Monasticism in North-Western Europe, 800–1200

Tore Nyberg

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138721425
• eBook ISBN: 9781351761369
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This title was first published in 2000: This is a full-scale integrated synthesis of the origins, spread and effects of monasticism in Scandinavia, and along the shores of the Baltic and the North Sea. Beginning with a review of the geography and communications by land and, especially, by sea, of the region, the authorgoes on to describe early monasticism among the Frisians, Saxons and the Danes, then in Norway and Sweden, Saxony, Slesvig and Ribe, and finally Pomerania and the southern and eastern Baltic littoral. Throughout the book he stresses the place of abbeys and convents within their local surroundings, as centres of conversion, recruitment and redistribution of wealth. He traces the intellectual, literary and liturgical connections between monastic centres and neighbouring cathedral towns and royal strongholds, and the means by which orders or congregations maintained discipline from the centre. He also describes the leaders who emerged from convent, abbey or congregation to command local and regional political and cultural life, and the ways in which monastic centres influenced popular devotion.

Chapter One
The monastic geography of North-Western Europe

I The regions

Already in Carolingian times, the Germanic languages spoken in Northwestern Europe were separated into the north Germanic - the Scandinavian - languages, and the south Germanic, which developed into Frisian and the different forms of Low (and High) German. One of the most important cultural and political barriers, therefore, is the one between the continental Saxons and Frisians, on the one side, and the Danes on the other: the Danevirke. This frontier between the Scandinavian and the Teutonic tribes was valid throughout the period treated in this book. It is useful as well for the scholarly treatment of monasticism. Monastic impulses that circulated inside the Carolingian empire reached all peoples belonging to the empire, and inspired monastic foundations there long before any Scandinavian group was ready even to accept Christianity.

Saxony

The Saxons or 'Old Saxons', as they were still called in Wulfstan's account from the ninth century, to distinguish them from those Saxons who had emigrated to Britain in the fifth and sixth century, inhabited most of the land from beyond the Rhine limes to Elbe in the north. Two large rivers flowing northwards through the land of the Saxons unified and simultaneously divided it in elongated south-north sections: the Ems and the Weser with its tributary the Aller.

The Saxons were not a seafaring people, which the Frisians were, who increasingly specialized in sea transport and commerce, expanding eastwards along the coast as far as the land of Danes. Settlement was dense in Upper Saxony and progressively thinner in Lower Saxony towards the marshy coast to the north. In 804, Charlemagne and Archbishop Hildebald of Cologne organized the Saxon mission by establishing four bishoprics: Münster for those living west of the Ems; Osnabrück for the land east of the Ems around its tributary, the river Hase; Bremen for the main Saxon settlement area around the estuary of the Weser; and Minden further up the Weser. Besides the area around the upper course of the Ems, Münster was also given the administration of the Frisian coastland (see Figure 1.1).

1.1 Diocesan boundaries in continental North-Western Europe: the church province of Cologne with neighbouring dioceses. (Drawn by Inger Bjerg Poulsen, after Platelle [1993].)

East of Bremen, the missionaries from Cologne met those sent there by the Archbishop of Mainz. An episcopal see under Mainz had been in existence at Paderborn south of Minden since 804, and the ecclesiastical province of Mainz came to take care of religious matters as far as the Elbe and its western affluent, the river Fulda, by means of several suffragan bishoprics: Bardowic, which Louis the Pious c. 815 ordered to be moved to Verden, near where the Aller joined the Weser, one in Hildesheim east of Minden, to be followed by Halberstadt further east in 827.

