Bobbio Abbey

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Basilica of San Colombano

The Abbey of San Colombano of Bobbio (Latin Abbatia Sancti Columbani Bobiensis ) is a monastery founded in 614 in Bobbio ( province of Piacenza ), which was later consecrated to its founder, the Irish wandering monk Columban of Luxeuil , who died here, his last Found resting place and was soon venerated as a saint . It is best known as a center against Arianism and because of its library, one of the largest of the Middle Ages. The abbey was dissolved in northern Italy under French rule in 1803, but many monastery buildings are still used for other purposes (parish church, school, train station).

history

The background to the foundation of the abbey was the conquest of Italy by the Lombards in 568. The King of the Lombards Agilulf married Princess Theudelinde from the Bavarian Agilolfinger dynasty in 590 , who - with the support of Columban - succeeded in getting the king to switch from Arianism to Moving Catholicism. For the conversion of the Longobards, Columban received from Agilulf the destroyed church of Ebovium and the land belonging to it, which had belonged to the Pope before the incursion of the Longobards. Columban himself had wanted this remote area because he preferred solitude for himself and his monks. In the vicinity of the church the monastery was built, which was dedicated to the apostles Peter, Paul and Andrew. The monastic community was subjected to the rules drafted by Columbanus , which are based on the monastic customs of the Iroschott Christians .

Columban died in 615, his successors at the head of the abbey were Attala († 627) and after him Bertulf († 640), who controlled the fortunes of the monastery in the days of offensive Arianism under King Rothari (636-652), after it was still had succeeded in converting Rothari's predecessor Arioald also to Catholicism. The legend reports that Arioald killed the monk Bladulf after he refused to greet him because of the king's Arian beliefs; Attala then brought Bladulf back into life and cast out the devil from Arioald who had gotten into him as punishment for the crime - a twofold miracle that caused Arioald to convert.

In 628 Pope Honorius I withdrew the Bobbio Monastery from episcopal jurisdiction and made it subject to the Holy See . However, this first occidental exemption could not be conclusively secured historically, as numerous forged king and papal documents have emerged from the abbey's scriptorium . The fourth abbot, Barbolenus, introduced the Benedictine rule in Bobbio in 643 , initially in competition with the Columban rule and only optional, but the less strict Benedictine rule soon replaced that of Columbanus. In 643, at the request of King Rothari and Queen Gundeperga, Pope Theodor I permitted the Abbot of Bobbio to use the miter and other episcopal insignia.

Theudelinda's nephew Aripert I († 661) returned all of the abbey land that had originally belonged to the Pope to Rome; his successor Aripert II confirmed this return in 707. The Lombards later expropriated the Pope until 756 King Aistulf was forced by the Frankish king Pippin the Younger to give up the property again. In 774, Charlemagne made extensive gifts of these goods to the abbey. Bobbio soon became one of the largest clerical landowners in northern Italy. At the time of Abbot Wala (834–836), a grandson of Karl Martell , the Benedictine rule with the Consuetudines of Benedict von Aniane was in force in Bobbio . A Breve Walas ( Breve memorationis ) also gives an insight into the organization of the abbey and, together with the adbreviationes added in 862 and 883 , information about the economic strength of the abbey.

Interior of the basilica

Gerbert von Aurillac, Pope from 999 as New Year's Eve II , became abbot of Bobbio in 982. In 1014, on the occasion of his own coronation as emperor in Rome by Pope Benedict VIII , Emperor Henry II achieved that Bobbio was elevated to the seat of a bishopric. Peter Aldus (Petroald), abbot since 999 to succeed Gerbert, became the first bishop of Bobbio. Many of his successors continued to live in the abbey where they had previously been monks.

This final highlight was followed by a rapid decline. In 1133 or 1161 the bishopric of Bobbio was subordinated to the Archdiocese of Genoa . At the beginning of the 13th century, Pope Innocent III. take action in Bobbio without being able to stop the decline of the monastery. The Benedictine abbey was also damaged by jurisdictional disputes with the bishops of Tortona and Piacenza , and later with the bishops of Bobbio . In 1449 Bobbio joined the Benedictine Congregation of Santa Giustina out of pure self-preservation . But the agony could not be stopped.

