecclesiastical infrastructure in Saxony in the 770s, the 28 29 30

31 32

Ibid. Ibid., p. 1155. Schmid, ‘Person und Gemeinschaft’, 225–49; Schmid, ‘Personenforschung’, 235–67; Schmid, ‘Zusammenhang’, pp. 331–8; Tellenbach, Personenforschung; Geuenich et al. (eds.), Person und Name; Smith, Europe after Rome, pp. 88–94. Fridugoz and Peractunc. Their names can also be found in the Annales necrologici a. 804 and 830. See list K, Freise, ‘Studien’, pp. 1250–1.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda involvement of the abbey apparently did not immediately result in close relations with local families.33 Saxon names appear in Fulda sources more frequently only from the ninth century onwards. It seems to have been some decades before families handed over their sons to the monastery. The same applies to their property. None of the donations in the volume of Fulda’s early medieval cartulary that deals with Saxony can be dated with certainty to the eighth century.34 Although this does not prove that Fulda did not receive any private gifts from recently converted Saxon families in the days of Sturmi and Baugulf, it indicates that we should not overestimate the monastery’s inluence in the north.35 As long as the area remained subject to Frankish military intervention, Fulda was not able to gain a irm foothold in Saxony. By 804, when Charlemagne had brought the region between the Weser and the Elbe under his direct rule, the political climate changed in favour of long-lasting relations between the local nobility and Carolingian royal abbeys.36 Another interesting point raised by the list of 781 is that a large number of those included in the list of living members appeared in the Annales necrologici only ifty or sixty years later, and that most of them by then had attained the order of priest.37 This means that at the time their names were written down in the Baugulf list, they were still young oblates and novices who were being trained for the major orders. The presence of this large number of future priests in the list needs to be understood against the background of a general increase of liturgical responsibilities of monasteries that is also visible elsewhere in the early medieval West. Whereas in the days of Benedict of Nursia, monks and nuns, like laymen and -women, used to attend mass only on Sundays and feast days, masses for the living and the dead became a central part of the daily monastic liturgy in the Frankish kingdom in the eighth and ninth centuries.38 This transformation of monasteries into institutions of prayer is also visible in late-eighth-century Fulda. Around 800

33 34 35

36

37 38

Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 23, p. 158. Freise, ‘Studien’, pp. 1164–77, especially p. 1171. Klaus Nass has argued that Fulda was not involved in a ‘Taufmission’ but rather contributed to the Christianisation of Saxony through ‘pastoralisation’ of its property, using saints’ cults as an intermediary to reach the local population. Nass, Hameln, pp. 149–50. For a summary of the wars against the Saxons, see Lampen, ‘Sachsenkriege’, pp. 264–72. For a map of Charlemagne’s military expeditions against the Saxons, see Backhaus, ‘Sachsen- und Wendenfeldzüge’, pp. 38–9. Schmid, ‘Mönchslisten’, p. 582; De Jong, In Samuel’s Image, pp. 242–4. De Jong, In Samuel’s Image, pp. 138–42; Angenendt, Frühmittelalter, pp. 331–41; Häußling, Eucharistiefeier. Concerning new developments in relation to the commemoration of the dead in the early Middle Ages, see McLaughlin, Consorting with Saints; Paxton, Christianizing Death; Hendrix, ‘Liturgy for the dead’; Hendrix, ‘Totenoizium’, pp. 70–82.

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Baugulf the monks asked Alcuin to write masses not only to honour the Holy Trinity, Mary and Boniface but also for particular purposes as penance and the commemoration of deceased brethren and living friends.39 The Supplex Libellus, written some ten years later, also shows how masses, both communal and private (for special groups and individuals), had become an integral part of Fulda’s daily liturgy.40 This multiplication of masses demanded large numbers of priests. Fulda too anticipated this need for clerics who were qualiied to celebrate the holy sacrament of the Eucharist, as becomes clear from, for example, the Baugulf list. Moreover, Fulda probably needed priests to preach the Christian faith and further expand the inluence of the Church in the regions to its north and east. Nevertheless, it is very diicult to establish the extent to which the monastery was involved either in the mission to the Saxons or in local pastoral care.41 The presence of a large group of young monks in Fulda, trained to become priests, presupposes the existence of a monastic school and the disposition of the necessary teaching material. To get an impression of what texts monks in Fulda had at their disposal in this period, we have to turn to the list of books, which is often interpreted to be a (incomplete) catalogue of Fulda’s early library, but more likely was a book inventory of one of its dependencies. It was written down around 800 and is now in the university library of Basel.42 It is a particular picture of the community, very diferent from the former group portrait, as it registers (part of ) the written tradition on which the monks based the knowledge that they deemed so necessary to fulil their tasks as monks. It therefore relects the monastery’s hopes and goals, i.e. what the monks wanted to be, more than the Baugulf list, which factually deined the community of monks who lived in Fulda around 781. As bookcases can be most revealing about the interests, tastes and occupations of the books’ owner, this catalogue ofers us another glimpse of the kind of community that Fulda was at the end of the late eighth and early ninth centuries. In the words of American author Anne Fadiman, ‘Their selves were on the shelves’.43

39 40 41

42

43

Alcuin, Epistolae, No. 250, p. 406. SL, cc. 1 and 2, pp. 321–2. Schmid, ‘Mönchslisten’, p. 582; Constable, ‘Cura animarum’, pp. 349–89; Nussbaum, Priestermönch, pp. 119–24. Compare below, pp. 187–8, 223. Basel, Universitätsbibliothek F III 15 a, fols. 17v–18r. CLA, vii, No. 842. See Schrimpf et al., Mittelalterliche Bücherverzeichnisse, pp. 3–13. Compare Lehmann ‘Klosterbibliothek Fulda’, pp. 9–23, and Brunhölzl, ‘Fuldensia’, p. 539, footnote 8. Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (New York, 1998), quoted in Petroski, Bookshelf, p. 14.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda Books, learning and monasti c g oal s The book inventory is a later addition to a manuscript that contains Isidore of Seville’s De rerum natura, recipes for medicine (the so-called ‘Basler Rezepte’, famous as one of the three was written in Old High German and another in a mixed language of Old High German and Old English), astronomic tables and extracts of Jerome’s letters.44 The catalogue, which once listed at least forty-eight titles, was added to the manuscript at an unknown moment, on the empty page following the medical prescriptions (fol. 17v) and the successive folio, underneath drawings of lunar phases. Nevertheless, it is written in the same AngloSaxon minuscule script as the rest of the manuscript and can therefore be dated to roughly the same period, the late eighth or early ninth century. The list was not written in one go, but in at least three phases, as Gangolf Schrimpf has pointed out.45 The irst and main part, headed by the title ‘these are our books’ (isti sunt [nost]r[i] libri),46 lists books of the New and Old Testament, though not all, Gregory the Great’s apocalyptic commentary on Ezekiel, his Dialogues and his Regula pastoralis, Isidore’s Synonyma and his compendium on moral and dogmatic theology, Sententiarum libri III, contemplative books, saints’ lives, miracle stories and some sermon collections. Somebody at a certain point erased some of the titles in the book inventory, including those titles that were added later to the list. They can no longer be read and identiied, except perhaps for the vita of the virgin martyr Eugenia by Pseudo-Ruinus. The catalogue was continued on the following page (fol. 18r), with an unidentiied passio, the story of the seven sleepers of Ephesus, a cronih (possibly the chronicle of Eusebius),47 a vita of saint Fursey, a collection of sayings and a Liber Alexandri, which probably is the same as the Vita Alexandri mentioned in a later book list from Fulda.48 The list represents a collection of books that formed part of the basic equipment of an ecclesiastical establishment. Starting with biblical books (irst the texts used in the liturgy), it continues with writings that were supposed to deepen the reader’s knowledge of Holy Scripture, such as the lives of the apostles and commentaries by such authorities as Gregory the Great. Then follows a section that may be divided into the clusters ‘pastoral care’, ‘asceticism’ and ‘martyrs’, and then there are the later additions, which do not seem to follow a speciic structure.The catalogue was 44 45 46 48

See Geuenich, ‘Althochdeutschen Literatur aus Fulda’, pp. 116–17. Schrimpf et al., Mittelalterliche Bücherverzeichnisse, p. 4. 47 Ibid., p. 5. Corradini, ‘Rhetoric of crisis’, pp. 301–2. Schrimpf et al., Mittelalterliche Bücherverzeichnisse, p. 11.

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Baugulf possibly the checklist for the custodian of the book collection, adding titles in case of new acquisitions or crossing them out when they were no longer in the community’s possession. Who this custodian was and for whom his list and the books that he registered were intended is now impossible to establish. The book list was probably not a catalogue of Fulda’s library, let alone a comprehensive catalogue of its possessions.Texts, of which it is implausible that Fulda did not own copies, are not listed, for example the Rule of Benedict, Boniface’s Ars grammatica and the three Codices Bonifatiani, which once belonged to Boniface and which were kept in Fulda as relics.The Rule of Benedict formed the basic guideline for how the monks shaped their lives. A grammar book was indispensable for a monastic school, which Fulda most certainly would have had by the time the book inventory was made, and considering Boniface’s involvement in Fulda’s past, it is most likely that the monks used his treatise on language rules.49 The other texts transmitted in the same manuscript that includes the book list are not mentioned either: Isidore’s De rerum natura, Jerome’s letters and the medicine recipes. It is more likely, therefore, that the inventory registered a smaller book collection, for example the books owned by a community subordinate to Fulda, one of the monastery’s dependencies. There exists such a list for Wolfsmünster (de cella paugoli), the monastic cell to which Baugulf retired after he had resigned his oice as abbot. It is transmitted together with four other lists of books from Fulda in a ninth-century manuscript, now in the Vatican library.50 This catalogue, which might have been made when the dependency was closed, lists two missals, a gospel lectionary, books from the Old Testament (historical books and prophets), two books from the New Testament (Acts and the Apocalypse) and Gregory the Great’s Regula pastoralis.51 Other evidence of the possession of books by Fulda’s dependent houses are notes in the margins of a mid-ninth-century library catalogue from Fulda. They are from the hand of the library’s custodian or one of the monks in his service, registering which books the mother convent had lent out to which nearby cell.52 As in the case of Wolfsmünster, it concerned mostly biblical books. As a matter of fact, Baugulf ’s cella possessed biblical books that are 49

50 51 52

Fried, ‘Bildungs- und Geistesgeschichte’, p. 11; Aris, ‘Einhard’, pp. 46–8. Also not listed in the book inventory are Origin’s commentary on Canticles and Augustine’s Enarrationes in Psalmos, of which Marc-Aeilko Aris argued that Fulda possibly owned copies, and Boniface’s letters, although a copy of them may have arrived in Fulda only during the days of Hrabanus Maurus. Aris, ‘Einhard’, pp. 41–56; Schrimpf et al., Mittelalterliche Bücherverzeichnisse, pp. 12–13. Rome, BAV, Pal. lat. 1877, fols. 35–43. I discuss the lists in Chapter 6. Schrimpf et al., Mittelalterliche Bücherverzeichnisse, pp. 18–19. Ibid., pp. 21–2.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda not mentioned in the book inventory under discussion here, as MarcAeilko Aris noted.53 This shows that it is highly unlikely that we are dealing with a comprehensive catalogue of Fulda’s library. In comparison to the splendid library which Fulda owned ifty years later, the collection of books represented by the book inventory is straightforward and pragmatic. Yet, it suited a community which had as its most important tasks prayer, the acquisition of divine knowledge and the training of priests, and was perfectly consistent with Charlemagne’s programme of correctio.54 The Admonitio generalis (General Admonition), a capitulary issued by the royal court in 789, demanded that ‘the ministers of the altar of God shall adorn their ministry by good manners’.55 What better reading matter was there for monks who wanted to learn this ‘just and itting life’ than the lives of the saints? What better examples were there for them to follow than Antony, Pachomius, Macarius, Malchus and Paul, the irst monks and ‘fathers of the desert’? Other books in Fulda’s catalogue, such as the Synonyma, which Isidore of Seville wrote to comfort those who struggled with sin and sufering, his textbook on Catholic doctrine and ethics (Sententiarum libri III) and the Regula pastoralis by Gregory the Great, in which the church father portrayed the ideal pastor, prepared the monks well for their vocation as soldiers of Charlemagne’s ‘spiritual army’, with which the king wanted to ight doctrinal errors, unbelief and religious ignorance in his church. With respect to learning in Fulda, it is interesting to note that the Admonitio generalis happens to be the oldest book copied at Fulda that is still extant.56 Besides its strong emphasis on order, uniformity and proper discipline and behaviour within the Church, it is about learning and literacy, as part of the king’s agenda of reform. It encourages monasteries and cathedral churches to set up schools to educate the next generations of priests and to teach monks and clerics correct Latin so that they could correct and copy the Christian texts that formed the basis of Charlemagne’s image of a Christian society.57 Fulda, which since the days of Sturmi possessed a scriptorium and school, complied with this call for trained scribes and uncorrupted texts. It had the means to meet 53 54

55

56

57

Aris, ‘Einhard’, p. 54, footnote 101. See, for example, the books prescribed by the court in: Admonitio generalis, MGH Cap. 1, No. 22, c. 72, p. 60; Capitulare missorum generale (802), MGH Cap. 1, No. 33, c. 26, p. 96; Council of Mainz (813), MGH Conc. 2.1, No. 36, preface, pp. 259–60. ‘ut ministri altaris Dei suum ministerium bonis moribus ornent.’ Admonitio generalis, MGH Cap. 1, No. 22, c. 72, p. 59. Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, Cod. Guelf. 496a Helmst. The manuscript was written possibly in the late eighth century, in a continental-insular minuscule. CLA, ix, No. 1381. Spilling, ‘Angelsächsische Schrift’, pp. 53–8; Mordek, Bibliotheca, pp. 949–52; Fried, ‘Bildungs- und Geistesgeschichte’, p. 12. Admonitio generalis, c. 72, p. 59.

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Baugulf this need. During Baugulf ’s abbacy, Fulda’s scriptorium produced several manuscripts, such as copies of the Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi, discussed in the previous chapter, the Admonitio generalis just mentioned, and works of Isidore, Jerome, Gregory the Great and Bede.58 Additionally, to encourage education in Fulda further, the abbot sent artistic and brilliant pupils such as Einhard and Hrabanus to study with the learned elite of those days.59 It was Baugulf who created the opportunities through which young students such as Einhard and Hrabanus Maurus could grow into the eminent scholars they would ultimately become. In addition, Baugulf ’s books formed the foundation on which Hrabanus would later build his extraordinary library. The making of the book list in Fulda in the late eighth or early ninth century signalled this general cultural bustle in the monastery.60 Both the lists of monks and books characterise Fulda as a contemplative and pastoral community of prayer, where monks were prepared to become true soldiers of Christ. Following the examples of the early monks of the Egyptian desert and paying heed to the lessons of the Western Church fathers, they trained themselves in prayer, worship and contemplation. Part of them possibly followed in the footsteps of Boniface not only by setting an example for their brethren, but also by propagating the message of Christ to the people in the nearby localities or in regions further to the north and east where Christianity had not established itself irmly, such as Saxony.The lists show that Baugulf busied himself to position Fulda irmly in the outside world, as a royal abbey with strong ties with local landowners, and as a centre of holy learning and prayer. These ambitions were also relected in the new abbey church that was built under his supervision. It is another complex picture of Fulda at the close of the eighth century. Th e abb ey church: an e xp re s si on of th e community’s g rowing se lf - aware ne s s When in 791 Baugulf decided to build a new abbey church, he employed Ratger for it, who for his impressive skills was later honoured as a sapiens 58 59

60

See Gugel, Handschriften, i and ii. See Walafrid Strabo’s introduction to Einhard’s Vita Karoli, p. xxviii; and Schaller, ‘Der junge “Raabe”’, pp. 123–41. Compare Lehmann, Fuldaer Studien, p. 5; Brunhölzl, ‘Fuldensia’, pp. 539–41; Brunhölzl, ‘Geistigen Bedeutung’, pp. 13–14; Fried, ‘Bildungs- und Geistesgeschichte’, p. 11, to whom the list, full of vulgarisms, represents the simple, ascetic life lived in Fulda in its early years, rather than the monastery’s future status as one of the most signiicant centres of learning and scholarship of the Carolingian age.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda architectus.61 Baugulf resigned as abbot before the church was inished and moved to Wolfsmünster, the cella which he had founded some 50 km south of Fulda.62 The monks then chose Ratger, the architect, to run their convent. He added a transept to the west of the church. The Gesta abbatum, written in the early tenth century, recounts the order of events as follows: With honour he [Baugulf] built a sanctuary in the east that admirably was constructed through the eforts of the very energetic man Ratger … Shortly after having accepted the position [of abbot] the third abbot, Ratger, the wise architect, has connected the western sanctuary with the other and has made one church [that was] of miraculous artistry and immense magnitude.63

What can we conclude from these words? Had the western sanctuary been part of the original concept approved by Baugulf, or did Ratger decide only later, when he had taken oice as abbot, that he wanted to extend the church in the west? Ratger (802–817) was not able not inish the church either. Between August 816 and August 817, Emperor Louis the Pious deprived him of his abbacy for his involvement in a serious conlict that upset life in Fulda for many years.64 It was Eigil who put the inishing touches to the work in the years following his appointment as successor of Ratger and who ordered the building of two crypts, one in the east and one in the west.65 After thirty years of hard work, and with increasing discontent on the monks’ part with the sacriices made in the course of the lengthy construction work, the church was dedicated on 1 November 819. Because three abbots succeeded each other in a span of three decades before the church was inished, it is diicult to determine the contribution of each to the ediice concerned. The abbots moreover disagreed about the uses and purposes of the new abbey church. Ratger’s viewpoints, for example, difered radically from Eigil’s wishes. Nevertheless, their opposite viewpoints in the end found expression in the same building. For a long time historians have been puzzled about Abbot Baugulf ’s motives for replacing the church of his predecessor. Taking Sturmi’s church as it was reconstructed by Gregor Richter and Joseph Vonderau 61 62 63

64 65

Gesta abbatum, p. 272. Ibid. ‘Orientale etiam illud templum miriicum artiiciose constructum studio Ratgeres strenuissimi uiri honorabiliter extruxit … Tertius abbas Ratgar, sapiens architectus, occidentale templum iam accepta potestate, mira arte et immensa magnitudine alteri copulans, unam fecit ecclesiam.’ Gesta abbatum, p. 272. Sapiens architectus refers to 1 Cor. 3: 10. Binding, Sapiens architectus, pp. 241–69, at 241. See below, pp. 116–31. Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 14, p. 15 and b. ii, c. 15, pp. 53–4.

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Baugulf in the irst half of the twentieth century as their starting point, they concluded that the old church was big enough to hold all the monks living in the mother convent when Baugulf became abbot of Fulda.66 It concerned some 130 monks at the most, mostly younger monks who were educated there, and seniors who looked after the pupils and took care of the cultus of the monastery.67 This number is based on the socalled ‘Recheo list’, probably a membership list of the monks living in the mother convent, written c.822 and later added to Fulda, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Hs. B 1 as fol. 62r-v.68 In the reconstruction of both Richter and Vonderau, Fulda’s irst abbey church was a large, three-naved basilica with a circular apse in the east.69 The width of the nave was almost 20 metres. The church was 40 metres long, and the apse was 10 metres wide. It was a big church: its size surpassed the measurements of most churches north of the Alps in those days, such as the churches of Echternach and Reichenau, simple hall churches, or those of old Merovingian abbeys like Nivelles (c.650) in the Frankish heartlands. It could easily compete with the monumental church built by Willibald (d. 787), another disciple of Boniface, in the 740s in Eichstätt.70 To build such a large church was a remarkable accomplishment, certainly in view of the fact that it was Fulda’s irst abbey church. What makes Sturmi’s achievement (as it was deined by Vonderau and his followers) even more extraordinary is that his church would have marked a new trend in architecture. For it would have been one of the irst three-naved basilicas with an apse in this part of the Frankish kingdom. Churches like Willibald’s church in Eichstätt, Niedermünster in Regensburg (750) or the church of Münstereifel (second half of the eighth century) that were erected around the same time as Sturmi started to build his, were hall churches, some with square choirs.71 Other examples of three-naved basilicas east of the Rhine were built in the decennia after the construction of Fulda’s irst abbey church.72 Why would Baugulf want to replace this remarkable church with a new one? After all, building was disruptive, unsettling and costly. When 66 67 68 69

70

71 72

For example Jacobsen, ‘Abteikirche Fulda’, p. 113. See Schmid, ‘Mönchlisten’, pp. 583–7, 630–1. See below, pp. 182–4. Following Vonderau, Hahn and Jacobsen, I have also defended this interpretation in my Ph.D. thesis (Raaijmakers, ‘Sacred Time’). The full extent of this church has not been discovered, because the eastern part was destroyed in the eleventh century, but we know that its width was approximately 12 metres. Parsons, ‘Churches of Anglo-Saxon missionaries’, 48; Jacobsen, ‘Abteikirche Fulda’, p. 109. Jacobsen, ‘Abteikirche Fulda’, p. 109; Binding, Vorromanische Kirchenbauten, pp. 37–9. Spindler, Bayerischen Geschichte, pp. 537–8.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda Fulda’s second church was inished, the monks did not alter it for more than a century, until a large ire in 937 forced them to repair its damaged parts.73 Sturmi’s church had been inished probably between 754 and 765. Based on the quotation in the Vita Bonifatii cited at the beginning of Chapter 2, which records that Boniface had asked Lull to complete the church in Fulda, historians have assumed that the monks were still in the process of building when Boniface was buried in their monastery.74 Sturmi seems to have added the inal touches to the basilica in 765 when he returned from exile.75 Besides the fact that the ediice was relatively new, it had not been damaged, as seems to have happened in 937 when aggressive Magyars roamed Buchonia and set ire to Fulda’s abbey church.76 A band of Saxons, causing havoc and destruction in the region just to the north-east of Fulda, passed the monastery by in 778 without laying a inger on it.77 So why a new church? There is good reason to assume that the starting-points, which lie at the basis of modern reconstructions of the Sturmi church, are wrong and that Vonderau was too optimistic in his interpretation of the archaeological evidence. Following upon earlier criticism voiced by Friedrich Oswald and Manfred Fischer in the late 1960s, Eva Krause has recently re-examined all the excavation reports to establish what is certain about Fulda’s abbey churches, and has made a large contribution to the discussion by giving a complete overview of all the archaeological indings, including the unpublished ones.78 She has incorporated post-medieval sources in her research, for example the building reports that were made when the medieval church was pulled down in the eighteenth century, as well as descriptions of the building made by visitors of Fulda in the early modern period before the destruction of the medieval ediice. In her opinion, to be able to understand what the early medieval abbey church had looked like, scholars should start with the present-day building, the baroque Dom which was built to replace the medieval abbey church in the early eighteenth century, and from there go back in time, reconstructing all the preceding building phases, Ratger’s and Sturmi’s churches last. Additionally, Krause has tried to distinguish the actual indings from 73 74 75

76 77

78

See Krause, Ratgerbasilika, pp. 16–17. Binding and Linscheid-Burdich, Planen und Bauen, pp. 558–63. Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 13, pp. 144–5. Jacobsen, ‘Abteikirche Fulda’, p. 107; Binding, Vorromanische Kirchenbauten, pp. 16–18, 37–9. Brouwer, Fuldensium antiquitatum, p. 120; Krause, Ratgerbasilika, pp. 17–18. In the Vita Sturmi this miracle is ascribed to Boniface. Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 24, pp. 159–60. See also ARF, a. 778, p. 52. Krause, Ratgerbasilika.

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Baugulf later interpretations by modern scholars who from the beginning of the excavations seem to have been determined to ind conirmation of the reconstruction made by Gregor Richter in 1905.79 As an art historian, Richter collected all existing descriptions of Fulda’s abbey church in order to reconstruct the monastery’s basilica. As such, his work is valuable to this day. Yet the texts used by Richter (most of all the extant biographies of Fulda’s abbots and Hrabanus Maurus’ tituli) mention the church only in passing and do not describe the ediice in full detail. Moreover, at the time Richter wrote, there were no material sources yet to test his indings. Richter’s reconstruction of Fulda’s architectural history ofered the archaeologists an appealing and helpful frame within which to interpret their indings. The archaeologists, not long after the publication of Richter’s study, started to excavate parts of the early medieval monastery. Their work was badly hindered by the destruction of the eighth- and ninth-century monastic complex during the late medieval rebuilding and the construction of the eighteenth-century cathedral with the spacious, raised square in front of the ediice. Lack of money and the fact that archaeology as a science was still in its infancy obstructed their work even more.80 Even though Richter’s conjectural reconstruction of the early medieval abbey church was helpful, it also blinded scholars to interpretations that did not it this model. Krause has tried to break away from the persistent presuppositions based on Richter’s reading of the written sources, and has cast doubt on what has been assumed so far. Her conclusions force us to reconsider what we actually know about Fulda’s abbey churches. Concerning the monastery’s irst church, this is astonishingly little. There is no archaeological evidence that proves Richter’s claim of the existence of a large three-naved basilica in Fulda as early as the 760s. As to whether the church built by Sturmi was a hall church or a basilica-type, whether it had an apse or square choir, we are simply in the dark.81 Only the size of the nave can be roughly estimated. According to Krause, it measured approximately 26.5 metres by 17 metres, with an internal width of the nave of 15.4 metres at the most (see Figures 3b and 4).82 This is a lot smaller than modern scholars so far have assumed.

79 80 81 82

Richter, Bonifatius-Jubiläum. Parsons, ‘Sites and monuments’, 298. See also Fischer and Oswald, ‘Baugeschichte’, p. 273. Krause, Ratgerbasilika, pp. 161–4. I have estimated the length of the nave on the basis of Krause’s drawing (igure lxii, p. 377) that delineates the area where the Sturmi church probably once was positioned.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda (a)

Structures on the site prior to 744

(b)

Area of Sturmi’s abbey church (dotted) and claustrum (grey) c.750

Tomb of Boniface

(c) Reconstruction of Ratger’s abbey church c.830

100 m

Figure 3 The site of the monastery of Fulda, showing the development of the abbey churches in relation to the earlier structures and landscape. © 2011 Caroline Goodson (a) Structures on the site prior to 744 (b) Area of Sturmi’s abbey church (dotted) and claustrum (grey) c.750 (c) Reconstruction of Ratger’s abbey church c.830

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the supposed annex to the 'Sturmi church' with a floor level that lies ca. 1.35m deeper (H/3/2ff) V/2/34

greatest possible extent of the eastern crypt, according to the situation in the 12th century

altar of St Agatha

H/3/36

H/3/11

area of the foundations of the apse C (V/2/10) and B (V/2/8, V/2/9) - supposed position of the Carolingian eastern apse

altar of St Stephen

altar of St Luke in the western choir: the altar of St Boniface in the western crypt: the altar of St Benedict

Holy Cross altar (V/3/1) H/3/16

H/3/10 H/3/15

V/2/12 V/2/12

in the eastern choir: the altar of the Holy Saviour in the eastern crypt: the altar of St Antony

altar of St Mark altar of St Clemens

V/1/21 H/3/14

altar of St Agnes

LEGEND "Gravel floor" (H/1/2)

supposed extent of the southern cloister built under Sturmi, bounded to the north by a change in the ground level H/3/14

oldest building remains in the area of the present-day chapel of St Andreas (H/3/18, DIV/16)

current reconstruction definitely established remains Krause's reconstruction building alignments up until now linked to the 'Sturmi church'

Figure 4 The Ratgerbasilica according to Krause, Die Ratgerbasilika in Fulda: Eine forschungsgeschichtliche Untersuchung (Fulda, 2002), igure LXII, p. 377. Scale 1:600. The shaded part marks the area where the Sturmi church was located. © 2002 Eva Krause

The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda If Sturmi’s church was indeed as small as this, it is no longer diicult to understand why Baugulf decided to replace it. The community of Fulda had increased considerably; counting at least 364 members in the early 780s, as the Baugulf list shows. The majority lived outside the mother convent, in Fulda’s dependent houses, but nevertheless will have visited the mother convent on special occasions. On important feast days, monks, prominent churchmen and lay people from the region gathered in Fulda to participate in the festivities. Pilgrims from near and far away places visited the shrines of the saints in the church.83 The church was probably no longer big enough to accommodate the monks and visitors who came to Fulda to celebrate liturgical feasts or to honour Boniface, who had become increasingly popular as Fulda’s patron saint. When in 786 a group of Thuringian rebels needed protection against the king’s anger, they led to Fulda and sought refuge at the tomb of Boniface.84 The account of their light, written down close to the event by a scribe in the Annales Nazariani, testiies to the martyr’s fame in the regions east of the Rhine and the growing importance of the place of his burial in local society and its relation with the royal court.85 The event may well have helped to stimulate Abbot Baugulf, who received the Thuringian noblemen and mediated on their behalf, to develop further the martyr’s cult in a new church, which would be bigger and in which he could give Boniface a more prominent position.86 In the same period Baugulf also asked Alcuin to write a mass for Boniface and possibly placed an altar on the martyr’s grave. In addition, from the 780s and 790s onwards, gifts to Fulda from the Middle Rhine valley were no longer redacted at Mainz, which lies some 160 km to the south-west of Fulda, but in the monastery itself.87 On these occasions, donors, accompanied by their relatives, friends and clients, travelled to the monastery to ofer their gifts. The monks will have welcomed the benefactors with honour and religious rituals that relected and enhanced the alliances between the community and its patron saint on the one hand, and the donating families on the other. They would have wanted the place of the reception to it these formal 83 84

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See, for example, Rudolf, Vita Leobae, cc. 21–3, pp. 130–1; and SL, c. 13, p. 325. ‘Ad corpus beati Bonifacii martyris confugierunt.’ Annales Nazariani, a. 786, pp. 41–2; Lendi, Frühalemannischen Annalistik, pp. 159–63; and, with a recent discussion of the event and transcription of the concerning passage, McKitterick, Perceptions, pp. 86–7. McKitterick, Perceptions, p. 88. With thanks to Rosamond McKitterick who pointed out the possible relation between the rebels’ visit to Fulda in 786 and the initiation of the building project in 791. Innes, ‘People, places and power’, pp. 413–14.

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Baugulf and festive ceremonies. It can therefore hardly have been a coincidence that the monks of Fulda started to build the new church around the same time that gifts were more frequently recorded in the monastery itself. One of the reasons for building the new abbey church must have been to impress the visitors and to increase the power and status of the monastery. Furthermore, for a community that lived dispersed across a vast territory, a new church could serve as a unifying symbol. In the light of the recent growth, the monks needed a clear embodiment of the centre of the organisation and the heart of worship.88 A new abbey church could ofer just that. Th e bi g g e r picture : the Carol ing i an ‘R e nai s sanc e ’ Apart from these considerations that resulted from local circumstances, Baugulf ’s work was part of a general cultural lowering that fostered ambitious building projects all over the Frankish kingdom, mostly monasteries and palaces.89 Together with other expressions of artistic creativity such as beautifully illuminated manuscripts, skilfully carved ivory and impressive silver- and goldsmith’s craft, historians in later times have classiied them as the fruits of ‘the Carolingian Renaissance’.90 This cultural lourishing sprang from the policy of the Carolingians to extend and consolidate their political authority and to reform the Frankish church, a precondition of the well-being of the Frankish people. Inspired by devotion, care for the salvation of one’s soul, but most importantly by what was considered to be the Church’s most important task – giving praise to God in the liturgy – they instigated the building of churches and monasteries. After all, those who were responsible for the liturgy should also see to it that sacred buildings were erected, where the performance of the cultus divinus could take place.91 Though royal pronouncements like the Admonitio generalis do not explicitly order the building of new churches, their concern for the reform and augmentation of the divine worship also implied the construction of buildings that enabled and served this liturgy. As holy places of perfect life, monasteries were well suited for this important task. A year before Baugulf started to erect a new abbey church in Fulda, Angilbert, a prominent member of Charlemagne’s court, begun his building project in the royal monastery of Centula, also 88 89 90 91

Schmid, ‘Mönchslisten’, p. 631. Mann, ‘Grossbauten’, p. 321. See 799 Kunst und Kultur, and Brown, ‘Carolingian Renaissance’, pp. 1–51. For the importance of the liturgy for the Carolingian kings, see, for example, the Admonitio generalis, MGH Cap. 1, No. 22.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda known as St Riquier, in northern France, where the king had just appointed him abbot. Charlemagne himself, the ‘devout defender of the holy church and its humble helper’ as he called himself in the Admonitio generalis, was the project’s most important supporter and material sponsor.92 When the new monastery was finished, the king and his entourage came to the Ponthieu to celebrate Easter, a great honour for St Riquier.93 Angilbert’s complex probably consisted of a triangular cloister with chapels at the corners and a huge two-transept church with tall crossing towers and a westwork, and was dedicated to the Holy Trinity.94 The interior of the abbey church offered room for multiple altars and different liturgical functions, and therefore answered the needs of the Carolingian liturgical reforms well.95 Around the same time Angilbert built his homage to the Holy Trinity, Charlemagne had a palace complex built in Aachen, a building project that continued at least until the early 820s.96 It comprised a great hall, a palace church and a tribunal building linked to the other buildings by a two-storey, covered corridor. The church, the only building of the whole complex that is well preserved, was enriched with marble columns, classical spolia and bronze doors which were cast in one piece, a remarkable accomplishment considering their size and weight.97 They are but one example of the chapel’s extraordinary nature whose aim was to impress. A poet in the early ninth century described the prestigious complex as ‘a second Rome’, ‘rising to great heights with its massive walls, touching the stars with its high domes’.98 It was one of the king’s major building projects. Other examples are the palaces in Nijmegen and Ingelheim, both mentioned in Einhard’s Vita Karoli as ‘exceptionally made palaces’ (palatia operis egregii) and Paderborn, the urbs Karoli, a whole new royal and ecclesiastical centre in recently 92

93 94

95

96

97 98

‘devotus sanctae ecclesiae defensor humilisque adiutor.’ In fact, it was Alcuin who wrote the Admonitio, but he did this on behalf of Charlemagne. Introduction, Admonitio generalis, MGH Cap. 1, No. 22, p. 53. ARF, a. 800, p. 110; Angilbert, De ecclesia Centulensi, i, pp. 173–8. The appearance and meaning of the complex in St Riquier are much debated by modern scholars. See Rabe, Faith, pp. 1–12; Heitz, L’architecture religieuse carolingienne, pp. 51–63; Parsons, ‘St. Riquier’, 21–55. Heitz, L’architecture religieuse carolingienne, pp. 56–62; Heitz, ‘Architecture et liturgie’, 30–47; Rabe, Faith, pp. 111–37. It is not precisely clear when the building of the complex in Aachen was started and ended. See McKitterick, Charlemagne, p. 167; Lobbedey, ‘Carolingian royal palaces’, pp. 130–1. Also Nelson, ‘Aachen’, pp. 217–37; Untermann, “‘Opere mirabili constructa”’, pp. 152–64. Maas, Aachener Dom, p. 17; Untermann, “‘Opere mirabili constructa’”, pp. 157–8. ‘Roma secunda … ingenti magna consurgit ad alta / Mole tholis muro praecelsis sidera tangens.’ Karolus Magnus et Leo papa, p. 368. Translation by Julia Smith, Europe after Rome, p. 268.

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Baugulf conquered Saxony.99 Of Nijmegen we know little, but archaeological findings of important Roman spolia, remnants of Carolingian architectural sculpture and evidence of the spacious layout of its palace complex suggest that Ingelheim was a place of great splendour, comparable to Aachen.100 Paderborn was less prestigious in its set-up, but nevertheless over the years developed into an impressive palace complex, with a ‘church of great magnitude’ (ecclesia mirae magnitudinis) and workshops producing glass, mosaic, ceramic tableware and wall-paintings.101 The building projects that were realised under the direct supervision of the Carolingians in the light of their religious reforms and political aspirations also stimulated communities elsewhere to innovate their churches and housing, including Fulda. Only two years after they had received the Admonitio generalis and in the same period that Charlemagne had commissioned his master builders to erect a palace in Aachen, the monks of Fulda started their own majestic project. Fulda’s new church (the so-called Ratger basilica) was a three-naved basilica with an apse in the east.102 Also with regard to this church, historians have long followed Vonderau.Vonderau assumed that the total width of the basilica was 35.5 metres, the internal width of the middle nave 17 metres, the total internal length of the church approximately 72 metres and the internal radius of the apse 7.5 metres, something that was unique and unprecedented in this period and, it appears, too exceptional to be true.103 Krause has argued that, like the church of Sturmi discussed earlier, the new basilica of Baugulf was smaller than has been thought. She has pointed to the fact that Vonderau’s estimation of the width of the basilica rests on a very badly documented discovery of what presumably is the base-plate of a column. Its function in the ediice is diicult to establish.The plinth was not necessarily part of one of the columns that separated the nave from two side-aisles.104 Moreover, Krause claims that what Vonderau deined as the apse of the Ratger basilica (apse A) was in fact a later added

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100 101

102 103

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Einhard, Vita Karoli, c. 17, p. 20. Paderborn is called ‘urbs Karoli’ in the Annales Petaviani, a. 776, p. 16; McKitterick, Charlemagne, p. 165, footnote 103. Lobbedey, ‘Carolingian royal palaces’, pp. 138–43; Grewe, ‘Ingelheim’, pp. 142–51. Annales Laureshamenses, a. 799, p. 38; Chronicon Moissacense, a. 799, p. 304. For a concise reconstruction of what is known about the palace in Paderborn, see: Mecke, ‘Pfalzen Paderborn’, pp. 176–82; Gai, ‘Pfalz Paderborn’, pp. 183–96. For the workshops, see the contributions of Preissler, Grothe and Gai to 799 Kunst und Kultur, vol. iii, pp. 197–217. Fischer and Oswald, ‘Baugeschichte’, p. 274. Vonderau, Ausgrabungen 1919–1924, pp. 19–20.The length of the church I have based on Vonderau’s drawing, p. 20. Find V/1/21 in Krause, Ratgerbasilika, pp. 193–4.Vonderau, Ausgrabungen 1908–1913, p. 21.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda fortiication of the actual apse (apse B or C) and that the archaeological remains that so far have been associated with the Sturmi church in fact were part of the Ratger basilica.105 In her view, the width of the basilica’s apse was 11–12.7 metres, and that of the church itself approximately 20 metres. She furthermore estimates the measurement of the central nave at approximately 11–12.9 metres, which, considering the average central nave width in Carolingian architecture (10 metres),106 makes more sense than what Vonderau suggested.107 This adjustment of the church’s sizes makes the ediice more ‘normal’ in comparison to other contemporary churches. The length of the church, including the apse, probably measured some 68 metres. With regard to this, Krause does not difer a lot from previous reconstructions. Even after Krause’s corrections, it still was an impressive church, though not as wide as was once thought (see Figure 4). The design of the church seems to have been inspired by the large basilicas that were erected in major Frankish royal abbeys in the years preceding its reconstruction. An example close by is the abbey church of Lorsch (767–774). Since the acquisition of the body of Nazarius, a powerful martyr, Lorsch had become Fulda’s ierce competitor in the struggle over patronage and possessions in the Middle Rhine area.108 Another one is St Alban in Mainz (787–805), where Charlemagne buried his fourth wife, Queen Fastrada (d. 794).109 Further away from Fulda, right in the centre of power of the Frankish kingdom, the abbey church of St Denis (768–775) was a three-naved basilica; so was the monastic church of St Maurice d’Agaune (770) which, because of its strategic position on the border between Burgundy and the Lombard kingdom, was a favourite residence of kings and popes.110 By following the example of these major royal abbeys, Fulda associated itself with the ruling dynasty and the centre of power. At the same time, the new basilica was well suited to contain a large community of monks and to accommodate the visitors who came to Fulda to participate in the festivities. In addition, its space ofered plenty of room to put up more altars, necessary for the growth of liturgical services. 105 106 107 108 109 110

Krause, Ratgerbasilika, pp. 138–9 (apse) and 161–3 (nave). Jacobsen, Klosterplan St. Gallen, pp. 174f . Krause, Ratgerbasilika, p. 164. Innes, State and Society. For the church’s structure, see Behn, Klosterkirche Lorsch, pp. 20–31. Oswald et al. (eds.), Vorromanische Kirchenbauten, p. 195. For St Denis: McKnight Crosby, Saint-Denis; Jacobsen, ‘Saint-Denis’, pp. 151–84; Jacobsen, Klosterplan St. Gallen, pp. 233–7. For St Maurice: Blondel, ‘Basiliques d’Agaune’, 9–58. See also Rosenwein, ‘Saint Maurice d’Agaune’, pp. 276–80. Also Lehner, ‘Saint-Maurice’, 341–4. Other churches like Eichstätt (741/2) or Niedermünster in Regensburg (750) that were built in preceding decades were still hall churches with square choirs. Jacobsen, ‘Abteikirche Fulda’, p. 109.

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Baugulf As a result of the construction of the new basilica, the grave where Boniface had been buried in 754 now lay at the centre of the church between the apse and the western wall of the church and both sideaisles. Yet this was only a temporary solution. Baugulf must have had plans to translate the martyr to a more suitable place for such an important saint, but never got around to executing them, because he stepped down as abbot prematurely. It is inconceivable that an abbot who had tried to stimulate the martyr’s cult would have wanted to replace the old church without providing Boniface with a resting place that surpassed the previous one in position and grandeur. A sepulchre in the middle of the church was not an option, as Boniface speciically had requested to be buried in the west.111 An extension of the church in the west would thus have been preferable, especially if there already existed a kind of prayer house in this place, where monks and pilgrims could honour Boniface.112 It is therefore likely that the addition of a western transept had already been planned under Baugulf.113 If this is the case, Fulda’s abbey church would have been the irst church building to have been conceived as a double-choired basilica with two apses. So far double churches often had been the result of later alterations to an already existing church; never had they been designed as such in advance.114 Although it would have been extraordinary in those days, there are, as we have seen, more examples of impressive, ambitious building projects from that period: the palace in Aachen, which already in its own day was recognised as a piece of technical ingenuity and praised for its remarkable building techniques, and the impressive and unique monastic complex at St Riquier.115 Together with his advisers and entourage Charlemagne created an environment in which the construction of a church such as the one built in Fulda would have been possible as early as the 790s. All in all, the addition of a western transept was a logical step in the light of local circumstances and it was therefore what Ratger would do in the end. In several ways Fulda’s abbey church is an image of the monastic community. Through its architecture, the church relects the ambitions of Fulda as a royal abbey. Through its size, the building is a sign of the 111 112 113 114 115

Jacobsen, ‘Abteikirche Fulda’, pp. 116–17. See Chapter 2, pp. 47–8. Compare Krause, Ratgerbasilika, pp. 162–4, 171, 173. Jacobsen, Klosterplan St. Gallen, pp. 239f . Alcuin, Epistolae, No. 241, p. 244; Einhard, Vita Karoli, cc. 17, 26, pp. 20, 30–31; Notker the Stammerer, Gesta Karoli, b. i, cc. 27, 28, 31, pp. 38–41; Chronicon Moissiacense a. 796, p. 303. Nelson, ‘Aachen’, pp. 217–41; Untermann, “‘Opere mirabili constructa”’, pp. 152–64; Untermann, Zentralbau, pp. 86–110.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda material growth of the monastery, the expansion of the number of monks and its increasing appeal for local families. These changes also come to the fore in the charters, the Annales necrologici and the Baugulf list. Through its spatial layout, the church mirrors the importance of the performance of divine worship. This development is also visible in the Baugulf list, which shows a rising number of monks who were trained to become priests. They were the servants that carried out the growing demand for liturgical services. In the discussion of the three self-representations of Fulda, we have seen how during Baugulf ’s abbacy Fulda grew bigger, with regard to both the number of monks and the amount of property, and how it further developed as a centre of learning and a royal abbey. Fulda beneited from these changes, but also sufered from them as they caused discord within the community. In the end, the transformation of the monastery would disrupt the community severely and culminate in a conlict that needed the repeated intervention of bishops and the royal court and the removal of an abbot before it was resolved. This conlict will be the subject of the next chapter, which deals with Baugulf ’s successor Ratger, the abbot who was removed from oice. As most historians consider the roots of the argument to lie in the time of Baugulf, and his early retirement to be an portent of the years of crisis that were to turn life in Fulda upside down only a decade later, a short discussion of this conlict will form the end of this chapter. An e pi logue In 802 Baugulf resigned as abbot and retired to his cella in Wolfsmünster along the river Saale.This was well placed, for it was close to Hammelburg, a powerful landholding of the abbey, and had good infrastructure, productive farmlands and even a small library.116 No extant document ofers us a reason for this momentous decision. The Annals of Fulda only record: ‘In that year, Baugulf, the abbot of the monastery of Fulda, after he had renounced the oice which he had held, accepted Ratger as his successor.’117 It is widely believed that the short, seemingly insigniicant record in the Annales Fuldenses in fact refers to a major conlict between Baugulf and the community that in the end forced the abbot to withdraw from 116

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Baugulf resigned between 26 May and 4 July. See UBF, No. 285, p. 413 and CDF, No. 219, p. 115. Concerning the library, see above, p. 81. ‘Eo anno Bougolfus abbas Fuldensis coenobii relicta, quam habuit, potestate Ratgarium successorem accepit.’ AF, a. 802, p. 15.

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Baugulf oice.118 The reason for this assumption is a letter written by Alcuin around 801 or 802 to the monks of Fulda, which could be read as a plea of reconciliation by Alcuin on behalf of his friend Baugulf. In this letter, Alcuin asked the monks not to condemn their abbot, who because of his illness could not bear the severity of monastic life. Instead of rebuking him for his failures, they should obey and love him like a father, for he enabled the monks to lead a regular life in all quietness. Moreover, it was not their call to judge him. After all, the abbot would have to justify his conduct before God at the Last Judgement. Alcuin continued his plea for concord with a brief treatise on the relations between the senior members of the community and the young monks, the iuniores, and ended with a reference to the votive masses he had written for the monastic community.119 Stefen Patzold warns us not to read too much into Alcuin’s letter. According to Patzold, the epistle relects the master’s usual concern with the well-being of God’s servants and is punctuated with his regular exhortations to monastic stability (stabilitas), obedience, love (caritas) and harmony. These are central themes in the Rule of Benedict, on which Alcuin also elaborates in his letters to other monasteries such as Murbach, Montolieu, St Vaast and Wearmouth-Jarrow.120 Indeed, Alcuin’s letters, including the one to the monks of Fulda, have a similar character of general admonition. In them, he singled out certain themes that were particularly relevant to monks and nuns, while drawing heavily on the authority on which the Carolingian reform was based above all: Scripture. It is striking how often Alcuin warned of the dangers of conlict within a religious community and how frequently he urged his audience to keep the peace, to remember their monastic vow and to think of the heavenly award that was lying ahead of them. To Alcuin, harmony was the basic necessity for efective prayer and therefore the salvation of the people. Yet, it was not self-evident. A peaceful, well-functioning monastery was hard work. Nevertheless, while Alcuin in his letters usually spoke in general terms and brought up issues that every monastery had to deal with, he was explicit and personal in his letter to the monks of Fulda, for he referred to a speciic problem that troubled this particular monastery at that particular time: a sick Baugulf, who because of his illness did not live up to 118

119 120

For an overview of the modern discussion about the conlict, see Patzold, ‘Konlikte’, 94, footnote 89. Alcuin, Epistolae, No. 250, pp. 404–6. Patzold, ‘Konlikte’, 98–9; Alcuin, Epistolae, Nos. 187, 205, 271–3, 280, 284, 286, 296, pp. 314, 340, 429–31, 436, 442, 444, 455. Concerning the admonishing nature of Alcuin’s letters see also: Garrison, ‘Les correspondants d’Alcuin’, pp. 319–32.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda the Rule of Benedict. Although we need to be careful not to project the events of the 810s into the period that preceded the crisis, Alcuin’s letter does relect the existence of discussions within the community, even if they did not necessarily result in a ierce conlict. Baugulf ’s illness apparently raised questions concerning the way in which a proper monastic life was achieved and the kind of abbot it required. As we shall see in the following chapter, the discussions gained added force in the second decade of the ninth century.

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Chapter 4

R AT GE R : C H U R C H A ND CO NFLI CT

When the monks of Fulda chose Ratger to succeed Baugulf as abbot of the monastery in 802, they seem not to have fully realised that they had opted for another period of even more construction work. Perhaps they were too much infected by the grandness of the majestic ediice that arose in their monastery and the name that they would make for themselves to care.The monks had started to replace Sturmi’s church ten years previously. With Ratger at the wheel, what was supposed to be a house of prayer would remain a building site for another sixteen years. In those years, Ratger realised one of the most ambitious building projects east of the Rhine of the early Middle Ages: by adding a western transept to the basilica he created a large cross-shaped structure, with two liturgical centres on raised platforms, one in the west and one in the east, and with plenty of room in the aisles of the nave and the transept for the celebration of votive masses and elaborate liturgical rituals on ecclesiastical feast days. Yet in this same period Ratger also got involved in a conlict that would end his career as abbot. It is primarily for this conlict and his extraordinary talent as an architect that historians remember Fulda’s fourth abbot. We should not forget, however, that Ratger was also an active manager of monastic property and concerned with the development of Fulda as a centre of cultural and intellectual activity. The abbot sent talented pupils such as Hrabanus and Hatto to study with Alcuin in Tours. Candidus and Modestus went to Einhard and Clemens Scottus at court. Expecting that Fulda would beneit from their education on their return, Ratger made sure that his most brilliant students were trained by these eminent scholars.1 In addition, ties with old local aristocratic families were further tightened under Ratger’s guidance and new relations established. As a result, the monastery’s property increased signiicantly. Most of the grants in this period came from families in the east-Frankish 1

Gesta abbatum, p. 272.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda regions of Saalegau, Werngau and Aschfeld, where Ratger seems to have had his roots.2 The following images of the monastic community date from Ratger’s abbacy: apart from the abbey church that the architect further extended as abbot, there are the Supplex Libellus and the Fulda version of the Chronicon Laurissense breve (Short Chronicle of Lorsch). The Supplex Libellus is a petition written in the early 810s by a group of Fulda monks to complain about Ratger and his way of ruling their monastery. It is addressed to the emperor, under whose protection and care Fulda fell as a royal abbey. The document lists the grievances of Ratger’s opponents and at the same time presents their vision of an ideal monastery.3 The Chronicon Laurissense breve is a piece of local history writing originally produced at Lorsch, but reworked and extended in Fulda in the years leading up to Ratger’s deposition, between 807 and 815.4 Both the Supplex Libellus and Fulda’s continuation of the Chronicon Laurissense breve in their own way take up a position and comment upon the conlict. In studying both representations of Fulda, I shall also briely return to the Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi, discussed in Chapter 2, as their account of the events of the 810s is very diferent from the description in the Chronicon.They provide, therefore, valuable evidence for the existence of diferent factions and self-perceptions within the community. Before turning to the conlict and its extant witnesses, I want to expand on the abbey church, which was further shaped during Ratger’s abbacy. As a representation of Fulda, it mirrors mostly the ambitions of the architect-abbot and his followers – a group that increasingly lost power and support in Fulda in the 810s. The ediice’s form, size and architecture provide a glimpse of the objectives of this faction that in the end tasted defeat and to which access can only be gained through the work of their adversaries: the winners of the conlict. The church is in fact the only product left of Ratger’s own hand, so to speak. Being made out of stone and with hardly any remains left, it is at the same time the most diicult to read. More bui l ding: the transe pt i n th e we st When Baugulf stepped down as abbot of Fulda, the new basilica was roughly inished. Ratger continued with the second part of the church, the already-mentioned transept in the west. It was a long, continuous 2 3 4

Freise, ‘Studien’, p. 1104; Sandmann, ‘Folge der Äbte’, p. 183. SL, pp. 319–27; Semmler, ‘Supplex Libellus’, 268–98; Patzold, ‘Konlikte’, 105–39. McKitterick, History and Memory, p. 35.

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Ratger structure with an apse and two rooms, one at each end, which were separated from the main part of the transept by either columns or walls. Richard Krautheimer assumed that it was columns that divided the transept into three spaces, as this was also the case in St Peter’s.5 Eva Krause, however, has suggested that the spaces were separated from each other by walls, and that the room at each end of the transept was only added later. Her hypothesis is that Hrabanus Maurus built the two rooms during his abbacy and that they were the library and the sacrarium, to which the Gesta abbatum refers. According to Krause the internal length of the transept was 75 metres, its internal width 13.6 metres and its height possibly 7 or 8 metres. This is smaller than so far has been assumed, though not substantially so. Krause furthermore calculated the width of the apse to be 12.2 metres, instead of the 17.6 metres proposed by Vonderau and Hahn.6 By adding the transept to the already large basilica, Ratger created an ediice which was unprecedented in early medieval Germany and which must have impressed everybody who set eyes on it. Its size was comparable to the great basilicas in Rome: the Santa Maria Maggiore, St Peter’s, the basilica of St John Lateran and St Paul’s, though the width of the nave in Fulda was smaller.7 Contemporary churches in the Frankish realm that were praised for their ‘miraculous magnitude’ were not as large as the one in Fulda. The church in Fulda outmatched the church of St Denis (768– 775), the abbey churches of St Riquier (790–799) and of Reichenau (816), and, nearer to home, the abbey church of Lorsch (767–774), the church of St Alban in Mainz (787–805) and Charlemagne’s church in Paderborn (793/4–799), which had been characterised as an ecclesia mirae magnitudinis.8 The nearest church north of the Alps that could compete with Fulda in size was the cathedral church of Cologne. To compare, the internal width of the middle nave in Fulda measured approximately 11 metres, and the total internal length of the church (including transept and apses) 90 metres. The internal width of the middle nave of Cologne’s cathedral (Bau II, period VIIa/VIIb) measured approximately 12 metres, and the total internal length of the church 91 metres.9 It was built in the third quarter of the ninth century, so half a century after the monks had inished their church in Fulda.10 All in all, Ratger’s creation was exceptional. 5 6 7 8

9 10

Krautheimer, ‘Carolingian revival’, 10. Krause, Ratgerbasilika, pp. 149–52. De Blaauw, ‘Hauptkirchen Roms’, pp. 529–41. Annales Laureshamenses a. 799, p. 38; Chronicon Moissacense a. 799, p. 304. Jacobsen, ‘Abteikirche Fulda’, pp. 114, 118; Jacobsen, ‘Renaissance Karolingerzeit’, pp. 623–42; Jacobsen, ‘Karolingische “Renaissance”’, 313–47. Oswald et al., Vorromanische Kirchenbauten, p. 214. Jacobsen, Klosterplan St. Gallen, p. 211.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda What do the ediice and its architecture tell us about Ratger’s intentions and his vision of Fulda? T he r hetoric of archite c ture It was not only the size of the church that was exceptional; it was also its shape that was extraordinary. Until the ifth century we ind what the architectural historian Richard Krautheimer has called the ‘basilica of the T-type’ hardly anywhere in Europe apart from Rome. This type of basilica was characterised by a long rectangular hall often accompanied by side-aisles, which were separated from the nave by columns, and, at right angles to it, a transept and apse. Famous examples of this kind of church are the early Christian basilicas built by Emperor Constantine and his successors: the so-called Constantinian Basilica (later renamed as the basilica of St John Lateran, begun c.312), St Peter’s (begun c.320) and St Paul’s (386–395).11 After 500 there were no churches of the T-type built in Europe at all, until this architectural form became popular again in the second half of the eighth century.12 Scholars such as Richard Coates-Stephens and Caroline Goodson have criticised Krautheimer’s typology of church architecture in Rome and his interpretation of the late seventh to early eighth century as a period of decline in Rome, followed by a revival of early Christian architecture during the ‘Carolingian Renaissance’.13 Nevertheless, Krautheimer’s claim that the basilica of the ‘T-type’ was only revived in the Carolingian period is still uncontested. The irst time a northern architect used this kind of church building again was in St Denis, now a suburb of Paris, then the cult-site of the third-century martyr Dionysius and a monastery with royal favour. Being the traditional burial site of the Merovingian kings, it also became the setting of the tail end of a coup d’état that was set in motion years before. For it was here that the pope anointed Pippin III – former mayor of the palace and member of the Carolingian family – king of the Franks in 754, after the last of the Merovingian kings, Childeric III, and his son had been sent to a monastery three years earlier.14 The anointing of Pippin

11

12 13

14

Concerning the dates of St Peter, I follow Sible de Blaauw and thus Krautheimer and Frazer. De Blaauw, Cultus et Decor, p. 222; Krautheimer et al. (eds.), Corpus Basilicarum, vol. v, pp. 272–8; Krautheimer, ‘Carolingian revival’, 2. Krautheimer, ‘Carolingian revival’, p. 2. See Coates-Stephens, ‘Dark age architecture’, 177–232; Goodson, Pope Paschal I, pp. 86–90; Goodson, ‘Revival and Reality’, pp. 163–92. LP, b. 94, c. 27, p. 448; Clausula de unctione Pippini regis, pp. 1–42. For the remembrance of Pippin’s usurpation in Frankish sources, see McKitterick, ‘The illusion of royal power’, pp. 1–20; McKitterick, History and Memory, ch. 6; Stoclet, ‘La Clausula’, 719–71.

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Ratger marked the end of three centuries of Merovingian dominion and the rise to prominence of a new royal dynasty.15 Probably by way of a memorial to this grand event, the new ruler ordered the building of a new church in St Denis where the assumption of power had been sealed with majestic ceremony. The church was realised and dedicated under Pippin’s sons Charles and Carloman in 775. As we have seen in the former chapter, it was an aisled basilica with a continuous transept with an apse and a ring crypt in the east.16 Around the same time that the bishop consecrated the new basilica at St Denis, the monks of St Maurice d’Agaune started to build a new abbey church (inished in 787). This ediice had a transept with ring crypt in the west. Besides the church of St Denis, it is the only other Carolingian example of a church with a transept that we know of that was built before the construction of the abbey church of Fulda.17 For the construction of their churches, the architects of St Denis and St Maurice d’Agaune and Ratger had sought their models in Rome, in the early Christian basilicas of the Constantinian and post-Constantinian period.18 St Peter’s especially, with its long, continuous transept and ring crypt, had been popular as a source of inspiration as it represented some of the most crucial moments and the most eminent igures of Christendom’s past. For the ediice was the burial church of the apostle and martyr, Peter, the prince of the apostles who, according to the Christian tradition, was the rock on which Christ would build his church (Matt 16: 18). In addition, the church was constructed by the irst Roman emperor to embrace Christianity himself: Constantine the Great (c.280– 337). Although the emperor’s conversion to Christianity is now disputed by historians, people in the early Middle Ages remembered him as the irst Christian Roman ruler. In the words of Pope Gregory the Great (c.540–604) Constantine was ‘the most religious emperor who converted the Roman state from the false worship of idols and subjected it along with himself to almighty God and our Lord Jesus Christ, turning to him with all his heart together with all the people subject to him’.19 As a inal point to the signiicance of St Peter, none other than Pope Gregory the Great, the widely respected Church father, had added the ring crypt to 15 16

17

18 19

McKitterick, Charlemagne, ch. 2. Wyss, ‘Saint-Denis’, pp. 138–41; Jacobsen, ‘Saint-Denis’, pp. 151–85; Semmler, ‘Saint-Denis’, pp. 75–123. Blondel, ‘Basiliques d’Agaune’, 9–58; Lehner, ‘Saint-Maurice’, 341–4; Jacobsen, Klosterplan St. Gallen, p. 239. Krautheimer, ‘Carolingian revival’, 10. Translation by Robert Markus, Gregory the Great, p. 82. Gregory the Great, Registrum, b. xi, No. 37, p. 930.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda the basilica to guide the pilgrims in a steady low past the grave of the prince of the apostles and to integrate his sepulchre into the daily liturgy of the church. Gregory had rebuilt the shrine of St Peter and made sure that the main altar came to stand directly above the body of the saint.The ixing of the altar and the introduction of daily liturgy had actually been the main reason for the new arrangement. The accessibility of the shrine had been of secondary importance.20 All in all, St Peter’s was imbued with sacred meaning and a reputable past. The constructors of St Denis, St Maurice d’Agaune and Fulda cited from their Roman examples what they thought was most typical and representative of the early Christian architecture of the Holy City and St Peter’s in particular: the basilica shape, the long, continuous transept and/ or the ring crypt. An ediice was never copied in its entirety, but the architect adapted the copied element to comply with local needs. In the case of St Denis, for example, the church had a continuous transept and a ring crypt, but not in the west as in St Peter’s and not with the same proportions and measurements. In Fulda, Ratger closely cited the long, narrow continuous transept of St Peter’s, including its wide apse and possibly the rooms at the ends of the transept, its orientation towards the west and its measurements. He did not, however, imitate its famous ring crypt.21 The fascination for Roman architecture was part of a larger interest in the Holy City in Francia, and in the British Isles as a matter of fact. All over the Frankish kingdom and in Anglo-Saxon England, people turned to Rome as a source of authority and inspiration.22 They did so not only when they needed an architectural model, but also when they wanted relics, instructions of liturgical ritual or law. Rome seemed an almost inexhaustible source of self-justiication and identiication for people both inside and outside the city. This ‘imagined city’, a ‘Rome in the mind’ as Peter Brown phrased it, was created and maintained by those whose needs and longings leant on the city’s rich past.23 For the Franks in the eighth and ninth centuries, Rome was the most sacred space within their immediate reach, an image that for centuries had been strongly promoted by the popes themselves, who, as vicars of St Peter, were believed to carry the apostolic tradition, and with great success.24 Their Rome was the city where the apostle Paul had preached, Saints Peter and Paul had 20 21

22 23 24

Hahn, ‘Seeing and believing’, 1098–9. Krautheimer has argued that it had been Ratger’s intention to copy the example from Rome exactly. ‘Carolingian revival’, 11, n. 83. Compare Krause, Ratgerbasilika, pp. 149–53. See, for example, Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica, v, c. 21, p. 333. Brown, Rise, pp. 218–32; De Jong, ‘Rethinking early medieval Christianity’, 270. Thacker, ‘Martyr cult’, pp. 32–70; Noble, ‘Papal Rome’, pp. 45–91; Schiefer, ‘Redeamus ad fontem’, pp. 45–70.

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Ratger been martyred and buried, and the Christian emperors had resided and had built their basilicas. Moreover, the bodies of numerous holy martyrs lay in the cemeteries outside its city walls as a witness to the promise of salvation and Christianity’s triumph. All in all, through the presence of the apostles and martyrs, Rome was the closest people in the north could get to the origin of Christianity, and the most powerful ‘entrance to heaven’ (porta caeli) and source of orthodoxy to which they had access. Rome’s superiority as a source of orthodoxy in the eyes of the people north of the Alps is illustrated by the replacement of the relics of the British martyr Sixtus by contact relics of the martyred Pope Sixtus II by Augustine of Canterbury. Another example is the Synod of Whitby, which declared the authority of St Peter superior to that of Columba.25 So when Charlemagne, in his attempts to reform the Frankish church and to unify his empire, needed authoritative texts such as a copy of ‘the archetype’ of the Rule of Benedict or a ‘standard’ of the Sacramentary of Gregory the Great, he turned to Rome. In 774 pope Hadrian sent Charlemagne the Dionysio-Hadriana, a revised version of the canon law collection brought together by Dionysius Exiguus (d. c.556).26 The Carolingians felt a strong connection with St Peter’s, a veneration which the popes certainly did their best to stimulate.27 It is to this reverence for Rome at court that the architects of St Denis and St Maurice d’Agaune responded, while at the same time taking part in it, and so did Ratger. Of course it was not the only reason for the monasteries to build a transept with a ring crypt, as I shall make clear further on in this chapter. Their churches had to serve the local community irst of all and architecture was a means to solve particular problems relating to the organisation of space and the fulilment of their liturgical duties. Both St Denis and St Maurice d’Agaune were in the possession of a powerful martyr, who needed an honourable burial place which pilgrims could easily visit without disturbing the praying monks. The ring crypt satisied both demands. Nevertheless, besides being an answer to practical challenges, architecture could also carry meaning and the ring crypt referred to the Rome of the Carolingians. St Denis and St Maurice d’Agaune were closely linked to the centre of royal power. We have already seen that it was at St Denis that Pippin was anointed king of the Franks. In the years following, the Carolingians continued to use the church on special occasions, such as the burial of Pippin III in 768 25

26 27

Thacker, ‘In search of saints’, pp. 259, 263–4. See also De Jong, ‘Charlemagne’s church’, pp. 116–19; McKitterick, Perceptions, pp. 35–61. Brown, ‘Carolingian Renaissance’, pp. 17, 22; Hen, Royal Patronage, pp. 74–8. See, for example, Einhard, Vita Karoli, c. 27, p. 32. Schiefer, ‘Charlemagne and Rome’, pp. 286–9. See also Noble, ‘Papal Rome’, pp. 45–91.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda and his wife Bertrada in 783, although it was not until the tenth century and thereafter that St Denis became the ‘royal necropolis of France’.28 St Maurice d’Agaune had also played an important role in the history of the Carolingian dynasty and its rise to power. Here Pippin III and Pope Stephen III had met in 753 before Pippin’s anointing by the pope, and here Charlemagne’s son Charles welcomed the pontif before he brought him to the Frankish ruler in 804.29 Some 40 km from the Great Saint Bernard Pass, the monastery was strategically placed between Italy and the kingdom of the Franks. Both St Denis and St Maurice d’Agaune were thus part of the royal network of palaces, monasteries and churches that the king and his entourage visited regularly and that formed the décor of many political events. Those who belonged to this inner circle used a special language of authority that was expressed in, among others, codes of behaviour, liturgy, art and architecture. This language of authority was not static. It was inluenced by those who wanted to be part of this elite and share their prominent position in society. Comparatively new monasteries such as Fulda quickly learned to master this language as it helped them to acquire royal patronage and to enhance their power and prestige. By building a western transept in Fulda, Ratger thus created a visible link with the Rome of the Carolingians and their political ideology. The fact that it was only a relatively brief period in which the building of western transepts and/or apses lourished, and that only few communities followed this ‘Roman fashion’, makes the addition of a western transept in Fulda even more signiicant.30 Moreover, through its addition Ratger also associated his own monastery with places such as St Denis and St Maurice d’Agaune, which lay at the heart of the Carolingian realm. Fulda, on the other hand, was situated on the periphery of the Frankish kingdom and it was only with the attempts of the Franks to incorporate Saxony within their empire that Fulda moved into the horizon of the Carolingians. Ratger wanted his monastery to play a role of importance similar to those places that of old were linked to the centre of royal power and that were important Frankish cult-sites. Of course, Ratger’s transept also alluded to the special bond between Rome and Fulda. After all, the papal privilege granted in 751 created an exclusive link between the Apostolic See and the monastery, as we have 28

29

30

See ARF, a. 768, p. 27; Einhard, Vita Karoli, c. 18, p. 23. Nelson, ‘Carolingian royal funerals’, pp. 131–84; Dierkens, ‘La mort’, 37–52; Krüger, Königsgrabkirchen, pp. 171–93, 495–6. LP, b. 94, c. 24, p. 447; ARF, a. 804, p. 119; Zuferey, Saint-Maurice d’Agaune, pp. 35–6; Rosenwein, ‘Saint Maurice d’Agaune’, pp. 271–90. From the Ottonian period onwards, churches with double choirs became popular again. De Blaauw, Met het Oog op het Licht, pp. 24–5.

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Ratger seen in Chapter 1. Fulda was the only monastery with such a privilege in today’s Germany until the middle of the tenth century.31 During the years in which Fulda’s new abbey church was constructed, the exemption proved as valuable as ever. In 800 Abbot Baugulf was called to the royal court because Bernward, bishop of Würzburg, had questioned the validity of the papal privilege. In the presence of Charlemagne the case was settled in favour of the monks of Fulda.32 This was neither the irst nor the last time that the bishop of Würzburg, or the archbishop of Mainz for that matter, would challenge the power of the privilege. Every time it must have reminded the monks of the signiicance of their bond with Rome. Thus, when Eigil wrote the Vita Sturmi – in the late 810s, around the time that the abbey church was inished and dedicated – he did not fail to mention the granting of the privilege and the relation with Rome that was so important to the monks.33 L iturgy Because I have started the section on Fulda’s abbey church with the architectural structure and layout of the building, it may seem as if Ratger and other Carolingian architects were purely interested in form, in the church as a building and in the impact that their creations had on the viewer. This was not the case. Although early medieval architects, like their modern colleagues, will have had an eye for the beauty and eloquence of buildings, their primary interest was in the contents and the key function of churches: the liturgy and the spatial arrangements it dictated. Liturgy was the irst thing on the mind of these church builders, especially if they, like Ratger, had been raised and trained in a monastic environment where worship determined the rhythm of daily life. By constructing a transept with an apse in the west, Ratger not only cited the architecture of one of Rome’s most famous churches, but also created a possibility for his community to incorporate Roman observances in the monastic liturgy.34 Most churches built in Rome before 400 had a western apse. The basilicas of St John Lateran and St Peter’s are the most famous examples. Liturgical practices in these churches were adapted to the orientation of the building.35 The priest(s) celebrated mass from behind the main altar, which stood on the edge of the western apse, facing east towards the faithful in the nave of the church. Frankish 31 33 34

35

Hussong, ‘Fulda’, i, 61–85. 32 Epist. Fuld. fragm., No. 26, p. 528. Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 20, p. 155. Jacobsen, ‘Abteikirche Fulda’, p. 118, footnote 38; Heitz, ‘More Romano’, pp. 27–37. Another advantage of a continuous transept was that it was a convenient location for additional altars. De Blaauw, Met het Oog op het Licht, pp. 27–38.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda churchmen who wanted to imitate the liturgical practices of these great Constantinian basilicas in their own churches ran into diiculties because the churches in the Frankish Empire had eastern apses. The advantage of a western transept was that the papal liturgy could be imitated precisely as it was done in Rome without any practical obstacles.36 The extent to which Roman practices were integrated into the Frankish liturgy has been much debated by modern scholars. In recent years, the older grand narrative, which claims that under the Carolingians the Frankish liturgy became ‘Roman’, has received severe criticism.37 Researchers of early medieval Christian worship have pointed to the individual character of local liturgical traditions in Francia, which did not easily agree with Roman uses.Whatever resulted from the process of integration can therefore not simply be labelled as ‘Roman’. Moreover, liturgical rituals in Rome itself were too diverse to establish what ‘Roman liturgy’ actually represented, not only by us but also by the people in the early Middle Ages. Often when Frankish sources allude to ‘Roman liturgy’ they actually refer to papal practices, which only formed a fragment of the total of liturgical observances in Rome, albeit a substantial one. By papal liturgy we mean the liturgy performed by the bishop of Rome or his substitute on the so-called stational days. They were especially selected for the communal celebration of the papal mass and often fell on important feasts such as Christmas or the anniversaries of signiicant saints. On these stational days the faithful would move from a place of gathering in the city to one of Rome’s many churches to celebrate mass there in the presence of the pope. Each stational day was celebrated in a diferent church. By taking turns in the location of the festivity, the bishop wanted to strengthen the public spirit in a city with a rapidly growing community of Christians and a likewise rapidly growing number of churches.38 For similar reasons, stational liturgy also became popular between the fourth and sixth centuries in other cities with large Christian communities such as Jerusalem, Constantinople and Antioch.39 Besides the papal, stational liturgy, which in the course of time became more detailed and ixed and which was celebrated only on certain days, there also was the daily liturgy celebrated in the churches of Rome; the ordinary Sunday services, feasts of local saints and votive masses for particular individuals and groups. For these, each church developed its own 36 37

38

39

Ibid., p. 29; Heitz, ‘More Romano’, pp. 27–37. Hen, Royal Patronage, pp. 42–64, 81–9; Paxton, Christianizing Death, ch. 3, especially at pp. 93–4; McKitterick, Frankish Church, ch. 4. De Blaauw, Cultus et Decor, pp. 16–33; Baldovin, Stational Liturgy; Noble, ‘Papal Rome’, pp. 83–91; Noble, The Republic of St Peter. Jungmann, Mass, vol. i, p. 59.