The men who changed the role of Saxony in the context of the Christian mission were Emperor Louis the Pious and the monk Ansgar of Corvey, for whom an episcopal see was established in Hamburg in 831, only to be plundered by Viking raids in 845. In compensation, Ansgar became Bishop of Bremen and this diocese was removed from the supremacy of the Archbishop of Cologne and made into the missionary archbishopric of Hamburg-Bremen (Seegrün 1967; 1976; Wavra 1991). Hereby a German maritime region was created, with significant consequences for Scandinavia's meeting with Christianity and with continental European culture. The archbishopric of Hamburg-Bremen lacked suffragan bishops and split in half: the area around Bremen and the Weser estuary, and the area beyond the Elbe, the Transalbingia, with the Danevirke as its northern frontier, and the limes Saxoniae as its eastern frontier, the 'Saxon limes' - a term created in analogy to the limes of the Roman Empire. It separated Transalbingia from the region of the Slavic Obodrites. Its task was exclusively the propagation of the Christian faith among the neighbouring non-German peoples.

The Ottonian duchy of Saxony thus counted no less than one independent archbishopric and seven well-established episcopal sees within its territory. To provide these mighty sees with faithful and loyal bishops was a main concern of the Ottonian and Salian kings and emperors. Monasteries grew up in collaboration with, and very often directly inspired by, these bishops, who were active within the framework of the so-called 'Ottonian-Salian Imperial Church System'. After the investiture contest, Saxon principalities became Denmark's mighty neighbours, partners and competitors, for example under Duke Henry the Lion (died 1195).

Frisia

The situation of the Frisians was very different. A people without a state but with a common law, they managed to survive thanks to their choosing to live on the geest - an inland belt of dry and sandy soil parallel to the coast - and the marshland, where no one else wanted to live, and to carry out sea-borne commerce from their coastal refuges (Kletler, 1924). The see of Utrecht had been founded for the Frisians in 695, with Willibrord as its first bishop (died 739). Utrecht administered the Christian mission in all the coastal land as far as the Ems estuary, which was under the bishops of Münster.

Unlike the Saxons, the Frisians found themselves in ecclesiastically weak areas on the outskirts of established dioceses: Utrecht, Münster, Bremen. Monasticism among the Frisians, therefore, once it emerged, turned out to display a character very different from patterns prevalent in Saxony. Powerful and influential families dominated even more than in Saxony, yet without getting involved in the investiture conflict as was the case with the Saxons.

The southern coast of the Baltic Sea

To the east of the 'Saxon limes', various Slav tribes became involved in Carolingian and Danish politics and warfare at the time when Saxony became Christian. Under the name of Vends, their attacks upon the isles of the Danes were recorded by Danish historians like Saxo and Svend Aggesen, as well as the Danish victory over them at Lyrskov Hede near Slesvig¹ in 1043. The closest neighbours of Saxony along the coast, the Obodrites, lived as far east as Rügen, followed by the Wilzians between Rügen and the river Oder. The lands between the rivers Oder and Vistula were inhabited by the Pomeranians, the land east of the Vistula by the Prussians (Pruzzi).

German eastward migration and Christian mission had long made its impact upon this region where Christian principalities came into being in the course of the twelfth century. The decisive blow to the last non-Christian cult centre, Arkona on the island of Rügen, came through conquest by the Danes in 1169.

In the 1160s, the diocesan boundaries of the region were defined: under Duke Henry the Lion, the missionary see of Oldenburg was moved to recently founded Lübeck, the land of the Obodrites was given two episcopal sees, Ratzeburg and Schwerin, and the three bishops were made suffragans of the archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen. Rügen was incorporated in the Danish diocese of Roskilde. The Wilzian lands and Pomerania were brought together into the diocese of Kammin or Kamién, which the Pope, because of competing German and Polish claims, decided in 1174 to keep outside existing church provinces - the German Archbishop of Magdeburg here competed with the Polish primate, the Archbishop of Gniezno. Kammin became exempt, in other words directly subordinated to the Pope. Only the eastern part of Pomerania, known as Pommerelia, which politically belonged to Poland, was part of a Polish diocese, Włocławek (diocesis Wladislaviensis, German Leslau). The eastern Christian frontier lay at the river Vistula in our period - the Prussians were not yet baptized.

