Frothar

Frothar (more rarely Frotar , Latin Frotharius ) was bishop of Toul from about 813 to 847/48 . Some of his correspondence has been preserved from him. Karl Hampe published a critical edition for the first time in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica .

Life

According to his own statements, the future bishop grew up in the Gorze monastery . (Letter 28) Later he worked at the court orchestra of Charlemagne . Either this or his successor Louis the Pious made Frothar bishop of Toul. His activity was largely directed towards his diocese. But he also took on imperial orders. He strove to preserve and increase the ecclesiastical property of his diocese. He also endeavored to implement the church reforms of his time. After a fire, Frothar had the cathedral of Toul rebuilt.

His letters show that he had contacts with the bishops of neighboring dioceses, with influential people at the imperial court and even with the emperor and his wife. He tried to alleviate the hardships of his time such as dearth of prices, fires or wolf plagues and complained about the high burden of taxes or the burden of military service.

Letters

Part of his correspondence has been handed down in a manuscript fragment from the 9th century, which today belongs to a collective manuscript ( Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. 13090 ) from Saint-Germain-des-Prés . The fragment contains 22 letters written by Frothar and 10 addressed to him. The chronologically disordered letters were put into a sequence by Hampe, among others; the more recent edition by Parisse, on the other hand, follows the order of the handwriting. The letters received probably only contain the correspondence of Frothar's early years as bishop. The letters of the following period have been lost.

content

In a chronological first letter, he reports to the emperor who installed him about a wolf plague and the number of wolves he had killed. Hampe assumes that this could only have been Charlemagne. The letter must come from the early days of Frothar's episcopate.

The following two letters are from Archbishop Hetti von Trier. In the first he ordered Frothar to summon troops against King Bernhard of Italy . The second dealt with the implementation of the church reforms that were decided at the synods of Aachen between 816 and 819. These concerned the enforcement of the Benedictine Rule as a mandatory norm for all monasteries and the regulation of the life of the canons and canons .

In Frothar's letter to Hugo , an illegitimate son of Charlemagne, it becomes clear that he and his brothers had been given into the care of Frothar by Ludwig the Pious for a while.

Letters 6 and 7 speak of military expeditions to Spain, which were probably related to the uprisings in 826. There is also talk of Louis the Pious visit to Toul.

The Cathedral of Toul burned down between 825 and 830. The beginning of a new building is mentioned in letter 9. It also deals with Emperor Ludwig's stay in the Palatinate in Gondreville near Toul, possibly in the year 828. Frothar appears desperate and overburdened by the burden of building the church and the construction work ordered on the Palatinate Gondreville and declares himself unable to be also to do the construction work on the Palatinate in Aachen . Should Archkaplan Hilduin not succeed in persuading the emperor to take this burden off him, he threatened to resign from the office of bishop. Apparently he was unsuccessful with the letter, as he wrote another letter to another dignitary at court. However, he has not resigned. In 828 the church was apparently finished because the bishop asked an abbot for colors for the painting. He thanks another abbot for leasing a foreman.

In Letter 13, which can possibly be dated to the year 829, Frothar asks Archbishop Hetti when he wanted to come to the Diocese of Toul and when a synodal council would take place according to the reform regulations. The reason for the request he gives is that he had to inspect the envoy hostels between the Alps and Aachen on behalf of the emperor and was therefore absent for a while.

Letters 14-16 are about the succession of Archbishop Jeremias von Sens . The canons of the Church in Sens asked, after their first personnel proposal had already been rejected, that the new candidate could at least introduce himself to the emperor. The emperor ignored the requests and appointed Aldrich von Sens archbishop.

In letter 18, Frothar asked Archaplain Hilduin for help to get the property of the Toul church back. The following letter to another person had similar content. Similarly, Letter 21 deals with property that has been alienated from St. Evre Abbey . The letter is related to a document by Frothar in which he arranged the conditions in the monastery around 838.

Letters 22–24 from the years between 825 and 830 deal with the dispute between the monks of the Moyenmoutier monastery in the diocese of Toul and their abbot. In letter 25 Frothar asked a Sichard to intercede with Emperor Lothar for the son of a Count Haudulf.

In letters 28 and 29 he addressed the half-brother of the emperor, Bishop Drogo von Metz, and the empress Judith . The letters are related to an order made by Frothar of the ownership structure of the churches in his diocese. He complains to Drogo that he is letting some churches, which are subordinate to Metz, but are located in the Diocese of Toul, deteriorate. He complained to the Empress that the Missi she had sent interfered with the order of ecclesiastical property that he had ordered. The letters can only roughly be dated between 826 and 840.

Letters 30 and 31 from and to Abbot Wichard von Inden show that Frothar had inventoried the property of the Inden monastery on imperial orders . The last letter 32 is addressed to two abbots. It speaks of past years of emergency.

Fonts

• Karl Hampe (Ed.): Frotharii episcopi Tullensis epistolae. In: Epistolae Karolini Aevi , Volume 2 ( Monumenta Germaniae Historica , Epistolae, Volume 5). Weidmann, Berlin 1899, pp. 275-298 ( digitized version ).
• Michel Parisse (ed.): La Correspondance d'un évêque carolingien. Frothaire de Toul (approx. 813-847) avec les lettres de Theuthilde, abbesse de Remiremont (Textes et documents d'histoire médiévale, Volume 2.) Publications de la Sorbonne, Paris 1998, ISBN 2-85944-348-7 . (with French translation)

literature

• Karl Hampe: On the dating of the letters of Bishop Frothar von Toul. In: New Archive of the Society for Older German History , Volume 21, 1895, pp. 747–760. ( Digitized version )

Web links

• Frotharius in the repertory "Historical Sources of the German Middle Ages" at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences .

Remarks

1. ↑ Extensive codicological examination of the Frothar fragment in Laurent Morelle: Enquête sur le manuscrit. In: Michel Parisse (ed.): La Correspondance d'un évêque carolingien. Frothaire de Toul (approx. 813-847) avec les lettres de Theuthilde, abbesse de Remiremont (Textes et documents d'histoire médiévale, Volume 2.) Publications de la Sorbonne, Paris 1998, ISBN 2-85944-348-7 , p 57-79.