Bruno the Great

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Not to be confused with Bruno of Cologne.
Church of St. Pantaleon
Feast11 October

Bruno the Great (May 925 – 11 October 965) was the

Otto I, Holy Roman Emperor.[2]

Life

Bruno was the youngest son of Henry the Fowler and his second wife Matilda. While he was still a child, it was decided that he should pursue a clerical career. In the early 940s he was educated in Trier by the leading scholar, Israel the Grammarian.[3] In 951, Otto appointed Bruno as his archchaplain.

Bruno soon received further advancement. In 953, the Archbishopric of Cologne fell vacant just when

Conrad the Red
, Duke of Lotharingia and Otto's son-in-law, had joined a rebellion against Otto. By appointing Bruno to the vacant position, Otto provided himself with a powerful ally against Conrad (much of Lotharingia fell under the archdiocese of Cologne) just when he needed one most. By the next year, the rebellion had collapsed. Otto deposed Conrad as Duke of Lotharingia and appointed Bruno in his place.

Bruno was to be almost the last duke of the whole of Lotharingia: in 959 two local nobles,

Gothelo I, Duke of Lotharingia
.

The combined positions of archbishop and duke — or archduke, as his biographer Ruotger called him — made Bruno the most powerful man after Otto not just in Germany but also beyond its borders. After the deaths of Louis IV of West Francia in 954 and Hugh the Great, his most powerful feudatory, in 956, Bruno, as brother-in-law to both of them and maternal uncle to their heirs Lothair, the new king, and Hugh Capet, acted as regent of west Francia.

From 962 onwards, Bruno was also appointed as Otto's regent in Germany while Otto was absent in

monastery of St Pantaleon
, which he had founded, just outside Cologne.

Legacy

Bruno's position in Cologne was little short of royal. Indeed, Otto delegated to Bruno and his successors as archbishop a number of normally royal privileges — the right to build fortifications and set up markets, to strike coins and collect (and keep) such taxes as the special ones on

Jews in return for royal protection, those on market trading and tolls from traffic along the Rhine. Even though Bruno's successors as archbishops would not be dukes as well, they would be the secular as well as the ecclesiastical rulers of Cologne until the battle of Worringen
three centuries later.

Bruno's court in Cologne was the main intellectual and artistic centre of its period in Germany — far more so than that of his brother Otto, which was far more peripatetic and militarily oriented. Among others,

Ratherius and Liutprand of Cremona spent time at the court. Many of the next generation of German ecclesiastical leaders were educated at Bruno's court, like Everaclus of Liège, Gerard bishop of Toul, Wikfrid, bishop of Verdun, and Theoderic
, bishop of Metz.

Bruno's effect on medieval Cologne was immense. Apart from building a palace, he extended the

Benedictine monastery
dedicated to St Pantaleon to the south-west of the city.

Bruno translated

relics from Troyes and buried them in 964 at St Patrokli Dom in Soest
, where Patroclus is still today venerated.

Canonization

Bruno was venerated at St Pantaleon throughout the Middle Ages. Ruotger depicts him as a moral example, but not a wonderworker. In the 12th century, there was an ephemeral miracle cult at his tomb. He was formally beatified in 1870. In 1871, Archbishop Paul Melchers made 11 October a double feast in his honour. His tomb was opened in 1747 and 1892. In 1895, he was canonized. The historian Jonathan Wright [de] situates the promotion of his cult against the background of the Kulturkampf. That is, it stemmed from a desire to preserve the Catholic identity of Cologne as it was drawn into the Protestant dominated German Empire.[4]

Notes

  1. ^ "Latin Saints of the Orthodox Patriarchate of Rome".
  2. ^ a b c Religious Drama and Ecclesiastical Reform in the Tenth Century, James H. Forse, Early Theatre, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2002), 48.
  3. ISBN 1-85285-012-4
    .
  4. ^ Henry Mayr-Harting (2007), Church and Cosmos in Early Ottonian Germany: The View from Cologne, Oxford University Press, p. xvii.

References

External links

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Wikisource has original text related to this article:
Catholic Church titles
Preceded by Archbishop of Cologne
953–965 		Succeeded by
Regnal titles
Preceded by
Duke of Lotharingia

954–965 		Succeeded by
divided into
Lower Lorraine

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