Bobbio Abbey was finally closed as a monastery by the French government in 1803. The abbey of San Colombano, exemte since it was founded in the 7th century, continued to exist as a legally independent ecclesiastical territory until 1923, when it was regionally united with the diocese of Bobbio: Diocese of Bobbio-San Colombano. The territorial abbey did not go out until 1986 with the incorporation of the Bobbio – San Colombano diocese into the Genoa – Bobbio archdiocese.

architecture

Columban sarcophagus

The current Basilica of San Colombano was built between 1456 and 1503. It has a floor plan in the shape of a Latin cross with a main and two side aisles, a transept and a rectangular apse ; in the church there is a baptismal font from the 9th century. The frescoes in the nave are the work of Bernardino Lanzani. The 15th century crypt houses Columban's coffin by Giovanni de Patriarchi from 1480, as well as the coffins of the first two abbots. In the crypt, the mosaic floor from the 12th century is preserved, on which the history of the Maccabees and the four seasons are depicted. The bell tower (late 9th century) and the chapel crown are all that remains of the Romanesque church.

The library

The Bobbio Abbey already had the most important scriptorium in northern Italy at the time of the Lombards . The nucleus of the monastery library was probably manuscripts that Columban had brought with him from Ireland , as well as the treatises that he had written himself. In the 7th century it was mainly biblical and patristic texts that were copied. B. the Historiae des Orosius with a wrapper in the Irish style . In the first half of the 8th century grammarians and ancient authors came along. 29 of the oldest palimpsests in Europe were produced in Bobbio during this time. The scholar Dungal († after 827) bequeathed his extensive personal manuscript collection of 25 manuscripts to the monastery, including the Bangor Antiphonale , which probably comes from Bangor Abbey .

A library catalog from the late 9th century, published by Lodovico Antonio Muratori (1672–1750), shows that all scientific directions were represented in the monastery library at this time. The catalog contains around 700 manuscripts (including more than a hundred manuscripts by classical authors), some of which were created in Bobbio, but some also came from Western and Southern Europe and North Africa.

Gerbert von Aurillac was able to write his treatise on geometry with the help of the monastery library. In the library he found the Astronomica of Marcus Manilius , De rhetorica of Marius Victorinus and the Ophtalmicus des Demosthenes , which he had copied and sent to Reims - the monks in Bobbio were some of the very few people in Europe able to do this at that time to translate the Greek texts of an Aristotle or Demosthenes. With the decline of the abbey was associated a decline in the productivity of the scriptorium.

It was not until the second half of the 15th century that manuscript production revived, if only for texts for internal church use. An inventory catalog from 1461 still contains 243 codices , so it must be assumed that part of the library had already passed into other hands at that time. When Giorgio Merula sent Giorgio Galbiato to the library of Bobbio, he discovered a number of classical Latin texts there in 1493, which were previously unknown.

In 1616, Cardinal Federico Borromeo took 86 manuscripts for the Biblioteca Ambrosiana he founded in Milan, including the Orosius Ambrosianus (Biblioteca Ambrosiana MS D. 23rd Sup.) Of Paulus Orosius from the 7th century, the antiphonal from Bangor , the Bobbio Hieronymus (MS S 45. Sup.) Called Isaiah commentary by the church father Hieronymus , also from the 7th century, the Bobbio missal from around 911, as well as the palimpsests with the Gothic Wulfilabibel . Pope Paul V received 26 other manuscripts in 1618 for the Vatican Apostolic Library , including the Palimpsest with De re publica by Marcus Tullius Cicero . Numerous other codices were brought to Turin , including those that are still kept in the National Library today and the 71 volumes that fell victim to the fire in the university library in 1904.

Abbots and Bishops of Bobbio

literature

  • Valentina Alberici: San Colombano, Basilica dello Spirito. In: Archivum Bobiense 30, 2008, pp. 265-279.
  • Valentina Alberici: Per una lettura complessiva degli affreschi rinascimentali della Basilica di San Colombano a Bobbio. In: Archivum Bobiense 31, 2009, pp. 465–478.
  • Werner Goez , Armando Petrucci: Bobbio . In: Lexicon of the Middle Ages (LexMA). Volume 2, Artemis & Winkler, Munich / Zurich 1983, ISBN 3-7608-8902-6 , Sp. 295-297.
  • Michael Richter : Bobbio in the Early Middle Ages: The Abiding Legacy of Columbanus. Four Courts Press, Dublin 2008.
  • Michele Tosi: Il governo abbaziale di Gerberto a Bobbio. In: Archivum Bobiense 2, 1985, pp. 195-223.

Web links

Coordinates: 44 ° 46 ′ 0 ″  N , 9 ° 23 ′ 13 ″  E