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Ratger liturgical traditions and practices.40 All in all, ‘Roman liturgy’ was rich, diverse and not easy to deine. Nevertheless, Frankish Church leaders adopted in their own observances liturgical practices which they themselves considered to be typically Roman, even if their contents did not derive from Rome.41 What matters is that the Frankish perceived them as Roman and therefore authentic, ‘because there was no other tradition like it, either for following the rules of the Faith or in the instruction of obligations’, as Walafrid Strabo, a ninth-century monk from Reichenau, explained.42 To early medieval liturgical specialists, Roman liturgy seems to have resembled the divine liturgy of the Heavenly Jerusalem as closely as was possible for human beings in their daily worship of God. It is likely that Ratger too had wanted to integrate Roman observances in the Fulda liturgy to show the connection of the monastery with the origin of Christianity and had therefore built an image of the basilica that represented the early Christian church more than all other churches in Frankish reach: St Peter’s. It may have been no coincidence that the monks of Fulda started to build the new abbey church around the time in which Charlemagne received what was believed to be the Sacramentary of Gregory the Great.43 Even though there are no liturgical sources extant from Fulda from the irst half of the ninth century, there are indeed some references that point to the adaptation of Roman practices in the monastic liturgy. One is a passage in the Vita Aegil, the biography of Fulda’s fourth abbot, written in the 840s. The context in which the quotation needs to be read is the dedication of the new abbey church in 819 by the archbishop of Mainz. In this particular scene the archbishop has just consecrated the building and proceeded with the translation of Boniface’s body to his new sepulchre in the western transept: His ita perceptis gressum porrexit ad aram Pontiicalis apex, magno comitatus honore In parte occidua Romano more peractum. Elevat interea populari voce repente Advena plebs kyrie eleison …44 [After he had received this, the bishop proceeded to the altar, 40 41

42

43 44

De Blaauw, Cultus et Decor; Jungmann, Mass, vol. i, pp. 49–60. For an overview of these sources, see Jacobsen, Klosterplan St. Gallen, pp. 249–55. Also: Scheider, ‘Roman liturgy’, pp. 341–79; Vogel, ‘La romanisation du culte’, pp. 13–41; Schiefer, ‘Redeamus ad fontem’, p. 48, footnote 19. ‘quia non est alia traditio aeque sequenda vel in idei regula vel in observationum doctrina.’ Walafrid strabo, Libellus de exordiis, pp. 166–7. Codex epistolaris carolinus, No. 89, p. 626;Vogel, Culte chrétien, pp. 72–8. Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. ii, c. 17, p. 59.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda surrounded with great honour, to perform [the liturgical acts] the Roman way in the western part. In the meanwhile the people present suddenly raised their voice and sang the Kyrie eleison …]

Often the passage has been interpreted as if Boniface was buried in the west Romano more, in imitation of the apostle Peter, whose grave was believed to lie also in the west of St Peter’s. The advocates of this theory consider peractum to be a mistake of the author and rectify it as peractam.45 Nevertheless, the passage could also be interpreted diferently. Peractum does not need to be a mistake; it could be a supinum, to be translated as ‘in order to act’, here relating to the liturgical proceedings.46 If this is the case, the passage of the Vita Aegil indicates Roman inluence, at least in the liturgy performed on the occasion of the church dedication. It may have been the archbishop of Mainz, who directed the ceremony, who had decided to follow Roman directions as it suited the solemnity of this particular feast.47 There is also a small fragment of a ninth-century sacramentary from Fulda, which is now in Kassel.48 It probably once was part of an Old Gelasian, which contained all the texts that the clergy needed for the celebration of the regular masses. Besides Frankish elements, which had been added to it in the process of transcription, the Old Gelasian was composed of a variety of Roman liturgical books from diferent periods, written for the daily liturgy performed by priests in some of Rome’s local churches.49 Beside the ninth-century fragment of the Old Gelasian, there is a letter by a certain monk-deacon named Theotrochus. It refers to the performance of mass in Fulda according to ‘the Roman rite’.50 If the monk-deacon can be identiied with Abbot Theotrochus of Lorsch (864–876), the letter is evidence of Roman inluence in the monastery’s observances around the middle of the ninth century.51 Fulda’s famous tenth- and eleventh-century luxurious editions of the so-called composite sacramentary also show Roman inluence.52 To 45

46

47

48

49 50

51

52

For example, Richter, Bonifatius-Jubiläum, p. xiii; and following him, Krautheimer, ‘Carolingian revival’, 11, footnote 84. With thanks to Louk Meijer and Els Rose. Compare Becht-Jördens, ‘Sturmi oder Bonifatius?’, p. 136, footnote 33. With thanks to Mayke de Jong, who pointed out to me the importance of the presence of the archbishop at the occasion. Kassel, Landesbibliothek und Murhardsche Bibliothek, 2º ms. Theol. 54, fol. 1r. See Frisch, ‘Zwei liturgische Fragmente’, 141–61. Palazzo, Sacramentaires Fulda, pp. 141–2; Vogel, Culte chrétien, pp. 48–57. Schönfelder, ‘Bruchstück’, 102. The letter only focuses on the roles of the deacons in mass, and part of the letter is missing. Palazzo, Sacramentaires Fulda, pp. 228–9; Mayr-Harting, Ottonian Book Illumination, vol. ii, pp. 125–54. Sacramentarium Fuldense; Palazzo, Sacramentaires Fulda. See also Thaler, ‘Festliturgie’, pp. 129–62.

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Ratger various degrees, these ‘mixed’ sacramentaries contain elements from both the Gregorian of the Hadrianum type that Pope Hadrian, at the request of the Carolingian king, had sent to Charlemagne in the late eighth century, and the supplement to the Hadrianum, which was written at the beginning of the ninth century. The Gregorian of the Hadrianum type was a mass book, similar to a seventh-century Roman sacramentary written under Pope Honorius, which was composed exclusively for the celebration of papal masses in the Lateran basilica and the stational churches of Rome. The book was not complete and somewhat out of date, and turned out to be unsuited for Charlemagne’s reform of the liturgy. It only contained directions for certain feasts and so was useless as a guideline for the daily liturgy in local churches. Therefore a supplement was written at court in the following years to adapt the contents to Frankish needs and to ill the lacunae of the Hadrianum.53 Besides the Hadrianum and its Frankish supplement, the Fulda sacramentaries also show some bearing of the Old Gelasian mentioned above. Of course, it is very diicult to establish the extent to which the late-tenth- and eleventh-century codices resemble practices in Fulda in the irst half of the ninth century. Gereon BechtJördens has argued that through Hrabanus, who had studied with Alcuin, an illuminated Gregorio-Gelasianum mixtum from Tours arrived in Fulda in the irst quarter of the ninth century.54 Also Eric Palazzo and Henry Mayr-Harting suggest that the tenth-century sacramentaries go back to a Carolingian example and contemplate Hrabanus’ involvement.55 All things considered, there are strong indications of Roman inluence in the liturgy of Fulda already in the ninth century. Besides the Roman liturgy, another concern of the architect had been the cult of Boniface. We have already seen how in the years following his death Boniface’s increasing importance for the self-awareness of the Fulda community also found expression in the architectural setting of his cult and the monastery’s liturgical practices. Alongside the bond with Rome and the Carolingian court it was this growing importance of the monastery’s new patron saint to which Ratger had wanted to pay tribute and further stimulate in his construction of the western transept. Ratger probably did not witness himself how, in 819, in the presence of the whole monastic community, a procession of both worldly and ecclesiastical dignitaries elevated the martyr from his old grave and, with due ritual, incense and candlelight, carried the body to the western 53 54

55

Vogel, Culte chrétien, pp. 72–83; Palazzo, Le Moyen Age, pp. 72–8. Becht-Jördens, ‘Litterae illuminatae’, pp. 347–8, 355–61; Becht-Jördens, ‘Geistes- und Kulturgeschichte’, 401–13. Palazzo, Sacramentaires Fulda, pp. 99–100, 107–8, 144–6; Mayr-Harting, Ottonian Book Illumination, vol. ii, pp. 119–54.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda sanctuary. By then, Ratger no longer ruled the monastery and probably was still in exile. In the end, Eigil, Ratger’s successor, allowed him to return to Fulda, but it is not clear when this happened.56 Yet, it was undoubtedly the architect’s intention to bury Boniface in the transept once the church was inished, just as the ancient tomb of the apostle had been integrated into the transept of St Peter’s, the martyr Dionysius lay buried in the transept of St Denis’ new abbey church and the grave of St Maurice was situated in the transept of St Maurice d’Agaune. Later examples, such as Reichenau (830) and Paderborn (836), show that the addition of a transept with an apse, in other words a new choir, proved a good solution when a religious community wanted to keep its traditional liturgical centre intact, while at the same time providing a saint with the opportunity to develop its own cult and accompanying liturgical space. The cathedral church of Saints Mary and Kilian in Paderborn, built around 799, got a transept in 836 after the translation of St Liborius from Le Mans. When in 830 the monks of Reichenau obtained the relics of St Valens, they extended their three-naved basilica with a western transept and a right-angled choir.57 Indeed, Boniface’s translation to the western transept of the church had great implications for his cult. It not only relected his ever-growing importance for the monastery of Fulda, but also enhanced and directed this development. Now there were two choirs, that is, two liturgical centres, providing locations for two altars of equal status at either end of the church. In the eastern apse stood the altar of the Holy Saviour, which Boniface himself had once consecrated, while the western altar contained the body of Boniface. Through this architectural change, which Boniface’s increasing importance had brought about, Ratger created an opportunity for Boniface to become the patron of Fulda and constructed a monument to commemorate the martyr-bishop. The eastern part with the altar of the Holy Saviour referred to the old church that Boniface had built together with Sturmi. Moving from this altar to the west, one passed the spot in the middle of the basilica where the martyr had been buried before the translation. After Boniface’s translation, an altar dedicated to the Holy Cross would be put in that place.58 In the west the long transept with apse highlighted the new liturgical focus of the church and the centre of attention: the sepulchre of Boniface.59

56 58 59

Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 23, p. 19. 57 Jacobsen, Klosterplan St. Gallen, p. 239. Krause, Ratgerbasilika, p. 159; Becht-Jördens, ‘Sturmi oder Bonifatius’, pp. 134, 140. According to Becht-Jördens, the church, including the choir and crypt in the west, remained oriented towards the east for a long time, possibly until the early eighteenth century. ‘Sturmi oder Bonifatius’, pp. 172–3. Compare Jacobsen, ‘Abteikirche Fulda’, pp. 121–2.

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Ratger To sum up, continuing the course already taken by Baugulf, Ratger used architecture and liturgy to express the ambitions of his monastery to be a holy place and an important political, cultural and economic centre that could be ranked among the major royal abbeys in the Frankish Empire. The connection with the ruling dynasty raised Fulda above a merely local status and connected the monastery to a supra-regional network centred on the royal court.60 Like Baugulf , Ratger moved in court circles and was well connected. There are some indications in the Vita Aegil that powerful aristocratic families had supported Ratger during the crisis and that Ratger had used this support to impose his own will on the community. In addition, the sixteenth-century catalogues of abbots, one by Apollo of Vilbel, also refer to Ratger’s noble origin. Their source might have been the Vita Ratgarii abbatis Fuldensis that was then still extant.61 Ratger knew that the possession of an impressive church with a rich, ‘Roman’ liturgy could gain a religious community valuable patronage, demonstrating its superiority as mediator between the faithful and God. Transferring examples of authentic early Christianity to the north, be it relics of martyrs, books, liturgical practices or architectural designs, conferred prestige upon the imitators and their communities.62 The audience at which Ratger aimed was not only inside the monastery but obviously also outside its walls. It was for a good reason that the monks of Fulda decided to build a church like this at a time in which the monastery established itself as an important political, economical and social centre.63 During ecclesiastical festivities lay people from the region came to the abbey to celebrate mass and honour the monastery’s saints. Moreover, under Ratger, Boniface’s feast day had also been ‘pay day’. Those who held monastic lands as beneice were expected to come to Fulda on 5 June to transfer part of their income to the monastery.64 And when on 1 November 819 the new abbey church was dedicated, many members from the upper echelons of society had been present.65 Thus, the message of the abbey church was not only aimed at the monks of Fulda, but also at local aristocratic families and those colleagues and superiors of the abbot who were invited for the occasion of the dedication, and who, to 60 61

62

63 64

65

Innes, ‘People, places and power’, pp. 397–437. Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 5, pp. 6–7; Apollo of Vilbel, Catalogus abbatum, pp. 38–9; Sandmann, ‘Folge der Äbte’, p. 183. For the same reason, for example, Einhard cited Rome in his church in Seligenstadt. Smith, ‘“Emending evil ways”’, p. 200; Smith, ‘Old saints, new cults’, pp. 317–39. See above, pp. 90–1. CDF, Nos. 250, 252, 264, 279, 377, pp. 129–30, 134, 139–40, 171; Lübeck, ‘Wirtschaft Fulda’, footnote 187; Lübeck, Bonifatiusgrab, p. 106; Kehl, Kult und Nachleben, p. 46. Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 15, p. 15. Also: b. ii, c. 17, pp. 55–9.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda diferent degrees, must have well understood the architectural language and the meaning of the symbolism of the church and the liturgy performed in it.66 B ui l ding fatigue All in all, Ratger’s church expressed Fulda’s high ambitions in the years 790–820. It relected the royal status of a major abbey that felt strongly connected to the Frankish court, the importance of the martyr Boniface as patron of the monastery, the bond with the most holy city of Rome, and, above all, the ambitions of Fulda’s abbot(s). It was a statement of power, a witness to the sanctity of the monastery and a trophy of its fame. But it was also a church that had demanded many sacriices. A troublesome period of epidemic and strife in the years before its dedication besmirched its eventual grandeur. In 807 the outbreak of a ruthless disease brought death and unrest in Fulda. The epidemic afected monks of all ages indiscriminately. Some of the juniors tried to lee the monastery, but got caught.67 It is unclear whether they had wanted to run away from the death-bringing disease or whether some sort of conlict had driven them to disobedience. Two years later, in 809, the archbishop of Mainz visited Fulda ‘for the sake of the abbot and the monks’ (abbatis et fratrum causa).68 The reason for the visit of the archbishop is unknown, but in the light of what was to come it is realistic to think that the monastic community had already been torn by disagreements about the ideals and responsibilities of the monastery and dissatisied with the way that Ratger ruled Fulda. Other indicators of disturbance within the community are the long intervals between the moments in which the Annales necrologici were kept up to date in those days and the fact that transactions of property were less frequently documented in Fulda itself.69 Because of the long time it had taken the monks to build the abbey church, the monks seem to have lost sight of its usefulness. In the 810s a delegation of monks together with Abbot Ratger travelled to court, for the situation in the monastery had become unbearable.70 At least a considerable part of the monks disagreed with Ratger’s line of management and asked the emperor, among other things, to ensure ‘that immense and superluous buildings and other useless projects are given up, through which the brethren get extremely exhausted and the households outside 66 67 69

70

For example, Bosman, ‘Speaking in stone’, 13–28. 68 CLb, a. 807, p. 37. CLb, a. 809, p. 37. Schmid, ‘Suche’, pp. 142–52.; Schmid, ‘Mönchslisten’, p. 618; Corradini, ‘Rhetoric of crisis’, p. 273. CLb, a. 812, p. 38.

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Ratger the monastery perish’.71 They cannot but have referred to Fulda’s enormous abbey church. In retrospect, Ratger’s attempts to complete this gigantic building project without disrupting the monastery’s daily routine and tasks almost seem to have been doomed to failure.The construction of a church like his was an enormous undertaking.The mobilisation of all the necessary manpower, knowledge, material and patronage, which the building of the church required, put intolerable pressure on the community. Besides, the abbey church was not Ratger’s only building project. As abbot of Fulda he also constructed at least two other churches in the immediate surroundings of the monastery, one on the Frauenberg, directly north of the monastery, and one on the Johannesberg, some 4 km south-east of Fulda.72 Although these churches were considerably smaller than Ratger’s masterpiece in the heart of the monastic complex, they too demanded the monks’ attention. Still, we need to be careful not to repudiate Ratger’s building projects too easily as an excessive, isolated case of a materialistic, megalomaniac architect whose sole interest was to build. In the previous chapter we have already seen how Charlemagne’s reign brought forth some of the most ambitious building projects of the early Middle Ages: the palace complex in Aachen and the Holy Trinity monastery in St Riquier. Ratger’s projects also had their roots in this powerful impulse to bring honour to God and his saints and fame to the Franks. As abbot of a major royal abbey, it was Ratger’s duty to build. According to Rome’s early medieval Liber pontiicalis or the biographies of other bishops and abbots from the Middle Ages, this is what these ecclesiastical dignitaries were remembered for: the construction of buildings, bridges and aqueducts, the repairing of roofs, the donation of beautifully crafted golden or silver crosses and reliquaries or precious altar cloth to the churches under their care, to name only a few examples.73 These were considered to be good works as they beneited both the Christian communities on earth and God and his community of saints and angels in heaven. So when Einhard tried to convince Emperor Louis the Pious to invest in a basilica for the martyrs Marcellinus and Peter in Seligenstadt, he wrote: Similarly I ask you to deign to relect upon and consider what rewards [will] await you in heaven and the praise of you that will spread in this world, if during your time [here] you increase, decorate and venerate the resting place of the holy 71

72 73

‘Ut aediicia immensa atque superlua et cetera inutilia opera omittantur, quibus fratres ultra modum fatigantur et familiae foris dispereunt.’ SL, c. 12, p. 324. ‘Familiae foris’ probably refers to the dependants of the monastery who lived outside the monastic complex. Measured in a straight line. CLb, a. 809 and 812, pp. 37–8. See, for example, the LP or the Gesta abbatum and Gesta episcoporum, of which plenty of examples can be found in Sot, Gesta.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda martyrs with both buildings and other necessities. This building campaign will, of course, be credited to your name. Indeed, your memory and the memory of the martyrs will forever be joined together and celebrated by all peoples.74

To be sure, there was criticism of ambitious building projects and the riches of the churches. Especially the monastic reforms of Louis the Pious and his advisor Benedict of Aniane resented a too intimate entanglement of spiritual ideals and worldly display. Nevertheless, Ratger did what he, and many contemporaries with him, believed it was right to do. Fulda’s Gesta abbatum, written in the tenth century, indeed praises Ratger for the construction of the abbey church and remembers him as a sapiens architectus.75 I would now like to turn to the conlict that caused the deprivation of Ratger and stimulated the creation of the Supplex Libellus and the Fulda continuation of the Chronicon Laurissense breve. As will become clear, Ratger’s building projects were indeed not the only reason for the monks’ unhappiness. Underneath their discontent about ‘immense and superluous buildings’ lay deeper issues that touched upon the identity of the community and that had grieved the monks deeply. Th e C H R O N I C O N L A U R I S S E N S E B R E V E and the A N N A L E S F U L D E N S E S A N T I Q U I S S I M I The incidents of the 810s leading up to Ratger’s removal from the oice of abbacy are described in the Fulda recension of the Short Chronicle of Lorsch. This chronicle, edited as the Chronicon Laurissense breve, was originally made at Lorsch. At Lorsch monks wrote down events concerning both the Frankish kingdom and the monastery itself. A copy of the Chronicon reached Fulda around 807, possibly through Hrabanus Maurus who had good contacts with Lorsch’s abbot Ricbod and one of the monastery’s scholars, Samuel, with whom Hrabanus had studied in Tours.76 At Fulda, a monk added to it events relating to both the royal court and his own monastery in the years between 807 and 815. In 817/818 another scribe added some more notes, after which the text was no longer continued until 833, when a third and fourth hand added

74

75

‘Item rogo, ut cogitare atque pensare dignemini, quae merces vos apud Deum maneat at laus coram saeculo vobis adcrescat, si per vos in diebus vestris locus requietionis sanctorum martyrum tam in aediiciis quam in aliis necesariis rebus fuerit auctus, ornatus et excultus, ut etiam exstructio eius nomini vestro adscribatur simulque et vestra et martyrum memoria ore omnium populorum perpetua mentione celebretur.’ Einhard, Epistolae, No. 10, p. 114. Translation by Dutton, Charlemagne’s Courtier, p. 164. 76 Gesta abbatum, p. 272. Corradini, Cvp 430*, p. 26.

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Ratger some data concerning the cycles of the moon and the sun for the years 818–833. By then the manuscript possibly had already left Fulda.77 The Fulda version of the Chronicon Laurissense breve is of particular interest here as it not only records the political history of the Frankish realm, but also includes notes about the crisis in Fulda and provides us with a personal, intimate account of what happened in those dark years. The author of the notes carefully listed the names of brethren who did not survive the epidemics of 807 and 810 and recorded the attempt by a group of young monks to lee the monastery in 807 and the visits by irst the archbishop of Mainz in 809 and then the committee of bishops which Charlemagne had installed to solve the conlict in Fulda in 812. Some of the events he incorporated within the main text, others he recorded in glosses. He did not bother to supplement the chronicle with events of the monastery’s more distant past, such as Sturmi’s exile in the 760s or the conspiracy against Charlemagne, which took place in 786 and in which Abbot Baugulf had a role as intermediary on behalf of the plotters. In addition, he did not record events that were unrelated to the Ratger conlict such as the Treaty of Retzbach (815), which ended a quarrel between Fulda and Würzburg over the collection of tithes. Although Fulda was not allowed to collect tithes in all the parishes that fell under its inluence, the treaty nevertheless meant a substantial victory for the monks, as no monastery so far had managed to obtain the right from a bishop to collect tithes in such a great number of parishes.78 Instead, the writer concentrated on the crisis and the epidemics, which apparently to his mind were closely connected with one another. The result is an example of history writing at the most local level, probably intended for private use only. Some of the monks who passed away in the years 807–815 were mentioned by name: Eggi and Hutuman (807, fol. 7v); Arndeo, Nordaloh and Prezolt (810, fol. 7v). We ind the names of Eggi, Arndeo, Nordaloh and Prezolt also in the Baugulf list of 781 discussed in the previous chapter. Arndeo, Nordaloh and Prezolt occur frequently as witnesses in Fulda’s charters. Prezolt might be identiied with the Prezzolt who replaced Sturmi as abbot of Fulda when the latter was in exile and Lull’s candidate had been removed from oice after loud protests on the part of the brethren.79 77

78 79

The manuscript containing Fulda’s version of the Chronicon Laurissense breve is now in Vienna: Vienna, ÖNB, Cvp 430*. This is the copy made in 815 and continued in 817/818. See Corradini, Cvp 430*, pp. 14–21; Corradini, ‘Rhetoric of crisis’, pp. 269–321; McKitterick, History and Memory, pp. 35–6; Schmid, ‘Suche’, pp. 156–61; Freise, Geschichtsschreibung, pp. 67–110. Schannat, Corpus traditionum Fuldensium, pp. 439–40; Hussong, ‘Fulda’, i, 167–8. UBF, Nos. 180, 182, 192, 286, pp. 274–7, 289–90, 416–18. Corradini, Cvp 430*, pp. 65–6, especially footnote 241.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda Worries about the commemoration of the dead and important past events probably inspired the compiler of the Fulda version of the Short Chronicle to make the notes, and rightly so; in this period the Annales necrologici were no longer kept up to date and charters were no longer automatically written up in Fulda itself.80 Although it is not possible to identify the scribe, it certainly was someone who was close to Hrabanus Maurus, if not Hrabanus himself. The scribe followed the career of Hrabanus attentively and wrote down in the margin of the chronicle milestones in Hrabanus’ career near the years in which they had happened: his ordination as deacon in 801 and priest in 814. He, moreover, included the note Soror Meginrat among the names of those monks who had died during the epidemics. This Meginrat might be equated with the sister of Hrabanus, who also appears as a witness of a donation by Hrabanus’ parents to Fulda.81 Both the Fulda version of the Chronicon Laurissense breve and the Kassel redaction of the Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi were made by someone close to Hrabanus and were composed at the time of the crisis. As we have seen in Chapter 2, the Kassel manuscript was a pedagogical manual containing Bede’s De temporum ratione and Easter Tables with, in their margins, the Northumbrian annals and the so-called Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi, probably used in Fulda’s monastic school by Hrabanus himself. Yet, this piece of history writing, as the other extant copies of Fulda’s Oldest Annals, is completely diferent from the private notes just mentioned. None of the events relating to the crisis and listed in Fulda’s version of the Chronicon Laurissense breve are included in any of the manuscripts containing the Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi. Concerning the events of the 810s, the annals only record Ratger’s appointment as abbot, the death of Baugulf in 815, the election of Eigil in 818 and the dedication of the new abbey church in 819.The deposition of Ratger is silently passed over. Only insiders, witnesses of the Ratger conlict or those who had read Fulda’s version of the Chronicon Laurissense breve, knew that a mention of the dedication of the church on the Frauenberg in 809 on the last page of the Kassel manuscript indirectly referred to the troublesome times that preceded Ratger’s removal from oice. For the church on the Frauenberg was dedicated by the archbishop of Mainz, when he visited Fulda to settle the conlict. Possibly another notation in the Kassel manuscript also alludes to the existence of disagreement in the community. While the other versions of Fulda’s Oldest Annals simply read Ratger electus est abbas (‘Ratger is elected abbot’), this one states 80 81

Schmid, ‘Mönchslisten’, pp. 617–18; Corradini, ‘Rhetoric of crisis’, pp. 295, 320–1. UBF, No. 177, pp. 271–2; Staab, Untersuchungen, p. 387; Corradini, Cvp 430*, p. 66.

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Ratger Ratger mira concordia est fratrum electus ad abbatem (‘Ratger is elected abbot in remarkable harmony among the brethren’).82 The later phrase is also used in the Vita Aegil, which relates the story of the crisis from the perspective of Eigil, the fourth abbot of Fulda, as we shall see in Chapter 7, and was written in the 840s.83 The author of the Vita Aegil paints Ratger as a haughty unicorn that attacks the lock of sheep (the community of monks entrusted to his care) instead of guiding it to safe pastures, while Eigil is depicted as a good shepherd, under whose leadership peace and quiet returned to the monastery. For the author of the Vita Aegil the words mira concordia are thus emotionally charged. The question is whether the same holds true for the scribe who recorded them in the Kassel manuscript. His note was not a spur-of-the-moment response to Ratger’s election in 802. He wrote his annalistic notes some twelve years after Ratger had been appointed abbot, around 814, when the crisis had been well under way. Both Fulda’s version of the Chronicon Laurissense breve and the Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi ofer a diferent picture of Fulda in the 810s by selecting or omitting certain events. The irst text seems to be a personal account of the Ratger crisis intended for private use as it focuses on speciic events and persons from the circle around Hrabanus. Even though the author of Fulda’s version of the Chronicon Laurissense breve linked the events of the crisis and the epidemics that infested the monastery in that period, it is not a programmatic pamphlet against Ratger like the Supplex Libellus, as we will see shortly. Fulda’s Oldest Annals, on the other hand, gloss over the painful moments of the crisis and instead present the course of Fulda’s past as the history of a peaceful monastery, where abbots simply succeed each other and are remembered by the community after their death. They were written for public use, for future generations of monks in order to keep the remembrance of Fulda’s long past alive by focusing on, among other things, the sequence of abbots and dedications of churches in connection with a narrative that extended that of the monastery into salvation history. The

SUPPLEX LIBELLUS

The visit of 812 to the royal court by Ratger and a group of monks was also the occasion for the monks to ofer the emperor the Supplex Libellus.84 The text, now only extant in the seventeenth-century edition 82 84

83 Corradini, Cvp 430*, p. 150. Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 3, p. 5. Introduction SL, p. 321; Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, cc. 3, 9, pp. 5, 9. See also Semmler, ‘Supplex Libellus’, 268–98.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda by the German Jesuit Christopher Brouwer, lists the complaints of the monks about Ratger.85 Together with the Fulda recension of the Chronicon Laurissense breve, it is the only contemporary witness to the conlict of the 810s. While the short historiographical notes in the chronicle and annals ofer us a broad outline of the chronology of the crisis, the Supplex Libellus brings us closer to the causes of the conlict and the discussions about Fulda’s identity that lay at the heart of it. The Supplex Libellus is a list of grievances against the monastery’s management neatly grouped by subject. It consists of twenty chapters. The irst chapters deal with problems relating to the monastery’s liturgical observances, starting with the commemoration of the living and the dead, an issue which the monks must have believed to be directly relevant to the emperor. After all, Fulda was a royal abbey, and prayer for the ruler, his family and the people in his realm was the monastery’s main responsibility.86 By opening the Supplex Libellus with this topic, complaining that Ratger had changed the contents, the frequency and the time and place of commemorative celebrations, the monks certainly aroused the interest of Charlemagne, who in his programme of church reform attached great importance to prayer and liturgy. In addition, the authors asked permission for the priests to say mass more often and were most of all concerned with keeping the modus of prayers, psalms, vigils and processions in line with what the fathers (patres nostri, nostri maiores) had once instituted.87 The Supplex Libellus then continues with issues relating to the recruitment of new members (chapters v–ix), the internal organisation of the monastery and the reception of guests (chapters x–xvi). To give a few examples, the authors demanded that the sick and elderly be looked after properly, and that they too had access to monastic life, not only the young and healthy novices.88 They furthermore disapproved of the neglect of the ceremonial washing of the feet of the guests,89 and protested against the imprisonment of the murderer of a monk in the monastery and the accommodation of lay criminals in nearby cellae out of fear of the revenge of relatives of the victim and the plundering of their possessions.90 Reading the Supplex Libellus, it is clear that Ratger’s way of ruling the monastery had afected the community deeply and had upset a considerable number of the monks, the authors of the Supplex Libellus irst 85

86 88 90

Brouwer, Fuldensium antiquitatum, pp. 212–16. For the other, later editions, see the introduction to the edition of Semmler, SL, p. 320. SL, cc. 1, 3, 19, pp. 321–2, 326. 87 Ibid., cc. 1–3, pp. 321–2. 89 Ibid., cc. 5–6, p. 323. Ibid., c. 13, p. 325. Ibid., c. 17, p. 326. Most likely it concerned public penitents. See De Jong, ‘Opting out?’, pp. 291–328; De Jong, ‘Public penance’, pp. 863–902.

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Ratger and foremost. We should realise how extraordinary it was for a group of monks to rebel against their abbot and to leave the cloister to protest at court, in Ratger’s presence. They were monks, bound in heart, soul and mind to the conines of their monastery and trained to control their desires and feelings in complete obedience to God and his substitute within the monastery, the abbot.91 As Alcuin had reminded the monks in the letter discussed in the previous chapter: ‘There should be no conlict among you, no hate, no envy, no slander, and you should not judge each other.’ In addition, they should love and obey their abbot.92 On top of the fact that their behaviour conlicted with the obedience that was expected of them, the monks did not yet know the outcome of their visit to court. They might have to continue living under Ratger’s governance, as indeed happened irst. Charlemagne appointed a commission of bishops to mediate in the conlict, while the abbot remained in place. The fact that the monks put aside these obstacles to make their case at court is evidence of a strong group awareness. These monks must have been convinced that they, not Ratger, served their community best and that, moreover, the emperor would be of the same mind. A key point of the Supplex Libellus was that in every possible way discord within the community had to be prevented. For example, all property should be communal, for private property and the distribution of possessions would cause ‘quarrels, disputes, rivalries, wrath, brawls, hostilities, disagreements, jealousies, secret parties and drunkenness and almost all the other things that are bad and at variance with the wellbeing’ of the monks.93 Everybody who entered the monastery should do so because of love for the monastic way of life, not because of a desire for money or earthly possessions or because he was forced to receive the tonsure. For, the monks argued, people who entered the monastery on the wrong grounds would cause discord and pollute its sanctity.94 Once inside the monastery, their struggle with the heavy demands of ascetic life and longing for the world outside made them easy victims of the devil, whose cunning would eventually turn them into unpleasant men if not criminals.95 Instead of sins such as avarice, lust, luxury and vanity, the monks who wrote the Supplex Libellus thus considered conlict to be most harmful. 91

92

93 94

RB, cc. 2, 4, 5, pp. 441–53, 456–69; Capitulare missorum generale (a. 802), ed. A. Boretius, MGH Cap. 1, No. 33, c. 17, p. 94. ‘Non murmurationes inter vos, non odia, non invidiae, non detractiones; et nolite judicare alterutrum.’ Alcuin, Epistolae, No. 250, p. 405. Alcuin reminded them here of the directions of the Rule of Benedict: RB, cc. 5, 34, pp. 464–9, 564. SL, c. 15, p. 325. The monks here cite, among others, RB, c. 65, pp. 654–5; Gal. 5: 19–21. SL, cc. 6, 7, 9, pp. 323–4. 95 Ibid., p. 323.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda Even more than the other vices, it threatened the existence of the monastic community. As the Admonitio generalis of 789 explained: ‘Without peace, nothing pleases God.’96 No mass would be accepted as ofering to God, no prayer would be heard. Without peace, the monks’ role as intermediaries between God and the faithful would be meaningless and have no efect. Without peace their raison d’être would vanish into thin air. T he abbot The person who was especially accountable for the state of afairs in the monastery was the abbot. According to the authors of the Supplex Libellus he had failed his responsibilities badly. What had disturbed the monks most was that Ratger had not protected the peace inside the monastery. On the contrary, his behaviour had only strengthened the unrest and had caused conlict. The Supplex Libellus ends with an afecting plea of what its authors thought a good abbot should be like, which was apparently the opposite of what Ratger had been: The following we ind of extreme importance above everything: this is to have unity and concord with our abbot as we had with our former abbots and to observe mercy, friendship, piety and modesty in him; and that he is kind toward the sick, gracious to the ofenders, approachable for the brethren, a comforter of the sad, a helper of those who sufer, an aid for the kind, encourager of those in need of assurance, a reviver of the tired ones, supporter of the people who pass away, restorer of the fallen: that he loves all the brothers, that he hates no one and that he will punish no one with hatred and the malice of envy and that he will not cause disturbance with an angry look, nor be troubled of mind, nor excessive in judgment, nor stubborn on advice, but with a happy face, a cheerful mind, discreet in work, harmonious in skill. And when someone of the brothers commits any crime, that he will not torture this person with tyrannical punishment, but that he will hasten to correct [him] with merciful discipline and to receive the penitent clemently and that he will not plague him again with vicious suspicion and not banish him with an everlasting hate.These things, lord emperor, were common with our former abbots and this we have asked this abbot many times but till this day we have not been able to accomplish.97 96

97

‘quia Deo sine pace placet’. Admonitio generalis, MGH Cap. 1, No. 22, c. 62, p. 58. See also Capitulare ecclesiasticum Caroli Magni 2, ed. H. Mordek and G. Schmitz, DA 43 (1987), pp. 396–414, at 399. ‘id est unitatem et concordiam cum abbate nostro habere, sicut cum anterioribus nostris abbatibus habuimus, et misercordiam et familiaritatem, pietatem et modestiam in illo sentire; et ut esset benignus inirmis, propitius delinquentibus, afabilis fratribus, maestorum consolator, laborantium adiutor, benevolorum auxiliator, bene certantium hortator, lassorum refocillator, cedentium sustentator, cadentium restaurator; omnes fratres amaret, nullum odiret et nullum zeli uel liuoris dolo persequeretur ieretque non turbulentus uultu, non anxius animo, non nimius in iudicio, non obstinatus in consilio, sed hilares facie, laetus mente, discretus in opere, consentiens in utilitate, et, quando aliquis de fratribus praeoccupatus fuerit in aliquo delicto, non statim tyrannica uindicta

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Ratger According to the Rule of Benedict, in fact a common sense guide for managing a monastery, it was the task of the abbot to guide the monks to salvation, while taking into account the constitution and abilities of every individual monk.98 Some he needed to guide with mild goodness, others the abbot must correct with reprimands or persuasiveness.99 In the chapter ‘The election of an abbot’, the rule reminds the reader of Jacob’s warning in Genesis: ‘If I drive my lock too hard, they will all die in a single day’ (Gen. 33: 13).100 Therefore one quality that an abbot according to the monastic rule should have and that Ratger according to the Supplex Libellus lacked was discretion (discretio).101 If we are to believe the authors of the Supplex Libellus, Ratger and his associates had not tolerated any weakness, either physical or mental. It seems that Ratger expected all his monks to meet the same obligations, taking no account of their natures and capacities and with no room for diferences. The abbot took away the crutches and the stools from the elderly and the sick. Anyone who could not cope with the abbot’s directives, for example because of illness, was either refused entrance or sent away from the mother convent to one of the monastery’s cellae.102 When the monks who wrote the Supplex Libellus protested against immense and superluous building projects, they did not mean that they were against building per se, but they resented excesses.The monks did not disapprove of the construction of the new abbey church started by Ratger, but disliked the excessively heavy sacriices they had had to make for it, which to them were out of proportion to what monastic life was all about. ‘Everything should be done within certain limits and with discretion’, as beitted the powers of the monks, they argued.103 The monks did not complain about, for example, the building projects which Eigil, Ratger’s successor, initiated immediately after his appointment as abbot. These were started within two years after Ratger had been sent away. During the four years he was abbot of Fulda, Eigil added two crypts to the new basilica, built a church on the cemetery of the monastery and started to replace the old cloister with a new monastic complex directly adjacent to the transept of the new church, apparently without any complaints.104

98 99 101 102 103 104

illum excruciaret, sed misericordi disciplina corrigere festinaret conuersumque clementer susciperet nec praua suspicione denuo illum fatigaret, neque perpetuo odio exterminaret. His et talibus, domine imperator, apud priores nostros abbates usi sumus et de hoc istum abbatem saepissime rogavimus, sed usque in praesentem diem impetrare non potuimus.’ SL, c. 20, pp. 326–7. RB, cc. 2, 3, 27, 36, 64, 68, pp. 440–54, 548–50, 570–2, 648–52, 664. Ibid., c. 2, pp. 440–52. 100 Ibid., c. 64, p. 652. Fry, Rule, p. 283. According to the Rule of Benedict, discretion was the mother of all virtues. SL, cc. 6, 20, pp. 323, 326–7. ‘sed omnia iuxta mensuram et discretionem iant.’ SL, c. 12, p. 324. See Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, cc. 14, 17, 19, pp. 15–17.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda Ratger’s personality, and speciically his apparent lack of compassion and good judgement, increasingly frustrated the monks and brought their unhappiness with his management to a head. This is what formed the essence of the conlict in the 810s, not the construction of the abbey church in itself.105 Nevertheless, the building will have contributed to the tense situation within the community. After all, it exhausted the brethren, depleted the monastic funds and injured morale.106 Besides the heavy demands of long-term construction work, the very rapid growth of both the number of monks and the property of the community in this period played a role. Under Ratger, the community reached the highpoint of some six hundred monks, with an increase of more than a hundred monks in the last ten years of his rule.107 At the same time Fulda’s landholdings extended.108 These developments demanded a substantial reorganisation of the monastery, and subsequently resulted in a signiicant transformation of life in Fulda and an estrangement from the original ideals of Sturmi and Boniface.109 More than ever before, the monastery was confronted with the problem of balancing inner purity and sacredness on the one hand and secular responsibilities on the other. Fulda was not unique in this. It was a problem that all major royal abbeys in the Frankish realm shared and that therefore was discussed not only in the monasteries themselves, but also during the church meetings set up by the Carolingian rulers.110 Participants of these councils may very well have used the crisis in Fulda as an example to illustrate the problems that all major monasteries faced. All the above-mentioned factors contributed to the diiculties that Ratger encountered as abbot. In the end, it was his personality, in combination with a strong self-awareness of the monastic community, that triggered the conlict and that caused the situation to get out of hand in Fulda. Of course, the Supplex Libellus, which turns Ratger into the anti-type of an ideal abbot, gives a one-sided representation of the conlict. Its authors were opponents of Ratger. In addition, they tried to convince 105 106

107 108

109

110

Compare, however, Semmler, ‘Supplex Libellus’, 290–2. Patzold, ‘Konlikte’, 69–162;Wenger, ‘Hrabanus Maurus’, pp. 99–114; Becht-Jördens, ‘Vita Aegil als Quelle’, 19–48. For a more extensive treatment of the discussion concerning the Ratger crisis, see Patzold, ‘Konlikte’, 70–1, 105–39; Fried, ‘Bildungs- und Geistesgeschichte’, pp. 3–38. Schmid, ‘Mönchlisten’, p. 615; Zörkendörfer, ‘Statistische Untersuchungen’, p. 990. Until 815 the number of gifts recorded in the charters increased. Freise, ‘Studien’, pp. 1100–1, 1202–3; Hussong, ‘Fulda’, ii, 155. Also, Eigil refers to changes in the monastery in the Vita Sturmi: introduction and cc. 13, 14, pp. 131, 144–7. Schmid, ‘Mönchslisten’, p. 632. For example: Concilium Moguntinense, ed. A. Werminghof, MGH Conc. 2.1, No. 36, pp. 258–73; Legislatio Aquisgranensis, pp. 435–582. See also Patzold, ‘Konlikte’, 129–31; Geuenich, ‘Kritische Anmerkungen’, pp. 99–112.

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Ratger the emperor to intervene and therefore will not have painted an even picture of why it had got out of hand so badly. We need to bear in mind that in a community as big as Fulda in the 810s, there will have existed several factions, each with their own perspective and views. Instead of being the product of a united group of kindred spirits, the Supplex Libellus itself probably was a compromise of diferent voices. Certainly not all the monks ranged themselves on the side of the rebellious monks.111 Even after his deprivation, Ratger will still have had supporters in Fulda, for why else would Eigil, after his appointment as abbot, reconcile with his predecessor and arrange his return?112 Ratger spent the remaining years of his life in the nearby monastic cell at Frauenberg – the place where Boniface had also resided during his visits to the monastery almost eighty years earlier – until he died in December 835. He was also buried at Frauenberg, apparently with all the rituals and symbols it for an abbot. When, centuries later, rebellious farmers plundered the dependency in the early spring of 1525, they found Ratger’s body ‘intact’ (incorruptus) and ‘with all ornaments’ (cum omnibus ornamentis), so Apollo of Vilbel, prior of Petersberg and house historian of Fulda, wrote in his chronicle.113 With the ornamenta Apollo probably alluded to the liturgical vestments and the insignia of an abbot, his crozier and cloak, with which Ratger presumably had been dressed before he was put in his grave, if it was indeed the body of Fulda’s fourth abbot upon which the farmers had hit during their raid.114 The honours paid to Ratger at his burial, Ratger’s proximity to the monastery’s centre of power during the remaining years of his life, and his reconciliation with Eigil, all suggest that Ratger could still count on the sympathy of many after his banishment and are evidence for the diiculties of the argument. Notwithstanding the probable existence of a considerable group of monks who supported Ratger and the complexity of the conlict, there may well have been some truth in the description of Ratger’s character in the Supplex Libellus. Ratger’s lack of discretion and his tenacity may have been helpful to lead a project as ambitious as the construction of the enormous abbey church, but they also seem to have made him blind to the consequences of his inlexible rule as abbot and unable to smooth out the diferences of opinion in the strained community.

111

112

113

Schmid, ‘Suche’, pp. 157–8; Freise, ‘Einzugsbereich’, p. 1100, footnote 537. See also Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 5, pp. 6–7. Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 23, p. 19; Oexle, ‘Memorialüberlieferung’, pp. 136–77, especially pp. 159–65. Apollo of Vilbel, Chronica, pp. 265–6. 114 Oexle, ‘Memorialüberlieferung’, p. 162.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda An image of community The Supplex Libellus is not only an interesting source for the reconstruction of the events of the 810s, it also relects two facets of Fulda. First, the text represents the views of its authors on how life in Fulda should be organised. Second, it contains clues as to the views of their opponents, Ratger and his supporters.To the writers of the Supplex Libellus, the ideal monastery was a community of love and charity, unity and concord, with commemoration and prayer as its main responsibility. Monks should look after their brethren, especially the old and the weak.115 Everybody who wanted to enter the monastery for love of the monastic way of life should be allowed entrance, including the elderly. All the guests should receive a warm welcome, with ‘appropriate honour and hospitality’.116 As said above, everything should be done with discretion and moderation. In correspondence with what is expected of the community, the main qualities of a good abbot are mercifulness, kindness and modesty. This model of perfect monastic life was founded in tradition. In the defence of their ideal monastery, the brethren fell back on the time of Ratger’s predecessors. Several times the Supplex Libellus referred to the times of ‘our forefathers’.117 Occasionally the authors speciically mentioned the founders of the monastery, Sturmi and Boniface, by name. To give an example, in response to Ratger’s apparent reform of the monastic diet and outit, the Supplex Libellus recalled that since Sturmi had visited Monte Cassino in 747 and, with the consent of Boniface, had implemented their custom of clothing and diet, the monks of Fulda were used to dressing, drinking and eating like their brethren in the foundation of Benedict of Nursia. Many monks could still remember (and thus testify to) this, the Supplex Libellus stresses. The Supplex Libellus is the irst source to refer to Sturmi’s visit to Monte Cassino. Under inluence of the Carolingian monastic reforms and papal promotion of the Rule of Benedict, Monte Cassino had become the cradle and model of ‘Benedictine’ monasticism.118 Recently, these reforms had got a new impetus with the attempts of Louis the Pious and his advisor Benedict of Aniane to enforce the observance of the Rule of Benedict and Benedict of Aniane’s reading of this rule on all Frankish monasteries. The aim of this policy of una regula, una consuetudo 115 117

118

116 SL, c. 5, p. 323. Ibid., c. 14, p. 325; RB, c. 53, pp. 610–17. ‘nostri patres’; ‘maiores nostri; praecedentes patres’; ‘secundum priorum nostrorum consuetudinem’; ‘sicut apud decessores nostros fuerunt’; ‘sicut apud maiores nostros usus erat’; and ‘sicut cum anterioribus nostris abbatibus habuimus’. SL, cc. 1–4, 10–11, 13, 16, 19, 20, pp. 324, 326. Holdsworth, ‘Boniface the monk’, pp. 51, 62; Wollasch, ‘Benedictus abbas Romensis’, pp. 126–30.

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Ratger was to bring clarity in the goals and way of life of the various religious communities in the Frankish Empire. Benedict of Aniane’s guideline for monastic practice, which he had written to update the sixth-century rule in accordance with ninth-century practice, was to replace all local monastic customs and to stimulate a strict observance of the Rule of Benedict. It was probably this renewed interest in the Rule of Benedict and the monastery of its composer that made the authors of the Supplex Libellus, and later also other writers, stress Sturmi’s visit to Monte Cassino in their texts.119 In defence of what they believed to be authentic Fulda tradition, the link with the ‘home’ of Benedict of Nursia became more relevant than ever before. Although the eforts of Benedict of Aniane contributed to the monopoly of the Rule of Benedict in the West, the reformer did not succeed in enforcing his interpretation of the monastic rule on all monasteries in the Frankish realm. He encountered severe opposition.120 An anonymous report of the meetings of 816, written for an unknown monastery, shows that the decisions of Aachen in 816/817 were the result of long discussions and that not all issues were resolved overnight. It informs those who stayed at home that the meeting had come to a conclusion concerning the acceptance of novices in monasteries, but that the issue of the taking in of scholastici (the boys who were educated in the monastic schools) and priests was still under discussion.121 Two ninth-century commentaries on the Rule of Benedict also indicate that not all agreed with the proposed reforms of Benedict of Aniane. While the commentary of Smaragdus, written shortly after the reform councils, is consistent with their decisions, another commentary, that of the priest-monk Hildemar, disagrees with certain issues and follows the ideas of the author’s mentor, Adalhard of Corbie, an adversary of Benedict of Aniane.122 Local traditions remained efective, in Fulda as well as in other monasteries. Chapter Eighteen of the Supplex Libellus refers to Boniface’s legacy and his inluence on present-day monastic life in Fulda.123 Its authors asked the emperor to reprimand the abbot for questioning the validity of Boniface’s regulation, the so-called instituta sancti Bonifatii.124 Ratger appears to have carried out changes in the monastery, with the argument that a council had condemned the directives of Boniface. According 119

120 121 122 123 124

Rudolf, Vita Leobae, c. 10, p. 125. Sturmi’s visit to Italy is mentioned in the Vita Sturmi, c. 14, p. 146. Yet, Eigil does not mention that the abbot went to Monte Cassino. Semmler, ‘Benedictus ii’, pp. 11–12; De Jong, ‘Carolingian monasticism’, pp. 623–53. Statuta Murbacensia, pp. 437–45; De Jong, In Samuel’s Image, p. 66. Smaragdus, Expositio in Regulam S. Benedicti; Hildemar, Expositio regulae; De Jong, ‘Hildemar’, 101. Semmler, ‘Instituta’, pp. 79–103. ‘Quod ipse abbas corrigatur, ne institutis sancti Bonifatii detrahat dicens, quod decreta eius synodus damnaverit.’ SL, c. 18, p. 326.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda to Semmler, the council in question is the meeting in Aachen in 816. He has argued that after the monks had ofered the Supplex Libellus to Charlemagne around 812, they again ofered a slightly revised version to his son, Louis the Pious, somewhere between the end of August 816 and the beginning of August the following year, as the conlict in Fulda had still not settled.125 This revised version contained the reference to the condemnation of the instituta sancti Bonifatii.126 The Supplex Libellus does not explain what is meant with the instituta of Fulda’s patron saint, and Fulda’s early sources do not help us much either. We have seen in Chapter 1 that in the days of Boniface, Fulda was a small cell of monks who lived from the work of their own hands and whose main responsibilities were the training of monks and prayer. The early monks used the Rule of Benedict as a guideline for monastic life, but did not follow it to the letter. Did the writers of the Supplex Libellus wish to return to this life of complete poverty, in which the monks with manual labour provided for their wants themselves? This is hardly likely. The Supplex Libellus only explicitly mentions Boniface when it discusses the dress and diet of the monks, but possibly Boniface and Sturmi were meant every time the text speaks of nostri maiores. In that case, Boniface’s instituta were also concerned with the organisation of the monastery, the liturgy and the admission of new recruits and guests. Still, even if we can no longer ascertain the precise contents of the instituta sancti Bonifatii, it is signiicant that the monks who wrote the Supplex Libellus used the founders of the monastery to justify their claims against Ratger’s policy and to defend their vision of an ideal monastery. Indirectly, the Supplex Libellus also ofers a glimpse of Ratger’s views on monastic life and his policy as abbot of Fulda, however blurred by the emotions and prejudices of the abbot’s opponents. For one, the abbot seems to have advocated increasing austerity, separating the monks ever more strictly from the world by tying them closer to the cloister. For example, the monks who worked in the monastery’s workshops such as the bakery, the garden and the brewery, and the monks who managed Fulda’s estates from the dependencies of the monastery, were replaced with laymen by the abbot.127 Furthermore, Ratger limited the Sunday procession, which used to also call at places in the vicinity of Fulda, to the conines of the monastic complex.128 In addition to this, he reduced the hospitality towards pilgrims and strangers.129 In this context, it is 125

126 128

The Aachen council took place at the end of August, and Ratger is no longer mentioned as abbot of Fulda in the charters from the beginning of August 817 onwards. CDF, Nos. 325a, 325b, pp. 158–9. Semmler, ‘Supplex Libellus’, 286–8, 296–9. 127 SL, cc. 10, 11, 15, pp. 324–5. 129 SL, cc. 13, 14, p. 325. SL, c. 19, p. 326. Patzold, ‘Konlikte’, 115.

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Ratger worthwhile to return briely to the abbey church that was built under his supervision. What does the construction tell us about, for example, the abbot’s vision of Fulda as a cult-site? How Ratger envisaged the handling of the pilgrims, who came to the abbey to honour Boniface, is uncertain. Ratger had only built a transept and not the ring crypt, which the architects of St Peter, St Denis and St Maurice d’Agaune had constructed to guide the pilgrims past the graves of, respectively, St Peter, St Dionysius and St Maurice without disturbing the worshipping community of clerics and monks.130 In the end, the abbey church of Fulda got two crypts, but this was done by Eigil, not Ratger, as we will see in the following chapter, and their initial purpose seems to have been unrelated to the accommodation of pilgrims. Of course Ratger had considered the visits of the devout guests to Fulda when he planned the church, for his creation was in all respects intended to be a site of veneration and to honour Fulda’s most important saint, Boniface. It is unlikely that Ratger had wanted to turn the monastery into a public attraction without any respect for the holiness of the monastery and the ideal of seclusion of its inhabitants. In the light of Ratger’s other regulations as abbot of Fulda, which could be interpreted as attempts to divide monastic pursuits of prayer more strictly from secular occupations, it could well be possible that the abbot had created the western transept partly as a means to separate the space to which only monks had access, and which he centred on Boniface’s grave, clearly from the area where lay visitors were allowed entrance, the nave of the church.131 Entrances of the church were probably situated on both sides of the eastern apse, one leading to the northern side-aisle of the basilica and one leading to the southern side-aisle.132 Although it had been Ratger’s successors, Eigil and Hrabanus, who moved the cloister from the south of the church to the west, to become directly adjacent to the western sanctuary where Boniface’s body rested, it had already been part of Ratger’s plan.133 It would it the over-all impression, as relected in the sources, of an abbot who was deeply concerned to organise monastic life irmly around the cloister. From what we can tell on the basis of the Supplex Libellus, it seems that Ratger’s actions were partly in line with the reforms propagated by Louis the Pious and Benedict of Aniane and partly not. Benedict of Aniane had also wanted to protect the cloister. He, for example, did not want monks to leave their abbey and only allowed abbots to visit the administrative 130

131

132

Smith, ‘Women at the tomb’, pp. 163–80; Hahn, ‘Seeing and believing’, 1079–1106; Jacobsen ‘Saints’ tombs’, 1107–43. I thus disagree with Jacobsen, who, on the basis of the fact that Ratger did not plan a crypt, argues the opposite. Jacobsen, ‘Abteikirche Fulda’, p. 125. 133 Krause, Ratgerbasilika, p. 138. See below, p. 149.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda centres of their estates for compelling reasons. If a monk had to fulil a special task in one of the dependencies, he had to return immediately to the monastery after his job was done. Benedict of Aniane also wanted laymen to manage the cellae outside the convent, but contrary to the abbot of Fulda he instituted that monks had to fulil the ministeria within the monastery.134 The changes in the monastery under Ratger had afected the community deeply. This much is clear from the many references in the Supplex Libellus to the olden days and what seems to have been a lively oral tradition centred on Sturmi and Boniface.The writers of the Supplex Libellus used the era of Sturmi and Boniface to advocate their ideas, emphasising that Ratger had betrayed the ideals of Fulda’s founders. They elaborated on existing traditions and stories in the monastery and created an idyllic past of peace and happiness. This golden age had happened recently and was still present in the daily rituals, the buildings and in the minds of those monks who had lived long enough to remember it. By invoking a past of peace and concord and by picturing themselves as well meaning victims, they laid all the blame on Ratger. By deinition it was an uneven match. How could Ratger defend himself against this idealistic time and against these heroes, already dead, who in the eyes of the monks could do nothing wrong? After they had skilfully turned Ratger into the antitype of an ideal abbot, the authors of the Supplex Libellus again directly addressed the emperor in their inale and begged for his help. The delegates whom Charlemagne had sent to Fulda in 812 to solve the conlict were unsuccessful. In the years following their visit, monks continued to lee the monastery, others the abbot expelled.135 In 814 Louis the Pious succeeded his father as emperor of the Franks. Old advisors retreated and new counsellors such as Benedict of Aniane made their irst appearance at the imperial court. Perhaps with the departure of the ‘old guard’ Ratger’s patrons had also made their exit. In any case, the conlict had lasted long enough. Louis the Pious took tough measures against the abbot. In 817, Ratger was deprived of his abbacy and sent into exile.136 After Louis the Pious had deposed Ratger as abbot of Fulda, the emperor sent two envoys to Fulda, together with some west-Frankish monks. Their aim was to bring peace in the community and, where necessary, to correct the lives of the monks according to the standards 134 135

136

Legislatio Aquisgranensis, pp. 443–5, 464; Semmler, ‘Supplex Libellus’, 284–5. Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, cc. 5, 6, p. 7; b. ii, c. 5, p. 39; Hrabanus, Carmina, No. 40, p. 204; Freise, ‘Einzugsbereich’, pp. 1100f; Hussong, ‘Fulda’, ii, 153; Schmid, ‘Personenforschung’, 242f; Corradini, Cvp 460*, p. 78. We do not know where Ratger was sent to. AF, a. 817, p. 20; CLb, a. 817, p. 38.

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Ratger of Aachen 816/817.137 According to the Vita Aegil, the reforms in Fulda progressed smoothly and harmoniously, but one can ask whether this was really the case. If the delegates of Louis the Pious amended life in Fulda according to the directives of the royal court, they must also have had to transform the liturgy of the monastery, the appearance and diet of the monks and the organisational structure of the abbey.138 These were changes against which the monks barely a year earlier had bitterly protested. 137 138

Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 3, p. 5. For a summary, see Semmler, ‘Supplex Libellus’, pp. 268–98.

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Chapter 5

E IGIL : NE W U NI TY

In 818, Emperor Louis the Pious considered the situation in Fulda stable enough to allow the monks to choose a new abbot. It had been a year now since Ratger had been sent into exile and west-Frankish monks had come to Fulda to restore peace and reorganise monastic life according to the standards of the recent reform councils. This indicates that the reforms in Fulda had indeed not progressed as easily and amicably as the Vita Aegil likes us to believe. Several candidates seem to have qualiied for the position of abbot, among them Hrabanus Maurus, but he had to wait his turn.1 In the end, the monks opted for Eigil, a senior monk raised and trained in Fulda, who had won his spurs as close advisor of Abbot Sturmi, as estate manager (iudex2) of the monastery and possibly also as mediator in the negotiations with the royal court during the Ratger crisis.3 By the time of his election Eigil was approximately seventy years old and had, as it were, almost become one with the place where he had spent such a large part of his life. Having his roots in Bavaria, he had come to Fulda as a young boy in the 750s.4 Here he successfully went through the monastic curriculum and was ordained priest around 775.5 Eigil’s deep knowledge of the Sacred Scripture, the divine oice and monastic business, his wide experience as fellow-monk, priest and executive of monastic afairs 1 2

3

4

5

See Fried, ‘Bildungs- und Geistesgeschichte’, pp. 13, 19–22. Concerning the meaning of iudex in this context, see Becht-Jördens, ‘Vita Aegil als Quelle’, 29–31, 41. Also, the early-ninth-century Capitulare de villis, MGH Cap. 1, No. 32, cc. 44, 55, 62, 66. Wickham, Framing, p. 267. See Semmler, ‘Supplex Libellus’, 289, 320. Further: Oexle, ‘Memorialüberlieferung’, p. 146. More information about Eigil is given in the Vita Aegil, written by Candidus. Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, cc. 1–2, p. 5 and b. ii, c. 3, pp. 37–8. Concerning the date of Eigil’s election, see the AFa, a. 818, p. 138. The irst charter in which Eigil is mentioned as abbot of Fulda dates 18 February 819: CDF, No. 379, p. 171. Concerning the kinship of Eigil and Sturmi, see: Störmer, ‘Adelsgruppe’, pp. 1–34; Hahn, ‘Eihloha’, 50. Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 1, p. 131. Freise, ‘Gebuhrtsjahr Hrabanus’, pp. 35–6.

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Eigil and his good connections with the world outside the monastery, which he, especially, as iudex of Fulda will have acquired and needed, made him a suitable candidate for the vacant position of abbot of Fulda. In addition, he had the advantage of his family name. For Eigil was related to Sturmi, founder and abbot of Fulda, by birth. Eigil’s kinship with Sturmi also explains why his parents, Bavarian aristocrats, decided to hand over their child to a monastery that was so far from their home country. Finally, Eigil’s advanced age promised those who initially had preferred another candidate, or were afraid that Eigil would turn out to be another Ratger, a relatively brief abbacy and thus another opportunity to choose a new abbot in the near future. These considerations and the long discussions that preceded his election according to the Vita Aegil have led historians to believe that Eigil’s election had been a compromise.6 Indeed, Eigil ruled the monastery for not more than four years until he died an old man in May 822. During this relatively brief period he was, nevertheless, able to take on a lot of work. Without causing another uproar, the abbot continued the construction of the abbey church by adding two crypts to the already large ediice. He also built a sanctuary on Fulda’s cemetery dedicated to the Archangel Michael, aimed at supporting the souls of those who lay buried there, and started to construct a new cloister on the west side of the abbey church. As far as the sources allow us to pass an even-handed judgement on his abbacy, Eigil’s contributions to the monastic community mostly consisted of an intensiication and reform of the liturgy, especially those observances that related to the commemoration of the dead. Next to the construction of the church of St Michael just mentioned, Eigil extended the liturgical celebration of Sturmi’s dies natalis and initiated a communal commemoration of all the deceased members of the Fulda community on his relative’s anniversary.7 Besides looking after the dead and their spiritual welfare, Eigil also saw to the material comfort of the monastery. Under Eigil’s rule the number of gifts rose again, after having dropped to zero in the years 816–818, when the monastic crisis was at its high point.8 While Ratger had extended the landed property of the monastery in the Middle Rhine area, the Alsace and in the east-Frankish districts between Fulda and Würzburg, Eigil instead turned to the nearby regions of Grabfeld and Tullifeld to establish relations with possible benefactors.9

6

7 9

Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 5, pp. 6–7 and b. ii, cc. 10–11, pp. 43–6. Engelbert, Die Vita Sturmi, pp. 11–12; Oexle, ‘Memorialüberlieferung’, p. 159. Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 22, p. 18. 8 CDF, Nos. 379–99, pp. 171–81. Freise, ‘Studien’, pp. 1101–5.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda One of the irst challenges that Eigil had to confront as a newly appointed abbot was the legacy of the recent crisis. Part of this legacy was the almost inished abbey church that must have won great admiration among rival religious communities longing for power and prestige, but that was also diametrically opposed to what the current monastic reforms of Louis the Pious and Benedict of Aniane stood for: simplicity, austerity and humility. The construction of the church had, moreover, caused the monks a lot of grief. Eigil responded by providing the church with a strongly monastic-inspired liturgical programme. In addition, he made the dedication of the church a grand public event, which Candidus later described in his Vita Aegil as a new beginning for the monastery and a rebirth of its origins. On 1 November 819 the once despised building was turned into a house of God in the presence of all the monks of Fulda, their families, befriended bishops and abbots and benefactors.10 This chapter will irst discuss Eigil’s crypts and his arrangement of the altars in the new abbey church. They are both particular pictures of the monastic community in the late 810s and early 820s and its expectations for the future. The holy contents of the altars, their tituli which named the saints to which the altars paid tribute, and the order in which Eigil placed them, relect a particular vision of Fulda’s position within the Christianitas and the older liturgical traditions at hand. Using models of exemplary Christian life and evoking these in the corporal presence of the saints, the tituli and the performance of the liturgy that honoured them, Eigil ofered his monks a new guide to relect upon their behaviour and to lead them back to what he considered to be the origin of monastic life in Fulda. Within this programme of reform, the abbot reserved a special place for his kinsman Sturmi, who, as we have seen, had been closely involved in the foundation of the monastery. While his predecessors had merely focused on Boniface to become Fulda’s ‘house’ saint, Eigil instead tried to strengthen Sturmi’s position as patron of the monastery and symbol of its identity, though always in close association with Boniface. He therefore gave Sturmi a more prominent place in both the monastic liturgy and its architectural setting, the abbey church where the liturgical observances took place. In addition, he wrote a vita of the abbot. This text, the Vita Sturmi, clearly positions Sturmi as the founder of Fulda and the monastery’s irst abbot. Boniface is the spiritual master, who from a distance guided Sturmi throughout the whole process of Fulda’s foundation, but who never acquired the dominant role that he probably actually had, as discussed in Chapter 1. In addition, Eigil used 10

See below, and Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, cc. 15–16, p. 15; b. ii, c. 17, p. 55–60. The dedication ritual is reconstructed by Sheerin, ‘Church ordo’, 304–16.

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Eigil the Vita Sturmi to respond to earlier discussions about monasticism in Fulda, of which we have seen a glimpse through the Supplex Libellus. It was his aim to soothe the disagreements in the disrupted community and bring new unity. In the text, Eigil explained the origin of certain traditions typical of Fulda. Moreover, he ofered the monks an example of communal life with which they could identify and stressed the shared background of all the brethren. In recounting Fulda’s foundation, the author, inevitably, created a new image of the community and its early past. While early charters from Fulda remember Boniface as the initiator of Fulda, later sources, probably under the inluence of Eigil’s eforts to put forward his relative as Fulda’s founding father, instead honour Sturmi as the monastery’s ‘irst abbot and founder’. This transformation had lasting repercussions on how the monastic community perceived its origin, still visible today in the marble tablets that decorate the walls of Fulda’s baroque Dom, narrating the story about the establishment of the monastery from the perspective of Sturmi. Eigil’s Vita Sturmi, the only text by his hand still extant, will be the second picture of Fulda to be discussed in this chapter. The last self-representation of the abbey with which I shall close this chapter is the church of St Michael. Eigil built the chapel on the monastic cemetery in 820 to support the souls of the dead who lay buried in its vicinity and to house his own body when he died. According to the Vita Aegil, the church was a igura Christi et ecclesiae, a type (typus) of Christ and his church.11 Although this written allegorical reading of the church dates to the 840s, it is likely that the author had learned about it from the designers of the church itself: besides Eigil, also Hrabanus Maurus, Eigil’s successor as abbot of Fulda and a specialist in exegesis. Eigil and Hrabanus intended the church to relect the community’s pursuit for salvation, which lay at the heart of the existence of the monastery. In this sense, the church also symbolised the community of Fulda itself. In addition, it expressed a consciousness of lineage and continuity with the past, not only because of its location in the monastic cemetery and the presence of the bodily remains of the previous generations of monks, but also because of its proposed role as the mausoleum of Fulda’s oiceholders, the abbots. E ig i l ’s cryp ts When Eigil became abbot of Fulda in 818, he had an almost inished, but controversial church at his disposal. The exterior of the building was 11

Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 17, p. 16. Becht-Jördens, ‘Text, Bild und Architektur’, pp. 89–90.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda complete. The walls had been painted. Only the loor had to be constructed and all the dust and soil of years of construction work cleared away.12 With most of the work already completed, Eigil had little option but to put the building to use. He moreover added two crypts underneath the eastern and western choirs. Little is known about the architecture of these crypts as they, together with the rest of the early medieval abbey church, were largely destroyed during the construction of the baroque Dom at the beginning of the eighteenth century.The eastern crypt appears to have been a triple-apsed crypt.13 As a later source describes how in the early morning the light of the rising sun came in through the windows, the crypt must have been rather high, with windows far enough above the ground to catch the rays of the rising sun.14 The western crypt presumably had ive apses.15 It had entrances to its north and its south, and ive windows, of which two were illed up with bricks; probably a result of the addition of a cloister directly adjacent west of the transept in the 820s–840s.16 Eigil had no practical reason for building the crypts. They were not built to accommodate pilgrims to the saints who lay buried in the abbey church. Unlike many medieval undercrofts, these crypts also do not appear to have been designed to integrate the tomb of the saint within the liturgical space of the community, nor to separate the monks more strictly from the laity.17 Unlike the crypts of St Maurice d’Agaune, St Denis or St Peter’s in Rome discussed above, Eigil’s crypts were unrelated to the promotion of a saint’s cult. After all, Boniface’s body was translated to the main altar on the choir platform of the western transept, not to the crypt underneath, and also the corpses of Sturmi and Leoba, likely candidates for further promotion as ‘special dead’ as explained below, found a resting place elsewhere. Werner Jacobsen has suggested that Eigil may have created a confessio-like construction through which visitors of the crypt could see into Boniface’s grave from below, but there is no evidence for the existence of such a structure.18 Moreover, Eigil dedicated the altar in the western crypt to Benedict of Nursia, not to Boniface whose body 12 13

14 15

16

17 18

Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 14, p. 15. See Vita Aegil, b. ii, c. 15, pp. 53–4 and Vonderau, ‘Zum Grundriß’, 49–69; Hahn, ‘Ostkrypta’, 60–2. Compare Krause, Ratgerbasilika, pp. 59–61, 136; Becht-Jördens, ‘Sturmi oder Bonifatius?’, pp. 174–8. Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. ii, c. 15, pp. 53–4. Hahn, ‘Benediktuskrypta’, 60–2; Becht-Jördens, ‘Vita Aegil als Quelle’, 32–3. Compare Krause, Ratgerbasilika, pp. 94–8. Rudolf, Vita Leobae, c. 23, p. 131; Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. ii, c. 15, p. 54. Krause, Ratgerbasilika, p. 145. See also Becht-Jördens, ‘Sturmi oder Bonifatius?’, pp. 178–80. Compare Jacobsen, ‘Abteikirche Fulda’, p. 125. Krause, Ratgerbasilika, pp. 14–15, 153–4; Becht-Jördens, ‘Sturmi oder Bonifatius?’, pp. 180–1.

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Eigil rested one loor higher up.The patronage of the altar remained Benedict’s for almost nine centuries, until the tomb of Boniface, whose body, apart from his head, was moved to the crypt only in the ifteenth century, was connected to the main altar inside the crypt in the eighteenth century.19 It remains to be seen to what degree Eigil intended the crypts to be directly linked to the cult of Boniface. The fact that the abbot had them consecrated on 2 November, the day after the dedication of the church and the translation of Boniface to his new grave in the western transept, suggests an independence from the upper church, which to a large extent was the creation of Eigil’s predecessors Baugulf and Ratger.20 Instead of regulating the pilgrim traic to Boniface’s grave, the new abbot used the crypts to formulate a monastic programme for the community to contemplate.21 Drawing on relics to focus the devotion of the beholder to particular themes and using the dedication of altars to explain their meaning, Eigil created a monument of the history of monasticism that honoured the fathers of both Eastern and Western traditions of ascetic life. At the same time, he left his mark on the church. A monastic p rog ram m e Though the altars are no longer there, their tituli still are. These short poems were written by Hrabanus Maurus, then still master of the monastic school, probably at the request of Eigil on the occasion of the church’s dedication.22 They have survived in two redactions: one Candidus included in the Vita Aegil, the other the Jesuit Christopher Brouwer edited in the early seventeenth century on the basis of an older, now lost, manuscript of Hrabanus’ poems. Both have been studied and edited by Gereon Becht-Jördens.23 Hrabanus’ tituli recount the names of the saints whose corporal remains were included in the altars or who were particularly remembered in the dedication. The altars will not always have included the relics of all the saints listed in the tituli. Often it will have concerned contact relics, or secondary relics, such as little strips of cloth that had been placed upon the tomb or the body (parts) of the saint, earth soaked in martyrs’ 19 20 21

22

23

Krause, Ratgerbasilika, p. 153. Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 16, p. 15, and b. ii, c. 19, p. 62. Becht-Jördens, ‘Text, Bild und Architektur’, pp. 75, 91–2; Becht-Jördens, ‘Vita Aegil als Quelle’, 42–4; Becht-Jördens, Vita Aegil, p. xxii. Concerning the old tradition of composing tituli see, for example, Trout, Paulinus of Nola, pp. 163–94; Lehmann, ‘Eine spätantike Inschriftensammlung’, 243–81; Wesch-Klein, ‘Damasus i’, pp. 1–30. See Becht-Jördens, Vita Aegil, pp. xxxiii–xxxvi, and Becht-Jördens, ‘Sturmi oder Bonifatius?’, pp. 123–87, which includes an edition of the tituli.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda blood, oil drawn from the fuel of the lamps burning near the saint’s grave or regenerative body parts such as hair or nails. Although Carolingian ecclesiastical legislation laid down that every altar should contain relics, it did not prescribe that each dedication should correspond to the precise content of the altars.24 Often the inclusion of at least some of the relics of the listed saints or of saints of a similar type (such as ‘female martyrs’ or ‘bishops from Gaul’) and the naming of the saints in the tituli seem to have been enough.25 Because we often have only the tituli to work with (the altars no longer being there, and, if the altars were still extant, we cannot be sure that their contents remained the same over the centuries), it is diicult to establish the precise relation between the tituli and the relics included in the altars. The altar of the eastern crypt paid tribute to what was considered to be the beginning of all monastic existence: the ascetic practices of the Eastern desert. It was dedicated to ive famous, exemplary hermits, of whom most had also pioneered coenobitic forms of asceticism: Antony, Paul of Thebes, the martyr Anastasius, the monk Sabas and Theodosius abbas, also called Theodosius Koinobiarches. Antony (d. 356), one of the most authoritative desert fathers, was considered to be the father and founder of all Christian monasticism, not only in Egypt, but also due to, among others, the work of the patristic writer Cassian, the short biographies of hermits in Egypt and Palestine (Historia Lausiaca) by Palladios of Helenepolis (translated into Latin at least by the sixth century) and of course the Latin translation of Athanasius of Alexandria’s Vita Antonii also in the West.26 Although Antony was the irst to found Christian communities in the desert, it was actually Paul of Thebes (d. 339), a contemporary of Antony, who was the irst Christian hermit to retreat in the barren regions of Egypt, as also the titulus of Fulda’s eastern crypt recalls: Antony, although listed irst, is called heremita but Paul is the senior. His life became known in the West through the Vita S. Pauli prima eremitae written by Church father Jerome.27 That both hermits are bracketed together here is not surprising as the tradition of the Vitae Patrum remembered them together, as two men who would have known and admired each other during their lifetime. This collection of saints’ lives and sayings of 24

25

26

27

Capitulare Aquisgranense (801–813), ed. A. Boretius, MGH Cap. 1, p. 170. For a full overview of Carolingian legislation concerning relics, see Hermann-Mascard, Reliques; Geary, Furta Sacra, pp. 40–50. Concerning the importance of the names of saints in devotional practices, see Lifshitz, The Name of the Saint. Bertrand, ‘Shaping authority’, pp. 179–89. There existed two Latin translations of Athanasius’ Greek original, but that of Evragius of Antioch (373) was the most popular. Concerning the translation into Latin of the Historia Lausiaca, see Schulz-Flügel, ‘Vitae Patrum’, 297. Jerome, Vita Pauli, pp. 143–83.

