Boniface's Mission and Reform in Central Germany and Bavaria

Boniface's missionary activities in Hesse and Thuringia

The first trip to Rome to legitimize his mission

After the first attempt at a missionary mission to Friesland from Wynfreth ( Bonifatius ) was unsuccessful from spring 716 until it was broken off at the end of 716, he went back to England and became abbot in Nursling monastery from 717. In the autumn of 718 is now again went the more than forty years Wynfreth to mainland Europe to the Christianization further promote pagan peoples. Probably accompanied by a few companions and a letter of recommendation from his friend and diocesan bishop Daniel, he traveled to Rome , where he stayed until May of the following year and wanted to be personally legitimized by the Pope for his missionary work. Gregory II (Pope from 715 to 731) received him and on May 15, 719 appointed him a missionary to the Gentiles. According to an old church custom, he was given a new name and from then on he was allowed to call himself Bonifatius (“the good fate bringing”). This privilege also meant acceptance into the closest community with the Catholic Church in Rome.

Boniface's first trip to Rome in the Vita Bonifatii Auctore Willibaldo

First missionary work in Franconia after the first trip to Rome

On the return trip Boniface visited the Longobard King Liutprand in Pavia, followed by short stays in Bavaria with the Agilolfingers and in Thuringia. (Source: Vita Bonifatii Auctore Willibaldo). In Bavaria and Thuringia he found a country that had already been evangelized, but which was partly still permeated by paganism. Thuringia owned individual Christian communities that Willibrord and other Anglo-Saxon and Irish-Scottish missionaries had founded.

After the Frisian King Radbod died in 719, Willibrord resumed missionary work in the Frisians with his helpers, including Bonifatius. In 721, however, there was a falling out between Willibrord and Bonifatius.

The missionary work in Upper Hesse and the second trip to Rome

After the final quarrel with Willibrord in Friesland, Bonifatius decided in 721 to travel to Hesse to join the Chatten . This step was an intermediate goal for him on his way to proselytizing the Saxons .

In Upper and East Hesse, the Franconian culture had hardly reached the residents. Although they were already in contact with Christianity, they continued to practice their pagan religions. Bonifatius met Dettic and Deorulf on the Amöneburg , the central Franconian base in the upper Lahngau . The brothers made a mess of pagan and Christian religiosity. Here Boniface encountered a core problem in his future missionary work. The hasty missionary work of his predecessors caused a certain superficiality of faith among the population. After a thorough briefing of the two administrators, he founded a small monastery in Amöneburg and began proselytizing the surrounding area. Soon he had gathered a large number of brothers around him. He roamed the area preaching the gospel , learning local languages and dialects quickly helping him gain the people's trust.

In his missionary work, he used a method that had already been used by his predecessors, but was not very successful: After an inspiring sermon, he baptized the evidently convinced residents and hoped that the church's follow-up work would make them good Christians. However, this could only work in the long term if he could rely on a strong position of power. But this was precisely what he lacked. Therefore he sent his compatriot Bynnan to Rome to report to the Pope about the enormous successes of the mission in Hesse. He was then invited to Rome and, after several conversations and the verification of his faithfulness, was ordained mission bishop without a permanent seat on November 30, 722 . Boniface thus held an ecclesiastical office to which both spiritual and secular rulers were obliged. The task now was to consolidate the powers that had been acquired and, in particular, to obtain Karl Martell's approval for a reorganization of the Frankish church. He received the order from the Pope to organize the ecclesiastical conditions in Thuringia and Hesse, in close connection with Rome, and to carry out his missionary work in the area of the Saxon tribes.

Consolidation of the position of power and continuation of the Hessian mission

After Boniface had returned from Rome, he went to the Frankish caretaker Karl Martell in the spring of 723 in order to get support for his future missionary work from the secular ruler. Martell was well aware of the benefits a functioning church order could have for stabilizing his power and granted him protection and support. This was the decisive step towards a mission that was not only based on papal legitimation, but was also borne by the secular rulers.

With this reinsurance he went back to Hessen. In 723 he felled an oak consecrated to the god Donar near Geismar (Gäsmere). Bonifatius is said to have built a small St. Peter's Church out of the wood, which became the nucleus of a monastery and the city of Fritzlar that grew out of it. Such actions guaranteed attention, which certainly brought far greater success than sermon and missionary detail work alone. In the next two years he continued to work on the mission of the Hessians.