Under the pressure of German princes and colonists the transformation of Slav agricultural society caused many Slav groups to flee further east to escape Germanization. Poland became the only Slav kingdom in this region to be organized upon principles originating in Western Europe. However, this kingdom displayed an inland culture from the start. As in the case of the Ems and the Weser, the inland population did not show any tendency to move towards the sea and earn their living there. Germanized Vends and Pomeranians organized themselves along the coast as feudal principalities, stimulated urbanization and paved the way for the Hanseatic League.

Jutland

A Danish kingdom, the centre of which is not known with certainty, had erected the wall called Danevirke in the eighth century. To the north of the Danevirke is the Cimbrian peninsula: Jutland, land of the Jutes. Politically capable of dealing directly with Carolingian Europe, Jutland was united by at least the middle of the tenth century under the Jelling kings. In contrast to the west coast with its few trading sites Ribe, the present-day Ringkebing area, the western estuary of the Limfjorden, and, on the island of Vendel to the north of Limfjorden, the area of Børglum and Hjørring - the east coast offered many more openings: the eastern end of Limfjorden with Aalborg; the estuary of Gudenåen, Jutland's biggest river, with the town of Randers; Aarhus, walled in from the tenth century; further settlements in the bottom of the bays of today's Horsens, Vejle, Kolding and Haderslev; and, finally, Hedeby, which the Germans refer to as Haithabu, walled by the eighth century.

Zealand (Sjælland)

Jutland's political unity is normally taken to be the starting-point for Danish power extending eastwards to the isles: to Funen, Langeland and Femern, to Lolland and Falster, and to Zealand; from there, finally, to the southern part of the Scandinavian peninsula: Scania and Halland. Three regions emerged out of this movement, as evidenced by the three provincial laws of Jutland, Zealand and Scania. The highly maritime Danish kingdom received its Christianity partly from the South - its earliest three dioceses in Jutland 948 and that on Funen before 988 rested on imperial initiative - partly from the West; Cnut the Great installed the first bishops in Zealand and Scania around 1020. Funen and Zealand opened up to the North by the harbours of Odense and Roskilde, the two episcopal sees, and were part of an internal Danish maritime system between the coastal areas of eastern Jutland and of Halland, with the island of Samso as a link in the middle. Roskilde became a centre of royal power after Swein Forkbeard was buried there in 1014.

Scania

The Zealand and Scania bishoprics were instituted at the same time, but their further history pushed them apart. Very early the regional construction of Danish power gave the diocese for Scania-Halland, based at Lund, a character of its own, marked by its position as the archbishopric for all Scandinavia between 1104 and 1153, for Denmark and Sweden between 1153 and 1164, and from that time for Denmark alone. Blekinge, the coastal area to the east of Scania, may have been Swedish in the pre-Christian period, according to Adam of Bremen; in the twelfth century at the latest it was part of Denmark and of the archdiocese of Lund.

Scania with Hailand and Blekinge, its two adjacent strips of coastal land, was by nature split into a rich western and southern coastal zone, well adapted to agriculture and coastal trade, and a less inhabited inland zone in the north-east, where the land rose and was inhospitable to the type of agriculture normally preferred by the Danes. Lund, founded by Cnut the Great c. 1020 lies in the coastal zone, and it is no wonder that after a generation the need was felt for another ecclesiastical centre facing inland. This is how Dalby came into being as a diocesan centre for some years in the 1060s.

Västergötland-Värmland, 'Western Götaland' and 'the Land of the Wermilani'

Between the two huge lakes, Lake Vätter and Lake Väner, a very old settlement area filled the plain which partly descended towards the north, partly towards the south-west, with rivers running out into the Kattegat through Halland. The inland orientation towards the huge lake in the north brought the people into close contact with the less densely populated area to the north of the lake, the people which Adam of Bremen calls Wermilani. Missionaries arrived here very early, since this area, contrary to the adjacent region to the east, offered a more comfortable passage overland from the Viken area in Norway to the Danish territory of the archbishops of Lund. The first Christian king, Olof Skötkonung, created the episcopal see of Skara here c. 1020. The river valleys running south to west did carry some cultural impulses between the Danes and the Swedes of Västergötland but, seen from the central settlement area south of Lake Väner, these valleys were outskirts and not very densely populated.