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Eigil the desert fathers, often supplemented with other monastic texts such as Palladios’ Historia Lausiaca, must have been well-known by Eigil as it was compulsory reading in most monasteries.28 The Egyptian desert fathers are followed by ascetics illustrative of monastic traditions in Palestine. Like Antony and Paul, Sabas and Theodosius had also known each other. Sabas (d. 532) had spent part of his life as a hermit and had been an active promoter of monasticism, having founded several monasteries in Palestine, including Mar Saba.29 Theodosius abbas (d. 529) had established the Theodosius monastery near Jerusalem and was entrusted by the patriarch of Jerusalem with the care over all communal living ascetics in the Holy Land, hence his name Koinobiarches, ‘leader of monks’.30 ‘Martyr Anastasius’ is less easy to identify, as there are several ‘Anastasii’ that meet the description of martyr. Still, considering the fact that he is listed among monks, he might well be identiied with the soldier who after his conversion to Christianity became a monk in Jerusalem and died a martyr in Persia in 628.31 Directly opposite the eastern crypt, at the other end of the church, the altar in the western crypt honoured the great fathers of Western coenobitical monasticism. It was consecrated in honour of Benedict, Honoratus and Columbanus, founders of authoritative monasteries in the West, respectively Monte Cassino, Lérins and Luxeuil.32 As noted above, Benedict increasingly came to be regarded as ‘the father of Western monasticism’ and was therefore listed irst in the altar titulus. He was followed by Honoratus (d. 429/430), who, attempting to lead an ascetic life, irst travelled to the East for inspiration before he founded the monastery of Lérins around 400.33 For two centuries the monastery was the home of many inluential churchmen, who also played a central role in spreading Lérins’ monastic ideals throughout Gaul. In addition, it was the cradle of several monastic rules, which combined Western traditions with monastic practices from Egypt and Asia Minor.34 Columbanus (d. 615) was an Irish ascetic, who as a ‘pilgrim for Christ’ (peregrinus pro Christo) came to the Continent at the end of the sixth century and founded several monasteries there. Luxeuil in France and Bobbio in Italy are the most famous and inluential examples. Columbanus stood at the outset of a new form of monastic life in Gaul, in modern times 28

29 30 32 33 34

RB, cc. 42, 73, pp. 584, 672. Schulz-Flügel, ‘Vitae Patrum’, 289–300; Berschin, Biographie, vol. i, pp. 188–91; LdM, vol. viii, col. 1765–6; LTK, vol. x, p. 824. LTK, vol. viii, p. 1399; LdM, vol. vii, col. 1213. LTK, vol. ix, pp. 1422–3. 31 LTK, vol. i, p. 603. Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. ii, c. 20, pp. 64, 68. Heinzelmann, ‘Honoratus, Bf. v. Arles’, in LdM, vol. v, col. 118. Kasper, Theologie und Askese; Prinz, Frühes Mönchtum, pp. 47–87 and map iii.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda called ‘Iro-Frankish monasticism’, which was based on a regula mixta. It combined Columbanus’ own monastic rule, which was characterised by rigorous fasting and a strong emphasis on penance, and that of Benedict, often supplemented with other ascetic habits or rules (both oral and written) typical of the religious community that adapted it to its own usage.35 Interestingly, the titulus of Fulda’s western crypt depicts Columbanus as the column that carried the arches of the vault, on which the grave of Boniface above in the western choir rested.36 That Columbanus and not Benedict is speciically tied to the tomb of Boniface should probably be explained as a play upon the name of the Irishman by the poet who wrote the titulus, and the fact that both men were self-chosen exiles who had left their homes to serve God in foreign countries. It does not witness to a stronger preference for Columbanus as a guide for monastic life over Benedict among either the monks of Fulda or by Boniface himself. Benedict after all was listed irst. Nevertheless, the inclusion of Columbanus and Honoratus, next to Benedict, as representatives of Western monasticism indicates that even though the Rule of Benedict in the course of the eighth and ninth centuries superseded other monastic rules as the una regula in the Frankish church, the inluence of other monastic traditions persisted.37 This is also witnessed by the wide-ranging, extraordinary collection of monastic rules that Fulda possessed, to be more fully discussed in Chapter 6, which consisted of some thirty monastic rules, or texts that were equated with monastic rules for their instructive character. They included those of Columbanus and Benedict.38 Like the column, the whole of Eigil’s creation carried a deeper meaning, which to those who were tried and tested in the monastic tradition would have been easy to grasp. His crypts represented the two pillars on which monastic life in Fulda, according to the abbot, was founded – Eastern practices and Western customs, eremitism and coenobitism – and provided models for all the monks to emulate. At the same time the crypts, as undercrofts below the two liturgical centres of the church, also in a literal, architectural sense formed the foundation of the abbey church, where the monks in accordance with ancient monastic tradition daily fulilled their most important task: prayer.

35 36

37 38

Prinz, Frühes Mönchtum, pp. 121–51; Diem, ‘Regula Columbani’, pp. 63–89. ‘Hicque Columbanus ixa stat rite columna / martyris et tumulo subsidia apta feret.’ Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. ii, c. 20, p. 68. Compare Benedict of Aniane’s collection of rules in the Codex regularum, pp. 423–702. Schrimpf et al., Mittelalterliche Bücherverzeichnisse, p. 72.

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Eigil A re f le ction of the unive r sal C h urc h Just as Eigil’s crypts with their altars and dedications relected the abbot’s view on the basic principles of monastic life, so the arrangement of the altars in the rest of the church, as it can be reconstructed on the basis of Hrabanus Maurus’ altar tituli, was the result of a well considered programme (see Figure 4).39 Together the altars, their contents and tituli situated the monastery in relation to other sacred spaces in the Carolingian realm and displayed a vision of the community’s position in salvation history. At the same time they formed a monument of Fulda’s past. Of course we need to bear in mind that even though it was Eigil who put up the altars and arranged them in a certain order, he needed to reckon with existing liturgical traditions and collections of relics to hand, instituted and brought together by his predecessors. Moreover, even though the ground plan of the altar arrangement in itself ofers an interesting image of a monastic agenda, its deeper meaning became apparent only during the liturgical rituals, when the monastic community moved through the church and, through procession and prayers, connected the present-day community to the community of saints who were represented through their names and holy remains. Its meaning shifted with the route the monks chose for the occasion. The importance of the narrative sequence is shown by the manuscript tradition of Hrabanus’ altar tituli. Becht-Jördens has demonstrated that they are transmitted to us in two redactions, each with its own focus and plot. In the manuscript used by Brouwer for his edition of Hrabanus’ poems, now lost but probably dating to the ninth century, the order of the altar tituli is diferent from the one included by Candidus in his Vita Aegil.Whereas the latter put the emphasis on Eastern and Western monasticism by starting with the titulus of the eastern crypt and ending with the one in the west, the anonymous compiler of Hrabanus’ carmina ordered the tituli around the places of burial of both Boniface and Sturmi and thus focused on their meaning for the Fulda community. Each procession and liturgical observance placed a diferent emphasis on the narrative through the selection of altars and the determination of the itinerary.40 Starting in the east, we irst come across the altar of the Holy Saviour in the apse with the altar of Stephen to its right in the northern sideaisle and the altar of Clemens to its left in the southern side-aisle and underneath the crypt dedicated to Antony and associates.The altar of the 39

40

Fulda was not exceptional in arranging its altars in a certain order. See, for example: Angenendt, ‘In honore Salvatoris’, 431–56; Heitz, ‘Architecture et liturgie’, 30–47. Becht-Jördens, Die Vita Aegil, pp. xlix–lii; Becht-Jördens, ‘Sturmi oder Bonifatius?’, pp. 123–54.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda proto-martyr Stephen contained relics of famous martyrs from the West, including Rome, Gaul, Spain and Germany, such as Laurence, Pancratius, Donatus,Vincentius and Ferrutius. Clemens, one of Rome’s irst bishops, shared the altar with other early popes, some of whom like him had died as a martyr. His altar also remembered other famous martyrs such as the children of Bethlehem, who had been massacred by King Herod, and George, later patron saint of England, whose head was rediscovered at the Lateran in the 740s.41 Moving from the eastern choir towards the west, in the middle of the nave we ind the altars of Jacobus and Philippus, the Holy Cross and Ignatius.These altars were not inished when the church was dedicated in 819 and were therefore added later, in 820.42 The altar of the Holy Cross contained relics collected and brought to Fulda by Boniface himself, among others remnants of Christ’s Passion and holy remains of saints from Rome.43 It stood on the spot where Boniface had been buried before his translation to the western transept, right in the middle of the nave, and therefore could only be installed after Boniface’s grave had been opened and his body had been translated to his new tomb in the western choir.44 From there, progressing towards the altar of Boniface in the western choir, one irst had to pass the altars of Agnes, Mark, Luke and Agatha that as gate-keepers were stationed at the eastern end of the transept.45 The altar of the apostle Luke also remembered famous Western missionaries and bishops such as Augustine of Canterbury, Germanus of Auxerre and Remigius of Reims. Besides the apostles Paul and John, the altar of Mark paid tribute to the patron saints of major royal abbeys, including Lorsch, Gorze and St Maurice d’Agaune. Agnes shared an altar with other female martyrs and saints such as Geneviève, a virgin who was believed to be the founder of St Denis in Paris, Brigid, a popular Irish saint who was venerated on the Büraburg near Fritzlar,46 and Scholastica, the sister of Benedict of Nursia who was made famous by the Dialogues of Gregory the Great.47 The altar of Agatha, a Sicilian saint whose cult was also given a strong impetus by Gregory the Great, commemorated female Roman martyrs, of whom many had their own chapel or church in the Apostolic city: Petronella, Juliana, Lucia, Perpetua and Sabina.48 41 43 44 45

46 47 48

Krautheimer, Proile, p. 90. 42 Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. ii, c. 19, p. 62. Ibid., c. 20, p. 66. Becht-Jördens, ‘Sturmi oder Bonifatius?’, pp. 134–5. For their tituli see Hrabanus Maurus, Carmina, No. 41, pp. 205–8; Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. ii, c. 20, pp. 66–7; Becht-Jördens, ‘Sturmi oder Bonifatius’, pp. 167–8. Becht-Jördens, ‘Sturmi oder Bonifatius’, p. 141, footnote 64. LTK, ix, pp. 198–9. Krautheimer, Proile. Later added were Prassede, Basilla and Pudentiana.

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Eigil The altar at Boniface’s tomb contained relics related to Christ (for example, a fragment of the crib and earth of the place where he ascended to heaven) and part of the sepulchre of the apostle Peter. In addition, it honoured the two great saints of Gaul, Martin of Tours and Hilary of Poitiers; two of Rome’s most illustrious popes, Leo the Great and Sylvester; and missionaries such as Alban and Kilian who, like Boniface, had sufered a martyr’s death and whose bodies rested in places that had had a special meaning in Boniface’s life. Alban was killed and buried in Mainz, where Boniface had been bishop and Kilian’s inal resting place was Würzburg, where Boniface installed an episcopal see in 741 or 742.49 Finally, underneath the choir platform, which carried the altar and tomb of Boniface, there was the altar of Benedict, Honoratus and Columbanus in the crypt, as mentioned above.50 In total the altars in the abbey church thus numbered thirteen, originally. Later, at an unknown date, some time before the end of Hrabanus’ abbacy, two more altars were added, one dedicated to female saints, the other erected in honour of Timothy.51 In those days it was not uncommon for a powerful abbey such as Fulda to possess such a high number of altars.52 As explained above, in the course of the eighth and ninth centuries votive masses had ousted private prayer from its central place in the monastic liturgy. Monasteries had become holy places, where Christian families requested intercession in the form of masses for the beneit of the salvation of their souls and those of their ancestors. As a result, the number of priests in monastic communities rose substantially, as only they possessed the order to fulil the holy sacrament of the Eucharist. In addition, the number of altars in the abbey churches expanded, as on these sacred tables the Holy Communion was to be celebrated.53 Through their contents and dedications the altars in Fulda’s abbey church not only represented some of the key igures in the history of Christianity, but also honoured saints held in high esteem in the ninth century. Many of them had a cult-site in the Carolingian sphere of inluence, including Rome, and were entered in the Canon, the most 49 50 51

52

53

Reuter, ‘Boniface and Europe’, p. 82, footnote 73. See also Becht-Jördens, ‘Sturmi oder Bonifatius?’, pp. 139–42, and his edition at pp. 161–3. The younger redaction of Hrabanus’ tituli includes two tituli for altars of which we no longer know the location. Hrabanus Maurus, Carmina, No. 41, p. 208; Krause, Ratgerbasilika, p. 159. See also Becht-Jördens, ‘Sturmi oder Bonifatius?’, pp. 144–53, who argues for an early date of the younger redaction, before Eigil’s death. See, for example, St Riquier, with eleven altars in the abbey church, Heitz, L’architecture religieuse carolingienne, pp. 56–60. The Plan of St Gall shows seventeen altars in the abbey church, and another two in the towers. See also Bandmann, ‘Altarordnung’, pp. 371–411. Angenendt, ‘Missa specialis’, 153–221; De Jong, ‘Carolingian monasticism’, p. 648; Häußling, Eucharistiefeier, pp. 221–33.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda solemn part of the mass, in which the wine and bread are consecrated and the saints are asked for their intercession. Their inclusion in Fulda’s altar arrangement points to the frequent contacts between the monastery and other religious communities and the intensive exchange of goods and knowledge, liturgical traditions and saints’ cults within the Frankish realm. Relics of some of the saints just mentioned may have been kept in Fulda for many years. The translation of the relics of Ferrutius (a local martyr from Mainz who died through torture under the notorious Emperor Diocletian) by Lull of Mainz to the monastery of Bleidenstadt in 778 might have been the occasion for Fulda to acquire a relic of the saint.54 It was certainly through Mainz, where the saint had died and had been buried, that Fulda got hold of the holy remains of the martyr Alban. An occasion for Fulda to acquire a relic of Kilian might have been the translation of the saint to the cathedral of Würzburg in 752.The occasion was orchestrated by Burchard, Würzburg’s bishop and a follower and appointee of Boniface, who personally had consented to moving the corporal remains of the saint.55 Relics of typical Roman saints such as Agnes could have got to Fulda through Boniface, Sturmi or Lull, who we know to have been in Rome. It was possibly also from Rome, which formed an important bridge between ascetic traditions from the Near East and the Occident, that Fulda acquired relics of foreign saints such as Sabas and Theodosius who came from such far-away countries, if indeed the altar in the eastern crypt contained their sacred remains. The Apostolic city was a major place of pilgrimage for all Christians in the post-Roman world and a favoured shelter for Eastern refugees since their homelands had been absorbed by Islam or forms of Christianity that did not tolerate their own beliefs.56 Besides the immigrants themselves, the former capital of the Mediterranean world also welcomed the arrival of the religious traditions from the East that the pilgrims brought with them, including new saints, their feasts and relics.57 All the saints, who were represented through the relics and the dedications of the altars, were in one way or another linked with Fulda’s own past. Or, as important igures in the history of the Christian church and representatives of popular cult-sites throughout the Frankish Empire, they connected the monastery to salvation history and positioned Fulda in relation to the outside world. In the end, the majority of the saints commemorated by the altars of Fulda’s abbey church obtained an entry 54 55 56 57

Sermo de sancto Ferrutio, p. 150; LTK, vol. iii, pp. 1247–8;Van der Linden, Heiligen, p. 297. Passio Kiliani, c. 15, p. 728. LP, for example, b. 90. See also Herrin, Formation, p. 272; Krautheimer, Proile, pp. 89–108. Herrin, Formation, pp. 272–4.

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Eigil in the liturgical calendar of the community, though some had to wait until the middle of the eleventh century before their dies natales were included in Fulda’s Sanctorale. That is, if we add up all the entries of all extant calendars of Fulda, for each calendar has its own selection of saints.58 The reason for these diferences still needs to be sorted out. The exceptions are Sabas and Theodosius, who were not listed in Fulda’s martyrologies, nor in the monastery’s calendars that relect Fulda’s annual cycle of the feast days.59 Although the monks of Fulda apparently did not celebrate the feasts of these Eastern saints, they nevertheless recognised their importance as exemplary, authoritative representatives of ascetic life in both the East and the West, of both communal and eremitic life.This is why Eigil included these saints in his altar programme: for the monastic traditions they represented. Through these models of religious devotion, Eigil seems to have wanted to remind his monks of their origins, to teach them what he believed were the basic principles of monastic life and to anchor Fulda’s existence in long-standing tradition. The number of saints and the pattern in which they were distributed among the altars relect a general tendency, also witnessed in other religious communities in the early Middle Ages, to gather as many saints as possible and to create an image of the choirs of saints that formed the Heavenly Kingdom: the apostles, the martyrs, the confessors, to mention the most common categories.60 This idea of a community of saints divided into choirs or categories was further developed and visualised in the images of All Saints in Fulda’s sacramentaries, which were composed in the tenth and eleventh centuries.61 Whether this is what Eigil wish to achieve here, to materialise the feast of All Saints in his altar arrangement, is not clear, although there is evidence that Fulda was familiar with this feast, which was introduced on the Continent only at the end of the eighth and the start of the ninth century, by 800.62 One of the masses that Alcuin had composed and had sent to Fulda around 800 was dedicated to All Saints. Hrabanus would write two sermons in honour of this feast and include its celebration in his martyrology. In addition, he dedicated one of his churches to All Saints.63 Eigil orchestrated the dedication of the

58 59

60 61 62

63

Heyne, Studien, pp. 188–235. Leiden, Ms. Scal. 49, fols. 1r–47r (edition: Breviarium Fuldense, pp. 2–48); Martyrologium historicum Fuldense, pp. 656–75; DeRossi, AASS, Nov. ii, i. See Kühnel, Heavenly Jerusalem, pp. 76–9, 124–38. Sauer, ‘Allerheiligenbilder’, pp. 365–402. Ibid., pp. 376–83; Bandmann, ‘Altarordnung’, pp. 371–411; Hennig, ‘Choirs of saints’, pp. 239–47; Hennig, ‘Die Chöre der Heiligen’, 436–56. Hrabanus Maurus, Homiliae, Nos. 27–8, col. 1668–9; Hrabanus Maurus, Martyrologium, p. 11. See also Claussen, ‘Eine Reliquiennische’, 259; Ellard, Master Alcuin, pp. 91, 255.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda new abbey church to take place on 1 November, the day of All Saints, but seems not to have exploited this, or at least Candidus does not recall it. Fulda’s altars represented areas where Christianity had long since been established, such as Rome and Gaul, and more recent converted regions, for example the bishoprics on the eastern border of the Frankish kingdom. The altars of Fulda’s abbey church, including their contents and dedications, thus positioned Fulda in relation to other important cultsites within the Frankish realm and in the end the whole of Christendom. Together, they formed a relection of the universal ecclesia, albeit from the perspective of a monastery at the outer fringes of the Christianitas. At the same time, this particular self-representation also deined the monastic community by focusing on particular events, places and persons that were unique to Fulda, as we shall see in what follows. A monume nt to F ul da ’s past Some of the altars in the abbey church pursued typical ‘Fulda’ narratives and marked places in the church that had a special meaning for the monastic community, as Becht-Jördens has demonstrated.64 Boniface formed one of the leitmotifs through the sacred topography of the abbey church. It ran right along the central axis of the ediice, from the one end in the east to the other side in the west, halting at three stations. In the eastern apse stood the altar of the Holy Saviour, which Boniface himself had once dedicated, as the titulus recalled.65 Right in the middle of the nave, the altar of the Holy Cross was situated on the spot where Boniface had been buried before his translation to the western transept. Even with the martyr’s body removed, it continued to remind the monks of their patron’s previous shrine as becomes clear from the altar’s titulus, which reads ‘at the cross, where the martyr Boniface was buried irst’ (Ad crucem, ubi martyr Bonifacius primum fuerat tumulatus).66 Further to the west, at the other end of the church, shone the martyr’s new grave as a symbol of the increasing importance of the saint for the Fulda community. In the end this altar would replace the high altar in the east as the most important liturgical centre within the church.67 The second leitmotif integrated by Eigil within the altar arrangement of the church was focused on his predecessor and relative, Sturmi. We do not know the precise location of Sturmi’s tomb, but he seems to have 64 65

66

Becht-Jördens, ‘Sturmi oder Bonifatius?’, pp. 123–54. ‘Hoc altare deo primum Bonifacius ipse, nam salvatori rite dicavit amor.’ Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. ii, c. 20, p. 65. 67 Ibid., p. 66. Gesta abbatum, p. 273; Kehl, Kult und Nachleben, p. 95.

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Eigil been buried in the southern aisle of the abbey church, not far from the entrance which the monks used to get from the cloister into the abbey church. His tomb was probably not relocated with the rebuilding of the abbey church.68 Instead, Eigil placed an altar near the spot where Sturmi lay buried, dedicated to Ignatius, bishop of Antioch and supposed disciple of the apostle Peter, who according to tradition died a martyr, being thrown to the lions in the Coliseum in the imperial city for being a Christian.69 The martyr’s body now rested in St Clemente in Rome, from where his cult further spread to north-western Europe.70 In Fulda’s new abbey church the position of Ignatius’ altar was south of the altar of the Holy Cross in the southern side-aisle. Eigil placed the altar near Sturmi’s grave and dedicated it, besides to Ignatius, to saints of whom at least some can be linked to Sturmi. Florianus had been a Roman army oicer, quartered in Noricum, Sturmi’s home country. He died a martyr for visiting Christian prisoners and was buried in Lorch, Bavaria. Also Emmeram, bishop of Regensburg, was a Bavarian saint, and Wigbert was the priest who had trained Sturmi in Fritzlar. Wigbert lay now buried in Hersfeld, the monastery which Lull of Mainz had built on the location where Sturmi had established his hermitage before he founded the monastery of Fulda.71 Providing the place of Sturmi’s remembrance with an altar – the primary instrument of eucharistic worship – facilitated liturgical observances and was part of Eigil’s plan to put his predecessor forward as a new patron of the community. Besides linking Sturmi and Ignatius physically, Eigil also instituted Sturmi’s anniversary and the martyr’s dies natalis to be celebrated on the same day. The abbot’s anniversary was moved to 17 December, the feast day of Ignatius, and was further extended with the celebration of masses, the singing of psalms and prayers as it was integrated within the martyr’s liturgical festivity.72 In celebrating the feast of Ignatius on 17 December, Fulda followed Bede’s martyrology, which mistakenly lists Ignatius under 17 December instead of 20 December, the day preferred by Eastern churches.73 Letting Sturmi’s anniversary coincide with the feast of an acknowledged saint, who was close in the liturgical calendar, 68

69 70 71 72

73

Krause, Ratgerbasilika, p. 160; Ellger, Michaelskirche, p. 112. Compare Brouwer, Fuldensium antiquitatum, p. 104;Vonderau, Ausgrabungen 1919–1924, p. 64; and Becht-Jördens,‘Sturmi oder Bonifatius?’, pp. 145, 148, footnote 95, who think that Sturmi was originally buried in the eastern choir and was translated from there to the southern aisle. Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. ii, c. 19, p. 62. Jungmann, Mass, vol. ii, p. 255; Baumstark, Missale Romanum, p. 210. Lupus, Vita Wigberti, c. 25, p. 43; Schipperges, Bonifatius, pp. 161–4. Sturmi’s anniversary used to be observed with a vigil and a psalter. See SL, c. 1, p. 321. For Eigil’s measures, see Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 22, p. 18. Quentin, Les martyrologes historiques, pp. 547–52.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda was possibly an attempt to prevent Sturmi’s commemoration from being overshadowed by the festivities of Christmas and to boost his veneration. Changing the date of a feast to prevent rivalry with major feasts happened often. For instance, at the beginning of the ninth century the community of Sithiu moved the depositio of St Omer from 1 November to 9 September to avoid competition with the feast of All Saints.74 We do not know Sturmi’s original day of death. Candidus’ remark ‘in natale sancti Ignatii … qui paulo inferius ab hac anniversaria numeratur’ suggests that the Fulda calendar originally listed Sturmi’s anniversary after the feast of Ignatius.75 The Würzburg manuscript, which according to Pius Engelbert resembles most closely Eigil’s original text, dates the dies natalis of Sturmi as 17 December. The other three manuscripts (Bamberg, Erlangen and Paderborn) record 20 December, which may have been Sturmi’s original day of death or a correction of later copyists who discovered the scribal error in Bede’s martyrology.76 From the tenth century onwards Sturmi’s death (obiit Sturmi abbas) is recorded in Fulda’s calendars, like Ignatius’ feast, under 17 December.77 In creating a monument for Sturmi, Eigil did not forget to stress the connection of his relative with Boniface, whose meaning for the Fulda community was much more signiicant than that of Ignatius. This association was shaped further by translating the body of Leoba, Boniface’s relative, who originally had been buried north of the main altar in the old church, to the same spot where Sturmi rested.78 Possibly Eigil, or Hrabanus, later placed an altar on the spot where Leoba had once been buried. As indicated above, the old codex with Hrabanus’ poems contains two partly destroyed tituli, which once belonged to altars of which we no longer know the location. One of them is dedicated to northern virgins.79 As the monks of Fulda placed the altar of the Holy Cross on the site where Boniface had once lain buried, they might have done something similar when they removed the body of Leoba to her new resting place in the southern aisle of the nave, thereby creating another leitmotif in the altar arrangement.80 74 75 76 77

78 79 80

Mériaux, Gallia irradiata, p. 177. Candidus,Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 22, p. 18. Engelbert, Die Vita Sturmi, pp. 46–7, 51–3, 162. In his edition of one of Fulda’s tenth-century calendars, Rome, BAV, Lat. 3806, fols. 3–8, Ebner has wrongly put Sturmi’s anniversary under 19 December, while the manuscript itself reads 17 December: Ebner, Quellen und Forschungen, pp. 212–15, 343. Engelbert, Die Vita Sturmi, p. 112, footnote 10. See also Heyne, Studien, p. 233. For the position of Leoba’s old grave, see Rudolf, Vita Leobae, c. 21, p. 130. Hrabanus Maurus, Carmina, No. 41, p. 208. Krause, Ratgerbasilika, p. 159; Richter, Bonifatius-Jubiläum, p. 31. See also Becht-Jördens,‘Sturmi und Bonifatius?’, p. 148, footnote 95.

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Eigil The theme centred on Boniface was continued in the years immediately following the dedication of the abbey church, when the old cloister, which for all those years had been directly adjacent south of the abbey church, was moved to the west.The old buildings, part of which had been destroyed during the construction of the new abbey church, probably no longer met the needs of a still growing community. Later tradition recalled how Eigil had asked the monks for their advice, but it remains to be seen how much there was to vote for. According to the Vita Aegil, the abbot gave his brethren the choice between a cloister south of the church ‘according to previous habit’ (iuxta morem prioris) or to the west, near the place of Boniface’s grave.81 The monks decided to have a cloister that directly bordered on the western transept in order to be as close to Boniface as possible. Even though a longing for the martyr’s continuous proximity may well have been one of the arguments for the cloister’s relocation, the possibilities of the monastic site in the end must have been decisive.82 Directly south of Fulda lowed the Waidesbach, and its course obstructed the extension of the monastery in a southerly direction. To the east there were the elevated terrace, on which, around the same time, Eigil built the chapel of St Michael, and the adjacent monastic cemetery. To the north the Frauenberg made the relocation in that direction impossible. The relocation of the cloister to the west was therefore an inevitable move, probably already considered by Ratger.83 Even though considerations of the practical sort had determined its location, it was later remembered in the Vita Aegil to be the result of a communal wish to be as close as possible to Boniface. By moving the monastic housing to the west and orienting it on the central axis of the abbey church, the cloister came to be a continuation of the narrative centred on Boniface in the altars. The installation of an altar near Sturmi’s grave and the promotion of his anniversary by joining it with the feast of Ignatius changed Sturmi’s status in the monastery and marked his transition from the realm of the dead to the sphere of the ‘special dead’. It was given another impetus by Eigil’s writing of a vita of Sturmi, to be discussed in the next part of this chapter. Eigil ordered the vita to be read out during the mealtime of the monks on Sturmi’s anniversary.84 A vita, an altar, liturgical celebrations in 81

82 83 84

‘Quidam dederunt consilium partem meridianam basilicae iuxta morem prioris, quidam autem Romano more contra plagam occidentalem satius poni conirmant propter uicinitatem martyris, qui in ea basilicae parte quiescit.’ Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 9, p. 17. Here Romano more refers to the position of Boniface’s grave in the west. See also Krautheimer, ‘Carolingian revival’, 11; Binding, Planen und Bauen, p. 71. Hahn, ‘Vorgängersbauten’, 185; Kehl, Kult und Nachleben, p. 94. Compare Becht-Jördens, ‘Sturmi oder Bonifatius?’, pp. 149–51. Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 22, p. 18.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda the form of masses and mealtime lectures were all ingredients of a saint’s cult.Was a saint’s cult for his relative Sturmi what Eigil orchestrated? And if so, was he successful in his attempts? I shall return to these questions after the discussion of the Vita Sturmi. This text is another portrait of the Fulda community through the eyes of its fourth abbot. T he

VITA STURMI

Historians have long believed that Eigil composed the Vita Sturmi in the late eighth century, around 794 or 795.85 It would be too much of a tangent to repeat their arguments here. To a large extent the argumentation hinges on one, single word: incolumitas, ‘well-being’, which can refer to both physical health and salvation of the human soul.When Eigil in the Vita Sturmi recalled how grateful the monks of Fulda were for Charlemagne’s gift of the iscus Hammelburg, a Frankish settlement on the banks of the river Saale in Bavaria, he hastened to add that the brethren ‘to this day pray to the Lord for his [Charlemagne’s] incolumitas’.86 As incolumitas is often used in early medieval sources to wish someone good health, historians such as Wolfgang Heßler, Walter Berschin and Pius Engelbert concluded that Charlemagne was still alive when Eigil wrote the Vita Sturmi and have sought the reason for its composition in the late eighth century.87 Subsequently Berschin considered the text to be Eigil’s answer to Charlemagne’s Admonitio generalis and his letter De litteris colendis, which both propagate reform and education of the clergy, as we have seen in Chapter 3.88 Heßler and Engelbert also situate the Vita Sturmi in the 790s, but against the background of the king’s attempts to incorporate Saxony within his realm. They consider Charlemagne’s victory over the Saxons in 794 at the Eresburg, a strategic military stronghold that the Carolingians had taken from the Saxons in the 770s and later lost again, as the occasion for Eigil to write the text. For otherwise the author’s reference to Sturmi’s stay at the Eresburg in the late 770s to them would seem irrelevant.89 In her article on the Vita Sturmi, Petra Kehl, however, rightly contests such an early date of composition and, following Becht-Jördens, argues that Eigil wrote the text much later, around 812–818.90 One of Kehl’s 85

86 87 88 89 90

Berschin, ‘Biographie’, pp. 315–25; Engelbert, Die Vita Sturmi, pp. 16–20; Heßler, ‘Abfassungszeit’, 1–17. ‘Dominum pro illius incolumitae preces usque hodie fundunt.’ Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 22, p. 157. Engelbert, Die Vita Sturmi, pp. 16–20; Heßler, ‘Abfassungszeit’, 1–17. Berschin, ‘Biographie’, pp. 315–25. Heßler, ‘Abfassungszeit’, 1–17; Engelbert, Die Vita Sturmi, pp. 18–20. Kehl, ‘Entstehungszeit’, 11–20. See also Becht-Jördens, Die Vita Aegil, p. 19, footnote 38, and ‘Text, Bild und Architektur’, p. 81, footnote 37, who was the irst to propose a later date of composition.

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Eigil key arguments is that one cannot conclude solely on the basis of the incolumitas sentence in the Vita Sturmi that Charlemagne was still alive when the text was written. After all, incolumitas can also be used to refer to dead people as, besides good health, it also means spiritual welfare in the afterlife.91 To this I should like to add that the fact that Eigil stressed that the monks of Fulda still prayed for Charlemagne ‘to this day’ rather suggests that Charlemagne was already dead when Eigil composed his text. Moreover, Eigil himself clearly explained that Charlemagne made the donation of Hammelburg out of concern for his ‘eternal welfare’.92 A later date would solve some of the oddities of the Vita Sturmi. For example, the text claims that after Carloman had donated all his property in Buchonia to Boniface to found the monastery of Fulda, the Grabfeld aristocracy followed quickly to do the same. Yet, no trace of this generosity can be found in the charters. Instead, the charter material shows that Fulda’s early benefactors mainly came from the Middle Rhine region, where Boniface as bishop of Mainz had been well connected. In fact, there were hardly any gifts from the Grabfeld until Eigil became abbot of Fulda, even though the monastery was situated in this area and owned considerable estates there from the early 780s onwards.93 Under Eigil’s supervision the quantity of donations from the Grabfeld suddenly increased.94 It may therefore be easier to understand the prominent place of the Grabfeld aristocracy in the Vita Sturmi against the background of the late 810s than the 790s and to consider Eigil’s reference to the noblemen from the Grabfeld partly as a reward and commemoration of the support of these particular families with a view to establishing lasting ties and ensuring future generosity.95 A foundation history In his introduction Eigil explains that he wrote the Vita Sturmi at the request of Angildruth, a woman now unknown to us. Perhaps

91

92 93 94 95

Compare Sacramentarium Fuldense Saeculi x, p. 2. Jungmann, Mass, vol. ii, pp. 159–70; Kehl, ‘Entstehungszeit’, 15. See also: Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, vol. vii, 1b, pp. 978–83. The same clause, ‘hoping for their salvation and redemption’, is in the Gelasianum Vetus, iii, 17, 1245. Found in: Blaise, Le vocabulaire latin, p. 433. ‘pro intuitu retributionis aeternae.’ Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 22, p. 157. Hünfeld, Rasdorf and Soisdorf. UBF, Nos. 145–6, pp. 203–6. Freise, ‘Studien’, pp. 1102–5. In my thesis I mistakenly interpreted a reference in the Vita Aegil to be evidence of Eigil’s writing the Vita Sturmi just before he summoned the reading of his book at Sturmi’s anniversary. Raaijmakers,‘Sacred time’, p. 70. Nevertheless, as Becht-Jördens pointed out,‘nuperrime’ does not relate to ‘composuit’, but to ‘nominati’. ‘Sturmi oder Bonifatius?’, p. 146, footnote 92.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda the woman was a nun in the monastery of Kitzingen, a convent on the western bank of the river Main in northern Bavaria (not far from Hammelburg, as a matter of fact), and a relative of Eigil.96 A possible blood relationship would explain why she had asked Eigil to write a little book about the life of Sturmi and the foundation of his monastery. Although Eigil addressed Angildruth in his introduction, it is clear that the text was intended primarily for his own community. After all, this is what the Vita Sturmi deals with in the irst place: the foundation of the Fulda monastery.That Sturmi’s biography is in fact a foundation history is explicitly stated by Eigil in his introduction, but it also becomes clear from the way the book is structured.97 Eigil divided his work into four parts. In the irst part (chapters 2–3) he introduced Sturmi and described how the child of Bavarian origin ended up in Hesse and became part of Boniface’s circle of close followers. The second part (chapters 4–12) deals with Sturmi’s decision to live the life of a hermit and his search for a suitable place to retire from the world. It is followed by the third section that describes the fulilment of his quest: the foundation of the monastery of Fulda (chapters 13–19).This section could be further subdivided in four other parts, namely the physical construction of the monastic complex; Fulda’s religious ediication; the acquisition of a patron saint; and the attainment of worldly protection. In Eigil’s story the actual establishment of Fulda starts with the arrival of Sturmi and his brethren at the spot where they were to build their monastery after the donation by Carloman. The author called attention to the importance of this moment by describing it right in the middle of the book and dating it according to Anno Domini. Apart from the death of King Pippin, it is the only occasion in the vita for which Eigil drew on this particular way of time reckoning, which was rarely used in those days, as I have noted in Chapter 2.98 Eigil depicted everything that happened before the monks took possession of the site as a prelude to this episode; everything that happened afterwards was an elaboration, a fulilment of what had been initiated the moment Sturmi decided to break with his old life of preacher in order to live a solitary life in the wilderness. Chapter 14 then continues with the instruction of the community in the monastic way of life and the institution of a monastic rule. Chapters 15 and 16 describe Boniface’s martyrdom and his burial in Fulda, an event of great importance for the community, as the saint would bring the community 96

97

98

That Angildruth was a nun is clear from the way Eigil addresses her in the introduction of the Vita Sturmi: c. 1, p. 131. And compare: ibid., c. 13, p. 146. Ibid., c. 1, p. 131. See also Remensnyder, Remembering Kings Past; Kastner, Historiae fundationum monasteriorum. Eigil, Vita Sturmi, cc. 13, 22, pp. 144, 157.

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Eigil great prosperity. In chapters 16–19, Eigil recorded the conlict with Lull and Sturmi’s exile. This period can be considered to be the last phase of Fulda’s foundation, as it was in this stage that Fulda broke away permanently from Boniface’s Oberabbatiat. The monastery gained independence from episcopal jurisdiction and came under the protection of the Frankish king. The fourth and inal part (chapters 20–25) is about the other, practical requirements for the monastic experiment to succeed.99 It deals with Sturmi’s contributions to the growth of the monastery, both in a material and spiritual sense, and his attempts to safeguard its continued existence. These attempts consisted of the abbot’s eforts to correct the lives of his monks, his building projects (including making the monastery self-supporting by providing it with a water supply), his renewed bond with the Carolingian kings, the duties he had to fulil in their service and the rewards in the shape of property and privileges that sprang from this union with the royal court. By the time of Sturmi’s death, with which Eigil ended his narrative, the foundation of the monastery had come about and the community had overcome the teething pains of a new monastic establishment. Moreover, it had acquired the worldly and spiritual support that was so necessary for a community of praying monks to hold out in a world of violence and severe competition for patronage and power. In describing the origin of his monastery, Eigil created a picture of Fulda’s past that met the current needs of his community and deined its hopes and wishes for the future. Although the Vita Sturmi is from the hand of one man, it aimed to reach the whole community of monks and to ofer its members a foundation story with which they could all identify. Eigil’s narrative draws the attention of his readers and listeners to certain themes, which he considered to be relevant, appealing and edifying and which in his opinion formed the basis of Fulda’s existence: the solitude, Boniface, the Rule of Benedict. They are topics, which, as we have seen, are recurrent themes in Fulda’s self-representations. Eigil also introduced a relatively new theme: the meaning of Sturmi as founder of Fulda. Although there already existed a tradition in Fulda to remember Sturmi in close association with the foundation of the monastery, it was only in the 810s and early 820s, when reforms jeopardised the old way of life, that his role as founder of the monastery was further stressed and developed. It was only then that a need was felt to set down his story on parchment and preserve this particular version of the events for posterity.

99

Diem, Monastische Experiment, pp. 2–3.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda A p lace of hol ine s s and s ol itude Eigil depicted the place where Fulda was founded as an island of exemplary holiness amidst a sea of complete desolation. He achieved this by carefully describing the course of Sturmi’s travels from the known world into the dark woods of Buchonia. Moving from the world into solitude, Eigil’s depiction of the landscape becomes more detailed, and the woods of Buchonia grow darker and more dangerous. At irst Sturmi and his companions were hardly able to see anything, except earth, the sky and thick forests.100 When Sturmi entered the last stage of the journey, he could see nothing at all, apart from wild beasts, birds and enormous trees.101 Whereas Eigil had characterised the outer ring of Buchonia in more general terms, he became more precise as Sturmi reached the immediate vicinity of Fulda, naming, as it were, every rill, river and road. It was a region Eigil must have known very well. It roughly encircled Carloman’s donation in the early 740s, demarcated by the Lüder mouth and Kämmerzell in the north, and the Giesel stream and Bronzell in the south. Both Kämmerzell and Bronzell were crossings of the river Fulda, at a distance of only a couple of kilometres from the place where Fulda was founded. The image of an enclosed area of holiness is brought to mind not only by Eigil’s lively evocation of the environment through which Sturmi was travelling, but also through the imaginary border between ‘world’ (saeculum) and ‘solitude’ (solitudo) that Eigil carefully constructed throughout the text, as Pius Engelbert has demonstrated. Where the woods of Buchonia came to a stop, the world started. Fritzlar was on the western border of the wilderness and was considered part of the saeculum.102 Hersfeld, where Sturmi had initially settled and had founded a small cell, and Fulda, where in the end he would build his abbey, were both inside the solitude. Of both settlements, only Fulda was preordained by God to become the irst monastery in the eastern part of Carloman’s realm.103 By the time Eigil wrote his Vita Sturmi, Hersfeld, like Fulda, was a royal abbey with an extended network of property.104 That the situation was diferent in the early 740s was a theme exploited by Eigil to underline

100 101

102 103

104

Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 4, p. 134. First Eigil talked about ‘praeter caelum ac terram et ingentes arbores pene nihil cernentes’, later he wrote ‘nihil cernens’. Ibid., cc. 4, 8, pp. 134, 141. Ibid., cc. 4, 5, 14, 16, pp. 134–5, 146, 149. ‘in orientali regno vestro monachorum vitam instituere et monasterium fundare quod praeteritis temporibus ante nos nemo inchoavit.’ Ibid., c. 12, pp. 142–3. Wehlt, Reichsabtei, pp. 149–97; URH, I.

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Eigil and strengthen Fulda’s individuality against its neighbours, not only then, but also in the present day. As explained in Chapter 1, excavations have shown that the place where Fulda was founded was not as solitary as Eigil suggested.105 The junction of roads and rivers, along which the monastery was constructed, played an important role in the story of Sturmi’s travels. In Eigil’s report of Sturmi’s whereabouts Sturmi met merchants, the servant of an aristocrat from the Wetterau and some Slavs, and made good use of the available infrastructure.106 Eigil’s silence regarding the presence of the seventh-century villa rustica in Eihloha is striking, especially since the author had so extensively described the physical surroundings of the place.The Vita Sturmi appears to be distinctive in ofering such a detailed description of the physical surroundings of a religious settlement.107 Eigil’s silence is also remarkable, because it was not uncommon in those days to use the remains of earlier occupation for the construction of a monastery, as is shown by excavations of other early medieval abbeys, and often the re-use of older buildings is mentioned in foundation stories.108 Gregory of Tours (d. 594), for example, related in his Liber Vitae Patrum, a collection of lives of local charismatic holy men from the sixth century, how an abbot who wanted to build a funerary chapel to his joy discovered the foundations of an old building on the spot where he had planned his church.The ind facilitated the construction work considerably and was interpreted as a sign of God’s favour.109 There are several reasons as to why Eigil ignored the early occupation of Eihloha and described the place where the monastery was founded as an isolated wilderness. As I have explained in Chapter 1, the seventhcentury buildings at Fulda possibly once belonged to the Heden family expelled by Charles Martel shortly after 716 or 717. Eigil’s hushing-up of the foregoing occupation of the place could have been a damnatio memoriae of the enemies of Fulda’s most eminent patrons, the Carolingians, as Maria-Elisabeth Brunert has argued. Often, Carolingian sources are either negative about the Heden family, or they silence their existence.110 Brunert thinks that the silence in the Vita Sturmi must be interpreted 105 106

107 108

109

110

See pp. 28–30. Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 7, p. 139. Görich, ‘Nochmals: Hersfeld’, 136–40. Wehlt, Reichsabtei, pp. 149–50. See Brunert, ‘In eremo’, pp. 72–3. See also Zwanzig, Gründungsmythen, pp. 43–140. For examples of the re-use of older villae, see Chavarr ía Arnau, ‘Campesinos’, 113–25; Percival, ‘Villas and monasteries’, 1–21; Efros, ‘Monuments and memory’, pp. 93–118. Gregory of Tours, Liber Vitae Patrum, b. xii, c. 3, pp. 264–5. Brunert, ‘In eremo’, pp. 73–4. See also Efros, ‘Monuments and memory’, pp. 93–5. For example, the passio of Kilian or Willibald’s Vita Bonifatii.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda in the same way. Fulda was pro-Carolingian and had beneited from the expulsion of the Heden family and the coniscation of their belongings by the Carolingians, so Eigil excluded them from his account of Fulda’s foundation.111 Of course, Eigil had also wanted to ground the foundation story of Fulda in the traditions of the irst Christian monks and had followed on the vitae of such desert fathers as Antony, Paul, Malchus and Pachomius. These describe the habitat of monks and hermits as a solitudo. In imitation of examples from the Scripture, these early Christian ascetics and solitaries had withdrawn to the desert – a holy and isolated place where God was venerated with celebrations and oferings and the faith of his servants was taxed – to dedicate their lives solely to God.112 Kindred spirits in the West picked up upon their example and Sturmi will also have felt that he followed in their footsteps when he chose to live a solitary life in the woods of Buchonia. Eigil singled out this theme in Sturmi’s life and elaborated on it in his text to show that Fulda had its roots in the old and sacred tradition of the desert fathers and the prophets of the Bible and, like the religious enclaves in the Near East, was a place of holiness. A similar motivation had inspired Boniface more than half a century earlier to portray Fulda in heremo vastissimeÇ solitudinis when he wrote to the pope to ask for a papal exemption. By describing Buchonia as a solitude, Eigil also called to mind this particular letter and its meaning for the present-day community. Although it was probably not until the abbacy of Hrabanus Maurus that the monks of Fulda possessed a copy of Boniface’s letter collection, they will have owned a copy of, or at least have remembered, this particular epistle, which paved the way for their papal privilege. 113 Like other Western hagiographers, Eigil adjusted the solitude to the environmental conditions of a cold and wet north-western Europe and, instead of the heat of a bare desert, where the devil tested God’s servants with demons in the shape of lions, leopards, serpents and scorpions, Sturmi encountered smelly pagans and the darkness of towering trees.114 Similar images cannot only be found in the Vita Sturmi, but also in both earlier and contemporary hagiography such as the Vita Wynnebaldi written by Wynnebald’s sister, Hygeburc of Heidenheim, around 785. In this vita, Hygeburc carefully described the establishment of Heidenheim, the

111 112 113 114

Brunert, ‘In eremo’, pp. 76–7; Hussong, ‘Fulda’, i, 27–9. For example, Exod. 5: 1 and 3; 7: 16; 8: 23. Tangl, Introduction to Boniface, Epistolae, p. vii. Brunert, ‘In eremo’, p. 63;Von Nahmer, ‘Ideallandschaften’, 195–270; Diesenberger, ‘Bausteine der Erinnerung’, pp. 39–66; Diesenberger, ‘Die Überwindung der Wüste’, pp. 87–92.

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Eigil foundation of her brother, in Sualeveld, near Eichstätt. Heidenheim was a place of holiness in the middle of the woods in a region that was inhabited by pagans, foreordained by God to become a monastery.115 Eigil described the environment of Fulda in full detail not only to demonstrate the remoteness and holiness of the area where the abbey was established according to hagiographic conventions, but also to illustrate the diferent phases by which Sturmi’s journey progressed. One of his examples in this respect had been the Vita Antonii, in which Antony’s ascent to the ideal of complete poverty, abstinence and solitude and his search for God is also expressed in terms of landscape and nature.116 As Antony moved deeper into the desert and further away from civilisation, from his hometown via a deserted fort at the Outer Mountain to the foot of the so-called Inner Mountain, so too Sturmi penetrated Buchonia’s forests until he discovered the ideal place to found a monastery. Like Antony’s biographer, Eigil invited his listeners and readers to follow Sturmi on his journey, which had been not only a physical experience but also a spiritual pilgrimage, and to relive it in a mystical sense. It was a journey which took the monks from the solitary life of a hermit to communal life in a monastery and, progressing from there, from Boniface’s directives, the instituta sancti Bonifatii, to a life according to the Rule of Benedict. From e re mitism to the Rule of B e ne di c t In the Vita Sturmi Eigil recounts how it had been Sturmi’s initial wish to found a hermitage.Yet, during his search through the woods of Buchonia and the conversations with Boniface he was slowly won over to the coenobitic form of asceticism and decided to establish a community of monks instead.117 To increase the impact of this transition from eremitism to coenobitism, Eigil employed his vocabulary with great precision: until the moment of Fulda’s foundation the author denotes Sturmi and his companions as anachoretae, eremitae, solitarii and the place where they settled as cella, habitaculum or habitatio. Fulda, however, is described as a monasterium and its inhabitants as monachi.118 Boniface guided Sturmi through this process and stimulated him ‘to a love of the monastic life’.119 Eigil does not deine or specify what kind of life Boniface had in mind, 115

116 117 118 119

Hygeburc, Vita Wynebaldi, pp. 106–17.Wood, Missionary Life, pp. 64–5; Zwanzig, Gründungsmythen, pp. 79–93. Brunert, ‘In eremo’, pp. 68–9, 74. Athanasius, Vita Antonii, cc. 3–50, pp. 135–273. Eigil, Vita Sturmi, cc. 6, 11, pp. 138, 142. Engelbert, Die Vita Sturmi, pp. 120–1. ‘ad monasticae vitae amorem incitare.’ Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 11, p. 142.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda only that the bishop took his examples from the Bible, secundum sanctae scripturae traditionem.120 After having dealt with the construction of a monastic community in Buchonia, Eigil continues with the completion of the establishment of coenobitic life through the implantation of the Rule of Benedict. The author recalled how the monks decided to follow the Rule of Benedict and to go to Italy, the native soil of Benedict of Nursia and the place of origin of his rule. They wished to learn from the example of those who seemed to understand and know the rule best because of their closeness to its origin. With two companions Sturmi spent a year visiting several monasteries in Tuscany and middle Italy to study ‘the customs, observances, and traditions of the brethren who lived in them’.121 On their return they taught their brethren what they had learned there. From that moment, Eigil explained, the monks ‘carried out in every detail the Rule of Saint Benedict that they had vowed to follow’.122 Eigil illustrated this by referring to the water-supply system, which Sturmi built so that the monks, in accordance with the Rule of Benedict, no longer had to leave the monastery in order to fetch water. After all, the rule forbade monks to wander around and prescribed that various crafts should be practised within the monastery. Thanks to the large channels underneath the workshops of the monastery, the craftsmen were provided with water without having to leave the monastic complex.123 Moreover, the Vita Sturmi on several occasions cites or paraphrases the Rule of Benedict and incorporates its ideas on, for example, the role of the abbot and the importance of obedience.124 With regard to the prominence of the Rule of Benedict in the description of Fulda’s early days, we need to appreciate the circumstances in which the author wrote his text and the implications that the demands of his own day had for the way Eigil told his story. Eigil composed the Vita Sturmi in the late 810s, soon after the reform councils in Aachen ordered all monasteries in the Frankish realm to follow the Rule of Benedict and Benedict of Aniane’s reading of it and west-Frankish monks had reformed life in Fulda according to the standards of the emperor and 120 121 122 123 124

Ibid., cc. 11, 13, pp. 142, 145. Ibid., c. 14, p. 147. ‘et regulam sancti Benedicti quam se implesse promiserant, ad omnia observabant.’ Ibid. Probably the Waidesbach. Ibid., c. 21, p. 156; RB, c. 66, p. 660. Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 14, pp. 146–7. See the edition of Engelbert: Die Vita Sturmi, cc. 3, 16–17, p. 133 – RB, c. 4, p. 462; Vita Sturmi, cc. 13, 7, p. 145 – RB, c. 40, pp. 578–80; Vita Sturmi, cc. 14, 1–2, p. 147 – RB, c. 2, p. 444; Vita Sturmi, cc. 17, 18, p. 151 – RB, c. 64, p. 648; Vita Sturmi, cc. 21, 11–14, p. 156 – RB, c. 66, p. 660.

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Eigil his advisor. In the light of these reforms Eigil’s text emphasised how the Rule of Benedict had already been adopted in the days of Sturmi and observed ‘in every detail’ by the monks. Besides the debates on monastic life on a central level and the reforms that sprang from them, Eigil was also inluenced by the discussions within his own monastery, set of by the monastic policy of his predecessor, Ratger. Due to Ratger’s reorganisation of the monastery, which was partly inevitable considering the rapid growth of both the number of monks and the monastic landholdings, the old way of life in the monastery had come under attack. The authors of the Supplex Libellus had iercely resisted the changes and had defended the instituta sancti Bonifatii. Also, Eigil valued Boniface’s guidelines concerning the arrangement of the monastery, the training of the monks and their way of life highly. In his Vita Sturmi he let Sturmi tell Boniface: ‘Anything that you may command me, I believe to be holy.’125 So when Boniface read in the Bible that monks should not drink wine, the monks decided only to drink weak beer.126 Nevertheless, Eigil’s Vita Sturmi is not a plea to return to the old way of life, as the Supplex Libellus is. Instead, the Vita Sturmi is an attempt to reconcile the ancient traditions and the current reforms and to unite a divided community by demonstrating its shared beginnings. Eigil deliberately evoked the traditions on which monastic life in Fulda was based to explain to his audience the origin of present-day monastic practices and the common goal towards which they successfully all worked, and had been working for so long.127 He showed that Fulda was rooted in both the teaching of Boniface and the Rule of Benedict. Considering the fact that historians have often bracketed Boniface and the Rule of Benedict together, it is signiicant that Eigil pulls them apart; Benedict’s monasticism was a logical next step for the monks to take after Boniface had instructed them in the basic principles of monastic life. Likewise, Eigil also distinguishes between eremitism and coenobitism, while at the same time describing the transition from the solitary to the communal way of asceticism as a lucid evolution. According to the Vita Sturmi, Fulda thus developed from a hermitage in imitation of the desert fathers to a monastic community whose monks obeyed the Rule of Benedict. A comparable narrative can be read in Eigil’s crypts. They also show that monastic existence in Fulda was based on traditions from both the East and West, on both eremitism 125

126 127

‘Totum sanctum, inquit, credo, quod a vobis mihi fuerit imperatum.’ Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 6, p. 138. Ibid., c. 13, p. 145. See also RB, c. 40, pp. 578–80. Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 14, pp. 145–6.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda and coenobitism, represented by Antony and Benedict. In the depiction of his narrative Eigil was inspired by not only the Vita Sturmi itself, but also the examples set by other founders of monasteries, such as Benedict of Nursia and Benedict of Aniane, who in the course of their lives progressed from a solitary life to coenobitism, and the texts in which their transitions had found expression.128 Also, Christ had irst withdrawn to the desert before he stepped into the limelight to preach and gather a community of apostles around him. Moreover, Eigil might have been inluenced by Benedict of Aniane’s reforms and their written exponents, the Codex regularum and Concordia regularum, as Becht-Jördens has argued in relation to the altar programme of Eigil’s crypts. Benedict had made both compilations of monastic rules to demonstrate that his monastic reforms, based on una regula (the Rule of Benedict), were the perfect outcome of old ascetic traditions ranging from the Rules of Pachomius and Basil to the writings on monastic life by Church fathers such as Augustine and Isidore of Seville.129 The altars in Eigil’s crypts, in Becht-Jördens’ words ‘ein Stein gewordener Codex regularum’, relect these reforms. Moreover, Becht-Jördens considers the crypts to be a statement against Ratger’s pompous church, which was at variance with the austerity prescribed by the Aachen reform councils of 816 and 817.130 Because of the complexities of both the conlict in Fulda and the monastic reforms associated with the royal court, it is preferable to think of Eigil as an inspired and clever manager who tried to unite a divided community, instead of regarding him as an adherent of Aachen 816/817 and adversary of Ratger, which, given the delicate situation in Fulda, he probably could not permit himself to be. Nevertheless, there are indeed similarities between Eigil’s creations and Benedict of Aniane’s work.What they had in common was an exegetical approach to explaining and justifying a current monastic programme by creating a lineage of ancient traditions with roots in solitary as well as communal asceticism. Whether this method of seeking perfection (as an exemplar) was inherent to contemporary Western monastic culture, which merged itself in tradition, or was instead typical of Benedict of Aniane’s reform movement is a question that requires further study. Whatever the case, Eigil stressed the broad tradition of asceticism from which Fulda had developed not so much to express his ainity with certain monastic reforms,

128 129 130

Gregory the Great, Dialogi, b. ii; Ardo, Vita Benedicti, pp. 200–20. Benedict of Aniane, Concordia regularum, and Codex regularum, pp. 423–702. Becht-Jördens, ‘Text, Bild und Architektur’, pp. 91–2. Also Werner Jacobsen considers the crypts to be a relection of the so-called Aniane reforms, for reasons of architectural nature. Jacobsen, ‘Abteikirche Fulda’, p. 125.

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Eigil but rather to reconcile a divided community and to alert them to their common origin. T he me ntor and the founde r Besides wanting to write a foundation history that proved Fulda’s sanctity and grounded the monastery within the venerable traditions of asceticism, Eigil also used the Vita Sturmi as a piece of family propaganda to put his relative Sturmi forward as the founder and irst abbot of Fulda. While early tradition remembers Boniface as the monastery’s founder, the Vita Sturmi portrays Boniface as Fulda’s spiritual patron and Sturmi’s mentor. The Boniface in the Vita Sturmi is clearly Fulda’s Boniface. Instead of remembering the saint as a bishop, as Willibald had done in his Vita Bonifatii, or a missionary, as Boniface was remembered according to the Utrecht tradition, Eigil stressed Boniface’s love of monastic life.131 Sturmi, however, was the actual founder of Fulda in the Vita Sturmi: he discovered the place, built the monastic complex and (in close consultation with his brethren) chose the kind of religious life lived in the monastery. The moment that Sturmi set foot on the soil where he and his followers were to build the monastery Eigil made the heart of his text. Of course, Eigil did not wish to ignore Boniface’s share, for the saint (in the words of Ian Wood, Fulda’s ‘greatest relic’) would bring the monastery great prosperity.132 So when Boniface’s body arrived in Fulda, ‘Sturmi and his brethren gave thanks to God because they had been granted the presence of so powerful a patron as the holy martyr Saint Boniface in their midst’.133 Hoping that Boniface’s popularity as saint would beneit Sturmi’s reputation as new patron of the abbey, Eigil paid close attention to Boniface’s involvement in Fulda’s foundation in the Vita Sturmi: the bishop personally guided his pupil throughout the process of establishing monastic life in Buchonia, continued to encourage him and ‘through the merits and prayers of Saint Boniface’, God revealed to Sturmi the appropriate place to build Fulda.134 Once Sturmi had set his eyes on Eihloha, Boniface took care of the formalities (the donation of Carloman) a nd sent aid to help the monks build the abbey church.135 131 132 133

134

135

Wood, Missionary Life, pp. 61–4, 70–1, 100–17. Ibid., p. 70. ‘Sturmi abbas cum suis fratribus Christo gratias referebant, quod tantum patronum, sanctum videlicet Bonifatium Dei martyrem, iuxta se habere meruerunt’. Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 16, p. 150. Ibid., c. 9, p. 141. On the basis of ch. 4 of the Vita Sturmi Heinrich Hahn has concluded that Boniface knew the area where Fulda was founded quite well and already had a place in mind when he sent Sturmi to Buchonia. Hahn, ‘Eihloha’, 51. Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 13, p. 144.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda In the years following the foundation Boniface continued to visit Fulda to instruct its monks in the monastic way of life.136 The hill where the bishop used to retreat during his stays was still called Bishop’s Mount by the time Eigil wrote the Vita Sturmi, as an honorary title to this period and Boniface’s benefaction, so Eigil recalled.137 Eigil furthermore dwelt upon the travels of the saint’s body, after having being killed in the north of Frisia, from Utrecht via Mainz to Fulda. The author used visions, in which Boniface appeared to those who wished to prevent the martyr’s body leaving their cities, to emphasise Boniface’s last wish to be buried in Fulda, not Mainz, where he had been bishop, nor Utrecht, Boniface’s operating base in Frisia and the place where his body was irst brought after the assault. Knowing that Boniface’s burial had led to an unexpected growth of Fulda, Eigil included the episode of the martyr’s translation as it also relected well on Sturmi. Although Boniface has a prominent role in the text, the Vita Sturmi in the end concentrates on Sturmi and his involvement in Fulda’s existence, well-being and traditions. Eigil portrayed Sturmi as a peaceful and modest abbot, who did everything in close consultation with his brethren, just as the Rule of Benedict prescribes.138 He did not elevate himself at the expense of others. He was a peace-loving father and a reconciler, who in his teaching embraced patience, mildness, humility, longanimity, faith, hope and charity as his principles.139 Although Eigil nowhere makes it explicit or quotes the text itself, his portrayal of Sturmi reads as an antithesis of Ratger’s representation in the Supplex Libellus. Whereas the Supplex Libellus portrays Ratger as a harsh and rigid rector, Eigil presents Sturmi as the mild and discreet father the monks had longed for in those diicult years. Besides stressing Sturmi’s qualities, Eigil obscured Sturmi’s part in controversial episodes, such as the abbot’s exile and the conlict with Lull. Eigil simply blamed Lull for Sturmi’s exile.140 However, the situation was a lot more complex, as I have indicated in Chapter 2, and even Eigil could not ignore the fact that it had been monks of Fulda who had gone to court to accuse their abbot of conspiracy. Following the tradition of other narratives that commemorate the great deeds of oice holders, such as the Liber pontiicalis, Eigil stressed Sturmi’s contributions to both the spiritual and material well-being of the monastery. The author, for example, relates how Sturmi after his return 136 137 138 139 140

Ibid., cc. 5, 6, 10, pp. 135, 138, 142. Ibid., c. 13, p. 144. For example, Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 13, p. 144. Ibid., c. 3, p. 133; Eph. 4: 26. Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 18, pp. 152–3.

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Eigil from exile improved the administration of the monastery, beautiied the church, repaired the monastic buildings and gave the monastery its own waterworks. Eigil, moreover, recorded the gifts from both King Pippin and his son Charlemagne to the monastery to show the cordial and special relationship of Fulda and its abbot with the royal family, and also as evidence in case of future claims.141 Through Sturmi’s actions both inside and outside the monastery, Eigil showed that the abbot was not only a humble disciple of Boniface and a peaceful father but also a competent manager of the monastery and its properties and a worthy representative of Fulda in secular afairs. A new patron saint ? The composition of a vita, or other written witnesses to someone’s outstanding qualities, could form a substantial part of the often long and complex process of establishing a saint’s cult.142 Was this what Eigil hoped to achieve here, to make Sturmi a saint? What distinguished the saints from ordinary mortals was excellent virtuousness, a great devotion to the well-being of the Christian community and the ability of these extraordinary and exemplary men and women to work miracles. However, vitae of contemporary abbots and bishops written in Carolingian times frequently lack miracles because of a general reservation towards new saints in this period.143 The vitae of, for example, Alcuin and Benedict of Aniane, both written soon after their subjects died, present them as competent managers, not charismatic wonder-workers.144 The Vita Sturmi also contains hardly any miracles.145 Instead, Sturmi is portrayed as primus abbas et fundator monasterii Fuldae, ‘the irst abbot and founder of Fulda’. In general, it was Frankish bishops who declared people to be of exemplary virtue in the eighth and ninth centuries – often long after their death and through the elevation of the body.146 Besides the elevation from an 141 142

143

144 145

146

Ibid., c. 22, pp. 156–7. Cubitt, ‘Universal and local saints’, pp. 423–53; Head, Hagiography; Thacker, ‘Making of a local saint’, pp. 45–73; Angenendt, Heilige und Reliquien, pp. 138–48; Van Egmond, Conversing with the Saints. For the process of canonisation in late medieval times, see Vauchez, La sainteté. Concilium Francofurtense (a. 794), MGH Conc. 2.1, p. 170, and see also Admonitio generalis, No. 22, c. 42, p. 56; Capitula ecclesiastica (a. 801), ed. Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum, vol. xiii, col. 1067; Concilium Moguntinense (a. 813), MGH Conc. 2.1, p. 272. See also Smith, ‘Female sanctity’, 3–37; Mikoletsky, ‘Sinn und Art’, 83–112; Riché, ‘Sainteté’, pp. 217–24. For the political motives of this anxiety, see, for example, Fouracre, ‘The cult of saints’, pp. 143–65. Ardo, Vita Benedicti, pp. 200–20; Vita Alcuini, pp. 182–97. What are described in the Vita Sturmi as miracles are in fact signs of good preaching and teaching in the Christian doctrines. Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 3, p. 131. Angenendt, Heilige und Reliquien, pp. 167–82; Angenendt, ‘Zur Ehre der Altar erhoben’, 221–44; Hermann-Mascard, Reliques, pp. 87–91.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda often rather simple grave to a splendid tomb near an altar, the inclusion in the Sanctorale, the calendar of the ecclesiastical feasts of saints, marked the transition from the domain of ordinary mortals to the realm of holy men and women. Sturmi’s body was not elevated, so it seems, but Eigil did upgrade Sturmi’s grave with the addition of an altar. All the same this was the altar of Ignatius, which nevertheless was also dedicated to saints of whom many can be linked to Sturmi and the region of his origin.147 Moreover, Eigil extended the liturgical celebration of his predecessor’s anniversary with prayers and masses and ordered that on Sturmi’s anniversary the Vita Sturmi should be read out during the mealtime of the monks. To prevent Sturmi’s feast from being ‘superstitious’ and ‘vain’ and to ground it within solid tradition, Eigil modelled the commemoration of Sturmi on an example of an anniversary given by John Cassian.148 With this the abbot probably responded to a general hesitation towards new sanctity in the ninth century. Possibly he also responded to a lack of consensus within the community itself concerning Sturmi’s suitability for sainthood, for, as we have seen in Chapter 2, the abbot from Bavaria had been a controversial igure. Were these the irst cautious steps towards establishing a saint’s cult or did Eigil simply obey the regulation of Aachen 816/817 that the death of an abbot should be commemorated annually by a liturgical commemoration (Ut pro abbate defuncto anniversarium iat oicium), as Pius Engelbert has argued?149 The problem is how to translate oicium, which can refer to any divine service and signify the hours, mass and prayer. Nevertheless, Eigil did more than institute any of these celebrations. The following extract from the Vita Sturmi explains the kind of role Eigil hoped Sturmi would fulil for his community, it is from the end of the vita, where Eigil described Sturmi’s death. While we stood around his bed and saw how quickly his end would be, one of us said: ‘Father, we have no doubt that you are going to God and that you will enjoy eternal life.Therefore we beg your paternity to be mindful of us there and pray for us, your disciples; for our conidence is great that it will be to our proit to have sent on before us so powerful a patron.’150 147 148

149 150

See above, pp. 147. ‘Sed ne cui fortasse haec celebratio superstitiosa et cassa esse uideatur, legat conlocutiones sanctorum patrum, et ibi reppieret huius festiuitatis exemplum.’ Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 22, p. 18. Cassian, Collationes xix, 1, p. 39. Legislatio Aquisgranensis, pp. 481, 532, 552, 561. Engelbert, Die Vita Sturmi, pp. 111–14. ‘Circumstantibus vero nobis et videntibus eius celerem fore exitum, aliquis ex nobis exorsus est: Pater, inquit, nos non ambigimus, te ad Dominum migraturum et ad vitam pervenire perennem. Quapropter paternitatem tuam deprecamur, ut nostri memorari digneris et ibi pro discipulis tuis Domino preces fundere, quoniam multum conidimus nobis profuturum, quod talem praemittimus patronum.’ Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 26, p. 162. Translation by Talbot in Noble and Head (eds.), Soldiers of Christ, p. 187.

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Eigil As Eigil earlier on in the vita, in relation to the burial of Boniface, had recalled the gratitude of Sturmi and his monks for ‘the presence of so powerful a patron as the holy martyr Saint Boniface in their midst’, he now ofered the monks another patron who, like Boniface, could act as intermediary on their behalf.151 In the early Middle Ages there existed a large grey area between the almost self-evident perfect holiness of martyrdom and the unorthodox practices of an Aldebertus, who during life sold bits of his own hair and nails as relics to promote his own veneration and was condemned for it by Boniface and a papal council in Rome in 745.152 The example of Sturmi’s remembrance in Fulda illustrates just that. And there are more examples from this period, such as Alcuin, Benedict of Aniane, Adalhard and Wala of Corbie.153 They were all ‘saint-like’ abbots, who during life had made large contributions to their religious communities and also after death were invoked by their communities as powerful intercessors, without having an oicial saintly status. This venerable ‘no man’s land’, which the Church tried to monopolise and regulate, was continuously discussed and exploited by churchmen like Eigil to serve personal needs and those of a community. A saintly status for Sturmi would not only have beneited the monastery of Fulda, but also Eigil himself, most of all in his attempts to legitimise his leadership within the community. By casting himself in the role of self-appointed keeper of a venerable and ancient tradition represented by Sturmi and Boniface, Eigil also portrayed himself as a worthy candidate for Fulda’s abbacy. Harmony and re conci l i ati on Eigil not only used the Vita Sturmi to push Sturmi forward as a new patron for the Fulda community, but also to restore and reairm the cohesion of the monastic community by ofering the monks a history and hero with which they could identify. For this reason it was important that Eigil appealed to all factions in the monastery. It explains why Eigil did not explicitly speak his mind about Boniface’s heritage, while we know from the Supplex Libellus, written in the years just before the composition of the Vita Sturmi, that it had been under discussion. In this respect it is interesting to see the diferences and similarities 151

152

153

‘quod tantum patronum, sanctum videlicet Bonifacium Dei martyrem, iuxta se habere meruerunt.’ Ibid., c. 16, p. 150. Boniface, Epistolae, No. 59, pp. 117–18; Zeddies, ‘Bonifatius und zwei nützliche Rebellen’, pp. 217–63. With thanks to Mayke de Jong who brought to my attention the examples of Adalhard and Wala.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda between how the authors of the Supplex Libellus and the Vita Sturmi reverted to the times of Sturmi and Boniface to defend a certain image of what monastic life in Fulda should be all about. Both texts highlight the signiicance of Boniface and Sturmi for the foundation of Fulda and, therefore, the present-day community. The Supplex Libellus pictures the age of Sturmi and Boniface as a golden age to explicate what Ratger’s abbacy had lacked. Then, the monks and abbot had lived together in unity and concord, with charity and humanity as their standards. The Vita Sturmi responds to this idyllic period of peace and happiness evoked by the Supplex Libellus, though from a diferent angle. Eigil also elaborated on what he considered to be the origins of the monastery and the parameters of its authoritative past to create a golden age, but not to carry on a controversy or to gain support for his own cause. On the contrary, his aim was to reconcile, and his golden age was meant for every monk. Like the authors of the Supplex Libellus, Eigil did not revive past events and local traditions indiscriminately, but adjusted them to his own purposes and the needs of the community. Thus, in response to the recent monastic reforms, Eigil emphasised that the monks already from Fulda’s earliest beginnings had carried out the prescriptions of the Rule of Benedict in every detail, while Boniface’s reading of the rule and daily practice in Fulda difered from what the reform councils of Aachen had advised. Additionally, Eigil did not explicate a preference for a certain monastic tradition, but described the history of Fulda as a gradual progression from anachoretism to coenobitism, from the instituta sancti Bonifatii to the Rule of Benedict. Furthermore, Eigil moved Sturmi to the forefront as a new patron of the monastic community and drew a veil over controversial episodes in his life to enable him to become an incarnation of the monastic ideals on which Fulda was based. Eigil reminded the monks of what they had in common. He therefore singled out and elaborated on a collective set of symbols in the Vita Sturmi which he designed to appeal to all and to generate a feeling of community: Sturmi, Boniface, the wilderness, the Rule of Benedict and the involvement of the Carolingian family in the establishment of Fulda. He urged the monks, moreover, to continue the life that Sturmi and Boniface had established in Fulda. In the Vita Sturmi he wrote how Sturmi, when he had felt that the end was near, had gathered the brethren around his bed and had spoken the following words: I have laboured, even till the present day, for your proit and peace, particularly for the continuance of this monastery after my death, so that you may be able to serve God here with sincerity and charity according to the will of Christ.

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Eigil Persevere, then, O brothers, all the days of your life in the way of life that you have begun.154

Reading this passage, it is diicult not to think of the hardships that the monks had recently sustained. With the conlict settled it was now up to the monks to safeguard and continue the work of their founder: so Eigil reminded his brethren. Therefore they needed to seek reconciliation, a theme that Eigil made one of the leitmotifs in the Vita Sturmi, among others in Sturmi’s deathbed scene. The speech continues: ‘Pray to God for me; and if I have committed any fault among you through human frailty or wronged anyone unjustly, forgive me as I also forgive all those who have ofended or wronged me, including Lull, who always took sides against me.’155 Eigil used the episode to hold up a mirror to the monks; just as Sturmi had apologised for his own mistakes and had forgiven his enemies in the face of death, so should the monks. Likewise, Eigil himself had set a good example and had suited the action to the word when he asked Louis the Pious to release Ratger from exile and allowed his predecessor to live in Fulda’s satellite community on Frauenberg, a stone’s throw from the mother convent.156 Even when the last witnesses of the Ratger crisis had died and the memory of the conlict had faded, Eigil’s message remained relevant to the community of Fulda, where diferent ideals and wishes and clashing opinions and characters causing discord continued to exist. At least once a year, when they celebrated the memory of their founder and prepared themselves for the festivities of Christmas, the monks were reminded of Eigil’s call for perseverance as they heard the words from the Vita Sturmi during their communal meal. Eigil gave further shape to this initiative to make Sturmi a unifying symbol for the whole community by including the commemoration of all the deceased monks of the community in the celebration of Sturmi’s anniversary. By connecting the anniversary of the founder of the monastery with the remembrance of all previous generations of monks who had continued the work of their founder, Sturmi became the benchmark of the monastery’s history and a symbol of the 154

155

156

‘qualiter usque in hodiernum diem pro vestra utilitate et pace laboravi et hoc maxime curavi, qualiter istud monasterium post obitum meum perservare in voluntate Christi valeret et vos istic Domino servire sincere cum caritate quiveretis. O ilii, nunc vero in incepto proposito omnes dies vitae vestrae perservate.’ Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 25, pp. 161–2.Translation by Talbot in Noble and Head (eds.), Soldiers of Christ, p. 186. ‘et si quippiam prave apud vos egi vel aliquem iniuste ofendi ignoscite mihi et ego cunctis ex intimo corde omnia convicia et omnes contumelias meas ignosco, necnon et Lullo qui mihi semper adversabatur.’ Ibid., p. 162. Eigil also elaborates on the theme of reconciliation in, for example, the scene of rapprochement between Sturmi and King Pippin in 765. Ibid., c. 19, p. 154. Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 23, p. 19.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda new agreement and unity of the entire community of Fulda. Promoting Sturmi’s cult and memory can only have strengthened this efect. Possibly Eigil attributed a special role to the Annales necrologici in this communal commemoration. As described in Chapter 2, the extant fragments covering the early period of Fulda’s existence start with Sturmi’s name, written in red ink. His name is followed by those of his successors and the names of monks who had passed away in 779 and following years. Because the earliest copy of this list of deceased monks dates to the last quarter of the ninth century it is now impossible to retrieve whether Sturmi’s name had always formed the beginning of the Annales necrologici or whether Eigil had composed their current form, or at least had set in motion a commemoration that considered Sturmi to form the beginning of Fulda’s existence that would later ind written expression in the way the Annales necrologici were structured. Also, the Kassel redaction of the Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi, written in this period, makes Sturmi’s year of death a point of reference in the monks’ perception of time. As we have seen, it was a pedagogical manual on time-reckoning produced under the supervision of Hrabanus, probably before 822, certainly after 809. On the outer edges of the pages containing the annalistic notes, a scribe marked every ten-year anniversary of Sturmi with a Roman numeral indicating how many decades had passed since Sturmi’s death in 779. Starting with the addition of ‘I’ to the year 780, the monk marked every tenth anniversary until 819 (V). A later hand added the subsequent Roman numerals for the years 829, 839, 849, 859 and 869.157 It is another example of the growing importance of Sturmi as a uniting symbol of community, which Eigil took up or possibly initiated in his attempts to establish his relative and predecessor as patron of the Fulda community. The chape l of St Mi c ha e l The last representation of the Fulda community to be discussed in this chapter is the church of St Michael, the funerary church that Eigil built on the monastic cemetery.158 Eigil constructed the church together with Hrabanus Maurus, his successor as abbot of Fulda, then still head of the monastic school. The ediice was inished and dedicated in 820, in honour of the Archangel Michael, the guardian of souls; and furthermore John the Evangelist, another important intercessor; the Roman martyr Abundius (d. c.304); and Amand (c.584–c.675), who as a missionary 157 158

Corradini, ‘Zeiträume’, p. 139; Freise, Geschichtsschreibung, pp. 51–2. The following is to a large extent indebted to Ellger, Michaelskirche.