Return to Thuringia

In 725 he shifted his mission focus back to Thuringia, where he had failed six years earlier with his attempt at Christianization. Two years before the papal mandate to Boniface, Gregory II had sent various letters to the Thuringian people and to the Thuringian ruling class, in which he called for obedience to Bishop Boniface and to be honored. At least the missionary activity that was now resuming could be based on papal legitimation. Wynfreth - Boniface was therefore no longer one missionary among many. He came to his old place of activity as bishop and papal envoy. The reasons for Bonifatius 'return to Thuringia are based on his attitude to the papal chair in Rome: Bonifatius' was loyal to the Roman Church and the Pope and must have seen it as a disgrace not to have fulfilled the papal mission of 719. He wanted to finish the work he had begun. In addition, Thuringia was the last missionary challenge on the way to Christianizing the Saxons. Without converting this country, he didn't need to go any further east. Above all, the work in the Thuringian core area around Erfurt was important . This region seemed to be reasonably safe from the constant attacks of the Saxons in the north. Boniface initially urged the tribal leaders to return to the Christianity that had long been accepted and to refrain from mixing the Christian faith with pagan rites. So the situation had not changed. However, he seemed to have encountered some resistance in his missionary work. Presumably Christian-Celtic priests tried to prevent the work of the bishop. Ultimately, however, they could do little against the power of the Roman Church and so Boniface seems to have succeeded in overcoming the church opposition in Thuringia. Gradually the number of believers increased and soon he was able to found a first missionary cell in Thuringia: a monastery in Ohrdruf (Orthorpf), north of the Thuringian Forest . Starting from this “headquarters”, he was able to start Christianizing the population in the years that followed.

Reform of the Bavarian Church

Bonifatius had fulfilled his papal mandate with the extensive missionary work in the Thuringian region. Now it was a matter of stabilizing what had been achieved and securing the Christian faith through institutionalization. If the Pope in Rome and the Anglo-Saxon missionary wanted to reorganize the existing, inadequate church order in the Franconian Empire and in Bavaria, at least an extension of the clerical powers for Boniface was required. In recognition of the work he had done up to then and as a qualified qualification for future tasks, he was appointed in 732 by the newly appointed Pope Gregory III. appointed archbishop . This gave him the right to found dioceses, to ordain bishops and to change existing divisions of the church on behalf of the Pope.

Boniface's trips to Bavaria and Rome

In the same year, the Bavarian Duke Hugbert invited the archbishop to his kingdom. Boniface, whose work had long since earned him recognition and respect, was to lead the reorganization of the church structures in Bavaria and thus create a Bavarian church independent of the Franconian Empire. Bavaria was already Christianized, so that Boniface's first trip there is to be regarded as a visitation. He attended many churches, wandered around, and preached with great enthusiasm. There was initially no agreement with Hugbert about the future order of the Bavarian dioceses. It is quite possible that the duke still had reservations about giving the Frankish archbishop a completely free hand in church reform. Boniface must have recognized that even here he could not work without the participation of the secular rulers. After Hugbert's death in 736 the situation seemed to improve. Duke Odilo had clear ideas about mutual cooperation. He wanted a stricter ecclesiastical order in his country. Before this challenge could be met, Boniface traveled to Rome for the third and last time in 737. Boniface had already achieved a certain cult status and his last visit to Rome was 15 years ago. This stay probably served an exchange of interests, which was inevitable, especially when the new Pope took office. Gregory III. commissioned his most important missionary north of the Alps to force the church organization in Bavaria. At the same time he appointed him legate for Germania and thus his "deputy". This made Boniface's work a political issue. For the Franconian rulers it was now a permanent institution that could not be ignored and the papal directive on the "repatriation" of deviant believers could lead to incalculable friction between secular and spiritual power. This visit to Rome marked the actual beginning of the last phase of work in Boniface's life: the reform of the Franconian church order.

The Bavarian church conditions

The Bavarian Duke Odilo was open to church affairs. Even before Boniface's activity in his empire, he had begun building churches and equipping them accordingly. He had the Niederaltaich Abbey founded on the Danube and founded a monastery in Pongau . The city of Salzburg and the Mondsee monastery owed their possessions to him. The Bavarian Church has so far been as independent of him as it is of Rome. There was no fixed division into different dioceses. This constellation was particularly favored by the Bavarian nobility, who equated a uniform connection of the clergy to the duke with their own loss of power. A reform was therefore out of the question. The Franconian caretaker Martell also welcomed the ecclesiastical situation in Bavaria. After all, Odilo was the leader of all opponents of the Arnulfingers and thus Martell's rival. The population of the Bavarian duchy did not practice the Christian faith according to the fixed ecclesiastical custom. For example, there were irregularities in the conduct of confession, the Lord's Supper, and church services. Marriages were concluded without clerical participation and the population was said to be vicious. Boniface had already found similar conditions in Thuringia, although apparently no one had profited from the grievances there.