The diocese of Skara, consisting of all the land around Lake Väner but, turning its back to maritime Halland as well as to Lake Vatter and the people to the east of that lake, was quickly identified as a region of its own by the missionaries who as early as the eleventh century saw the chance here to establish a model for a Christian kingdom among the Swedes. Early impulses, possibly from Byzantium, created some unique patterns in this region, for example of decorated memorial slabs with the tree of life as their main motif, which is only known from this diocese, but which continued to be used for at least two centuries; an exact dating is not possible.

Småland-Östergötland, 'the Small Lands' and 'East Götaland'

The huge forests to the north of Scania created an effective barrier between Danes and Swedes. To the north of the highlands, most of which constitute Småland, are lands more suitable for farming, the plains of 'East Götaland' to the east of Lake Vätter - but never on such a scale as the Danes could enjoy, much further to the south. The maritime character of early settlement is evident; although the coast, dotted with rocky islands, was ideal for piracy, travel by sea was preferred to travel by land, as we can see from the voyages of Ansgar in the ninth century. In the eleventh century, too, foreign missionaries recognized the potential of this region for trade and cultural development.

Three important islands played the role of staging posts for Christian penetration into the interior of Scandinavia and the eastern part of the Baltic Sea: Öland in the South-East, Gotland between Sweden and Livonia, and Åland between the Mälar region and Finland. The missionary diocese created somewhere here c. 1060 under the famous Birka name soon merged in the diocese of Linköping. Not until the twelfth century do we find further collaboration between the church and a Swedish kingdom, that of King Sverker (died 1156).

Folklanden, 'the Folk Lands', around Lake Mälar

A number of Swedish tribes were grouped around the twisting Lake Mälar. One of these tribes, in the area called Attundaland on the northern shore of Lake Mälar ('The Land of Eight Units') adopted Christianity in the early eleventh century; their conversion is evidenced by numerous runic inscriptions. Their northern neighbours, however, those of Tiundaland ('The Land of Ten Units') seem to have hesitated, while the people of Fjädrundaland ('The Land of Four Units'), the Västmänningar to their west, and the Södermänningar south of the lake followed suit. With the consent of some of the rulers in this area, missionaries created an ecclesiastical centre in Sigtuna in Attundaland on the northern shore of Lake Mälar c. 1060. In spite of further diocesan division - two more episcopal sees, Västerås for the Västmänningar and Strängnäs for the Södermänningar, were planned c. 1100 - the region retained its unity, and soon took the lead among the Swedish regions by becoming the centre of royal power and, from 1164, by being the home of the archbishopric of Sweden, Uppsala. The archdiocese itself consisted to a great extent of a fourth region, which is not treated here since no monasteries were ever f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The monastic geography of North-Western Europe
• 2 Early monasticism among Frisians and Saxons
• 3 The archbishops' options
• 4 Eleventh-century monasticism: Eastern Denmark
• 5 Eleventh-century monasticism: Funen and Jutland
• 6 Eleventh-century monasticism: Norway and Sweden
• 7 Eleventh-century monasticism: Saxony, Slesvig, Ribe
• 8 The great period: civil war 1
• 9 The great period: civil war 1
• 10 The great period: civil war 3
• 11 The Valdemarian age 1: 1157 and the coming of competition
• 12 The Valdemarian age 2: movements among monks
• 13 The Valdemarian age 3: sons and daughters of St Augustine
• 14 The Valdemarian age 4: peripheria and conclusion
• Appendix Development of Cistercian foundations in Denmark
• Bibliography
• Index