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Eigil in today’s Flanders and northern France had founded important royal abbeys such as St Amand and Nivelles.159 The day that the abbot selected for the dedication was 15 January, feast day of the ascetics Macarius of Egypt and Paul of Thebes, who were also commemorated in the eastern crypt of Fulda’s abbey church, as well as Maurus, Benedict of Nursia’s favourite pupil, after whom Alcuin named his own beloved student, Hrabanus.160 Eigil built a small, round church, a so-called rotunda, with an apse in the east and a vaulted crypt and ambulatory.161 In the middle of the crypt a column supported the loor above it. At ground level, eight columns encircled the middle of the church. In the apse stood the high altar. It was dedicated in the irst place to Christ and contained relics of many saints, of which the most prestigious included remnants of Christ’s grave and place of birth. The main altar was lanked by two other altars, either in the apse itself or the adjacent ambulatory. The one to its left honoured martyrs (Anianus, Desiderius of Vienne, King Sigismund of Burgundy, Genesius of Arles and Christopher); the one to its right the confessors (represented by Bishop Paulinus of Nola, Bishop Britius of Tours, Perpetuus, another bishop of Tours, Isidore of Seville and Bishop Martial of Limoges). Today’s church, the layout of which dates to the eleventh century, has two loors. Possibly this was part of the original plan.162 The ceiling of the ninth-century church, which like the crypt was probably also vaulted, converged in a single stone. Of the original church, only the crypt and one column are still extant; the rest of the building (among others, the annexes that give the rotunda a cross-shaped form) dates to later centuries, including the Romanesque, gothic and baroque periods.163 Nevertheless, we still have a contemporary description of the church, including an explanation of its meaning, in the Vita Aegil. Although the description is from the pen of Candidus, it is likely that his words relect the minds of the church’s architects, Eigil and Hrabanus, whom he as one of their favoured pupils had come to know well. As Becht-Jördens has demonstrated, Candidus’ architectural exegesis is inspired by the same theological thinking that we also witness in Hrabanus’ masterpiece In honorem sanctae crucis.164 159

160 161 162 163 164

Hrabanus Maurus, Carmina, No. 42, p. 209. Concerning Michael, see Hrabanus, Martyrologium, p. 12; Ellger, Michaelskirche, pp. 71–8. See above, p. 138. Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 17, p. 16; Ellger, Michaelskirche, pp. 12–19. Ibid., p. 13. Ibid., pp. 13–14. Hrabanus Maurus, In honorem sanctae crucis; Becht-Jördens, ‘Text, Bild und Architektur’, p. 89; Ferrari, Il ‘Liber sanctae crucis’; Ferrari, ‘Hrabanica’, pp. 493–526.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda Candidus explained the meaning of the rotunda as a igura Christi et ecclesia, an image of Christ and the Church, which needed to be interpreted allegorically as a igure of the divine truth.165 The column in the crypt and the corner-stone in the upper ceiling of the church symbolised Christ who was the beginning and end of all things (Phil. 1: 6).The eight columns corresponded to the eight beatitudes of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5: 3–10) and referred to Christ’s resurrection.166 The circular shape of the church symbolised eternal life and the Heavenly Jerusalem of the almighty God. As a whole the church represented Fulda’s vision of the purpose of its existence and its eschatological destination.167 The layout and architecture of the chapel, the sacred objects and sacraments it contained (the Eucharist), the relics inside the altars and the dedication, all symbolised the redemption of mankind through Christ and were meant to help the dead. Otfried Ellger has shown how many of the relics that were kept inside the church were directly linked to Christian relections on the afterlife and were meant to assist the souls of those buried in the nearby cemetery on their last journey. The relics of Christ’s grave represented the promise of salvation – the titulus for the altar containing the relics reads: ‘whose [meaning Christ’s] grave helps our sepulchres here’ (cuius hic tumulus nostra sepulcra iuvat). Additionally, relics of the Three Young Men, who withstood Nebuchadnezzar’s lames (Dan. 3), referred to the purifying ire, which awaited sinners after death, and their resurrection on Judgement Day. Finally, the evangelist John represented the Second Coming and the Day of Judgement as author of the Apocalypse.168 As well as a holy place of intercessory, salviic prayer for the souls of the dead, Eigil may have intended its crypt as a mausoleum for Fulda’s abbots.169 In the Vita Aegil Candidus describes that when Eigil felt his death approaching he went to the chapel, which he had recently built, and dug his own grave in its east end. From the epitaph Hrabanus Maurus wrote for Eigil we know that the place Eigil selected for himself was in the crypt.170 Indeed, archaeologists have discovered two graves in the ambulatory of the crypt. One of them almost certainly belongs to Eigil. The other one was possibly that of Hatto, the sixth abbot of Fulda, who 165

166

167 168 169 170

Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 18, p. 16. See also Becht-Jördens, ‘Vita Aegil als Quelle’, 33–6; BechtJördens, ‘Litterae illuminatae’, p. 341; Reudenbach, ‘Säule und Apostel’, 310–51; Markus, Signs and Meanings. Hrabanus Maurus, In honorem sanctae crucis, B17, C17, pp. 136–43. See also Meyer and Suntrup (eds.), Zahlenbedeutungen. Becht-Jördens, ‘Text, Bild und Architektur’, p. 89. Ellger, Michaelskirche, pp. 82–90. Ibid., pp. 104–16. Hrabanus Maurus, Epitaphium Eigili, ed. Becht-Jördens, Vita Aegil, p. 74.

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Eigil died in 856.171 Eigil probably had intended the crypt to serve as a tomb for the abbots of Fulda rather than as a burial ground for the whole community: the space in the crypt’s ambulatory was too small to accommodate the bodies of all the monks of Fulda. The council of Mainz in 813, moreover, had prohibited the burial of people in churches, with the exception of high-placed ecclesiastics such as bishops and abbots.172 Until Eigil built his chapel there had been no ixed place in Fulda where the monks buried their abbots. As indicated above, Sturmi rested in the abbey church of Fulda. Baugulf, who died in 815 in Wolfsmünster, was also buried in his cella.173 Perhaps Eigil had wished to create a monument for the abbots to strengthen the awareness of a genealogy, a continuity with the past. A similar motivation probably underlay his initiation of a sequence of abbots’ vitae. In the years following the completion of the Vita Sturmi, Eigil asked the learned monk Candidus to write a vita about Baugulf, Sturmi’s successor who had died in 815. The text is now lost.174 The same Candidus also wrote a Vita Aegil, in the early 840s, which will be more fully discussed in Chapter 7. We do not know whether by then the Vita Ratgarii had already been written. In the sixteenth century Fulda’s librarian wrote down the incipit and explicit of the text, but the manuscript itself, like many other codices from Fulda’s library, disappeared during the Thirty Years War.175 Possibly the succession of abbots’ vitae had a forerunner in a vita Bonifatii prosica et metrica. The manuscript containing the Vita Bonifatii itself is lost, but Gangolf Schrimpf discovered a reference to the text in a ifteenth-century library catalogue.176 Even though the abbots’ biographies were individual texts, written by diferent authors, together they formed a chain that linked the present with the past, and helped to structure the latter. To use the periods of oice as a chronological framework to narrate the history of a single institution was not unique. The Liber Pontiicalis, a series of papal biographies, starting with the apostle Peter, is often considered to be the prototype of this kind of history writing. Another well-known example is the Gesta abbatum of St Wandrille.177 The structure of these texts proceeded from the role of oice holders, be they abbots or bishops, as representatives of 171 172 173 174

175 176

177

Ellger, Michaelskirche, p. 113. Concilium Moguntinense (a. 813), MGH Conc. 2.1, No. 36, p. 272. Brouwer, Fuldensium antiquitatum, p. 275; Sandmann, ‘Folge der Äbte’, p. 182. Candidus’ reference to the vita in the Vita Aegil is the only evidence of its existence. Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, praef. ii, p. 4. See also the preface of the Vita Aegil, b. ii, p. 35. Christ, Bibliothek Fulda, p. 141; Schrimpf et al., Mittelalterliche Bücherverzeichnisse, p. 152. Basel, Universitätsbibliothek F iii 42, fol. 12r. Schrimpf et al., Mittelalterliche Bücherverzeichnisse, p. 153. See also Becht-Jördens, ‘Text, Bild und Architektur’, pp. 93–7; Becht-Jördens, ‘Rechtsstatus Fulda’, 12, footnote 9; and Kehl, ‘Auf den Spuren’, 104–6. Wood, ‘St. Wandrille’, pp. 1–14. See also Van Houts, Chronicles, pp. 17–26; and Sot, Gesta.

171

The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda their communities and intermediaries between the communities over which they presided and the society around them.178 While the sequence of abbacies served as a framework to structure the history of Fulda from its foundation to the present day, this succession also legitimised and shaped the continued existence of the community, for it created a genealogy of abbots of Fulda and their pupils. Eigil recorded the Life of his relative and teacher Sturmi. Candidus, a pupil of Eigil and Hrabanus, dedicated a vita to both Baugulf and Eigil. Authors and subjects formed an intellectual lineage of tutors and disciples that went back to Fulda’s origin. Partly this lineage was based on actual family ties, for Sturmi and Eigil had been related. In addition, it had its roots in a sacred and venerable past personiied by the holy martyr Boniface and Fulda’s founder Sturmi. A sense of relief that Fulda had withstood the recent crisis will have strengthened the awareness of the fragility of this continuity and the fact that the existence of the monastery was not straightforward. Probably the construction of the chapel of St Michael was a material expression of this same awareness of continuity and its vulnerability. If Eigil had wished to create a tangible, architectural counterpart to the sense of lineal descent that he also evinced in the abbots’ vitae, his initiative was not followed. Ratger was buried on the Frauenberg in 835, where he had spent the last ifteen years of his life.179 Eigil’s successor, Hrabanus Maurus, became archbishop of Mainz in 847 and was therefore buried in the monastery of St Alban in Mainz, where the archbishops of the see had been interred since 813.180 It is unknown where Thioto, Hatto’s successor, was buried. Of Sigihard (d. 899), we know that he was buried in Fulda, but not precisely where. According to the Jesuit Christopher Brouwer, Sigihard’s body was placed in maioris ecclesiae conditoria, a speciic place for burials (conditoria refers to the places were dead bodies are kept), probably in or near the abbey church.181 The addition of maior, ‘large’ or ‘larger’, to ecclesia probably indicates that it concerned the abbey church, not the smaller funerary chapel of St Michael. Between 1908 and 1913 the archaeologist Joseph Vonderau discovered twelve graves in the eastern ambulatory of the cloister, which bordered on the western transept of the abbey church. All graves point in the direction of Boniface’s sepulchre. One of them probably belonged to

178 179 180 181

See also RB, for example c. 56, p. 622. Brouwer, Fuldensium antiquitatum, pp. 92 and 275; Oexle, ‘Memorialüberlieferung’, p. 161. Ellger, Michaelskirche, p. 113. Brouwer, Fuldensium antiquitatum, p. 281. See also Gesta abbatum, p. 273; Vonderau, Ausgrabungen 1919–1924, p. 17; Ellger, Michaelskirche, p. 115.

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Eigil an abbot, as appears from the liturgical vestments that Vonderau found in the burial site.182 Brouwer, who saw the old abbey church before it was replaced by the baroque Dom, as well as other informants conirm that at least since the last quarter of the eleventh century the abbots of Fulda had been buried near the grave of Boniface, in the eastern ambulatory directly bordering on the western apse and transept.183 According to Vonderau and Otfried Ellger this was also the place where Sigihard was buried and possibly also his predecessor Thioto. This was the conditoria to which Brouwer referred. Their bodies lie, however, in the part that cannot be excavated because of the position of the present-day cathedral.184 Thus, the other abbots of Fulda, with the possible exception of Hatto, apparently did not follow the example that Eigil had set by choosing the crypt of the funerary chapel of St Michael as his tomb. They seem to have preferred the proximity of Boniface above that of their brethren. This does not mean, however, that Eigil had not intended the crypt of the church of St Michael to be an abbatial mausoleum. It would it well into the picture that we have of his other activities as abbot of Fulda that were all geared towards the preservation of its continuity, the creation of an awareness of its enduring existence and the salvation of its members’ souls. Eigil’s relatively brief abbacy brought forth several artefacts that can be interpreted as self-relections of the Fulda community, although answering the question ‘who are we?’ was by no means their only, let alone always explicit, aim. Eigil’s crypts and altar arrangement relected a monastic programme in which Eastern ascetic traditions met Western forms of monastic life and the solitary life of the hermit preceded coenobitism. Within this programme a special place was reserved for Boniface and Sturmi, who linked the present-day community of monks to monastic traditions that had their origin in places far removed from the woods of Buchonia and times that had happened long before the foundation of their monastery. The same themes are prominent in Eigil’s Vita Sturmi, which describes how Fulda progressed from the wish to found a hermitage to the establishment of a community of monks who chose the Rule of Benedict as their guide. In spite of Boniface’s decisive role, Eigil pushed Sturmi forward as the irst abbot and founder of Fulda. Also, other sources, of which at least one was produced during Eigil’s abbacy,

182 183 184

Vonderau, Ausgrabungen 1919–1924, pp. 13–17. Brouwer, Fuldensium antiquitatum, pp. 177–9, 351, 357; Ellger, Michaelskirche, pp. 114–15. Vonderau, Ausgrabungen 1919–1924, p. 17; Ellger, Michaelskirche, p. 115.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda witness to Sturmi’s growing importance for the self-awareness of the monastic community. Whereas the altars in Fulda’s abbey church, with their relics and dedications, had positioned Fulda in relation to the Christian world and its past, the church of St Michael focused on the eschatological end, the reason for the monastery’s existence and the promise of salvation through Christ’s death. It was probably also intended to serve as a memorial to Fulda’s abbots. While functioning efectively as a igura of Christ and his Church, of which Fulda was a part, the church of St Michael also represented the entire monastic community.

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Chapter 6

HR A BA NU S, PA RT I: REFO RM A ND R E C OR D

Of all Fulda abbots Hrabanus Maurus is the most famous, the most praised and the best documented.1 Unlike all the other abbots, we know the name of his mother and father, we own contemporary pictures of him (dedication images in his igure poem In honorem sanctae crucis), and we possess numerous writings from his own hand that provide us with information about his ideas on wide-ranging topics as priesthood, the Trinity and loyalty of sons to fathers, his insecurities about his writing skills, his worries about the administration of a large royal abbey such as Fulda and his struggle to ind the time for reading and writing because of these heavy responsibilities.2 And there was a lot to worry about. Under his direction, Fulda reached the high number of some six hundred monks, of which the majority lived outside the abbot’s direct ield of vision in the monastery’s dependent houses. All these monks needed to be fed, clothed, educated and disciplined. Although Fulda was a powerful royal abbey, it still seems to have struggled at times to supply all its needs. To Louis the Pious’ horror, the monks used the fat of pigs for the lamps in the abbey church instead of oil, so he promised to give them an olive orchard in Italy.3 And when in 836 Hrabanus complained to the emperor that the brethren lacked clothing, Louis granted Fulda freedom of toll throughout 1

2

3

Too much has been published on Hrabanus to give a complete bibliography here. Important for this book have been the articles in Schrimpf, Kloster Fulda; the 1982 volume on Hrabanus, edited by Raymund Kottje and Harald Zimmermann; De Jong’s work on Hrabanus’ biblical commentaries; Sandmann, ‘Hraban als Mönch’, 133–80. Recently, new studies have appeared, originating from the conferences remembering the 1150th anniversary of Hrabanus’ death organised in 2006: Kössinger et al., Hrabanus Maurus; Felten and Nichtweiß (eds.), Hrabanus Maurus; Depreux et al., Hraban Maur et son temps; Aris and Bullido del Barrio, Kirche und Schrift: Hrabanus Maurus in Fulda, which includes a Hrabanus bibliography (1979–2009). See the letter that Hrabanus sent along with his commentary on Genesis to Frechulf of Lisieux, Epistolae, Nos. 8, 10, pp. 393, 396. Epist. Fuld. fragm., No. 2, p. 517.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda the empire so that the monastery’s merchants could buy clothes and other necessitates.4 Next to the day-to-day worries of ruling a large monastery, Hrabanus and his abbey were closely involved with the well-being of the realm, which sufered some severe crises from the late 820s onwards. Conlicts between Emperor Louis the Pious, his sons and their followers, Fulda’s most powerful benefactors, inevitably also divided the monastic community and afected its status, property and position.5 By the time he was elected abbot of Fulda, Hrabanus was in his late thirties or early forties. His parents, local aristocrats from the Mainz area, had handed over their son when he was eight years old, possibly younger.6 Through the oblation of their son, supplemented with gifts of the family residence in Mainz and an estate at Dromersheim, they closely linked their family to the community of Fulda and its patron saint, establishing a bond that would last for a long period.7 In the next years, donations continued to be made. Following the example of his parents, Hrabanus’ brother, Guntram, gave up his son to the Fulda monks with a view to an ecclesiastical career.8 Even as monk of Fulda, Hrabanus remained an active member of his earthly family and, using his inluence as abbot, continued to look after his family’s interests. He supported his brother in his secular career and also his nephew, whom he made leader of Fulda’s dependency in Solnhofen. It was possibly on Hrabanus’ recommendation that the son of his brother became royal chaplain (regis capellanus) at the court of Louis the German.9 Hrabanus developed into a proliic writer and one of the leading intellectuals of his day, consulted by highly placed persons in matters ranging from the reckoning of the Christian moveable feasts to the interpretation of the book of prophet Jeremiah, and cherished as magister orthodoxus by kings.10 He studied for a while with Alcuin, irst at the palace school in 4 5

6

7 8

9

10

CDF, No. 489, pp. 216–17. A lot has been written on the struggles of the Carolingian dynasty. See, among others, De Jong, The Penitential State; Goldberg, Struggle, pp. 21–116; Nelson, Charles the Bald; Nelson, ‘The last years’, pp. 147–59. Concerning the date of Hrabanus’ birth, see Freise, ‘Geburtsjahr Hrabanus’, pp. 18–74; Freise, Geschichtsschreibung, pp. 80–4; De Jong, In Samuel’s Image, pp. 73–7. About the position of his parents in the Middle Rhine area, see Innes, State and Society, pp. 65–8. UBF, Nos. 177–8, 219, pp. 271–3; De Jong, In Samuel’s Image, pp. 75–6. Probably Guntram was never monk. ‘Kommentiertes Parallelregister’, FW 2.1, X11, pp. 439–40; Sandmann, ‘Wirkungsbereiche’, p. 779. See below, pp. 106–7. Concerning Hrabanus’ nephew, see Ermanrich of Ellwangen, Vita Sualonis, dedication letters and cc. 9, 10, pp. 154–5, 161; Epist. Fuld. fragm., No. 27, p. 529. For his position at the royal chapel, see Fleckenstein, Hofkapelle, vol. i, pp. 179 and 184; and more general ‘Kommentiertes Parallelregister’, FW 2.1, X11, pp. 439–40. De Jong, ‘Empire as ecclesia’, p. 201; Brunhölzl, ‘Geistigen Bedeutung’, pp. 1–17. Rudolf has added a list of Hrabanus’ works (those written before he became archbishop of Mainz) to his Miracula sanctorum, c. 14, pp. 340–1. See also: Bischof, Mittelalterliche Studien, vol. ii, pp. 77–8; Kottje, ‘Praeceptor Germaniae?’, 534–45; Berggötz, ‘Hrabanus Maurus’, 1–48.

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Hrabanus, part I

Mittelbuchen Mainz Simmern Rhaunen

Kirn

Schallodenbach

Dromersheim Oppenheim Saulheim Sulzheim Dienheim Flonheim Hofheim Rudelsheim Bockenheim Lonsheim Pfungstadt Wendelsheim Múnsterappel

Rohrbach Friedelsheim Deidesheim

Land given to Fulda by Hrabanus’ family Guntram’s gift of 841 Land granted as precaria by Fulda to Guntram, 841

Figure 5 Grants to Fulda by the family of Hrabanus Maurus. Based on Figure 7 in M. Innes, ‘The Family of Hraban Maur: kinship and property’, in State and Society in the Early Middle Ages:The Middle Rhine Valley 400–1000 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 64

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda Aachen and later at Tours, who in imitation of Benedict of Nursia nicknamed his favourite pupil Maurus.11 After his return, some time before 804, Hrabanus followed in his master’s footsteps and began to teach himself, and in 818 he became leader of Fulda’s school.12 Hrabanus soon made a name for himself outside the monastic conines. Students from all over the Carolingian realm travelled to study in Fulda because of him, just as he himself had once journeyed to court and Tours for Alcuin’s expertise. Among his pupils are some of the most prominent members of the next generation of scholars, namely Walafrid Strabo, Lupus of Ferrières, Otfried of Weißenburg, Gottschalk and Rudolf of Fulda.13 Besides the fact that we know much about Hrabanus’ person, relatively speaking, his abbacy also produced most of the sources about Fulda, many of which ofer interesting information about the ways in which the community perceived itself in the second quarter of the ninth century. In this chapter I shall focus on the non-narrative sources, which initially principally served the administration of the monastery and its members’ commemoration: the membership lists that were later included in Reichenau’s confraternity book; the Annales necrologici that were updated and renewed under Hrabanus; the lists of books that reveal the contents of Fulda’s library and, lastly, an inventory of Fulda’s possessions in southern Germany and the monastery’s cartulary. All these sources testify to the abbot’s eagerness to gain a clear insight into Fulda’s afairs, to put matters in order, and to systematise the administration of the abbey’s personnel and possessions. One of the irst actions that Hrabanus undertook as abbot was to make lists, of both the members of the community he came to rule and the property it possessed. It was probably also Hrabanus who ordered the making of a list of the books owned by the monastery’s library. Of this list, two fragments are still extant; one (B5) is transmitted together with four other lists of books in a manuscript dating to the middle of the ninth century, now in the Vatican library. The other (C) has not survived the ravages of time, but an incomplete transcription of it was included in Johann Friedrich Schannat’s Historia Fuldensis, an eighteenth-century history of the monastery written at the request of its prince-abbot. Both the lists of monks and books ofer interesting material for comparison in relation to the lists made in Baugulf ’s days examined in Chapter 3. While Fulda’s earliest manuscript catalogue shows the 11

12 13

Schaller, ‘Der junge “Raabe”’, pp. 123–41. Concerning Hrabanus’ nickname, see De Jong, In Samuel’s Image, p. 74, footnotes 72–3. Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 16, p. 15; Kottje, ‘Praeceptor Germaniae?’, 536. Kottje,‘Praeceptor Germaniae?’, 539–40, with further references to the sources in which these scholars mentioned Hrabanus as their teacher.

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Hrabanus, part I collection of a religious community focused on prayer, worship and contemplation, the ones dating to Hrabanus’ abbacy disclose an impressive collection of books, one that belonged to a lourishing intellectual centre and beitted a community that was praised for its learning. In addition, the membership lists compiled under Hrabanus show the rise in the number of monks since the days of Baugulf and the changes in the composition of the community. The cartulary was the irst attempt by the monks to map out systematically the monastery’s property, copying the private charters in conveniently arranged volumes. It pictures Fulda as a network of cellae, dependencies and churches stretching far into the surrounding landscape. In addition, it reveals some of the ways in which the monks thought about themselves, in relation to the social space in which they were living and their past: as an institution, large landowner, keeper of Boniface’s cult and intermediary with the divine, and remembers all those who through their generosity had established long-standing relations with the monastery. The inventory of Fulda’s possessions in southern Germany is diferent in its structure and function from the cartulary. It has an administrative use instead of a commemorative one, and ofers interesting material for a complementary comparison with the cartulary. A n update and re newal of the

ANNALES NECROLOGICI

When Hrabanus became abbot of Fulda he irst made sure that the Annales necrologici, which for some years now had been neglected, were brought up to date. The names of monks who had died in the second half of the 810s, when the crisis under Ratger was at its high point, were added together with those who had passed away in 823 and 824. It is a plausible explanation, put forward by Karl Schmid, for the lapse in names in the Annales necrologici between 812 and 824 and the sudden increase in the year 823/824.14 Why Hrabanus’ predecessor, Eigil, had not brought the Annales necrologici up to date is unclear, but considering his concern for the souls of the dead, expressed in, for example, the building of the church of St Michael on the monastic cemetery and his liturgical reforms relating to the commemoration of the deceased brethren, it is likely that he would also have done so eventually, if only death had not intervened. Nevertheless, Hrabanus did seem to have been preoccupied with ‘creating order’, a phrase used by his pupil Rudolf to characterise the abbot, so the impulse given to record-keeping in the 820s was not 14

Schmid, ‘Mönchslisten’, pp. 615–19; Zörkendörfer, ‘Statistische Untersuchungen’, p. 988. Also in the years 795–806 not all deceased monks were included. Schmid, ‘Mönchslisten’, p. 618.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda simply a logical development from the passing of time, but a resolute attempt by Hrabanus to put things in order.15 Hrabanus not only made sure that all Fulda monks were included in the Annales necrologici. Under his management the tradition primarily to include brethren of his own community started to change, though still hesitantly. Although the relation with the outside world had always been of existential importance to the Fulda community, it seems as if under Hrabanus the brethren allowed the world outside the monastic conines to become more integrated into communal images that so far had been mostly reserved to Fulda monks. Until the year 822 the only ‘outsiders’ included in the Annales necrologici, besides the Carolingian rulers and the archbishops of Mainz, had been Boniface’s cousin Leoba, a certain Bishop Paciicus and a man named Denihart (d. 784), who might be identiied with the priest Denehard, an acquaintance of Boniface and Lull who frequently crops up in their correspondence.16 It may well have been Hrabanus who orchestrated the entry of the names of his parents in the Annales necrologici, either immediately after their death or later, after he had become abbot of Fulda, when the lists were updated. Because the earliest extant copy of the Annales necrologici dates to 875, it is impossible to claim with certainty that all those registered in later copies had been so since their deaths.The Uuolaram (d. 802) and Waltrat (d. 807) in the Annales necrologici can indeed be identiied with Walaram and Waltrata, Hrabanus’ parents. This its Walaram’s disappearance in the charters as benefactor and witness after May 802. The name of Waltrat was used for both men and women in those days, and as there is no monk with the name Waltrat included in the Baugulf list, which, as indicated above, records the names of the living monks in Fulda in 781, it is likely that the person who is hidden behind the name Waltrat was an ‘outsider’ and probably indeed Hrabanus’ mother. Moreover, in 802 Walaram donated the family’s church in Hofheim, the destined burial place of him and Waltrata, to Fulda.17 He seems to have been making preparations for his death, placing the salvation of his soul and that of his wife in the care of the Fulda monks by quite literally making the family’s memorial their property. The insertion of Hrabanus’ parents’ names in the Annales necrologici was most likely related to this gift, next to the potential inluence of their son.18 15 16

17 18

Rudolf, Miracula sanctorum, c. 1, p. 330. For a discussion of the inclusion of ‘outsiders’ in the Annales necrologici under Hrabanus, see Jakobi, ‘Magnaten’, pp. 838–40. UBF, No. 283, pp. 410–12; Marburg, Hessisches Staatsarchiv, K 424, fol. 75r. For Hrabanus’ parents, see ‘Kommentiertes Parallelregister’, FW 2.1, X23 and 24, p. 442; Freise, ‘Studien’, pp. 1183–5; Staab, ‘Wann wurde Hrabanus Mönch?’, pp. 85–90.

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Hrabanus, part I Under Hrabanus, the names of bishops Ercanbert of Minden (?–830), Wolfger of Würzburg (810–832) and Harud of Verden (?–829) were also included in the Annales necrologici. Their deaths were recorded because of their speciic relation with Fulda: Bishop Ercanbert of Minden was Abbot Baugulf ’s brother and probably, like him, had been raised in Fulda; Bishop Wolfger of Würzburg had acted as intermediary in the Ratger conlict; and Bishop Harud of Verden, who shortly before his death attended a synod in Mainz, may have died in Fulda on his way back home and for this reason found his way into the Annales necrologici.19 In the years following Hrabanus’ abbacy, Humbert of Würzburg (833–842), Hemmo of Halberstadt (840–853), Samuel of Worms, Ebo of Reims (d. 851) and Abbot Gozbald of Niederaltaich (830–855) were also listed in the Annales necrologici. This may have been due to Hrabanus’ inluence, still reverberating at Fulda after his departure (he withdrew to the nearby cell on the Ugesberg in 842 and became archbishop of Mainz in 847). All three bishops, Humbert of Würzburg, Hemmo of Halberstadt and Samuel of Worms, had been old friends of Hrabanus.20 Archbishop Ebo of Reims had been held prisoner in Fulda in 835 for his part in the rebellion of 833 against Louis the Pious. He had befriended the abbot and his monks during his stay in the monastery.21 Gozbald of Niederaltaich, who since 843 was also bishop of Würzburg, presumably was educated in Fulda, and continued to stay in touch with his former teachers for the beneit of an intellectual exchange between both monastic schools.22 Hrabanus, his personality, preferences and relations, left a deep impression on Fulda’s records: the Kassel redaction of the Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi, Fulda’s version of the Chronicon Laurissense breve, and Fulda’s cartulary, as I shall show below. We may need to see Hrabanus’ inluence in these entries in the Annales necrologici as well. It was only in the second half of the ninth century, as I shall explain in the inal chapter of this book, that the monks of Fulda consistently recorded the names of representatives of important institutions in Fulda’s sphere of inluence in the Annales necrologici, regardless of any personal bonds between the monks and these ‘outsiders’. L ists of monks Hrabanus’ quest for order also stimulated the making of membership lists of the Fulda community. Two of them have survived, one in the 19

20 21

‘Kommentiertes Parallelregister’, FW 2.1, B13, 19, 39, pp. 322–4, 327. Concerning Harud of Verden see also Epist. Fuld. fragm., No. 29, p. 530. ‘Kommentiertes Parallelregister’, FW 2.1, B17, 23, 34, pp. 323–4, 326. 22 Ibid., B14, p. 322. Ibid., B12, p. 322.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda manuscript Fulda, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Hs. B 1, which, as indicated above, also holds two fragments of the Annales necrologici (F2), the other in Reichenau’s confraternity book (F3).23 The irst, the so-called Recheo list, was probably made immediately after Hrabanus had taken oice as abbot. Like the Baugulf list, discussed above, the list was made at the end of the year, when the monks gathered in Fulda to remember Sturmi’s anniversary and celebrate the festivities of Christmas, and at the beginning of a new abbacy.24 The Recheo list contains in total 141 names, of which seven are later additions. All of them are also included in the Annales necrologici, which suggests that their owners had all been monks of Fulda. The list was written on a single leaf, which later was included in the manuscript that also contains the Annales necrologici and other texts that were kept for commemorative purposes.25 The inventory is led by the heading ‘DOM[NUS] ABB[AS]’, written in capitals and red ink, to distinguish the title from the rest of the names. It was written in 822, most likely at the end of the year and after the monks had elected Hrabanus as their abbot.26 It would explain why his name is absent from the list; he is the ‘lord abbot’ that headed the list of monks. Possibly Hrabanus himself was at Frankfurt when the list was composed, being oicially installed as abbot by Emperor Louis the Pious who had travelled to the Middle Rhine area in November and spent all of December in his residence on the river Main.27 The irst on the list to be mentioned by name was Recheo. He may well be identiied with Reccheo senior (d. 839), one of the monks who on behalf of Fulda had travelled to the royal court in 818 to ask the emperor permission for an abbot’s election.28 Modern scholarship has named the list after him. We may need to take his place in the list after the abbot literally and assume that he was the irst in rank within the monastic community after Hrabanus, fulilling the position of praepositus.29 In the olden days, the position of praepositus in Fulda had been comparable to that of a cellarius, someone with economic and administrative duties. He was subordinate in rank to the decani, who the abbot had 23

24 25

26

27 28 29

For a description of the contents of Fulda, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Hs. B 1, see Chapter 2, pp. 61–2. Schmid, ‘Mönchslisten’, p. 586. See Chapter 3, pp. 74–9. Fulda, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Hs. B 1, fols. 26r–v. Described and analysed by Schmid, ‘Mönchslisten’, pp. 583–8. Hrabanus’ irst established action as abbot has been recorded in a charter dating 28 October 822. CDF, No. 400, p. 181. Schmid, ‘Mönchslisten’, p. 586. Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. ii, c. 7, p. 41; ‘Kommentiertes Parallelregister’, FW 2.1, MF239, p. 264. Schmid, ‘Mönchslisten’, p. 584.

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Hrabanus, part I put in charge of their own deaneries (a group of around ten monks) in accordance with the Rule of Benedict that recommended the institution of decani for communities that were too large to be managed by a single abbot.30 Nevertheless, under inluence of the recent reforms in Fulda, the praepositus had become second in command, outranking the decani in the monastic hierarchy. When the abbot was absent, the praepositus took the abbot’s seat in the choir, the chapter and the refectory.31 As with the other membership lists it is diicult to reconstruct the underlying structure and aims of the Recheo list. Some of the names are written in a character slightly bigger in size than the others, dividing them into smaller groups of around ive to sixteen names. Schmid has suggested that those whose names were written in bigger letters were the decani of the monastery. According to him, the Recheo list was headed by a leading group of mostly senior monks who held the community’s prominent positions, followed by ten groups of monks, each led by a deacon. A comparison with the Annales necrologici also shows that the last of these ten groups consisted for the most part of senior brethren.32 The list registered all the monks who lived in the mother convent. Among the names in the list we recognise Racholf, the architect who added the crypts to Ratger’s church (d. 824); Brun Candidus, the author of the now lost Vita Bauguli and the Vita Aegil, to be discussed below (d. 845); Reccheo Modestus, to whom Candidus dedicated his Vita Aegil (d. 843); Rudolf , one of Hrabanus’ beloved pupils who supervised the composition of the cartulary and the author of, among others, the Miracula sanctorum (d. 865); Gottschalk, Hrabanus’ brilliant student who after a severe conlict with his master left Fulda (d. 869); and Hatto, Hrabanus’ friend and successor as abbot of Fulda, then still the monastery’s librarian (d. 856).33 Hatto, Reccheo Modestus and Racholf each headed a subgroup of monks, which may indicate, if we follow Schmid’s theory, that they held the position of decanus in the community. Comparison of the Recheo list with the Annales necrologici shows that most of the monks listed were either rather old or very young. Occasionally, the list includes a monk of average age. This suggests that the Recheo list records the names of monks who lived in the mother convent, and had as their most important duties the cultus divina; the education of the pupils; the looking after of the library and the monastic 30 31 32 33

RB, c. 21, p. 539. SL, cc. 11, 15, pp. 324–5, and Semmler, ‘Supplex Libellus’, 279–80, 291. Schmid, ‘Mönchslisten’, pp. 584–7. For short biographies of these monks, see the relevant entries in ‘Kommentiertes Parallelregister’, FW 2.1, MF78, 112, 168, 240, 241, pp. 238, 245–6, 253–4, 264–5; Sandmann, ‘Wirkungsbereiche’, pp. 700, 704–8.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda archives; the production of manuscripts in the scriptorium; and, social dealings such as the reception of guests. The children in the list were probably child oblates and other pupils who were trained by the seniors within the monastic conines. Many members of the middle group, the monks of average age who could do manual labour, lived outside the conines of the monastery, maintaining Fulda’s dependent cellae. Contrary to the Recheo list, the other inventory, the so-called Hrabanus list, included all members of the Fulda community; the juniors and seniors who lived in the mother convent and the monks who managed the monastery’s many estates. All the monks whose names were written down in the Recheo list were also recorded in the Hrabanus list, with the exception of six. The Hrabanus list was written at the end of 825 or early in 826, so again around the turn of the year. The names of most of the monks that the list registers were also recorded in the Annales necrologici after they had died. Only twenty (out of 603) cannot be traced at all.34 The list seems to have been structured according to orders, irst listing the priests, then the deacons and subdeacons and, inally, the monks who had not (yet) attained an order. This way of structuring a membership list shows the importance of the orders for the community’s self-understanding and thus the large extent to which liturgical tasks determined the rhythm of daily life in the monastery.35 As explained in Chapter 3, the Hrabanus list is no longer extant in its original form. Soon after its composition, a copy was sent to Reichenau, to be included in the community’s confraternity book, which already contained the Baugulf list, the list of deceased monks headed by Sturmi and entries of small groups of Fulda monks. A scribe copied the list of names on the designated pages, on the empty spaces that separated the already existing lists, thereby doubling the columns on every page. As the fourth page is missing, possibly also the Hrabanus list was originally longer than the 603 names that the Reichenau scribe included in his community’s liber vitae. We may even need to add another seventy names, which would mean that after the irst quarter of the ninth century the monastery housed some 670 monks.36 This is an enormous community. Among them there will have been a considerable number of child oblates, pulsantes (novices) and pupils who were taught to become secular clerics (the twenty persons whose names were not recorded in the Annales necrologici?).37

34 35 36

Schmid, ‘Mönchslisten’, p. 589. For a detailed analysis of the list, see ibid., pp. 588–96. 37 De Jong, In Samuel’s Image, pp. 243–4. Ibid., p. 622.

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Hrabanus, part I A comparison with the Baugulf list, which registers the living monks of Fulda in 781/782, shows that since the Baugulf list was made, the community had not only increased in the number of monks, but also had almost completely renewed itself. Less than a sixth of the monks registered in the Baugulf list was included in Hrabanus’ list.38 Freise’s study of Fulda’s Einzugsbereich and his comparison of the names listed in Fulda’s commemorative lists with those included in Fulda’s charters, as benefactors or witnesses, demonstrates that many of these new members came from new areas. The monastery had clearly expanded and moved its sphere of inluence from which it recruited new members over the past years. For example, while in the irst decades of its existence many of Fulda’s benefactors came from the Middle Rhine area, Ratger established contacts with families in Saalegau, Werngau and Aschfeld, and Eigil and Hrabanus opened up the Grabfeld area. Freise, moreover, has shown that in the period between the composition of the Baugulf list and the making of those of the 820s, Fulda had also established contacts with diferent families in areas from which the community had drawn recruits and possessions already since its early days, such as the Middle and Upper Rhine region.39 A comparison with the Recheo list suggests that of the 600 monks belonging to the monastery at the end of the irst quarter of the ninth century, only some 140 lived in the mother convent. The rest lived at out postings (cellae and monasteriola).40 These dependent houses fulilled strategic roles in Fulda’s organisation as they administered and maintained its landed property and provided the mother convent with the means to sustain its members. As abbot, Eigil had instituted that the monks who lived outside should regularly, and voluntarily, provide the monks in the mother convent with food, drinks and other necessities, besides the usual yearly contributions.41 Hrabanus continued further to integrate the monastic cells into the administration of the monastery, tying them closer to the mother convent through keeping a irm grip on their staing policy and the distribution of precious relics, to be discussed below.42 The cellae also ofered the monks work experience and could serve as useful leg-ups to higher positions. Although it is unknown where precisely he was located, we know that Hrabanus himself passed part of 38

39 40

41 42

See Zörkendörfer, ‘Statistische Untersuchungen’, pp. 988–96; Schmid, ‘Mönchslisten’, pp. 616–20; Freise, ‘Studien’, pp. 1056–7. Freise, ‘Studien’, pp. 1105–22. Schmid, ‘Mönchslisten’, pp. 585–8; Schmid, ‘Suche’, pp. 154–5; De Jong, In Samuel’s Image, pp. 242–4. Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 21, p. 18. Rudolf, Miracula sanctorum, c. 1, p. 330. See Chapter 7.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda his early monastic career in one of Fulda’s dependent houses and composed his masterpiece In honorem sanctae crucis there (inished around 810). Hrabanus’ stay is recalled by Candidus, who some three decades later seems to have been in a similar position and spent his days away from the mother convent writing the Vita Aegil.43 Unlike Hrabanus, Candidus was already a senior when he stayed in a monastic cell, possibly in an executive function, administering Fulda’s possessions in the region, as Hrabanus’ nephew, named Guntram after his father, seems to have done in Solnhofen. As magister, Candidus may also have been responsible for the education of the cella’s pupils.44 I shall return to the educational role of some of Fulda’s dependent houses in Chapter 8. The position of praepositus earned the person who fulilled it a good deal of respect, especially when the dependency entrusted to his care was a large centre of landed property and a former royal curtis, as was the case with Solnhofen.45 Guntram was well aware of the honour bestowed on him by his uncle, but nevertheless also complained to a friend about the location of the cell, a ‘most narrow and barren place’ along the river Altmühl. He grumbled that he grew tired of staring at ‘rocks and pine trees every day’.46 These rocks, known as the Solnhofen Limestone, are actually still famous today for the many extraordinarily detailed fossils (of jellyish, dragonlies and beetles and the Ur-bird Archaeopteryx), and have been used since ancient times for the production of roof and loor tiles.47 Guntram’s complaints are transmitted to us via the Vita Sualonis, written by Ermanrich of Ellwangen between 839 and 842 at the praepositus’ request in honour of Sola, the eremite whose cell would later develop into the dependent house under Guntram’s care. We therefore need to be wary of trusting Ermanrich’s rendering of Guntram’s words, if he had ever spoken them at all, as the author in his portrayal of the eremite-saint, just like, for example, Eigil in the Vita Sturmi, took great care to paint the ascetic’s habitat as a secluded wilderness.48 Nevertheless, Guntram may well have had diiculty settling in Solnhofen, which was far removed from Fulda and his family and the bustle of the royal court.49 Similar feelings of unease and loneliness seem to have troubled Candidus

43 44 45

46 47 48 49

See the next chapter, p. 242. ‘Kommentiertes Parallelregister’, FW 2.1, MF78, pp. 238–9. See the list of Solnhofen’s property in Codex Eberhardi, vol. i, p. 337; and Werner-Hasselbach, Güterverzeichnisse, pp. 27–41. For Solnhofen as a royal curtis, see Ermanrich, Vita Sualonis, pp. 156, 162, and Bosl, Franken, p. 28. Ermanrich, Vita Sualonis, c. 10, p. 161. See, for example, the website of the University of California Museum of Paleontology. Zwanzig, Gründungsmythen, pp. 57–60; Coon, ‘Vita S. Sualonis’, 1–24. Ermanrich, Vita Sualonis, c. 10, pp. 161–2.

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Hrabanus, part I during his stay in a Fulda outpost. He sought refuge in the composition of a rather complex opus geminatum, the Vita Aegil.50 Guntram’s grumbles, a reference in a letter to Ermanrich that he needed his prayers to be protected from ‘the net of the world’ (mundi retiaculum)51 and his transfer from the king’s chapel to a monastic cell, have led some historians to believe that Hrabanus’ decision to place Guntram in Solnhofen, which happened at the request of Louis the German, was in fact a punishment for some misbehaviour. This may have been related to the political troubles of 830–833, although I have found no evidence for this.52 Fulda’s dependent houses may thus also have functioned as places to (temporarily) put up politically controversial igures in an elegant way. A third of the monks enlisted in the Hrabanus list were priests, another third deacons, subdeacons or clerics. I have already discussed the reasons for the increase of clerics in Fulda in Chapter 3, which was closely related to the growth of liturgical responsibilities of early medieval monasteries. The high number of altars in Fulda’s abbey church testiies to the abbey’s rich liturgy, and so does, for example, the Supplex Libellus, which mentions masses for the king, his family and the well-being of his realm, friends, benefactors and the deceased fellow-brethren and which requests more time for private masses, and a now lost letter that recalled Fulda’s promise to King Louis the German to say a thousand masses and another thousand psalters during Lent for him, his army and his father as support in a military expedition against the Bulgars.53 Many of Fulda’s priest-monks thus performed liturgical duties inside the monastic conines in the abbey church. Others were responsible for pastoral care in Fulda’s cellae, looking after the souls of the brethren who inhabited the dependent houses. One of the reasons that the monks in the 810s had opposed Ratger’s measure to replace the monks who administered and maintained the monastic cellae with lay people was that the elderly and sick that he also stationed there died without having received Communion and confession.54 The priests were nevertheless probably also of service to the local people who lived in the 50 51 52

53 54

See the next chapter. The letter is added by Ermanrich by way of prologue to his Vita Sualonis, p. 154. Ermanrich, Vita Sualonis, c. 10, p. 161, does not give the name of the king who ordered Guntram to be placed in Solnhofen, but it is highly probable that it concerned Louis the German, as both Louis the Pious and Lothar would have been referred to as emperor. See the introduction of Bauch to the Vita Sualonis, p. 192; A. Hirschmann, Der heilige Sola. Ein historischer Versuch (1894), pp. 13–22, which I have not been able to consult; Fleckenstein, Hofkapelle, pp. 179, 184; Bigott, Ludwig, p. 41, footnote 163. SL, cc. 1–2, pp. 321–2; and Epist. Fuld. frag., No. 4, p. 518. SL, cc. 5 and 16, pp. 323, 325; Semmler, ‘Supplex Libellus’, 285.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda vicinity of the dependent houses. There is evidence, to be discussed in the next chapter, that at least certain hours of the divine oice and masses celebrated in the cellae’s churches were open to the public and that priestmonks heard the confessions of locals in spiritual need.55 In addition, the book collections of these dependent houses often seem to have included a copy of Gregory the Great’s Regula pastoralis.56 This handbook for bishops and priests was useful for all clerics interested in care for the souls and rhetoric in the service of the Christian Church, both inside and outside monastic communities. Nevertheless, its presence in the book collections of Fulda’s cellae may be a sign of the pastoral responsibilities of its owners towards the local men and women, who will have held these professionals in high esteem for their training, ascetic way of life and, due to Hrabanus’ eforts to supply Fulda’s outposts with holy remains, possession of powerful relics.57 To many, these cellae will have been the nearest places of holy intercession to which they could turn for spiritual help, next to the local priests and their churches, with whom the dependent houses of large monasteries such as Fulda may have competed for inluence.58 A considerable number of these men and women will have worked for the monks, tilling the land and lending them other services. Some of the local landowners may have sent their sons there, for education and with an eye to an ecclesiastical career. Besides their practical function of record-keeping, the Recheo and Hrabanus lists came to be considered as valuable self-deinitions that represented (part of) the Fulda community in commemorative prayer and bound its members together.The names in these lists, belonging to monks who were removed from those who prayed either because of geographical distance or death, evoked the presence of their owners and tied the community that remembered them in their prayers to the community represented by the lists. Interestingly, both the Baugulf and Hrabanus lists were not preserved in Fulda itself, but were sent to Reichenau, where they were included in the monastery’s confraternity book and only in this context survived. Possibly the monks felt no need for such lists to remember their brethren at the time of composition, as they had the Annales necrologici for that. They did, however, keep the Recheo list and those of Fulda’s dependent houses, and bound them together with (fragments of) the Annales necrologici, a prayer bond, other membership lists

55 57

58

Chapter 7, p. 223. 56 See the book lists, discussed below. For the importance and popularity of the Regula pastoralis in the Carolingian period, see McKitterick, Frankish Church, pp. 88–90. For an analysis of local priests from the perspective of episcopal statutes, see Van Rhijn, Shepherds of the Lord.

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Hrabanus, part I (one composed in 919, another in 935) and the Gesta abbatum, thus creating a manuscript that now is known as Fulda, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Hs. B 1. This happened not earlier than the late tenth century, for to this period dates the fascicle that separates the Recheo list from the main body of texts that was aimed at memoria and was composed and brought together under Abbot Haicho (917–923).59 Until then, the Recheo list may well have been kept as a single leaf in Fulda’s archive, as a memorial of days long past, and also the lists of Fulda’s dependencies existed as a separate fascicle before they were included in the manuscript as its last folios. By the time all these fragments were bound together, the aim of the Recheo list seems to have been purely commemorative, tying the present-day community to its past and uniting all the monks who had once dedicated their lives to Fulda’s cause and had served God and his people with endless prayers. To create such a monument of Fulda’s past, the compiler used documents, previously written for diferent purposes, that he found in Fulda’s archive or among the liturgical texts kept in the sacristy. For, long before this moment, the Recheo list may well have served commemorative purposes, treasured by the monks as an authentic self-representation of their community. More se lve s on the sh e lve s Besides making lists of people, for both administrative and commemorative purposes, Hrabanus also ordered the making of an inventory of Fulda’s books. These lists enabled the monks not only to see which books Fulda possessed, but also to get an impression of the gaps in the monastery’s collection and to determine what books the monks wished to possess and still needed to acquire. During Hrabanus’ abbacy many books were copied, brought to Fulda and written by the monks, which the abbot stored in one of the most impressive monastic libraries of the early Middle Ages, comparable in size and riches to those of St Gall, Reichenau, Fleury and Corbie.60 Hrabanus built this library possibly adjacent to the transept of Fulda’s abbey church.61 The library, famous for its rich collection of classical and sacred literature, was directed by Hrabanus’ friend Hatto before the latter succeeded Hrabanus as abbot of Fulda.62 By the eighteenth 59 60

61 62

Oexle, ‘Überlieferung’, pp. 467–74. McKitterick, Written Word, pp. 165–210; Berggötz, ‘Hrabanus Maurus’, 1–2; Spilling, ‘Fuldaer Skriptorium’, pp. 165–81. See also Ganz, Corbie; Mostert, Fleury. Gesta abbatum, p. 273. Concerning the location of the library, see Krause, Ratgerbasilika, pp. 150–1. In a letter to Pope Leo IV (847–855), which is no longer extant, Hatto refers to his function as custos librorum. Epist. Fuld. fragm., 31, p. 530. See also Sandmann, ‘Wirkingsbereiche’, p. 766; Sandmann, ‘Folge der Äbte’, p. 186.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda century Hrabanus’ library had not lost its attraction for lovers of books. In June 1709 the bibliophile Zacharias Conrad von Ufenbach travelled from Frankfurt to Fulda to exult in its abundance. He had heard of the library’s reputation and that of its initiator, Hrabanus Maurus, whose name and fame were still associated with the library. Ufenbach was, however, to be disappointed.63 Contrary to, for example, the library of St Gall, little is left of Fulda’s book collection, which according to the tenth-century Deeds of the Abbots contained so many manuscripts that it was almost impossible to count them.64 Most of its contents vanished during the Thirty Years War, when Swedish soldiers occupied the area. Some manuscripts ended up in Kassel, through the scholar Remigius Faesch, who managed to acquire a number of books at the beginning of the war. It may have been under direction of the landgrave of Hessen-Kassel, to whom the Swedes handed over the region, that a considerable number of Fulda manuscripts was stored in Kassel’s Hofbibliothek.65 Most of the rest of the books disappeared, perhaps under the waves of the Baltic Sea on the way to Sweden. This happened to part of Mainz’s Dombibliothek: it sank with the ship that was supposed to carry this treasure to the soldiers’ homeland.66 Another possibility suggested by Oliver Berggötz is that the books were hidden to save them from the disasters of war. This happened to the cathedral library of Würzburg, which was so well hidden during the Thirty Years War that it was only discovered in the eighteenth century.67 The idea of a hidden treasure waiting to be found delights the historian’s imagination, but we had better accept that most of Fulda’s medieval library has gone. Since its disappearance, several scholars have tried to reconstruct the library’s contents, studying extant manuscripts that lie dispersed over various libraries all over the world and looking for traces of Fulda provenance, and analysing the sources used by Fulda authors in their writings.68 This has led to the discovery of, among other things, the presence of a copy of Tacitus’ Germania in Fulda’s library, used by Rudolf for his 63

64 65

66 67 68

Commercii epistolaris Ufenbachiani selecta cum vita ejusdem, ed. J. G. Schelhorn, 5 vols. (Ulm, 1753–6), vol. i, pp. 78–94, cited in Aris, ‘Bibliotheca Fuldensis’, pp. 68–9. Gesta abbatum, p. 273. These manuscripts were discovered by Nikolaus Kindlinger. Gugel, Handschriften, i, p. 17; Christ, Bibliothek Fulda, pp. 165. Langer, Kulturgeschichte, pp. 130–1. Berggötz, ‘Hrabanus Maurus’, 3. Lehmann, Fuldaer Studien; Lehmann, Fuldaer Studien: Neue Folge; Lehmann, ‘Quot et quorum libri’, pp. 47–57; Christ, Bibliothek Fulda; Gugel, Handschriften, i and ii; Schrimpf et al., Mittelalterliche Bücherverzeichnisse. The project Instituta Bibliotheca Fuldensis, now under the direction of MarcAeilko Aris, aims to reconstruct the contents of the library.

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Hrabanus, part I composition of the Translatio S. Alexandri.69 Another essential source to reconstruct the possessions of Fulda’s library are the extant lists of books, including the inventories made under Hrabanus that disclose some of the library’s original contents. These early medieval records are of interest here as they also give an impression of the community’s ambitions as a centre of learning and reveal the corpus of texts on which they wished to build their identity. Manuscript Vaticanus Palatinus Latinus 1877 contains ive lists of books dating to the middle of the ninth century (known as B1, B2, B3, B4 and B5) that give an impression of the contents of this library.70 The cover that once held the book lists together carries the title ‘How many and which books have been in the libraries of Fulda’ (Quot et quorum libri/ fuerint in libraria fuldensi).71 The title is possibly from the hand of the Fulda monk Johann Knöttel, the monastery’s librarian who reorganised the library in 1476/1477.72 The irst four lists are very short, with histories that are diicult to trace. The irst of these four is the above-mentioned list from Wolfsmünster, the dependent house of Fulda to which Baugulf retired after he had resigned as abbot of Fulda.73 Like the irst list, the following two book inventories are also written in a mixture of insular and Caroline minuscule. They register titles of basic literature useful for each monastic community, big or small, and include liturgical books as missals and psalters, books from the Old and New Testament, a sermon collection of Augustine, the Rule of Benedict and Gregory the Great’s Regula pastoralis, referred to above. The third list is headed by the title ‘the abbot has brought these books from there’ (istos libros abstulit abbas inde), without specifying the name of the abbot or the place where he had collected the books. Possibly it concerned collections of books that once belonged to Wolfsmünster or other cellae of Fulda, which after their dissolution passed into the library of the mother convent.74 The fourth list, written in Caroline minuscule and under the heading De Ahahusum Alamanniae allati sunt libri Otolti qui occisus est, registers the collection of a certain Otoltus from Auhausen in Alemannia.75 It lists a missal, Gregory the Great’s Regula pastoralis, a psalterium, one codex 69

70

71 72 73 74

Wattenbach et al., Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen, p. 712, including footnote 186; McKitterick, Charlemagne, pp. 19–20. For an extensive description, see Schrimpf et al., Mittelalterliche Bücherverzeichnisse, pp. 14–56. Also Christ, Bibliothek Fulda; Lehmann, ‘Quot et quorum libri’; and Spilling, ‘Fuldaer Skriptorium’, pp. 165–81. Literally: ‘books by whom’. Schrimpf et al., Mittelalterliche Bücherverzeichnisse, pp. 14–17. Chapter 3, pp. 81–2. Schrimpf et al., Mittelalterliche Bücherverzeichnisse, pp. 18–24. 75 Ibid., p. 24.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda with the four biblical books Judith, Tobias, Job and Esther, and part of an antiphonarium. Considering the nature of the book collection and its heading, Otoltus seems to have been a priest, who lived in Auhausen on the river Altmühl. After he was murdered, his collection passed to Fulda, apart from his missal, which he had bequeathed to a certain Sandratus. The latter probably needs to be identiied with the prepositus of the dependency of Solnhofen (d. 855), which lies relatively close to Auhausen. Sandratus was a monk of Fulda, who before Guntram came to Solnhofen served part of his monastic career administering this important property complex. He is included in Rudolf ’s Miracula sanctorum as one of the witnesses and orchestrators of the relic translations to Fulda that took place in the 830s.76 Following Paul Lehmann, Gangolf Schrimpf has equated his benefactor Otoltus with another priest-monk from Fulda, Oedoltus, who is also mentioned by Rudolf in his account of the relic translations to Fulda.77 Schrimpf suggested that Fulda had lent the books to this Oedoltus and that they returned into the monastery’s possession after his death, besides the missal which the monastery donated to Sandratus.78 I doubt the identiication, for if the murdered priest was indeed a priestmonk from Fulda it is likely that his name would have been included in the Annales necrologici after his death. Nevertheless, the only persons named Otoltus or Ortoltus in the list of deceased monks who qualify died in 784, 858 and 876, therefore long before or after the composition of the book inventory and the death of Sandratus, the recipient, as a matter of fact. There are too many uncertainties to reach a deinite answer, but Otoltus may have been a local priest, who bequeathed his possessions to Fulda after his death, as many members of the local elite had done before him. The list of books may have served as a kind of will, like that of Eberhard of Friuli or the inventories of possessions included in the charters that register transfers of property to Fulda.79 Among the gifts there are many donations from local priests and gifts of churches and objects used in them. Explicitly listed in charters are gold and silver cruciixes, liturgical vestments made of purple and other precious fabrics, relics, reliquaries and gold images, but such church treasures and possessions will also have included books.80 76

77

78 79

80

Rudolf, Miracula sanctorum cc. 4, 10, pp. 333, 336. See also ‘Kommentiertes Parallelregister’, FW 2.1, MF254, p. 267. Rudolf, Miracula sanctorum, c. 10, p. 333. Oedoltus is a corrupt reading of Ortolt or Otolt by Brouwer who edited the Miracula sanctorum or by the manuscript’s copyist. ‘Kommentiertes Parallelregister’, FW 2.1, MF219, p. 262. Schrimpf et al., Mittelalterliche Bücherverzeichnisse, p. 24; Lehmann, ‘Quot et quorum libri’, p. 56. Cartulaire de l’abbaye de Cysoing et des ses dépendances, ed. I. de Coussemaker (Lille, 1883), No. 1, pp. 1–5; La Rocca and Provero, ‘Eberhard’, pp. 225–80. UBF, Nos. 22, 57, 71, 73, 93, 182, 202, 220, 249, 264, 283, 287; CDF, No. 363, p. 169.

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Hrabanus, part I Compared to the other fragments, fragment B5 is a rather long list of some 110 titles. It registers part of a collection that is of a completely diferent order than the assortments of books so far described, both with regard to the kind of books listed and the number of codices. The catalogue, of which fragment B5 once had been part, seems to have been a precise survey of the contents of Fulda’s monastic library. Like a systematic bibliography, it records all the texts individually; treatises, vitae and letters.81 The aim of this exact listing was not only to get an overview of what was there, but also of what the collection lacked. The fragment is divided into three sections: one dedicated to ‘Scripture’, the other two, each with their own heading (in red ink and majuscule), to the works of Jerome (Opuscula sancti Hieronymi presbyteri) and Augustine (Opuscula sancti Augustini episcopi). The section ‘Scripture’ registers copies of all the books of the Bible, both individually or bound together with other biblical books. Space is left blank between this section and the next for later additions, as is the case after the next section, which lists Jerome’s work and was updated in subsequent years. Probably the other subdivisions in the original list were also separated from each other by spaces initially kept empty for later updates. The section Opuscula sancti Hieronymi presbyteri lists thirty-one out of the thirty-seven extant texts from Jerome, including all his commentaries on the books of the Old and New Testament, though not his homilies on Mark and his commentary on the Apocalypse.82 Jerome’s commentaries on the Bible were highly inluential in the early Middle Ages; Augustine’s works, listed in the next section, were mostly valued for their theological content and discussions of important dogmatic issues. Under the heading Opuscula sancti Augustini episcope, only twenty-two of the approximately one hundred writings of Augustine were recorded, including his Confessiones and De civitate dei, but it is in this section that fragment B5 breaks of. Originally, more works of Augustine would have been listed, followed by those of other late antique and early medieval authors. The sections in another, late-ifteenth-century inventory of Fulda’s books, dedicated to the works of Boethius, Cassiodorus, Isidore of Seville, Ambrose, Origines and Bede, suggest that similar subdivisions existed already in the ninth century.83 Those responsible for the book collection of Fulda’s library seem to have been concerned with its completeness. They had brought together copies of almost all works by Jerome and of all books of the Bible. Moreover, they continued to collect and copy manuscripts for the library 81 82

Schrimpf et al., Mittelalterliche Bücherverzeichnisse, pp. 25–47. 83 Ibid., pp. 98–171 (Basel F iii 42). Ibid., p. 52.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda and to write down the titles of new purchases on the parts between the sections that had been left blank for later additions and updates, seizing every opportunity to extend the monastery’s collection of books.84 So Lupus of Ferrières complained to Einhard during his stay in Fulda in 836 that the book that he had borrowed from him (namely Aulus Gellius’ Noctes Atticae) had been coniscated by Hrabanus for duplication.85 The inventory of which fragment B5 once was part seems also to have functioned as an alphabetical (library) catalogue, for it very consistently records the number of volumes in which these texts were included. Nevertheless, like the other book inventories, it does not register in which volumes the individual texts were kept or their position on the shelves, which disqualiies it as a practical aid to ind one’s way in the monastic library. In addition, the list was a tool which the librarian kept up to date and showed which books were lent, to whom, and when they were returned.86 It, for example, records what books were lent to the nearby satellite communities of Frauenberg and Johannesberg.87 It may also have served as an inventory for others (other religious communities and scholars) to consult the contents of Fulda’s library and to determine if the monastery owned books which they themselves wished to possess. We know that in the early Middle Ages library catalogues circulated between intellectual centres. The fragments under scrutiny here, B1–5, are in fact bound together with lists of books from Lorsch, suggesting a sharing of knowledge between both communities.88 Fragment C seems to have been another fragment of this same catalogue. It is a list of books written on a piece of parchment that is now lost, but is included in the Historia Fuldensis (1729) by Johann Friedrich Schannat. Schannat had been appointed as oicial historian and librarian of Fulda in 1722 and had been commissioned by the prince-abbot to compose a history of Fulda. Among the sources he used and described in his Historia Fuldensis was a list of books, now known as fragment C.89 This book inventory was also subdivided into diferent categories and what is left of it lists monastic rules, the works of Alcuin (Opuscula Alcuini) and those of Hrabanus (Opuscula Magnentii Hrabani Mauri). The beginning of the list is gone; the parchment fragment that Schannat used starts with a 84 85

86 87 88 89

Ibid., p. 47. Lupus of Ferrières, Epistolae, No. 8, p. 50. It is now in the Provinciale Bibliotheek, Leeuwarden, as B. A. Fr. 55. Lieftinck, ‘Le manuscrit d’Aulu-Gelle’, 1–17; Aris, ‘Bibliotheca Fuldensis’, pp. 67–8. Schrimpf et al., Mittelalterliche Bücherverzeichnisse, pp. 47–9. Ibid., pp. 25, 29. Ibid., p. 15; McKitterick, Written Word, pp. 209–10. Schannat, Historia Fuldensis, pp. 63–6. He also made a irst attempt at a critical edition of the monastery’s charters: Corpus traditionum Fuldensium.

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Hrabanus, part I list of four monastic rules that once formed part of a bigger collection of monastic regulations, bound together in one codex. It is followed by a similar collection of monastic rules, copies of individual rules (among which the Rule of Benedict) and the Vitae patrum. Also, the end of the list was already lost by the time Schannat studied the fragment, and it seems, moreover, that Schannat did not bother to transcribe this fragment until the end, omitting the titles of several sermons of Hrabanus’ hand that originally had been listed.90 The structure and set-up of the book list is very similar to that of fragment B5, which has led Schrimpf, following Lehmann, to conclude that both B5 and C are fragments of the same catalogue.91 As C only includes Hrabanus’ early work, it was probably already under Hrabanus, before 830, that the catalogue was initiated.92 While Fulda’s earliest catalogue made under Baugulf shows the collection of a religious community focused on prayer, worship and contemplation, the ones dating to Hrabanus’ abbacy and the years following evince the abbot’s eforts, and those of his friend Hatto, the custos librorum, to turn Fulda into one of the best centres of study in the Carolingian Empire, in possession of a rich collection of both secular and sacred literature, and praised moreover for its teachers who taught their students so well ‘that everywhere grammarians and philosophers chanted hymnal songs in the holy church’.93 Besides Tacitus’ Germania and Aulus Gelius’ Noctes Atticae, the library owned copies of Cicero’s Ars rhetoricae, Servius’ commentary on the poems of Virgil, as well as Flavius Josephus’ De bello iudaico, Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica and Sulpicius Severus’ Vita Martini.94 Of particular interest to this study is the great number of monastic rules that Fulda possessed.95 This ‘self on the shelves’ was truly monastic. Fulda’s library housed some thirty rules and texts that, because of their instructive character, were considered of similar value, namely: vitae of charismatic founders of monastic communities that contained valuable information about the institution and regulation of exemplary monastic life; a penitential (the one ascribed to Theodore of Tarsus); and De restauratione lapsis, a Latin translation of a Greek treatise by John Chrysostom that defends and urges the ascetic life.96 The catalogue lists the rules of Columba, Augustine, the Regula Magistri, Fructuosus of Braga, Isidore of Seville, Caesarius of Arles, Columbanus and Benedict, relecting a 90 91 92 93

94 95 96

Schrimpf et al., Mittelalterliche Bücherverzeichnisse, p. 63. Ibid., pp. 83–4; Lehmann, Fuldaer Studien, pp. 7–10. Schrimpf et al., Mittelalterliche Bücherverzeichnisse, pp. 96–7. ‘ita ut ubicumque grammatici ac philosophi ecclesia in sancta ymnidicos resonant modos.’ Ermanrich, Vita Sualonis, introductory letter, pp. 153–4. Gugel, Handschriften, i, pp. 30–42. McKitterick, Frankish Kingdoms, p. 121. Schrimpf et al., Mittelalterliche Bücherverzeichnisse, pp. 67–72.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda collection that brought together traditions from the East and the West, the British Isles,Visigothic Spain and North Africa. Like the dedications of the altars in the abbey church’s crypts, this collection represented some of the principal monastic movements of the early Middle Ages and shows a deep concern to gain an overview of and to study the roots of monastic life. Not mentioned are the rules of Basil, Cassian and Pachomius, but these works may well have been among the eleven rules that were listed on the lost page(s?) preceding the fragment edited by Schannat.We know that Candidus for his Vita Aegil used a letter by Pachomius and it is likely that the monastery possessed other works of this father of coenobitism as well.97 The collection of monastic rules that was brought together in Fulda is very similar to the compilation that Benedict of Aniane had made to build on and legitimise his reforms, the Codex regularum. Fourteen of the rules listed in the inventory are also included in Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 28118, the oldest extant manuscript of the Codex regularum that can be closely linked to Benedict of Aniane, now kept in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.98 The ten rules that were once recorded in the now lost part of the book catalogue may well have included the rules of Macarius, Pachomius and Basil that Benedict’s codex also contained. In this respect, it is interesting to note that the Latin translation of Pachomius’ letter used by Candidus for the Vita Aegil is only transmitted through Benedict’s Codex regularum.99 This suggests that Fulda once possessed a copy of this particular collection of monastic rules, possibly brought to the monastery by the west-Frankish delegation that under the command of Louis the Pious reformed the monastery around 817/818. Nevertheless, Fulda also owned copies of rules and prescriptive literature that Benedict’s Codex regularum did not contain, namely the Regula monachorum Aegypti, quam scripsit Eucherius, an unidentiied rule possibly from the hand of Bishop Eucherius of Lyon; the Regula abbatis Columbicellae, again an unidentiied text that may need to be equated with Adomnas’ Life of Columba of Iona; the Regula abbatis Congelli, the monastic rule of Columbanus’ teacher Comgalls that is now lost but formed the basis of Columbanus’ own rule; the above-mentioned Latin translation of John Chrysostom’s work on the beneits of asceticism; Theodore’s penitential; and a Vita sanctorum Germani abbatis, probably a reference to either Constantius 97 98

99

See the next chapter. Schrimpf et al., Mittelalterliche Bücherverzeichnisse, p. 75; Becht-Jördens, ‘Vita Aegil als Quelle’, 31, footnote 76. Ibid., p. 44. The letter (No. 7) is edited by Boon, Pachomiana Latina, pp. 95–6.

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Hrabanus, part I of Lyon’s vita of Germanus of Auxerre or Venantius Fortunatus’ Life of Germanus of Paris.100 The diferences between both collections of rules show that Benedict of Aniane’s blueprint for monastic observance was not simply copied, and that local traditions remained important in Fulda. At the same time the monastic reforms promulgated by the royal court certainly also had an impact on the ways in which the monks shaped their lives and stimulated a thorough study of ascetic traditions. Monastic reformers, with Benedict of Aniane at the helm, had succeeded in establishing the Rule of Benedict as the sole standard for monasteries to follow, but how this rather short rule, written in the sixth century for a small community of prayer and manual labour in southern Italy, should be implemented in the large royal abbeys of the Carolingian realm, with their schools, libraries, scriptoria and rich liturgy, remained open to discussion.101 Commentaries were written to establish the correct interpretation of the rule and to elaborate on issues that Benedict of Nursia hardly discussed because they were not relevant to him and his brethren. Smaragdus, abbot of St Mihiel and one of the missi who inspected the observance of the Aachen legislation, wrote his expositio in the years immediately following the Aachen councils of 816/817.102 Following the example of patristic and early medieval biblical commentary, he explained Benedict’s rule sentence by sentence, sometimes even word for word, and used Benedict of Aniane’s Concordia regularum, which closely links Benedict of Nursia’s guidelines to other monastic traditions, to provide his interpretation of the Rule of Benedict with a solid basis that, apart from in daily experience, was rooted in older traditions. Hildemar of Civate also integrated older monastic rules in his interpretation of Benedict’s rule, which he expounded in several lectures during his days as the monastery’s schoolmaster.103 Fulda’s large collection of monastic rules shows a similar concern to base the monastery’s observance on authoritative tradition and, moreover, reveals the importance of written texts herein. In the monastery’s early days, the monks drew on Boniface’s instructions, the instituta sancti Bonifatii, passed on to the monks during his frequent visits to Fulda, and the experiences of a delegation of brethren, who under supervision of Sturmi visited Italian monasteries to study their observances which they believed best resembled 100 101

102

103

Schrimpf et al., Mittelalterliche Bücherverzeichnisse, p. 75. Semmler, ‘Benedictus ii’, pp. 1–49; Semmler, ‘Die Beschlüsse’, 15–82; De Jong, ‘Carolingian monasticism’, pp. 629–34. Smaragdus, Expositio in Regulam S. Benedicti, pp. xxxi–xxxii; Bonnerue, Praefatio, Benedict of Aniane, Concordia regularum, pp. 147–9 and his ‘Concordantia inter Concordia regularum et Expositio in regulam s. Benedicti’, pp. 239–56. Hildemar, Expositio regulae; De Jong, In Samuel’s Image, pp. 68–73.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda Benedict of Nursia’s ideal, in shaping their way of living. Possibly they brought a copy of the Rule of Benedict with them from Italy, if they did not already possess their own copy. In the ninth century, the signiicance of written rules as a source of monastic identity was given a new impetus by the monastic reforms that engaged the royal court and religious communities all over the Carolingian Empire. They stimulated the monks of Fulda to make their collection of ascetic traditions from the East and West a comprehensive one, turning their library into a rich source of learning and an ideal environment to study monastic life, with an important aspiration to use this rich monastic heritage to establish the best coenobitic custom. Let us now turn to Hrabanus’ cartulary that ofers another picture of Fulda, deining its property, the scope of its sphere of inluence and its social network. One of its most interesting features is that it reveals the impact of groups outside the monastery on life inside the conines. Local aristocratic families, owning land and high-ranking positions, inluenced the ways in which the community structured its memory, remembered its past and deined itself . Organising and re cordi ng F ul da ’s archival me mory Within two or three years after he had taken oice as abbot of Fulda, Hrabanus ordered the production of a cartulary: a collection of copies of the monastery’s private charters, i.e. the written documents that served as evidence of the donations, precarial grants and sales relating to Fulda.104 In total, the cartulary contained some two thousand charters, representing one of the largest collections of private charters in the early Middle Ages, divided over numerous volumes and covering some ifteen regions.105 It was an extensive survey of the monastery’s property, soberly laid out and written in insular minuscule. Royal diplomas and papal privileges were not included; they were kept separately from the private gifts, as was common in early medieval times.106 104

105

106

My deinition of a charter is based on the one given by Bresslau, Handbuch der Urkundenlehre, i, p. 1, and illuminated by Heidecker in his introduction to Charters, pp. 2–3. For a discussion of Fulda’s cartulary in relation to charter collections of other religious communities, see Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance, pp. 81–114; Lohrmann, ‘Évolution et organisation’, pp. 79–90. For a deinition of the term cartulary, see Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance, pp. 81–2.The main studies of Fulda’s cartulary include: Heydenreich, Fuldaer Cartular; Vaupel, ‘Chartulare’; Stengel, ‘Fuldensia ii’, pp. 146–93; Stengel, ‘Fuldensia iii’, pp. 194–202; Stengel and Semmelmann, ‘Fuldensia iv’, pp. 203–65, and his introduction to his edition of the Fulda charters UBF, pp. xviii–xxxv. Stengel and Semmelmann, ‘Fuldensia iv’, pp. 228–40; DeClercq, ‘Originals and Cartularies’, pp. 151–2.