Church organization in Bavaria

Boniface's real goal, namely the Saxon mission, had become a long way off due to the new papal mandate. It was now a matter of taking care of church issues in Bavaria. Gregory III. sent a letter to the Bavarian and Alemannic rulers expressly asking for support for his new legate. Boniface wanted to successfully implement the church order there in agreement with Duke Odilo. He received the archbishop and both sounded out the respective positions. It quickly became clear that, contrary to the papal wishes, there was no need for a synod in Bavaria to clarify the situation.

First, a start was made to neutralize the alleged opponents of the church in Bavaria. Local clergymen were meant who did not practice the Christian faith “conforming to Rome” or who had raised themselves into offices. Following on from this, Bavaria was ecclesiastically divided into four districts . Some starting points for this division were already in place. Due to the interaction of local ecclesiastical traditions with the temporary political subdivisions of Bavaria, Regensburg and Salzburg had been the seat of monastery bishops for centuries and Freising for two generations. Even the papally ordained Vivilo resided in Passau . Boniface installed a bishop in every diocese: Gaubald in Regensburg, Erembercht , the pupil of Korbinian, had been bishop in Freising since his death in 730 and remained so, and Johannes in Salzburg. Vivilo remained Bishop of Passau. However, this external order could only be a basis for a further organization of the Bavarian church system, because too strong canonical-universal church-shaped institutional norms and a lively but unregulated mission church clashed, so that formal innovations could lead to a profound change. Nevertheless, important things had been achieved in a very short time, even if it was not yet possible to speak of an orderly penetration of church life among the population.

With the formal, ecclesiastical reorganization of Bavaria, Bonifatius succeeded in creating a regional church with papal legitimacy and thus the expansion of Roman influence to parts of the Frankish Empire. Furthermore, the reorganization of the Bavarian Church was also in the interests of secular rulers. Odilo was able to show a modern ecclesiastical organizational structure in his sphere of influence, and the Franconian ruler Karl Martell knew that the Franconian and Bavarian churches would remain connected.

The final phase of missionary work in Hesse and Thuringia

The Concilium Germanicum

The year 741 brought great changes for Boniface's missionary and reform activities. The death of Karl Martell resulted in a division of power between his sons Karlmann (East Franconia) and Pippin the Younger (West Franconia ). Both were interested in a close religious bond with Rome and so they also agreed to transform the state church, which had previously been dominated by the landed nobility, into a regional church loyal to Rome. The Concilium Germanicum should form the basis for this . On April 21, 742 some Frankish bishops met under the direction of Bonifatius and Karlmann in Australia for the Concilium Germanicum. The Franconian ruler condemned the “outrageous handling” of church property by his father Karl Martell and announced the fight to all bishops who would not follow the future church course. It was decided that synods should be held annually so that the order of the church could be maintained and the inauguration of priests could be controlled.

The dioceses of Büraburg, Würzburg and Erfurt / Eichstätt

Immediately after these resolutions, Boniface began to implement them. Just as he had already organized church affairs in Bavaria, he also set up permanent dioceses in the Hessian-Thuringian mission country. Bonifatius declared the Büraburg fortress to be the bishop's seat for North and East Hesse. This strategically safe location was chosen with care. Witta , an Anglo-Saxon companion , became bishop . For the area south of the Thuringian Forest, Würzburg was to serve as the seat of a bishop. Here Buchard , also a companion of Boniface, became bishop. For northern Thuringia, Erfurt was chosen as the bishopric because the city was located near the Ohrdruf monastery . Boniface's close confidante Willibald became Bishop of Erfurt.

In the summer of 742 all three bishops were ordained. With that Bonifatius had reached his goal in Central Germany. The country was not only proselytized, but evidently also permanently organized. In the same year he informed Rome of the diocesan division that had been made. The Pope should legitimize the new dioceses. The papal confirmation cops arrived in 743. The new Pope Zacharias confirmed the appointments and called on Boniface to control the correct practice of religion in these regions. This warning was not unfounded, because Erfurt had to be dissolved again soon because of the dangerous situation with the Saxons. Instead, Willibald was ordained bishop of Eichstätt, which has now become the new seat of the diocese. With the establishment of the three dioceses in Hesse and Thuringia, Boniface's original missionary work was completed. He not only achieved the Christianization of these countries, but ultimately also their church organizational consolidation.

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Individual evidence

↑ Boniface Letter No. 12, according to Tangl

[1] Boniface Letter No. 12, according to Tangl