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Hrabanus, part I Originally the cartulary consisted of ifteen booklets, but certainly by the twelfth century some of these had been combined, which brought the total number of volumes to eight, all of which were kept in Fulda’s library.107 Only one of these volumes, containing three original booklets, has survived the ravages of time. The booklets cover Alsace, Wormsgau and, as recently argued by Hans Hummer, the family estates of Hrabanus Maurus, not simply the Rheingau-Nahegau area as has long been assumed.108 They are our main source of information concerning the appearance of the original cartulary; the ink used, its colours, the handwriting and scripts, the layout and size of the pages. Two other volumes, one containing donations and precarial grants relating to the Saalegau and Aschfeld-Werngau, the other to the Grabfeld area, are known through an early-seventeenth-century edition from the hand of the early modern humanist Johannes Pistorius.109 Just before he died of the plague in 1608, Pistorius published the booklets of Hrabanus’ cartulary, which by then were in the possession of a member of the Hohenzollern dynasty, and thereby saved them for posterity.110 Almost three-and-a-half centuries after Pistorius’ publication, in the late autumn of 1949, Paul Lehmann discovered a bifolium that once belonged to the volume for Thuringia, and shortly thereafter Ludwig Bieler came across two other fragments of the cartulary during a palaeographical research trip.111 They had once belonged to the Grabfeld booklet, which had been edited by Pistorius.112 Bieler’s discovery puts modern researchers in the privileged position to read, as it were, over Pistorius’ shoulder while he made his copy some four centuries earlier. A comparison between Pistorius’ edition and these scraps of the original cartulary shows that the humanist had carried out his job carefully. For our purpose, studying the early medieval cartulary as a self-representation of the community, it is important to note, however, that Pistorius did not precisely reproduce the manuscript in front of him, as this was not his intention. As a true humanist Pistorius corrected the Latin of his early medieval exemplar, and there are the occasional errors, misunderstandings and misprints already noted by Stengel.113 To Stengel’s observations I should like to add 107

108 109 110 112

113

Codex Eberhardi, i, fol. 161; Dronke, TAF, c. 65, p. 144. From a letter by Abbot Hatto to Pope Leo IV we know that the papal privileges were kept in Fulda’s library. Epist. Fuld. frag., No. 31, p. 530. Hummer, ‘Family Cartulary’, pp. 645–64. Pistorius, Rerum Germanicarum, fol. 4; Stengel, ‘Einleitung’, UBF, pp. xxiii–xxv. Lehmann, Mitteilungen, p. 6. 111 Ibid., pp. 3–18. Now in the Universitätsbibliothek Tübingen. Edited by Stengel in 1956 in ‘Fuldensia iii’, pp. 200–2. The fragments concern Pistorius 507 ii and iii, and 508 i and ii. Stengel, ‘Fuldensia iii’, pp. 195–200.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda that in his edition Pistorius omitted the Roman numerals in the margin that marked the sequence of the charters. Apparently he also changed their headings. In the case of a donation made by a certain Hartger and his son Hruadmunt, Pistorius changed the title, which originally read Trad[itio] Hartgeres et illii eius Hr[uadmuntes] into Traditio bonorum in Baldmunteshufen.114 The dedicatory epistle that prefaced his edition explains that Pistorius’ patron was Johann Friedrich von Schwalbach, prince-abbot of Fulda, who was mostly interested in the past and the geography of the province subordinate to him and the possessions of its monastery.115 This might have inspired the editor to alter the headings that commemorated the benefactors concerned into titles that are more precise with regard to the geographical designation and roughly indicate the content of the gift. The place-names will have meant more to the prince than the names of people long dead. The last discovered fragment of the original cartulary was located in the early 1970s. Following upon the tip of a local archivist, Walter Heinemeyer discovered an early medieval bifolium that had been used for the back of a seventeenth-century booklet. Heinemeyer ascertained that the parchment piece had once served as a later addition to the Saxony-Frisia volume of Fulda’s cartulary.116 His discovery has not altered our view of the cartulary in any substantial way. It has conirmed existing assumptions about the layout and structure of the cartulary, while it of course also adds to our knowledge about the cartulary’s contents and its history after it had left Fulda; like the fragments discovered by Lehmann, and Bieler and Pistorius’ volumes, it turned up in southern Germany. Besides the above-mentioned extant booklets and fragments, the twelfth-century cartulary made under supervision of Eberhard, a monk of Fulda, also helps us reconstruct the contents of its early medieval predecessor. One of the aims of the so-called Codex Eberhardi was to defend Fulda’s property against secular lords and new religious movements.117 To this end Eberhard used everything he could lay his hands on: papal privileges, royal immunities and records of transactions, as well as the ninth-century cartulary. However, the monk, remembered by Edmund Stengel as the ‘the most untrustworthy of all copyists’ (unzuverlässigsten aller Abschreiber), altered many of the charters he used. He summarised 114

115 116 117

Compare the fragment, which Stengel published as Tafel 5, between pp. 192 and 193 (edition on pp. 200–2), to Pistorius, Rerum Germanicarum, Liber ii, p. 507 (the heading of the last charter on the page). Pistorius, Epistola dedicatoria, fol. 3r. Stadtarchiv Leutkirch Sign. B Nr. 102a. Heinemeyer, ‘Ein Fragment’, 126–35. Codex Eberhardi. See also Meyer zu Ermgassen, ‘Nominis nostri conscripto caractere’, 201–67.

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Hrabanus, part I the contents, omitted dates and names of witnesses, and when he did include them he updated their spelling. He regularly left out the placenames, a practice which, Stengel commented, could hardly have beneited Fulda.118 Stengel judged Eberhard’s work according to the standards of his own day, the early twentieth century, when scholarly editions of charter material were aimed at reconstructing original charters and their chronological order as precisely as possible.119 His Urkundenbuch des Klosters Fulda, still the most recent critical edition of Fulda’s early medieval charters, attempts to give the chronological order of the charters without paying heed to the structure and functions of the cartularies that formed the context and determined the form in which the charters were transmitted. Recently, scholars such as Patrick Geary have argued in favour of cartularies as intelligent constructs worthy of study in themselves.120 Indeed Eberhard’s codex should be studied on its own terms, something that has been facilitated in the mid 1990s by the edition of Heinrich Meyer zu Ermgassen, and so should Fulda’s ninth-century cartulary.121 It is, however, beyond the scope of this book to provide a full analysis of the cartulary that does justice to all its interesting and complex facets. It is included here as a particular self-representation of the monastic community in the second quarter of the ninth century (one that in the course of time changed in meaning and form), with the reservation that my analysis is based on a study of six out of the original ifteen booklets, two of which are only transmitted in an early-seventeenth-century edition. Although we need to be careful to use our indings as a standard to measure the rest of the cartulary, the extant volumes ofer enough material to gain an impression of its possible meanings and uses for the Fulda community. Ex ploring the cartulary and it s m eani ng s The cartulary was a work in progress and a collective collaboration, rather than a polished lifework of one person who conscientiously carried out a well-thought-out master plan throughout the whole cartulary. Most 118

119

120

121

Stengel, ‘Fuldensia ii’, pp. 151–2. See also the introduction of his edition of the Codex Eberhardi by Heinrich Meyer zu Ermgassen, pp. ix–xiv. See, for example, also Hans Hirsch’s review of Stengel’s UBF in Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 14 (1918), p. 157. Geary, ‘Entre gestion et “gesta”’, pp. 13–14; Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance, p. 83. Also the other contributions of the Actes de la table ronde Les cartulaires, organised by the Ecole nationale des chartes and the G.D.R. 121 of C.N.R.S., evince this new approach, as does the work of Georges Leclercq and Hans Hummer. See also Meyer zu Ermgassen’s volume Der Buchschmuck des Codex Eberhardi, published in 2009.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda of the cartulary’s booklets dealt with a speciic gau (county), though initially without explicit headers on the front page that indicated the region concerned.122 Only in the twelfth century did Fulda scribes add titles to the original manuscripts that speciied the gau concerned. In addition, they wrote down in the margins the names of the places where donated properties were located.123 Each volume in turn was roughly categorised chronologically by the reigns of Fulda’s abbots. Again, this way of ordering the transactions was not made explicit by headings and was not consistently followed throughout the whole booklet.124 The cartulary seems to have been an administrative tool that was adjusted, as time went by, to contemporary needs and evolving ideas about the cartulary’s principal aims and the best way to structure the collection of charters accordingly. It was irregularly updated, well into the tenth century, on the empty pages already designated or on pieces of parchment added later. These updates concerned new transactions and old contracts, possibly forgotten by the scribe(s) who had started the cartulary.125 In the course of time, other scribes also added corrections in the margin, and in the tenth century at least one volume, that of the Wormsgau, received an index.126 In general, the cartulary seems to have copied the transactions exactly, recording the names of the donor(s) and recipients, the conditions of tenure, often the date, regularly the place of transaction and the names of the witnesses of the proprietary contract and the scribe who had recorded the transaction. The entrances are preceded by a short heading, written in red ink, which introduces the benefactor(s) concerned and the geographical unit. The titles were inserted later, by hands that difer from the main hand(s), though probably shortly after these had inished the body of the cartulary as the headings were also written in insular minuscule, a type of handwriting that was used in Fulda until the mid ninth century.127 Examples of these headings are: ‘the donation of Hugh from Alsace’ (traditio Hugis de Alsacia) or ‘the charter of Otacer from Worms’ (kartula otacri de uuormacinse).128 Roman numerals were added in the margin of the cartulary to distinguish the charters from each other, or to 122 123

124

125 126

127 128

Stengel, ‘Fuldensia ii’, pp. 155–62; Hummer, ‘Family cartulary?’, p. 648. Heydenreich, Fuldaer Cartular, p. 39; Heinemeyer, ‘Ein Fragment’, 130; Hummer, ‘Family cartulary’, p. 648. Not in the case of the Alsace compilation and Lage X, the so-called Rheingau/Nahegau section. Stengel, ‘Fuldensia ii’, pp. 156, 161. Concerning the dating of the index, see Stengel and Semmelmann, ‘Fuldensia iv’, p. 229, and Stengel, ‘Fuldensia ii’, pp. 175–77. Heydenreich, Fuldaer Cartular, p. 39; Spilling, ‘Angelsächsische Schrift’, pp. 47–98. The irst example is from Marburg, Hessisches Staatsarchiv, K 424, fol. 3r; the second fol. 17r.

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Hrabanus, part I distinguish groups of charters from each other.129 Later updates often lacked a heading and Roman numeral.130 Like the other extant cartularies and copybooks dating to the same period, Fulda’s cartulary is a witness of a transformation in recordkeeping and archiving memory that took place between the ninth and eleventh centuries, irst east of the Rhine, then from the tenth century also in the west.131 Ecclesiastical recipients increasingly monopolised the documentation of property transfers.This afected the ways in which the contracts were written down and archived. While in Fulda’s early days, charters of gifts were drafted by local scribes on behalf of the author of the transaction, monastic scribes took over this task in the course of the late eighth and ninth centuries, frequently writing up charters in the monastery itself. In addition, making and keeping these records became an integral part of organising the institutional memory of the monastery, of which the cartulary itself is an example. The compilation of Fulda’s cartulary started in the years 824–830, in which Hrabanus also arranged the making of the lists of monks and books, discussed above.132 It needs to be considered against the background of Hrabanus’ reform and the abbot’s wish to bring order to his administration. Arranging the transactions geographically, even if implicitly, and adding headings that often speciied the location and the benefactors concerned, facilitated the use of the cartulary as an administrative tool and helped to acquire an overview of the monastic property. In spite of these aids, the cartulary was nevertheless only easy to use for the monks of Fulda themselves, who knew the people and places mentioned in the charters copied, in particular the scribes who were trained to aid the monastery’s administration. Outside Fulda and out of the hands of these professionals, the cartulary will have been of little use. The most likely candidate to have supervised the whole project was Rudolf, a learned monk, whose closeness to Hrabanus and his expertise as a legal specialist, writing up charters in the periods 812–815 and 822–824 and thereafter only in the case of important transactions, made him perfect for the job.133 129 130

131

132 133

Hummer, ‘Family cartulary’, p. 651;Vaupel, ‘Chartulare’, pp. 21–3. An exception seems to have been an update in the Frisia booklet, which was preceded by a title, though one written in the same ink as the transaction rather than red ink. Heinemeyer, ‘Ein Fragment’, 129 and table 1. For possible explanations of this transformation, see Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance, pp. 98–107; DeClercq, ‘Originals and cartularies’, p. 162; Metz, Das karolingische Reichsgut, pp. 44–6; Dopsch, Wirtschaftsentwicklung, vol. i, pp. 101–11. See also Erhart and Hollenstein (eds.), Mensch und Schrift. Hummer, ‘Family cartulary’, p. 647. Stengel, ‘Fuldensia i’, pp. 27–146; Sandmann, ‘Wirkungsbereiche’, p. 707.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda Possibly it was in the same period that an inventory of the monastery’s property was made, most commonly known by its German name, Güterverzeichnis, or TAF 44, as it was edited by Dronke as chapter 44 of his Traditiones et antiquitates Fuldenses (1844).134 The text is transmitted to us through the Codex Eberhardi (on fols. 142v–145v) among many other property inventories from the ninth to the twelfth centuries, varying from Urbare, which list property rights and the services and payments due by the monastery’s tenants, to short notices concerning Fulda’s possessions.The Güterverzeichnis that is discussed here was composed some time between 820 and 845 and also seems to have had its roots in Hrabanus’ programme of internal reorganisation. It lists the monastery’s immoveable property, often with great precision, describing the number and status of the tenants who farmed the land, the livestock and sometimes even a farm’s tools and a church’s treasures.135 Nevertheless, it mainly focuses on Fulda’s possessions in southern Germany, from the river Werra in the north to the Danube in the south, and does not include the taxes and rights attached to the enlisted estates. Possibly the inventory was made under the direct supervision of Rudolf, who visited the region in the second half of the 830s. His trips to fetch the relics from Rome, to be discussed in the next chapter, may well have had an administrative aim as well.136 The list deserves mentioning here, for, besides the fact that it can be considered a speciic self-representation of the Fulda community, namely a snapshot of its possessions in southern Germany at a speciic moment in time, it also helps to better understand the meanings and aims of Fulda’s cartulary (which the Güterverzeichnis complemented) and Hrabanus’ reforms. In fact, I think that there once existed similar lists for the other regions, and if not, that it had been Hrabanus’ intention to make them, for only together were the cartulary and the Güterverzeichnis useful tools for the administration and defence of the monastery’s property.The cartulary records names: those of the benefactors, of the regions and villages where the property they donated was situated, of the mancipia that were tied to the land and of the people who witnessed the transactions. The Güterverzeichnis lists the monastery’s resources, registering the number of mansions, mills, families, horses, cows, pigs, meadows, churches with tithes, to give a few examples.137 Like the Güterverzeichnis, the cartulary provided its users with insight into the scope of Fulda’s vast possessions, which Ulrich Weidinger on 134

135 136 137

TAF, No. 44, pp. 125–9. Werner-Hasselbach, Güterverzeichnisse, discusses this inventory and the problems of its dating at pp. 27–41. For a map of the region covered by TAF 44, see Weidinger, Wirtschaftsstruktur Fulda, p. 130. Werner-Hasselbach, Güterverzeichnisse, p. 41. Morris, ‘The problems of property’, p. 330.

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Hrabanus, part I the basis of TAF 44 estimated to have comprised some 5,500 farmsteads, 26,000 morgen arable land (approximately 50,000 acres), 4,000 cart-loads (carradae) of grassland and 50 vineyards by the time the cartulary was initiated, spread over an area that extended into Frisia, Westfalen and Saxony in the north and Alsace and Bavaria in the south, and with a concentration in Rheinhessen, Mainfranken and Thuringia.138 Nevertheless, the cartulary was intended to be brought up to date, as is shown by the blank pages after each booklet, which were later illed with new donations and old gifts that earlier had not been included. In addition, it aimed to be more than an orderly survey of Fulda’s properties and rights, as the Güterverzeichnis had been. Its purpose was to preserve Fulda’s rich collection of private charters and the memory of the monastery’s benefactors, who had donated their possessions in exchange for monastic prayer and care for their souls. Placing all the charters together in one cartulary ofered a greater security against possible loss of documents in the expanding archives. Probably because of the existence of the cartulary, the original private charters were in the end neglected and possibly even destroyed, for they no longer served to prove ownership or rights as time went by and their commemorative function was taken over by the cartulary.139 Already by the middle of the twelfth century, when Eberhard was compiling his two-volume cartulary, many of the original charters were no longer there and the monk had to rely to a large extent on the ninth-century compilation to reconstruct the more distant past of Fulda’s property.140 Contrary to the Güterverzeichnis, which records Fulda’s possessions in southern Germany in the 820s very precisely and thereby deines Fulda in an economic sense as a large landowner and ‘multinational’, the cartulary focuses on the social context of Fulda’s lordship and names all the people involved, from members of the supra-regional elite who granted possessions or witnessed those of their subordinates, down to the farmers who ploughed the monastery’s lands. It is structured around the geographical framework of the gau, the benefactors, their families and acquaintances, who through their gifts entered long-standing relationships with the monks, and the abbots, whose terms of oice often determined the chronological division of the charters in the cartulary. The names of the benefactors had a prominent place in the headings that introduced the contents of the subsequent charters; the remembrance 138 139 140

Weidinger, Wirtschaftsstruktur Fulda, pp. 118–19. Stengel and Semmelmann, ‘Fuldensia iv’, pp. 243, 251; Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance, p. 86. Concerning his use of (copies of) charters, see Codex Eberhardi i, fol. 1v, p. 2 and vol. ii, fol. 158r, p. 302. See also Roller, Eberhard von Fulda, pp. 50f.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda of these patrons seems to have been an important aim of the cartulary, together with their relatives, friends, neighbours and lords who witnessed their transactions. The cartulary also remembered the abbots under whose leadership the lands, goods and rights came into the monastery’s possession and who represented the monastery in the contacts with the outside world. Besides the names of the benefactors, the abbots and the witnesses to the transactions, the cartulary carefully listed the names of the subordinate mancipia who tilled the land and the names of their children, while the Güterverzeichnis only records the number of families attached to a certain piece of land (for example, familiae ii). The cartulary’s precision with regard to the recording of the mancipia probably originally served the community for legal claims and administrative purposes. Nevertheless, with the passage of time commemoration came to surpass the legal and administrative uses of the cartulary, whether intentionally or not. The names of the members of Fulda’s familia were integrated in the community’s memory, next to those of Fulda’s abbots, patrons and the benefactors who sought Boniface’s proximity. What makes Fulda’s cartulary so interesting is that it not only deines the monastery’s possessions in relation to the social world of which it was part and relects Fulda’s complex of relations on all levels of society, but it also allows us a glimpse of the importance of certain social groups within this world for Fulda’s self-understanding, in particular the family of Hrabanus Maurus himself. Hrabanus ’ ‘fami ly cartulary ’ The surviving manuscript of Fulda’s cartulary is composed of ten quaternions, one ternion, a double page and two single leaves. The irst quaternion records transactions of property in Alsace. It did not originally precede the following sections and may have been added to them only in the tenth century.141 The following part consists of eight quaternions and a ternion. It concerns the Wormsgau. It is followed by another quaternion, with a double page and two single leaves added to it, and it is this part that deserves our special attention. Those who compiled the cartulary considered this section to be an intrinsic, though separate, part of the section devoted to the Wormsgau. After having numbered the subsections of the Wormsgau volume i–ix, they numbered this section X, which for that reason has been named 141

Hummer, ‘Family cartulary’, pp. 647–8.

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Hrabanus, part I Lage X by Stengel. Nevertheless, Lage X (fols. 75r–82v) was not entered immediately after the Wormsgau section. Initially, the scribes left four pages empty (for updates) and started Lage X on a new quaternion, which shows that this section was distinct from the others, of which it nevertheless was also part.142 In addition, the compilers structured it differently. While the reigns of Fulda’s abbots determined the order of the preceding sections, albeit implicitly, and all charters in it are numbered individually with a Roman numeral, the irst part of Lage X, fols. 75r– 79r, is divided into ive subsections, each marked with a Roman numeral. As Hans Hummer has recently argued, unlike the other two, the Alsace and Wormsgau ones, this section did not cover a speciic geographical area, although all transactions listed in it concerned property in Mainz, the lower Neckar and the lower Nahe valley. As it happens, Lage X is structured around several interrelating groups, and one of them concerns the family of Abbot Hrabanus.143 The irst subsection consists of four charters, all written one after the other. They are bound together by their connection to Walaram, Hrabanus’ father, whose name was singled out in the headings, for he was the most prominent benefactor. It concerns (in this order) his deathbed grant of the family church in Hofheim and property in Oppenheim, Dienheim, Mainz and Rudelsheim in May 802.144 It is followed by Walaram’s donation, and that of his wife Waltrata, of their family residence in Mainz, though they reserved the usufruct for themselves and their son Hrabanus.145 The next charter records Walaram’s and Waltrata’s grant of Waltrata’s estate in Dromersheim, which like the preceding one took place on 25 May 788 and was most likely related to Hrabanus’ oblation in Fulda.146 The last gift to be recorded was a gift by Walaram of a mansion and vineyard in Schwabenheim in 763.147 The second subsection is started on a new page, even though there was still some space on the preceding page, which indicates its distinct status though at the same time it was considered to belong to the previous subsection. It concerns one charter and records the transaction of Hadurich, a well-to-do local igure. The following four charters, divided into three parts by Roman numerals, are written down immediately following on Hadurich’s gift.148 Together, this cluster of ive charters (divided over subsections ii–v) represents a social group tied around Hadurich, Gerolt

142 144

145 147

143 Ibid., p. 653. Ibid., pp. 654–5; Stengel, ‘Fuldensia ii’, p. 157. UBF, No. 283, pp. 410–12. I have borrowed the phrase ‘deathbed grant’ from Hummer, ‘Family cartulary’, p. 660. 146 UBF, No. 177, pp. 271–2. UBF, No. 178, pp. 272–3; De Jong, In Samuel’s Image, pp. 75–7. UBF, No. 38, pp. 65–6. 148 CDF, No. 377 (Gerolt), p. 171.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda and Berahtricho, three prominent local igures. Between 803 and 818 Hadurich frequently headed witness lists in cases of property transaction around Dienheim and the Rheingau, an indication of his high social status and possibly also of an oicial position as hundredman (centenarius).149 In the same period, Gerolt and Berahtricho appear regularly in the witness lists as well, Gerolt occasionally as the irst witness.150 The charters in which these men appeared as witnesses were included in the Wormsgau section of the cartulary or the Grabfeld volume; their gifts to Fulda, however, were recorded in Lage X. Then there follows a second group of charters (fols. 79v–82v), again on a new page while the preceding one was almost empty.The irst three are numbered individually (i, ii, iii), just like the transactions recorded in the Wormsgau part. It concerns gifts from Ruodbald, Ratbot and Abun, an ancilla Dei, together with her brother Hadupraht and the son of her sister, Elbrich.151 Ratbot may need to be identiied with the wealthy local who, through his kin – Count Gerold, the brother of Charlemagne’s wife Hildegard – was connected to the upper echelons of society. His name frequently appears in witness lists near to that of Count Hatto, Walaram and his son Guntram.152 Ruodbald was a local igure from the Worms area, who acted as witness to transactions which also involved Hadurich.153 Like the irst four charters in Lage X, this cluster of charters emanates from a network that was closely connected to Hrabanus’ father. Taking all the charters that were copied on fols. 75r–82v together, two networks come to the fore: one connected to Hrabanus’ father Walaram and two other prominent local men, Radbod and Hadupraht; the other to Hadurich, Gerolt and Berahtricho. These two networks were linked through igures that moved in both circles and their shared interest in the Middle Rhine region where the family estates of Hrabanus were also located. The identiication of these two networks is the work of Hans Hummer, who convincingly demonstrated that the transactions recorded in Lage X were written down not solely as evidence of the monastery’s property rights in a certain region, but also for their relation to a cluster of social groups, all tied to Hrabanus’ family.154

149

150

151 152 154

For Hadurich as witness leader, see: CDF, Nos. 212, 228–9, 252–3, 318, 320, 362, pp. 113, 119–20, 130, 154, 169. Innes, State and Society, pp. 127–8. Berahtricho: CDF, Nos. 218, 229, 318, 379, pp. 115, 120, 154, 172. Gerolt: CDF, Nos. 245, 295, 310, 328, pp. 351–2, 422, 428–9, 434. UBF, Nos. 63 (Rhuodbald) and 185 (Ratbot), pp. 110–11, 279–80; CDF, No. 214, p. 113. Innes, State and Society, p. 150. 153 CDF, Nos. 252–3, p. 130. Hummer, ‘Family cartulary’, pp. 654–5.

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Hrabanus, part I Shortly after the section had been completed four more entries were added, by three diferent hands, immediately following on the copy of Abun’s gift. These were written not in the insular script of the main hand, but in the Caroline minuscule.The irst three concerned donations made by Hrabanus’ brother, Guntram. They were probably all entered in the cartulary shortly after 841.155 The irst records the transaction of Guntram’s landed property to Fulda on 20 May 841. Immediately upon donating his property, Guntram received it back again from the monks as precarial grant, with some extras, which is recorded in the next entry by the same hand as the irst, shortly after the transactions had actually taken place.156 The next entry records Guntram’s donation of family property in Hofheim to Fulda, on 30 August 834. All three charters were written by Rudolf of Fulda, who used to be one of Fulda’s regular charter writers, but now was only asked in this capacity in the case of special transactions.157 The fact that he wrote the charters, ‘on the orders of my lord abbot Hrabanus’, indicates that these were special cases.158 Rudolf also served as notary to the donations of the above-mentioned Gerolt and Gozholt, another member of this same circle, which is another indication of the underlying particular network of people for the composition of Lage X. The last transaction concerns an undated gift from another Guntram, probably the count’s son and Hrabanus’ nephew, who was also a member of the Fulda community as explained above and apparently in the possession of some family land.The charter was drawn up some time during Thioto’s abbacy and lists donations in Mainz and Simmern in the Nahegau, areas where Count Guntram had also held property, granted to Fulda in 841.159 What is interesting about the donation of Guntram’s property in Hofheim is that the transaction was also copied into the Wormsgau section, on fol. 50v. This version is much more elaborate and formal than the one included in Lage X (fol. 82r), and is dated 836 instead of 834. In it, Guntram presented himself as count, which probably was a reward of Louis the Pious for loyal service in February 834, when the emperor, who had been deposed by means of a public penance the year before, was freed from custody. Guntram seems to have been one of his liberators and in return was granted the honour of a countship.160 The author of the charter modelled the document on a royal charter and used the 155 156

157 159 160

Ibid., pp. 658–9. Ibid., p. 658. The charters are edited in CDF, Nos. 534–5, pp. 237–9. See also Goldberg, Struggle, pp. 100–1. 158 Sandmann, ‘Wirkungsbereiche’, p. 707. Marburg, Hessisches Staatsarchiv, K 424, fol. 50v. CDF, No. 604, p. 271. Hummer, ‘Family cartulary?’, p. 660. Innes, State and Society, pp. 201–2.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda same invocation formula as the one used by Louis the Pious’ chancery.161 The version included in Lage X, however, seems to have been based on another charter, as the invocation is diferent.162 While the document copied into the Wormsgau section was probably written down for legal and administrative purposes and to present an image of Guntram in his new position of count, the version in Lage X seems to have been recorded for more intimate use. The compilers of the cartulary considered this last version to belong to the last section of the Wormsgau volume that was set up around Hrabanus’ direct kin. Together with the other three charters it formed the tail end of a family history that had started with Walaram’s grants, marking the beginning of a long relationship between the family and the monastery, in the control of which they placed the care of their souls and which they made into a powerful ally. Nevertheless, the composers were, of course, not aware of this end when they entered the charters into the cartulary. A couple of years after the compilation of Lage X the grant of the family’s possessions by Hrabanus’ brother Guntram was copied into the section, followed by Fulda’s counter-gift.The context of these gifts and their recording was the political crisis after the death of Louis the Pious, when insecurity about which of his sons to support made local landowners look for strategies to safeguard their possessions from coniscation in case of backing the wrong man. In drawing up the transaction Guntram and Hrabanus may have anticipated Louis the German’s acquisition of the region east of the Rhine after the king’s important victory over one of Lothar’s allies at Ries in May 841; the brothers ensured that though the lands that Guntram donated to Fulda were on both sides of the Rhine, he only got property west of the Rhine back as a precarial grant.163 Nevertheless, the political crisis changed the course of both Hrabanus’ and his brother’s careers. Like Hrabanus, Guntram supported Lothar, and his position indeed seems to have sufered a severe blow when Louis the German became the region’s new ruler. After 842 Guntram disappeared from the political stage, with his name no longer to be found among the names of witnesses and benefactors in charters.164 Guntram’s grant of 841 and Fulda’s counter-gift were probably entered into the cartulary shortly after the transactions had taken place, under the supervision of Hrabanus. 161 162

163

164

Heydenreich, ‘Urkunde 834’, 390; Heydenreich, Fuldaer Cartular, pp. 51–2. CDF, No. 487, p. 215. Heydenreich, ‘Urkunde 834’, 390–1; Tangl, ‘Urkunde 834’, 527; Innes, State and Society, pp. 200–2. This is clearly visible on the map of the landed property of Hrabanus’ family in Staab, ‘Wann wurde Hrabanus Mönch’, p. 88. Also: Goldberg, Struggle, p. 101; Innes, State and Society, pp. 64–8, 208–9. Innes, State and Society, pp. 208, 212.

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Hrabanus, part I By then Hrabanus may no longer have been abbot of Fulda – he retired some time between 20 August 841 and the spring of 842165 – but even after his withdrawal he remained in the near vicinity of his beloved monastery and its scriptorium. Guntram’s donation of family property in Hofheim in 834 or 836 was entered in the cartulary in the same period, although by a diferent scribe. The person who supervised the compilation of Lage X must have wanted to ile Guntram’s donations together. Some three decades later, another Fulda scribe added a gift by a certain Guntram, probably the other Guntram’s son, Hrabanus’ nephew who was also a member of the Fulda community, to the donations of Guntram ‘senior’, where it belonged in the eyes of the monks. The undated donation by Hrabanus’ nephew, who died in 877, ‘on behalf of my salvation and that of my relatives’ (in elimosinam meam meorumque propinquorum) may well have taken place at the end of his life, as Hummer suggested, originating from a desire to secure the salvation of his soul and those of his kin.166 The reason to dedicate a section to the grants of Hrabanus’ family and their friends was surely Hrabanus’ personal concern for his family’s interests, possessions and past (see Figure 5). He still enjoyed the usufruct of the family residence in Mainz, a gift by his parents in 788, and he may well have looked after the other family possessions once they became part of his monastery’s property.167 In addition, the two charters of 788, in which Hrabanus appeared as principal witness, were in all likelihood drawn up on the occasion of his oblation to Fulda. These charters were about him as much as they were about his family and its relationship with Fulda. The order in which the transactions were entered, starting with the grant of the family church in 802 and from there going back in time to end with Walaram’s gift of 763, was possibly related to the order in which the charters were kept in Fulda’s archive. The inclusion of the following charters can be explained by their relation to a cluster of social groups in which Hrabanus’ father Walaram had had a dominant position. Why Lage X focused on these particular two groups, while we know that Walaram had been involved in various local networks in the Mainz and Worms area, remains unclear. It would be worthwhile to explore further the kind of relations that existed between Hrabanus’ father and the other local igures mentioned as benefactors or witnesses in the charters copied into Fulda’s cartulary, their position in the localities, their possessions and the networks of which they were part. In addition, a further 165 166 167

Bigott, Ludwig, pp. 90–1. CDF, No. 604, p. 271; Hummer, ‘Family cartulary’, p. 661. Hummer, ‘Family cartulary’, pp. 661–4.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda step would be to investigate if there are more of these networks hidden behind the many names in Fulda’s cartulary, with which Fulda, one of its members or a faction within the community had had a special bond.The later updates of this section were prompted by the political circumstances which caused Hrabanus’ brother to secure his family’s possessions. His gifts to Fulda were neatly copied near those of his father, probably under the supervision of Hrabanus. The grant and subsequent death of his son, Guntram ‘junior’, formed the tailpiece of this family history. Hrabanus’ ‘family cartulary’ reveals the close ties between monasteries, as bases of family power, and the networks of benefactors on which they depended and of which they were part.168 In addition, it brings to the fore the complexity of Fulda’s self-portraits as they represented several interests and groups; not only factions within the community itself, but also groups that extended well beyond the conines of the monastery. Analysing the Kassel redaction of the Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi in Chapter 2 and Fulda’s version of the Chronicon Laurissense breve in Chapter 4, we have already seen how a circle of monks clustered around Hrabanus left its mark on Fulda’s collective memory. Most likely, the ‘Uuolaram’ and the ‘Waltrat’ listed in the Annales necrologici under the years 802 and 807 need to be identiied with Hrabanus’ parents, as argued above. Their inclusion in the commemorative lists that otherwise mostly registered Fulda monks indicates their special status for the community. Fulda’s cartulary is another example of the fact that certain groups determined the ways in which memory was recorded and a community’s identity was formed. In this particular case, it again concerned a group, or a cluster of groups, that through Walaram and his son Guntram was related to Fulda’s ifth and most famous abbot. Apart from the ways in which local families dominated life inside religious communities, Hrabanus’ cartulary also relects the impact of monasteries on the religious means of (self-)deinition of social groups in the countryside. As explained above, Hrabanus Maurus’ family owned a church on their rural estate in Hofheim, which was a focus of family memory and a mark of their membership of the local elite. Here, Hrabanus’ parents, and possibly other members of the family, were buried, as were his brother and his brother’s wife. As abbot, Hrabanus would give further shape to the transaction and the incorporation of his family’s ‘(after)life insurance’ into Fulda’s possession with the disposition of relics of Boniface, Fulda’s patron saint, in the Hofheim church.169 A plausible occasion was the donation of the family’s other possessions in Hofheim 168 169

Hummer, Politics and Power. See below, p. 225.

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Hrabanus, part I by his brother Guntram in 834 or 836.The church continued to function as a memorial for the family, commemorating Walaram and Waltrata and serving as a burial place for Guntram and his wife Ottruda; their graves were adorned with epitaphs written by Hrabanus Maurus himself.170 The sources discussed in this chapter originate from Hrabanus Maurus’ reorganisation of the monastery and his wish to gain insight into Fulda’s possessions, moveable and immoveable, and the number of monks. They deined Fulda in the sense that they record the names of the monks who inhabited the monastery and its cellae, the names of places and regions where the monastery held property, and the titles of the literary heritage and monastic traditions on which the monks based their self-understanding. They reveal, moreover, the responsibilities and tasks that determined the monks’ rhythm of daily life and that bound them together as a thriving enterprise of prayer, landholding and education, while at the same time driving them apart, forcing most of the monks to live outside the mother convent in cellae scattered over the countryside and pushing each monk to occupy a certain position in the monastery’s hierarchy. In deining what they were, they also lay bare what they wished to become, what they wanted to possess and reform. The fragments of the library catalogue reveal a deep concern to build up a centre of learning, as well as a pursuit for completeness, creating an ideal environment to study Holy Scripture, dogmatic issues and monasticism’s rich heritage. In the course of time, the lists of monks and the cartulary came to be tools for the commemoration of the people involved and for the remembrance of the monastery’s past, and thereby determined the community’s memory and self. The next chapter will deal with the narrative sources that were written under Hrabanus’ direction and some of the churches he built and/or enriched with precious relics and decorated reliquaries. In a diferent way, these all relect upon and contributed to Fulda’s identity. 170

Hrabanus, Carmina, No. 86, p. 238; Gockel, Königshöfe, pp. 41–2, footnote 42.

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Chapter 7

HR A BA NU S, PA RT II: SI N S, SAI N TS A N D T H E S TA BIL IT Y OF THE REALM

The 830s, according to contemporary chroniclers, were a decade lamented for its poor harvests, epidemics, battles and rebellions, as well as celebrated for the arrival of holy treasures in places that earlier had been deprived of such sacredness.1 During these years, Hrabanus collected the relics of some forty Roman martyrs. According to Rudolf, the monk who wrote down Hrabanus’ relic translations in his Miracula sanctorum in Fuldenses ecclesias translatorum (‘Miracles of the saints who were brought to the churches of Fulda’), the abbot also brought together holy remains from other parts of the world, though which saints these concerned, he did not explain.2 Besides the translation of the martyr Venantius from Rimini in 836, which he also included, Rudolf conined the descriptions of the relic translations in his Miracula sanctorum to the acquisition of Roman relics that arrived in Fulda in four loads: one in the late spring of 835, one in April 836 and two in 838, in early spring and the summer. Hrabanus brought the holy remains to some of Fulda’s churches, where he placed them in skilfully decorated reliquaries. He wrote tituli to remember his actions and to identify the saints who had travelled so far to assist the people of Germania in their struggle for salvation. In addition, the abbot had wall paintings enforce his story with those spectators who grasped both the meaning of the Latin words and the symbolic signiicance of the igures that decorated the walls. In accordance with a generally accepted habit of using imagery in the education of the illiterate, he possibly also drew on them to instruct the minds of those ignorant in the Latin language and the craft of reading.3 To gain a better understanding of the impact of Fulda’s cult-sites on the surrounding landscape and Hrabanus’ ambitions for his monastery, I 1 2 3

See, for example, Rudolf ’s Miracula sanctorum, Einhard’s Translatio and the ARF. Rudolf, Miracula sanctorum, c. 14, p. 340. Famous in this respect is the letter of Gregory the Great, Registrum, b. xi, No. 13.

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Hrabanus, part II shall include their remnants in my analysis of how Fulda represented itself in this period – the tituli, the wall paintings, other archaeological material – as far as they are still extant. Thereafter I shall discuss the text that recorded the creation of these cult-sites for posterity, Rudolf ’s Miracula sanctorum, for the document itself ofers another, equally interesting picture of the monastic community. Subsequently I shall analyse Candidus’ Vita Aegil. Written in the 840s, during the same few years as the Miracula sanctorum, it also relects on Fulda’s identity; this time not from the perspective of the neighbouring countryside and its cult-sites, but from the inside of the mother convent, where the interior life of the monks was discussed. Nevertheless, what both sources have in common is their deep concern for correction and reform and an awareness of Fulda’s accountability for the well-being of the Carolingian realm. Hrabanus’ re l ic translati on s With his relic translations Hrabanus responded to a general revival of relic translations in the Frankish Empire in the second quarter of the ninth century, starting in the highest echelons of Frankish society.4 In 826 Hilduin, arch-chaplain of Louis the Pious and abbot of some of the most prominent Carolingian royal abbeys, had obtained the body of St Sebastian, a victim of Diocletian’s persecutions in the late third century. Sebastian’s translation from Rome to St Médard (Soissons) was the irst time in almost ifty years that a pope consented to the transfer of a martyr’s body to the north, an event the annalist of the Annales regni Francorum considered worthwhile to record.5 The following year Einhard, another member of the royal entourage and abbot of, among others, Michelstadt and Seligenstadt, acquired the bodies of the third-century martyrs Marcellinus and Peter, according to his own account through cunning and guile and, most importantly, the support of the saints themselves. He recorded the famous theft in the Translatio et Miracula SS. Marcellini et Petri.6 This text served as a model for many of the subsequent translation accounts, including Rudolf ’s Miracula sanctorum.7

4

5

6

7

As Rudolf explained in his introduction to the Miracula sanctorum. See also Smith, ‘Old saints, new cults’, pp. 335–9; Angenendt, Heilige und Reliquien, pp. 149–66. ARF, a. 826, p. 170. For an overview of papal policy concerning relic translations and the Carolingian want for Roman relics, see Smith, ‘Old saints, new cults’, pp. 317–34; Hermann-Mascard, Reliques, pp. 26–41. Important studies of this relic translation and text include Heinzelmann, ‘Einhards “Translatio Marcellini et Petri”’, pp. 269–98; Smith, ‘“Emending evil ways”’, pp. 189–223; Smith, ‘Einhard’, 55–77. To give some examples: Rudolf, Miracula sanctorum, introduction, p. 329 – Einhard, Translatio, introduction, p. 239; Miracula, c. 5, p. 333 – Translatio, b. i, c. 12, p. 244; Miracula, c. 5, p. 334 – Translatio,

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda Others, including Hrabanus, abbot of an important royal abbey himself and moving in the same circles as both courtiers, imitated the initiatives taken by Hilduin and Einhard and sent servants to Rome to fetch relics or awaited the yearly visits of relic traders. Each spring these professionals who specialised in holy commodities crossed the Alps and called in at religious communities to sell their wares.8 The buyers had several motives to acquire relics: private piety; the need to supply newly founded religious communities with patron saints; and Carolingian legislation, which obliged each altar to contain relics and each oath to be sworn near holy remains.9 As I shall show shortly, however, Hrabanus did not use his relics to consecrate new churches or to provide saintless basilicas with new patrons.10 Many of the holy treasures Hrabanus brought to existing churches. In his Miracula sanctorum Rudolf mentioned six of them: Fulda’s basilica, where Hrabanus located the majority of the holy remains; the church of Mary on the Frauenberg, directly to the north of the monastery; the church of John the Baptist on Johannesberg to the south-west of Fulda near the Giesel, a branch of the river Fulda; the church of St Peter on the Ugesberg, 3 km east of Fulda;11 and further away from Fulda, the churches of Holzkirchen and Rasdorf.12 St Mary, St John and St Peter were all satellite churches of the monastery located within the circle of four miles that demarcated Carloman’s gift to Boniface and Sturmi in the 740s. At Frauenberg Boniface used to stay during his visits to Fulda, and here Ratger spent the remaining years of his life after his return from exile. In fact, the deposed abbot will have witnessed the advent of the relics, which arrived shortly before his death in December 835.13 It was he who had built the church, dedicated in 809, where Hrabanus housed the relics of Saints Alexander and Fabianus.14 Ratger had also built the church on the Johannesberg, dedicated in 812, which Hrabanus enriched

8 9

10

11

12 13 14

b. i, c. 14, p. 245; Miracula, c. 6, p. 334 – Translatio, b. ii, c. 8, p. 247. David Appleby, in his ‘The Ark of the Covenant reliquary’, 424, footnote 19, has come to the same results. For other relic translations that Einhard’s text inluenced, see Geary, Furta Sacra, pp. 143–50, and Heinzelmann, Translationsberichte. Geary, Furta Sacra, pp. 51–68. Capitulare Aquisgranense (a. 801–813), MGH Cap. 1, No. 70, p. 170; Concilium Moguntinense (a. 813), MGH Conc. 2, p. 270; Capitulare legi Ribuariae additum (a. 803), MGH Cap. 1, No. 41, c. 67, p. 118; See Smith, ‘Einhard’, pp. 55–77; Smith, ‘Old saints, new cults’, pp. 329–30; Hermann-Mascard, Reliques, pp. 179–80; Geary, Furta Sacra, pp. 40–50; Schiefer, ‘Reliquientranslationen’, pp. 484–97. It would be worthwhile to check other examples as well. In Essen we notice the same: relics there were not used to ill empty churches with patron saints. See Bodarwé, ‘Roman martyrs’, 345–65. It was called Ugesberg until the eleventh century. The irst source to refer to it as ‘Petersberg’ (Mons sancti Petri) is the Vita Bardoni, by Vulculdus p. 325. Rudolf, Miracula sanctorum, cc. 3, 4, 8, 12–14, pp. 332–3, 335, 337–9. The relics were brought to St Mary on 29 July. Rudolf, Miracula sanctorum, c. 3, p. 332. CLb, a. 809, p. 37.

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Hrabanus, part II with the holy remains of the martyr Venantius.15 The Ugesberg was the only hill which did not yet have a church and where Hrabanus had free reign to design his own creation. The churches of Holzkirchen and Rasdorf were even older than the ones on the Johannesberg and Frauenberg. Rasdorf, some 30 km to the north-east of Fulda, lies north of the Rhön near the old road from Frankfurt to Leipzig in the valley of the Grüsselbach. The place had been inhabited at least from the eighth century onwards.16 Around 780 a wealthy family from eastern Francia, relatives of the earlier mentioned Abbess Emhild of Milz, donated the place to Fulda. It was then that the monks built a small monastery there, which they dedicated to John the Baptist and which is mentioned for the irst time in a charter dated 2 May 816.17 Holzkirchen was situated further to the south, along the river Aalbach, a tributary of the Main, 20 km west of Würzburg and some 130 km south of Fulda. Its monastery had been built around the middle of the eighth century by a local count,Troand, and was dedicated to Mary. The count granted Holzkirchen to Charlemagne, and the king then transferred the monastery to Fulda in 775.18 Apart from the church that Hrabanus built on the Ugesberg, all the churches, which he enriched with the holy remains of Roman martyrs, had existed for some decades, if not longer, and already had their own patron saints. Moreover, in all cases Hrabanus did not place the relics inside the church’s altar, as was done when a church was dedicated in those days or an empty altar illed.19 Instead, the abbot placed the holy remains behind the sacred table, in sculpted wooden reliquaries that were decorated with gems, images and metrical tituli inscribed in silver and golden letters, probably towering above the altar, visible for the community that gathered in the choir to celebrate the liturgy. The reliquaries would have been detached from the ground, easy to lift and carry around during processions when the occasion demanded it. What was their function and meaning, besides protecting the holy contents from dust and decay? What did Hrabanus hope to achieve? To gain a better understanding of the ideas that underlay the relic translations and the abbot’s creations I want to examine two relatively well documented examples, namely the Ark of the Covenant reliquary and the church on the Ugesberg. Both are described in the Miracula sanctorum, but are also testiied in other sources, textual or material. They endorse Rudolf ’s 15

16 18 19

CLb, a. 812, p. 38. For the patronage of John the Evangelist, see Köchling-Dietrich, ‘Die AndreasKirche’, 27. Sturm, ‘Rasdorf ’, 5–6. 17 CDF, No. 323, p. 156. MGH DKar. 1, No. 106, pp. 150–1; UBF, No. 73, pp. 131–7. Sheerin, ‘Church ordo’, 304–16; Angenendt, ‘Zur Ehre der Altäre erhoben’, 221–44.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda characterisation of the abbot as someone whose ‘mind was always anxious to put into order those things which concern the divine cult’ and as a great teacher above all, who knew how to employ the media at his disposal – word, image and relics – to teach the principles of the Christian faith.20 Both the reliquary and the church relect Hrabanus’ ideas about the destination of his community and give us a sense of the impact that his monastery will have had on its surrounding landscape. A re l iquary and a church: re f le c ti on s of F ul da as the E C C L E S I A Compared to Hrabanus’ other reliquaries, the Ark of the Covenant reliquary is rather elaborately described; irst by Rudolf in his Miracula and then, in the early tenth century, by the compiler of the Gesta abbatum, who listed it among Hrabanus’ contributions to Fulda’s well-being. The reliquary, made out of wood and covered with gold, was shaped as the Ark of the Covenant with cherubim, handles and rings and a portable candelabrum made of gold.21 It must have been an exceptional piece of craftsmanship. David Appleby has unravelled the diferent layers of understanding of the reliquary, making use of Hrabanus’ De institutione clericorum and his commentaries on the historical book of the Old Testament, and has convincingly demonstrated that Hrabanus used the Ark of the Covenant reliquary to express his belief in the position of the community of Fulda within salvation history.The reliquary needed to be understood as a signum, a sign or igure that led the beholder’s mind to a higher truth and that preigured the Christian ecclesia.The Old Covenant, which the ark signiied, referred to the new promise of salvation; the laws of the Israelites, which the ark contained, to the grace made possible through the sacriice of God’s son; and the Levites, who looked after the ark, to the Christian clergy. Finally, the procession of the ark into the temple symbolised the arrival of relics in modern churches and the advent of Christ accompanied by his saints at the End of Times.22 Appleby concludes: ‘[Hrabanus’] Ark of the Covenant reliquary symbolized the continuity between old and new dispensations, the gradual expansion of the Church in the interim between the Passion and the Second Advent, and

20

21 22

‘Mens eius ad ea disponenda quae ad cultum divinum pertinent semper erat intenta.’ Rudolf, Miracula sanctorum, p. 330. Rudolf, Miracula sanctorum, c. 3, p. 333; Gesta abbatum, p. 273. See Appleby, ‘The Ark of the Covenant reliquary’, 435–43. Concerning Hrabanus’ understanding of the ark as a particular igura, see Hrabanus Maurus, In honorem sanctae crucis, C 11, p. 97, and also Becht-Jördens, ‘Litterae illuminatae’, p. 341; Markus, Signs and Meanings.

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Hrabanus, part II the connection between Fulda and the transcendent end of all historical development.’23 The church of St Peter, today called Liobakirche, also contained a story that could only be revealed through ‘the eyes of the mind’. It lay on the Ugesberg, a basalt hill with steep rock faces and thick forests, but also with an excellent view from the top (valde conspicuam in monte excelso), which probably explains why Hrabanus chose to build a church here, no matter the challenges involved.24 The result was an aisled basilica with a crypt underneath the choir. Part of the crypt, including the original wall paintings, is still extant. The rest of the church dates to the Romanesque, gothic and baroque periods.25 Just like the reliquary, the building was not simply a material artefact, but carried deeper meanings. It relected particular ideas about the position of the church and that of the community to which it belonged in the wider context of the universal ecclesia and its, seemingly, inevitable progression to the End of Times. The entrance of the church on the Ugesberg seems to have been on the south-west side, opposite the high altar. On entering the church, the visitor was immediately drawn to the altar of the Holy Saviour in the choir, the centre of the church and the focus of the liturgy.26 Above the altar in the apse probably two scenes from the gospels igured: Christ’s Ascension and Pentecost. The paintings are no longer there, but the tituli are, as reproduced by the Jesuit Christopher Brouwer in the early seventeenth century in his book on the history of Fulda. To the right of the apse, in the south aisle of the church Hrabanus placed an altar dedicated to the martyrs. This was a top location; from the perspective of the lectionary, from which the Gospels were read, they sat to the right of Christ. The altar in the north aisle was a tribute to the confessors.27 From the aisles two sets of stairs led visitors to the crypt underneath. It consisted of three vaulted niches with a corridor to the front. In the middle was the altar of Mary and the virgins. Above it, one can still see, however vaguely, the image of Mary and two rows of virgins. On both sides of the image, paintings of the announcement of Christ’s birth to the shepherds and the Adoration of the Magi adorn the walls. Both the pictures and the inscriptions point to the coming of the Redeemer.28 23 24 25

26 27 28

Appleby, ‘The Ark of the Covenant reliquary’, 443. Rudolf, Miracula sanctorum, c. 14, p. 339. Claussen, ‘Eine Reliquiennische’, 252; Schwarz, St. Peter. Compare Preusler, ‘Liobakirche’, pp. 239–52. Brouwer, Fuldensium antiquitatum, b. iii, c. 15, pp. 162–3. Only the inscriptions of the altars have survived. Hrabanus Maurus, Carmina, No. 44, p. 211. Ibid.; Schwarz, St. Peter, pp. 12–13.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda In the left niche stood the altar of John the Baptist, the patriarchs and the prophets of the Old Testament. On the ceiling above the altar the Lamb of God was painted, behind the altar the baptised Christ and on the side-walls the angel holding Christ’s clothes and John the Baptist’s predecessors from the Old Testament. Like Mary, they represent the message of Christ’s coming and the promise of salvation. To the right of the altar of Mary, in the other niche, used to be an altar dedicated to the Archangel Michael and the heavenly spirits. Whereas Michael in Eigil’s rotunda was called upon as the guide of the souls of those who had passed away, here he was invoked as representative and leader of the angels, God’s messengers who had brought the word of Christ’s birth, his resurrection and Second Coming and had accompanied him when he ascended to heaven.29 Together the six altars in the church relected salvation history from the time of the patriarchs and prophets to the End of Times; they represented the bodies of All Saints, a novelty in this period.30 Hrabanus’ construction should be read from the bottom upwards. In the crypt Mary, the mother of Christ who had carried and given birth to the Saviour, the patriarchs and prophets led by John the Baptist and the host of angels under the command of Michael referred to the coming of the Saviour and served as the foundation of the church. On the ground level the Saviour ruled with the saints who died after him, the martyrs and confessors.31 Above the main altar, which carried the tokens of Christ’s Ascension and the promise of his Second Coming, the paintings on the walls showed how Christ opens the entrances to the heavenly Jerusalem. Further up, far above the roof of the church, God resided. The monks believed that one day his Kingdom would descend to Earth. Once the church was inished, Hrabanus brought the body of Leoba, Boniface’s cousin, to the basilica. She had lain buried in Fulda’s abbey church since her death in 782, as Boniface had requested.32 Hrabanus must have had good reason to break with the wish of Fulda’s patron saint and to take her remains to the church he had recently built on the Ugesberg. Concerned to protect the integrity of Fulda’s claustrum against female pilgrims, the abbot possibly felt that he could only stimulate

29

30

31 32

Hrabanus Maurus, De universo, b. i, c. 5, col. 28; Hrabanus Maurus, Homiliae, No. 31, col. 58–60. See also LTK, vol. vii, pp. 227–31; Ellger, Michaelskirche, pp. 138–43. Hrabanus Maurus, Carmina, No. 44, p. 211. On All Saints, see: Hrabanus Maurus, Homiliae, Nos. 27, 28, col. 1668–9; Hrabanus Maurus, Martyrologium, p. 11. See also Claussen, ‘Eine Reliquiennische’, 259; Ellard, Master Alcuin, pp. 91, 255. We ind a similar scheme in Hrabanus Maurus, In honorem sanctae crucis, C 5, pp. 59–61. Rudolf, Vita Leobae, c. 21, p. 130.

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Hrabanus, part II Leoba’s cult once the saint was removed from the abbey church.33 I shall return to this below. Leoba’s translation was accompanied by that of the relics of seven female Roman martyrs and the holy remains of Aquila, the husband of Priscilla, whose relics were also included. According to tradition both Aquila and Priscilla had been fellow-workers of the apostle Paul until they died a martyr’s death in Rome.34 Hrabanus placed Leoba behind the altar of Mary in the crypt in a stone ark, covered with wood and decorated with silver and gold. On the upper loor, at about the same position, Hrabanus sited the relics of the female martyrs in a wooden structure behind the main altar.That Leoba was crucial to Hrabanus’ creation is conirmed by the fact that he dedicated the church on the date of her death, 28 September. By putting Leoba behind the altar in the crypt, Hrabanus literally integrated her into the group of virgins that was centred on Mary and elevated Leoba to the status of saint. The presence of Leoba and the female martyrs and their speciic position within the church connected the past of Fulda with the early Christian Church. Leoba, a home-grown saint, intimately connected with the community’s history, represented the monastery through her close connection with Boniface, while the martyrs as heroic witnesses to the faith were a tangible link to the age of persecution. Hrabanus thus used relics of Roman martyrs because they connected the present community of the faithful, who could not enjoy a direct link with the beginning of Christianity through its own past, to the early Christian church. Through Rome’s relics, Fulda became another holy city and another centre of the world.35 D e fi ni ng Ful da and sp reading the c ult of sai nt s Compared to Hrabanus’ other creations, the composition of the church on the Ugesberg was probably distinctive in its coherence, for Hrabanus did not have to reckon with an already existing church with its own arrangement of altars and relics and liturgical practices. Nevertheless, Hrabanus’ tituli and the Miracula sanctorum suggest that Hrabanus’ other cult-sites were also interactive pieces of religious art and exegesis, in which the word, the image, the architectural setting, the incidence of light, the glittering of the precious metal that covered the reliquiaria and the presence 33

34 35

Concerning Leoba’s popularity, see the entry on 28 September in Hrabanus’ Martyrologium, p. 99; Rudolf, Vita Leobae, cc. 22–3, pp. 130–1. Concerning the problems of gender in monastic cultsites, see Smith, ‘Women at the tomb’, pp. 163–80; Schulenburg, ‘Gender’, pp. 353–76. LTK, vol. i, p. 898. See Hrabanus’ poem on the meaning of Rome: Hrabanus Maurus, Carmina, No. 48, p. 213.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda of the saints through their relics urged the beholders to relect upon the position in salvation history of the faithful in general, and of Fulda in particular, and to raise their voices in praise of God. Hrabanus used tituli to guide the behaviour and thoughts of the visitors of his churches and to teach them the basic principles of the Christian faith. To give two examples, to the visitors of the church on the Frauenberg Hrabanus explained: ‘You who enter this temple, ask these patrons to help you with luent prayer.’36 Guests of another church he addressed as follows: ‘Shining in the circle of the sun the beautiful martyr Boniface possesses this altar together with his companions. If you, reader, would like to know their names, look at this painting and read the tituli.’37 Hrabanus’ tituli disclose the identity of the saints whose relics lay buried in the church, or urge the faithful to prostrate themselves or kneel in front of the holy men and women and honour God.38 Moreover, the tituli connected the present with salvation history and could be understood as subtitles to spiritual pilgrimages that directed the people’s experience of moving through the buildings. In addition, they honour the recipient of the holy treasures, Hrabanus himself, and formed an important link between the churches and the abbey that Hrabanus Maurus represented and even became, in a manner of speaking: Fulda.39 Hrabanus made a distinction in how he communicated his messages to his audience. Following Augustine’s De doctrina christiana and Gregory the Great’s Regula pastoralis, he explained in his De institutione clericorum that each audience should be approached diferently.40 He seems to have applied similar distinctions to the cult-sites that he created with word, image, relics and architecture.The abbot wanted to show the highly educated, trained to read beyond the literal and historical meaning of things, that Fulda had a place in the Heavenly Jerusalem.To those who could not grasp the higher signiicance of his creations, Hrabanus mainly succeeded in demonstrating that Fulda had the control of many powerful saints. He moreover taught them in the divine cult. To all, the churches, richly ornamented with paintings, poems, cloths and beautifully decorated reliquaries and illed with the enticing sounds and smells of the liturgy, showed that what they contained was of great value and embodied the holy power of the monastery that owned it. 36

37

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‘Vos quoque qui intrastis templum, istos cum prece fusa / patronos Vobis quaerite in auxilium.’ Carmina, No. 45, p. 212. ‘Clarus in orbe solis martyr Bonifacius istud / obtinet altare cum sociis partier. / Quorum si, lector, tu noscere nomina quaeris, / inspice picturam et relege titulos.’ Brouwer, Fuldensium antiquitatum, b. iii, p. 140. For example, Carmina, Nos. 45, 49, pp. 212, 215; Brouwer, Fuldensium antiquitatum, b. iii, p. 140. Hrabanus Maurus, Carmina, No. 97, pp. 243–4. Hrabanus Maurus, De institutione, cc. 28–39, pp. 574–644.

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Hrabanus, part II Hrabanus chose the places he took the saints carefully. He brought a substantial number of the relics to places that were easily accessible, such as Holzkirchen and Rasdorf. Both places occupied important positions within the organisation of the monastery. Holzkirchen was at the centre of Fulda’s possessions in Lower Francia. Rasdorf lay at the heart of Fulda’s property between the river Fulda and the Thuringian forest.41 Both dependencies were active nuclei in the region, crucial for the administration of the property of Fulda and presumably responsible for the pastoral care in that area, as many of the monks of Fulda who lived there were priests.42 In his Miracula sanctorum Rudolf mentions one of the inhabitants of these dependent houses by name, Eburhart, who served as priest in Holzkirchen in the late 830s and presumably was monk of Fulda, although Rudolf does not mention this explicitly.43 Rudolf narrates how Eburhart read mass in the church of Holzkirchen, when a couple brought in their possessed daughter. Due to the healing powers of the saints, whose relics were placed in a reliquary near the altar, the demon was driven out of the poor woman’s body. Thereupon she confessed her sins to the priest and left the monastery fully cured.44 Apparently, the monastic cell in Holzkirchen held masses that were open to the public, and the monastic clergy was willing to grant local inhabitants from the region pastoral care when needed. Both Holzkirchen and Rasdorf were vital social centres for the region that many people travelled through. As explained above, Rasdorf lay by the old road from Frankfurt to Leipzig, Holzkirchen along the river Aalbach. Here Hrabanus probably reached a larger and diferent audience from that in Fulda itself, where under the inluence of the recent reforms the monks were separated ever more strictly from the world, and lay people only seem to have had access on certain important feast days. On these festive days the monks opened their doors to people from outside and showed them their treasures that otherwise remained in the seclusion of the abbey church. Perhaps the monastic cellae were considered a solution to the problem of guarding the purity of the cloister.These dependencies were at one and the same time part of the monastery and outside the claustrum, the nucleus of the monastery that needed to be protected from worldly inluences. With the help of relics Hrabanus created places of veneration and orthodox Christianity and further deined the territory of Fulda’s sphere of inluence. To a large extent he also did this through the translations 41 43 44

Stengel, Geschichtliche Atlas, p. 47. 42 FW 1, p. 222. See also below, pp. 292–4. ‘Kommentiertes parallelregister’, FW 2.1, MF82, p. 239; FW 1, p. 223. Rudolf, Miracula sanctorum, c. 12, p. 338.

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Hrabanus, part II themselves, which, when possible, paused on the way to their destinations at sites related to Fulda. Their itineraries ran along the threads of Fulda’s web, with Solnhofen at one of its south-eastern fringes. Solnhofen was the irst stop-over of the relics to be mentioned by name by Rudolf in his account of the relic translations, ofering a glimpse of life in one of Fulda’s administrative cells while describing the miracles that took place, proclaiming the value of the saints whose remains were brought to the regions east of the Rhine. It was in Solnhofen that the relic translations were made public and that the ‘media circus’ began; messages were sent to Hrabanus to announce the arrival of the saints, and their relics for the irst time were put on display, henceforth carried on litters for all the people to see and touch. Continuing the journey from Solnhofen, the processions called in at, for example, Bischofsheim, the convent of Leoba where Sturmi also stayed on his way back from Italy, and Hammelburg, a iscus donated to Fulda by Charlemagne in 777.45 Additionally, Hrabanus used relics to strengthen the sacredness and power of this holy web of cult-sites, while at the same time tying them closer to the mother convent. Introducing foreign relics seems to have been part of a strategy to control and reorganise religious life in the region, without breaking of relations with the local families who had donated their proprietary churches to the monastery and had entrusted the commemoration of their dead and the care of their souls into the monks’ hands. It seems that monasteries such as Fulda contributed to the process of Christianisation not so much through baptising pagan peoples, but rather through the ‘pastoralisation’ of its landed property, using saints’ cults as an intermediary to reach the local population as Klaus Nass suggested.46 Bri ng i ng Boniface ’s cult to the out si de wor l d Hrabanus’ stimulus of the cult of Boniface is also important in this respect. Boniface had become Fulda’s most prominent saint, beyond the monastic conines. Hrabanus was the irst abbot of Fulda to distribute relics of the saint to churches outside the monastery. He was probably the one who provided his family’s church in Hofheim, a gift of his father to Fulda, with holy remains of Boniface. When in 838 Hrabanus brought the relics of the martyrs Januarius and Magnus to the church of Holzkirchen, he also placed relics of Boniface there.47 In a hymn, which Hrabanus composed 45 47

Ibid., cc. 7, 11, pp. 335, 337. 46 See above, p. 78, n. 5. Hrabanus Maurus, Carmina, No. 49, p. 214; Meyer-Barkhausen, ‘Versinschriften’, 73–4; Lübeck, ‘Fuldaer Nebenklöster’, 1–52.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda to be sung possibly during the liturgical celebration of Boniface’s feast, he ranked the bishop with the great missionaries of the Christian past: the apostles Peter, James and John, and Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage, who according to tradition had made large contributions to the conversion of North Africa and because of that was remembered within the Christian Church as the ‘apostle of Africa’.48 Just as Asia holds James in high esteem, Hrabanus wrote, just as Italy (Ausonia) pays tribute to Peter, just as Ephesus has John and Africa has Cyprian, so too Germania honours its own missionary: Boniface.49 A similar concern to propagate Boniface’s cult outside the monastic precincts probably underlay the production of some copies of the Codices Bonifatiani under Hrabanus’ guidance. These manuscripts, once part of Boniface’s personal book collection, then reputedly saved from the bloody hands of the martyr’s murderers, had been kept in Fulda as precious relics.50 Hrabanus ordered a copy to be made of the Victor codex, a gospel harmony, as a gift for Hartmut when the latter became abbot of St Gall in 841. It had been corrected on the basis of the Cadmug evangelary (Codex Bonifatianus 3), which the monks of Fulda believed to be an autograph of Boniface himself.51 The manuscript was an image of the Codex Bonifatianus, as it relected its example precisely, and moreover contained the words of the gospels as Boniface himself had once read and spoken them. In that sense the manuscript served as a contact relic of the saint, a most precious gift.52 In addition, Hrabanus’ involvement in a lourishing hagiography surrounding Boniface’s disciples can be interpreted as a signal of the abbot’s policy to put Fulda irmly on the map. At Hrabanus’ request, Rudolf wrote a vita of Leoba, around 836, and two other students of Hrabanus also dedicated a saint’s life to followers of Boniface. During his stay in Fulda in the 830s, Lupus of Ferrières wrote the Life of Wigbert, abbot of Boniface’s foundation at Fritzlar, who was buried in Hersfeld.53 Ermanrich of Ellwangen, who studied in Fulda with Hrabanus and Rudolf, dedicated a vita to Sola, an Anglo-Saxon recluse and another supposed companion of Boniface, who for some time served as monk in Fulda before he headed south-east to found a hermitage.54 Hrabanus brought ‘Fulda’ outside. By distributing objects that symbolised the monastery beyond its conines – holy remains of home-grown 48 50

51 52 54

Rudolf, Apostoli gentium, pp. 150–1. 49 Hrabanus Maurus, Carmina, No. 49, p. 214. Willibald, Vita Bonifatii, c. 8, p. 51; Von Padberg, Bonifatiusverehrung, pp. 21–44; Kehl, Kult und Nachleben, pp. 96–7. See the entry on fol. 65v of the manuscript. Schmid, Unum ex quattuor, pp. 198, 220–9. 53 Ibid., pp. 226–9. Lupus of Ferrières, Vita Wigberti, pp. 36–43. Ermanrich of Ellwangen, Vita Sualonis, pp. 151–63.

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Hrabanus, part II saints such as Boniface and Leoba and foreign relics with Fulda labels – and explaining and propagating their meaning in tituli, hymns and homilies, the abbot strengthened and extended the inluence of his abbey in the surrounding countryside and contributed to Christianity taking further root in the daily lives of the local population. An answe r to sin Nevertheless, Hrabanus’ relic translations were not purely inspired by a general wish to expand Fulda’s power and that of the Church, to which the monastery belonged. The call for emendation of sinful life and the appeal to imitate the exemplary life of the holy men and women whose relics had recently arrived, expressed in Hrabanus’ work and, following Einhard, Rudolf ’s Miracula sanctorum, originated in deep concerns about the troubles of the 830s. Rebellions, changes of weather, crop failures, famines, military defeats and epidemics led to a belief that God’s wrath had come down upon men, and the faithful felt an urgent need for spiritual help. Witnesses to this unease with ‘the evils of the empire’, interpreted as divine punishments, are, for example, the capitularia of Louis the Pious dating to the late 820s, which request an inquiry into what had ofended God, how the Lord could be appeased and what kind of correctio was needed, and the booklet that the emperor’s relative Wala had produced in response to this request, listing all the sins and vices of which he considered the Franks to be guilty.55 Einhard worried about the accumulating signs of a severe tragedy taking place in his day as well and the sins that were ‘daily growing worse’, infecting monastic life as much as life at court or in the countryside.56 His judgement of the monasteries in his neighbourhood was harsh: ‘although it was known that some monasteries had been founded not far from us, nevertheless because of the crude regulation of [religious] life in those places, there was not one man, or few men, about whose holiness anything, even the slightest rumour, was spoken.’57 Einhard outlined his anxieties in his Translatio SS. Marcelini et Petri, written possibly at the end of 830, in the aftermath of the irst revolt 55

56 57

The booklet is mentioned in Paschasius Radbertus’ Epitaphium Arsenii, b. ii, c. 1, p. 61. See Mayke de Jong’s forthcoming book on this text, and also De Jong, The Penitential State, pp. 164–6, 197– 207, 225–8. The capitularia can be found in MGH Cap. 2, Nos. 187–8, pp. 7–10. Also Smith, ‘“Emending evil ways”’, p. 204. Paschasius Radbertus, Epitaphium Arsenii, b. ii, c. 1, p. 61. ‘praesertim in illa regione, in qua, tametsi quaedam coenobia ab eo loco in quo eramus haud longe posita esse constabat, tamen propter rudem in his locis eius conversationis institutionem aut rarus aut nullus erat, de cuius sanctitate tale aliquid vel tenuis fama loqueretur.’ Einhard, Translatio, b. i, c. 11, p. 244. Translation by Dutton, Charlemagne’s Courtier, p. 80.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda against Louis the Pious in the spring of that year. Nevertheless, Einhard also ofered his audience a sweet, consoling way out of this downward spiral of sin: the healing power of his newly acquired martyrs, Marcellinus and Peter. Following this great courtier, Hrabanus too sought solace in the holy potential of saints, and recording his master’s relic translations Rudolf repeated Einhard’s wish that ‘the lives and deeds of the just’ would arouse ‘the minds of all to emend [their] evil ways and to praise God’s omnipotence’.58 Notwithstanding the great deeds of the saints and the gleaming of their miracles, a contemporary, Paschasius, was in despair that evil continued to increase and vices multiplied.59 The rebellion against Louis the Pious of 830 was followed by another one in 833. As Mayke de Jong has argued, the main causes of the rebellion of the 830s was not so much Louis’s weakness, but rather the longevity and ambitions of the emperor as well as those of his three elder sons (Lothar, Louis and Pippin). By 827 they were all three married and in command of their own households and were all three ‘kings wishing to rule in their own might, commanding the respect and support of their own ideles’.60 Nevertheless, until his death in 840 Louis remained a strong emperor, who kept a tight rein on his adult sons. During the conlicts between Louis the Pious and his sons, Hrabanus and his monastery were loyal to the emperor.61 In 832 Louis the Pious visited Fulda and Hrabanus expressed his allegiance to the ruler by ofering him his commentary on the Book of Kings.62 In 833 Hrabanus wrote another commentary, on the Books of Esther and Judith, for Louis the Pious’ wife, Judith. The following year he wrote two treatises, which condemn the revolt of Louis’s sons and point to the obedience that they owed to their father.63 In 835, the scapegoat of the rebellion of 833, Archbishop Ebo of Reims, was imprisoned in Hrabanus’ monastery.64 In the meantime, the low of donations to Fulda by local landowners stagnated.65 58

59 60 61 62

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‘vitas et facta iustorum … nisi ut ad emendandos pravos mores et conlaudandam Dei omnipotentiam per eiusmodi exempla quorumcumque animos incitarent.’ Einhard Translatio, praef., p. 239; Rudolf, Miracula sanctorum, praef., p. 329. On the use of relics as political weapons, see Smith,‘“Emending evil ways”’, pp. 189–223; Heinzelmann, ‘Einhards “Translatio Marcellini et Petri”’, pp. 269–98. Paschasius Radbertus, Epitaphium Arsenii, b. ii, c. 1, p. 61. De Jong, The Penitential State, p. 33. Bigott, Ludwig, p. 58. Hrabanus Maurus, Epistolae, No. 18, p. 423; De Jong, ‘Empire as ecclesia’, p. 206; Wehlt, Reichsabtei, p. 236. Hrabanus Maurus, Epistolae, Nos. 15–16, pp. 403–20; Hrabanus Maurus, De virtutibus et vitiis, PL 112, col. 1335–98; De Jong, ‘Empire as ecclesia’, p. 207; De Jong, The Penitential State, pp. 242–3. The fact that Hrabanus was loyal to Louis the Pious is also stressed by Rudolf in the Miracula sanctorum, c. 15, p. 340. Epist. Fuld. fragm., No. 13, p. 520. The number of private charters per year: 822: 4, 823: 19, 824: 28, 825: 10, 826: 7, 827: 5, 828: 1, 829: 1, 830: 3, 831: 0, 832: 0, 833: 1, 834: 0, and so on. CDF, Nos. 400–500.

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Hrabanus, part II In 836 monks of Fulda complained to the emperor that they were not able to acquire textiles and other necessary goods for their expanding community, whereupon Louis the Pious granted the monastery freedom from toll across the whole empire.66 Had the people of east of the Rhine lost their faith in Fulda as a safe, powerful prayer house? With his relic translations Hrabanus responded to the recent political events and the monastery’s economic diiculties. Besides using relics as witnesses to Christ and instruments in the instruction of the Christian faith, the abbot also seems to have used the holy remains to make clear that in the hands of the monks of Fulda the salvation of the believers was guaranteed, that Fulda indeed was a sacred place and that God was on the side of the monks and the ruler to whom they were loyal. The belief in the close interdependence between these four – God, his saints, Fulda and the emperor – is expressed in a charter recording a gift of Louis the Pious to Fulda’s dependency Johannesberg, whither the martyr Venantius had been recently taken. In the prelude to the grant Louis explained his concern not only with ‘the government of the realm’, but also with ‘the management of the holy church’ and ‘the needs of the Christian faithful’. The emperor, therefore, willingly met the wishes of Abbot Hrabanus, who had asked Louis the Pious for his support in the acquisition of relics (in the form of a kind of letter of recommendation). Hrabanus had been successful, Louis continued, and had obtained the body of the holy martyr Venantius ‘who in our times and in part of our lands has been deemed worthy to visit and is considered it to rescue his people from diferent diicult straits and distressing human diiculties’.67 Modern scholars consider the charter to be a fake, containing original elements nevertheless, either from the hand of the monk Eberhard, who included the charter in his Codex Eberhardi around the middle of the twelfth century, or that of Rudolf , Hrabanus’ trusted agent, who had worked as charter writer in his early career and continued to be asked for his literary skills in the following decades when it concerned a special, high-proile transaction.68 If indeed Rudolf or one of his contemporaries had written the charter or the original on which the twelfth-century forgery was based, the document is a beautiful witness to the way in

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CDF, No. 489, pp. 216–17. ‘qui nostris temporibus in nostris terrarium partibus visitare dignatus est plebem suam et ex diversis necessitatibus et angustiis miseris mortalibus dignatur subvenire.’ Codex Eberhardi, vol. ii, p. 110. Stengel dates the falsiication to the time of Rudolf: ‘Ludwigs angebliche Schenkung’, p. 310. See also Zwanzig, Gründungsmythen, pp. 122–3.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda which, in the eyes of the ninth-century elite, saints and politics worked very well together.69 At irst, Hrabanus’ attempts to reinforce the role of the monastery and its saints as intercessors on behalf of the faithful were successful. People seem to have recovered their faith in Fulda: the monastery’s private charters show a rise in gifts from 835 onwards, the year in which the irst relics arrived.70 These included a couple of churches with their reliquaries and embellishments, maintained by pious women, who possibly witnessed the arrival of the relics themselves, as their estates were close to one of the places where the processions carrying the relics halted.71 Watching the miracles of the exotic saints from distant holy places might have convinced these women that the care of their souls and those of their relatives was in good hands in Fulda. The death of Louis the Pious in June 840 caused a renewal of conlict, and the number of gifts to Fulda dropped again. The only gifts granted to the monastery came from aristocrats, who, insecure about who would emerge victorious, tried to safeguard their property by granting it to a monastery and receiving it back as beneicium. An example, discussed in the previous chapter, is the donation of the family property to Fulda by Guntram, Hrabanus’ brother. Hrabanus sided with Lothar, who, being the eldest son of the old emperor, in his view was most entitled to the imperial crown.72 Nevertheless, as suggested by Boris Bigott, a considerable faction inside the Fulda community seems to have supported Lothar’s brother, Louis the German. The irst charter issued in Fulda after the death of Louis the Pious was dated anno primo regnante iuniore Luduuico rege and omitted Hrabanus’ name, Louis’s opponent.73 In the following charters, Hrabanus reappears as abbot of Fulda, all of which are dated according to the regnal years of Emperor Lothar.74 Unfortunately for him, things did not go as Hrabanus wished. After the battle of Fontenoy in 841, Charles the Bald, Lothar and Louis the German divided the Frankish Empire into three kingdoms and Fulda came to lie in the sphere of inluence of Louis the German. Hrabanus felt compelled to withdraw as abbot of Fulda,75 and moved to the Ugesberg, where he found the peace and quiet to write, having laid down the 69

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Louis the Pious was, in fact, involved in several relic translations. See Nobel, Königtum, pp. 187–91 and Smith, ‘Old saints, new cults’, pp. 317–39. The number of gifts per year: 835: 1, 836: 4, 837: 14, 838: 13, 839: 1, 840: 0, 841: 0, 842: 1. CDF, Nos. 492–3, p. 218. Hrabanus Maurus, Epistolae, No. 28, p. 444; De Jong, ‘Empire as ecclesia’, pp. 207–8. CDF, No. 531, p. 236. Dronke added Hrabanus’ name in his edition, but it is not in the original. Bigott, Ludwig, pp. 90–1. CDF, Nos. 532–5, pp. 237–9. Bigott, Ludwig, pp. 90–1. Compare Goldberg, Struggle, p. 96–7, footnote 51, and pp. 100–1.

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Hrabanus, part II weight of ruling a large royal abbey for twenty years.76 It was in all likelihood in this period that Rudolf wrote the Miracula sanctorum. Rudol f and the

MIRACULA SANCTORUM

Rudolf seems to have composed the Miracula sanctorum after 842 but before 847, the year in which Hrabanus was made archbishop of Mainz. The latter event was not recorded by Rudolf in his text, and this is one of the arguments in favour of a composition date before 847.77 Hrabanus had recently withdrawn as abbot of Fulda, leaving his beloved monastery in the capable hands of his friend Hatto. Rudolf ’s text, besides a collection of relic translations is also an homage to Hrabanus, therefore unjustly but understandably called Vita Hrabani in the past.78 The monk described Hrabanus as ‘a very religious man, a scholar of the Sacred Scripture’.79 He noted that Hrabanus devoted all his time to the study of God’s law, the preservation of the orthodoxy of the Christian faith, the monastic discipline and the progress of his students. Whenever he could Hrabanus instructed others or he nourished himself on the Divine Scriptures. Rudolf ended his account of the relic translations with a list of titles of works that Hrabanus had written so far, mostly exegetical work composed for a vast network of friends including kings, queens, bishops and abbots.80 This list of Hrabanus’ works seems an odd way to end an account of relic translations. Nevertheless, besides recording the relic translations, Rudolf wanted to show that Hrabanus was a teacher of the divine knowledge in all respects, through diferent means and for diverse audiences; exegesis, the teaching of the Sacred Scripture, pastoral care, the gathering of relics, building churches and writing inscriptions were all aimed at ediication and the spread of correct Christianity. Most likely Rudolf wrote the Miracula sanctorum in the irst place for his brethren. In the introduction to the text he explained that he had wanted to write about ‘the virtues and miracles, which God considered worthy to happen through his saints in the present day, of whom the holy relics that were brought to our region, are brought out today for the faithful for their well-being’ (italics mine).81 In addition, the Miracula sanctorum is transmitted to us only in the early-seventeenth-century edition 76 78 79 80 81

Hrabanus Maurus, Epistolae, No. 34, p. 468. 77 Compare Stengel, ‘Fuldensia i’, p. 37. Brunhölzl, Geschichte, vol. i, p. 344. ‘vir valde religiosus et in Scripturis Divinis adprime eruditus.’ Rudolf, Miracula sanctorum, c. 1, p. 330. Ibid., c. 15, pp. 340–1. See also De Jong, ‘Empire as ecclesia’, pp. 191–226. ‘virtutes et miracula, quae Deus per sanctos suos modernis temporibus facere dignatus est, quorum sacri cineres regionem nostram inlati cotidie idelibus causa salutis existunt.’ Rudolf, Miracula sanctorum, p. 329.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda of Christopher Brouwer, which is based on a single manuscript, once kept in Fulda’s library but now lost.82 This indicates little interest in the text outside Fulda. Nevertheless, even though the Miracula sanctorum’s direct audience was Fulda monks, Rudolf might have intended the miracle stories it contained to spread beyond the conines of the monastic community. As we have seen, Rudolf hoped to stimulate the veneration of the saints ‘by the faithful in these places’, referring probably not to the monks of Fulda who administered the monastery’s dependencies, but to the local population who lived nearby. Many of his stories have laymen and -women as their main characters. Contrary to the miracle stories of Jonas of Bobbio’s Vita Columbani, for example, which were clearly intended to edify a monastic audience, Rudolf ’s accounts of the miracles concerned the correction of the behaviour of lay people: the punishment of a greedy ferryman who took advantage of poor pilgrims; the correction of the hasty servant of a count, who, in his hurry to serve his lord, almost passed by the saints whose relics lay in a nearby church; the reprimand of a woman who donated to the saints the wool of a stolen sheep; the punishment of a farmer who harvested on the feast day of the saints whose relics had recently arrived in his parish; and the healing of sick who put their faith in God and his saints.83 Possibly Rudolf ’s text was intended to serve the monks in their pastoral duties, presenting ‘raw material that might be adapted or elaborated according to the needs of a particular occasion or audience’, as David Appleby has suggested.84 Rudolf ’s miracle stories not only demonstrate the almighty power of God, but most of all teach the correct way to treat a saint and approach him or her. They were focused on the dignity of saints, dealing with purity and impurity of mind and actions when a saint was venerated.85 The Miracula sanctorum is of particular interest here, not only for the explicit data it provides – the names of the saints whose relics were brought to Fulda, the times of arrival, the routes the saints travelled (information useful to reconstruct Hrabanus’ relic translations) – but also for its indirect information about the monastery where Rudolf had been brought up. Contrary to the Vita Aegil, to be discussed in the second part of this chapter, which pictures Fulda from the inside (the courtyard where monks considered the future of the monastery or from the abbey church, where the monastic community received its new abbot, Eigil, with due 82

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Brouwer, Fuldensium antiquitatum, p. 223. Further, there is the 1626 edition of Colvenerius. See the introduction of Waitz to Rudolf ’s Miracula sanctorum, p. 328. Rudolf, Miracula sanctorum, cc. 2, 6, 12, pp. 330–1, 334–5, 337–8. Appleby, ‘The Ark of the Covenant reliquary’, 430. See, for example, Rudolf, Miracula sanctorum, c. 2, p. 331.

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Hrabanus, part II ritual, awaiting him near the grave of Boniface), Rudolf depicted Fulda from the outside, from the perspective of a holy procession, carrying relics all the way north, from Italy to Buchonia. Inevitably, Rudolf looked at and described this world with the eyes and hands of a monk, who had been trained inside the monastic conines from childhood and who in a way had known no other world than this one. It was one, moreover, that had as its main objective: prayer. Rudolf ’s monastic upbringing left its stamp on how he pictured Fulda in the Miracula sanctorum, namely, as a sacred network, centred upon the cloister. A spide r in a we b of churc h e s Rudolf ’s main aim was to stimulate the cult of the saints who had arrived almost a decade before. His text, therefore, reads as a devotional guidebook of Christian lieux de memoire east of the Rhine. It extensively describes the roads the relics travelled before their arrival in Fulda, the villages they visited, the miracles they worked and the places where they were inally buried.86 As it was one of Rudolf ’s goals to incorporate the foreign saints from Italy (almost forty from Rome and one from Rimini) into Fulda’s network of cult-sites and the monastery’s collective memory, the monk, like other authors of translation stories, carefully wrote down the names of the villae, monasteries and small oratories where the processions halted, whence those who were cured came and where the relics were venerated and buried.87 Along the way to Fulda we meet farmers, ferrymen, weavers, servants of lords, noble women, priests and monks of Fulda, who on behalf of their community administered Fulda’s cellae and estates. Rudolf ’s Miracula sanctorum represents Fulda as a spider in a web of churches and cellae, once donated by the Frankish elite and now administered by Fulda monks or built by the brethren themselves on acquired property or newly cultivated lands. Like the charters reproduced in Fulda’s cartulary, discussed in the previous chapter, the Miracula sanctorum pays testimony to Fulda’s success in penetrating the surrounding countryside. In the eighth century the lands east of the Rhine had been dotted with small family monasteries and proprietary churches.88 By the following century major royal abbeys such as Fulda, Lorsch and Weißenburg had completely changed the scene. They progressively succeeded in monopolising intercession with the sacred and commemoration of the dead on behalf of the 86 87 88

Appleby, ‘Ark of the Covenant reliquary’, 419–43. Heinzelmann, Translationsberichte. On proprietary churches in general, see Wood, The Proprietary Church.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda local inhabitants, and absorbed many of these tiny aristocratic church foundations, several of which had been maintained by women, into their web of prayer.89 Rudolf ’s Miracula sanctorum presents a snapshot of this changed setting in which large male communities dominated local religious, and also social, economic and political life. These churches and monastic cells that Fulda in the course of time acquired and founded formed a sacred infrastructure, clustered around the mother convent, while at the same time being centres of religious activity in their own right, providing local faithful an opportunity to interact with the divine. The Miracula sanctorum depicts the process of delineating and strengthening the monastery’s network with relics to the greater glory of Fulda and its abbot, Hrabanus, and positions the monastery irmly as a place of holy intercession. More importantly, it contributed to it and inluenced it through its selection and presentation of the events. The text opens up a world normally hidden for those who are solely focused on the cloister, the centre of Fulda’s familia of churches and cellae, though it inevitably gives only a one-sided view of this world. The voices of the local families themselves, whose sons were trained in Fulda, whose property created lasting ties with the monastery or who as mancipia tilled the monastic lands and whose salvation depended on the prayers of the holy men, can only be heard indirectly. The Miracula sanctorum was written by a monk who grew up in Fulda and thus from childhood had internalised the monastic codes of behaviour that were aimed at protecting the purity of the cloister.90 As we shall see, Rudolf ’s background inluenced how the monk described Fulda’s position within the surrounding landscape. At the same time, Rudolf spent a considerable part of his life outside the conines of the monastery. He was one of Fulda’s most proliic charter writers, a job which required frequent and sometimes long-distance travel and a good understanding of social relationships. Additionally, Rudolf, on behalf of his abbot, had arranged and supervised the relic translations that he would later describe in the Miracula sanctorum. His experiences as representative of Fulda in ‘public relations’ make him an excellent informant for modern scholars interested in the larger world of which Fulda was part. The cloiste r as a f rame of re f e re nc e To Rudolf the surrounding world was organised around the cloister. Although Rudolf never explicitly deines the boundaries of the monastic complex at Fulda in the Miracula sanctorum, they surface in the monk’s 89 90

Innes, State and Society, pp. 13–50; Innes, ‘People, places and power’, pp. 397–437. De Jong, In Samuel’s Image; De Jong, ‘Internal cloisters’, pp. 209–21.

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Hrabanus, part II description of the arrival of the Roman relics in the monastery. While many people from nearby villages joined the processions during the journey to Fulda, hoping for cure and salvation, none of them seems to have entered the monastery. In all cases, the abbot and the monks of Fulda met the procession that brought the relics outside the conines of the monastery at places near the convent: the church of St John the Baptist on the nearby Johannesberg and a place on the slope of a nearby hill, possibly Röhlingsberg near Kohlhaus, south of Fulda and to the east of Johannesberg. At these places the faithful were allowed the opportunity to pray before they returned home. From there, only the monks proceeded to the abbey church in the cloister. Additionally, Rudolf included in his text many stories of miracles which had happened en route to illustrate God’s almighty power. In these stories local men and women brought their loved ones to the churches where the relics spent the night and laid the invalids or possessed right in front of the altar.91 Yet similar scenes, with pilgrims sleeping overnight in the church or sick people, both men and women, lying in the sanctuary itself, did not take place in Fulda itself, or so it seems on the basis of the Miracula sanctorum. To a large extent this can be explained by the involvement of the lay population in the stories, in particular the participation of women. Rudolf ’s perception of the Fulda monastery, and therefore his description of the monastery in relation to its surroundings in the Miracula sanctorum, were dominated by the frame of reference of the cloister, which as an ideal, separated monks from lay people. Rudolf depicted the mother convent therefore as a centre of sacredness and purity within Fulda’s network of cellae and churches. Also in his Vita Leobae, written around 836, some ive or ten years before the composition of the Miracula, Rudolf pictured the mother convent as a restricted area.92 With this text Rudolf gave a voice to a tradition that claimed that the only woman who had ever entered the conines of the monastery had been Leoba, Boniface’s beloved cousin, an extraordinary, highly learned and well-connected woman, who Rudolf, with diiculty, tried to it into the ninth-century straitjacket of female religious regulations.93 The monk was forced to address the boundaries of the claustrum explicitly, for the woman he portrayed in the text had been travelling frequently, supervising the nuns entrusted to her care, giving council to Queen 91 92

93

Rudolf, Miracula sanctorum, cc. 2, 4, 10, 11, pp. 331, 333, 336–7. Rudolf explained in his introduction that he wrote the vita ive years after the death of Mago, a priest-monk from Fulda (d. 831). Most likely Rudolf wrote before Leoba’s translation to the Ugesberg in 838 for he makes no mention of it. Hartmann, Synoden, pp. 424–27. Further, see Hen, ‘Milites Christi’, 24; Smith, ‘Female sanctity’, 16–17; Schulenberg, ‘Strict active enclosure’, pp. 51–86.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda Hildegard among others, although she ‘detested the life at court like poison’, and praying at her relative’s grave in Fulda.94 Because of their special relationship Leoba was permitted admittance to Fulda’s abbey church, where Boniface lay buried after he had been killed in Frisia. Nevertheless, the nun had had to follow strict regulations.While Leoba visited Fulda, the rest of her company stayed behind in a cell near the monastery. She was only allowed to visit during daylight and then had to be accompanied by a senior nun.95 For no other reason than that it had been Boniface’s explicit wish ‘that her bones were to be placed next to his in the tomb, so that they who had served God during their lifetime with equal sincerity and zeal should await together the day of resurrection’, her body was taken to Fulda after her death and buried inside its abbey church.96 Yet, other sources from Fulda, for example the Supplex Libellus and some of the monastery’s charters, indicate that the monastic enclosure was not as strictly observed as tradition, or Rudolf, presented it or wished it to be. As explained above, people from the locality and dependants of the monastery came to Fulda on important feast days, such as the dies natalis of Fulda’s patron saint Boniface, to honour the saint, participate in the festivities and pay tributes and taxes. The Vita Leobae itself records the curing of sick pilgrims in the crypt underneath Boniface’s grave in Fulda’s abbey church, although none of the travellers seeking Leoba’s aid in the vita were women.97 Notwithstanding Rudolf ’s heightened sense of awareness of the boundaries between the secular world and the holiness of the abbey, arising from his monastic training, in practice the two worlds merged and the secular world regularly seeped into the cloister. S ol itude The frame of reference with which Rudolf had grown up from childhood also inluenced his vocabulary to designate the area in which Fulda was situated. Besides describing the area where Fulda lies as saltus, a wooded mountain pass, Bochonia, beech wood, Rudolf called the immediate surroundings of the monastery eremus, solitude, an evocative word with a rich history not only in Latin hagiography, but also in Fulda itself.98 In addition, he explained in the irst chapter of the Miracula sanctorum that 94 95

96

97

Rudolf, Vita Leobae, c. 18, p. 129. Ibid., c. 19, pp. 129–30. Also Smith, ‘Women at the tomb’, pp. 163–80; Schulenberg, ‘Gender’, pp. 353–76. ‘Ut post obitum eius corpus illius ad ossa sua in eodem sepulchro poneretur, quatenus partier diem resurrectionis exspectarent, qui pari voto ac studio in vita sua Christo servierant.’ Rudolf, Vita Leobae, c. 17, p. 129. Translation by Talbot in Noble and Head (eds.), Soldiers of Christ, p. 272. Ibid., cc. 22–3, pp. 130–1. 98 See Chapters 1 and 5.

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Hrabanus, part II Fulda’s founders had selected the place on the eastern bank of the river Fulda ‘because it was isolated and remote from the numerousness of the people’.99 With the eremus Rudolf called to mind the long tradition from the origins of Christianity through the examples of ascetics in East and West who had chosen a life in seclusion, and the writings of the Church fathers. As explained in Chapter 5 this tradition was represented in the crypts of Fulda’s abbey church and had been given a voice and body in the person of Sturmi in Eigil’s Vita Sturmi. This was a text that Rudolf knew very well. He heard it yearly during the mealtime lecture on Sturmi’s anniversary and had used the text for the composition of some charters, the Miracula sanctorum and his Vita Leobae.100 As we have seen, Eigil depicted the immediate surroundings of Fulda in the Vita Sturmi as a solitudo or eremus, which he contrasted with the saeculum, the world that started where the woods of Buchonia came to an end. Rudolf also used the term eremus to describe the direct environment of his monastery, not as a meditative tool to support a spiritual pilgrimage, as Eigil had done, but as a geographical designation. The fact that the topos also had become a name to designate a geographical area, and thus had been incorporated into the monastic vocabulary for organising the surrounding space, illuminates beautifully the impact of a monastery such as Fulda on its environment. Over the past century this eremus had evolved from a wilderness into a cultivated area, dominated by a booming monastery and its richly decorated churches on the nearby hills, where the remains of precious Roman martyrs rested in sculpted wooden reliquaries decorated with silver, gold and gems. Monastic images such as that of solitude may have become part of local lore, inluencing the ways in which the inhabitants looked at and deined their world.The impact of Fulda on the neighbouring region was probably both physical, changing the actual landscape through agriculture, cattle breeding, water management and the construction of churches and houses, and mental, creating new contexts in which to understand the world and new mental landscapes to interpret and experience the daily habitat. Stories, written and oral, played an important role in this transformation, and so did Rudolf ’s Miracula sanctorum. Brun Candidus and the

VITA AEGIL

The Vita Aegil, written only a couple of years before the composition of the Miracula sanctorum, also remembered how Boniface used to call 99 100

‘Quia secretus erat et a populari frequentia valde remotus.’ Rudolf, Miracula sanctorum, c. 1, p. 330. Stengel, UBF, No. 4, p. 3.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda Sturmi ‘his hermit’ and responded to the home-grown tradition of Fulda as solitude.101 It is another narrative source dating to the 840s that relects upon Fulda’s identity, though from a completely diferent angle from that of the Miracula sanctorum. While Rudolf has provided us with a bird’s-eye view of part of Fulda’s network east of the Rhine and the ways in which Hrabanus attempted to connect and sanctify its nodes, Candidus, the author of the Vita Aegil, chose as the setting for his comments on the monastery’s self, the aftermath of the Ratger crisis. He thus delivered his commentary from the inside, in the central claustrum itself, where the monks of Fulda discussed the future of their abbey, the royal court and the episcopal palace of the archbishop of Mainz. For several reasons Candidus’ text is an interesting source of information for the ways in which the monks perceived themselves and attempted to create community. First, the Vita Aegil describes the discussions that took place in Fulda in the late 810s. These concerned the abbey’s future and the kind of abbot that best itted their goals in life. It therefore supplements the information about the Ratger crisis already provided by the Supplex Libellus, the Chronicon Laurissense breve and the Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi, discussed in Chapter 4. Candidus had been an eyewitness and had possibly, holding a prominent position within the community, actively participated in the debates, which made him well resourced to make a report of the proceedings of the meetings in those days.102 The fact that Candidus wrote more than twenty years after the events evidently inluenced his description. Being a product of its own time, the Vita Aegil relects ideas about perfect monastic life in the 840s as much as it describes the discussions preceding the election of Ratger’s successor and signiicant features and events of Eigil’s abbacy. It addresses familiar themes, elaborated in, for example, the Vita Sturmi, such as the importance of the Rule of Benedict, the involvement of Carolingian kings in monastic life in Fulda and the remembrance of Boniface and Sturmi. But it also introduces new topics, such as the value of penance, correction and the giving of alms, and the dangers of lay abbacies and large building projects. Candidus (d. 845), also known as Brun, wrote the Vita Aegil at the end of Hrabanus’ abbacy, somewhere after 839 and before the summer of 842, when Hrabanus resigned as abbot and withdrew to Fulda’s satellite 101

102

‘Styrmi …, quem sanctus Bonifacius, praeceptor eius, heremitam suum uocitare solebat.’ Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 3, p. 5. In Eigil’s Vita Sturmi, Sturmi is referred to as ‘heremita suus’ (‘suus’ referring to Boniface) and ‘anachoreta’. Eigil, Vita Sturmi, cc. 5–6, pp. 135, 138. Sandmann, ‘Kommentiertes Parallelregister’, FW 2.1, MF78, pp. 238–9.

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Hrabanus, part II church on the Ugesberg.103 As we have seen, it was a troublesome time for the monastic community, for most of its property lay in an area that, at irst, formed the arena of a power struggle between Emperor Louis the Pious and his son Louis the German, and then, after the death of the emperor in 840, the quarrel formed between Louis the German and his brother Lothar (who then claimed lordship over the lands east of the Rhine). I shall return to this below. Candidus was a priest-monk who, like his contemporary Rudolf, had been raised and trained in the monastery of Fulda from childhood. As an adolescent Candidus studied with Einhard at court, ‘the most learned doctor of manifold arts’. This is how Fulda’s Gesta abbatum remembered the man who now, above all, is known as Charlemagne’s biographer.Yet, Einhard was also a craftsman and creative mind, nicknamed Bezalel by contemporaries after the artisan chosen by God to make the Tabernacle (Exod. 31: 1–5).104 With Einhard, Candidus seems to have further developed his artistic skills, for, besides being a proliic writer, Candidus must have been a gifted painter. According to his own testimony, he painted the western apse of the new abbey church, without doubt a privilege granted only to Fulda’s most talented artists.105 Possibly Candidus also illustrated the Vita Aegil, which makes the text the oldest illustrated vita in Western Europe still extant.106 Cynthia Hahn considers the Vita Aegil an abbot’s biography and not a saint’s life, but like Becht-Jördens, I think that the distinction between a saint’s life and an abbot’s biography is very diicult to make in the Carolingian period. In any case, it does not change the special nature of the Vita Aegil as an illustrated text.107 Scholars have not been able to establish the full programme of the series of images, now extant only as seventeenth-century engravings, for the cycle in the codex vetustissimus that Brouwer used for his compilation of Fulda’s past was incomplete. Many of the empty spaces that interrupted the text were never illed, and of course Brouwer did not bother to mark 103

104 105

106

107

Candidus mentions Reccheo senior in his text, a monk of Fulda who had just died, which happened in 839. Vita Aegil, b. ii, c. 7, p. 41. Moreover, he calls Hrabanus abbot, which makes it likely that he wrote the text before the summer of 842, when Hrabanus retired to the Ugesberg. Ibid., praef., b. i, p. 3. Gesta abbatum, p. 272. Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. ii, c. 17, p. 60. Ineichen-Eder, ‘Künstlerische und literarische Tätigkeit’, 201. The titulus of ch. 18 of book ii of the Vita Aegil reads Supplicatio pictoris et poetae, p. 61. See also Becht-Jördens, ‘Vita Aegil als Quelle’, 10; Becht-Jördens, Vita Aegil, pp. xxix–xxx. Berschin and Löwe think that the monk Modestus, to whom Candidus dedicated the text, made the paintings. Berschin, Biographie, vol. ii, p. 243; Wattenbach et al., Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen, vol. vi, p. 697. Becht-Jördens, ‘Text, Bild und Architektur’, p. 101, footnote 54 and p. 103, footnote 81. Hahn, ‘Picturing in the text’, 1–33. See also Abou-El-Haj, The Medieval Cult of Saints, p. 26. Further: Schmitt, Die Fuldaer Wandmalerei, pp. 24–6; Zimmermann, Die Fuldaer Buchmalerei, pp. 95–7.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda these lacunae in his edition. After all, it was not his aim to make an edition of the Vita Aegil according to modern standards; he aspired to bring together and describe all extant fragments of Fulda’s past in a collection of antiquities. So Brouwer only included the three illustrations that had been done.108 Besides the Vita Aegil, Candidus also composed a Vita Bauguli, now lost, and some charters, copies of which have been transmitted to us in Fulda’s cartulary (in the edition of Johannes Pistorius, discussed above).109 There also exists a manuscript of the Rule of Benedict in his hand, written in insular minuscule, providing an exceptional opportunity through its script to catch a glimpse of the person behind the author.110 The fact that Candidus wrote in insular script instead of using Caroline minuscule, which had become the dominant way of writing in the Frankish realm from the late eighth century onwards, may be understood as an expression of a speciic Fulda self-awareness. Although the monks of Fulda were familiar with Caroline minuscule, they continued to use the insular script until the middle of the ninth century, side by side with the minuscule that owes its name to Charlemagne.111 It is tempting to think that their use of the insular script was not simply an old habit, but a deliberate choice based on a strong awareness of the origin of this way of writing that connected them to their patron saint Boniface and the beginnings of their existence as a monastery. An

OPUS GEMINATUM

Candidus dedicated two booklets to Abbot Eigil’s life, one in prose and one in verse, which he bound together ‘so that one strengthens the other in the narrative’.112 Both the verse and prose Vita Aegil narrate the same story, starting with Eigil’s oblation to Fulda not long after Boniface’s martyrdom and ending with Eigil’s death in 822. Both libelli summarise high points in Eigil’s career as abbot, but each text puts the emphasis diferently. Whereas the prose version is mostly concerned with the aftermath of the Ratger crisis and the election of Eigil as Ratger’s successor, the metrical one concentrates on the dedication of the new abbey church 108

109 110

111 112

Brouwer, Fuldensium antiquitatum, pp. 90, 170. Brouwer edited the Vita Aegil in his Sidera illustrium. He omitted the paintings, tituli and epitaphs, which Candidus originally had included in his text, as he had already edited them in his Fuldensium antiquitatum four years earlier. See Becht-Jördens, Vita Aegil, pp. xxix–xxxii. CDF, Nos. 254, 292, 336, 344, pp. 130–1, 144, 163, 165, with references to Pistorius’ edition. Now in the university library of Würzburg: M. p. th.q. 22, fol. 57r. See Bischof and Hofman, Libri sancti Kyliani, pp. 54, 110; Gugel, Handschriften, vol. i, p. 67. Spilling, ‘Frühe Phase’, pp. 249–50; Spilling, ‘Angelsächsische Schrift’, pp. 47–98. ‘ut in rerum narratione alter alteri subsidia ferret.’ Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, p. 3.

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Hrabanus, part II in 819, one of Eigil’s irst deeds as head of the monastery and one of his most signiicant acts considering the burdened past of the ediice. The prose Vita Aegil, a mirror and an admonition for abbot and monks alike, had a clear moral and didactic agenda. Its purpose was to edify the audience by exhortation and example. The metrical life, however, which aimed to disclose the deeper signiicance of Fulda’s past, was probably written for the initiated only, the advanced students who used the text for private meditation in their cells and who through their training in exegesis were well equipped to read the sensus allegoricus.113 The history of Fulda was transformed into a battle between good and evil and the monastery into the ecclesia of Christ. By writing a vita in prose and verse the author followed the classical literary tradition of the opus geminatum, a twinned work consisting of a prose and a poetic version, not necessarily identical in their content. Candidus’ models had been the late antique and early medieval writers Juvencus, Caelius Sedulius, Arator and Bede. The last of these had been the irst in the West, as far as I am aware, to apply the form of an opus geminatum to a hagiographical subject in his Vita Cuthberti.114 Candidus had been inluenced, moreover, by the work of popular poets such as Virgil (in particular his Aeneid),Venantius Fortunatus, Paulinus of Nola, Alcuin, Aldhelm and Hrabanus Maurus, especially his masterpiece In honorem sanctae crucis, the only work to which Candidus explicitly referred in his introduction.115 With his opus geminatum Candidus departed from the tradition, initiated by Eigil, to write abbots’ biographies solely in prose. Besides the Vita Sturmi, Candidus’ Vita Bauguli and the anonymous Vita Ratgarii had presumably also been prose texts. As mentioned above, there also once existed a Vita sancti Bonifatii metrice et prosaice conscripta, of which the only evidence for its existence is a reference in a late-ifteenth-century library catalogue of Fulda (Basel Universitätsbibliothek, F III 42).116 Yet, when this opus geminatum was written and whether it had served Candidus as a model is impossible to establish. Becht-Jördens has argued that the vita was written under Ratger and that Candidus did not explicitly refer to this text, because it was the product of the reign of this hated abbot.117 Although the translation of Boniface in 819 indeed was a likely occasion 113

114

115

116 117

Compare Alcuin, Vita Willibrordi, prologue, p. 113. See also Wood, Missionary Life, pp. 81–90; Lapidge, ‘Bede’s metrical Vita S. Cuthberti’, pp. 77–93. Lapidge, ‘Bede’s metrical Vita S. Cuthberti’, pp. 77–93; Wieland, ‘Geminus Stilus’, pp. 113–33; Godman, ‘The Anglo-Latin Opus geminatum’, 215–29; Godman, Alcuin, pp. lxxviii–lxxxii. See the similarium apparatus of the edition of Becht-Jördens’ Die Vita Aegil, b. ii, pp. 79–99, and his explanation of it, pp. xlv–xlvi. Schrimpf et al., Mittelalterliche Bücherverzeichnisse, pp. 153, 563. Becht-Jördens, ‘Text, Bild und Architektur’, p. 95.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda to write such a text, there were other opportunities, including the several anniversaries (might Hrabanus have ordered the vita’s making in 854?) and the acquisition of the relics of Boniface’s associates, Eoban and Adalhard, between 899 and 915, who had also died a martyr’s death in Dokkum.118 In addition, surely Candidus, who called for reconciliation in his Vita Aegil, would not have created such a damnatio memoriae. Even more so than in the case of the Vita Sturmi it is diicult to ascertain whether the Vita Aegil (or the Vita Bauguli, or Vita Ratgarii for that matter) was linked to some kind of cult centred on Eigil’s grave in the crypt of the St Michael chapel.There are no liturgical sources to indicate a remembrance of Eigil that was greater than an ordinary abbot’s anniversary, but this does not mean that Candidus had not wished to accomplish this. His prose portrayed Eigil as an ideal abbot and an example to all, personifying the recommendations about perfect asceticism made by Benedict and Pachomius. In verse, Eigil was compared to Christ himself, as the saviour who rescued the monks from downfall and safely guided them back to the beneicent pastures of salvation.119 Candidus’ use of the ‘twinned work’, together with his employment of a vast corpus of sources and his eloquence, demonstrates the high level of education in Fulda at that time. While Eigil’s prose in the Vita Sturmi is simple and unsophisticated, and according to Berschin ‘entspricht durchaus noch den Anfängen der Karolingischen Bildungsreform’, Candidus wrote distinguished, sometimes stilted Latin, inluenced by great ancient writers such as Sallust and Virgil.120 Just like Rudolf and Gottschalk, this brilliant monk, who famously broke with his teacher and Abbot Hrabanus in a bid for freedom, Candidus belonged to the third generation of scholars who had clearly beneited greatly from the attempts of the abbots of Fulda to turn the monastery into a lourishing centre of learning and who constantly sought intellectual challenge.121 When Candidus wrote the Vita Aegil, as he explained in the introduction, he was stationed in one of Fulda’s dependent cells, and missed the discussions on Scripture with his fellow students. Following the advice of Hrabanus, who had, years earlier, been in a similar isolated position and had sought his own refuge in the composition of his complex igure poem In honorem sanctae crucis, Candidus tried to satisfy his longing for intellectual efort and contest by applying a related literary form to Eigil’s vita.122 118 119 120

121 122

Gesta abbatum, p. 213; Kehl, Kult und Nachleben, p. 135. Becht-Jördens, Die Vita Aegil, p. 48. ‘... in general its the beginning of the Carolingian educational reform’, Berschin, Biographie, vol. iii, p. 253; Wattenbach et al., Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen, vol. vi, pp. 695–6. De Jong, ‘From scolastici to scioli’, pp. 45–57. Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, praefatio, p. 3.

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Hrabanus, part II Candidus dedicated the Vita Aegil to Reccheo Modestus. Reccheo was a fellow monk who, like Candidus, belonged to the group of Fulda’s brightest students, and who had also been sent by Abbot Ratger to court for further training. Modestus studied under the grammarian Clemens Scottus (d. 826).123 Candidus did not write the Vita Aegil solely for his friend, who he frequently addressed throughout the text. Every time he spoke to Modestus, he actually addressed all monks of Fulda, who either heard Candidus’ stories during mealtimes or other communal gatherings, or individually pondered his words in the quiet of private reading. Just as Gregory the Great had couched his thoughts on Benedict of Nursia and other Italian ascetics of the sixth century in the form of dialogues with his trusted deacon Peter in order to determine the deeper meaning of the lives of these holy men, so Candidus used his conversation with Modestus as a means to draw his audience into the story and expound the lessons and values of this particular aspect of Fulda’s past.124 Candidus’ Vita Aegil did not circulate outside the community for which it was written. No library catalogue, apart from the one from Fulda dating to the ifteenth century, the already-mentioned Basel Universitätsbibliothek, F III 42, lists the manuscript. In addition, there are no references to the vita in later sources that were produced outside Fulda.125 Becht-Jördens even assumes that the exemplar that was referred to in the ifteenth-century catalogue of Fulda’s monastic library was Candidus’ autograph, and that it was this autograph, with uncompleted illustrations, that Brouwer used for his edition in the early seventeenth century.126 A monastic p rog ramme in p ro se The prose text formed the irst part of the two books.The libellus, which MGH editor Georg Waitz broke up into twenty-ive chapters, can be roughly divided into ive parts: the introduction of the vita, the preamble to Louis the Pious’ interference in Fulda, the election of Eigil as Ratger’s successor and his inauguration, Eigil’s most memorable deeds as abbot and the abbot’s death. The contributions of Eigil to Fulda’s comfort, listed by Candidus in his text, included: the construction of the crypts; the dedication of the new abbey church and the translation of Boniface in 819; the reorganisation of monastic life by Eigil; the building of the funerary 123 124 125

126

Sandmann, ‘Kommentiertes Parallelregister’, FW 2.1, MF240, pp. 264–5; LdM, vol. ii, col. 2149. Gregory the Great, Dialogi. Basel, Universitätsbibliothek, F iii 42 (Ba). Schrimpf et al., Mittelalterliche Bücherverzeichnisse, pp. 152, 555. Becht-Jördens, Die Vita Aegil, pp. xxix–xxx.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda chapel of St Michael; Eigil’s involvement in the cult of his predecessor and relative Sturmi; and, the relocation of the monastery’s claustrum. Candidus’ story really takes of when he described the moment that the monks of Fulda were allowed to choose a new abbot. The author slowed down his narrative to zoom in on the events immediately before and after Eigil’s election. Moreover, he included speeches to enliven his text and to strengthen its exhortatory nature.127 They were ictive creations of Candidus’ brain, but nevertheless truthful in the sense that they could have been spoken like that and were in keeping with the character of the concerned deliverer of the speech.128 The speeches belong to the most interesting parts of the prose text for their ideas on perfect coenobitic life, the responsibilities of an abbot and the use of written tradition. Encompassing a monastic programme that derived from ascetic practices and beliefs from the East and the West, they form the running thread of what follows. Discussions concerning the new abbot The context of the irst speeches included in Candidus’ story is formed by the extensive discussions concerning the qualities required of the leading igure in the monastic community that preceded Eigil’s appointment as abbot of Fulda. Candidus recounted them in great detail, explaining that this diference of opinion was unsurprising ‘in a multitude of [people with] diverse wishes’.129 Of course the dispute was surprising; it went against ascetic principles of obedience and humility, which discouraged monks to follow their own will and to speak their minds, and general expectations of monasteries to be places of peace and concord. This becomes evident further on in the Vita Aegil as well.130 Candidus narrated how some monks had made out a case for an abbot of noble birth. After all, a person of high social standing would be better prepared to defend the monastery against lay magnates and would have the good will of the emperor (quia habet in palatio generositatem). Opponents, on the other hand, warned against the dangers of a well connected abbot, for he could also use his inluence against the community, to oppress the monks.This seems to have happened under Ratger, of whose bad management Candidus constantly reminded his audience. He did so 127

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129 130

Another example is Paschasius Radbertus, Epitaphium Arsenii, pp. 1–98. See Innes, ‘Memory’, 15, with further references in footnote 33. Compare with the Rhetorica ad Herennium, translated by H. Caplan, Loeb Classical Library (Harvard, 1909) vol. 403, pp. 366–9. With thanks to Irene van Renswoude for this reference. ‘sicut saepe ieri solet in turba diuersae uoluntatis.’ Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 5, p. 6. For example RB, cc. 3–5.

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Hrabanus, part II in the debates leading up to Eigil’s election, but also in the admonitory speeches of Emperor Louis the Pious and Archbishop Haistulf that he included further on in his text. Good contacts with the upper echelons of society would explain why Ratger, about whom the monks had complained already in 812 at court, and possibly even earlier, in 809 at the episcopal palace of the archbishop of Mainz, managed to stay on as abbot until the summer of 817. The discussion about the abbot’s social background is followed by an argument regarding his training, starting with pleas in favour of a learned and eloquent candidate. Were they talking about Hrabanus Maurus, as Johannes Fried has argued?131 If it is indeed Hrabanus’ nomination to which Candidus referred here, he did not do it to make Eigil and Hrabanus personiications of clashing monastic traditions, one simple and ascetic (that of the prayers, die Beter), the other intellectual and sophisticated (that of the men of learning, die Gelehrten), as Fried has suggested.132 Candidus’ representation of the debates is an abstraction of the main arguments, still relevant in his own days. The discussions as they took place in 818 will have been more chaotic, more complex and nuanced than depicted by Candidus, or by Fried for that matter. The adversaries of an intellectually gifted applicant were afraid that an erudite scholar would draw on his intelligence and eloquence to suppress the monks in the expression of diferences of opinion. They reasoned that in case of an argument, a well expressed abbot would dispose of their complaints with the remark: ‘Why do you argue with me? Does the rule not forbid a monk to ight his abbot?’133 It is not diicult to imagine that during the crisis in Fulda in the 810s Ratger in a similar fashion put his opponents in their place when they questioned his running of the monastery. Indeed, Candidus let one of the monks who resented an articulate candidate carry on to stress how ‘A burned man fears the ire’, without doubt an indirect reference to the monks’ experiences with Ratger and the way in which he once silenced his critics. ‘Brethren, do you remember how it went?’, Candidus continued, though without explicitly mentioning the abbot’s name.134 Candidus’ reconstruction of the discussions that took place on the eve of Eigil’s election relects the strong self-consciousness of a community that was tried and tested in the beneits and limits of life under an abbot and a rule, and had no intention of making the same mistakes. Like 131 132 133

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Fried, ‘Bildings- und Geistesgeschichte’, pp. 20–1. Ibid., pp. 15, 20–1. ‘Quare contenditis mecum, cum regula prohibeat, uti monachus cum abbate suo non contendat?’ Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 5, p. 7. ‘Scitis, fraters, si haec ita sint?’ Ibid., c. 5, p. 7.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda other monastic rules, the Rule of Benedict left the abbot considerable room for personal judgement. In particular, chapter 3, which prescribed the monks to obey their abbot and forbade them to argue with their superior, had frequently placed the monks of Fulda in an awkward position, even if the same chapter also recommended the abbot to seek the brethren’s advice.135 Nevertheless, a tyrannical abbot who knew how to bend the rule to his will could easily ignore such council, focusing on those parts which he could turn to his advantage. The monks of Fulda had experienced to the full how this could work and, therefore, knew how important it was to choose the right man for the job. An abbot who lacked good judgement, or discretio as Benedict termed it in his rule, jeopardised harmonious monastic co-existence. Candidus wished to alert his brethren to this essential lesson. These included possible successors of Hrabanus Maurus, the abbot at the end of whose abbacy Candidus composed his text. Although Candidus of course did not yet know that Hrabanus Maurus would step down as abbot of Fulda, let alone when, when he wrote the Vita Aegil he was well aware of the inite nature of Hrabanus’ management and the challenges that future generations of monks would face when a new abbot needed to be appointed. Hrabanus’ position as abbot had possibly already come under attack by the time Candidus wrote Eigil’s life, certainly if this was after 840, when Louis’ death at the brink of summer caused a new civil war, or after 841, when the battle of Fontenoy left the upper echelons of Carolingian society insecure about their future as oice holders.136 Admonition and reform After having described how, in the end, the monks came to an understanding and elected Eigil to succeed Ratger, Candidus continued the story with Eigil’s visit to court in order to get the emperor’s consent, followed by Louis the Pious’ speech and Eigil’s stop-over in Mainz, where also the archbishop of Mainz addressed the new abbot. Both the sermons of Louis the Pious and Haistulf provide valuable information concerning contemporary ideals about the perfect monastic life and, again, the kind of abbot it required.137 Louis the Pious’ admonition is the longest speech and the climax of the prose Vita Aegil; it takes up more than a quarter of the complete text. Unlike Haistulf, who spoke to Eigil alone, 135 136

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RB, c. 3, pp. 452–4. See p. 230, where I discuss the charter that can be seen as evidence for Hrabanus’ contested position as abbot of Fulda in 841. For an excellent overview of the uses and forms of admonition in the early Middle Ages, see De Jong, The Penitential State, in particular ch. 3.

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Hrabanus, part II the emperor addressed the whole delegation from Fulda, upset as he was by what had happened during the crisis years. Sternly Louis asked the monks why they had banned the rule (meaning the Rule of Benedict) they had once observed from their monastery. He ordered: ‘Bring your manner of living into line with the fear of God and the authority of the holy rule, so that you, persevering in this [way of life], will be heirs to the kingdom of God.’138 In addition, the emperor condemned the disobedience of those monks who had led the abbey during the conlict with Ratger and their violation of the oath of stabilitas loci. ‘It is shameful to dismiss the law of the truth and the holy place so easily only because of the threats of one [Ratger], when so many saints have fought for the law of God to death and have not feared the words of enemies.’139 The monks should have known better: After all, brothers, you have the knowledge of the Divine Scripture; you have the examples of the holy fathers who have preceded [you], you have a rule that is instituted especially for you. In all these you can without doubt observe yourselves as if in a certain mirror, what you are and whither you are striving. The Apostle Paul has said: ‘For what things soever were written were written for our learning: that, through patience and the comfort of the scriptures, we might have hope’ [Rom. 15: 4].140

Further on in the Vita Aegil, it becomes clear that Eigil had been one of the monks who had run away from the heat of the crisis.141 Instead of having the emperor, who was frustrated with the improper behaviour of the monks, aim his ammunition solely at Eigil, Candidus silently glossed over Eigil’s share in the light and let him be absolved into the anonymity of the group. After having put the monks in their proper place, the emperor lashed out at those who caused conlict and taught the monks that love and concord should be at the core of monastic life.This lesson, a direct quotation from the Vita Pacomii, is the essence of Louis’s speech: Because this is the irst commandment of the law that was given to Moses on the Mount Sinai: ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart and 138

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‘Conuersationem uestram secundum Dei timorem et sanctae Regulae auctoritatem componite, ut in ea permanentes heredes sitis regni Dei.’ Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 9, p. 9. ‘Turpe est propter unius minas legem ueritatis et locum sanctum tam facile dimittere, cum plurimi sanctorum pro lege Dei sui certarint usque ad mortem et a uerbis iniquorum non timuerint.’ Ibid. ‘Uos igitur, fratres, habetis notitiam Diuinarum Scripturarum, habetis praecedentium exempla sanctorum patrum, tenetis praeterea regulam uobis specialiter institutam, in quibus sine dubio uos ipsos quasi in quodam speculo considerare potestis, quales sitis et quo tendatis. “Quaecumque enim” ait apostolus Paulus, “scripta sunt, ad nostram doctrinam scripta sunt, ut per patientiam et consolationem scripturarum spem habeamus”.’ Ibid. Ibid., c. 23, p. 19.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda with all thy mind and with all thy strength and with thy whole soul: and thy neighbour as thyself ’.142 For the love for God is empty if it is not connected with love of your neighbour. The full instruction of the Truth is that the rule of love remains indivisible in [its] substance. The care of the discipline is the perfect love for the monks. She [perfect love] incites a chain of charity and peace without avarice. Thus in sincere love the measure for those present is suicient. They, who love each other, will be called the sons of the Kingdom who love each other completely. They are the ones who eat the bread in the Kingdom of God, who live without blemish and free from the wrinkle of improper discord.143

Once he had addressed the monks, Louis the Pious turned to Eigil. The main topic he raised in his lecture to the new abbot was building and the spending of alms. The emperor said: Behold, they who build martyria and decorate churches seem to do good work, but only when they also guard the other justice of God, when the poor rejoice in their goods, when they do not make the goods of others their own through violence. Know that they build for the glory of God. If however they do not serve the other justice of God, if the poor do not rejoice in their goods, if they make the goods of others their own through violence or fraud, who then would be so unwise as not to understand that they do not build these buildings for the glory of God, but because of esteem among the people? … What kind of justice is this, to reward the dead and plunder the living, to take away the blood of the miserable ones and ofer this to God? … People live in buildings and God lives in holy people.144

Quoting the words which Jerome (c.347–419) had once written to a friend, Louis reminded Eigil that exuberantly decorated churches meant 142

143

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Dt 6: 5. See also Mt. 22: 37; Mc 12: 30; Lc 10: 27. The author has changed the order of the words. The Vulgate (Mc 12: 30) reads: ‘diliges Dominum Deum tuum ex toto corde tuo et ex tota anima tua et ex tota mente tua et ex tota virtute tua.’ ‘Nam prima legis in monte Sinai ordinatio haec ad Moysen data est: ‘Diliges’, inquit, ‘Dominum Deum tuum ex toto corde tuo et ex tota mente tua et ex tota uirtute tua et ex tota anima tua, secundo proximum tuum sicut te ipsum’. Vacat enim dilectio Dei, nisi subiungatur et proximi. Plenum ergo praeceptum est ueritatis, ut maneat in sensu indiuidua regula caritatis. Cura ergo disciplinae monachorum perfecta dilectio est, haec uinculum caritatis et pacis exhortatur sine auaritia. Igitur in dilectione sincera modus suiciens est praesentibus, et qui inuicem diligunt, ilii regni vocantur perfecte inuicem diligentes. Ipsi sunt, qui manducant panem in regno Dei, sine macula uiuunt et alienae ruga discordiae.’ Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 9, p. 9. See also below, p. 256. Here Candidus quotes Pseudo-John Chrysostomus: ‘“Ecce enim”, inquit, “qui martyria aediicant, ecclesias ornant, bonum opus facere uidentur, sed et siquidem et aliam iustitiam Dei custodiunt, si de bonis eorum pauperes gaudent, si aliorum bona per uiolentiam non faciunt sua, scito, quia ad gloriam Dei aediicant. Si autem alias iustitias Dei non seruant, si de bonis eorum pauperes non gaudent, si aliorum bona faciunt sua aut per uiolentiam aut per fraudem, quis tam insensatus est, ut non intelligat, quia non ad gloriam Dei faciunt aediicia illa, sed propter aestimationem humanam? … Qualis est illa iustitia munerare mortuos et spoliare uiuentes, de sanguine miserorum tollere et Deo ofere? … In aediiciis enim homines habitant, Deus autem in hominibus sanctis.’ Ibid., c. 10, p. 12.

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Hrabanus, part II nothing to God if their builders disobeyed his laws: ‘What use are walls blazing with jewels when Christ in His poor is in danger of perishing from hunger?’145 Thereupon the emperor urged Eigil to spend the alms on the poor, as it should be done: ‘Do you really want to build a house of God? Then give to the needy faithful and you have constructed a spiritual house of God.’146 After the sermon of Louis the Pious, Candidus carried on with Eigil’s journey back to Fulda, the visit of the delegation to the archbishop of Mainz and the prelate’s speech to the newly appointed abbot. Archbishop Haistulf exhorted Eigil to be the kind of abbot that he himself had wished for a couple of years earlier, when he and his brethren had been weighed down under Ratger’s mismanagement and some of them had even led the monastic precincts, including Eigil himself. To enforce his message the archbishop repeated the words that the monks themselves had once spoken to Charlemagne and had handed over to the emperor in the form of the Supplex Libellus: ‘The following, most merciful emperor, we ind of extreme importance above everything: this is to have unity and concord with our abbot as we had with our former abbots and to observe mercy, friendship, piety and modesty in him …’147 Here Candidus directly quoted chapter 20 of the Supplex Libellus, including the addressing of the emperor, at whom the Supplex Libellus was originally aimed.148 Penance and humility Using texts such as the Rule of Benedict, the Vita Sturmi, the Supplex Libellus and the Vita Pacomii, Candidus created a monastic programme, ‘a certain mirror’ to observe ‘what you are and whither you are striving’. The speeches in the Vita Aegil, although constructions by Candidus, relect discussions about proper monastic life in the 810s and 820s as much as issues that concerned both the Fulda monks and the royal court two decades later. They called on the listeners to reform their lives, to emend their ‘evil ways’, to do penance, to forgive and reconcile themselves with old enemies. Candidus puts these words in Louis’ mouth: ‘If you have disputes among you, settle them, because you know that 145

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Quae utilitas parietes fulgere gemmis et Christum in paupere fame mori?’ Jerome, Epistolae, No. 58, p. 537; trans. by Freemantle et al., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Ser. ii, vi, p. 122; Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 10, p. 12. ‘Uis domum Dei aediicare? Da idelibus pauperibus, unde uiuant, et aediicasti rationabilem domum Dei.’ Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 10, p. 12. For the full quotation, see Chapter 4, pp. 122–3. According to Candidus, the monks both recited the text and ofered the document to the emperor in writing. Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 12, p. 14. Ibid., c. 11, p. 14; SL, c. 20, pp. 326–7.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda God is not a God of discord, but a God of peace. Forgive each other and may they pardon, each one, their brothers for [their] faults, unkindness and hypocrisy according to the prescription of the Gospel.’149 Even Ratger was forgiven, despite Candidus, following the Supplex Libellus, portraying him as the anti-type of a good abbot, frequently contrasting his management with that of Eigil. Freed from exile, the deposed abbot was allowed to return to Fulda’s cell on the Frauenberg in the immediate vicinity of the monastery, where he spent the remaining years of his life. This cell had once been inhabited by Boniface himself. Ratger even spent his last months in the salutary presence of Roman martyrs, whose precious relics arrived in the summer of 835. Candidus depicts Ratger doing penance for his sins and dying in peace, reconciled with his Lord, despite his terrible treatment of many Fulda monks during his incumbency. One of the most interesting paragraphs in this respect runs as follows: Let the reader not consider the so frequent reference to the above mentioned unrest to be calumny, as the sin of his [Peter’s] threefold denial, which is often recited in church, and which he [Peter], pricked by the divine visitation, has washed of with most bitter tears, is not known to do any harm to Peter, prince of the Apostles.150

This fragment, whose main aim was to justify the recollection of painful events and sinful actions, also indirectly compares Ratger with the apostle Peter, suggesting that Ratger too had washed of his sins with bitter tears. It was Eigil above all whom Candidus praised for his mercy and his ability to pray for and forgive his old enemies, inspired by the love of God. But it seems as if, besides Eigil, depicted by Candidus as a perfect abbot and an exemplary human being, Ratger also served as an exemplar for the monks. Apart from the fact that he was an example of bad behaviour, Ratger also embodied the possibilities of rectifying one’s own actions and forgiveness. Candidus continued with other biblical references to corroborate his point, to convince his audience that divine grace made everything possible, including Ratger’s return to the monastic precincts: the conversion of the persecutor Saul, who, called by the divine voice, from a ‘master of error’ (magister erroris) became a 149

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‘Dissensiones, si quas habetis inter uos, proiicite ab inuicem scientes Deum non esse seditionis, sed pacis. Ignoscite inuicem, et dimittant singuli iuxta praeceptum euangelii debita fratribus suis et tristitias ac simultates.’ Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 9, p. 10. ‘Non enim lectori supradictae inquietudinis tam crebra mentio calumnia uideatur, dum Petro, principi apostolorum, nihil obesse dinoscitur culpa trinae negationis saepius in ecclesia recitata, quam Diuina uisitatione compunctus amarissimis lacrymis aboleuit.’ Ibid., c. 24, p. 19 (Luke 22: 54–62).

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Hrabanus, part II ‘disciple of truth’ (discipulus ueritatis); the story of Lot’s wife, who leeing from the burning city of Sodom turned into a pillar of salt, ‘as a spice for the faithful, for the punishment of the deed is knowledge for the righteous one’; and the unfertile ig tree, which can bear fruit with the help of manure.151 God’s clemency can grant a sinner forgiveness and eternal life, as he can give fruits to an unfertile ig tree. Candidus continued to expound: I have noted these testimonies from the Holy Lecture in this book, brother Modestus, so that everyone is not his own hope, but places his hope in God; so that he, who thinks that he stands, sees to it that he does not fall; that he who has fallen because of his pride, will do his best, reprimanded by the reading of the Scripture, to rise with the help of God in humility; that every sinner, who belongs to the church with the right belief will hope for mercy from God through humble confession and true penance.152 … Therefore brother Modestus ‘Be you humbled therefore’, following the incitement of the Apostle, ‘under the mighty hand of God that he may exalt you in the time of sadness:153 casting all your care upon him; for he hath care of you. Be sober, and watch; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, goeth about, seeking whom he may devour.’154 May the help of God, without which human weakness cannot do anything good, enable you to withstand his evil will.155

Candidus’ call for penance was dictated not only by a concern for the souls of his brethren but presumably also by worries about the well-being of the realm, which Candidus, like his contemporaries, directly linked to what happened inside monasteries. He wrote: That the people because of their sins endure hunger, pestilence, mortality, and wild animals makes the Book of Wisdom perfectly clear. And it is recognised that without doubt the human race has sufered from such disasters since the beginning of the world until the present, especially nowadays because ‘there 151

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153 154 155

‘ad condimentum idelium quia punitio rei eruditio est iusti.’ Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 24, p. 19, with references to Acts 7: 57–8 and 9: 1–26; 1 Tim. 1: 13 (Saul); Gen. 19: 26; Luke 17: 32 (wife of Lot); Matt. 21: 18–22 (unfertile ig tree). ‘Haec namque ideo testimonia Diuinae lectionis in hoc libro, frater Modeste, notaui, ut non sit spes sibi quisque, sed ponat in Deo spem suam, et qui se existimet stare, uideat, ne cadat, et qui lapsus per superbiam cadat, Diuina lectione correptus studeat cum Dei auxilio resurgere per humilitatem, et ut omnis peccator in ecclesia constitutus cum ide recta per humilem confessionem ueramque paenitentiam a Deo ueniam speret.’ Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 24, p. 19. Here Candidus has changed visitationis (visitation) in tribulationis (sadness). i, Pt 5, 6–8. ‘Hinc igitur, frater Modeste, secundum Apostoli commonitionem: “Humiliamini sub potenti manu Dei, ut uos exaltet in tempore tribulationis omnem sollicitudinem uestram proiicientes in eum, quoniam ipsi cura est de uobis. Sobrii estote et uigilitate, quia aduersarius uester, diabolus, tanquam leo rugiens circuit quaerens, quem deuoret.” Cuius nequissimae uoluntati uos resistere concedat auxilium Dei, sine quo nihil potest humana fragilitas boni.’ Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 24, p. 19.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda are’, as the Apostle says, ‘terrible times and the people are lovers of themselves’ [2 Tim. 3: 1], gathering for themselves masters according to the longings of their heart. Such sin appears to rule extremely in certain monasteries, not secretly, but patiently and unfortunately …156

In this particular case Candidus was talking about lay abbacies and how these caused hatred and envy in monastic communities.Though he never made the link explicitly, Candidus seems to suggest that there was a causal connection between the impious behaviour inside the monasteries and the disasters of his day, including the political turmoil. He adapted the quotation from Paul’s letter to Timothy to show that what the apostle had predicted was happening in his own day and age; he changed the future tense that Paul had used in the letter into the present tense and omitted in novissimis diebus.157 To Candidus these ‘last days’ of godlessness had already begun. In this respect it is interesting that Candidus’ use of discordia as the source of all sin, combined with the need for reconciliation, is very similar to the language used at the councils organised in Mainz by Hrabanus once he had become its archbishop. Whereas pax and concordia had been part of the rhetoric of Carolingian legislation from the late eighth century onwards,158 they were elaborated on and rephrased during the council held in Mainz under Hrabanus’ supervision in 847.159 Moreover, discordia was added to the vocabulary as being the paramount sin people could commit, to be punished with the most severe penalty that church legislators knew: excommunication.160 As the church leaders who gathered in Mainz in 847 felt responsible for what happened in the world outside and tried to bring peace and consensus, Candidus seems to have felt responsible too. His call for penance and reconciliation also had political repercussions.161 156

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‘Propter peccata siquidem homines famem, pestilentiam, mortalitatem, bestias perpessos esse Sapientiae liber manifeste proclamat. Quibus nimirum incommodis ab initio mundis usque nunc humanum genus desudasse dinoscitur, et maxime nunc, quia, ut Apostolus ait, “instant tempora periculosa, et sunt homines se ipsos amantes” et coaceruantes sibi magistros secundum desideria cordis eorum’. Quod nefas non mediocriter in quibusdam monasteriis neque latenter, sed patienter et infeliciter regnare uidetur.’ Ibid., c. 9, p. 10. 2 Tim. 3 : 1–2 (Vulgate): ‘quod in novissimis diebus instabunt tempora periculosa et erunt homines se ipsos amantes.’ See, for example, MGH Cap. 1, No. 33, p. 98; No. 46, p. 131; No. 112, p. 226; No. 154, p. 312; and MGH Cap. 2, No. 196, p. 47; No. 203, p. 67; No. 248, p. 177; No. 249, p. 185. Both the canons of a council held in Mainz in 813 and Hrabanus’ own penitential served as a model for the decrees of the council that took place in Mainz in 847. MGH Conc. 3, No. 14, pp. 150–77; Hartmann, Synoden, pp. 222–6; Hartmann, ‘Mainzer Synoden’, pp. 130–44. MGH Conc. 3, No. 14, c. 5, p. 165, l. 18–29. Hartmann, Ludwig, pp. 193–6. For a good understanding of the political ‘crisis’ of the 830s and 840s, see Patzold, ‘Eine “loyale Palastrebellion”’, 43–77; De Jong, The Penitential State.

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Hrabanus, part II Issues of the past and present As far as the speeches included in the Vita Aegil are concerned we need to be aware that it was Candidus who composed them. He deliberately put words from the Supplex Libellus into the mouth of Haistulf , who, though well informed about the existence of the document considering his intermediary role in the crisis, probably never owned his own copy of the Supplex Libellus. Fulda possessed one, and so did the emperor in all likelihood, but beyond these two parties the text will not have been disseminated. When in the early seventeenth century Brouwer made an edition of the Supplex Libellus, he used Fulda’s only copy. It is now no longer extant, but it was at that time present in Fulda’s monastic library. The admonition by Emperor Louis the Pious is also Candidus’ work, though some of the subjects that the speech raises and the note it strikes do relect the concerns of the one-time emperor faithfully. Resentment against prestigious, luxurious church buildings, though relevant to all times, was of current interest at the close of the 810s, both in Fulda, where the construction of a new abbey church had upset monastic life, and at the royal court, where large building projects seem to have been under discussion, probably partly because of conlicts such as the one in Fulda.162 On the other hand, building did not seem to have troubled the monks much in the time in which Candidus wrote his text. Likewise the giving of alms, another subject that Louis the Pious’ speech raises, was very relevant to both the Fulda monks and the reform councils of the 810s and 820s. In the Vita Aegil the emperor urged Eigil to be careful with the substantia Christi: the alms that the lay people had donated to the monastery for the poor and the well-being of their souls. Eigil should not only refrain from spending alms on people other than the poor, that is, people who did not need it, but also make sure that his monks did not channel these gifts to family and friends or, even worse, use them to gain support in conlict situations. Again, this is a reference to the Ratger crisis, when, apparently, money for the poor had been drawn on to maintain certain factions in the conlict.163 The reform councils of the 820s also worried about church property no longer being used for religious goals. This continued to be a problem in the following decades.164

162 163 164

Jacobsen, ‘Allgemeine Tendenzen’, pp. 641–54; Jacobsen, ‘Benedikt von Aniane’, pp. 15–22. Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 10, pp. 12–13. See, for example, the council of Paris (829), MGH Conc. 2.2, pp. 648–9. Also Agobard, Liber de dispensatione ecclesiasticarum rerum. Boshof, Agobard, pp. 83–90. Hrabanus was also particularly worried about church property, coniscated by nobles during the 830s and 840s. MGH Conc. 3, pp. 161–2.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda Comparison of the emperor’s speech in the Vita Aegil with a letter of admonition that Louis the Pious had sent the community of Aniane in 821 also points to the accuracy of Candidus’ reconstruction.165 The occasion for Louis’ letter to Aniane was the election of Tructesind as the new abbot of the Septimanian monastery. The emperor focused on obedience and humility as the main monastic values and urged the monks to continue the valuable work of their founder Benedict of Aniane. He alerted the newly appointed abbot to the importance of discretion in guiding the monks to salvation; a quality which, as I have argued above, Ratger lacked and which was a requirement of continuous, harmonious monastic existence. Louis the Pious, moreover, warned against conlict and pleaded with the community to turn to him, the emperor, in case of severe arguments. A similar concern for the monasteries under his care and a comparable warning against argument is manifest in the speech included in the Vita Aegil, as it was the emperor who instructed the new abbot and his monks in matters of doctrine and monastic behaviour. Candidus voiced the responsibility of the emperor for the wellbeing of his church, including those who prayed for the salvation of his soul and those of his family and subordinates, as follows: ‘For this reason I, unworthy, have been appointed to this emperorship by Divine Providence, so that I will be eye to the blind, foot to the lame, father of the poor, and I will investigate unknown problems diligently [Job 29: 15], and for this reason I cannot be silent if it concerns the beneit of his order.’166 Considering the time in which Candidus wrote his text, possibly the last year of the emperor’s reign, the positive image of Louis as a good Christian ruler is worth mentioning. After all, besides a tribute to Eigil, the Vita Aegil is also a homage to Louis the Pious, who, like his father Charlemagne and grandfather Pippin, had intervened when Fulda found itself in a nasty situation. This mark of respect and gratitude displays Fulda’s loyalty to the emperor, at least by the majority of monks, and bears witness to how much Louis was still in control over his abbeys east of the Rhine in the late 830s, not least Fulda, notwithstanding the attempts of his son Louis the German to include them in his power base. 165

166

Diplomata ecclesiastica, ed. J.-P. Migne, PL 104, col. 1312C–1314C. Pückert, Aniane und Gellone, pp. 191–2, was the irst to point to the similarities between the two texts. It was Gereon BechtJördens who brought Pückert’s study to my attention: ‘Text, Bild und Architektur’, p. 91, footnote 95. ‘Ad hoc enim me, licet minus idoneum, tamen Diuina potentia in hoc subrogauit imperium, ut essem oculus caeco et pes claudo, pater essem pauperum et causam, quam nescirem, diligentissime inuestigarem, ac per hoc huius religionis non possum utilitatem non loqui.’ Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 10, p. 12.

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Hrabanus, part II Candidus also put words into Louis’ mouth that the emperor probably would never have used. They concerned a topic speciically discussed in Candidus’ days: the issue of lay abbots, abbots who where appointed by the ruler in order to control the property and ministeria of the monastery. Like the costly building projects and the improper use of alms, this was another problem typical of Carolingian royal abbeys. The practice of lay abbacies developed from the growing political and economic importance of monasteries under Carolingian rule. Kings appointed loyal followers, be they monks or laymen, to royal monasteries, both to control the economic resources of the monasteries and to gain a irm foothold in the localities.167 The emperor’s speech in the Vita Aegil, however, disapproves of lay abbots and points out how important it was for an abbot to have been trained as a monk himself before accepting the position of head of a monastic community: because if someone, as Cassian says, has not been taught in the monastic precepts under [supervision of] an elder, he will never be able to lead the monastic community in any way, because what he needs to command his subordinates to obey, he has not learned by obeying, and what he needs to teach them, he has not understood before through the teaching of the seniors.168

Louis the Pious himself would probably never have used such strong words against lay abbots, given that he had been personally involved in several appointments of laymen at the head of royal monasteries.169 His capitularies are, moreover, silent on the topic of lay abbacies, although related themes such as church property and abbots who behaved as lay magnates were discussed.170 Presumably lay abbots were tolerated as long as they did not plunder monastic wealth or threaten the spiritual, inner life of the monasteries. Only after the death of Louis the Pious, in the early 840s, did lay abbots become a topic of concern in Carolingian legislation, probably under the inluence of critics such as Candidus who had entered the monastery as child oblates and who, like a colleague from Murbach, understood a monastery to be ‘we, who have lived this kind of life virtually from our cradle, instructed by our elders’.171 Lay abbots 167 168

169

170 171

Felten, Äbte und Laienäbte; De Jong, ‘Carolingian monasticism’, pp. 622–53. ‘“quia si quis”, ut ait Cassianus, “regularibus institutis sub seniore non fuerit eruditus, nunquam poterit ullo modo fratrum congregationem praecedere, quia, quid minoribus obtemperaturis imperare oporteat, obediendo non didicit, nec, quid minoribus tradere debeat, seniorum prius adsecutus est institutis”.’ Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 9, p. 10. Becht-Jördens, Die Vita Aegil, p. 23. Nelson, ‘The last years’, p. 155; Felten, Äbte und Laienäbte, pp. 257–79; Felten, ‘Laienäbte’, pp. 397–431. Felten, Äbte und Laienäbte, pp. 290–7; De Jong, ‘Carolingian monasticism’, p. 635. ‘Nos vere qui ab ipsis pene cunabilis a maioribus nostris eruditi in eadem dispositione viximus.’ Statuta Murbacensia, p. 442, cited by De Jong, ‘Carolingian monasticism’, p. 643. Felten, Äbte und Laienäbte, pp. 298–304.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda from outside the monastery did not accord with this kind of communal life.172 Texts as pillars of monastic reform The monastic self-understanding voiced by the Vita Aegil did not stand alone, but was rooted in the wide-ranging texts and traditions used by the ecclesiastical elite in those days to discuss proper monastic life. Among the many sources that Candidus used to compose his agenda of reform was the Vita Pacomii, a sixth-century monastic programme and theological treatise.173 The oldest extant copy of this extraordinary text about an illiterate hermit from Memphis is included in Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Clm 28118, which, as explained above, is the oldest manuscript containing Benedict of Aniane’s Codex regularum still in existence. Even more revealing is Candidus’ use of Jerome’s translation of the seventh letter of Pachomius, irst noted by Becht-Jördens, this time not the obscure hermit carrying the same name as the desert father, but the famous Pachomius himself who died in 346.This letter is transmitted to us only as part of Benedict of Aniane’s collection of monastic rules, which suggests that the Fulda community possessed a copy of this or a similar compilation of texts.174 It was thus on a comprehensive tradition, originating in the East and West, that Candidus founded his image of the identity of the monastery of Fulda. At its centre stood the Rule of Benedict. The importance of this rule for the monks of Fulda was already evident in the Supplex Libellus and the Vita Sturmi, but it is even more pronounced in Candidus’ text.175 Eigil depicted Sturmi as a peaceful and discreet abbot who was loved by all the monks. Following the Rule of Benedict, he did everything in close consultation with his brethren. The Vita Aegil puts even greater stress on the close co-operation between the abbot and his monks. Candidus emphasised that Eigil did nothing without consulting the brethren beforehand. He asked them advice in all matters: the dedication of the new abbey church, the building of a new cloister and the construction of the funerary chapel. Even on his deathbed Eigil listened 172

173

174 175

See, for example, the councils of Yütz (near Diedenhofen, 844), Ver (844), Langres (859). Hartmann, Synoden, pp. 199–201, 204–5, 270, 423–4. See Becht-Jördens, Die Vita Aegil, p. 22; Becht-Jördens, ‘Vita Aegil als Quelle’, 42–5. Editions of the text: as Vita Pachomii iunioris, pp. 358–62, and Vita Posthumii, col. 429–38 (BHL 6411). See also the edition of the Vita Pacomii by A. Diem and H. Müller and their analysis of the text: ‘Vita, regula, sermo’, pp. 223–72. See Chapter 6. RB, cc. 2, 3, 27, 36, 64, 68, pp. 440–52, 452–4, 548–50, 570–2, 648–52, 664.

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Hrabanus, part II to their advice.176 More than in the Vita Sturmi, the focus of the Vita Aegil is on written tradition: ‘For all that has been written, has been written for our teaching’, Candidus stated, whereas Eigil had Sturmi say to Boniface: ‘Everything you command me I believe to be holy’ (italics mine). The noted diference between the Vita Sturmi and the Vita Aegil corroborates Albrecht Diem’s observation that textual observance formed the core of the Carolingian monastic reforms, with the Rule of Benedict as their authoritative example, and that in the Carolingian period monasteries became ‘text-based institutions’, ‘deeply rooted in earlier attempts to use texts for institution building’.177 This is also evident from the large collection of monastic rules that Fulda’s library possessed, ofering the monks texts to relect upon the monastic way of life, next to their daily experiences and the stories told by the senior monks. The instituta sancti Bonifatii, which had been under discussion in the 810s (see Chapter 4), apparently were no longer an issue when Candidus wrote his text. Candidus did not recall Boniface’s share in Fulda’s foundation and spiritual formation, but instead remembered him as Fulda’s patron saint and the monks’ most important intercessor. While closely following the Vita Sturmi he remembered Sturmi as primus abbas et fundator monasterii Fuldae, the irst abbot and founder of Fulda.178 Apparently in the years after the reforms in Fulda in 818, Boniface’s heritage had been integrated into a monastic identity that was now much more focused on the Rule of Benedict. The monks formally remembered every year that it had been Sturmi who had instituted the rule in Fulda. The prose Vita Aegil, the irst of the two books, thus functioned as a mirror for monks and future abbots, bringing together monastic traditions from the East and West. It was written for moral instruction. It shows how Fulda had become a text-based institution, with a strong self-awareness based on the Rule of Benedict. The vita in verse, on the other hand, was intended for spiritual exposition. After the correction of sins, penance and forgiveness, which the prose text invokes, the mind was prepared for the interpretation of the deeper meaning of the events described by Candidus, guided by the rhythm of poetry.

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177 178

‘accepto fratrum consilio’ (Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 15, p. 15); ‘una cum fratribus suis’ (ibid.); ‘cum consilio et fratrum consensu’ (ibid., c. 17, p. 16); ‘vocantur ad consilium fratres’ (ibid., c. 19, p. 17), etc. Diem, ‘Inventing the Holy Rule’. Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, cc. 3, 22, pp. 5, 18.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda ‘S e e with the eye s of th e m i nd ’ Candidus’ carmen, as he called the work in his preface, is divided into twenty-four chapters preceded by an original table of contents. Contrary to the section division of the prose text made by Dümmler, it was Candidus who made the chapter arrangement of the poem, giving each part its own title and each number its own meaning. The main narrative is similar to the one of the prose libellus, starting with Eigil’s arrival in Fulda as a young boy, following his career as monk, priest and abbot, and ending with his death in 822. Nevertheless, the emphasis is placed diferently. Whereas, for example, the prose text focuses on the speech of Louis the Pious at court, Eigil’s visit to Mainz and the liturgical celebrations surrounding his stop-over in the episcopal city earned more lines in verse, ending with an elaborate account of how the monks awaited Eigil near the grave of their patron saint Boniface. Moreover, in the poem the sequence of events is regularly interrupted by short relective expositions, guiding the reader on his spiritual pilgrimage. ‘The poet introduces the metaphor’ (metaphoram inducit poeta) is the title of chapter 5, which deals with the escape of some monks from Ratger’s tyranny and their return to Fulda. It depicts Ratger as a unicorn who had put his entrusted sheep to light and an unidentiied igure, possibly Eigil or Candidus, as the ram who guided the dispersed sheep back home.179 Chapter 9,‘Rebuke of the poet and his exhortation’ (increpatio poetae et hortatio eiusdem), immediately follows upon the emperor’s permission to choose a new abbot and precedes the discussions about the right candidate. It explains the long discussions preceding Eigil’s election as a victory of discord over concord, only to be ended with the help of God. ‘Supplication of the painter and the poet’ (supplicatio pictoris et poetae), chapter 18, which divides the long exposition of the dedication of the abbey church from the dedication of its crypts and some of its altars the following day, asks the reader to remember this great event piously in his prayers. Central to Candidus’ poem are the dedication of the abbey church, the translation of Boniface to the western transept and the dedication of Eigil’s crypts, described in chapters 15 to 20. The last of these, chapter 20, which is called Commemoratio magistri Hrabani Mauri, includes the altar tituli that Hrabanus wrote for the occasion. It concerned the contributions of Eigil and Hrabanus to the abbey church. Ratger’s role as the ediice’s architect is quietly ignored. Becht-Jördens has argued that Candidus deliberately paid no attention to Ratger’s involvement in the construction of the abbey church, because he despised the pompous 179

Becht-Jördens, ‘Vita Aegil als Quelle’, 24.

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Hrabanus, part II creation of the tyrant under whose rule his beloved community had sufered so much.180 I am not so sure this was the case. It may indeed seem odd that Candidus described only the crypts, altars and dedication of the church and omitted the architecture of the building itself, which he did describe when he talked about the funerary chapel of St Michael, another creation of Eigil and Hrabanus. Nevertheless, it is not so strange when we realise that this was a text dedicated to Eigil’s abbacy, not that of Ratger, who perhaps by then had received his own vita. Candidus’ poem was no ordinary story, to be understood purely literally and historically, but one whose deeper meaning needed to be sought with the instruments of allegory.181 It must have been this part of the Vita Aegil in particular that had been most satisfying for Candidus to compose in the lonely hours spent in Fulda’s cell, when he most missed the theological discussions with his brethren. Following, among others, Bede, Candidus considered verse a suitable medium to reveal the allegorical meaning of Fulda’s past, in this case how concord inally beat discord and Fulda became a true ecclesia again after the terrible period under Ratger. Candidus also used tools of biblical commentary to direct the reader in this search for the deeper meaning of the events of the late 810s and early 820s: he employed images and scenes from the Bible, which exegetes had acknowledged to be types of the ecclesiae; he made use of numerology to divide up his text into chapters, most of all in regard to the table of contents; and Candidus presumably added paintings to his text.182 On certain occasions the author explicitly explained how his text should be read. At the apogee of the metrical version, the translation of Boniface to his new resting place, he wrote: Perspice nunc, frater, … mentis luminibus, ‘Now, brother, see with eyes of the mind’.183 Th e unicorn and the E C C L E S I A : fal l and rise of a monaste ry To stress the exceptional nature of his story, the magnitude of Fulda’s victory over the crisis and thus the greatness of God and his servant Eigil, Candidus needed a formidable adversary. It might explain why Candidus, whose picture of Ratger is nuanced in prose, emphasising the importance of forgiveness, depicted the abbot in such black-and-white terms in 180 181

182

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Becht-Jördens, Die Vita Aegil, pp. 40–1. Becht-Jördens is the irst to have elaborately expounded on the allegorical aspects of the metrical Vita Aegil. See Die Vita Aegil, especially pp. 35–48. See Becht-Jördens, Die Vita Aegil, pp. 40–8; and his introduction to the edition of the Vita Aegil, pp. xxvii–xxviii. Becht-Jördens, Die Vita Aegil, p. xlvii. And see the following paragraph. Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. ii, c. 16, p. 55.

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Figure 7 Ratger depicted as unicorn. Printed in Christopher Brouwer, Fuldensium antiquitatum libri IV (Antwerpen, 1612), p. 90. Universiteitsbibliotheek Utrecht, H. qu. 189

his poem. He was a brutal unicorn that persecuted the monks entrusted to his care. Candidus introduced Ratger in chapter 5 of the metrical Vita Aegil. The reader trained in exegesis immediately understood that the number 5 symbolised sin and worldly behaviour.184 The chapter is accompanied by an illustration (see Figure 7). To the left we see the much despised abbey church. Ratger stands in a porch, fully dressed as an abbot. He has turned his back on the altar, which we can discern through the windows. Inside the church it is dark. Only the altar and the abbot are clearly visible. A pillar separates the abbot from a unicorn that is about to attack a lock of frightened sheep. The poem explains what can be perceived in the picture. It reads: Because, after he [Baugulf] had left, the monohorn succeeded him – a terrible afair is now to be told – [the monohorn] that, with a front I do not know [how great], 184

Becht-Jördens, Die Vita Aegil, p. xxvii, footnote 63. Also: Meyer and Suntrup (eds.), Zahlenbedeutungen.

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Hrabanus, part II persecuted the lock, which was entrusted to him, with foolish torments until he, forced by a great power, left the pasture and the rich wells – the places were sweet and the stables were sublime – and led from the ancestral realms.185

From the poem it is clear that Ratger, nicknamed monoceros, indeed is the abbot and the unicorn. Often the unicorn has a positive signiicance, being a symbol of Christ and virginity, but not in Candidus’ poem.186 His unicorn attacks the lock, a igure of Psalm 21, in which a discouraged David prays in great distress to God: ‘Rescue me from the mouths of the lions; save me from the horns of the unicorns.’187 Those trained in biblical commentary understood this metaphor perfectly well. The psalm preigures the Passion of Christ; the unicorn and the lion are Christ’s persecutors.188 Comparing Ratger to one of Christ’s oppressors was harsh criticism. According to the Rule of Benedict, an abbot ‘must always remember what his title signiies and act as a superior should. He is believed to hold the place of Christ in the monastery, since he is addressed by the title of Christ, as the Apostle indicates … “abba, father”’.189 Instead of Christ’s representative, as he should have been, the author of the Vita Aegil depicted Ratger as a unicorn, one of Christ’s tormentors. The horn symbolised his lust for power and pride, which according to Candidus caused Ratger’s downfall. Comparing Ratger to a savage beast, Candidus elaborated on an older tradition. Years earlier Hrabanus Maurus had expressed his grief about Ratger’s cruel government and the escape from it by some fellow monks in a poem called Metrum de transitu monachorum. About Ratger, Hrabanus wrote: ‘He has grown harsh in his soul and does not know how to give up. Grimly he drove away the sheep, slaughtering he wounded [them]. He pitied no one and was furious with everyone.’190 Candidus not only used Psalm 21 to portray Ratger as persecutor of Christ but also to hint at the rescue of the monks, the sheep that 185

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187 188 189

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‘Hoc nam cessante successit monoceros, qui / forte gregem sibi commissum, res faeda refertur, / nescio, qua fronte, stimulis agitabat ineptis, / donec ui nimia pastum fontesque luentes / dulcia namque loca et stabula alta coactus / deserit atque fuga regnis decessit auitis.’ Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. ii, cc. 4, 5, pp. 38–9. For the positive and negative meanings of the unicorn, see, for example, Cassian, Collationes, ii, xvi, c. 2; Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob, b. xxxi, c. 15; Hrabanus Maurus, De universo, b. viii, c. 1, col. 218–20. See also Einhorn, Spiritualis unicornis, pp. 129–33, 520–4. Ps. 21: 21. Hrabanus Maurus, De universo, b. viii, c. 1, cols. 218–20. ‘semper meminere debet quod dicitur et nomen maioris factis implere. Christi enim agere vices in monasterio creditur, quando ipsius vocatur pronomine … : Accepistis spiritum adoptionis iliorum, in quo clamamus: Abba, Pater [Rom. 8: 15].’ RB, c. 2, pp. 440–1; Fry, Rule, p. 173. ‘Durescit qui animo, et cedere nescit / trux deturbat oves, caede cruentat / nullius miseret, saevit in omnes.’ Hrabanus Maurus, Carmina, No. 40, pp. 204–5.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda the unicorn attacked. For the psalm is not only about the sufering of Christ, but also about his resurrection and the redemption of mankind. The monks of Fulda would also be saved. It was irst the emperor, ‘who always had been a lover of the better [i.e. monastic] life and who loved the monks with holy love’, who had come to the rescue of the monks.191 Thereupon Eigil had led them back to the path of virtue. Under his care Fulda became a house of God again. The conirmation of this transformation occurred during the liturgical celebration of the abbey church’s dedication and the translation of the monastery’s new patron saint, Boniface, during which the Holy Spirit descended on the community that had gathered within the basilica’s walls.192 With vigour the author approached the climax of his poem. After the dedication rituals, the procession led by Haistulf and Eigil strode to the grave of Boniface.193 The martyr was elevated from his old sepulchre, while the faithful proclaimed the Te Deum, and was carried to the western apse, where Eigil and the monks had prepared him a new burial place. When the procession reached the altar where Boniface was to be buried, Candidus wrote: Meanwhile the people who had gathered, Suddenly with a voice of the people [as one], raised the ‘Kyrie eleison’, From the Christians a cry rose to heaven, They burn completely, infused with fervour for the new divine power – What a miracle! Truly you know that not commonly an equal voice of praise is brought forth by all: The joy in [their] hearts evokes tears; Jubilations, crying and singing amalgamate in one.194

With the reforms and Eigil’s appointment as abbot, peace and harmony had returned in Fulda, for which all present intensely felt relief and joy during the ceremony of the translation of the community’s patron saint. In Candidus’ account of the event, the abbey church, which earlier would have reminded the monks of a painful period, became a sign of salvation and new beginning, a house of God ‘made out of living stones’.195 From 191

192 193 194

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Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. ii, c. 6, p. 40; Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, cc. 21, 22, pp. 203, 532. Becht-Jördens, Die Vita Aegil, p. 43. Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. ii, c. 16, p. 55. See Sheerin ‘Church ordo’, pp. 304–16. ‘Eleuat interea populari uoce repente / aduena plebs kyrie eleison, it clamor ad astra / christicolis, ardent penitus feruore recenti / numinis infusi. Uerum – mirabile dictu! – / tu scis, non solito laudis uox omnibus aequa / eicitur: lacrymas profundunt gaudia mentis, / laetitiae, lacrymae et cantus miscentur in unum.’ Vita Aegil, b. ii, c. 17, p. 59–60. Becht-Jördens, ‘Text, Bild und Architektur’, pp. 90–2.

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Hrabanus, part II an empty building it had become the ecclesia Christi. The infusion of the Holy Spirit at the supreme moment was a sign of God’s presence in the church of Fulda and thus of its transformation into the true ecclesia. Although Candidus’ decision not to describe the physical outlook of the abbey church should not be understood as a damnatio memoriae of Ratger’s creation, Candidus considered Eigil to be the true sapiens architectus, not Ratger, who was remembered as a new Salomon almost a century later in the Gesta abbatum, when feelings of anger and frustration had long faded. Unlike Ratger, Eigil had understood that real building meant constructing a community, and that the best building material was charity, discretion and consensus. Eigil had remembered his calling and had ruled the monastery as Christ’s representative. Fittingly, Candidus concluded his portrayal of Eigil’s abbacy with a commemoration of the ‘beloved father and shepherd’, which he ended with the following words: ‘Here is the ornament, here is the protector and the glory of our life, of our work and our efort, in this house of God, together with the salutary dogma of Noah.’196 As Becht-Jördens has argued, the ‘salutary dogma of Noah’ most likely should be understood as a reference to the Ark and Noah’s role in the redemption of humanity.197 Earlier in the poem, in chapter 17, which deals with the church dedication and the translation of Boniface, Candidus had vividly described the moment of salvation of the monks. The number 17 symbolises the Ark of Noah, in itself a signum of the ecclesia. In summarising Eigil’s main qualities as abbot, Candidus again seems to have referred to Noah’s Ark and its particular meaning for the monks. As Noah had preserved mankind from total extermination, Eigil had rescued the monks from the crisis they had been in and had guided them back to the safe pastures of eternal life.198 This chapter has presented several self-images of Fulda – a web of cult-sites, a secluded holy place, a relection of the ecclesia, a community of love – on the basis of two diferent texts, both written by Fulda monks, though each one portraying life in the monastery from a diferent perspective. Candidus, through his description of the aftermath of the Ratger crisis and Fulda’s reform and recovery under Eigil, focused merely on what happened inside the mother convent. Together with the tituli and remains of Fulda’s churches, Rudolf with his report of the relic translations gave us an idea of ‘Fulda’ in the broadest sense of the word, as a network of churches and cellae extending far into the surrounding 196

197 198

‘Hic decus, hic nostrae fautor et gloria uitae / exstitit, hic operis nostri nostrique laboris / in hac aede Dei salubri cum dogmate Noe.’ Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. ii, c. 25, pp. 76–7. Becht-Jördens, Die Vita Aegil, p. 46. Ibid.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda landscape. What both the Vita Aegil and the Miracula sanctorum have in common is a deeply felt concern for the well-being of the realm, with prayer as the main responsibility of a royal monastery. Each text formulates its own answer to the troubles of their days. One, the Miracula sanctorum, sought it in the redeeming power of the saints, the other, the Vita Aegil, looked for it in the lives of the monks themselves, holy men living according to an ideal, and urged them to correct their lives, to do penance, to forgive and to be forgiven. This concern for the salvation of the soul and the responsibility for the welfare of the realm were further given shape in new ways of remembrance in the following decades, the subject of the next chapter.

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Chapter 8

ROYA L POWE R A ND M ONASTI C P RAYER

Historians have long considered the period under Hatto (842–856), Thioto (856–869) and Sigihard (869–891) as a phase of decline in Fulda’s history, intrinsically connected with the collapse of the rule of the Carolingians on whose power the royal abbey depended for its wealth, growth and protection. Due to the weakened grip of the Carolingians on their realms and aristocracies, the monks had to seek patronage elsewhere. They found protection primarily in the military strength of the increasingly powerful nobles who took advantage of the political vacuum and were keen to place the economic resources, cultural productivity and sacred power of royal abbeys such as Fulda in their sphere of inluence.1 Recent studies, however, have added nuance to this picture and have demonstrated that Louis the Pious’ descendants were not so much weaker kings, but that they resorted to diferent patterns of royal patronage, taking advantage of their proximity to regional power as they ruled smaller kingdoms. It was only at the end of the ninth century that Carolingian rule sufered a structural crisis and that the irst non-Carolingian aristocrats took possession of the royal crown.2 Following from this, we also need to reconsider Fulda’s position as a royal abbey. The bond between Fulda and the Carolingians, of which Fulda’s founders, Boniface and Sturmi, together with Carloman and Pippin, had laid the foundations, did not weaken in the second half of the ninth century. On the contrary, frequent visits by Fulda abbots to the royal court, travels to Rome on behalf of the king, participation in the king’s army against the Moravians and later the Magyars, royal interventions and renewed prayer obligations rather suggest that the ties between the monks of

1 2

Jakobi, ‘Magnaten’, p. 842; Wehlt, Reichsabtei, pp. 270–2. Innes, State and Society, pp. 196–7.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda Fulda and the Carolingians strengthened in this period.3 To be sure, some fundamental changes occurred in the course of the ninth century. They afected the mental and spatial organisation of the community and forced the monks to rethink their place within the political and social networks of which they were part. The Treaty of Verdun (843) divided the Frankish realm into three kingdoms, giving each Carolingian a fair share in the royal resources and the one who held Italy the imperial title.4 The power of the emperor, however, no longer encompassed the entire Carolingian realm, but was limited by the boundaries of the middle kingdom, a rather narrow sweep of land stretching from Frisia in the north to Tuscany and Corsica in the south. In addition, Louis the German, instead of Lothar as Hrabanus had anticipated, received all the lands east of the Rhine, including the region where Fulda was situated.5 Louis’s rule difered from that of his father, and this afected the monasteries under his care. Regularly occupied with defending the eastern border against Slavic peoples, the east-Frankish king used the monasteries in his realm to build up an infrastructure to support his military campaigns. Instead of renewing old exemptions from military service granted by his predecessors and written down in documents such as the Notitia de servitio monasteriorum (c.819), he enlarged the military obligations of eastern monasteries such as Fulda.6 All these changes compelled the monks of Fulda to reconigure the connection with the court, which nevertheless remained an essential part of the monastic identity that had grown over the past generations. This rethinking of the monastery’s position in society is evinced and expressed by the sources extant from this period and that form the pillars of this chapter. Before discussing these sources I shall briely introduce the three abbots whose abbacies form the epilogue of this book and whose careers demonstrate both a stronger involvement on the king’s part in regional politics and an intensiication of the bond between court and monastery. 3

4 5 6

See, for summaries of the duties of the Fulda abbots and their involvement in Carolingian politics, Sandmann, ‘Folge der Äbte’, pp. 186–8; Wehlt, Reichsabtei, pp. 267–71, 359–61; Schiefer, ‘Fulda’, pp. 48–50. See Innes, State and Society, pp. 195–6. Goldberg, Struggle, pp. 213–16 and see above, p. 230. The Notitia, written in the second half of the 810s, laid down that Fulda owed the king solely the services of yearly gifts (dona) and prayer: CCM 1, pp. 483–99; MGH Cap. 1, No. 171, p. 350; Bigott, Ludwig, pp. 124–36 (discussing Fulda at pp. 132–3); Goldberg, Struggle, pp. 123–4. See also W. Kettemann’s study of the Notitia in the context of the manuscript transmission (including editions): ‘Subsidia Anianensia’, pp. 339–484, 531–620 and Appendix 1 for a map of the monasteries involved.

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GESTA

of thre e ab bot s

Hatto, Thioto and Sigihard had all been monks of Fulda and had been trained in its customs and learning from childhood. Of Hatto’s abbacy we are not as well-informed as of those of his famous predecessor Hrabanus and his successors Thioto and Sigihard. After having studied together with Hrabanus in Tours, Hatto worked as Fulda’s librarian (custos librorum). As abbot he may well have continued to look after the monastery’s collection of books, providing it with new titles and updating its catalogue. Probably a supporter of Louis the German, he was appointed abbot of Fulda in 842.7 Hatto never emerged from the shadow of Hrabanus; modern scholars often mention him in relation to his old friend. Hatto ofered help to Hrabanus in completing his masterpiece In honorem sanctae crucis and lent an ear when Hrabanus was threatened with excommunication by the pope for forging a clause to the papal privilege on behalf of Fulda.8 Hatto’s entry in Fulda’s tenth-century Gesta abbatum is relatively short compared to that of Hrabanus, with apparently no deeds worthy of record and only his aeterna virginitate, ‘eternal virginity’, and way of ruling the monastery by which to remember him.9 The compiler of the abbots’ catalogue depicted Hatto as discreet and modest ‘in the manner of Moses’, who had been ‘very humble, more so than anyone else’.10 Moses’ humility referred to the way in which he carried the burden of his responsibilities without complaining, not even to God, and apparently Hatto had handled his duties as abbot of a major royal abbey in a similarly modest way, and whilst prudently managing his monks without arrogance. After all, a good abbot was expected to be both humble and vigorous, enhancing the physical well-being of the community by building, obtaining property and supplying the church with richly decorated liturgical utensils, while remaining humble and not having ‘too great a concern about leeting, earthly, perishable things’ as the Rule of Benedict prescribed.11 Thioto, Hatto’s successor, was a more talked about, high-proile igure, who moved in the upper echelons of Frankish society. His nephew 7

8

9

10

11

CDF, No. 543, p. 242. See also Sandmann, ‘Folge der Äbte’, pp. 186–7; Wehlt, Reichsabtei, pp. 287–8. Hrabanus Maurus, In honorem sanctae crucis, pp. xii–xvi, cxv; Epistolae, Nos. 1, 26, pp. 381–2, 528; and Carmina, No. 38, p. 196. The edition of the Gesta abbatum reads ‘alterna virginitate’, but Fulda, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Hs. B 1, fol. 4v, has ‘aeterna virginitate’, which makes more sense. Quotation from Num. 12: 3. Gesta abbatum, p. 273: ‘discrete et modestissime rexit in morem Moysi de quo scriptum est: Erat mitissimus super omnes homines.’ RB, cc. 2, 64, pp. 440–52, 648–52. Quotation on p. 650. See also De Jong, ‘Internal cloisters’, pp. 209–21.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda Albwin served the court of Charles of Aquitaine, the son of Charles the Bald.12 He himself functioned as intermediary between King Louis the German and the pope, travelling to Rome in 859 to ask for a papal pardon for the king’s recent invasion of Gaul.13 It might have been his good contacts that had facilitated the acquisition of the bodies of Eonius, former bishop of Arles (484–502), and Anthony, an ascetic from Noricum (d. before 521), two saints who were probably treasured for their link with Caesarius of Arles, a bishop-saint whose writings on monasticism were valued highly in the ninth century.14 Eonius had been patron and relative of Caesarius, and Anthony had spent the last years of his life in Lérins, the monastery where Caesarius was trained and where the two ascetics supposedly had met.15 Louis the German himself had consented to Thioto’s appointment as abbot of Fulda in 856,16 but when the abbot angered the king in 869 he deposed him, pro eo quod regem contempnens ofenderat, a highly unusual move for a king who during his long reign had deprived no other abbot of his abbacy.17 Two years later Thioto died, presumably in one of Fulda’s nearby cellae. This is where former abbots usually retired to; Baugulf withdrew to his cella Baugoli, Ratger to Frauenberg, Hrabanus to the Ugesberg and Sigihard,Thioto’s successor, would retreat to Johannesberg in 891.The background to the rift with Louis and the subsequent deposition of Thioto may have been the conlict between Louis the German and Pope Nicholas I over the revival of the Roman archdiocese Illyricum. In the eighth century, Illyricum, together with the archdioceses of Dacia and Macedonia, had been lost to Byzantium. The pope now wished to reclaim the former eastern ecclesiastical provinces.18 One of the consequences of the restoration of the archbishopric Illyricum for Louis the German would have been to lose control over Lower Pannonia and Moravia, which would come directly under Roman jurisdiction, with greater political independence for the Slavs who lived there.19 So the king opposed the pope. Did Thioto side with the pope and was it for 12 13 14

15

16 17

18 19

Epist. Fuld. fragm., Nos. 33, 36, p. 532; ‘Kommentiertes Parallelregister’, FW 2.1, G5, p. 383. AF, a. 859, pp. 53–4; Epist. Fuld. fragm., No. 33, p. 531; Hussong, ‘Fulda’, ii, 202–4. On Caesarius’ reception in the early Middle Ages, see Rudge, ‘Women’s dedicated life’, pp. 13–54. Gesta abbatum, p. 273. For the identiication of the saints, see Bley, ‘Äonius und Antonius’, 57–80. AF, a. 856, p. 47. Annalisto Saxo, a. 869, p. 89. Nass thinks that the annalist used a Fulda compilation of annals for this entry: Die Reichschronik des Annalista Saxo, p. 68. Also Annales Hildesheimenses, a. 869, p. 18; Oexle, ‘Memoria’; Hussong, ‘Fulda’, ii, 206. Goldberg, Struggle, p. 281. Ibid., pp. 279–88.

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Royal power and monastic prayer this reason, as Goldberg has argued, that Louis the German replaced the abbot with Sigihard, a monk of Fulda, who would become one of the king’s most important supporters in the war with Moravia? This makes better sense than to seek the causes of Thioto’s removal inside the community itself and suspect another internal conlict and conspiracy against an abbot.20 Although indeed ‘such an intrigue was in Fulda not a novelty’ (we only need to think of Sturmi’s exile and the crisis preceding Ratger’s deposition),21 there is no evidence that the monastic community had been involved in Thioto’s deposition. In Regensburg, where the king was preparing for war against the Moravians, Louis the German himself invested Sigihard, Thioto’s successor, with the abbacy.22 Three years later, in 872, the abbot himself joined the battle, leading an army into Moravia to aid Carloman, Louis’s eldest son, in the war against the Slavs. Sigihard survived the disastrous military expedition and returned safely to Fulda, though ‘with great diiculty’ (cum magna diicultate), so the Annals of Fulda report.23 The expedition was subsequently followed by frequent visits by the abbot to the court of Louis the German (in 875 and 876), Louis the Younger (in 878), Charles the Fat (yearly in the period 882–885) and Arnulf (in 887).24 All of them, apart from King Charles, visited Fulda. In 885 Hugo, a Carolingian descendant who obstructed the plans of his uncle Charles the Fat, was imprisoned in Sigihard’s monastery.25 The earlytenth-century Gesta abbatum passes over the abbot’s close involvement in Carolingian politics and instead remembers Sigihard for his liturgical reforms, his decoration of a precious gospel book and the building of a stone bridge. In addition, the text praises Fulda’s eighth abbot for his way of ruling the monastery, which the author characterised as hrabanice, referring explicitly to his strict observance of the Rule of Benedict.26 Having ruled the monastery for some twenty-two years, the abbot retired in 891 to Fulda’s dependency on the Johannesberg, where he died in 899.27 Again it was the king, by then Arnulf, presumably on the advice of his counsellors (consilio regis et optimatum), who deposed the 20

21 22 23 24 25 26

27

See Oexle, ‘Memorialüberlieferung’, p. 155; repeated by Bigott, though with some hesitancy, in Ludwig, pp. 246–7. See also Wehlt, Reichsabtei, p. 268, and Hussong, ‘Fulda’, ii, 206. Bigott, Ludwig, pp. 246–7. AF, a. 869, pp. 68–9; Goldberg, Struggle, p. 284. AF, a. 872, p. 76. Wehlt, Reichsabtei, pp. 360–1. AF, Cont. Alt., a. 897, p. 131; Sandmann, ‘Folge der Äbte’, pp. 187–8. Gesta abbatum, p. 273. A charter, dated 23 July 876, also refers to Sigihard’s way of ruling the monastery ‘sub norma regularis uitae regendo’. CDF, No. 613, p. 277. He was buried in Fulda. Gesta abbatum, p. 273.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda abbot and appointed the prepositus Huoggi, a loyal follower of one of the king’s close magnates, Poppo II, duke of Thuringia and the Sorbian March, as Sigihard’s successor. The reasons are unclear.28 Nevertheless, the appointment may have been related to attempts by Arnulf, who had acquired the throne through a coup, to safeguard the support of leading eastern families such as Poppo and his kin.29 A papal privilege, which Huoggi acquired immediately after his appointment as abbot, may well shed some further light on the circumstances in which Sigihard had been forced to withdraw.30 The privilege difered substantially from earlier papal privileges granted to Fulda, containing a clause which prohibited kings, bishops and counts from using violence against the monks or to cause conlict over the property and dependent households of the monastery.31 Had its inclusion had anything to do with Sigihard’s deposition? It may well have done, though we shall probably never be able to reconstruct what happened precisely. What seems clear, however, is that by his interference in Fulda afairs, Poppo had gone too far; apart from the papal privilege, which protected Fulda against excessively disruptive interference by those in power, Poppo’s name was not entered in the Annales necrologici when he died some time after 906. This omission is indeed signiicant.32 Sigihard’s deposition, as well as Thioto’s removal, conirms Innes’ observation that from the middle of the ninth century kings were more closely involved in the exercise of regional power, a consequence of the smaller kingdoms they ruled. Innes came to this conclusion by analysing, in particular, royal control over local oices, especially countships, in the Middle Rhine valley. Kings distributed honores as seemed right to them, though carefully taking into account the rules of patronage and the sensibility of the balance of power; rulers depended on aristocrats as much as aristocrats depended on rulers.33 Did the repeated royal interference in Fulda afairs (even when you consider the fact that Fulda was a royal abbey) result from a similar close involvement by the court in local politics and the distribution of local oices? It seems likely. The abbacy of Sigihard in particular saw an intensiication of the bond between monastery and court, comparable to the close link between Fulda and the 28 29 30 31

32 33

Wehlt, Reichsabtei, p. 271. Goldberg, Struggle, pp. 340–1; Jakobi, ‘Magnaten’, p. 843. Compare AF, a. 892, p. 122. Hussong, ‘Fulda’, i, 183–4 and ii, pp. 230–2. ‘et neque regi neque episcopo cuilibet uel comiti uel alii magne˛ parue˛que persone˛ licitum sit quamlibet uim inferre siue aliquam controuersiam facere in rebus uel familiis eiusdem sepe dicti uenerabilis monasterii.’ CDF, No. 642, pp. 292–3. Hussong, ‘Fulda’, ii, 231; Jakobi, ‘Magnaten’, p. 843. Innes, State and Society, pp. 215–22; Innes, ‘People, places and power’, pp. 397–437.

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Royal power and monastic prayer Carolingians in the days of Sturmi and Hrabanus. This was not only witnessed by Sigihard’s highly political deposition, but also by the numerous royal charters that conirm old privileges and gifts, settle conlicts (one over tithes between Fulda and the archbishop of Mainz) and grant Fulda property. In addition, there are the visits of the ruler to the monastery and the exceptionally high number of oicial trips by the abbot on behalf of the king.34 This intensiication of the bond between Fulda and the royal court is also relected in the diptych, made under Sigihard in 875, together with a new copy of the Annales necrologici.This is the irst extant copy of the Annales necrologici to have survived the ravages of time, although the making of lists themselves was initiated in the second half of the eight century.35 The diptych listed members of the Carolingian family on its left and the archbishops of Mainz on its right. The list is an interesting portrait of a group of prominent outsiders, representatives of powerful networks that the monks wished to single out from their extended relations and associate themselves with. But before discussing these documents, we will turn to the prayer association of 863, an association not at all concerned with kings and ‘outsiders’, but, possibly as a response to changing political circumstances, focusing on the community of monks itself. This association of prayer was exclusively set up for Fulda monks to ofer the community a means of coming to grips with the challenges of managing a dispersed living community in a changing social order. CONVENTIO, 863 Besides the already-mentioned Miracula sanctorum, which Rudolf probably wrote in the days of Hatto, the irst extant document that relects on the community of Fulda from the second half of the ninth century is the Conventio of 863. It was an association of prayer, instituted to tie the monks together and to avert the escalation of conlicts. As a list of measures regarding the care of the sick, the commemoration of the dead and the number of meetings, the Conventio was more of a practical tool than an ideological pamphlet or monastic programme. Nevertheless, its regulations and prayer obligations do give us a sense of its members’ values and perception of community, themes that are of particular interest in this book. The aim of the Conventio was communal prayer and mutual assistance. Like similar eighth- and ninth-century prayer associations in the 34

35

MGH DD LG, Nos. 139, 162, 170; MGH DD LY, Nos. 8, 16–17; CDF, Nos. 609–10, 614–16, 619–20, 622–4, 627, 629, 631, 633, 636, pp. 273–5, 277–8, 280–1, 282–91; Wehlt, Reichsabtei, pp. 268–70. See Chapter 2.

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monastery of Weiβenburg, Cologne (St Gereon) and Paris (the society of the Twelve Apostles), only the members of the religious community themselves participated; laymen and -women were excluded and so were clerics and monks from other religious communities, although in the case of the Conventio relatives of the monks were indirectly involved.36 Often prayer associations, or confraternities, included outsiders, mostly members of other religious communities, and entailed the exchange of names of both the living and the dead. An early and famous example is the socalled prayer association of Attigny. During a council that took place in Attigny in 762, those present took the initiative for a bond of reciprocal prayer.37 Fifteen of the communities that attended the meeting were later included in the confraternity book of the monks of Reichenau; some of these were headed by the bishops and abbots that had represented them during the council.38 The confraternity book of Reichenau, compiled in the 820s, is the example par excellence of a prayer association, comprising more than ifty religious communities and almost 40,000 names, including those of lay benefactors of the community. The manuscript, now in Zurich, reveals Reichenau’s participation in an enormous prayer network extending to the east of the Rhine, north of the Seine and south of the Alps. Fulda’s prayer association of 863, however, was of a completely diferent kind. It was intended solely for the monks of Fulda itself and did not represent Fulda’s contacts with the outside world. It was a prayer association in its most local form and its purpose needs to be sought within the community itself. The Fulda Conventio prescribed prayer throughout the whole year for its living members. In case of illness of one of the associates, those who were healthy and nearby should visit the patient; this is a reference to the wide range of the area in which Fulda monks were active. Those who were too ill to participate in the divine oice should be prayed for with psalms. Moreover, when a monk died, all the others had to fulil their prayer obligations within thirty days. The brethren not only prayed for each other’s souls but also for those of their father, mother, brothers, sisters and other relatives. Regardless of monastic prescriptions that, following Christ’s call to ‘take his cross’ (Matt. 10: 38), ideally tried to 36

37

38

Oexle, ‘Memorialüberlieferung’, pp. 152–4. The prayer association of Weiβenburg is the earliest known example of such an association, dating to 776/777: Borgolte, ‘Eine Weiβenburger Übereinkunft’, 1–15, with an edition of the association on p. 15. For the prayer association between corepiscopus Hildibert and the canons of St Gereon: Oediger (ed.), Das älteste Totenbuch des Stiftes Xanten, p. 97; for Paris: Meerssemann, ‘Die Klerikervereine’, 1–42, with an edition of the bond at pp. 32–8; Paxton, Christianizing Death, pp. 195–6. Attigny (762), MGH Conc. 2.1, pp. 72–3; Schmid and Oexle, ‘Attigny’, 71–122; Verbrüderungsbuch Reichenau, p. lxiii. Verbrüderungsbuch Reichenau, pp. 14–15, 24–5, 59, 63–4, 68–71, 83–5, 87.

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Royal power and monastic prayer break through ties of blood, this fascinating arrangement demonstrates the importance of kin in early medieval society.39 Parents, brothers and sisters were to receive ifty psalms, a vespers and vigil when they died, more distant relatives thirty psalms. When the Conventio was renewed at the beginning of the eleventh century, however, relatives were no longer included in the prayer association and the amount of prayer was signiicantly reduced.40 Besides the prayers for certain individuals, there were also communal commemorations for all the dead. During the cycle of one year, each member had to say twelve masses and sing twelve psalters for the souls of those who had passed away. In addition, the Wednesday before Palm Sunday all deceased members were remembered collectively with prayer, alms and fast.41 In addition to the prayer obligations, the Conventio also regulated the rules of membership and the times when all members would gather in assembly to discuss necessary, inevitable matters (necessitates), issues that demanded the monks’ immediate attention.They met at least three times a year: on Ash Wednesday or the irst Sunday of Lenten season (Invocabit),42 on 6 June, the day after Boniface’s feast day; and on 2 November, the day after the remembrance of the church’s dedication.These were all important feasts, for the celebration of which many of Fulda’s monks would be present anyway. In addition, in the event of a severe argument or in case of misbehaviour by a member the assembly would meet, if attempts by individual members to settle the conlict and reprimand the person in question had failed.43 Some historians have found conirmation in the Conventio of a conlict between Thioto and his monks, which subsequently led to Thioto’s removal.44 To my mind, however, the institution of the prayer association should not be seen as evidence for the existence of a speciic argument between the abbot and his monks, but instead be considered as a safety measure by the management of a large community, vulnerable to disintegration and conlict because of its size, to avoid friction and to bind the monks more closely together. Although the prevention of serious

39

40 41

42

43 44

See, for example, Althof, Verwandte; Schmid, ‘Person und Gemeinschaft’, 244–6. Also Smith, Europe after Rome, pp. 323–6. Rome, BAV, Otto. Lat. 2531, fol. 5v; (edition) MGH SS 13, p. 216, repr. in FW 1, p. 208. Rome, BAV, Otto. Lat. 2531, fol. 3v, and Fulda, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Hs. B 1, fol. 2r. The Conventio of 863, as well as the renewal of the eleventh century, are edited by Waitz as an appendix to the Annales necrologici in MGH SS 13, pp. 215–16, and repr. in FW 1, pp. 207–8. Depending on how we need to translate caput ieiunii, ‘the head of the fast’. With the head of the fast, Ash Wednesday is often mentioned, though sometimes also the irst Sunday of Lent. FW 1, p. 208. For example, Oexle, ‘Memorialüberlieferung’, pp. 165–6.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda discord (discordia) is one of the central items on the agenda, next to prayer, the emphasis is on avoidance and reconciliation; the underlying aim seems to have been to prevent dissension between individual monks from developing into something that disrupted the whole community. The Conventio does not refer to a particular conlict and should not be considered as out of the ordinary for a large, diverse community that knew only too well the dangers of discord. Also, the regulations of the prayer association of the ‘society of the Twelve Apostles’ (societas duodecimo apostolorum) in Paris have the prevention of discord as one of their central themes.45 Although this is a diferent kind of source, we might compare the arrangement of the Conventio to the sanctions of Hildemar in his commentary on the Rule of Benedict, composed between 845 and 850, for hot temper, sowing discord and having a great liking for disputes. To Hildemar the principal enemy that monks had to ight was anger. It threatened the community’s existence more than any other vice.46 The original document of 863 is no longer extant, but the prayer association was renewed a couple of times in the years following.47 We possess a copy dating to the late ninth or early tenth century and one transcribed around 920.48 At the beginning of the eleventh century the bond was renewed again, though in a substantially reduced form. Initially the Conventio was followed by a list of names of all the monks involved, so the covenant itself explains: ‘it has been arranged and agreed to among those, of whom the names are written below.’49 It presumably concerned all the monks of Fulda, as the Conventio refers to omnis congregatio, the whole congregation.50 Yet, the manuscripts that contain the later copies of the Conventio do not include these columns of names. Nevertheless, in both manuscripts the prayer association is immediately followed by a congregation list, comparable to the so-called Baugulf list or Hrabanus list, discussed in Chapters 3 and 6 respectively. In the Fulda manuscript the Conventio is followed by the so-called Haicho list, compiled around 919 and kept up to date until 926/928.51 The Vatican manuscript adds a 45 46

47 48 49

50 51

See edition of Meerssemann, ‘Die Klerikervereine’, Nos. 2, 3, 6, 8, pp. 34–5. Hildemar, Expositio regulae, cc. 1, 23, pp. 77–8, 345. De Jong, ‘Claustrum versus saeculum’, 58. Also other monastic prescriptive literature points to the dangers of anger. For example, Caesarius, Regula virginum, c. 33, pp. 212–14. Oexle, ‘Memorialüberlieferung’, pp. 150–2. Rome, BAV, Otto. Lat. 2531, fol. 3v and Fulda, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Hs. B 1, fol. 2r. ‘conuenit atque complacuit (Fulda mss: conplacuit) inter illos (Fulda mss: eos) quorum nomina inferius scripta sunt.’ Rome, BAV, Otto.Lat. 2531, 3v; Fulda, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Hs. B 1, fol 2r. Oexle, ‘Memorialüberlieferung’, p. 151. Fulda, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Hs. B 1, fol. 3r.

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Royal power and monastic prayer list made around 940.52 The making of these congregation lists could well be related to a renewal of the prayer association.53 If the congregation lists of 919 and 940 were indeed intended to replace the original inventory of 863, they reveal a change in the scope of the covenant that took place in the last decades of the ninth or the irst decade of the tenth century, possibly under inluence of a greater independence of the monastic cellae.54 The lists probably included only the names of the monks who inhabited the mother convent and the neighbouring dependencies, not those who lived farther away. They certainly did not contain the names of all the monks of Fulda.55 The institution of the Conventio was in line with older commemorative practices in Fulda that had a strong focus on the community of monks and thus enforced an exclusive membership. Nevertheless, the prayer association also shows changes in the traditional ways of commemoration and creation of coherence in Fulda. As already stated, the union included the relatives of the monks: fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters and more distant relatives. They too were to beneit from the power of prayer evoked by this confraternity. It shows how the laity increasingly gained access to the specialised commemorative services of religious communities in the course of the late ninth century.56 I shall return to this issue below, when discussing the increased inclusion of magnates listed in Fulda’s Annales necrologici. The prayer association left ample room for the individual monk to arrange the duties of prayers, psalms and masses according to his own wishes, provided he performed them within a certain time frame. It did not matter when or where he carried out the liturgical tasks assigned to him. For comparison: all liturgical activities mentioned in the Supplex Libellus were tied to a certain moment and a certain place, and were to be performed by all the monks together – daily prayer for the king and his people in the morning; every Monday a prayer for all living benefactors in front of the altar of Boniface; every irst Monday of the month a vigil and a psalter for all the deceased monks. Of course, we need to keep in mind that the Supplex Libellus and the Conventio are completely diferent texts. It was not the aim of the Supplex Libellus, an appeal to the emperor, to give a full description of all liturgical tasks performed by the monks; it only listed those that were threatened by Ratger’s reforms and that would raise the interest of the emperor. Likewise, the Conventio only listed observances outside the ordinary, communal curriculum of 52 53 55

Rome, BAV, Otto. Lat. 2531, fol. 4v–5r. Oexle, ‘Überlieferung’, pp. 480–1. 54 See below, pp. 292–5. Oexle ‘Überlieferung’, pp. 493–5. 56 Paxton, Christianizing Death, pp. 194–200.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda prayer.What stands out, nevertheless, is that the demands of the Conventio were attainable for every monk, including those who did not live in the mother convent, but instead were involved in the administration of the monastic cellae. The prayer association may therefore indicate a looser organisational structure within the Fulda community, which it at the same time tried to counter-balance by instituting yearly gatherings for all members to attend. Alterations in the community’s management would also explain some of the changes noticeable in the Annales necrologici. This had formerly acted as a unifying representation of the monastic community, remembering all the monks of Fulda together, including those who inhabited Fulda’s dependent houses. By the end of the ninth century they no longer solely included the names of the brethren, nor did they record all the monks of Fulda after death. Apparently, the meaning of these commemorative lists for the community had changed, allowing lay people and monks and clerics from other religious communities to be incorporated in the Annales necrologici. Simultaneously, new ways of remembrance were developed for the monks of Fulda themselves. A worrie d king and a cal l f or p raye r The oldest extant copy of the Annales necrologici was compiled under Abbot Sigihard.57 The abbot had not only been intensely involved in high politics, but had also been deeply concerned with internal life in Fulda and the commemoration of the dead. Besides initiating a new copy of the Annales necrologici, which was kept up to date until the late tenth century and holds the names of the monks who had died between 779 and 980, Sigihard also arranged the making of a diptych and lists of all the members who inhabited Fulda’s dependencies, to be discussed below. In addition, he instituted a daily memorial service to commemorate the monks who had died on that particular day.58 As far as we know, this was a novelty in the monastery where the deceased brethren were usually remembered together as one congregation. Besides the fact that we need to understand the making of this new copy of the Annales necrologici in the context of Sigihard’s liturgical reforms, the decision to put together a new commemorative list might also have been related to a visit of King Louis the German to Fulda in the spring of 874 and recent misfortunes in Carolingian territories. 57

58

Now known as Rome, BAV, Ottobonianus Latinus 2531; Rome, BAV, Otto. Lat. 2531, fol. 6v–29v. For the dating, see Oexle, ‘Überlieferung’, pp. 460–1. Gesta abbatum, p. 273.

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Royal power and monastic prayer The Annals of Fulda describe how Louis had come to Fulda that year to celebrate Easter, probably burdened by worries about the well-being of his kingdom and the spiritual welfare of his father. For years now the Frankish realm had been plagued by natural disasters; manifestations of God’s wrath for the sins of the king’s subjects. In February, Louis the German had met with his counsellors in Frankfurt, to consult them about ‘the peace and situation of [his] kingdom’, probably a reference to the rebellion of his son Louis the Younger earlier that year. One night, after his return from Frankfurt and in the middle of prayer (as it was Lent), the king was startled by a horrible vision of his father, Emperor Louis the Pious. In it, the once emperor appeared, in great pain, sufering the punishments of purgatory, for, so the Annals of Fulda explain, he had not fully heeded the warnings of God’s messengers to incite his people to do penance and retreat from the evil path of sin.59 This was a warning to which Louis the German will have been sensitive, considering the misfortunes that he and his subjects sufered in his own day. Prayer, penance and fasting were his answer, the same means on which his predecessors had relied in their attempts to reconcile their angered Lord.60 The king sent a letter to all monasteries in his empire, asking them to pray on behalf of his father.61 He himself set of to Fulda, to celebrate Easter and to pray. By then it was the middle of April. Louis the German’s call for prayer and his subsequent visit to Boniface’s shrine, therefore, could well have contributed to the decision by the monks of Fulda to renew their prayer commitments in writing.62 Years earlier, another vision, the so-called Visio Wettini, had incited the community of Reichenau to create their confraternity book, as Karl Schmid convincingly argued. In this vision an angel appeared to the monk Wetti and, leading him through hell, purgatory and heaven, he explained that the high casualties caused by the recent plague (823) were the result of the sins of the people and a sign of God that the end was near.63 A similar anxiety about the disasters of their own day and another vision, this time the dream of a king, seems to have been the basis of the renewal 59

60

61

62

63

AF, a. 874, p. 82. For an overview of visions by and of Frankish rulers, see Dutton, Politics of Dreaming. Compare De Jong, The Penitential State, pp. 136–41. De Jong, The Penitential State; De Jong, ‘Power and humility’, 29–52; Kottje, ‘Fastenzeit’, pp. 307–11. A reference to this letter, a copy of which was received by Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims, we ind in Flodoard, Historia Remensis ecclesiae, b. iii, c. 20, pp. 266–7; Dutton, Politics of Dreaming, p. 219. Althof , ‘Verschriftlichung von Memoria’, p. 57; Schmid, ‘Reichenauer Verbrüderungsbuches’, pp. 39–41; Schmid, ‘Mönchslisten’, p. 605; Corradini, ‘Zeiträume’, pp. 113–14. Schmid, ‘Reichenauer Verbrüderungsbuches’, pp. 24–41; Dutton, Politics of Dreaming, pp. 63–7. For the vision itself, see Heito, Visio Wettini, pp. 267f; Walafrid Strabo, Visio Wettini, pp. 301–33.

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Figure 8 The diptych of 875. Rome, BAV, Otto. Lat. 2531, fol. 6r. © 2011 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. To the left the names of members of the Carolingian family, to the right the archbishops of Mainz, with later additions

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Royal power and monastic prayer of the Annales necrologici and the making of a diptych in Fulda. It was in the year following Louis’s visit to Fulda that the new copy of the Annales necrologici was made and the monks composed the diptych of bishops and kings. In the diptych’s visual layout they singled out the name of the tormented emperor, as well as those of three other Carolingian rulers, by underlining his name and adding his date of death in red ink. T he dip tych The diptych of 875 is only transmitted to us in the manuscript holding the oldest copy of the Annales necrologici.64 It precedes the list of deceased monks and was written in the same hand that wrote the irst entries of the Annales necrologici (up to the year 875). The close relation between both texts is also shown by the cross-references in both lists, which I shall discuss below. A red line divides in two the leaf of parchment on which the diptych was made. Left, under the heading nomina defunctorum regum, set apart from the rest of the list by the red ink in which the title was written, the scribe entered the names of members of the Carolingian family. He started with Pippin III, the irst Carolingian to ascend to the throne, and ended with a certain ‘Theotrat’, who might be identiied with Charlemagne’s daughter Theodrada, abbess of Argenteuil.65 In the same column, later separated by another red line, he added the names of eleven noblemen. To the right, the same scribe recorded the names of the archbishops of Mainz, from Lull to Charles, and then added the names of another ten bishops and, again separated by an empty space, that of an unidentiied Bishop Paciicus. Possibly, the same scribe wrote down the names of Einhard, Charlemagne’s and Louis’s courtier who had received his training in Fulda, and Baldrich, probably the archchancellor of Louis the German, of whom little is known further, at the bottom of the list. Other writers added the name of Archbishop Liutbert of Mainz and those of Theoderic, bishop of Minden, and Marcward, bishop of Hildesheim, who both died, together with twelve counts and their followers, ighting the Danes in Saxony in 880.66 In the course of time, again other hands updated the list of deceased kings, writing down the names of Louis the German, his wife, his sons and one of his four daughters and that of a certain ‘Karal rex’, possibly a reference to Charles the Bald.67 Later on (in the tenth century?), diferent hands added the

64 66 67

Rome, BAV, Otto. Lat. 2531, fol. 6r. 65 Jakobi, ‘Amtsträgerlisten’, p. 509. AF, a. 880, p. 94. Carroll, ‘Saxony’, 239; Oexle, ‘Überlieferung’, p. 460. Jakobi, ‘Amtsträgerlisten’, pp. 511–12.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda names of some unidentiied persons at the bottom of the folio holding the diptych, presumably laymen and -women.68 What does this diptych tell us about Fulda’s network and the community’s self-awareness? A couple of features are striking. To begin with, the Carolingians and the archbishops of Mainz are prominent in the list of secular and ecclesiastical magnates. As discussed earlier, their signiicance for the Fulda community was immense; they belonged to the monastery’s most important patrons. The diptych shows that the bond with both the Carolingian family and the archbishops of Mainz, Boniface’s successors, was highly valued by the monks themselves and considered a fundamental part of their identity. Second, the ‘silences’ in the diptych are interesting: the absence of names that could have been included, but were not. With regard to the list of the archbishops of Mainz the absence of Boniface catches the eye. The irst to be listed was Lull, Boniface’s successor to the episcopal see. Boniface’s absence may be explained from the fact that, by the time the diptych was made, he was already an established saint in Fulda with a prominent place in the community’s memoria, its calendars and martyrologies.69 Moreover, Boniface’s importance for the Fulda community lay not in the fact that he had been bishop of Mainz (in Boniface’s days Mainz was not yet an archbishopric). The diptych therefore was not the best place to remember the patron who had been so closely involved in Fulda’s foundation. Next to Boniface, not all members of the Carolingian family were listed.The scribe included Charlemagne, his parents Pippin and Bertrada, his three wives (Hildegard, Fastrada and Liutgard), though not his concubines, three of his ten daughters (Gisela, Hruodtrud and possibly Theodrada), all three of his sons by Hildegard (Charles, Pippin of Italy and Louis the Pious),70 though not his brother Carloman, nor his uncle Carloman, who had played an important role in the foundation of Fulda, nor Theodrada’s sister, Hiltrude, nor his illegitimate sons.71 The scribe did list Louis the Pious and his wife Ermengard, but not Judith (d. 843). He included Louis’s son Lothar I and grandson Lothar II, though not his other two grandsons (Louis II, d. 875,72 and Charles of Provence, d. 863). As King Louis the German was still alive when the diptych was 68 69 70 71

72

FW 1, p. 230; Freise, ‘Fuldischer Namengruppe’, Exkurs C, pp. 568–9. Jakobi, ‘Amtsträgerlisten’, p. 512. Not Lothar, Louis’s twin brother, who died when he was about one year old. Oexle, ‘Überlieferung’, pp. 460–1; Jakobi, ‘Amtsträgerlisten’, pp. 508–15. For genealogical tables of the Carolingian family, see McKitterick, Charlemagne, pp. 90, 92–3. The diptych may well have been made before Louis’s death in the middle of August, which would explain why Louis was not included.

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Royal power and monastic prayer composed, his name was not in the original list and was added only later, by a diferent hand, as were the names of his wife Hemma and his sons Carloman and Louis the Younger. ‘Karal rex’ might be identiied with Charles the Bald. If not, the omission of his name and that of his brother Pippin of Aquitaine attracts attention. Besides his relation to the Carolingian family, the entry of Bernard, son of Pippin of Italy and king of Italy, may well be explained by Bernard’s special bond with Fulda; here he had spent the formative years of his adolescence, learning the sacras literas. When Bernard fell into disfavour with Louis the Pious, it was the monks of Fulda who tried to intercede on his behalf, calling on the help of their saints, in particular Boniface.73 The compiler presumably drew on older examples to make his list. Franz-Josef Jakobi has suggested that the scribe may have used a list of living and deceased members of the Carolingian family that had Charlemagne as its starting point; to this I should like to add that there may also have been another list, focused on Lothar.74 For besides highlighting the ‘stem’ of the genealogical tree (Charlemagne, Louis the Pious), the compiler of the diptych also drew attention to the branch that in the end would inherit the imperial title and the middle kingdom, singling out the names of Lothar I and Lothar II, just like those of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, by adding their day of death in red ink and underlining their names. After Louis the German’s death in 876 a diferent hand added his name and this scribe felt no need to distinguish the east-Frankish king from his relatives by external marks and red ink. The settlement of 843 at Verdun created three equal kingdoms. Fulda came to lie in the most easterly one, and only the middle one was from now on tied to the imperial title. Considering all this, it is interesting that this diptych displays a continuity of thinking about the Carolingians and Fulda’s position as royal abbey within the framework of the Carolingian imperium as a whole. A similar focus on the imperial rule as it existed under Charlemagne and Louis the Pious can be discerned among the imperial aristocracy and the Carolingians themselves who time and again attempted to recreate the former realm.75 Although not all Carolingians were included in Fulda’s diptych, those who were came from all parts of the Frankish realm, if indeed ‘Karal r[ex]’ can be identiied as Charles the Bald. For comparison, the diptych that was made some ifty years later, after Fulda had become an Ottonian royal abbey, only recorded the 73 75

Epist. Fuld. fragm., p. 517. 74 Jakobi, ‘Amtsträgerlisten’, p. 510. Innes, State and Society, pp. 214–15, 223. For a useful discussion of the Carolingian perception of this imperium, see also: De Jong, The Penitential State, pp. 10–11; Patzold, ‘Eine “loyale Palastrebellion”’, 43–77; Airlie, ‘Semper ideles?’, pp. 129–43; Nelson, ‘Kingship and royal government’, pp. 383–430.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda east-Frankish kings.76 Regardless of the division of 843 with Fulda’s subordination to Louis the German, the monks of Fulda continued to situate themselves in relation to the old Carolingian imperial rule. Besides that of the new ruler and his family, they still felt responsible for the salvation of the souls of other members of the Carolingian family, many of whom had once been their lords, protectors and benefactors, and some of them, as a matter of fact, still were. After all, a small part of Fulda’s landed property lay in the middle kingdom, the sphere of inluence of Lothar and his sons. Following previous Carolingian divisions, the Treaty of Verdun had allowed large landowners (bishoprics, monasteries, aristocratic families) to keep their property throughout the empire, regardless of the political borders of the kingdoms created in 843.77 Similarly, the diptych of 875 went beyond the boundaries of the Verdun treaty, representing Fulda’s political sense of belonging and the monastery’s economic interests, and extended into the past of the ‘glory days’ of the Carolingians. Is there indeed a link between the diptych and Louis the German’s vision and visit in 874? If we understand this link to have been a shared feeling of an urgent need for prayer and puriication in response to natural disasters, wars and anxious images of hell and damnation, the answer is ‘yes’. Fulda was afected by the calamities of those days. Their former abbot, Hrabanus Maurus, then archbishop of Mainz, had even played a heroic role during one of them, the famine of 850, feeding more than three hundred people each day from a villa along the Rhine, the area that had been most severely struck by the food shortage.78 The event, famous for the moving account of the death of a young mother for whom help had come too late, was recorded in the Annals of Fulda, presumably by Rudolf of Fulda, who supposedly had followed Hrabanus to Mainz once he had become archbishop.79 Even when Rudolf was not the author, the monks of Fulda would have heard about the sad death, which was recounted by the author in an evocative way, describing how the baby, which the woman had been carrying with her, was searching for his mother’s breast after she had collapsed to the ground. They may have known similar tragic anecdotes, some of them from irst-hand experience. In addition, stories such as Louis’s dream, Einhard’s recount

76

77 78 79

München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, clm 4012, fol. 5v; FW 1, p. 216; Oexle, ‘Überlieferung’, p. 476; Jakobi, ‘Magnaten’, pp. 517–25. Goldberg, Struggle, p. 115. AF, a. 850, p. 31. Wattenbach et al., Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen, vol. vi, pp. 678–83, and Reuter, Annals of Fulda, p. 2, for a discussion of authorship. For the Annals of Fulda in general, see also Corradini, ‘Identitätskonstruktionen im ostfränkischen Raum’, pp. 121–36.

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Royal power and monastic prayer of Archangel Gabriel’s visit to the blind Alberic and the Visio Wettini were well-known in the monastery.80 However, we cannot establish a direct connection between the diptych and Louis the German’s visit to Fulda during Easter 874, in the way that Karl Schmid did for an entry in Remiremont’s Liber memorialis.81 Fulda’s diptych does not contain a similar ‘witness list’ that can be linked to a particular event. I doubt, moreover, that the making of the diptych of 875 was actually instituted by Louis the German himself.82 Prayer for the king was already an established practice in Fulda, and most likely there had been a diptych before this one. The monks’ own inluence on their communal memory was considerable.The fact that, next to the names of members of the royal family, the diptych also lists those of the archbishops of Mainz and other magnates, both secular and ecclesiastical, with whom Fulda had a special bond is also signiicant. Among the dignitaries included in the diptych are eleven noblemen, all of them benefactors of the monastery.Why the names of these men were listed, while those of other inluential, generous magnates were excluded, is diicult to establish. The secular magnates certainly held an important place in Fulda’s remembrance or else their names would not have been recorded together with those of the Carolingians and the archbishops of Mainz. The kings and archbishops, after all, were patrons, whose signiicance for the monastery was already established and cherished by Fulda tradition. The inclusion of the secular magnates in the diptych should be understood as part of a changed policy under Abbot Sigihard concerning the commemoration of powerful benefactors and the increased extent to which lay people beneited from the commemorative services of religious communities. Next to the Conventio of 863, which includes the relatives of its members in its salutary prayer, this change is also manifest in the Annales necrologici, to which I now turn. Th e

revi site d : th e inclusion of ‘out side r s ’

ANNALES NECROLOGICI

A careful study of the copy of the Annales necrologici of 875 by Karl Schmid and his team, in close comparison to the other existing manuscripts, has revealed some signiicant changes in the ways in which the monks of Fulda commemorated and recorded the dead in the second half of the 80

81 82

Rudolf used a copy of Einhard’s translation story for his Miracula sanctorum, and the Annals of Fulda refer to Gabriel’s warning to Alberic when explaining the sufering of Louis the Pious. Schmid, ‘Ein karolingischer Königseintrag’, 96–134. Compare Dutton, Politics of Dreaming, pp. 222–3.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda ninth century.These changes are of great interest to us here, for they help us to understand the monastery’s reaction to recent political developments and its response to the increasing involvement of lay people in the monks’ care for the dead. What irst catches the eye is the rising number of lay people and clerics and monks from other religious communities who were included in the Annales necrologici in the course of the ninth century. Secondly, there is the system with which this was done in the days of Sigihard. While earlier, in the days of Hrabanus, an occasional friend or benefactor was entered because of his personal friendship with the monks and the abbot, now magnates found their way into the list because of their position of power, next to the Carolingians and the archbishops of Mainz who were probably included from the beginning (apart from Lull and Richulf). Among those whose names were written down were the abbots of Lorsch, Hersfeld and Corvey. These abbots were representatives of the three most important royal abbeys close to Fulda in Francia and Saxony. Also recorded were the names of some important noblemen, who were not only among Fulda’s most prominent benefactors, but also held very important positions of power in Fulda’s immediate sphere of inluence in eastern Francia, Thuringia and eastern Saxony.83 They include counts, margraves and members of the most powerful aristocratic families in the region, such as Thacholf, who as margrave of the Sorbenmark was in command of the Thuringian border against the Sorbs. He had donated his property near the Bohemian border to Fulda for his salvation and a place in Fulda’s cemetery after his death.84 Egino was count of Badenachgau in East Francia.85 The ‘Babenberger’ Henry was count in Francia and brother of the earlier-mentioned Poppo II, who had been involved in Huoggi’s appointment as Sigihard’s successor. His family had gained a strong position at the royal court under Louis the German, Louis the Younger and Charles III, and later married into the Ottonian family.86 Brun was count in Saxony and member of the Liudolings, the famous Saxon family, from which the dynasty of the Ottonians arose and with which the Carolingian family had entered into an alliance by marrying Louis the Younger, Louis the German’s son, to Brun’s sister Liutgard. His brother Otto was married to Hadwig, and

83 84

85 86

Jakobi, ‘Magnaten’, pp. 841–2. CDF, No. 578, pp. 260–1. He also served as an envoy on behalf of Fulda, carrying a letter for Pope Leo iv (847–855). Epist. Fuld. fragm., No. 31, p. 531. See also Freise, ‘Studien’, p. 1214. ‘Kommentiertes Parallelregister’, FW 2.1, G2, p. 382. Wehlt, Reichsabtei, p. 270. Henry is called princeps militae (AF, a. 866, p. 65) and dux Austrasiorum (Annales Vedastini, a. 886, p. 59). In 886 he died in battle against the Vikings before Paris. ‘Kommentiertes Parallelregister’, FW 2.1, G15, pp. 384–5.

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Royal power and monastic prayer through her Brun was related to the Babenbergern, the inluential family just mentioned.87 Some of these dignitaries, such as Thacholf, were also included in the diptych of 875 as a sign of their special relationship with the monks. The scribe of the oldest copy of the Annales necrologici, who was responsible for the entries up to 875, did not list the names of these special friends in his copy of the Annales necrologici. He added certain marks instead, varying from two to ive dots, to the places where their names should have been. We ind the same, or similar, marks next to the names of these speciic benefactors in the diptych that was made together with the copy of the Annales necrologici. Although there is clearly a system in this, it is not consistently carried through. Sometimes a person is mentioned in the Annales necrologici and in the diptych. Not all those enlisted in the diptych had a reference mark in the Annales necrologici. In addition, not all the marks in the Annales necrologici refer to the diptych, though most of them do. Finally, the reference marks are not always used consistently.88 The two later copies of the Annales necrologici do list the magnates whose names were omitted in the copy of 875. It appears that the dignitaries were originally included in the Annales necrologici, but were singled out by the scribe who made the diptych to stress their particular signiicance for Fulda’s existence.89 This reference system, which closely linked the Annales necrologici and the diptych to each other, was not continued after the summer of 875.90 According to Franz-Josef Jakobi, the insertion of names of secular and ecclesiastical dignitaries in the Annales necrologici was due to a shift in the balance of power and the collapse of Carolingian rule. The monks of Fulda had always been closely connected with the Carolingian kings, but now came to rely on local aristocratic families for patronage and protection. Therefore they started to enter the names of their new patrons and protectors into the Annales necrologici.91 This explanation is not entirely satisfactory. Local patrons already played an important part in monastic politics before the disappearance of the Carolingians.They had long been remembered for this by the monks, who, as we know, had said prayers for the founders and benefactors of the monastery since the days of Sturmi. Furthermore, even though the balance of power changed, the relationship of Fulda and the Carolingians remained close. As shown by the careers of, 87

88 90

91

Widukind, Rerum gestarum Saxonicarum, b. i, c. 16, p. 26; ‘Kommentiertes Parallelregister’, FW 2.1, G12, p. 384. Oexle, ‘Überlieferung’, pp. 477–80. 89 Ibid., p. 477. The last two persons to receive such a treatment were Lothar ii and Count Albwin, who both passed away in 869. Concerning the identiication of Albwin, see Nass, Hameln, p. 82. Jakobi, ‘Magnaten’, pp. 865–6.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda for example, Thioto and Sigihard, the abbots still performed loyal service for the rulers, travelling to Rome as their envoys, marching in the king’s army against enemies in the east and frequently visiting the court. Kings, in their turn, visited Fulda. As we have seen, Louis the German stayed in the monastery in 874 to celebrate Easter. In 897, Arnulf followed in his footsteps and visited Fulda causa orationis.92 Following the example of their predecessors, the east-Frankish rulers showed a deep concern for prayer, as is also demonstrated by their charters, in which call for prayer and commemoration have an important place. For example, in September 885 Charles III granted Fulda the property of his vassallus Meginward in Berstadt, north of Frankfurt, in exchange for prayers to be recited on the day of his coronation (Epiphany) and on the day of his death.93 Further, when around the year 900 Fulda became fully dependent on the support of aristocratic families, the number of ecclesiastical and secular dignitaries listed in the Annales necrologici decreased. It expanded again only in the tenth century, when the new ruling dynasty of the Ottonians rose to power.94 Under Abbot Hiltibert (923–927) Fulda became a powerful Ottonian royal abbey, closely involved in royal politics. Hiltibert pursued the policy of including outsiders in the Annales necrologici and furthermore broadened the network of magnates that the commemorative lists contained. Both Hiltibert and his successor Hadamar (927–956), a trusty follower of Otto the Great, made sure that the names of the higher imperial aristocracy, both ecclesiastical and lay, were systematically recorded in the Annales necrologici.95 The inclusion of magnates in a royal abbey’s list of the dead is thus not necessarily a sign of weak kingship. On the contrary, it is a sign of power, of the appeal that Carolingian patronage and closeness to the court still had on the local elites. It may have been precisely the aristocrats’ longing for Königsnähe that had stimulated the monks to include the names of magnates in lists that also honoured the Carolingian family. Indeed, the reason for Thacholf to donate Fulda his property in exchange for a burial place in the monastery’s cemetery was not only Boniface’s fame, but also the fact that kings and rulers associated themselves with this monastery, visiting the saint’s burial site and paying tribute (quia reges et principes facerent sibi memoriam in monasterio).96 At the same time the monks of Fulda tried to tighten their grip on the region, through their associations and friendships and the ways in which they deined themselves and recorded membership of their community. 92 94 95 96

93 AF, Cont. Alt., a. 897, p. 131. CDF, No. 624, p. 284. Jakobi, ‘Magnaten’, pp. 792–887. Ibid., p. 866; Schiefer, ‘Fulda’, p. 49; Sandmann, ‘Folge der Äbte’, pp. 190–3. CDF, No. 578, p. 260.

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Royal power and monastic prayer In the words of Patrick Geary, monks ‘preserved the memoria of their patrons, but in ways that emphasized those who were directly connected to the concerns of the religious communities themselves’.97 The concerns of (groups or persons within) religious communities could well overlap with those of their patrons, as the example of Hrabanus Maurus’ family cartulary, discussed above, shows. I do not wish to dismiss the changing political circumstances as a possible explanation for the new ways of recording and remembering the dead. They made the monks rethink their position in society and search for new ways to express and formalise old bonds and new friendships with those in power. Including the names in the Annales necrologici of those magnates who held the most prominent positions in the monastery’s immediate sphere of inluence was an explicit statement of their importance for the community. Nevertheless, shifting mentalities towards the care for the dead need to be included in the discussions about the inclusion of members of the local elite in the Annales necrologici, at least when lay people are concerned. These transformations are relected in the creation of a complex ritual guiding the Christian to the other world and the increasing lay participation in these rituals that took place in the eighth and ninth centuries.98 The changes also afected the ways in which the monks of Fulda remembered and recorded their dead and the role these records played in binding the community together. The insertion of names of ecclesiastical and secular magnates in the Annales necrologici, which earlier recorded almost solely monks of Fulda, for one, relects the monastery’s willingness to grant lay families access to their ‘space’: irst of all, the mental structure that underlay the speciic form and characteristics of the Annales necrologici and possibly also the physical area of the monastic cemetery. This was a communal burial-place where, like its written counterpart, the lists of deceased monks, the unity of the dead was maintained. The irst witness to the burial of a lay person in Fulda dates to the same period in which outsiders were increasingly admitted into Fulda’s Annales necrologici. In a charter, transmitted through the Codex Eberhardi and dated to 861,99 the above-mentioned Thacholf, count of the Sorbenmark, bought himself into a prayer association with the monks and exchanged land for a place in Fulda’s cemetery.100 The count is also one of the benefactors listed in the Annales necrologici and later included in 97 98 99

100

Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance, p. 177. Paxton, Christianizing Death; McLaughlin, Consorting with Saints. The codex originally dated the charter 801, but a later hand changed this to 861. Considering the fact that Thachulf died in 873, 861 indeed is more likely. See Dronke, CDF, No. 578, p. 261, footnote 1. CDF, No. 578, p. 260.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda the diptych. This is not a coincidence. Something changed in those years and this transformation can be linked to the increasing participation by the laity in the commemorative facilities of religious communities in the later ninth century to which the Conventio of 863 is also a witness.101 Thacholf ’s case raises the question of where the bodies of Fulda’s other benefactors rested after death and whether there might have been a link between interment in the monastic cemetery and inclusion in the Annales necrologici and/or its diptych. We know that burial in or near churches was rather a common practice in the early Middle Ages in certain areas of the Frankish realm, such as Gaul, but for Fulda we lack evidence.102 Nevertheless, by the tenth century, interment of lay people in Fulda had become an established custom. One of the monasteries’ sacramentaries dating to this period holds a mass for ‘the peace of your servants and maidens and all the orthodox faithful who rest in Christ in the church and its surroundings’.103 But what about the eighth and ninth centuries? Unfortunately, archaeology does not help us any further. There is no archaeological data that points to the burial of lay people in Fulda in the early Middle Ages, but we need to take into account that the evidence is highly problematic. In the irst decades of the twentieth century, Joseph Vonderau discovered graves in the immediate vicinity of the church of St Michael, the funerary church built by Eigil, and close to the abbey church, namely in the eastern ambulatory, directly bordering on the western apse, and behind the eastern apse of the basilica.104 Shortly thereafter, in 1933, Josef Schalkenbach found ive more graves underneath the western part of the nave of today’s chapel of St Michael.105 Yet, most of these tombs have not been properly dated, nor has it been possible, on the basis of physical evidence, to conclude whether the bodies they contained belonged to monks or also laymen. As I have indicated earlier, the sepulchres near the western apse have been recognised as abbots’ graves, partly on the basis of the liturgical garments found in one 101

102

103

104

105

Another interesting example is the case of a layman named Phento, who in 848 donated his property in Werngau to Fulda in exchange for a place in the monastery’s commemoration. When he died in 874 his name was included in the Annales necrologici.We do not know where his body was buried though. CDF, No. 555, p. 248; ‘Kommentiertes Parallelregister’, FW 2.1, X19, pp. 441–2. Efros, Body and Soul; Lauwers Naissance du cimetière; McLaughlin, Consorting with Saints, pp. 24–54; La Rocca and Provero, ‘Eberhard’, pp. 225–80; Smith, ‘Religion and lay society’, pp. 672–8. ‘pro tuorum requie famulorum et famularum ill. et omnium idelium catholicorum orthodoxorum in hac basilica et in circuitu huius ecclesiae in Christo quiescentium.’ Sacramentarium Fuldense, p. 311. Ellger thinks that the church, to which the sacramentary refers, is the chapel of St Michael; Michaelskirche, pp. 97–8. I, however, think that basilica signiies the abbey church and should be understood in more general terms. Vonderau, Ausgrabungen 1908–1913, pp. 13–17, 36; Vonderau, Ausgrabungen 1919–1924, pp. 37–9, 61–3. Schalkenbach, ‘Wiederherstellung Michaelskirche’, 47; Ellger, Michaelskirche, p. 64.

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Royal power and monastic prayer of them.106 The graves found in the vicinity of St Michael and underneath the chapel have been identiied as monks’ tombs, as written sources remember the chapel to have been built on the cemetery of the monks. In his Martyrologium Hrabanus speaks of the cimiterium fratrum, and in the titulus that he wrote for St Michael of the coemiterium fratrum.107 Also Candidus speaks of the rotunda ‘where the dead bodies of the brethren have been buried and rest, which they call cemetery’ (ubi defuncta corpora fratrum sepulturae tradita requiescunt, quam cimiterium vocant).108 None of these sources are explicit about the precise location of the monastic cemetery. Nevertheless, it may have been in the same space that special friends of the monastery were laid to rest and whose names, such as Thacholf, were also recorded in the Annales necrologici. The burial and commemoration of lay benefactors in the later ninth century was not related to a relaxed attitude towards the integrity of claustrum. It was precisely the two abbots, remembered for their strict adherence to the Rule of Benedict, under whose supervision Fulda’s contacts with the outside world lourished: Hrabanus Maurus and Sigihard. Good contacts with the outside world and protection of the integrity of the cloister could go hand in hand, if handled by skilful managers who knew how to balance ideals and the practicalities of daily life.109 Clearly, Hrabanus and Sigihard knew how to do this. Nor did the change solely come from the monks, who included members of the local elite in their care for the dead more and more. The brethren responded to a demand on the part of the lay people themselves, who increasingly wished to beneit from inclusion in the monastery’s Book of Life and the physical proximity to the community of praying professionals and the bodily remains of their saints. By being included in the same commemorative lists that also contained the names of the royal family, moreover, aristocratic families associated themselves with the court, which was a closeness they sought. Large male communities like that of Fulda came to dominate local religious life in the eighth and ninth centuries. They monopolised intercession with the sacred and commemoration of the dead on behalf of the local inhabitants. Members of the elite seem to have continued the custom of burying their dead within their own world that was centred on the family, although they increasingly left the spiritual care, the prayers and masses to be said for the soul, in the hands of prayer specialists, 106

See above, pp. 172–3. Hrabanus Maurus, Martyrologium, p. 12; Hrabanus Maurus, Carmina, No. 42, p. 209. 108 Candidus, Vita Aegil, b. i, c. 17, p. 16. 109 De Jong, ‘Carolingian monasticism’, pp. 633–6, 639–40; De Jong, ‘Internal cloisters’, pp. 212–13. 107

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda namely the monks. These members of the elite proceeded to found their own churches as places of burial, if possible provided with precious relics, while at the same time donating property to existing monasteries for their salvation. Well-known examples are: Einhard and his church in Seligenstadt, where both he and his wife Imma were buried near the holy remains of their beloved Marcellinus and Peter; and Eberhard of Friuli, who together with his wife founded the monastery of Cysoing in France to have their bodies buried in its church after death.110 An example closer to home is the family church of Hrabanus Maurus in Hofheim, where not only his parents but also his brother and his brother’s wife were buried after they died.111 Thacholf, however, chose to have his body buried in an existing holy place of established reputation, in the proximity of the monks, whose prayers helped him to gain salvation, and its patron saints. Though Thacholf may have lacked the resources to found his own chapel, as Einhard had done or Walaram and Waltrata (assuming that they were the ones who built the church in Hofheim), there seems to have been more to it. The example of Lothar, who just before his death in 855 entered the monastery of Prüm and died in a monastic habit, shows that, in the face of death, members of the elite increasingly sought the proximity of praying professionals and their saints.112 In addition, Thacholf ’s request to be admitted to Fulda’s memoria and to be buried in the monastery is rather detailed compared to more general phrases such as ‘for the salvation of my soul and those of my relatives’, which we often ind in charters registering transactions of property and prayer.113 His words seem to relect a nobility that was no longer satisied with a more general association of prayer, but required a speciic, clearly deined place in Fulda’s commemoration, the Annales necrologici, and its physical space, the monastic cemetery. Besides the changing balance of power and new forms of patronage, these changes regarding care for the dead and concern for the afterlife also need to be taken into account in explaining the increased inclusion of magnates in the Annales necrologici, at least as far as lay aristocrats were concerned. While lay people and representatives of important religious institutions gained a more prominent place in forms of remembrance that earlier had been primarily reserved for Fulda monks, new forms of remembrance were developed in Fulda for the monks themselves. These show an increased care for the individual monk in Fulda, next to communal commemorations that continued to exist. Archaeologists have excavated 110

111 113

Smith, ‘Einhard’, 55–77; La Rocca and Provero, ‘Eberhard’, pp. 225–80. See also Smith, ‘Religion and lay society’, pp. 672–8. 112 Paxton, Christianizing Death, pp. 194–5. See above, pp. 212–3. CDF, No. 578, pp. 260–1.

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Royal power and monastic prayer memorial tablets with the names and dates of deaths of Fulda monks engraved on them, which probably once served the cemetery on the Michaelsberg.114 Two of these were built into the chapel of St Michael and three others were later bricked in the eighteenth-century Dom and are now kept in Fulda’s Dommuseum. Another one, no longer extant, we know from a description by Christopher Brouwer.115 The oldest stone belongs to a certain monk named Harthleih, who died 21 January 863.116 The others, as far as can be discerned, date to 884, 938 and 995. These commemorative stones show an increased attention on the part of the individual monk in the rituals guiding the soul to eternal salvation from the 860s onwards, a development that is also indicated by the arrangements in the Conventio of 863, urging monks to visit the sick, to pray for those too sick to be able to attend oice, and to say prayers and masses individually once a monk had died. It was Sigihard who gave this development further shape by instituting a daily commemoration of deceased brethren; each day, after they had read a chapter from the Rule of Benedict and the relevant entry from the martyrology, the monks would commemorate with three psalms the fratres who had died on that particular day.117 One would expect the monks to use a necrology for this, but if such a book ever existed, it has left no trace.The two necrologies of Fulda that have been transmitted to us contain the names of monks who died from around 1000 onwards.118 One copy of the Annales necrologici, made under the supervision of the humanist and antiquarian Conrad Peutinger (1465–1547) and listing the brethren who passed away between 779 and 793 and 862/863 and 890, does include the dates of death of the deceased monks.119 Nevertheless, like the other, older copies, it is structured according to the year of death, which makes it diicult to use in order to quickly gather the names of all the monks who had died on one particular day. For that purpose a necrology, that is, a list organised as a calendar, would have been more convenient. The joint ritual of remembering all the members of the Fulda community together, centred on the Annales necrologici, apparently no longer suiced. In this, Fulda conforms to a more general pattern, visible in the Frankish realm in the Carolingian period. The ritual surrounding a 114 115 116 118

119

Ellger, Michaelskirche, p. 93. Brouwer, Fuldensium antiquitatum, p. 178; Ellger, Michaelskirche, p. 93, footnote 97. Pralle, Dom-Museum, No. 8. 117 Gesta abbatum, p. 273. Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek, Ms. Scal. 49, fols. 1–47, a martyrology composed around 1020– 1030 with necrological notes added in the same period in the margin, and Fulda, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Hs. 4º D 28, fols. 2r–62r, a necrology of Frauenberg from the irst half of the ifteenth century. Wollasch, ‘Die Necrologien’, pp. 934–8. München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 4012.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda Christian transition to the other world, focusing on the sick, the dying and dead, that had developed over the past centuries expanded in the course of the ninth century. Death increasingly became a second ‘conversion’ that needed to be prepared for by penance, prayer and liturgical rites performed by ecclesiastical professionals and that needed sustained aftercare in the form of prayer and alms.120 While rituals of death became more elaborate and complex, there seems to have been an increased focus in Fulda on the individual that went through this process. As said above, individual monks got their own memorial tablets and were remembered on their day of death at least from the 860s onward, next to the already long-existing communal commemorations. The appearance of references to someone’s status in the Annales necrologici from the second half of the ninth century can be considered in the same light, presumably evolving from a need to express the identity of the dead individual and his position inside the community more precisely. At irst, scribes recorded only the names of monks, which they considered to be intrinsic elements of the persons to whom they referred.121 Later, they started to add designations such as ‘monk’,‘deacon’, ‘priest’ or ‘oblate’ to the names to further diferentiate the person in question from the other members.122 In addition, scribes inserted titles as ‘count’, ‘duke’, ‘lay’ (laicus), ‘abbot’ or ‘bishop’ to distinguish lay people and secular and ecclesiastical dignitaries from the Fulda monks.123 The developments just described, all relected in the Annales necrologici – the expanding care for the dead and the salvation of the soul, and the need of the magnates and monks of Fulda to come to grips with changing political circumstances – must have altered the meaning of these commemorative lists for the community of monks. Another change that took place in the same period and that still needs to be discussed is that from the later ninth century onwards the Annales necrologici no longer recorded all the monks of Fulda. Gaining inde pe nde nc e A comparison of the Annales necrologici with lists of the inhabitants of some of Fulda’s major dependencies, made under Abbot Sigihard, has revealed 120

121

122

123

This process is described by Paxton in Christianizing Death; Smith, ‘Religion and lay society’, pp. 672–8; Constable, ‘Commemoration’, pp. 169–95; McLaughlin, Consorting with Saints. For the importance of names in commemorational practices and records see Oexle, ‘Gegenwart’, pp. 19–77; and, ‘Memoria’, 78–86. The inclusion of the last label may have been a response to the conlict between Hrabanus Maurus and Gottschalk and the condemnation of Gottschalk at the synod of Mainz in October 848. ‘Kommentiertes parallelregister’, FW 2.1, MF112, p. 246. Zörkendörfer, ‘Statistische Untersuchungen’, Diagram C 3.2.

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Royal power and monastic prayer that at the end of the ninth century the Annales necrologici no longer listed the names of all the brethren.124 The lists, recording the names of the members of Hameln, Rasdorf, Hünfeld, Großburschla, Holzkirchen and sancti Bonifatii cella, were made slightly later than the copy of the Annales necrologici and the diptych initiated in 875.125 However, their aim was probably initially not commemorative.They are not transmitted in the Vatican manuscript holding the oldest version of the Annales necrologici and the diptych, but were included in a younger manuscript, composed in the tenth century and now in Fulda.126 Nor were they updated in the course of the following decades. They are better compared to the membership lists made under Baugulf and Hrabanus.These lists were like snapshots of the community at a particular moment in time, made for administrative purposes, that later became functional for the remembrance of the dead and the construction of Fulda’s past. Nevertheless, the lists under discussion here did not record the whole community of monks or those living in the mother convent as the Baugulf and Hrabanus lists did; they simply recorded the inhabitants of some of Fulda’s dependent cellae. The precise aim of the lists of Hameln, Rasdorf, Hünfeld, Großburschla, Holzkirchen and sancti Bonifatii cella is unclear, as is the selection for speciically these six dependent houses. We know that Fulda had more dependencies under its wing, such as Solnhofen, Milz, Wenkheim and Wolfsmünster, but of those we do not own a membership list.127 According to the lists, none of the dependencies was headed by an abbot or a prior, which is an indication of their subordination to Fulda; in three cases it was a magister who appears to have been in charge of the community.128 One of the striking features of the lists is the division into monachi and scolastici. This suggests some kind of educational role of the cellae, besides their economic and administrative function in managing Fulda’s possessions.129 As they have no titles such as monachus or presbyter added to their names, and considering the high number among them who would die as priests, the expression scolastici probably denoted child oblates and young clerici. Madge Hildebrandt has interpreted the existence of these 124 125

126 127

128 129

Schmid, ‘Mönchslisten’, pp. 633–4. The list of Hameln was composed before 882, possibly 879; the one of Großburschla before 886, possibly 879; the one of sancti Bonifatii cella before 886; Rasdorf before 892; Hünfeld before 883, possibly 876; and Holzkirchen before 879. FW 1, p. 221. See also Schmid, ‘Mönchslisten’, pp. 601–10, and Oexle, ‘Mönchslisten’, p. 640. Fulda, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Hs. B 1, fols. 28r–30r. See, for example, Weidinger, Wirtschaftsstruktur; Hilpisch, ‘Die fuldischen Propsteien’, 109–17; Nass, Hameln, p. 140, footnotes 589–90. Also the cellae of Aniane were led by a magister. Ardo, Vita Benedicti, c. 22, p. 208. Concerning the economic function, see Weidinger, Wirtschaftsstruktur, and see the Fuldaer Geschichtsblätter (FGbl) for articles on the individual dependencies.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda dependencies as evidence of ‘segregated schooling of some sort, under the auspices of large monasteries’, a response to the reform council of 817 that demanded ‘that no school should be kept in the monastery, if not for those who are oblates’ (ut scola in monasterio non habeatur nisi eorum qui oblati sunt).130 Hildebrandt has taken this prescription to mean that only oblates were to receive training inside the claustrum and that the other pupils should be educated in ‘external schools’ outside the monastic conines. According to her, the presence of scolastici in the lists of Fulda’s dependencies is evidence of the monastery’s obedience to Aachen regulations. The dependencies, however, were more probably a practical means of managing a large community and its estates rather than ‘external schools’. These cellae were full religious communities with a hospitium to house guests, workshops to supply the needs of the community and monastic buildings for the monks.131 They were also responsible for the education of their pupils, both oblates and other pupils destined for an ecclesiastical career.132 Comparison of the membership lists with the Annales necrologici shows that not all the monks who inhabited the monastic dependencies concerned found their way into these commemorative registers. Furthermore, it also reveals that the names of those who lived in the cellae are diferent from the names of those who resided in the mother convent. Presumably these dependencies had their own networks from which they recruited monks.133 The fact that the ile of names of the dependencies difers substantially from the range of names in the mother convent indicates a growing independence of the dependent cells in relation to the mother convent at the end of the ninth century. This also had consequences for the Annales necrologici and the role they played in constructing a sense of community. This growing independence is also suggested by diferences between the individual copies of the Annales necrologici, which appear after 875. Until the year 875 all copies are very similar to each other, listing the same monks and the same occasional ecclesiastical or secular dignitary. Until that year they all seem to have relied on the same source. After 875, however, the copies difer. The oldest copy of the Annales necrologici lists, for example, the names of the abbots of Corvey (Adalger, d. 877, and Avo, d. 879); Brun, count in Saxony and member of the Liudolinger family; and Liutgard, wife of Louis the Younger and also a Liudolinger. The 130 131

132 133

Legislatio Aquisgranensis, c. 5, p. 474. Hildebrandt, The External School, p. 119. See, for example, Solnhofen: Ermanrich, Vita Sualonis, c. 10, p. 160; Schannat, Dioecesis Fuldensis hierarchia, p. 143. See above, pp. 186–7. De Jong, In Samuel’s Image, pp. 242–4. Schmid, ‘Mönchlisten’, p. 634.

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Royal power and monastic prayer manuscript, which is now kept in Fulda and is of a later date, does not hold these names, but records, among others, Gunzo, bishop of Worms, Elting, a chorepiscopus of Mainz and Thiotroch, abbot of Lorsch, none of whom is registered in the copy of the Annales necrologici of 875. The differences between the copies suggest that the lists were kept up to date in diferent places by diferent people, certainly by 875. We know that the dependency of St Andreas, founded in the irst quarter of the eleventh century by Abbot Richard on the nearby Neuenberg (the dedication of the church took place in 1023), received a copy of the Annales necrologici after its foundation.134 Likewise, the other satellite communities close to Fulda, those of All Saints, Mary and John the Baptist, may have had their own copies, and possibly dependencies further removed from the mother convent too. After 875 those who recorded the names of the recent dead were no longer concerned to make sure that their copy was identical to the other copies in use. In other words, commemorative practices based on the Annales necrologici no longer served the interests of the Fulda community as a whole. The strongly centralised organisation of the monastery seems to have been replaced by a looser structure, in which certain groups could form their own social memories, albeit within the framework of Fulda’s sphere of inluence. The Annales necrologici relect several changes that took place in the second half of the ninth century: a changing balance of power, which asked for a redeining of the monastery’s position in society and new ways to give shape to its prominent social relations; new developments in the remembrance of the dead, including an expansion of the rituals geared towards salvation, as well as an increased lay participation in the commemorative services of religious communities. Last but not least, there was a growing independence of Fulda’s dependent cellae. These changes afected the ways in which the monks of Fulda remembered and registered their dead. While the Annales necrologici changed in scope and organisation, the monks of Fulda started to turn to other forms of remembrance, other means of recording their dead and other ways of creating coherence in a community that lived dispersed over a wide area. The Conventio of 863 stimulated both communal commemorative gatherings and individual remembrance. Under Abbot Sigihard, commemoration of the individual monk gained a more prominent place as it became standard to remember deceased brethren on their day of death. Although the meaning of the Annales necrologici for the community under inluence of these developments changed, they were still of 134

Now Rome, BAV, Otto. Lat. 2531, fols. 30r–38v. Oexle, ‘Memorialüberlieferung’, p. 170; Oexle, ‘Überlieferung’, p. 493.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda great value to the monastic community; they were continued and used until 1065. Even though Abbot Sigihard had instituted a commemoration of deceased brethren on their date of death, it was under his abbacy that a new copy of the Annales necrologici was made, as explained above, and observances to commemorate the monastic community as a whole continued to exist.135 Finally, when Fulda founded a new dependency on the Neuenberg in the irst quarter of the eleventh century, the mother convent gave its inhabitants a copy of the Annales necrologici, probably as a token of their adherence to Fulda and a means to tie them to the monastery through a shared past and communal commemoration. 135

See, for example, the communal masses in Fulda’s sacramentary: Sacramentarium, pp. 245, 266–8.

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When Sturmi felt that death was near, he summoned his beloved monks (his familia) and took this last opportunity, according to Eigil, to bid them farewell and urge them to bear the responsibility for his achievements: ‘My brethren, you are well aware of my last wishes.You know how I have laboured, even till the present day, for your proit and peace, particularly for the continuance of this monastery after my death, so that you may be able to serve God here with sincerity and charity according to the will of Christ.’1 Sturmi and his brethren knew only too well that the existence and cohesion of a monastic community was not self-evident, but the result of social eforts. The sources considered in this book reveal the attempts of the monks of Fulda to create order and cohesion in response to the changes that they underwent: becoming a royal abbey, large landowner and home to an increasing number of monks. They sought unity irst-and-foremost in the liturgy, in the recurring communal commemorative gatherings, which brought all members, living and dead, together, and linked the temporal and the eternal. The regularity and the communal nature of these rites, which always took place in the same setting, evoked a sense of community and continuity. Although timelessness was what the monks aimed to achieve, overcoming the initeness of death, the communal expressions thereof nevertheless changed in character and frequency over the years. Next to communal gatherings, the monks developed new forms of remembrance that focused on the individual members of the community in rituals guiding the soul to salvation. This was a development that is also visible elsewhere in the Frankish realm in the ninth century. This increased care for the individual soul arose from a heightened awareness that Christians should prepare themselves for death through penance, prayer and liturgical rites, and that also after death the soul needed sustained aftercare in the form of prayer and alms. 1

Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 25, pp. 161–2. See above, pp. 166-7.

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The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda At the same time, the laity increasingly participated in the commemorative facilities of religious communities. Yet for all these changes, the diverse prayers that constituted the monastic liturgy continued to ofer the community an important means to create unity. When the monks in the 860s sought a way to come to grips with a dispersed living community in a changing social order, their response was to institute a prayer association. The monks further deined their community through the selection of those for whom they prayed: their deceased brethren, their benefactors and special friends, the Carolingian family and the populus christianus. Through excluding some from access to the beneicial efects of prayer but pointedly including others, implicit yet unmistakable statements were made about who belonged and who did not. All such choices served as identity markers of some kind, and each form of commemoration demanded its own way of record-keeping: a diptych to remember the royal dynasty and the archbishops of Mainz, charters and the cartulary to evoke the names of those whose pious gifts had enriched the monastery and provided the monks with the means to dedicate their lives to prayer. The commemoration of the deceased brethren was focused on the Annales necrologici, a particular form of recording the dead, which aimed at creating community by almost exclusively listing the names of the Fulda monks and a select group of the privileged with whom the monks had a special relationship. It initially listed all the monks of Fulda, whether they lived in the mother convent or inhabited one of the monastery’s dependent cellae. In determining the community’s social memory they also created this identity. The organisation of time and the chronological frameworks that underlay these representations of the community were another means employed by the monks to forge cohesion and bring about community. The Annales necrologici were structured according to Anno Domini dating, which through counting the years since the incarnation of Christ linked the monastery’s past to salvation history and created continuity between past and present.This carefully reckoned order of time was also employed in other writings that combined liturgy and history, such as the Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi, orienting important events of local and royal history in relation to the incarnation of Christ and incorporating them in the sacra historia. The diferences between the copies of the Annales necrologici and the Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi reveal that for all these attempts to create coherence, the community consisted of diferent groups. In addition to the incarnation of Christ, the monks used Sturmi’s anniversary as a reference point to order the passing of time. His death 298

Conclusion formed the beginning of the Annales necrologici, his name started lists and catalogues of abbots. The sequence of abbots ofered another chronological framework used to structure the past from the foundation of the monastery to the present day and to create continuity. Continuity was evoked in the sequence of abbots’ biographies, initiated by Eigil, and their material counterpart, the chapel of St Michael at Fulda’s cemetery, which Eigil may well have intended as a monument of Fulda’s abbots, the monastery’s main representatives on Earth. The monks also used the framework as one of the organising principles of Fulda’s cartulary. Fulda also deined itself through the distribution of relics and the use of architecture, which Fulda’s architects employed to distinguish Fulda from other religious communities, revealing the monastery’s superiority as a place of divine intervention and royal patronage, or, alternatively, to show resemblance with existing churches that represented authority and sanctity, such as St Peter’s in Rome.The authoritative monastic traditions from the East and West that the monks brought together under Eigil and Hrabanus were also represented in dedications and the tituli of the altars in Fulda’s abbey church and the relics that the altars contained. Thus the monks shaped their identity through material objects, physical settings and liturgy, as well as texts. Religious artefacts, altars and church architecture relected ideas and ideologies as much as written sources. As the elements in a language of power, they symbolised and enforced Fulda’s position in society as well as the hopes and dreams of the monks who used them to create community. Certain themes repeatedly come to the fore in Fulda’s sources as important points of reference in determining the monastery’s position in society and its self-perception: Boniface, solitude, the bond with the Carolingians, the Rule of Benedict and Rome.The importance of Rome for the monks of Fulda had its origin in the acquisition of the papal exemption by Boniface, who, moreover, had worked as a papal legate for most of his career on the Continent. But there was a more general interest in this Holy City among the members of the Carolingian elite. Likewise, the monks of Fulda turned to this source of holy power and authority when they sought inspiration, architectural models, relics and liturgical observances. Nevertheless, the distance to Rome (to the monks of Fulda, Rome in a way was a concept, ‘a Rome in the mind’, more than a real city) initially prevented the popes from becoming integrated in Fulda’s identity in the way that the Carolingians were part of Fulda. The monks included the names of the popes in the Annales necrologici only from the eleventh century onwards, while they listed the names of the members of the Carolingian family at least from the last quarter of the ninth century, and those of the archbishops of Mainz as a matter of course. In 299

The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda addition to this, the Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi only refer to the pope in relation to the Carolingians. They included those events relevant to the collaboration between Rome and the Franks that culminated in the coronation of Charlemagne as emperor in St Peter’s in 800. The pope’s legate, Boniface, became the monastery’s patron saint. His importance as a historical igure who had founded the monastery was increasingly replaced by his signiicance as the martyred saint and his role as patron of Fulda, both in heaven and on earth. This development is relected in the liturgy, in the invocation of the charters and in the physical setting of his grave that moved from a location of penitential humility to an elevated platform with an altar and choir of its own. Solitude, the eremus, used by Boniface to characterise the environment of Fulda in his letter to the pope, refers to an old and venerable tradition that, through the examples of the desert fathers, went back to the origin of Christianity. While this tradition had become well established in asceticism and had become a topos in Western hagiography long before Fulda was founded, it also became a hallmark of Fulda’s identity that the monks used to distinguish themselves from other religious communities and from local society. By the middle of the ninth century, the eremus had become a name to designate the immediate location of Fulda, although agriculture, cattle breeding and the construction of richly decorated churches, which housed precious relics in beautifully crafted reliquaries, had transformed Fulda’s environs substantially since Boniface had irst used the term to portray the monastery. Boniface had also used the monks’ observance of the Rule of Benedict to characterise Fulda. This monastic rule played a signiicant role in the creation of a monastic identity, although its use and meaning changed over the years under the inluence of, among other things, the monastic reforms of Louis the Pious and especially Benedict of Aniane. Another important means for the monks to construct a sense of community was the creation of a shared image of the past; their own past, but also that of the universal Church. The monks hoped to become part of this history of salvation through ordering time in relation to Christ and through the saints.Their relics were kept and venerated in Fulda’s churches and their names resounded in the liturgy. Sturmi and Boniface came to be important representatives of Fulda’s own past. In the discussions about proper monastic life that took place in the 810s and that were incited by rigorous reform, both in Fulda and at the royal court, the monks reverted to the time of their foundation to determine their position. The extant contemporary accounts of these debates illustrate that, especially in times when prevailing customs were called into question and were no longer self-evident, the necessity to validate the present 300

Conclusion with the aid of the past became urgent. The results of this process of identiication transformed the past to it present-day needs. The authors of the Supplex Libellus, defending the instituta sancti Bonifatii, depicted the early days of Boniface and Sturmi as a golden age, held up as a mirror to Ratger’s abbacy which they condemned for its reforms of the liturgy, the role and management of Fulda’s dependent cells, its inhospitable attitude towards guests and the elderly and its austerity. Eigil’s Vita Sturmi responds to this golden age, not to gain support for his own cause, but to create consensus. By the time Candidus wrote his Vita Aegil, Boniface’s legacy, which had been under discussion in the 810s, was apparently no longer the subject of debate and had been integrated in a monastic identity that was now much more focused on the Rule of Benedict. His Vita Aegil, a portrait of an ideal abbot, transformed the memory of both Ratger and Eigil in favour of the latter. If Candidus’ work were the only source we could rely on concerning Ratger’s remembrance, our impression of this abbot would be bleak and simplistic. We also know, however, that, after he had stepped down as abbot, Ratger lived for almost twenty years only a ifteen-minute walk away from the monastery, in a satellite community of Fulda. We know that he was buried there as beitted an abbot. Furthermore, the early-tenth-century Gesta abbatum does not mention the conlict between the abbot and the monks at all, but honours Ratger as sapiens architectus for having built the abbey church and Eigil for the construction of the funerary chapel.This all shows that such ierce conlicts within a monastic community did not necessarily lead to permanent schisms, social exclusion or to damnatio memoriae. The process of remembering and forgetting was a complex one. Thus, besides revealing the attempts of the monks to create coherence and continuity, the sources are also witnesses to the existence of conlicts and of failures to achieve unity. Diferences between the extant copies of the Annales necrologici disclose a growing independence of Fulda’s cellae. Tensions in Eigil’s recounting of Sturmi’s exile in the Vita Sturmi indicate that the abbot was a controversial igure, to whose claim to leadership not all the monks of Fulda consented. Unoicial notes in the margins of the Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi and the Chronicon Laurissense breve relect the perspective on Fulda’s past of a small circle of friends gathered around Hrabanus Maurus; similarly the Supplex Libellus and the Vita Aegil reveal the existence of several factions inside the community: ‘a multitude of [people with] diverse wishes’, as Candidus described his community. Sometimes conlicting viewpoints found expression in the same source, as is illustrated by Fulda’s abbey church, dedicated in 819. It took three abbots to complete the ediice, each one of them leaving his own mark on the building. 301

The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda Fulda’s close connection to the court makes the monastery an important case study for the way in which Carolingian politics, including their religious reforms, afected life at a local level, and the way in which local events reverberated in the palace. The example of Fulda illustrates the impact of the monastic reforms of Emperor Louis the Pious and Benedict of Aniane on life in the royal abbeys, while the crisis that the monks of Fulda experienced in the 810s may well have inluenced the agenda of the councils that took place in Aachen in 816 and 817, as well as the more informal discussions in the corridors of the palace. After all, the ideals of Louis the Pious and his advisers were based on, and nourished by, the everyday realities in monasteries all over the Frankish Empire. Besides changing the monks’ diet and dress, the reforms promulgated by the royal court generated an interest in Fulda in monastic traditions from the East and West and stimulated the monks to build up a collection of monastic rules and other prescriptive texts, comparable in size and scope to Benedict’s Codex regularum and Concordia regularum. Eigil’s crypts elaborated similar traditions and were evoked in his Vita Sturmi, which describes Fulda’s foundation as an inevitable development from eremitism to coenobitism. The sources reveal a great concern by the monks to base the monastery’s observance on authoritative tradition and the increasing importance of written texts herein. Fulda became a text-based institution with a strong self-awareness based on the Rule of Benedict. The call for emendation and correction of the populus Christianus, voiced in royal capitularies, was echoed at a more local level in Hrabanus’ cult-sites and Rudolf ’s Miracula sanctorum. The monastery’s network of holy places functioned as the backbone of the instruction of the faithful in the localities and the reform of religious life. Following the example of eminent courtiers such as Einhard, Hrabanus and Rudolf, each in their own way, urged the faithful to imitate the exemplary life of the holy men and women whose relics had recently arrived. They exhorted their audiences to pay tribute to their Lord, whose power had brought these powerful patrons to the regions east of the Rhine. The enormous scale on which Hrabanus created places of veneration and orthodox Christianity was unprecedented in Fulda. Using relics, Hrabanus further integrated former proprietary churches of local families into Fulda’s sphere of inluence and deined the monastery’s territory, without breaking of relations with these local families who entrusted the commemoration of their dead and the care of their souls into the monks’ hands. Hrabanus brought ‘Fulda’ to the world outside, while at the same time tying the monks more irmly to the cloister, imposing the Rule of Benedict more strictly than ever. Many of the places where he placed 302

Conclusion the relics were easily accessible and fulilled important roles in society and in the administration of Fulda’s property. The priest-monks, residing in these dependent houses and responsible for the administration of the monastery’s landed property, granted local inhabitants pastoral care when needed and allowed them access to the redeeming power of their masses, prayers and relics. The monks of Fulda felt deeply responsible for the well-being of the realm and took their central mission of prayer for the stability of the polity, expressed in monastic programmes such as the Supplex Libellus, very seriously. This was indeed a royal abbey. The crises that troubled the Carolingian Empire in the 820s and 830s, but also later, reminded the monks forcefully of their duty: prayer. They shared this sense of urgency with the Carolingian king and members of the elite, who also believed that prayer and puriication should be the answer to the wars and natural disasters that had recently troubled their kingdom. Fulda’s sources reveal how the monastery’s attempts to transform the religious life of society and to instruct the faithful in orthodox Christianity gradually paid of . Changes in the political constellation in the decades following Louis the Pious’ death in 840 forced the monks of Fulda to reconigure the connection with the court, which remained nevertheless an essential part of the monastic identity. Kings became more closely involved in the exercise of local power as is illustrated by their repeated interference in Fulda afairs. Especially during the abbacy of Sigihard, the bond between the Carolingian king (successively Louis the German, Louis the Younger, Charles the Fat and Arnulf) and the monastery intensiied.This is relected in and brought about by the diptych made under Sigihard in 875 together with a new copy of the Annales necrologici, in which prominent space was reserved for the Carolingian rulers and their relatives. Regardless of the division of 843, which placed Fulda in the kingdom of Louis the German, the monks included members from all over the empire and continued to position themselves in relation to old Carolingian imperial rule. Besides the members of the Carolingian family, other prominent ‘outsiders’ were also listed, singled out from Fulda’s extended relations, to express their importance for Fulda’s identity. Changing political circumstances made the monks rethink their position in society and search for new ways to articulate and strengthen old bonds and new friendships with those in power. The inclusion of representatives of prominent institutions and positions in the monastery’s sphere of inluence in the Annales necrologici and the diptych was one of the ways in which the monks tried to tighten their grip on society. The inclusion of these magnates in lists in which the royal family had a prominent position may also be understood as 303

The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda evidence of the appeal which the Carolingian family still had for the aristocratic elite, and a longing for Königsnähe. While monasteries inluenced local society, groups outside the monastery also had a great impact on life inside the monastic conines. Local aristocratic families, owning land and high-ranking positions, had a profound efect on the ways in which the community archived its memory, remembered its past and deined itself. Although doubtless many more families played a role, Hrabanus Maurus and his family left the most prominent mark on Fulda’s extant sources. The example of the impact of Hrabanus’ family on Fulda’s memoria illustrates that Fulda’s self-representations were in fact complex constructions that represented several interests and groups; not only factions within the community itself, but also groups that extended well beyond the conines of the monastery. At the end of the ninth century the Carolingian dynasty, lacking adult successors, was no longer able to hold on to its monopoly on kingship. In West Francia and Italy the irst non-Carolingian was crowned king in 888, while in 870 Lotharingia had already been divided between the western and eastern kingdoms. For a brief time it seemed that Carolingian dominance would be restored to its former glory when Charles the Fat, king of Italy and crowned emperor by the pope in 881, succeeded his older brother, Louis the Younger, in the east in 882 and became king of West Francia in 884. Nevertheless, Charles’ attempts to reintegrate the old Carolingian Empire failed. He was unsuccessful in involving the localities and their aristocracies in his politics as much as they wanted and were used to, thereby causing a growing distance between them and the court and denying them the royal patronage they needed.2 Charles was deposed in 888. Ruling elites chose new kings, who were often politically experienced aristocrats of established reputation. The eastern Franks raised Arnulf, an illegitimate grandson of Louis the German, to the throne. Arnulf ’s successor, Louis the Child, was a legitimate Carolingian, but an infant nevertheless. As a result, certain powerful aristocrats, such as Count Conrad, increasingly controlled patronage. Conrad and his kin managed to gain such power that when Louis the Child died in 911 it was Conrad’s son who succeeded him to the throne. The position of Conrad I was nevertheless fragile, enduring rivalry and the opposition of other aristocratic parties. The death of his father meant the end of his kingship; the Saxon leader Henry I took over the crown. His family, the Liudolings, later known as the Ottonians, successfully positioned 2

Innes, State and Society, pp. 222–3; MacLean, Kingship and Politics, pp. 161–98.

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Conclusion themselves above local rivalries and established a political pyramid with an Ottonian at its apex.3 Fulda was rather successful in managing to hold its own amidst the crises which hit the eastern kingdom.4 Their charters and commemorative lists, the Annales necrologici, relect the lexibility and social sensitivity with which Fulda created alliances with members of the leading families.5 One of them, Conrad’s son, King Conrad I, chose Fulda as his inal resting place, endowing the monastery with substantial gifts.6 His successor, Henry I, celebrated his irst Easter as king in the same monastery, which now housed the tomb of his predecessor. This appears to have been to display his newly acquired power.7 Under the Ottonians Fulda lourished again, as is clear from, for example, the numerous precious, beautifully illuminated sacramentaries produced in the monastery’s scriptorium, although the community would never again reach the size it had had under Hrabanus Maurus.8 A new epoch demanded a new past. Eigil’s Vita Sturmi was rewritten, prayer associations and the Annales necrologici were renewed and a new diptych was made which focused solely on the eastern kingdom of the Ottonians.The reviser(s) of the Vita Sturmi shortened the text and omitted certain passages that had lost their meaning for the present-day community and may have seemed awkward to them, such as the passage in Sturmi’s deathbed speech in which the abbot recalls his conlict with Bishop Lull of Mainz. Nevertheless, the opening of the speech remained largely the same. These words, with which Sturmi reminded the monks of the fragility of their existence, never lost their meaning for the community of Fulda. 3 4 5 6

7 8

Innes, State and Society; MacLean, Kingship and Politics. Innes, State and Society, pp. 231–2; Wehlt, Reichsabtei, pp. 268–73. MGH DD LC, Nos. 3, 46, 53, pp. 98–100, 167–9, 178–9. MGH DD CI, Nos. 6–8, 38, pp. 6–9, 35–6. Concerning the discussion about Conrad’s burial place, see Wehlt, Reichsabtei, pp. 272–3. MGH DD HI, No. 1, pp. 39–40; Hussong, ‘Fulda’, ii, 241–2. Palazzo, Sacramentaires Fulda; Sauer, ‘Allerheiligenbilder’, pp. 376–83.

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346

INDE X

Aachen councils of, 36, 38, 124, 127–8, 131, 158, 160, 164, 166, 197, 294, 302 palace of, 92–3, 95, 115, 178 Aalbach, 217, 223 abbacy ideals of, 122–5, 238, 242, 244–6, 248–9, 250, 255, 256, 261, 267 abbots free election of, 52 lay, 238, 252, 255–6 mausoleum for, 135, 171, 173, 174, 299 Abundius, martyr, 168 Adalhard, abbot of Corbie, 127, 165 Adalhard, martyr, 242 Admonitio generalis (789), 82–3, 91, 92, 93, 122, 150 Agatha, saint, 142 Agnes, martyr, 142, 144 Alban, martyr and priest, 44, 143, 144 Albwin, count, 268 Alcuin, 9, 48, 66, 67, 68, 79, 90, 96–8, 99, 111, 121, 145, 163, 165, 169, 176, 178, 194, 241 Aldebertus, 165 Aldhelm, 241 Alemannia, 11, 77, 191 Alexander, martyr, 216 All Saints, 145–6, 148, 220 allegory, 258–9 alms, 64, 70, 238, 248–9, 253, 255, 292 Alsace, 133, 199, 202, 205, 206, 207 altars programme of, 137–43, 160, 173 Altmühl, 186, 192 Amand, saint, 168 Ambrose, 193 De oiciis, 60 Amöneburg, 24, 52 Anastasius, martyr, 138, 139

Angilbert, abbot of St Riquier, 91, 92 Angildruth, 151, 152 Anglo-Saxon England, 11, 21, 26, 48, 55, 56, 104 Aniane, 254 Anianus, martyr, 169 Annales Corbeienses, 56 Annales Fuldenses, 96, 269, 277, 282 Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi, 44, 54, 57, 58–61, 64, 65, 66, 67, 71, 83, 100, 116, 238, 298, 300, 301 Kassel redaction of, 118–19, 168, 181, 212 Annales Lindisfarnensis, 60 Annales Nazariani, 90 Annales necrologici, 8, 16, 54–5, 61–71, 75–7, 78, 96, 114, 118, 168, 178, 179–81, 182, 183, 184, 188, 192, 212, 271, 276, 279, 283, 292–3, 294–6, 298–9, 301, 305 inclusion of magnates in, 9, 66–8, 181, 270, 275, 283–92, 303 annus Domini, 55, 57, 58, 61, 62, 65, 70, 152, 298 anointment, 53, 102–3, 105–6 Anthony of Noricum, 268 Antony of Egypt, 29, 82, 138, 139, 141, 156, 157, 160 Apollo of Vilbel, 113, 125 Appleby, David, 218, 232 Aquila, martyr, 221 Aquitaine, 11 Arator, 241 architecture, 170, 221, 259, 263, 299 basilica, 85, 87, 93, 94 ‘basilica of the T-type’, 102 citation in, 12, 104 crypts, 17, 84, 159, 160, 173 double church, 95, 99, 112 exegesis of, 135, 169–70, 174 hall church, 85, 87, 94

347

Index architecture (cont.) and identity, 11–12, 13, 74, 91, 100, 102–7, 113–14, 299 and liturgy, 12–13, 107–14 ring crypt, 103, 105, 129 rotunda,12, 169 transept, 105, 112 western transept, 16, 48, 84, 95, 99, 100–2, 106, 107, 112, 129, 136, 137, 172, 173, 189 Aris, Marc-Aeilko, 82 Ark of Noah, 263 Ark of the Covenant reliquary, 218–19 Arnulf of Carinthia, 269–70, 286, 303, 304 Aschfeld, 100, 185, 199 Athanasius of Alexandria Vita Antonii, 138, 157 Attigny, confraternity of, 272 Augustine, bishop of Canterbury, 21, 105, 142 Augustine, bishop of Hippo, 160, 191, 193, 195 Confessiones, 193 De civitate dei, 193 De doctrina christiana, 222 Auhausen, 192 Aulus Gellius, 194, 195 Bandmann, Günter, 11, 12 Basil of Caesarea monastic rules of, 160, 196 Basler Rezepte, 80, 81 Baugulf list, 73, 74–9, 90, 96, 117, 180, 182, 184, 185, 188, 274, 293 Baugulf, abbot of Fulda, 16, 46, 67, 72–4, 75, 81, 83–5, 90, 91, 95, 96, 99, 107, 113, 117, 137, 171, 172, 178, 181, 195 death of, 118 withdrawal as abbot, 81, 83–4, 95, 96–8, 100, 191, 260, 268 Baugulf, count of the Speyergau, 72–3 Bavaria, 11, 20–1, 26, 43, 132, 147, 150, 152, 164, 205 Becht-Jördens, Gereon, 111, 137, 141, 146, 150, 160, 169, 239, 241, 243, 256, 258, 263 Bede,Venerable, 55, 58, 83, 193, 259 De temporum ratione, 55, 60, 118 Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, 56, 195 martyrology, 147, 148 Vita Cuthberti, 241 Benedict of Aniane, 116, 126–7, 129–30, 134, 158, 159–61, 163, 165, 196–7, 254, 300, 302 Codex regularum, 160, 196–7, 256, 302 Concordia regularum, 160, 197, 302 Benedict of Nursia, 35, 78, 126, 127, 136, 139, 140, 142, 143, 158, 160, 169, 178, 197–8, 242, 243, see also Rule of Benedict Berggötz, Oliver, 190

Bernard of Italy, 281 Bernward, bishop of Würzburg, 107 Berschin, Walter, 150, 242 Bertrada, queen, 106, 280 Bieler, Ludwig, 199, 200 Bigott, Boris, 230 Bischofsberg, see Frauenberg Bleidenstadt, 144 Bobbio, 139 Boethius, 193 Boniface, 1, 17, 19–26, 32–8, 41–2, 50, 51, 55, 57, 66, 67, 69, 76, 79, 81, 83, 85, 86, 125, 126, 127, 128, 130, 135, 140, 142, 143, 144, 148–9, 151, 152, 153, 156, 157, 159, 161–2, 163, 165–6, 173–4, 180, 197, 206, 216, 220, 221, 222, 233, 236, 237, 238, 240, 242, 250, 257, 265, 275, 277, 280, 286, 299, 300 Ars grammatica, 81 death and burial of, 2, 3, 33, 34, 40, 41, 44–6, 86, 152, 162, 165 feast day of, 48, 113, 225, 273 and the foundation of Fulda, 26–32, 161, 257 grave of, 43, 44, 45, 46–7, 48, 66, 68, 71, 90, 95, 112, 129, 173, 236, 258, 300 importance for Fulda’s identity, 16, 38–40, 44, 166, 257 Oberabbatiat, 32–4, 153 as patron saint of Fulda, 49–50, 72, 90, 112, 114, 129, 134, 141, 146, 152, 161, 172, 173, 236, 240, 281, 300 translation of, 48, 95, 109, 111–12, 136, 137, 142, 146, 241, 243, 259, 262–3 veneration of, 43, 46–9, 68, 71, 90, 129, 137, 161, 179, 212, 225–7 Brigid, saint, 142 Britius, bishop of Tours, 169 Bronzell, 154 Brouwer, Christopher, 120, 137, 141, 172, 173, 219, 232, 239, 243, 253, 291 Brown, Peter, 104 Brun Candidus, 99, 146, 170, 171, 183, 186, 289 as painter, 239–40, 259 Vita Aegil, 16, 27, 87, 109–10, 113, 119, 132, 133, 134, 135, 137, 141, 148, 149, 169–70, 171, 172, 183, 186, 196, 215, 232, 237–64, 301 Vita Bauguli, 171, 172, 183, 240, 241, 242 Brun, count in Saxony, 284, 294 Brunert, Maria-Elisabeth, 155 Buchonia, 3, 27–8, 29, 86, 151, 154, 156, 157, 158, 161, 173, 233, 236, 237 Bulgars, 187 Büraburg, 25, 26, 142 Burchard of Würzburg, 144 burial ad sanctos, 290

348

Index Caelius Sedulius, 241 Caesaria, abbess of St John, 69 Caesarius, bishop of Arles, 69, 195, 268 calendar, 48, 61, 70, 144–5, 147–8, 164, 291 capitularies, 37, 82, 227, 255, 302 caritas, 97, 126, 247–9 Carloman of Bavaria, 281 Carloman, brother of Charlemagne, 72, 103, 280 Carloman, brother of Pippin III, 1, 2, 23, 24, 28, 30–1, 32, 39–40, 50–1, 57, 151, 152, 154, 161, 216, 265, 280 Caroline minuscule, 191, 209, 240 ‘Carolingian Renaissance’, 36, 54, 82–3, 91–3, 102, 242 Cassiodorus, 193 Centula, see St Riquier Charlemagne, 6, 20, 29, 36, 46, 52, 53–4, 60, 66, 69, 72, 74, 78, 82, 91–2, 93, 94, 95, 101, 103, 105, 106, 107, 109, 110–11, 114, 115, 117, 120, 121, 128, 130, 150–1, 163, 208, 217, 225, 239, 240, 249, 254, 279, 280, 281 conspiracy against (786), 72, 90, 117 coronation as emperor, 56–7, 300 Charles III, the Fat, 269, 284, 286, 303, 304 Charles Martel, 20, 23–4, 29, 155 Charles of Provence, 280 Charles the Bald, 230, 268, 279, 280, 281 Charles the Younger, 106 Charles, archbishop of Mainz, 279 charters, 71 private, 33, 35, 44, 49, 73, 75, 77, 96, 117, 118, 179, 185, 192, 198, 202, 205, 230, 290 writing up of, 90, 114, 118, 203 Childeric III, 23, 102 Christ relics related to, 143, 169, 170 resurrection of, 170 Sermon on the Mount, 170 Christianisation, 22, 23, 26, 77, 83, 221–5, 302–3, see also pastoral care Christianitas, 22, 134, 146, 174 Chrodegang, bishop of Metz, 48–9 Chronicon Laurissense breve, 238 Fulda’s version of, 100, 116–19, 120, 181, 212 church property, 26, 253, 255 Cicero Ars rhetoricae, 195 claustrum versus saeculum, 3–6, 46, 124, 128–30, 180, 220, 223, 234–6, 289, 302 Clemens, pope and martyr, 141, 142 Clemens Scottus, 99, 243 Coates-Stephens, Richard, 102 codices Bonifatiani, 81, 226 coenobitism, 157–61, 166, 173, 198, 302

Cologne, 272 cathedral, 101–2 Columba, 195 Columbanus, 139–40, 143, 195, 196 Rule of, 25 commemoration, 54, 189, 213, 271–3, 276, 297–8 of benefactors, 13, 79, 187, 205, 206, 283, 290 of deceased monks, 61–5, 70, 75, 79, 118, 167, 178, 179, 187, 188, 272, 276, 290–2, 295, 298 of the dead, 13, 14, 64–5, 233, 284, 287–90, 293 of the king and his family, 53, 66, 68, 120, 150, 187, 279–80, 282, 283, 286, 298 community construction of, 8, 68–71, 153, 159, 166, 238, 263, 273, 276, 291, 295, 305 images of, 8–10, 16, 44, 46, 55, 71, 73, 76, 83, 96, 100, 119, 141, 146, 150, 153, 173, 180, 188, 189, 191, 195, 198, 199, 201, 204, 212, 215, 238, 263–4, 276, 293, 298 of saints, 141, 145 Concilium Germanicum, 25, 36 concordia, 97, 119, 122, 126, 247, 259 confessio, 136 confraternity, 39, 67–8, 76, 271–2, 274, 287 Conrad I, 304, 305 Conrad, count, 304 Constable, Giles, 70 Constantine I, emperor, 102, 103 Conventio of 863, 188, 271–6, 283, 288, 291, 295, 298, 305 Corbie, 189 correctio, 15, 22–3, 24, 36, 37, 53–4, 82, 91, 93, 97, 120, 150, 215, 223, 227–8, 229, 231, 232, 238, 241, 243, 249–52, 257, 264, 302 Corvey, 56, 68, 284, 294 Council of Les Estinnes (743), 25, 37 Council of Soissons (744), 25 cultus divinus, 91 damnatio memoriae, 29, 155, 242, 263 Danes, 279 Daniel, bishop of Winchester, 23 decani, 182, 183 defensio, 23, 31, 50–1, 153 Deiningen, 53, 77 Denehard, priest, 66, 180 Desiderius of Vienne, 169 dicio, 31 Diem, Albrecht, 257 Dienheim, 74–5, 207, 208 Dionysio-Hadriana, 105

349

Index Dionysius Exiguus, 55, 58, 105 Dionysius, martyr, 102, 112, 129 diptych of 875, 66, 271, 276, 278, 279–83, 285, 287, 288, 293, 298, 303 discordia, 121, 252, 258, 259, 274 discretio, 122, 123, 125, 126, 246, 254, 263, 267 Donatus, martyr, 142 Dromersheim, 176, 207 Dronke, Ernst F. J., 204 Dümmler, Ernst, 258 East Franconia, 74, 77 Easter Tables, 54, 55–6, 57–61, 65, 118 Eberhard of Friuli, 192, 290 Eberhard of Fulda, 49 Codex Eberhardi, 49, 52, 200–1, 204, 205, 229, 287 Ebo, archbishop of Reims, 181, 228 ecclesia, 241, 250, 259, 263 Echternach, 25, 45, 47, 85 Echzell, 74 Egino, count of Badenachgau, 284 Eichstätt, 85, 157 Eigil, abbot of Fulda, 16, 112, 118, 125, 132–3, 168–73, 179, 185, 238 building projects of, 84, 123, 129, 133, 135–7, 159, 173, 243, 258 grave of, 170, 173, 242 liturgical reforms of, 133, 179, 244 remembrance of, 119, 240–2, 257, 261–2, 263, 301 Vita Sturmi, 27, 30–1, 33, 34, 38, 42, 45, 50, 51–2, 69, 87, 107, 134–5, 148, 150–67, 171, 172, 173, 186, 237, 238, 241, 242, 249, 256, 257, 297, 301, 305 Eihloha, 27, 28, 29, 30, 33, 50, 155, 161 Einhard, 60, 66, 81, 83, 99, 115–16, 194, 239, 279, 290, 302 Translatio et Miracula SS Marcellini et Petri, 215, 227–8, 282 Vita Karoli, 92 Ellger, Otfried, 170, 173 Emhild, abbess of Milz, 74, 217 Emmeram of Regensburg, 147 Engelbert, Pius, 148, 150, 154, 164 Eoban, martyr, 242 Eonius, bishop of Arles, 268 Epistola de litteris colendis, 73, 150 Ercanbert, bishop of Minden, 73, 181 eremitism, 157, 159, 166, 173, 302 Eresburg, 60, 69, 150 Erfurt, 25, 26 Ermanrich of Ellwangen, 187 Vita Sualonis, 186, 226 Ermengard, empress, 280 Exeter, 19, 24

Fadiman, Anne, 79 Faesch, Remigius, 190 Fastrada, queen, 94, 280 Fentress, James, 14 Ferrutius, martyr, 144 Fischer, Manfred, 86 Flavius Josephus De bello iudaico, 195 Florianus, martyr, 147 Fontenoy, battle of, 230, 246 Frankfurt am Main, 3, 28, 182, 190, 217, 223, 277, 286 fraternal wars, 230, 239 Frauenberg, 13, 33, 125, 149, 162, 167, 172, 194, 216, 222, 250, 268 church of St Mary, 60, 115, 118, 125, 216, 217, 222, 295, 301 Freise, Eckhard, 77, 185 Fried, Johannes, 245 Frisia, 2, 3, 11, 20, 21, 40, 41, 162, 200, 236, 266 Fritzlar, 24, 26, 27, 33, 35–6, 39, 52, 69, 142, 147, 154, 226 Fructuosus of Braga, 195 Fulda, 170, 171, 182, 220, 221, 228, 230 abbey church of, 3, 11, 16, 34, 41, 42, 43, 44, 47, 57, 71, 72, 73–4, 91, 99, 100–14, 115, 118, 123, 129, 133, 134, 135–49, 160, 171, 172, 175, 183, 187, 189, 196, 216, 221, 235, 236, 239, 241, 253, 258, 262, 288, 301 administration of, 175, 178, 185, 192, 202, 203, 204, 206, 223, 233, 293, 294, 302 archive of, 189, 211 baroque Dom of, 47, 86, 87, 135, 136, 173, 291 benefactors of, 40, 68, 71, 77, 90, 99, 113, 151, 179, 185, 202, 204, 205, 234, 283, 284–5, 287, 288, 298, 303 as bishopric, 17 cartulary of, 16, 49, 77, 178, 179, 181, 183, 198–213, 233, 240, 287, 299 cemetery of, 43, 47, 70, 123, 135, 149, 168, 170, 179, 284, 286, 287–9, 290, 299 church of St Michael in, 123, 133, 135, 149, 168–73, 174, 179, 220, 242, 244, 259, 288–9, 291, 299, 301 cloister of, 3, 34, 133, 136, 147, 149, 172 collection of monastic rules of, 140, 194–8, 257, 302 as cult-site, 2, 3, 40, 43, 44–50, 71, 90, 95, 111, 129, 137, 179, 289, see also Boniface and Leoba dependencies of, 44, 60, 64, 65, 69, 73, 75, 81–2, 90, 120, 128, 175, 184, 185–8, 213, 216, 223, 232, 233, 234, 235, 242, 259, 268, 275, 276, 292–5, 298, 301 foundation of, 23, 28, 134, 152–3, 172, 302

350

Index as intellectual centre, 54, 73, 83, 96, 99, 179, 191, 195, 213, 242 as large landowner, 6, 60, 69, 74–5, 77, 96, 99, 124, 133, 151, 178, 179, 184, 185, 186, 203, 204, 205, 223, 229, 239, 293, 294, 297, 302 library of, 14, 81, 82, 83, 101, 178, 189–98, 232, 267 lists of books of, 16, 73, 80–3, 171, 178, 189–98, 203, 243 membership lists of, 16, 44, 85, 178, 181–9, 203, 274–5, 276, 292–4 monastic school of, 79, 81, 82, 118, 168, 181 number of monks of, 43, 85, 90, 96, 124, 159, 175, 179, 213, 297, 305 as prison, 120, 228, 269 reforms in, 18, 27, 130–1, 132, 159, 183, 196, 257, 263, 300 river, 3, 13, 27, 28, 223 rotulus of, 49 as royal abbey, 2, 3, 14, 15, 16, 17, 39, 40, 43, 50–4, 66, 83, 94, 95, 106, 114, 115, 120, 153, 166, 175, 238, 251, 254, 264, 265–6, 270–1, 277, 281, 285–7, 289, 297, 299, 301–3 as a ‘sacred landscape’, 221, 222, 233–4, 235, 263, 299, 300, 303 as solitude, 1, 2, 17, 28–30, 39, 154–7, 166, 236–7, 238, 299, 300 Fulrad, abbot of St Denis, 41 Fursey, saint, 80 Garrison, Mary, 9 Geary, Patrick, 14, 201, 287 Genesius of Arles, 169 Geneviève, saint, 142 George, martyr, 142 Germania, 214, 226 Germanus of Auxerre, 142 Gerold, count, 208 Gesta abbatum, 83, 116, 189, 190, 218, 239, 263, 267, 269, 299, 301 Giesel, 154, 216 Gisela, 280 Gockel, Michael, 73 Goldberg, Eric, 269 Goodson, Caroline, 12, 102 Gorze, 142 Gottschalk, 178, 183, 242 Gozbald, abbot of Niederaltaich, 181 Grabfeld, 11, 29, 133, 151, 185, 199, 208 Gregorian of the Hadrianum type, 111 Gregory II, pope, 21, 22 Gregory of Tours Liber vitae Patrum, 155 Gregory the Great, 21, 30, 60, 80, 83, 103, 142 commentary on Ezekiel, 80 Dialogues, 80, 142, 243

Regula pastoralis, 80, 81, 82, 188, 191, 222 Sacramentary of, 105, 109 Großburschla, 293 Guntram, brother of Hrabanus Maurus, 176, 208, 209–11, 212, 230 Guntram, nephew of Hrabanus Maurus, 176, 186–7, 192, 209, 211, 212 Gunzo, bishop of Worms, 295 Hadamar, abbot of Fulda, 286 Hadrian I, pope, 105, 111 Hadurich, 207 Hahn, Cynthia, 239 Hahn, Heinrich, 47, 101, 161 Haicho list, 274 Haicho, abbot of Fulda, 66, 189 Haistulf, archbishop of Mainz, 118, 245, 249 in the Vita Aegil, 246, 253, 262 Hameln, 293 Hammelburg, 29, 53, 96, 150, 151, 152, 225 Harud, bishop of Verden, 181 Hatto, abbot of Fulda, 16, 67, 99, 170, 173, 183, 189, 195, 231, 265, 267, 271 Hatto, count, 208 Heden family, 29–30, 155–6 Heidenheim, 156 Heinemeyer, Walter, 200 Heito of Reichenau Visio Wettini, 277, 283 Hemma, queen, 281 Hemmo, bishop of Halberstadt, 181 Henry I, 304, 305 Henry, count and brother of Poppo II, 284 Hersfeld, 27, 45, 52, 68, 147, 154–5, 226, 284 Hesse, 20, 26, 52, 152 Heßler, Wolfgang, 150 Hilarion, anchorite, 29 Hilary of Poitiers, 143 Hildebrandt, Madge, 293 Hildegard, queen, 208, 236, 280 Hildemar of Civate commentary on the Rule of Benedict of, 127, 197, 274 Hilduin, abbot of St Denis and archchaplain, 215, 216 Hiltibert, abbot of Fulda, 286 Hofheim, 180, 207, 209, 211, 212–13, 225, 290 Holy Cross, 142, 146 Holzkirchen, 217, 223, 225, 293 Honoratus of Lérins, 139, 140, 143 Hrabanus list, 75, 76, 184, 188, 293 Hrabanus Maurus, 59, 60, 66, 67, 83, 99, 111, 116, 118, 132, 135, 168, 169, 170, 172, 176–8, 194, 231, 245, 267, 301 as abbot of Fulda, 16, 31, 65, 101, 129, 156, 175–6, 230, 266, 284, 289, 302, 305

351

Index Hrabanus Maurus (cont.) as archbishop of Mainz, 172, 181, 231, 252, 282 carmina of, 87, 134, 137, 141, 148, 170, 213, 214, 215, 217, 219, 221–2, 227, 231, 258, 261, 263, 299 De institutione clericorum, 218 exegesis of, 218, 228, 231 family of, 66, 118, 176, 180, 199, 206–13, 287, 290, 304 In honorem sanctae crucis, 169, 175, 186, 241, 242, 267 martyrology of, 145, 289 on obedience of sons to fathers, 175 oblation of, 176, 207, 211 relic translations of, 185, 204, 215–18 retirement of, 181, 211, 230–1, 238, 246, 268 Hugobert, duke of Bavaria, 21 Humbert, bishop of Würzburg, 181 Hummer, Hans, 199, 207, 208, 211 Hünfeld, 74, 293 Huoggi, abbot of Fulda, 17, 270, 284 Hygeburc of Heidenheim Vita Wynnebaldi, 156 identity, 14, 17 collective, 7 modern discussions about, 7–8 see also community Ignatius of Antioch, 142, 147 Illyricum, 268 immunity, royal, 52, 200, see also defensio and dicio incolumitas, 150–1 Ingelheim, palace of, 92, 93 Innes, Matthew, 14, 270 instituta sancti Bonifatii, 38, 124, 127–8, 130, 157, 159, 166, 197, 257, 301 insular minuscule, 80, 191, 198, 202, 240 Isidore of Seville, 83, 160, 169, 193, 195 De rerum natura, 80, 81 Sententiarum libri III, 80, 82 Synonyma, 80, 82 Italy, 11, 158, 225, 233, 266 Jacobsen, Werner, 136, 160 Jacobus and Philippus, 142 Jakobi, Franz-Josef, 281, 285 Januarius and Magnus, martyrs, 225 Jerome, 60, 83, 193 biblical commentaries of, 193 letters of, 80, 81, 248 Vita S. Pauli prima eremitae, 138 Jerusalem, 139 Anastasis rotunda, 12 Johannesberg, 194, 229–30, 268, 269 church of St John the Baptist, 115, 216, 217, 235, 295

John Cassian, 138, 164, 196, 255 John Chrysostom, 195, 196 John the Baptist, 217, 220 John the Evangelist, 142, 168, 170 Jonas of Bobbio Vita Columbani, 232 Jong, Mayke de, 228 Judith, empress, 228, 280 Juliana, martyr, 142 Jumièges, 42, 43, 46 Juvencus, 241 Kämmerzell, 154 Kehl, Petra, 150 Kilian, martyr, 44, 143, 144 Kitzingen, 24, 39, 152 Knöttel, Johann, 191 Krause, Eva, 86–7, 93–4, 101 Krautheimer, Richard, 11, 12, 101, 102 Kurze, Friedrich, 58 Lampert of Hersfeld, 43 Laurence, martyr, 142 Lehmann, Paul, 192, 195, 199, 200 Leo the Great, pope, 143 Leoba, 66, 136, 180, 225, 226, 235–6 cult of, 148, 220–1 Lérins, 139, 268 Liber Pontiicalis, 115, 171 Lindisfarne, 56 liturgy papal, 108 ‘Roman’, 107–9, 110–11, 113 Liutbert, archbishop of Mainz, 279 Liutgard, queen, 280 Lorch, 147 Lorsch, 48–9, 52, 68, 73, 94, 100, 101, 116, 142, 194, 233, 284 Lothar I, 187, 210, 228, 230, 239, 266, 280, 281, 290 Lothar II, 280, 281 Lotharingia, 3 Louis II, emperor of Italy, 280 Louis the Child, 304 Louis the German, 176, 187, 210, 228, 230, 239, 254, 266, 267, 268–9, 279, 280, 281, 282, 283, 284, 303 visit to Fulda in 874, 276–9, 282, 283, 286 Louis the Pious, 45, 84, 115, 130, 132, 167, 175, 182, 187, 209, 215, 227, 229–30, 239, 243, 245, 246, 253, 254, 255, 277, 279, 280, 281, 303 monastic reforms of, 27, 36, 37, 38, 116, 126–7, 129, 132, 134, 158, 160, 197, 198, 249, 253, 254, 257, 300, 302 rebellions against, 176, 181, 187, 227, 228–9

352

Index in the Vita Aegil, 246–9, 253–4, 258 see also Aachen, councils of Louis the Younger, 269, 277, 281, 284, 294, 303, 304 Lucia, martyr, 142 Lüder, 154 Luke, apostle, 142 Lull of Mainz, 27, 33, 34, 40, 41–3, 45, 51, 55, 66, 67, 86, 117, 144, 147, 153, 162, 167, 180, 279, 280, 284, 305 Lupus of Ferrières, 178, 194 Vita Wigberti, 33, 226 Luxeuil, 139 Macarius of Egypt, 82, 169, 196 Magyars, 86, 265 Mainfranken, 205 Mainz, 3, 26, 31, 32, 42, 44, 50, 67, 74, 90, 143, 144, 162, 176, 181, 190, 207, 209, 211, 238, 258, 271, 280, 283, 299 St Alban, 94, 101, 172 council of (813), 171 council of (847), 252 Malchus of Chalcis, 29, 82, 156 manual labour, 1, 3, 34, 35, 36, 38, 128, 184 manuscripts Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, Hist. 141, 148 Basel, Universitätsbibliothek, F III 15 a, 79–83 Basel, Universitätsbibliothek, F III 42, 241, 243 Erlangen, Universitätsbibliothek, Ms. 417, 148 Fulda, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Hs. 4º D 28, 291 Fulda, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Hs. B 1, 61, 66, 67, 85, 182–4, 189, 271–5, 285, 293, 294, 301 Kassel, Hessische Landesbibliothek & Murhardsche Bibliothek (Gesamthochschulbibliothek) 2º ms. astron. 2, 58, 60, 118–19, 168 Kassel, Hessische Landesbibliothek & Murhardsche Bibliothek (Gesamthochschulbibliothek) 2º ms. Theol. 54, 110 Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek, Ms. Scal. 49, 291 Marburg, Hessisches Staatsarchiv, K 424 199, 201–12 Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 4012, 62, 291 Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 14641, 58–60 Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 28118, 196, 256

Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 4012, 62, 291, 301 Münster, Nordrhein-Westfälisches Staatsarchiv, Msc. 1, 243, 55–8 Paderborn, Erzbischöliche Akademische Bibliothek, Theod. Bª 2, 148 Rome, BAV, Ottobonianus Latinus 2531, 61, 64, 66, 67, 207, 271–85, 294, 295, 301 Rome, BAV,Vaticanus palatinus latinus 1877, 81, 162, 178, 191–4 Vienna, ÖNB Cvp 460, 58, 59–60 Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cvp 430*, 116–19 Mar Saba, 139 Marcellinus and Peter, martyrs, 115, 215, 228, 290, see also Einhard and Seligenstadt Marcward, bishop of Hildesheim, 279 Mark, apostle, 142 Martial, bishop of Limoges, 169 Martin of Tours, 143 Mary, 219, 220 Mauritius, martyr, 112, 129 Maurus, saint, 169 Mayr-Harting, Henry, 111 McKitterick, Rosamond, 14 memory, 43 collective, 233 family, 180, 213, 304 organisation of, 201–3 Meyer zu Ermgassen, Heinrich, 201 Michael, archangel, 168, 220 Michaelsberg, 13 Michelstadt, 66 Middle Rhine region, 11, 74, 94, 151, 185, 208, 270 Milz, 74, 293 minsters, 24–5 models of exemplary Christian life, 24, 134, 140, 145, 195, 227–8, 238 monasticism, 213, 238 clericalisation of, 78–9, 96, 143, 184, 187 ideals of, 29, 35, 38, 83, 97, 98, 116, 120, 121–2, 126–30, 244, 246–8, 249, 254 traditions of eastern, 141, 145, 156, 159, 173, 196, 237, 244, 257, 299, 300, 302 traditions of western, 141, 145, 159, 160, 173, 196, 237, 244, 257, 299, 302, see also eremitism and coenobitism Monte Cassino, 39, 126–7, 139 Moravia, 265, 268, 269 Münstereifel, 85 Murbach, 97, 255 Nahegau, 199, 209 Nazarius, martyr, 49, 94 Near East, 144, 156

353

Index Neckar, 207 necrologies, 61, 70, 291 Neuenberg church of St Andreas, 295, 296 Nicholas I, pope, 268 Nijmegen, 92 Nivelles, 85, 169 Noricum, 147 Northumbria, 59 Notitia de servitio monasteriorum, 266 novices, 78, 120, 127, 184 Nursling, 24 oblates, 78, 184, 255, 294 Ochsenfurt, 24 Odilo, duke of Bavaria, 21 Ohrdurf, 24, 26, 35, 39 Old High German, 80 Oostergo, 40 Oppenheim, 207 Optatus, abbot of Monte Cassino, 39 opus geminatum, 240–2 Origines, 193 Ortesweg, 13, 28 Oswald, Friedrich, 86 Otacer of Worms, 202 Otfried of Weißenburg, 178 Otto I, 286 Ottonians, 66, 281, 284, 286, 304, 305 Otultus, priest, 192 Pachomius, 82, 156, 160, 196, 242, 256 rule of, 196 Paciicus, bishop, 180, 279 Paderborn, 92, 101, 112 Palazzo, Eric, 111 Palladios of Helenepolis Historia Lausiaca, 138, 139 Pancratius, martyr, 142 papal exemption, 1, 29, 31–2, 33, 36, 39, 41, 49, 51–2, 68, 106–7, 153, 156, 198, 200, 267, 270, 299 Paris, Society of the Twelve Apostles, 272, 274 Parsons, David, 47 Paschal I, pope, 31 past perceptions of, 10 rewriting of, 10, 153, 154 uses of, 6–7, 14, 55–8, 165–6, 240, 300–1 see also salvation history pastoral care, 79, 80, 82, 187–8, 223, 231, 232, 303 Patzold, Stefen, 97 Paul of Thebes, 29, 82, 138, 156, 169 Paul, apostle, 104, 142, 247, 252 Paulinus of Nola, 169, 241

penance, 79, 238, 249–52, 257, 264, 277, 292, 297 peregrinatio, 1 Perpetua, martyr, 142 Perpetuus, bishop of Tours, 169 Pertz, Georg, 56 Peter, apostle, 103, 104, 110, 112, 129, 143, 147, 171, 226, 250 Petersberg, see Ugesberg Petronella, martyr, 142 Peutinger, Conrad, 62, 291 pilgrimage, 139 spiritual, 157, 222, 237, 258 pilgrims, 45, 46, 47, 90, 95, 104, 113, 128, 129, 236 Pippin II, mayor of palace, 25 Pippin III, 23, 24, 28, 32, 42–3, 45, 50–2, 57, 72, 77, 102–3, 105, 106, 152, 167, 254, 265, 279, 280 Pippin of Aquitaine, 281 Pippin of Italy, 280 Pirmin, 47 Pistorius, Johannes, 199–200, 240 Plectrude, 25 Pliny, 60 Pohl, Walter, 8 Poppo II, duke of Thuringia and the Sorbenmark, 270 praepositus, 182–3, 186 priest-monks, 78, 187, 302 Priscilla, martyr, 221 private masses, 13, 78, 79, 97, 99, 108, 143, 187, 289 private meditation, 241 processions, 128, 141, 225, 230, 233, 235 proprietary churches, 225, 233, 302 Prüm, 65, 290 Racholf of Fulda, 183 Rasdorf, 74, 216, 217, 223, 293 Ratger, abbot of Fulda, 16, 46, 60, 149, 160, 216–17, 243 as architect, 83, 84, 93, 95, 99, 100–14, 115, 258 crisis under, 65, 84, 96, 98, 99, 114–31, 132, 133, 134, 167, 172, 179, 181, 238, 244–5, 247, 253, 258, 263, 301 personality of, 123–4, 125, 162, 254, 261 reorganisation of Fulda under, 121, 124, 127, 159, 187, 275, 301 retirement in Frauenberg, 84, 125, 167, 172, 250, 268, 301 as unicorn in Vita Aegil, 119, 258, 259–61, 263 Reccheo Modestus, monk of Fulda, 99, 183, 239, 243, 251 Reccheo senior, 182 Recheo list, 85, 182–4, 189 reconciliation, 92, 125, 165–8, 249–52, 274 Regensburg, 85, 269

354

Index Regula abbatis Columbicellae, 196 Regula abbatis Congelli, 196 Regula Magistri, 195 regula mixta, 25, 37, 140 Regula monachorum Aegypti, quam scripsit Eucherius, 196 Reichenau, 47, 85, 101, 109, 112, 189 confraternity book of, 67, 75–6, 178, 182, 184, 188, 272, 277 relics, 11, 14, 46, 70, 81, 137–8, 141, 144, 169, 170, 174, 185, 188, 192, 221, 228, 290, 299, 300, 303 legislation concerning, 46, 138, 216 Roman, 104, 113, 142, 144, 215, 221, 250, 299, 302 religious art, 11, 14, 221, 299 reliquaries, 115, 192, 213, 214, 217, 218, 221–3, 230, 237, 300 see also Ark of the Covenant reliquary Remigius of Reims, 142 Remiremont Liber memorialis of, 70, 283 Retzbach, treaty of (815), 117 Rheingau, 199, 208 Rheinhessen, 205 Rhön, 27, 217 Ricbod, abbot of Lorsch, 116 Richard, abbot of Fulda, 295 Richter, Gregor, 84, 85, 87 Richulf, archbishop of Mainz, 67, 114, 117, 284 Ries, 210 Rimini, 214, 233 Röhlingsberg, 235 Romano more, 110 Rome, 11, 12, 14, 16, 17, 31, 41, 55, 57, 71, 142, 143, 144, 146, 204, 215, 221, 233, 265, 268, 286, 299 Apostolic See, 1, 21–2, 57, 68, 106 as ideal, 92, 103–6, 221, 299 St Clemente, 147 St John Lateran, 101, 102, 107 Santa Maria Maggiore, 101 St Paul’s, 101, 102 St Peter’s, 12, 57, 101–4, 107, 109, 112, 129, 136, 299 royal abbeys, 78, 124, 255, 284 royal court, 56, 119, 186, 187, 238, 249 royal diplomas, 30, 44, 49, 198, 271 Rudelsheim, 207 Rudolf of Fulda, 31, 178, 179, 183, 203, 204, 209, 226, 229, 234, 239, 242, 282 Miracula sanctorum, 16, 183, 192, 214, 215, 217–18, 221, 223, 228, 231–7, 238, 263–4, 271, 302 Translatio S. Alexandri, 191

Vita Leobae, 35, 66, 226, 235–6, 237 Rule of Benedict, 1, 2, 16, 17, 25, 26, 36–8, 39, 52, 81, 97, 98, 105, 123, 126–7, 128, 140, 153, 157, 158, 159, 162, 166, 173, 183, 191, 195, 197, 238, 240, 246, 247, 249, 256–7, 261, 267, 269, 289, 291, 299, 300, 301, 302 commentaries on, 127, 197–8, 274 Saalegau, 77, 100, 185, 199 Sabas, 138, 139, 144, 145 Sabina, martyr, 142 sacramentaries 145, 288, 305 ‘mixed’, 111 Old Gelasian, 110, 111 supplement Hadrianum, 111 saeculum versus solitudo, 154–5 saints, 155 cult of, 13, 48, 222, 232, 233 making of, 45, 48, 149–50, 221 Sallust, 242 salvation history, 44, 54, 57, 58, 65, 70, 71, 141, 143, 144, 174, 218–20, 221, 222, 241, 259–63, 298, 300 Samuel, bishop of Worms, abbot of Lorsch, 66, 116, 181 sancti Bonifatii cella, 293 Sanctorale, 67, 145, 280 Sandratus, monk of Fulda, 192 sapiens architectus, 83, 116, 263, 301 Saxons, 24, 86, 150 conversion of, 52, 56, 69, 77–8, 79, 83 Saxony, 47, 77, 93, 106, 150, 200, 205, 279, 284 Schalkenbach, Josef, 288 Schannat, Johann Friedrich, 196 Historia Fuldensis, 178, 194 Schmid, Karl, 15, 33, 61, 179, 183, 277, 283 Scholastica, 142 Schrimpf, Gangolf, 80, 171, 192, 195 Schwabenheim, 207 Schwalbach, Johann Friedrich von, 200 scolastici, 127, 293–4 Sebastian, martyr, 215 Seligenstadt, 66, 115, 290 Semita antiqua, 13, 29 Semmler, Josef, 128 servitium regis, 3, 53, 266, 286 Sigihard, abbot of Fulda, 16, 172, 173, 265, 269–70, 289, 303 liturgical reforms of, 269, 276, 283, 284, 291, 295, 303 withdrawal as abbot, 17, 268 Sigismund of Burgundy, 169 Simmern, 209 Sithiu, 148 Slavs, 155, 266, 268

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Index Smaragdus of St Mihiel commentary on Rule of Benedict of, 127, 197 Soisdorf, 74 Soissons, St Médard, 215 Sola, 186, 226 solitude, 152, 153, 156, 186 Solnhofen, 176, 186–7, 192, 225, 293 St Amand, 169 St Denis, 46, 94, 101, 102–3, 105–6, 112, 129, 136, 142 St Gall, 189, 190 St Maurice d’Agaune, 94, 103, 105–6, 112, 129, 136, 142 St Riquier, 92, 95, 101, 115 St Wandrille Gesta abbatum of, 171 Stengel, Edmund, 199, 200–1, 207 Stephen III, pope, 106 Stephen, protomartyr, 141 Sturmi, abbot of Fulda, 16, 17, 26–7, 42, 76, 78, 87, 93, 94, 124, 126, 132, 133, 144, 161, 171, 197, 216, 265, 285, 297 anniversary of, 68, 75, 133, 148, 149, 167, 168, 182, 298 burial of, 146 death of, 62, 72 exile of, 33, 42–3, 57, 117, 153, 162, 301 and the foundation of Hersfeld, 27, 147, 154 as hermit, 27, 152 as patron of Fulda, 136, 147, 163–5, 166, 167–8, 173, 300 remembrance of, 32, 34, 68, 71, 112, 128, 134–5, 141, 146–8, 153, 161–3, 256, 257 Sualeveld, 157 Sulpicius Severus Vita Martini, 195 Supplex Libellus, 48, 68, 70, 79, 100, 116, 119–30, 135, 159, 162, 165–6, 187, 236, 238, 249, 250, 253, 256, 275, 301, 303 Susteren, 25 Sylvester, pope, 143 Tacitus Germania, 190, 195 TAF 44, 179, 204–6 Tassilo III, 20 Tauberbischofsheim, 24, 39, 225 Thacholf, margrave of the Sorbenmark, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290 Theoderic, bishop of Minden, 279 Theodo, duke of Bavaria, 21 Theodore of Tarsus, 195, 196 Theodosius abbas, 138, 139, 144, 145 Theodrada, abbess of Argenteuil, 279, 280

Theodulf of Orléans, 9 Theotrochus, abbot of Lorsch, 110, 295 Thioto, abbot of Fulda, 16, 172, 173, 209, 265, 267–9, 273 Thirty Years war, 171, 190 Thuringia, 20, 28, 41, 52, 77, 199, 205, 284 Timothy, apostle, 143 Tours, 46, 66, 111, 116, 178, 267 Tullifeld, 133 Tuscany, 158 Ufenbach, Zacharias Conrad von, 190 Ugesberg, 181, 231, 268 church of St Peter, 216, 219–21, 238, 295 Umstadt, 53 Utrecht, 20, 40, 44, 161, 162 Venantius Fortunatus, 241 Venantius, martyr, 214, 217, 229 Verdun, treaty of, 266, 281, 282, 303 villa rustica, 13, 28, 29–30, 34, 47, 155 Vincentius, martyr, 142 Virgil, 195, 241, 242 Vita Alcuini, 67 Vita Pacomii, 247, 249, 256 Vita Ratgarii, 113, 171, 241, 242, 259 Vita sancti Bonifatii metrice et prosaice conscripta, 171, 241 Vita sanctorum Germani abbatis, 196 Vitae Patrum, 138, 195 Vogelsberg, 27, 74 Vonderau, Joseph, 45, 47, 84, 85, 86, 93–4, 101, 172, 288 Waidesbach, 3, 13, 149 Waitz, Georg, 243 Wala of Corbie, 165, 227 Walafrid Strabo, 178 Libellus de exordiis, 109 Walaram, 66, 180, 207, 208, 211, 212, 290 wall paintings, 214, 215, 219–20, 222, 239 Waltrata, 66, 180, 207, 211, 212, 213, 290 Wearmouth-Jarrow, 55, 56, 97 Weidinger, Ulrich, 204 Weißenburg, 233, 272 Wenkheim, 293 Werngau, 100, 185, 199 Werra, 204 Wessex, 19, 20, 41 Westergo, 40 Westfalen, 205 Wetterau, 11, 29, 74, 155 Wickham, Chris, 14 Wigbert, priest and saint, 26, 45, 147 Willibald, bishop of Eichstätt, 85

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Index Willibald, priest of Mainz Vita Bonifatii, 25, 35, 41, 86, 161 Willibrord, 20, 25, 29, 34, 45, 47 Winchester, 19 Wolfger, bishop of Würzburg, 181 Wolfsmünster, 81, 84, 96, 171, 191, 293 Wollasch, Joachim, 15 Wood, Ian, 161

Worms, 72, 202, 208, 211 Wormsgau, 199, 202, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210 Würzburg, 24, 25, 26, 29, 31, 32, 44, 52, 107, 117, 133, 143, 144, 148, 181, 190, 217 York, 55 Zacharias, pope, 17, 40, 51

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